But it got a little better, much sooner than Felix had expected. They hugged in the car, and he even searched under her blouse. For a while he thought he could go all the way, right there in the street outside Giuliana’s mother’s building.
She murmured something to him even as he kissed her, and she pushed him away gently and when he opened his eyes he saw how flushed she had become, and the film over her eyes, that lost look.
It had him aching worse.
“Phone me,” she said. “When you get there.”
“How about every hour.”
“I’m worried about you, Felix. I am.”
“I have a mom already. What I want, what I need is”
She put a finger to his lips.
“Don’t let them, whoever they are, don’t do any more for those people.”
For a few moments he didn’t know what she meant.
He pretended to bite her finger. Her face soon turned sombre again.
“Felix, it’s not just about this thing. It’s been there awhile. And tell me I am not abandoning you.”
“Big word, ‘abandon.’ How long have you been thinking about this ‘talk’?”
“I feel terrible about this, you going up there by yourself.”
“Don’t. I spent summers there. They are easy. It’ll be a mini-holiday.” JOHN BRADY POACHER'S ROAD
“Severe, isn’t that what you said? But they’re older, he is, your Opa Kimmel.”
She put her hand out for the door latch.
“Be careful,” she said. “Driving, I mean.”
Felix drove on autopilot, his head swimming, and his thoughts beginning to clot and darken again. The words that Giuliana seemed to have left behind her in the car circled endlessly even as the spring air cannoned around from the open windows. It wasn’t helping, all this cool air. He couldn’t trap any of those words or phrases long enough to make any sense of what she had told him.
All he remembered was her eyes glistening, and the faraway look, too often near to tears. There had to be someone else. But why would she wait until their time together to tell him? Nonsense.
As if he weren’t in over his head already, with what had started with a drive in the hills with Gebhart only two days ago, when he had sat in the Himmelfarb kitchen eating home-made strudel. Two days? ‘A good day’s work’ Gebhart had called it, getting Hansi Himmelfarb out of the house at last? Off the deep end, for sure, he decided.
He yelled out the window, a long, ragged screech. When he saw there were no cars behind him still, he did it again, until his throat hurt. It sort of worked, but only in that he had a burning throat that took his attention. Within a short time, he was ready to head up into the hills from the roundabout in Weiz, beginning to wonder how the hell he had gotten all this way and not paid attention to the driving.
He earned two annoyed toots from drivers when he changed his mind at the roundabout and went the full way around, then back toward the supermarket. Oma Nagl was a sucker for blumen, any kind, but freesias most of all. Something would come of the end of this scheisslich day, with a cake, a dozen bottles of Puntigamer, and two city newspapers. Opa Nagl could laugh over them with gusto and regular quiet expressions of joyful malice that were entertaining to watch.
He found everything in the supermarket, including freesias that would have been better bought two days ago. The key in the trunk was tricky, and he stared at the reflections on the glass while he wiggled it. It wasn’t working. He stopped and left the key hanging, his eyes still on the evening sky reflected on the glass. He wasn’t overly surprised to feel an anger surging in him now.
So Giuliana had noticed changes in him. Sure, it was possible.
Everybody did the denial thing, and he’d be the first to admit it. But somehow decided it was better to wait until their holiday to have a “talk”? Well for the love of Jesus, as Gebhart might say in pious, controlled exasperation. So she had noticed something, changes he had not. Well why hadn’t she said something earlier? With the running jokes about the insensitive males, and womanly intuition, or inspiration or whatever they wanted to call it? She had given up, was why, she held out no hope. Was that fair?
He tried again and the key turned. He loaded in the beer and the cake and the newspapers and slammed the hatch shut. What had he done so wrong anyway? Before he knew it, Felix had reclined his seat and was reaching over the back seat to get at the beer. He gave the parked cars a quick once-over, opened one with the penknife he kept in the glove compartment, and took a long, long draught of warm beer. It was just fine. He held it down on the floor as a shopper pushed a trolley close by.
On his second, shorter drink from the bottle, he saw it was snobbery, Giuliana’s thing that had come out of nowhere tonight.
Or a day late, he had learned. She didn’t want her boyfriend being a cop; she wanted the fun-loving-student-headed-for-respectability back, the one she had started with two years ago. And maybe she was right. She had graduated and was teaching already. He had worn out some shoes and lost brain cells drifting around Europe and working for the year. Pretty simple decision for her then, no?
With the bottle emptying on his fifth or sixth sip, it was all coming together. It was like one of the accordions that always showed up at a Maifest outside the church walls in St. Kristoff, when the beer started to flow finally, but the wrong notes, or no notes at all, were coming out of it. He shook the bottle to be sure it was really empty. So fast? He slid it under the seat, and wondered if this was how going mad actually started. Yes, maybe this was what if felt like to go over the edge. He stared at the top of the steering wheel, a gassy burp escaping between his lips and the giddiness starting in his head. He’d make it, he knew, up to St. Kristoff and his grandparents’ place. The guilt at drinking one bottle of beer here in a car park wouldn’t cripple him.
Parts of the steering wheel were worn smooth. He ran his hand along from axle to axle. Giuliana was right.
He ran his fingers around the whole wheel now, and felt the parts that had received little wear. His father had driven this car as little as possible: it dies on the hills, he had said? Yes. And, you’d nearly have to get out and push it up to the village, was another.
He had shut things out. So? Couldn’t she understand that he’d had to shut things out? Hadn’t he even told her once, a year afterwards, that he couldn’t stop thinking what his father’s last moments had been like, maybe that second or two it was still in the air, spiralling down to the rocks? Maybe it had all just brought out something maternal in her, or a pity, and he had been too dumb to spot it growing, until now, even she knew it wasn’t enough to get over what he had become.
The scent of the freesias was winning out over his beery breath.
He remembered what the woman wrapping them had said. Any other day it might have been funny.
“Your liebchen will love these,” she had told him in accented German she had not grown up with. “After freesias comes diamonds, the engagement. Ever heard that?”