Heike would love that one. She took particular glee in pieces about the unlikely political righteousness of Hollywood stars. People of Yesterday had a profile of Anthony Michael Hall, Brat Pack star of
The Breakfast Club,
now living in suburban Chicago. He was pictured coming out of a supermarket, looking like a beleaguered accountant; he was also losing his hair. When the usual relief passed, Walter felt a stab of pity for him and ran one hand over the smooth spot on his own head, thinking he could just hear Heike’s throaty laugh. Somewhere out there, she was probably reading this article aloud to somebody else. He got up to open a window and turned on the radio for a glimpse of the world. He ate the sweet, sticky toast and wondered when his downtime started feeling so much like work. When he returned abruptly from Los Angeles in 1985, he had meant to take a break from acting, not abandon it altogether. The announcement of his hiatus had been greeted in the German industry by rumors of addiction, depression and rejection. They were all way off, but the saying went in German that
to excuse yourself is to accuse yourself,
so he’d said nothing, had let the stink of failure linger around him like a cloud of stale smoke, accepting
Top Gun
as a one-time thing, but then Tom Cruise’s career had just snowballed, carrying Walter’s voice along with it. One after the other, the films were hits. Walter didn’t even try to get the advertising work, he didn’t do anything; money just fell into his lap. He had been lulled into exile, he thought now. Tom Cruise was the kind of gig starving actors only dreamed about. Financial security plus nine months off each year to do other things. The problem was that he never did other things. Orson was probably going over his action-packed schedule of rehearsals with Til Schweiger right at this moment; maybe he really would make it on the outside after all. Bodo had, but only because his American died. The evening they’d learned that River Phoenix overdosed, drinks were on the house at The Wild West and Bodo had insisted the patrons observe a collective moment of silence. Only Walter had noticed the relief that washed across his face, that of a man in a miserable marriage whose wife suddenly leaves him for somebody else.
Walter went into his bedroom to look at the Berlin map again and contemplated the possibility of Tom Cruise’s sudden death. He would most certainly be hungrier. He couldn’t sell detergent to housewives as a ghost. But even with Tom Cruise dead and gone, he would never be free of Hans, with the thick, curly hair and his shit-eating grin, popping up at odd hours of the night, dragging him down like dead weight. Walter moved a stray piece of the city around on the carpet. Marienfelde looked nice, he thought: a lake, a green park, small streets. Where did it belong? Giving in to the steep downward slope on the other side of the caffeine high, he was about to climb under the covers when the suitcase in the corner, still half-packed with summer clothes for winter in Los Angeles, caught his attention. He dropped his underwear and pulled on a tight blue swimsuit that was lying on top. He didn’t own a full-length mirror but he didn’t need one to know that he wasn’t Malibu material; he could hardly see the tight blue of the suit for his stomach. His skin was pale under a light film of chest hair that extended down to his navel over the pregnant swell. A single gray, curly hair poked out near his left nipple. Just as he yanked it out, the doorbell rang. Hope! He pulled on a T-shirt and rushed across the apartment.
“What are you wearing?”
Those were the first words out of Heike’s mouth. The light from his foyer shined on her, so that through the doorway she was illuminated against the dark backdrop of the landing. She was wearing a black leather coat and jeans. Her long brown hair hung straight around pronounced cheek-bones, like the exaggerated female beauty in a Japanese cartoon.
“It’s December.”
Her light blue eyes looked him up and down. Walter pulled down the edge of his T-shirt.
“Are you going somewhere?” she demanded.
“Maybe.”
“Where? Why haven’t you called me? You could have asked my parents. Or Klara.”
When he didn’t respond, she pushed past him down the hallway into the bedroom. Walter had conjured Heike’s image so many times since she left that her sudden three-dimensional reality took his breath away. If she wanted to see him again, he thought, why had she returned his keys? He looked down at the floor, fighting the desire to folllow her, reach out to her, wrap his arms around her, sniff desperately at the private recesses of her body, lick her face. He couldn’t answer her question because the truth was pitiful. It had never occurred to him to call her; it had never occurred to him to do anything but wait. She came back.
“Where are my clothes?”
“I gave them away.”
“Seriously?”
He shuffled his feet.
“It’s winter, Walter. I need my winter clothes.”
“You should have thought of that when you left.”
She shook her head and looked over at the half-finished city on the floor of the living room.
“What is that?”
“It’s nothing.”
She walked over to examine it.
“Walter Baum’s view of the world,” she said, rolling one hand into a tube, looking up at him through it with one eye. “This big.”
Walter pulled at the bottom of his T-shirt.
“Marienfelde is in the southeast,” she said, picking up the piece he’d been trying to place before she came. “It’s a beautiful neighborhood, actually. Almost like the countryside and only twenty minutes from here. But you wouldn’t know that, would you? Because you never leave this apartment.”
When the doorbell rang again Heike beat him to the front door and opened it. Hope stopped short on the doormat and leaned against the wall.
“Oh. I’m sorry. I’ll come back later.”
“Wer ist das?”
“Are you okay?” Walter asked Hope over Heike’s shoulder.
“I’m fine. Am I interrupting something?”
“Yes.” Heike switched into broken English. “Who are you?”
She pulled Hope into the foyer of Walter’s apartment.
“Why wears he a swimming costume? What’s going on?”
“Why don’t you tell her?”
“California,” Walter mumbled. “I’m going to California.”
“What?”
Heike paused to light a cigarette she’d pulled out of a small purse hanging from her wrist. A cloud of smoke enveloped Hope, who waved one hand quickly in front of her face.
“I’d appreciate it if you’d put that out,” she said.
Heike rolled her eyes.
“Americans.”
“That has nothing to do with it.”
“Yeah.”
“Seriously. I’m pregnant.”
Heike pulled hard on her cigarette before tapping its long ash onto the hardwood floor. Walter stared at Hope as if she had slapped him.
“I just took the test this morning,” she said. “I was coming up now to tell you.”
Heike pulled on her cigarette. “Why?”
“What?”
“This is Walter’s baby?”
“No.”
“Then who?”
He cleared his throat.
“Did you ever meet the American guy who moved in downstairs last summer? Hope is his wife.”
“American Dave? He has a wife?”
“I was in New York till October.”
“Funny,” said Heike. “I always think he’s with that Polish girl from the wrestling movie.”
“Who?”
“You know that girl on the posters. They always come in and out of the building together.”
Walter recalled acutely the sensation of Heike’s tongue buried in the crease behind his ear. She dropped her cigarette into a cup of cold tea sitting on a table by the door where it went out like an exhausted fuse. Hope’s eyes filled with tears.
“Oh, please,” said Heike.
“I just don’t understand what you mean.”
“Time for Action,”
said Heike. “You know, Dave’s project. You’re his wife.”
“No.”
She checked the clock on her mobile phone impatiently.
“He explained to me once in the lobby. Just like what he is doing in Ecuador but better, because pornography is big business.”
“I thought it was a secret,” said Walter indignantly. “Why did he tell you?”
It felt strange to speak English to Heike. He wondered if Dave had been coming on to her. Bastard.
“I tell him I’m an actress. He ask some questions about makeup. So I ask questions too. He said the pornography is bigger industry than Hollywood because language is not important. Totally international. Of course I am interested.”
Heike shrugged.
“Instead of knitting sweaters, the Polish girls make the videos and sell all over the world,” she said. “Progress because they were prostitutes before.
Sure beats selling blow jobs at the side of the road,
he said. I remember because it sounds funny.”
Walter pictured Heike on the poster: arms in the air like a champion, her sly look following him from eyes pasted up on walls all over town.
“I don’t believe you,” said Hope.
“I make this up? Look. It’s not a bad idea. Very modern, actually. He is helping people.”
Hope glared at her.
“It’s a horrible idea.”
Walter reached out for Heike’s arm.
“Americans,” she said again, flinching him off. “You are so uptight.”
She turned to Walter and spoke in German.
“I’m leaving now. You know how to reach me.”
He lingered at the front door after she left, silently dividing up the female leads in Tom Cruise movies into two groups. There were only a few Heikes, he realized. The girlfriend in
The Color of Money,
the first fiancée in
Jerry Maguire,
random women in the
Mission: Impossible
s. Most of them were Hopes. Nicole Kidman always played Hopes; Renée Zellweger, the wives in
The Firm
and
Cocktail;
all Hopes. The brunette in the new film was definitely a Hope. Walter was almost surprised to find the real one still standing in his foyer, staring miserably at the floor. When he tried to read her mind, he caught only a fleeting image of the Polish girl with Dave in a headlock, his big body flaccid against the gym mat while the girl’s champion ass lorded triumphantly over his chest.
“You knew about this?”
“The girl? No.”
“I mean the project.”
He nodded.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I assumed Dave had told you.”
“Yeah. Well, he didn’t,” she sniffed loudly.
“Where is he now?”
“He left early this morning. I tried to call him earlier, to tell him about the baby, but I didn’t get through. I guess his phone’s out of range.”
She wiped one cheek with the back of her hand.
“What am I going to do?”
“Let’s get out of here,” Walter said.
The weather outside was cold but clear. Berlin’s distance from the Gulf Stream stripped it of Western Europe’s humidity, and its citizens suffered symptoms of the desert: rough skin, cracked fingernails, dry tonsils, chapped lips. Walter put one hand on Hope’s back, steering her north toward the university campus and the park beyond. Students streamed past them in both directions, shouting to one another, lit cigarettes hanging from their mouths.
“Why do they all wear black coats?” she asked. “It’s the same in New York. You’d think in cold climates everyone would wear bright colors to cheer themselves up.”
Walter looked down at his own black coat and around at the black-clad students’ bulky bodies, dreary silhouettes against the cityscape.
“People only wear yellow and turquoise in sunny places. Why is that?”
He took her arm, leading her past the train station toward the entrance to the zoo. A tour group was assembled in front of the large stone elephants at the gates. One of them came up with a digital camera.
“Can you take a picture of us?”
He had a British accent. Hope peeled away silently, as if resigned to perform a regular duty. The camera in hand she waved the group closer together.
“You ready?”
“Cheese!”
When she handed the camera back, they asked her where to get a bite to eat.
“Walk that way for about ten minutes,” she told them. “Then take a left at the light. On the opposite corner you’ll see a café with big windows and comfortable chairs. The menu is in English.”
Walter felt proud. Most people in Berlin would never take the time, even on a good day.
“Should we see the giraffes and zebras?” he asked her.
“Isn’t it too cold for them?”
“They take good care of them. They have lots of African animals here. Elephants and gorillas and everything. There’s a panda. The hyenas even had babies this spring.”
“In captivity?”
“Well, yes.”
“That’s so depressing.”
There was no one else in line to buy tickets and the guard at the front booth was clearly impatient to get back to his newspaper.
“There are all different kinds of parrots,” said Walter.
Hope looked through the gates as if the parrots were flying right there in front of them, a few steps away.
“They’re really colorful. None are black. One of them can repeat anything you say exactly, in any language. Once I heard him mimicking an Italian tourist.”
“We could train him to say
bitch
in Polish,” she said, “or
asshole.
Do you know the word for
asshole
in Polish? He could repeat it for me till I remember it, then I could repeat it into Dave’s answering machine.”
Forget the zoo. Walter looked over her shoulder at what was once the center of West Berlin. The neighborhood had been a symbol of capitalist power in the 1960s and 1970s, but now the buildings were shabby, and many appeared to be empty. It was three in the afternoon and already getting dark.
“It’s getting cold. Let’s go to Café Keese.”
Hope sighed.