SneakyUncle

Leah pulled her black wool coat tightly around her. She felt the other students in the classroom like a faint grey chill; ghosts writing words. They scratched at paper languidly as though time would spin faster that way; unravel like yarn into the end of class. There was a girl who sat two rows in front of her with an engagement ring on her finger; she could just see it gleam from where she was sitting. The bride-to-be’s blonde hair was pulled in a taught bun. Life was going on like the beating of the drum, and Leah looked at the girl and the ring, and she didn’t know if she had gone too far forward or been left behind. The professor wrote white words on a green wall, explaining literature, but she could only focus on his pock-marked face, and hear his American way of pronouncing German.

Fredrick felt the soft black leather in his hand and looked out the window shadowed with frost. The trees outside stood upright, the last touch of red seeping out of their leaves. The brown ones had already fallen, forming a crackling blanket over the greenish thinning grass.
Fredrick was a shoemaker. He didn’t want to be a shoemaker, but that’s what his father was and his father’s father and so on. Yet they were shoemakers in a time when Potsdam was not the worn elbow of a beautifully beaded sweater, but at the time when shoes were a measure of substance, and shoemaker a profession fit for kings, and there were balls and beautiful women and ways up and out. After all, his father would always say, it was a respectable way to make a living. But nobody really cared about a good shoe anymore, let alone a good fit.
He ran his hand along the wood table in front of him, feeling every divot, every jagged scratch with the pads of his fingers. He pushed his hair out of his face with the back of his palm and thought about how far a simple shoe could take a person, how well traveled and worn leather and glue could be. He knew other people’s lives were changing, were floating on the tide of the thick wind rattling the trees, thinning the paint on the houses that had already peeled past antique. And he just sat there, his flat hands and rounded nails thick and black with shoe polish, wishing for something more.

The professor had asked her to go see a play once. It was an awkward encounter outside of the old brick building that housed all the Literature classrooms. It was four o’clock and already dark and the lamp that lined the sidewalk made his face look green, otherworldly. She remembered he drove a motorcycle, and they had stood there for awhile, speaking about the book they were reading in class, something American. The words began to come less naturally, and she began to feel self conscious and play with her hair. The wind blew stronger and everyone else was tucked away in class, and all there was was the sound of thick wind in trees, as though nothing could sit still.
“I know that Mother Courage is up,” his green face glowed like the surface of another planet, and she imagined what it was like when men first touched the rock of the moon.
“Oh, yes,” she said “I’d like to see it.” But she said it and felt far away; she didn’t mean now, she didn’t mean him.
“I could get us tickets for Friday,” he said.
“Um, yes maybe,” she had said because she was on the spot, and it seemed an easy answer. “We could meet at my house, and I could take you,” he said, and she noticed the frayed cuffs of his brown leather motorcycle jacket. Suddenly, she felt unbearably sad about this pockmarked man stuck in a worn city teaching old books.
“Oh,” she paused, “I have to go, I’ll see you tomorrow,” and she rode her bike far away from the professor leaving him standing there in the cold, green light.

He had something more once. Or at least, she had started as something more. She was small and pointed with dark hair and dark brown eyes. He remembered when he first met her; she had come in with a badly worn heel to her lace up boots. She was so small and delicate, like a teacup, and he found her fragility beautiful, her pale skin so unlike all the rough materials he saw everyday. She seemed like she needed him badly; there was more to fix than the overworked heel. And he wanted to protect her, make sure she was never cold.
She was always cold. She lay in his bed after a year, after months with phlegm in her lungs and a headache at her temples, and he sat on the edge of the bed and wondered if he could do this anymore. Wondered if he could be responsible for someone so weak she could hardly cough. He looked at her and her long, thin fingers and even though she was still pale and lovely, he felt they would never get anywhere, that there was no up and out. They never even made love anymore, and if he even asked it was though he had committed an unforgivable crime.
“Could you hand me a tissue?” she asked in a voice that floated like an eyelash through the air. She lay in the bed and he sat at the foot of it, his head in his hands, and he could smell the shoe polish embedded in his pores.
“I think I’ve failed you, Emily,” and he remembered himself as a little boy in his father’s shop, tying all the shoe laces together, getting so tangled in them he couldn’t move. His father was showing him how to be like he was, and he had wanted Fredrick to just get it, to hammer the pieces together, to just make a shoe. But he wouldn’t get it, he’d never get it, and there would always be a cold and perilous lake between what he did and was supposed to do.
“What are you talking about?” she said and sneezed, and he thought she had broken into tiny little pieces that he could never pick up, that he didn’t want to pick up, that he wanted to sweep under a rug somewhere and pretend didn’t happen.
“Emily,” he chose his words carefully, “I don’t think I can save you anymore,” and he listened to her cry until she was too tired to fight it, and he kissed her forehead and disappeared.

She had stopped with professors a long time ago.  At least it seemed a different time, a different life, like she could stack herself up like a Russian doll, and that was just one of the times inside her, inside a different time as well.  She wished she were someone else entirely, the blond girl with the ring maybe, who had everything lined up and balanced like a checkbook, knowing exactly how the ledger should read.  Because each time she threw an iron in the fire, another one fizzled to ash, and she wanted to be five steps past any hot coals.  How could she know what was right and what right was?  Where was the measure, the yardstick?  There had to be some absolute.  But like a dense wood, the further she got into these relationships, the harder it was to get out, and one step forward only revealed more signs pointing in battling directions.  Like the flag on the flagpole, she just flapped in the wind.

How could he be expected to do so much? How could he be expected to save someone, to provide for them, to support a family?  How could he, if it was hard enough to make it through everyday?  Couldn’t she tell?  Couldn’t she tell he had drifted? In that room where she coughed and cried and broke into pieces, their relationship wore itself out until it was just unfolded laundry, just piles of wrinkled things.

There was his room; it was just a room like any other room. A room with a bed and books and a closet with a sliding mirror that always got stuck.
“Do you really mean you don’t love me?” she demanded. He was standing, and she was sitting with navy covers up to her neck and suddenly the room had become some sort of grave, a place of massive, unstoppable death. Even the wood floors gleamed menacingly, glaring at her in the bed.
“It just can’t work,” he said. He pushed his hair behind his ear and jumped to pull up his jeans, “you’re too young.” He had green eyes that let her have so many maybes, tiny pebbles like ocean glass.
“Since when did age mean anything?” She was feeling desperate; he was making her feel desperate, as though she were the crazy one who needed him. She hadn’t needed him, she didn’t need him in the beginning, but he had asked her to need him, and she had given in.
“Leah, calm down, you knew this wouldn’t work. We both knew it.” The trees stopped having leaves just then, she knew it.
The light hit his hand where his wedding band would soon be.
“You can stay here the rest of the day until I get back from class. You can stay here until then.” He was putting on his coat, finding his shoes, he was suddenly the grown up. He was her father saying, “Don’t you understand what that means?”
But she didn’t understand, she didn’t understand any of it. She stayed in that room until the very last minute, until the last second when the last hand on the clock said, “This is all over, it’s the end of class”. She hadn’t moved, staying in that bed with the covers around her, feeling impossibly small. Then she had dressed quickly, quietly and left.

Then there was Kate. He had thought Kate could be his own. He had thought Emily and sickness were a thing of the past, a thing of a smaller life, and Kate would be his girl to have and to hold. She was blonde with watery blue eyes and even now when he thought of her, it was as though she were from an old movie, imprecise and blurred around the edges. When she smiled it was as though the whole room suddenly had purpose, and he didn’t mind making shoes. He didn’t mind his father standing over him disapprovingly day after day. He would do anything to make her happy; he had loved her too much. Yet he felt when she began to worm out of his embrace. It was a slow twitch, until it became uncontainable, and the harder he held her, the harder he promised to keep her still, the longer he promised that everything was going to be okay, that everything could always be as it was those first few months when they would lie in bed until noon as though nothing else mattered, and he would smell her hair, and she would stroke his arm with her fingertips; the longer he promised it could be like that forever, the more she squirmed away. Until no amount of strength could keep her still and she looked at him and whispered, “I’m sorry,” and packed her things and went away. She had discarded him, as though he had never given her anything, and he felt it with such acute pain that ran all the way from his heart to his groin. She walked out of the wooden door in red heels and the little brass bell rang out a fit of warning, now too late. In that moment, his heart burst from overuse and the pain of not receiving anything in return, the pain of wanting fused with hope, and he thought it was possible he’d never breathe again. She was gone, and he was still a shoemaker and he had nothing to clutch any longer, no soft blond hair to smell.

He left the school which was worse than anything.  If he had stayed she could’ve had something to hold onto.  But now she couldn’t even ride by and see if his bike was parked.  See if a light was on like a beacon of a hope.  If he was alive, he could still possibly love her.  He could try.  He could be inside reading to that horrible woman, the poetry teacher, and picturing Leah, soft and naked under the navy quilt.  She had heard they had honeymooned in Portofino, and all she could see when she closed her eyes was the two of them on a sailboat in the most placid of seas taking off from the little port where old women sold sunflower tablecloths and men made fruite de mer an art form.  The poetry teacher would be thinking of a poem with sailors and an albatross and she would say, “Remember that student of yours?” and he would say, “Leah?  She was just young, she didn’t know any better,” and he would light a cigar to mask the inflection in his voice, and the poet would wonder how he guessed her name so fast.

What he wanted was the type of love that would make him run screaming through hospitals, throwing things. The type of love he had never seen before, but imagined many times, across the orange light of a room filled with cigarette smoke wafting from long holders and tumblers filled with gin. She would be wearing a red dress, and maybe a hat, and she would look up at him through a veil. He would invite her to dance, and she would accept with a manicured hand. He would put his hand on her lower back and feel the heat of naked skin and let her eye brush his face, so that it left a small black smear of makeup. He touched the stubble on his face where the mark would be, and ran his hand through his thick blond curls, pulling them out at the top. Love would not say, “Sorry.” Love would not say, as she stood in the middle of shop and held out overworked boots, “Could you fix these? They are my absolute favorite shoes.”

What she wanted was some exchange over warm light, the kind that came from a candle in a depression-era glass case, flickering in a dark place with smoke and wood and martini olives. She wanted a sweater with fur on the collar and possibly a kir royal, something heady and warm. Something that felt thick and comfortable and old. She wanted the faint smell of smoke, not dry but musky. Those were all the things he was to her. All the times they had sat in hotel bars far from the University, far from the reality that she was just a student like any other. There she was something bigger, grander than herself. There she was studied instead of studying, and all she had to do was look at him the way he wanted to be seen.
He held her hand across the table, and there were almonds in a silver dish, but she didn’t touch them.
“How did I find you?” he said.
And she wanted to say fate, but now she realized it was just another day like any other day, another paper to grade, another text to go over.
“Cause you’re one of the lucky ones,” she replied coyly, in the life when she still summoned up her coy. And his green eyes twinkled, and he leaned over in the middle of the hotel bar, while the piano was playing Edelweiss and kissed her like it was the most natural thing in the world.

He got up and put on his coat. He needed to get out of the shop, get some air. He left a shoe, half made, on the wooden table. He pushed the door with so much force that it slammed back, and he felt the sting of cold on his face. He watched his city as he walked, all the shades of browns and grays, and wondered if he would ever move forward, ever discover things. The University loomed in front of him like a foreign palace, where foreign subjects worshipped foreign kings. He sat on a cold metal bench and put his hands in the pocket of his brown coat. He wondered what it would be like if the whole world could open up for him, if it was not just heel toe, heel toe, everyday, but something deep and wide. He watched the students, as they went by in tennis shoes and sturdy boots, watched as they carelessly crunched the leaves beneath their feet, and he wondered what it felt like to move like that, to take off.”

Leah walked down from her classroom, kicking up dried leaves.  She sat on a cold metal bench and stared out into the sea of students. She wondered if they all clutched their books looking for somewhere to turn, or if they already knew where the road would lead them.  She watched a girl fix a bobby pin, pulling her hair back with one hand and readying the pin with her mouth, while hugging her purse between her legs.  She wondered if one could measure angst, and at the same time, wondered if she lost it, what would she have?  She wanted to strive for something and be someone all at the same time, and she wanted the world to let her.

Fredrick felt the warmth of the girl beside him. She had on black thick boots, and she seemed to have stopped for no reason, and yet she was chewing on her nails as though the fate of the world lay in her cuticles.  She had dark brown hair and the reddest lips that made him think of overripe raspberries, and he wondered what a girl like that could think and feel.  What she liked to worry about and what could make her happy. And he thought maybe love was much quieter than screaming hospitals and too big to express with noise.

Leah realized there was a boy beside her, staring. What she didn’t want were pink sunsets on a midnight blue sky. She had never been to the desert, but she pictured it as all those promises, kicking up dust in unwanted places. The vast expanse of land and life was wasted beneath those kisses that said they’d be there forever and lied. Her skin cracked in anger, it was so dry. But then, she looked at the boy’s face and his blue eyes so innocent, and she thought maybe it wasn’t only her who needed to be loved.
“Hi,” she said, and she said it because the truth was as much as she said she was sick of promises, she wanted one that would keep.

“Hi,” Fredrick responded, shocked that her red mouth had spoken, shocked that it was such a simple word he had been waiting to hear.