At first she hadn’t even missed talking to them. Their conversations had changed so much that there was nothing much to miss. Besides, she’d had Bartha to talk to then—though that was a different kind of talking, she saw now. She hadn’t noticed at the time, during their early days together, that it wasn’t really conversation they were having. He had told her stories, and she’d listened—she had loved to listen to his stories, and she’d heard some of them so many times she had learned them by heart, down to the particulars of dialogue. But it had been a long time now since he had told her any stories—it had been a long time since they’d talked at all beyond the pleasantries they exchanged without fail each day. Good morning, they said, and How did you sleep? And later on, Good evening. How was your day? And, at last, Good night, sleep well. He might, at dinner, speak of something he had read in that day’s newspaper or mention a new student—he had started giving lessons again—or she might tell him something Alexander had done in his absence (managed to roll over, closed his hand around a rattle, uttered a new sound). As for talk, real talk, about ideas or feelings, there was none, not ever. Not with Bartha, not with anyone.
There had been a few occasions when she had tried, early on, to talk to Vilmos. But he’d looked at her as if she had just spoken in another language—a third language, neither his own nor the second one he’d learned as an adult. He looked so bewildered it seemed hard-hearted of her to persevere, and so she did not. But she still wondered over it, wondered sometimes if Vilmos and Clara talked when they were by themselves—if Vilmos simply couldn’t talk to her, or if conversation, any conversation, seemed to him to be conducted in that other language he had never thought to learn.
With Clara, of course, Esther couldn’t talk at all. How could you talk to someone who disliked you so? How wrong Bartha had been about her! Imagine them as friends! And yet still, sometimes, Esther would find herself thinking that if only Clara had not been determined to dislike her from the start, they might have become friendly if not truly friends. They might have shopped together, taken walks around the neighborhood or sat down for a Coke together, chatted—chatted, at least, even if they couldn’t really talk—even if Clara would never understand her in the way that Leah and Kathleen had (in the way Esther had thought they had, she reminded herself). And maybe that would have been better than the nothing she had now.
There were limits to understanding, anyway, as she had already learned. If Leah and Kathleen hadn’t understood her—hadn’t known her, really, even with all of that talk between them—who would? Perhaps she was better off not talking, for this way she wouldn’t, couldn’t, be fooled into thinking she was understood. Perhaps she would never talk again! Perhaps she’d take a vow of silence.
It dawned on her then that she was getting drunk. It wasn’t altogether a familiar feeling, although she had been drunk four times that she could name. Bartha had introduced her to wine shortly after they had become lovers (often, right after her lesson, they would drink some wine together before opening the velvet couch that folded out into a bed) and while he was careful not to let her drink too much, he didn’t seem to know how little it took for her to get drunk.
She noticed that her glass was full—Vilmos must have refilled it—and now she saw the second bottle on the table. The waitress had already come and gone without her noticing. Vilmos had raised his glass again. “Just one more toast,” he said. “The most important one. To Esther and János—to their marriage, to their love.”
She picked up her glass and drained it quickly. Then she waited for Bartha to scold her. It was time for him to tell her that she’d had enough to drink, that it wasn’t good either for her or for the baby for her to drink too much wine.
But he didn’t say anything, and as she watched him for a moment, sipping his own wine and keeping silent, she saw that he wasn’t going to. That he could surprise her was itself surprising. It was disagreeable—and yet didn’t it confirm what she had just been thinking? That no one knew anyone, that we fooled ourselves into thinking we were truly known, fooled ourselves into thinking we truly knew others, even the people we loved. This was a reminder that one must be vigilant. It was too easy to be fooled.
It was too easy to be fooled in ways both large and small.
“More wine?” Vilmos said. He refilled her glass before she had a chance to answer. “One last toast. Just one, all right?” He spilled a little wine as he lifted his glass this time, and Esther realized that he must be getting drunk too—none of them had eaten yet today. “Let us drink to passion,” he said. “To true, beautiful, life-altering, great passion.”
Esther took a sip of wine. To passion. She peeked at Bartha, whose expression hadn’t changed. Vilmos was definitely drunk. But drunk or not, this must be how he saw them, her and Bartha—as two people caught up in a passion. Was it true? she asked herself. Was that what had happened to them?
“When I first set eyes upon my wife, I knew—I could see it for myself already, at that instant. She had changed my life forever.” Vilmos reached for Clara’s hand and clasped it. “And now, after seven years, perhaps you wonder how I feel?” He addressed himself to Esther. “Yes? You want to know? Well, I will tell you.” He removed his hand from Clara’s and slapped it to his chest. “I feel just the same!”
Esther stared at him. Vilmos and Clara! She couldn’t tell if he was serious. She couldn’t tell if Clara took him seriously either. But why shouldn’t he be serious? Why shouldn’t he feel what he said he felt?
A strange thought came to her. Perhaps the trouble between friends was not a lack of understanding—perhaps it was not a question of one person fooling himself about how well he knew someone else, or of fooling oneself about how well one was known, so much as it was the inability to be anybody else. For what if Leah and Kathleen had considered the idea that for the first time in her life Esther might have a secret from them? They could not have guessed the truth—how could they have?—when she had done something, felt something, neither of them would have done or could have felt. What had happened between her and Bartha was, for them (she knew—she didn’t have to hear it from them, she had heard enough from them before anything happened), unimaginable.
She had had the right idea, then, she thought. No one could know anyone, not really. There was always the chance that someone you thought you understood completely would do something that you could not understand—something that you could not picture yourself doing. And what of finding yourself doing something unimaginable, something that you surely hadn’t ever pictured yourself doing?
She chased this thought away as if somebody else had asked the question of her, interrupting her. Please, let me be, I’m talking about something else now. Why, just think of Vilmos—whom she’d never even thought she knew so well, whom she never would have said she “understood.” And yet how he had surprised her! And even though she had just heard him, with her own ears, declare how he felt about his wife, didn’t she still doubt that what he’d said was true? But why should Vilmos not be in love with his wife? Because she found her so unlovable? Yes, that was why. And this just proved her point, she thought. She could not even pretend she understood him.
She had begun to cry—she felt tears sliding down her cheeks. “Too much wine, Esther,” Bartha said. She set her wineglass down, too hard, too quickly. Bartha had to reach for it and right it before it could break or any wine spilled out. “Just wait a bit,” he said. “When the food comes you may want then to drink a little more. For now, I think perhaps you’ve had enough.” She nodded yes, and looked away. The tears were still slipping down. She couldn’t understand why she was crying.
She felt Bartha’s hand on her neck, under the thick, loose knot of hair that she’d twisted and pinned into place for this occasion—it was the way her mother always wore her own long hair on special days, and she had thought it would make her look festive as well as more like a wife (she wasn’t certain it had worked—she hadn’t been able to find a hand mirror this morning so that she could check the back of her head in the bathroom mirror).
Bartha stroked her neck. He touched the