In Frankfurt, in my small room at the Hessischer Hof, drinking a beer that isn’t very cold. At midnight it becomes October 3—Germany is reunited. On the TV, I watch the celebrations in Bonn and Berlin. A moment of history, alone in a hotel room. What can one say about German reunification? It’s already happened .
Coughed all night. Called the publisher this morning, then the publicist. It’s such a shame to cancel my appearance on the panel, but I must save my voice for my readings. The publisher sent me more flowers. The publicist brought me a package of cough drops—“with organically grown Swiss alpine herbs.” Now I can cough through my interviews with my breath smelling of lemon balm and wild thyme. I’ve never been happier to have a cough.
On the elevator, there was the tragicomic Englishwoman; from the look of her, she’d doubtless awakened with the recovered memory of yet another rape.
At lunch in the Hessischer Hof, there was (at another table) the German novelist who does it with chickens; he was being interviewed by a woman who interviewed me earlier this morning. My interviewer at lunch was a man with a bigger cough than mine. And when I was alone, just sipping coffee at my table, the young German novelist looked at me whenever I coughed—as if I had a feather caught in my throat.
I truly love my cough. I can take a long bath and think about my new novel.
In the elevator, like a small man inflated to grotesque size—with helium—there is the atrocious American male, the Unbearable Intellectual. He seems offended when I step into the elevator with him.
“You missed the panel. They said you were sick,” he tells me.
“Yes.”
“Everyone gets sick here—it’s a terrible place.”
“Yes.”
“I hope I don’t catch something from you,” he says.
“I hope not.”
“I’m probably already sick—I’ve been here long enough,” he adds. Like his writing, it’s unclear what he means. Does he mean he’s been in Frankfurt long enough to catch something, or does he mean he’s been in the elevator long enough to have been exposed to what I’ve got?
“Are you still not married?” he asks me. It’s not a pass; it’s a signature non sequitur of the kind the Unbearable Intellectual is renowned for.
“Still not married, but maybe about to be,” I answer.
“Ah—good for you!” he tells me. I’m surprised by his genuine fondness for my answer. “Here’s my floor,” he says. “Sorry you weren’t on the panel.”
“Yes.” Ah, the little-heralded chance encounter between world-famous authors—is there anything that compares with it?
The woman writer should meet the strawberry-blond boyfriend at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The bad boyfriend is a fellow fiction writer—very minimalist. He’s published only two books of short stories—fragile tales, so spare that most of the story is left out. His sales are small, but he has been compensated by the kind of unqualified critical adoration that often accompanies obscurity.
The woman novelist should be a writer of “big” novels. They are a parody of the proverbial wisdom that opposites attract. In this case, they can’t stand each other’s writing; their attraction is strictly sexual.
He should be younger than she is.
They begin an affair in Frankfurt and he comes with her to Holland, where she is going after the book fair to promote a Dutch translation. He doesn’t have a Dutch publisher—and he has been far less in the limelight in Frankfurt than she has been. Although she hasn’t noticed this, he has. He hasn’t been in Amsterdam since he was a student—a summer abroad. He remembers the prostitutes; he wants to take her to see the prostitutes. Maybe a live-sex show, too.
“I don’t think I want to see a live-sex show,” the woman novelist says.
It could be his idea to pay a prostitute to let them watch. “We could have our own live-sex show,” the short-story writer says. He seems almost indifferent to the idea. He implies that she might be more interested in it than he is. “As a writer, ” he says. “For research .”
And when they’re in Amsterdam, and he’s escorting her through the red-light district, he keeps up a casual, lighthearted banter. “I wouldn’t want to see her do it—she looks inclined to bondage.” (That kind of thing.) The minimalist makes her think that watching a prostitute will be merely a naughty bit of hilarity. He gives her the impression that the most difficult part of it will be trying to contain their laughter— because, of course, they can’t reveal their concealed presence to the customer.
But I wonder how the prostitute would hide them so that they could see without being seen?
That will be my research. I can ask my Dutch publisher
to walk with me through the red-light district—after all, it’s a thing tourists do. He probably is asked by all his women authors; we all want to be escorted through the seedy, the sordid, the sexual, and the deviant. (The last time I was in Amsterdam, a journalist walked with me through the redlight district; it was his idea.)
So I will get a look at the women. I remember that they don’t like it when women look at them. But I’m sure I’ll find one or two who don’t absolutely terrify me—someone I can go back to, alone. It will have to be someone who speaks English, or at least a little German.
One prostitute might be enough, as long as she is comfortable about talking to me. I can imagine the act without seeing it, surely. Besides: it is what happens to the woman in hiding, the woman writer, that most concerns me. Let’s presume the bad boyfriend is aroused, even that he masturbates while they’re hiding together. And she can’t protest, or even make the slightest move to get away from him—without the prostitute’s customer knowing that he’s being watched. (Then how can he masturbate? That’s a problem.)
Maybe the irony is that the prostitute has at least been paid for how she’s used, but the woman writer is used, too; she has spent her money to be used. Well. Writers must have thick skins. No irony there.