City of Women by David R. Gillham Page A

desires.”
    “If you’re intent on torturing yourself like this”—he shrugged—“I can’t stop you.”
    “Tell me her name.”
    Shaking his head. “Sigrid.”
    “It’s a question, Egon. Only a very small one for a mistress. What do you call your wife?”
    “I call her by her name.”
    “Which is?”
    A small breath of concession. “Which is Anna.”
    Anna. Sigrid takes the name inside herself, and consigns it to an interior vault. The name of her lover’s wife. “Where is she?” she asked. Nothing. “You have forgotten, perhaps?
Now, let’s see . . . where did I put my wife?
Should you search your coat pockets?”
    Egon exhaled darkly, then answered. “She’s in Vienna. Her parents are there.”
    “How long have you been married to her?”
    “Six years.”
    “Six years.” It might as well have been a lifetime. It might as well have been a century in comparison to their six frantic months. Six months, one week, and what? How many days? How many hours? How many minutes left? “And does she know?”
    “Know?”
    “Does she suspect that you so easily slip off your wedding band?”
    “I don’t wear a wedding band. I don’t care for symbols of ownership.”
    “How convenient for you. And you have children?”
    “
Sigrid,
” he says, glowering.
    “Should I assume that the answer is yes?”
    “I wouldn’t think you’d be in such a rush to assume
anything
at this point.”
    “But you
do,
though.
Have children
, that is.”
    “I have daughters,” he admitted. “Two.”
    “Ah. You see that wasn’t so difficult. A straight answer.”
    “How old?”
    He was up, out of the bed. His bare feet padding across the crooked hardwood floor. “How old?” she repeated.
    “Five and three.”
    “And they have names, like most children?”
    Uncorking a bottle of schnapps on the battered sideboard, he poured out a glass. Only one glass. “These questions of yours, Sigrid. They have nothing to do with us.”
    “No?” said Sigrid, her voice strident.
    He faced her, leaning naked against the sideboard’s edge with the drink in his hand. “What we have,” he told her, “is private. Just between you and me. If you must have the words, fine. You know that I love you.”
    “Are you certain of that?”
    “But this love is not to be made public. It would be an insult to our feelings to expose them to the hostility of the world.”
    “It was public enough in the back of a movie theater.”
    “That was fucking.”
    “Rather than love. I see.” Sigrid nodded. “And your wife?”
    “Not our subject, Sigrid.”
    “You love her, too?”
    He inhaled smoke. “Differently from you.”
    “Hmm. I wonder what that means.”
    “I don’t ask you about your husband.”
    “Well, you
can
.”
    “But I don’t wish to. Why must he exist for me?”
    “Because he exists for
me
. I go home to him and have you between us every day. The lies I must tell.” She shook her head at the lies stored inside of her brain. “The lies I must remember.”
    “Your lies are not my responsibility,” he said. “Your
choices
are not my responsibility.”
    “You have no feelings for me. Not really. If you did, you couldn’t say such things.”
    “I love you intensely, Sigrid. Touching you is like sticking my hand into a fire.”
    “Sounds very painful for you,” she replied in anger, but also knowing that it was true.
    “But my wife. My children. They’re quite simply none of your business. None of
our
business.”
    The words hit her with the weight of stones. For an instant, and not for the first time, she felt herself to be utterly alone. Alone, as if she lay dead in her coffin. The feeling emptied her completely, even of tears. It was also the end of his words for the day, even after he returned to the bed. To her body. As her punishment, his articulation was withdrawn, and afterward there were only grunts and mumbled half words. She was always helpless against this, and raged inwardly at her own stupidity. All