Gabriel and the Rhinemaidens

Gabriel Miles fled from his classroom in the only fine-arts building of the only English-speaking college in Vienna, walked fast and then almost ran down the concrete steps and onto the cobblestones, past a shoe store and a bookstore and sex-toy shop and a plaque commemorating Mozart, and then 8 more blocks, and up the windy stairway to Branson’s door where Branson, who hated Gabriel to arrive early, ordered him to wait on the balcony: no Wilkommen Freund, in that ridiculous drawl of his. No air kiss.

Shivering beside Branson’s beloved pots of roses, Gabriel waited to be able to breathe normally. Then he checked his phone. There it was. A text from Frau Dean. Please come to my office at 9:30 tomorrow morning, 8 March 2004. We must discuss the appropriateness of your behavior in Drawing the Natural World.

Of all the jobs he’d cobbled together to survive in Vienna for over 20 years, the only one that gave him working papers was adjunct teaching at Wilson College. Adjunct teaching led nowhere, but without it he was screwed. He looked down at the city he loved and breathed in the dusk. He sought out the Schöttenkirche, his second favorite church, hoping to make out a patch of wall where the deepest blue of the sky met the yellow in the stone. But it was too dark. Or maybe his eyes were getting bad. Still, the luminous colors throbbed somewhere in his memory, didn’t they? That class had him so rattled he couldn’t navigate the inside of his own head.

He was exhausted from missing Anna. It had been months since he’d seen her. She’d insisted before Christmas that the husband was back for good, she would not be returning to teaching. She’d emailed Gabriel: Now I block you. That simple and forever present tense. Gabriel had resorted to sending unsigned postcards to her former faculty address: their favorite gelato place; St. Rupert’s Church, a tiny holy shell where they’d huddled, his hand under her skirt; the Succession monument with the marble lizards where an old woman in a wheelchair had told them that they would make a beautiful baby.

“Are you sure a buffet will be okay?” Branson called out toward the balcony. “Is it sufficiently elegant?

“A buffet is fine!” The business was nothing like it once was—the Saab execs, the nephews of the Shah, the African bishop Branson was sweet on.

“I made my grandmother’s sacred Bavarian Kartoffelsalat.”

“Yeah, great. Prima!” Gabriel called back, standing up, noting a stiffness in his hip. Branson’s grandmother had lived and died in Athens. Athens, Georgia. Branson had inherited her fortune and her quilts. Gabriel had inherited nothing from his own mother, another Southern bel. But he missed her. She would have understood why he’d been so moved during the drawing lesson. Her purest love had been for horses. She’d understood their strides, their aches, their appetites. Bless her sorry soul. She’d mused on their romantic equine dreams, giving the word equine itself a ride.

Gabriel whispered goodnight to the rooftop gardens of potted trees, their leaves disappearing into the black of the Himmel—meaning both heaven and sky. And goodnight to the Ferris wheel, the distant hills, the tall steel cranes that protected the city from too much prettiness. He even loved the fat baby tutti taking up space on high corners, in lieu of gargoyles. He wished he could tell Anna how Frau Dean’s face would make an excellent gargoyle. He imagined Anna’s wicked smile in response, her plain Austrian face gloriously transformed.

Without asking permission, he wandered inside and got to work setting out napkins and glasses. Branson tilted his head and appraised him. “How are you faring? You seem sad.”

“I feel old.”

“Come, come. You could still pass for 35, with that Robert Redford handsomeness. Of course, I don’t know what you’d look like in a T-shirt.”

Fat. I’d look fat. “I’m in trouble at the college, Branson.”

Branson sighed a large sigh for such a little man. “Is one of your naked models getting modest?”

“Nothing with a model.” Gabriel knew the rules with models. “And it isn’t because I’ve refused to give credit for comics and dragon-illustrations.”

“Skipping more faculty meetings?”

“No. I’ve been going.” Even though the guy who led them was a twerp from Vanderbilt who looked 16. “Something happened today in the damn animal drawing class. I seem to have behaved inappropriately.”

“Do tell!”

“I think a girl from Delaware is going to accuse me of rubbing her shoulders. Her shoulders. In a room full of other students!”

“That little bitch.” Branson looked proud of himself for saying the word.

“God bless you, Branson.” The accuser wasn’t a bitch at all, but Branson didn’t need to know the distasteful details. He was fifty and a former seminary student.

But he had to add: “Poor Gabriel. No Anna to argue your case with the dean.”

“Not shit, Sherlock,” an expression Anna had loved when Gabriel had explained it to her.

Branson murmured, “Now, now. No need for that tone. Poor silly boy. Maybe they’ll let you teach a still-life class again.”

“I faked that. I don’t think I can fake it with the new dean.” Gabriel didn’t understand how objects on a table, used by the living, were supposed to evoke the transience of life. But at least Branson hadn’t lectured Gabriel on the horrors of adopting European attitudes toward adultery. That was something.

He breathed in the genteel hominess around him—the quilts on the walls, the embroidered tablecloth on the buffet, the weathered sheet music on the piano. He tried to believe that tonight would be a respite, or better yet, a new beginning: maybe a guest would offer him a tutoring position with a celebrity’s kid or at least buy one of Erik Grüen’s underwater murals. Selling was the one thing Gabriel had gotten better at over the years, selling Grüen’s work. He asked Branson, “Who’s on the guest list?”

“Martha Cutridge. Canadian. From the Lutheran church. She’s a middle-school teacher with an American husband who’s an X-military guy. He’s not coming.”

Good. Gabriel didn’t want to see any X-military guys tonight.

“And an American couple. Newlyweds. She’s Peggy Finkle. He’s Hal Smith. Apparently, he’s a climate expert. I don’t know a thing about her. And really, I don’t know which sounds worse for a name, the Finkle or the Hal.”

Gabriel didn’t care. He knew he’d remember the names. He was good at remembering names, one of his classroom skills. And he had others. He’d been teaching since the mid-eighties. Back then it had still been acceptable to get high with students after class. Even before class. Okay, okay, 2004, no more of that. But for years now he’d taken pride in becoming a knowledgeable and intuitive teacher who could light a spark with the point of a finger, a whispered suggestion, a bit of praise or a touch on the wrist.

The buzzer rang. “They’re punctual,” Branson noted with delight. “No time to be morose. Let’s give a good show tonight, shall we?”

“I’m on it.” Gabriel sucked in his belly and made his way down the stairs. “All at once!” he exclaimed at the sight of two women and one tall man. His greeting brought smiles from the women, one youngish and striking, the other on the far side of fifty and all matronly heft and tweed. The guy had an arm around the pretty one’s waist. He would not be easy to paint. All those blurring freckles. His new wife, obviously younger, was another story. Her hair was dark, cut short with flair. Her eyes were strikingly blue, her face Modigliani-long. Her coat was bright red and perfectly tailored for her ballerina-slimness. Gabriel introduced himself, made it clear that he was not the opera expert, double-kissed the ladies and shook hands with the man.

“How far up?” asked Martha from Canada. Her face was pleasing enough, but she obviously ran a tight ship in her classroom. No summons from above concerning the appropriateness of her behavior.

“Fourth floor,” he told his little group. “The third if you count like the Viennese.”

The cute one said, “The third floor. The dritten Stock.” Her husband grinned, proud of his smart and sexy new wife.

“Best get started,” said Martha, taking off her scarf. Gabriel was surprised by the spring in her bangs.

Once upstairs, Gabriel watched Peggy take the time to appreciate Branson’s apartment: the chipped but still lovely tiles on the floor, the exquisite molding around the walls, the view. Then she reached into her big leather bag and presented Branson with a kilo of luscious blueberries. He bowed in thanks. “These will grace my morning bowl of muesli.”

She followed him into the tiny kitchen. Gabriel followed her. He marveled at the berries, “Look at that blue: like the sky, just before the deepest darkness.”

“Or after the deepest darkness,” said Peggy.

Gabriel smiled. “American optimism.”

She smiled back. Anna used to demand to hear about Gabriel’s flirtations. She’d grill him about his lady friends: their purses, their breasts, their hair. She’d trusted him to keep a proper distance and he always had.

He told Peggy, “The berries against the silver foil remind me of Picasso’s Old Guitarist.” His hand reached for a sample, but Branson slapped it away. The slap would have stung, had Peggy not turned to Gabriel and whispered, “I love that painting.”

But then she sighed and said, “My poor husband. He’s been working all day at the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis. They’re deeply concerned about sea levels. He needs a drink.” Gabriel followed her to the dining room/living room. Watching her as she settled Hal down with a beer and his Blackberry, he imagined painting her in the red coat, unbuttoned at the bottom.

Meanwhile, Branson got to work passing artichoke dip, discussing roses with Marsha. Then they went off to the balcony to admire his plants. Hal was pumping his fist. “Basketball season,” Peggy explained to Gabriel, back at his side.

He shrugged, not wanting to get into American-sports talk. They walked to the wine table together. “White or red?” he asked.

“Weisse, bitte.” He poured. She lowered her voice. “Hal and his first wife both went to U. Michigan, and he’s still a fanatic about Michigan teams. What can I do?”

Gabriel raised his glass. She sipped. Asked him, “What brought you to this city?”

“I apprenticed with Erich Grüen, one of the original Viennese Fantastic Realists. I’m still associated with his studio. I train the new apprentices.” There was some truth in there.

“I don’t know his work, but I imagine he knew Friedensreich Hundertwasser?”

“Ah, yes. He knew the Viennese Fantastic Realist everybody has heard of.” Gabriel worried for a moment that she would resent being lumped in with everyone, but she laughed. They joked about Friedensreich Hundertwasser: the psychedelic sixties palette, the housing complexes with trees growing out windows, the lectures given in the nude. Gabriel wanted to paint her lips, which were full, with a hint of vermilion red.

Then Peggy’s face grew serious, pain in her eyes. She said, “Let’s stop. Hundertwasser was a visionary. Like Rachel Carson. Hal and I talked about both of them on our first date. Did you know Hunterwasser was using solar and wind power back in the ‘60s? His whole family was wiped out and yet he had such deep concern for humanity.” Then she stopped and looked uncomfortable, maybe for mentioning the Holocaust.

Gabriel said only, “I could show you his smaller housing units, the ones off the tourist track.”

“Oh, that sounds wonderful, but I don’t think on this trip. I’m sorry. Tell me about your mentor.”

“Another survivor. He still refuses to tell anyone where he was hidden.”

“My parents used to whisper when they spoke of relatives who’d been refugees. The survivor’s guilt was baked in.”

“Baked in,” Gabriel echoed. He’d never heard the phrase, but he understood it instantly and wished he could share it with Anna. He’d taught her English idioms. She’d taught him the science of water droplets, how they form, fall, splatter. The same principles applied to paint, rain, tears, snot.

Peggy tilted her head. “So what do you paint?”

“People. Mostly people who pass through my life in Vienna.”

Peggy pointed to the balcony and asked, “Have you painted her?”

“Martha Cutridge? No, I just met her.”

Peggy said, “She’s been here for four years and she teaches seventh grade at an Austrian public school. I think that’s so impressive. I write about school-lunch policy for a think tank in New Jersey.”

“I teach art at Wilson College. But I don’t usually mention that to Branson’s guests.”

“Why not?”

“They prefer to believe I’m a fulltime expat artist who does nothing but paint and talk about the opera scene. So I let them think it.” Peggy nodded and rolled her eyes. He and she seemed to understand one another exactly.

Then she went to the buffet and filled a plate that she brought to Hal, with a napkin, a silver fork, and another beer. He nodded his thanks, and as if remembering he was on his honeymoon, he reached for her hand, a tender exchange that stabbed Gabriel’s eyes. Peggy helped herself to a bit of bread and cheese and gravitated to a monumental book of photographs from Wagnerian operas. She ate while standing, alone, as if she knew her long lines would have tempted Klimt, Vienna’s most famous painter of long women.

Martha, a different shape altogether, walked over to the fireplace mantel. Maybe she was intrigued by Branson’s collection of miniature Schubert busts. Or by a small watercolor of Branson, painted by Gabriel, not much bigger than a postcard. Gabriel had managed to capture Branson’s expression as he was pointing out how Verdi interweaves the voices and motives in La Traviata. Martha gently touched the portrait. She reminded Gabriel of a minor figure in a painting from another century, maybe a knowing midwife bathing baby Jesus while Mary rests.

Out of nowhere, Hal commended on the convenient tram system in Vienna. Branson took the comment as an opening to give his guests a tidy civics lesson. Number one city in the world for quality of life. Transportation. Housing. Clean air. The safest capital in Europe. Then before the topic could get more complicated—gypsies, Turks—he inquired after Martha’s dog. “Jasmine, right? A Lab-collie mix?”

Martha beamed, explaining to all, “She’s in Ottawa, with my son.”

Hal volunteered, “That’s a nice excuse to stay in touch with your boy.”

“It is. My husband’s probably watching the new puppies on Skype as we speak.”

Hal seemed moved to hear this, emotion casting a shadow on that speckled canvas of a face. But Martha’s expression seemed to go from unconditional dog-love to troubled. “I don’t know that we’ll be together with our son come Christmas. What about you?” she asked Branson. “Will you get home?”

“Alas, no. The holy music in Vienna holds me here.”

Martha turned to Gabriel. “And you?”

“My home is here.”

Peggy smiled, as if pleased that her ex-pat friend had no other home. Martha seemed to find Gabriel’s answer a bit sad. He thought Martha was wonderful. He asked her, “Were you curious about this likeness of Branson?”

He prepared to receive a compliment. He would be modest, talk about his failed attempts to capture Branson with oil paint, say nothing at first about how he gives discounts to Branson’s friends for commissioned work. But she turned to him and said: “I believe you and I have a mutual friend.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“Anna Scheussel?”

“Oh.” Please no. “Of course. She’s an art historian.”

“I met her about a year ago, at a program for non-American Marine wives.” Had Martha put an extra emphasis on the word wives? Gabriel reached out for the mantel to steady himself. He’d known Anna had social life among the Anglophone military set, and she’d known he didn’t want to hear about it. He’d needed her to be his Austrian lover. Martha said, “I imagine neither of you expected Anna’s Marine to be away for so long. One never knows what will happen with active duty.”

Gabriel tried looking confused. Martha didn’t let up. “Anna didn’t plan for him to come home injured and likely disabled.”

Gabriel blurted, “I could do a portrait of your puppies from a photograph. A Christmas present for your husband?”

“You should paint something for Anna and Steven, Gabriel. And you must use bright colors—yellows, whites, pinks. He has to keep the lights low.”

Seething inside, Gabriel wanted to tell the room that Anna’s husband had voluntarily left a cushy job guarding the U.S. embassy, had chosen active duty. Ten years ago.

“Time for Das Rheingold!” Branson called out.

Thank God. Gabriel could focus on doing his job. He made sure the DVD player half-faced Branson’s armchair and half-faced the audience. He settled Peggy and Hal in the loveseat. He let Martha seat herself across from the opera expert, a notebook at the ready. He lowered the lights, pushing away the news of the Marine’s sensitive vision as the room grew silent.

Then Das Rheingold began, and the guests and even the room itself began to disappear. The film was in black and white. The screen filled with grays: mists and mountains and water, and wave upon wave of longer and louder and longer and louder arpeggios washed over the Rhine, and over rapt Peggy. And over Gabriel, who wanted to tell Martha that she knew nothing of Anna: How she’d relished the English verb “to lust,” with its Germanic root: Lust, which meant joy. How the Marine referred to the sweet softness around her middle as something to work on.

“Does Wagner explain how the ring got its power?” asked Hal.

“That’s an excellent question,” Branson said. “And the answer is no. Technically there’s no such world-controlling ring in either Germanic or Norse mythology.”

“But there’s The Lord of the Rings,” Hal pointed out.

The Rhinemaidens vamped and splashed and ugly Alberich lusted, his thuggish bass poisoning the water. The Rhinemaidens taunted him. Peggy asked about Wagner’s relationship to Hitler. Branson told her that the muses had chosen a monstrous human being through which to bring forth music of exquisite power and beauty. “Peggy, oh Peggy, it is beyond me to understand why.”

She said nothing more, probably thinking about beauty and evil and anything but Gabriel. Or maybe she was wondering why the hell she’d married a guy with so much to say about The Lord of the Rings. Hal was referencing a genealogy of hobbits and wizards and orcs.

“Why did Wotan have only one eye?” Martha asked.

Branson explained. “He drank the precious liquid laced with knowledge. His eye was the price he paid.” Branson lingered on Erde, the scorned earth goddess. Poor Erde. Gabriel was glad his own mother had been more of a Valkery on a flying horse. Then Branson pressed Pause: “The ring is cursed: whoever deliberately takes possession of it must knowingly sacrifice love.”

“I could never relinquish love,” Gabriel said, knowing better than to look at Martha as he said it, and afterwards, not understanding why he’d said it.

Branson identified the sword motif, the gold motif, the ledger motif. The movie was as great as ever, but Branson fast-forwarded to the last scene. Too soon the gods were lost on the rainbow path to their doom. Then mists returned and the music lingered as the rainbow faded. Usually, a moment of reflection would follow, and Gabriel would wait to stand and turn on the lights.

But tonight, Hal wanted a glass of water with ice and Peggy would have some, too, “If you’re getting up anyway,” she said to no one in particular. Branson gave Gabriel a look that meant “Fetch.”

Lights on it was. Gabriel headed to the kitchen to wrestle with Branson’s old metal ice tray. He helped himself to a handful of blueberries. When he rejoined the group, Hal was sitting down at the piano, asking Branson if he might play. Branson didn’t object, but he did take out his inhaler, just in case.

The Weather God’s music was light and jazzy. Sunny. Not classical. No thunder/no rainbows. He played ragtime—peppy and upbeat—the opposite of Vienna, and way out of Branson’s area of expertise. Gabriel watched the opera expert recognize that what was now happening was, in fact, what Branson wanted to happen at every music-education evening: guests from abroad hearing music anew. And the host was gentlemanly enough not to mind being upstaged. Whatever else he might be, Branson was a class act of a teacher.

The host and Martha danced a little two-step from quilted wall to quilted wall. Peggy smiled at Gabriel, her lips still luminous. Gabriel extracted a dreg of blueberry from between his teeth and balanced it on his thumb, studying the colors that made up the blue, wanting to imagine what Anna might say about the purples and reds but forcing himself to think about that girl from Delaware, slouched in front of her easel.

Just hours earlier he’d stood behind her chair and pressed back her shoulders, his thumbs and fingers massaging the thick muscles. Not a crime. He’d rubbed the shoulders of half the classroom at one time or another. No one had minded. She hadn’t minded, at first. The stag she’d drawn was anatomically exact, beautifully rendered, old and tired, imagining mares. There was poignancy in his tangled mane, dull coat, half-closed eyes. And poignancy also in the girl’s gnawed fingernails and heavy thighs. And in Gabriel’s memory of his mother, who had been banned from her beloved stables, her drinking that bad.

Then a dragon enthusiast from L.A., a girl who claimed to have connections in New York, suddenly shrieked, “Gross! He’s crying snotty tears! He’s dripping on her!” And comic book guy from Georgia—the other Georgia—sneered in Russian. Delaware Girl touched her scalp and pushed Gabriel. Hard. An easel was falling, Gabriel was taking off…

As Martha waited for an approaching streetcar, Gabriel stood beside her. He would walk home, taking a long route through the night, but he didn’t want her to wait alone. They watched cars go by, and a few solitary wanderers. She noted, “Vienna is a city of conscientious pedestrians.”

Gabriel nodded, remembering how he and Anna used to stand at crosswalks, two colleagues discussing their students, or their own work—his painting, her history. Sometimes they would keep talking and let the light turn red again and wait again.

Martha said, “Anna told me you were an excellent teacher, Gabriel.”

He said, “Tell her I send my regards.” Anna would know what that meant. He’d taught her to use the expression for professional correspondence.

Martha danced aboard the Strassenbahn. Gabriel watched her take a seat and thought she gave him a wave, but he wasn’t sure. The streetcar was moving, its light fading into the night, as the future, at least a future, became clearer: The girl from Delaware is an artist, Gabriel would tell the dean. I was leaning over her to get closer to her art. I was moved to tears and my nose started running. Droplets formed and fell. It’s what droplets do. It’s fluid dynamics. Physics. Math. He would close his eyes as he presented this collection of truths he only partially understood, and behind his eyes, perhaps the dean would morph into the Martha who looked like Mary’s midwife in a painting Gabriel had imagined into being. Maybe midwife Martha would help him look at the real dean and propose a still-life drawing class: blueberries in foil, a statuette of a dead composer, a cracked crystal dragon.