She wanted to escape a love affair.
She had dreamed of walking the grey streets of Paris, the wicked Henry Miller beside her on the shiny wet cobbles. But when she expressed this vision to Isaac, a law student obsessed with the stock market, he said that walking in the rain was merely getting wet.
IN MUNICH LATE BY IVANOV REYEZ 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 92
She told her girlfriends at the hotel, “I need something else, I don’t know what, just something else.”
She wanted to escape a “torrid love affair” as she jokingly and ruefully described it.
Jane and Isaac had talked about marriage. He wanted her to meet his family in California but he eventually wanted to live in Boston. He was Jewish—“very Reform”, he said, almost growling—and she was Catholic. He spoke of meeting with a rabbi, and she could only think the all-girls high school uniforms and Communion. The more he pressured her she started doubting the strength and depth of her love for him.
So this trip to Europe was to provide the time and distance to measure and weigh the relationship. And although she was hurting, she was convinced that ultimately she would emerge a free woman.
Before graduation she dabbled in politics and social protest. She joined the National Organization for Women, she aspired to be an officer. Her commanding height of five-nine, higher in her thick hippie sandals, and her aggressive spirit made her a favorite voice at meetings. She articulated strongly what other women only thought.
Nonetheless she had her detractors. Militant feminists dismissed her as too pretty and feminine, an idle rich girl, and the pretty feminine ones found her too brusque and even manly.
“Women didn’t get the vote by waiting for the men,” she reminded them. “In the Middle East, the women are never going to advance if all they do is wait for the men to come to supper,” she continued, and they listened. And then she listened to Isaac.
In the morning they would fly out of Munich back to the States. “Yesterday we went to the concert at the Amerika Haus, and shopping all over for souvenirs,” she told her girlfriends. “One of you bought a cuckoo clock, all of us got fat on fries with mayonnaise and rode the streetcars. So today is my day.”
She imagined a stroll in the drizzle to a Schwabing café. In her filmmaking classes she had dreamed of walking the grey streets of Paris, the wicked Henry Miller beside her on the shiny wet cobbles. But when she expressed this vision to Isaac, a law student obsessed with the stock market, he said that walking in the rain was merely getting wet. It was nice if she travelled to Europe, he allowed, in order to get it out of her system. “I love you that much, Janie, but there’s no way I can convert into your John Donne.”
Passing a kiosk she noticed a rack of postcards and found one called Ostbahnhof by Michael Sowa, whoever he was. “This symbolizes me,” she said to herself. “I’m this man waiting for the train.”
She bought the card and went on to a snack place. She ordered sausage and a cold beer. She looked at the postcard and wondered if the man was just there. He was not waiting for the train. He was not going anywhere. She thought of the transients who lived in bus stations.
Years ago she would not have bought a postcard. She thought of skittering with Isaac down Guadalupe Street in Austin, sidestepping bums, and settling in a cozy café to read The Rag together. When he found a jukebox, he played Diamond Girl for her and called her U6. That was the extent of his romanticism.
“Letters mingle souls,” John Donne had written somewhere, and now Jane thought of writing Isaac on this postcard even if she would be back in the States next day. But to say what? That she succeeded in failing?
Meanwhile she was going to enjoy her sunny day in Munich. She roamed the Ludwig-Maximilian university campus, took off her sandals and cooled her feet in the fountain, and watched the students hurrying to their classes. She was glad she had already graduated. On the wall of a building someone had sprayed “Nazis Raus!”
In a small bookstore that appeared to be part of the university she bought a postcard again, one with a snail and some Hebrew words. She decided to write Isaac on this card. She would tell him how all the bicycles reminded her of UT and their dates to their favorite deli for bagels and lox. “It must have purple onion,” he had said. She smiled and pictured his pitchy eyebrows. He had boasted that he resembled his hero Robert McNamara in looks and intelligence but she privately disagreed. What Isaac called meticulous she called fastidious.
In Prague she had been reading Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle, “running riot with it throughout Europe” as she told a pretty Bulgarian waitress named Irina. She missed Irina and their fervor, their conversations in smoky cafés. She lost the book, left it in a theatre or even on the park bench where she and Irina had been discussing it and listening to the wind. Or had Irina kept it?
Jane needed another “trip book”. She found Mann’s Death in Venice but she had already read it, besides it was in German. Aschenbach had started out in Schwabing, itching to live, and eventually found beauty and death in Venice. Now Jane was in Schwabing seeking not the littlest death or more sorrow, but life.