laughed. He offered her another bottle for free. She accepted, and by the time she arrived at the apartment on Winsstrasse she was quite beyond self-awareness in the conventional sense. In particular, she didn’t notice the time—in her rush, she had been too quick, and when Asja opened the door, Margaret found she was the only guest—it was just man and wife at home.
With her dress and her fresh face, Margaret had been successful. She was tall, Grecian-formed. Asja was tiny beside her, blouse old-fashioned; and she wore no bra beneath it. Her breasts were visibly sunken. So Margaret, young, muscled, in her radiant white dress and upturned breasts, had trounced her opponent. But she saw right away that she had beaten her with far too rousing a gesture, as though she had raised a sledgehammer to kill a moth.
Asja, standing indifferently before her, or perhaps with only a slightly sniffy dislike, had not even bothered to put makeup on her face, and her clothes were quiet, aged, poetic, asexual. Asja managed to have more class and style than Margaret would ever have.
That was how Margaret saw it. Her yearning for Amadeus had never been divorced from her desire to live like Asja, to be just as Asja was.
The two of them looked at each other, and then all at once began to fuss, in sugar-sweet voices, over the placement of the dirty radio, an item Asja eyed for a long moment once it was put down in the bedroom.
The apartment had very high ceilings, shining parquet floors that buckled ever so slightly. These Amadeus had stripped and refinished himself. They gave off a golden glow now. The moldings around the ceilings were broad and detailed, the balconies large, and filled with hyacinths, climbing roses, dill and basil. Amadeus’s study, where the party was to be held, had a large fireplace with a great Parisian mirror above it, bookshelves lining one wall, and a thick white carpet in the center of the room into which the feet sank with gratitude.
The kitchen was down a long corridor all the way at the back of the flat. This is where Amadeus was, when Asja ushered Margaret in. She said he was putting together the salad—he knew how to make a good vinaigrette. Margaret had never known that Amadeus knew how to make a good vinaigrette. She had never seen him cook in all her years as his mistress.
In Margaret’s drunken state, her embarrassment was both aggravated and mitigated, depending on how you considered it. Drunkenness only allows for one emotion at a time. The emotional thrust of the drunken mind has the wattage of the sun whose light burns out all other stars. So Margaret was sunk deep inside her excruciation. On the other hand, drunkenness also softens and blurs, so she found this excruciation much easier to tolerate than she might have.
Amadeus came in to see her in the study in the blank instant after Asja left for the kitchen. If he had not been so big, and Asja so small, Margaret would have entertained the possibility that they were the same person, exchanging masks, to fool her. She tried mightily to hide her intoxication. Amadeus was in high spirits. He pretended she was not his mistress of course, saying in casual, avuncular tones, that she looked “like a model.” This was colder than any unkind words. But he was quite taken with the radio, his jowls bouncing with a warm smile when she led him to it. He spent a nice amount of time twiddling the dials and pretending he knew how to fix it, as it seemed to be broken in the end, although it made a humming sound and the board lit up when the knob was pushed. After a while, he offered her a drink. He said that so far it was only the red wine that was open.
So she took red wine. Somehow, shortly after, when three or four more guests had arrived, as she was tripping gaily down the long corridor to the kitchen with the wineglass, she managed to spill it all down her white dress, in a long vertical stain the color of a pig’s kidney.
She went back into the kitchen, where Asja was working on the last of the dinner preparations. Asja said to Margaret, in a voice that Margaret would never forget, “Oh, you’ve spilled your wine.”
They looked at each other. Margaret wanted to laugh at the clarity. It seemed so