i wrote a story about vienna while my father lay dying
I sit composing a fiction about
Vienna and about falling in love with someone other than my fiancée, when the
phone rings; I look at the clock – 7:13 p.m. My mother's on the other end.
”Dad's in hospital. He’s okay, just some chest pains" She tries to sound
calm, talking like she’s rubbing my back. Instead, that false calm sounds like
dead-silence before an alarm. I'm thinking of buildings a disturbing shade of
gold, the colour beneath five centuries of soot, and the imperfect beauty of
the woman who might have loved me. Mom suggests it's his heart, considering the
man's age; hearts forever breaking down as they do. My mother implies he'll be
in hospital a while, as they mend what’s broken. I think I hear coronary,
infarction, angina. I swear my mother said those words, then promised to call
back if there was any change. Mom, sounding calm as low tide, sends love.
Something breaks inside so I
build verbal buttresses around frail muscle. In my head a castle falls down. I
write a story, not about the Blue-Danube, postcard Vienna; St. Stephensplatz
crowded with pigeons like mawkish old men; Klimt faces in every Kaffeehaus, but
about the other Vienna: the cold-hearted place with its harsh cigarettes and
forty-shilling coffee, walled against foreign features. This contrary,
miraculous Vienna, an oddly shaped beauty moving me by one ginger elbow through
the Christkindlmarkt.
Past stalls of ornaments, Glühwein,
Maroni …
In the story the woman loves me.
You can make people love you in stories. I wait for the phone to ring, thinking
my father will die before I finish. His heart is broken. My mother's hopeless
reassurance becomes long-distance silence. Midnight: I assume my father is
deeply cold or under a knife. I stop writing a story about Vienna as my father
lay dying.
I have a problem telling the
truth, so I tell stories.
The call actually comes at 3
p.m.: I start the story later. I like Vienna more than I say, and love the
woman less. Her feelings for me are pursued by question marks. My heart,
therefore, is not so bad. Neither is my father’s, not nearly so bad as I
pretend. He passes tests of the heart with flying colours. My mother sounds
calm because she is calm; she says nothing about hearts — I compose words to
justify writing about a woman who probably never loved me. If I told you that I
retreated into fictions because my father had chest pains from eating
pepperoni, you wouldn't have come this far.
In retrospect, everything’s fine.
Except the story. The story is a disaster.
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