He did not know what to say, so he said that there was nothing to tell. He did not say that he’d forgotten facts were less dense than all the thick fictions, that facts pushed against the surface, bobbing. It was the night before she was to leave for New York, and now she was circling on what he could not say.
“It’s just you never said you were in the army,” she said.
“I haven’t known you all that long,” he said. “Whereas I am very old. The math of it is skewed.”
“So catch me up, old man,” she said, bright and campy with something.
She’d ceased eating. He reached across the table for a crumple of lettuce and tried to think up a quip about how she was allowing her salad to get cold. They had gotten to the moment because she liked war movies, not cowboy movies. They had gotten to the moment because he’d burned the roast. They had gotten to the moment because he’d wanted them to have a very nice dinner before she left, and they had been having a very nice dinner. He saw her glance at his hand holding an oily green. “I was in the army at the end of the eighties, in Germany, and I went home.”
Alexandra made her voice dramatic, ironic. “Did you kill anyone?”
Jeremy cut into his steak carefully. He finished chewing, said, “I drank like a young man for a while, and it made an old man of me. I used to have a hairline in the proper place, you know.” Jeremy searched for more true things to say. This meant stick to Germany.
In Teufelsberg—translation: Devil’s Mountain—the air then was Dylan and Klassenfeind radio, Bitlovka jackets and the class enemy who comes in the night. By the time he had arrived, old ladies across the wall were watching Dallas. He had been eighteen and buoyant with army money, a fortune compared to the sums available in the gray mines at home. The Siggies had three days of the week off, and so when he was not listening on the radio for words that meant war games, he’d read E. T. A. Hoffmann or left Field Station Berlin to buy champagne for young Germans who sang songs about the state where hop and malt did not lose. The final days of the Cold War arranged themselves like a holiday, and whether it was Schabowski’s mistake or his stratagem, what everyone accepted was a few words and the war was over.
“That’s what you did in the army?” Alexandra dangled her fork over her plate. “You read stories and sang songs?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Why do you think I’ve got dirty little secrets?”
“I don’t entirely, but I want it all,” she said. “Don’t you?”
He thought of how he loved that she couldn’t sleep without music playing on the stereo, how because of that sometimes he’d wake in the middle of the night to Bach. She had never known her father, but she said because he’d owned a grocery, she thought of him when she saw a misty globe of lettuce. She was quietest in mornings. She left vitamins on Jeremy’s toast plates. And, simply, he thrilled to look at her clavicle, her cheek.
“No,” he said. “I don’t. I like you just the way you are.”
Alexandra’s mouth drew into a wry little bow. “And what if there is more?”
“Is there?” he said.
He set his knife down. His fork. He lay both hands flat on the surface of the table. Steady. Symmetrical. One side of him, the other. Heart, skin.
“I used to have secrets. I was a fifteen-year-old with a forty-year-old boyfriend.”
“You nearly still do,” he said.
Her hands were brisk on a cloth napkin, folding it, setting it on the table. Done. Alexandra wobbled a glass of wine, circling it on its base. He could see she was a little drunk. “Did you ever think of one thing,” she said, “did you ever think if you could only fix that one thing, you would fix it all?”
“Once,” he said, “for a few years.”
“And then?” she said.
“And then I grew up.”
“My friend Lyle Michaels,” she said.
“The journalist.”
“The journalist,” she said. “Lyle says when you learn someone’s secret, that’s when you really know them.”
Jeremy swallowed. Jeremy raised a finger. “It is my turn for a question,” he said. “Tiramisu or flan?”