Decompression

10

For a few days afterward, I felt as though I had a fever. The typical combination of weakness, confusion, and nervous euphoria. Actually not an unpleasant feeling. Suddenly the whole world took a step back. It was like watching a movie with me in the lead role. As if life was an entertaining adventure without consequences. My mother used to call that my “don’t give a shit” mood. She’d say, “You’re not leaving the house, not in that don’t give a shit mood. Get in bed and wait until you can think clearly again.”

Of course, I didn’t really have a fever. Nevertheless, in retrospect it’s not easy for me to describe correctly what happened. The days leading up to the dinner on the Dorset, where I now believe all decisions were made, flow together in my memory and refuse to arrange themselves in a clear sequence, blending instead into a fuzzy continuum with no beginning and no end. At night I’d wait for Antje to fall asleep so that I could sit at the computer and watch a few episodes of Up and Down. I’d set Emile on one arm and pull my cock out of my boxer shorts. I liked to wait until Bella finally appeared, and in general I took my time. I could sit through as many as three episodes. When I was finished, the clock showed it was after one, so sleep was out of the question. I lay on the couch and pondered whether my new passion for Up and Down was having a bad effect on my work with Theo and Jola. After careful consideration, I came to the conclusion that what I undertook in my free time had nothing to do with my business relationships. No lawyer would withdraw from a case just because he was having fantasies about his sexy client.

In summary it may be said that only underwater did everything remain unchanged. Theo was back in the company; in spite of his sniffles, he insisted on participating in every dive. I explained the risks to him and forbade nose drops. He took an excruciatingly long time to equalize his pressure, but he managed to get down to the planned depth every time. He’d apparently decided he wasn’t going to let Jola and me out of his sight again, not even twenty meters under the surface of the sea. The three of us drifted through the liquid silence, pointing out angel sharks and rays and groupers to one another. We fed sea urchins to octopuses and watched barracudas on the hunt.

Above the water, however, the air between us seemed to vibrate. It was as if we were all three waiting for something to happen. And we had an audience. It started one afternoon when we went shopping. Because I didn’t like talking to salesclerks, I maneuvered Theo and Jola past the cheese, fish, and meat counters and made a detour around the produce that customers weren’t allowed to weigh for themselves. Then I stood in front of a shelf with olives in glass jars and waited while Theo studied the wine selection two aisles farther on and Jola disappeared into the cosmetics department. She came back with a brightly colored package, put her arm through mine, and held the product up to my eyes.

“What do you think?”

I looked at the photograph on the box — a woman with wheat-blond hair, dressed to kill — and didn’t understand.

“Bleach,” Jola explained. “Lotte’s a blonde. If you want to know how someone thinks, you need to have the same hairstyle.”

I tried to free my arm from her grasp.

“You think it’ll look good on me?” She snuggled closer.

“I like your hair,” I said.

Jola laughed and kissed me on the mouth. When I felt her tongue between my teeth, I forgot myself. It was only a brief moment, during which my eyes closed and my hands grabbed. I thought I was going to fall down. Until I heard my colleague Laura’s voice saying, “Are you all shooting a scene for Up and Down?”

I could have punched myself in the head. The supermarket was on the way to the beach. Everybody shopped there. Laura looked as though she’d been standing behind us for a good while.

“Or is mouth-to-mouth resuscitation part of the training course?” She seemed to find this question witty.

Jola, whom I’d pushed away from me in fright, leaned against the olives shelf, ostentatiously and provocatively straightening her T-shirt. I raised my hand in a superfluous greeting. “Laura. How are things going?”

“That’s what I was about to ask,” said Theo. He was standing at the other end of the aisle and staring at Jola. “Why not just kneel down and blow him?”

“Well, okay, see you,” said Laura and disappeared.

In some panic, I considered all the people she could tell about this scene. And at the same time, I was searching for the words to apologize to Theo. He came up to me. “Don’t worry about it,” he said without taking his eyes off Jola. “If you didn’t love yourself so damned much, you’d understand you aren’t the problem at all.”

I withdrew to the magazine aisle. Fifteen minutes later, when they loaded their purchases onto the cashier’s conveyor belt, they were joking together. I wondered if I’d been dreaming.

They changed places in the van. Now Jola sat in the middle of the front seat, and Theo leaned against the side window. When she spoke, Jola kept putting her hand on my forearm or my knee. If I told some diving story, she listened gravely and asked questions. If I made a joke, she laughed out loud. In the evenings, she sent so many text messages that I had to switch off the ringer in my phone.

“Thanks for the wonderful day! Your Friend J.”

“Missing you. Your Friend J.”

“Lotte on a school of fishes: It was as if I were in the presence of a great power that observed me with a thousand eyes. Good, don’t you think? So does Your Friend J.”

“Shall we go down to the beach? Surf, moonlight, just the two of us? YFJ.”

In the mornings it would start up again while I was still lying on the couch. “Looking forward to what comes next. Your Friend J.”

I didn’t answer. I tried to keep Jola at a distance. Nevertheless, people I knew kept seeing me with her again and again. I wondered whether she could be doing it on purpose. In the Wunder Bar café, she even sat jokingly on my lap right when Bernie came in. I badly wanted to push her off my knees, but that would have looked like an admission of guilt. And so she stayed there while Bernie and I had a brief conversation about the expedition we were planning. The Aberdeen was shipshape, Dave knew what was up. If the weather held, there shouldn’t be any problem on November 23.

“As easy as a walk in the park,” Bernie said in English. He nodded to Theo and went to the counter in search of a piece of chocolate cake. As if he hadn’t seen Jola.

Another time she was standing in front of me and rummaging in my jeans pockets for the car key. Before I could grab her hands, Bernie’s pal Dave came around the corner. He looked away and didn’t say hello. On the promenade in Puerto del Carmen, Jola was hanging on my arm when a group of Spanish women walked toward us. I thought I recognized two of Antje’s girlfriends, even though with all the bright dresses and big noses and thick black hair, I couldn’t ever be sure about them.

The island was a village. People knew one another. Nothing happened unnoticed. The strange thing was that in actual fact nothing happened, but that wasn’t unnoticed either. I began to feel I was always being watched.

While we waited for Theo, who was off somewhere buying cigarettes, I emphatically asked Jola to stop.

“Stop what?” she said, taking my hand.

“That, for example!” I pulled my hand away.

“Maybe I’m just a bit more honest than you.” She snatched up my other hand and laid it on her hip. “Tell me that feels bad.”

It was always the same: at that very moment, a silver Land Rover Defender drove past us. There was only one silver Defender on the island, and it was driven by Geoffrey, who owned the Lobster’s Paradise. Could Jola know that? Could she have seen him before I did? Or was I getting paranoid? The sun turned Jola’s eyes into green glass. I liked looking into it. Moreover, I couldn’t claim that her hip felt bad. On the contrary. Theo came out of a shop shortly before I let her go.

“Don’t let me disturb you, Little Shit,” he said.

What was even stranger was how lighthearted Jola seemed at that time. She laughed a lot. Antje, with her simplistic understanding of human nature, would have attributed Jola’s behavior to new love. Even though it made no sense, Jola’s beaming smiles made me proud. Her face darkened only when she looked at Theo. Theo, who was now calling me nothing but “Little Shit,” seemed to find real enjoyment in the situation. He followed our every movement with his eyes, smiled pathologically when Jola touched me, and waited eagerly for what would happen next. I didn’t want to form any judgments, but I found Theo’s lack of pride repellent. His presence got on my nerves. It was like being permanently exposed to toxic radiation. Besides, I didn’t understand what he wanted me to do. Whatever Jola might have told him, he was free to find another diving instructor or leave the island altogether. As long as he continued to require my services, my only option was to do my job, as decently as possible. He could hardly have failed to notice my efforts to keep Jola off me. As best I could, I stayed out of the cross fire. Jola was the one who engaged in blatant behavior. Moreover, it wasn’t my fault that we three were together almost around the clock and separated only to sleep. They never wanted to go home after a dive. I chauffeured them up and down the island, trying hard to make the most of its meager sightseeing attractions. We ate duck in Omar Sharif’s former villa. We looked into the green water in the sea-level crater known as El Golfo. We trudged around every single piece bequeathed to the island by its artist. On one side I had Jola’s overheated chatter, on the other Theo’s icy silence. I told myself that only an idiot would have expected to pocket fourteen thousand euros just for a few diving lessons. I was being paid to handle two neurotics who’d anticipated their need of supervision while on vacation. Contrary to Theo’s implication, I wasn’t so stupid as to consider myself the problem. When Jola took my hand in public, I knew she was doing it for him.

During that time I often thought of a talk show that Antje and I had seen years before. A couple sitting on a white sofa had discussed their sadomasochistic inclinations. The two were in their late forties, conventionally dressed, the parents of two grown children. Without subordination, love wasn’t possible, the man said. Whoever claimed otherwise demonstrated not modernity of attitude but dishonesty. He declared that equal status or even freedom in interpersonal relations represented an illusion. The difference between someone who lived the S&M lifestyle and a normal citizen didn’t arise from the possession or not of an underground torture chamber, but from the fact that the S&M practitioner acknowledged that illusion. The man asserted that the viewers should take the trouble, just once, to think about their own relationships.

Antje and I had sat motionless on our couch. There was something embarrassing about our torpor. It was as if we weren’t actually following the program but rather staring frantically straight ahead so we wouldn’t have to look at each other.

The viewers could just examine their own sexual fantasies, the woman remarked. She doubted that anyone masturbated while dreaming about gentle foreplay and the missionary position.

About what, then? Asked the moderator, for whom things were not proceeding scandalously enough.

About young things who desired to be put properly through their paces, said the woman. About mothers who did it with their sons. About teachers and their female students, willing prostitutes, Africans with long cocks. Hadn’t the moderator ever visited a standard porn site? The name of the game was submission, she said.

The most important thing in life, the man explained, was being able to count on each other. And for that, you needed rules. Then everyone knew what he or she had to do.

And what the other person had to do, the woman added. That gave you a sense of security.

Then what looks from the outside like hell on earth is happiness on the inside? the moderator asked.

If you want to put it that way, yes, the woman replied.

Hell outside, happiness inside: I remembered that image when Jola’s hand brushed my belt buckle. I was looking for an explanation. I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that Jola and Theo were following the rules of a game I didn’t understand. Basically, I don’t understand it to this day. It’s strange that even in retrospect, no explanation occurs to me. Yet we’re supposed to think that explanations are our well-deserved reward for enduring the passage of time. We’re entitled to them. We go crazy when we don’t get them.

JOLA’S DIARY, EIGHTH DAY

Saturday, November 19. Early morning.

I’m happy. That sounds funny — I wouldn’t have thought I’d ever write such a sentence. I don’t even recognize myself. A strange woman with bright eyes and a knowing smile. Happiness is always a secret. Happiness always belongs to yourself alone. People write all kinds of drivel about happiness, and it always sounds false somehow. The beautiful part is that neither of us has a clue about happiness. I don’t, and Sven doesn’t either. That’s obvious from his embarrassment. From his tic of pushing me away if I touch him. From the way he’s always trying to dodge me. He doesn’t want to believe it. Can’t believe he deserves it. And then all at once he pulls me against him. Fastens himself to my mouth. In the middle of the supermarket. While his diving instructor colleagues look on, and through their eyes the entire island. We know absolutely nothing about happiness. Sven’s Antje and my old man weren’t very good guides. We’ll have to teach ourselves. Each in his own way. Sven struggles, I press forward. He probably has it harder than I do. More to lose. He’s going to have to hurt a sweet person like Antje. And whom must I hurt? Only the old man. That’s brutal, that only. I offered Theo a ticket on the next flight back to Berlin and told him he could stay in the apartment at first. A trial separation. So we can calmly wait and see how everything develops. With me. With Sven. Then we’ll figure out what’s next. But he doesn’t want to go. He says things like, I’m not abandoning the field to Little Shit. I have a right to be cuckolded by you. I’m staying until the bitter end. And: If nothing else, I can always write about it.

That would be lovely, I throw in. And see how his eyes flash. But he controls himself. Gets a grip. Says, That would be lovely. Exactly right.

Of course, I knew he wouldn’t go home. Did I ask him just to make him mad? Is it even possible that I want him to stay? Do I need him as an audience? Sometimes I wonder whether my happiness exists only for his sake, only to make him suffer. Whether any Sven would be possible without Theo. Then Sven wouldn’t be the end of Theo’s story, but only the next chapter in it. A new quality. At this thought, sheer horror seized me.

I cried out, You’ll never lay a hand on me again. If I tell Sven about this, he’ll break every bone in your body! He’ll kill you! It sounded like, Wait until I get my big brother. Was probably meant that way too.

The old man says, You love me. You’re not capable of leaving me. A little sun, a little sea, feeling good — you’re not the type for that sort of thing, not at all. You need me, Jola. I just have to wait until you realize Little Shit can’t make you happy.

I tremble at the thought that he could be right.

At night Sven comes to the window and calls softly. He waits until Antje’s asleep before he sneaks out. Which means he still hasn’t told her. I’m applying no pressure. The old man has taught me at least one thing: you can’t force men to do anything.

We go down near the water. Sven lays a camping mat on some flat rocks. At night the Atlantic roars even louder than it does during the day. The racket drowns out our cries. The darkness is absolute. A kind of darkness unknown in Berlin. Even if the old man were standing a few meters away, he could neither hear nor see us.

Sex and oceans — many corny things have been said about that subject. I’m afraid they all apply. Mostly it happens pretty fast. Then we wrap ourselves up in a blanket and wait half an hour before beginning again. More slowly, with a different sort of force.

Sometimes, in the midst of it all, panic suddenly overcomes me. Something’s not right. The whole thing’s too improbable. I’m losing control. It’s as though Sven could at any moment rip off his face, and someone else’s would emerge from under it. My father’s. Or the old man’s. Then all at once hatred is mixed in with pleasure. I want to draw up my feet and kick Sven in the stomach so that he falls backward into the breakers. When Theo slaps me around, at least I know: this is reality. Unmistakably. Senseless, unfair, brutal reality. No error possible.

Such thoughts soon vanish again. Most likely I’m just not used to being treated well. It scares me.

We go back, not touching each other, and separate in silence. Each to one side of the sandlot, each to a different house. In the morning, when I wake up: a sudden flood of happiness. Like a child on Christmas morning, I know something lovely is in store. I get up and make coffee for me and the old man.