and the more I did to protect her from the unexpected, the more stifled she felt, the wilder her longing, until it had become unbearable.
It seemed possible. Or at least, in that purgatorial cafeteria, not impossible, more or less as likely as the other scenario, the one I’d believed the whole time, priding myself on how well I understood my wife. Suddenly I wanted to cry. Out of frustration and exhaustion and despair of ever really coming close to the center, the always-moving center of the woman I loved. I sat at the table staring into the greasy food and waited for the tears to come, even wishing them to come, so that I might unburden myself of something, because as things stood I felt so heavy and tired that I couldn’t see any way to move. But they didn’t come, and so I continued to sit there hour after hour watching the unrelenting rain slosh against the glass, thinking of our life together, Lotte’s and mine, how everything in it was designed to give a sense of permanence, the chair against the wall that was there when we went to sleep and there again when we awoke, the little habits that quoted from the day before and predicted the day to come, though in truth it was all just an illusion, just as solid matter is an illusion, just as our bodies are an illusion, pretending to be one thing when really they are millions upon millions of atoms coming and going, some arriving while others are leaving us forever, as if each of us were only a great train station, only not even that since at least in a train station the stones and the tracks and the glass roof stay still while everything else rushes through it, no, it was worse than that, more like a giant empty field where every day a circus erected and dismantled itself, the whole thing from top to bottom, but never the same circus, so what hope did we really have of ever making sense of ourselves, let alone one another?
At last my waitress approached. I hadn’t noticed that the cafeteria had emptied, nor that the waiters had cleared the tables and were laying them with white cloths for the evening when the place apparently transformed itself into something respectable. The lunch shift ends at four, she said. We’re closed until dinner starts at six. She was no longer wearing her black and white uniform, and had changed into her street clothes, a blue miniskirt and yellow sweater. I apologized, paid my bill and a large tip, and stood. Perhaps the waitress, who was not more than twenty, saw a grimace on my face as I did so, the grimace of a man lifting a tremendously heavy weight, because she asked me if I had far to go. I don’t think so, I said, because I didn’t know exactly where I was. I’m going to Theaterplatz. She said she was going that way, too, and to my surprise asked me to wait while she got her bag. I don’t have an umbrella, she explained, and pointed at mine. While I waited for her I was forced to reassess my opinion of the cafeteria, which now had candles on each table that a waiter was setting out one by one, and which, as I couldn’t help but admit when the girl returned with a smile, employed such a pretty and friendly waitress.
We huddled under my umbrella and set off into the storm. Her nearness immediately softened my mood. The walk was only ten minutes, and mostly we discussed her classes at the art school, and her mother who was in the hospital with a cyst. To anyone who passed, we might have been father and daughter. When we reached Theaterplatz I told her to keep the umbrella. She tried to refuse but I insisted. May I ask you a personal question? she said just as we were about to part ways. All right, I said. What were you thinking about at the restaurant all that time? You had the most miserable look on your face, and just when I thought it couldn’t get any more miserable it did. About train stations, I said. Train stations and circuses, and then I touched the girl on the cheek, very gently, as I thought her father might, the father she should have had if the world were just, and went back to the hotel where