A Dry Wish
R R Angell
The end is near. My two-week assignment reviewing the cafés of Vienna is almost over and I’ve left them all to the last minute. You can occupy a table here as long as you like, and I’ve been here for a week. I found the perfect one in the back corner of Berggasse and Wasagassa in a café that also doubles as a gay bar.
My plan for my last two days was to drink only coffee. Nose to the grindstone, and all that. I swore to take motivation this morning from the cold, overcast and threatening day outside, the entire city covered in gloomy grey light.
Unfortunately, a piece of eye candy at the other end of the bar caught my eye. My guess is that he is twenty-six or twenty-seven. He sits with perfect posture, very German, at a table by the only floor to ceiling window in the place. I can see everything from his trendy footwear, tight jeans, soft sweater, thin torso, brown hair, ears you would call elven if they had been sharp; they are soft, oval, and without lobes to nibble on.
Small moles dot the visible side of his face and neck. His left hand cradles his chin, then brushes lightly at his forehead, lifting the bangs there as he pages through a magazine with the long fingers of his other delicate hand. The hand darts to the phone on the tablecloth, and he swipes, glances my way, dismisses me and goes back to tapping. He hasn't shaved. Sparse, dark whiskers emerge from translucent skin and give him a dirty appearance, like he'd been up late with someone somewhere and was on his way home in the middle of the afternoon when he stopped here to have some breakfast.
He came in, like everyone else, from the side street through a kind of airlock, which is a good thing since it is February. My time here has been cold, with an empty bed warmed only by a down comforter. I’m not used to sleeping alone for more than a few days. I don’t know what’s stopping me. Probably all the smoking. The weather app warns of an approaching southern storm. Rain is forecast when snow would be far more romantic.
This café is one of the few I've seen that has a separate smoking section sealed off from the main areas by a glass wall. I hate smoke. Most Vienna establishments allow smoking, so this is an oasis for me. I sit in an alcove at the other end of the bar that contains booths, as far away from the smoke as possible. A doorway past the magazine rack leads into a hall with a bathroom.
The wall up to the alcove is taken up with one long bar with a granite counter, a blond rail, red leather sides, a row of high-backed wooden chairs, and a steel foot rail for comfort. To my delight, there are hooks underneath the bar rail for hanging coats and purses; A required feature in any respectable bar in my opinion, and one of my pet peeves if missing. For that reason, and for the charming and clean atmosphere, the younger clientele, and the excellent lunch specials, I'd given Café Berg an excellent review.
What I like most about the place is the half-meter high mirrors that top the chair railing all around the room so patrons may watch each other without staring directly.
This is a gay café after all.
The boy gets up, walks in my direction, meets my eye and smiles a sad smile. The vibration in my pocket is more than a text. It’s his expression that keeps me from checking my phone.
He comes the length of the bar, entering the booth area where I sit watching from one of the Italian marble four-tops but whose surface I have entirely claimed with tea, the remnants of a salad, my laptop and a worn notebook. Earlier, a pen had leaked through my shirt pocket, but it is under my fleece vest so the boy can't be smiling at that. I check anyway.
He enters the alcove and goes to the floor-to-ceiling magazine rack, and I watch the tight contours of his thighs through a pair of blue jeans sanded down in all the comfortable places. Does he reach up to the highest shelf for my benefit? Allowing private glimpses of the unbranded underwear and pale skin under the lift of his sweater? His calves swell as he gets up to his toes. He is wearing high-top Adidas sneakers with baby blue panel inserts.
Adidas. All Day I Dream About Sex is the mnemonic my old college roommate taught me, a blond boy from the fundamentalist backwaters of Findlay, Ohio. We'd had drunken sex during finals at the end of our sophomore year and he never spoke to me again. Totally worth it. My grades had been good, good enough to pass. I'd heard he crashed and burned in the next semester, some fundamental conflict, and he transferred out.
The boy, sifting magazines, still stretching to the top shelf, lengthens and stretches his torso like a cat at a scratching post. He reaches back to smooth the jeans on his rump as he returns to earth.
Without a glance my way, he walks to the bathroom and disappears through the door.
I'd forgotten that there were others in the café. Two older men, obviously a couple, are reading newspapers and sipping coffee. A man and woman occupy a table against the wall sharing a large bowl of soup. She carves the froth from her latte and savors it like ice cream while he glances around. He sips at his carrot juice, stirring the soup with his other hand all the while avoiding her eyes. Two university students, one with a swanky beret, the other a large hooked nose, scribble on paper and use their phones as calculators. Their bodies bend toward each other as if conspiring, perhaps adding up the chances of a romance. Too bad the forecast is for rain.
Did I mentioned that I'd already given Cafe Berg a high rating? Today, I am reviewing Cafe Savoy down in the gay district south of the Ringstrasse, the Naturhistor and Kunsthistor museum, the Albertina and the Opern cafés. I should actually go there, of course, soak up the atmosphere, write from experience about the decor, the vibe, the food and service, but I have an aversion to smoke and they, like almost all the cafes in Vienna, allow smoking at every table. That kind of atmosphere soaks into my clothes, constricts my airways, and makes me tear up and cough for all the wrong reasons.
The magazine blog I work for will get their Vienna Café Review series, but will never know that I have written all of them from this table. It is a little too Rolling Stone of me, I know, but the magazine I work for is less famous and even less scrupulous.
It was my own fault that I was sent here anyway, and in winter. I'd somehow stumbled into a good run of articles based on trendy cafes in cities around the US, beginning with one in Portland, Maine, and followed the next month by one on Boston cafes. Readers emailed and tweeted praise and my editor noticed and bumped me up in pay and sent me around the country for the next year and a half: New York; Washington, DC; Savanna, Georgia; Tampa; New Orleans; Dallas; Chicago; Omaha; Seattle, Spokane; Takoma; Portland, Oregon; San Francisco; Los Angeles.
The only negative posts, and only from a small number of readers, was that I reviewed many more gay cafes than straight. So what? I'm queer. It used to be a great way of meeting guys until I came home from Seattle and met Eric. That was seven months ago and we have been on a spiraling relationship ever since. Which way the spiral turns depends on the day.
Eric is not exactly my type. He's a redhead with thick, rough skin. My age. Very handsome. He hardly drinks. He's an aerospace engineer with LMC and works on things that fly high in orbit. There are times when I'm with him that I feel like I'm one of them. The earth and my cares lie far below as I float above the surface of his body, the sandy deserts of his skin, the odorous peaks and valleys, followed by a fiery reentry.
Other times, it's a failure to launch, usually when I've been drinking too much because an article wasn't going well. Or any number of other excuses. He comes over, interrupts, and we fight. But he likes that I'm a writer, an artist he says, and he puts up with more crap from me than I ever would.
You should know that I've never been in a relationship that lasted more than a year. Bob, the dancer with the tight body, lasted three months until he left with a traveling troupe. Sam, the soft-spoken carpenter with great forearms and a nice smile, fell back in with his ex, also known as heroin. And so on.
If you asked me, the only chance I'd ever get at a long-term relationship with a guy was if the two of us were stranded on a desert island for twenty some years and had no one else. The day we were rescued he would probably hook up with the cabin boy.
Yes, it's part the age thing. I'm thirty-seven, just thirty-seven last month, but thirty-seven is a long way from twenty five or six, an age when you are still young, still pretty, have a somewhat stable job and life, are intimate with the mating dance and can stay out and play late and still get up clear and alive and singing brightly the next morning. You are at the peak of your existence, and with a simple act such as stretching up to reach the top shelf of a magazine rack you can get someone like me to follow you into the bathroom for the sheer fun of it.
* * *
In front of the gay bed and breakfast where I'm staying, seven streets converge to make a grand stone square with a large wading fountain that effectively creates a traffic circle. In its center, a bronze woman in a toga with one tit bared holds a serpent in her left hand and a lyre in her right. She is on a pedestal, of course, and there are four cherubs around the base, one at each cardinal point. They are all naked as cherubs go and three of them face away from the pedestal, holding fish that normally would spew into the surrounding pool if there was any water. Three cherubs have carved ribbons draped over their genitals. One might think the artist was a prude but in truth a decree by Pope Innocent X in the mid-1600’s said all male members must be covered.
All across Europe, masterworks containing perhaps the most exquisite male genitalia ever carved, shaped, molded, or chiseled was covered up with leaf appliqué, and if the penis was too large, it was lopped off. All the drooping goodies in Europe disappeared practically overnight.
The artist that made my fountain was a rebel, and I adore him for it. The fourth cherub's uncovered butt faces southwest toward the Vatican, and he is not as much wrestling with a fish as hugging it close to his chest as he looks southwest over his behind. Smiling. Taunting. If you look from just the right angle you'll find the artist covered nothing up, his ass dimple and dangly bits are all there.
Lying on the outer ledge of the fountain from the mooning cherub is a bronze youth partly on his side looking into the fountain at a huge bronze carp that would be underwater if they hadn’t drained it for the winter. In his raised right hand he holds a trident poised to throw. The boy’s muscled back and backsides are the last thing I last see at night from my window, a dream boy forever aiming at a perfect fish he will never catch.
The most interesting thing about that empty fountain is that there isn't a single coin in it. Only trash and frozen puddles of rain. At first, I thought that the nearly invisible homeless had gathered them all up, but that isn't so.
Most writers understand the literary standard that water is a metaphor for the unconscious and, in the city that gave us Freud, cigars, and the license to blame our parents for everything, I think the Viennese are holding true to standards. They know that when you toss a coin into a fountain that you are paying the fates for your wish. Your greatest desire enters your subconscious the moment the coin breaks that metaphorical surface.
At that instant, your subconscious takes over and everything you do from that moment forward unconsciously moves you toward your heart’s desire. That is my theory of fountains and wishes.
It was in Chicago last year that I woke up very hazy and warm from a night of chasing wishes around various watering holes. One wish tricked me and took me up to his 42nd floor apartment with a view of Lake Michigan. It was also winter, and there was plenty of ice piled up in huge mounds around the shoreline with shards of it angled toward the sky for as far as the eye could see.
We were still drunk when we woke up. I rolled away from him and stood, went to the bathroom, and then stood naked in front of the floor to ceiling windows. The cold lake seemed far away but below me was a beautiful Gothic cathedral with glowing stained glass and delicate spires stretching heavenward. Around it were little five story walk-ups with terra cotta tiled roofs like you see everywhere in Europe. I noticed other buildings: an ancient Bank with Ionic columns; a Romanesque church squatted around the corner.
I heard movement behind me, the rustle of sheets, the strike of a match, the strong suck on a joint, and so I returned to that warm island, with that warm man and later made the mistake of writing in my Chicago review about the local architecture being reminiscent of old European cities. Cities like Vienna.
The hate mail flooded in, angry tweets and posts everywhere claimed that I was ignorant of real architecture, demanded that I go to Vienna to see for myself. Six months after that article, the criticisms were still flooding in and my editor finally broke.
"We are sending you to Vienna for two weeks," he said. "Review the cafe scene there and make the world love you again. If you do, we'll send you around Europe like we did here. If you don't, well, you figure it out."
* * *
Three o’clock in the morning. The eternal time of Fitzgerald’s dark night of the soul. I lay curled against the sleeping Berg Boy, under the down comforter that was too small for two. A knife of cold air sliced my skin along the gap between comforter and mattress. The taste of him mingled with the zwetschken schnapps we’d drunk. I was contemplating the vintages when Eric’s text buzzed on the night table.
He sent: Miss you. Are you awake?
Yes.
He sent: Call me?
Rolling out of bed, I slipped on sweatpants and shrugged into the complementary bathrobe and slippers, then stepped onto the tiny balcony outside my room through the floor to ceiling window. The sky was black. Spotlights on the fountain were turned off by midnight and the statues there were softly illuminated by street lamps and business signs. It had warmed noticeably and the wind had died.
I shouldn’t have looked at the phone. I should have let it go, pretended I was asleep to avoid any awkward moments. But I was dialing anyway, despite my own self-interest, and eager to hear his voice though I’d be home in a few days.
“What are you doing?” I said when he answered.
“Hey. It’s Friday night. Reading a new space opera. What else? You’re not here to corrupt me after all.”
“Yeah. I feel guilty about that.”
“We all have to work.”
I nodded, glanced inside at the sleeping contour in my bed. “True.”
“Did you go out?”
“For a while. It’s too smoky here. I should have come in the summertime.”
“Maybe we can go back then? Did you meet anyone interesting?”
It would have been easy to lie or to hurt him with the truth but I didn’t want either option. Eric, this nerdy engineer, was at home reading science fiction and happy about it. And he was thinking about me. That was his personality, honest and unpretentious.
Mine was an addictive one, so old habits died hard for me. I found myself lately with good intentions submarined by drinks and impulses I didn’t want to control.
Evidently I’d let silence answer for me and he said, “What’s his name? Oh, never mind. We’re not officially a couple yet so I guess I can’t complain.”
He’d said, “yet.”
Somehow, out on the balcony in the cold, that word made me feel warmer. I slipped my free hand into the robe’s pocket, and found a coin there. One euro. It rolled between my fingers easily enough. I could flip it. Make a decision. But that wouldn’t be a decision at all, would it? Not one that I made.
It started to drizzle; the kind where you could see streaks illuminated in the open spaces but couldn’t feel the drops yet.
“Maybe we should talk about that?” I said.
“I’d like that.” Somehow I could hear him smiling. “Okay. When you get home, then.”
“When I get home.”
“Good night, then. Sweet dreams, George.”
“You, too.”
I stood there in the rain rubbing the coin and staring down at the fountain, at the youth lying on the ledge there with his poised trident. What the hell, I thought, and heaved the coin out into the rain. It hit the backside of the mooning cherub and bounced toward the fish and I lost sight of it.
Behind me, I heard a soft thump against the glass. Berg Boy was awake. He’d thrown a pillow at the window and lay facing me on the edge of the bed looking hungry. I thought of Eric and his book. The boy took my immobility as a tease and started tempting me. I watched, then heard him through the glass pane.
“Jorgy, you must come back to bed now.”
It was pouring then. My robe was getting soaked. In an hour there would be an inch or more of rain in the fountain.
Enough time for one last drink.
__________
R R Angell is credentialed but he would just as soon have a good conversation over a cold beer. Find out more at www.rrangell.com. This story was started in Vienna, Austria while tagging along as the spouse on his husband’s business trip.