Hausfrau Read Free Page A

what Bruno was, and Anna was almost sure it wasn’t) and the vessel by which her grandchildren—whom she deeply loved—were carried into the world. The help that Ursula offered was for the children’s sake, not Anna’s. She had been a high school English teacher for thirty years. Her English was stilted but fluent and she conceded to speak it whenever Anna was in the room, which sometimes Bruno didn’t even do. Ursula shooed her grandsons into the kitchen for a snack.
    “I’m taking a shower,” Anna said. Ursula raised an eyebrow but then lowered it as she followed Victor and Charles into the kitchen. It was no concern of hers. Anna took a towel from the linen closet and locked the bathroom door behind her.
    She needed the shower. She smelled like sex.

2
    “W HAT CAN ’ T YOU LIVE WITHOUT ?”
    This, Anna asked Archie as they shared, incautiously, a cigarette in bed. Anna didn’t smoke. She was wrapped in a top sheet. It was Friday.
    “Whiskey and women,” Archie said. “In that order.”
    Archie was a whiskey man. Literally. He stocked it, stacked it, and sold it in a shop he owned with his brother, Glenn.
    He laughed in an up-for-interpretation way. Archie and Anna were new lovers, green lovers,
ganz neue Geliebte.
Nearly virgin to each other, they still had reason to touch. Archie was ten years older than Anna, but his brown-red curls had not yet begun to thin and his body was taut. Anna responded to his laughter with laughter of her own: the sad, empty laughter of knowing that the newness, nice as it was, wouldn’t last. Novelty’s a cloth that wears thin at an alarming rate. So Anna would enjoy it prior to its tattering. Because tatter it surely would.

    “I F ,” D OKTOR M ESSERLI ASKED , “you are miserable, then why not leave?”
    Anna spoke without reflection. “I have Swiss children. They belong to their father as much as to me. We are married. I’m not really miserable.” Then she added, “He wouldn’t accept a divorce.”
    “You have asked him.” This wasn’t a question.
    Anna had not asked Bruno for a divorce. Not directly. She had, however, in her most affected and despondent moments, hinted around the possibility.
What would you do if I went away?
she’d ask.
What if I went away and never came back?
She would pose these questions in a hypothetical, parenthetically cheerful voice.
    Bruno would smirk.
I know you’ll never leave because you need me.
    Anna couldn’t deny this. She absolutely needed him. It was true. And honestly Anna had no plans to leave.
How would we split the children?
she wondered, as if the children were a cord of wood and the divorce an axe.
    “Anna,” Doktor Messerli asked, “is there someone else? Has there ever been anyone else?”
    The lunch hour folded into early afternoon. Archie and Anna shared a plate of cheese, some greengage plums, a bottle of mineral water. Then they set everything aside and fucked again. Archie came in her mouth. It tasted like school paste, starchy and thick.
This is a good thing I am doing,
Anna said inside herself, though “good” was hardly the right word. Anna knew this. What she meant was
expedient.
What she meant was
convenient.
What she meant was
wrong in nearly every way but justifiable as it makes me feel better, and for so very long I have felt so very, very bad.
Most accurately it was a shuffledcombination of all those meanings trussed into one unsayable something that gave Anna an illicit though undeniable hope.
    But all things move toward an end.
    That night, after she had put the children to bed and washed the dinner plates and scoured the sink to the unimpeachable shine that Bruno demanded (Doktor Messerli asked “Is he truly that much an ogre?” to which Anna responded
no,
which translated as
sometimes
), Anna spread her notebooks on the table and began her German exercises. She’d fallen behind. Bruno was locked in his office. Separate solitudes were not an unusual arrangement between them, and Bruno