West Berlin, January, 1983
There are letters, but Raven doesn't read them. It doesn't matter to her what they say, she tells herself. It isn't as though she loves him.
The letters live in a neat brown folder in Erik's desk drawer, folded in their envelopes, the envelopes neatly slit at the top with a letter opener. Erik doesn't tear mail open. Probably he never has.
Raven works in the mornings at the bakery, comes back to the apartment shortly after two. Erik is never home until ten to six, sharp. He is in the lab at the university until exactly five thirty. There is plenty of time to read the letters if she wanted. He would never know.
They're all from Charles Xavier. Some of them are postmarked from 1967, some earlier. Fifteen years old, twenty.
Some were postmarked last fall. Only two of them. Erik doesn't read them. He doesn't take them out at all.
But he knows they're there, like the tattoo on his skin.
Raven wonders sometimes about her friends in the East, about Dieter who was so terribly sweet, but drank far too much and slept with the wrong kind of men. About Katja, who was going to marry this boy who was only sixteen, six years younger than her, who was convinced that Raven wanted him and was trying to get him into bed. About her grandfather. She hadn't sent him a note, just disappeared.
A life interrupted. Frozen. For her, Dieter would always be sweet and twenty-two, unsure of himself. Katja was always confused, suspended on her suspicions. Her grandfather would always be old, but never die. Strange to think that for them, life was still going on. A year and more had passed. Things had changed. Had Katja married? Had they broken up instead? Was she pregnant? Had Dieter figured it all out, or was he dead? Their lives went on without her, the hole where Mareile used to be slowly closing behind her, like a pot of honey with the spreader taken out.
Raven opens the desk drawer and lays the folder on the top. The letters are old. Except the ones that aren't.
If she had stayed, she would be going drinking with Dieter tonight. Maybe. Or with someone. She would be drinking and laughing and going home with someone or another, whoever she'd met.
She'd told Dieter she was leaving, Dieter and Katja both. Katja had tried to talk her out of it, said that she'd get shot or arrested, that getting over the Border was too hard. Raven hadn't explained how she planned to do it, that she could look like anyone, even a soldier.
Dieter had cried and then turned stonily away. “You don't love us. You think you're too good for us. You always have to be first, to have it your way.”
There wasn't anything she could say to that. Because it was true. And it would be mindlessly cruel to say to Katja, “Do you think I want to stay here and spend the rest of my life dealing with your petty jealousies, drinking and pretending that it matters who goes with who and what people think? To spend my youth on dreams that can't ever come true? To get old sitting here, waiting for life to start, in the same town where I was born?”
But Katja knew she meant it even if she didn't say it. Her blue eyes got very hard. “You don't care about anyone except yourself.”
“I'd better care about myself, hadn't I?” Raven snapped. “Nobody else does.”
“There isn't anything else to say, then, is there?” Katja asked.
“No,” said Raven.
Raven unfolded the first letter. 1964.
Dear Erik,
I didn't think I could miss you so much in the week since you left for Boston.
Raven put it down.
Dieter had gone with her as far as the Border. He had been quiet. Only there, at the last moment, he'd looked at her as she picked up her bag and stood on the curb.
“You break everything you touch, don't you?”
“Like your heart?” she said.
He hadn't smiled. “You don't care.”
“No,” she said.
“You think you're some kind of Bond girl, some femme fatale who can get anything she wants.”
“Sometimes you have to break things,” Raven said.
“Mareile, you break things for fun.” He shook his head. “You don't have to do this. You just want to.”
“Goodbye, Dieter.” She leaned forward to kiss him.
“Don't,” he said, and walked away.
She turned, so she did not see him walking.
Raven smoothes out the letter. Then she folds it and puts it back in the envelope without reading it. It doesn't really matter what it says. She is living in Berlin with a man she hardly knows, working in a bakery. Every morning she carefully folds dough into latticework around apples and cherries. He says he will take her to America. She only half believes him, but she doesn't see a better alternative.
She's watching television when he gets home. She hears him hang up his overcoat. Wordlessly, he goes and fixes himself a gin and tonic, and one for her as well. He sits down in the battered naugahide chair and she leans back against his knees.
“You've made it strong,” she says, tasting.
“What are you watching?” he asks.
“Vampire movie,” she says. “There's this vampire, and he's come to New York looking for the reincarnation of his one true love whose picture he saw in a magazine, only she doesn't want anything to do with him, and she's dating a psychiatrist.”
“Ah.”
On the screen, George Hamilton's Dracula has finally cornered the girl in a discotheque. She thinks he's the waiter. Then they dance.
“Do you want to go out for dinner?” Erik says. They do that too often.
Later that night they're curled around each other in the dark. She might have wanted sex, or might not. He didn't ask, and she couldn't decide whether to or not. But they're not sleeping.
“It's warmer this way,” he says.
“Yes,” she replies. “I slept this way with my friend Dieter all winter before last, just as friends, you know? He doesn't sleep with women. Doesn't make love with them, I mean.”
“I understand what you meant,” he says.
“Does it bother you? That I compared you to a friend who is a homosexual?” He doesn't know she knows about the letters.
“Of course not,” he says.
“Do you sleep with men?” she asks. She doesn't turn around in his arms to see his face.
He hesitates. “Yes.” There is a swift intake of breath that tells her what she wants to know.
“Do you like men better?”
“I like both.”
“Good.” Raven shifts back against him, curls her hand around his left arm around her, the stained arm.
His voice is tight. “Do you care?”
“Why should I? You don't belong to me.”
“No.”
“Do you miss your lover?”
The hesitation is longer this time. “Charles is not my lover any more.”
“Why are you here?”
Perhaps she means in Berlin. Perhaps she means in this bed. “Sometimes it's time to go,” he says.
“I know.” Raven caresses his fingers. They're warm and real. “I can be a man for you if you want. For a change of pace.”
“You can really do that?”
She shrugs. “Yes.”
He sighs. “Then you are uniquely qualified to answer the age-old question.”
“Which is?”
“Who has it better?”
Raven laughs. “I like all four ways.”
It takes him a minute to work it out. Then he laughs too. “You have an amazing gift.”
She turns in his arms, faces him. “I suppose.”
He kisses her, as she knew he would. Is it breaking things to wonder what he would say if he knew? If she breaks it, she will go on. She doesn't love him.
“You are very beautiful,” he says.
“You wouldn't say that if you saw me in my own skin.”
“Do you know I wouldn't?”
“I don't even look human.” She does not look at him. She hesitates, one hand against his chest.
“You don't have to show me,” he says, and that decides it.
Raven tosses her hair back. “I don't care,” she says. She stretches her hands out in front of her, pushing the covers down and back, stretching her fingers out. The change begins at her fingertips, glides up her arms, white skin darkening to indigo, nails to black. Small scales ripple along her upper arms.
Erik looks at her curiously, almost clinically. He runs one hand down the scales on her back, testing their warmth, their thickness. She shivers.
Erik smiles, that edged smile that cuts both ways. “Lovely,” he says.
She turns over. His fingers slip across her parted lips, across the soft blue skin on her neck, the rise of the scales at her collarbone. “Simply lovely.” There is nothing in his face to suggest he thinks anything different. He strokes one scale with a fingertip. “What does it feel like?”
“Like touching a fingernail,” she says.
Instead he strokes one nipple, watching it pucker and harden. “And that?”
She lets out a long breath. “Like always,” she says, and draws him down to kiss her.
It's slow, almost dreamlike, not as awkward as before. They're getting used to each other. She can read his pauses. He knows what to say to get her over the last precipice. “For me,” he says, and she does. Maybe it would work the same if anyone said it in that insistent, unhurried tone. Maybe not. Maybe it would work if anyone's hands pressed against the small of his back just so, stroking down in long, light caresses, pausing as he catches his breath in anticipation. Maybe not.
Afterwards, they are lying twined together, and he pulls the duvet up. Erik is always cold.
“I have never…” she begins, and stops.
“What?”
“Made love in my own skin.”
He strokes her red hair against his shoulder. “There's a first time for everything, my dear.” With a gesture, he turns the stereo on. The record drops on the turntable, and the needle moves, the soft strains of Vivaldi filling the room.
Raven sighs. It's a long record. It will last until they've gone to sleep. She closes her eyes against his shoulder. She could shift again, be Mareile or Katrin. But she doesn't.
Erik's lips brush the top of her head. “To make an omelette you have to break eggs.”
She can feel tears pricking the backs of her eyelids, all the people she has gotten over. She doesn't know why she feels this now.
“You are very beautiful,” he says.
“Blue.”
“Yes. And very beautiful.”
She looks up. He's not lying, at least not in any of the ways that she can see. “You really believe that.”
“Yes. Haven't I just demonstrated that?”
Raven smiles. “I suppose so.” She places one indigo hand against his cheek. “I can be a man, you know. If you want.”
“Another time, yes. Not tonight.” He pulls the duvet over her shoulders. “Aren't you tired?”
She is, and she curls into his warmth. It's hard to leave in the morning for work, waking up in her own skin, leaving him sleeping with his arm outflung against white pillows, blue numbers on white skin. If she left, he would never find her. He would never know who to look for.
But she won't. Winter is too cold. Maybe she'll leave in the spring, walking out of his life without even the souvenir of letters he won't read. And maybe not.
She is watching a movie about long-distance truckers on television when he gets home at exactly ten until six.
“Convoy?” he says dubiously.
Raven shrugs and takes a sip of her gin and tonic. “Ten-four, Big Daddy.” She hands him his drink, ice cold and just beginning to sweat. He sits down in the naugahide chair, and she leans back against his knees.
“It's strong,” he says, tasting it.
She turns, shifting into a young man, olive skinned and black haired, muscled like a Greek statue. Erik's eyebrows go up. With one hand she unzips his pants.
Five minutes later she takes a sip of the gin and tonic to clear her throat. Behind her, the eighteen wheelers rumble on.
“I don't think I'll look at monster trucks quite the same way again,” he says. His voice is a little shaky. She certainly hopes so.
Her glass is empty, and he holds his for her to drink from. There's something about that gesture, with her kneeling there, that pulls at her with blind lust. He can see it in her face. “And now I believe you have something coming,” he says.
It makes her forget. It always does.
Later, after they've gone in the bedroom, she shifts out of the young man's shape into Katrin's familiar leggy brunette body. He looks almost disappointed.
“I can stay a man,” she says.
“I prefer just you,” he says. “Not that this wasn't memorable.”
She doesn't know what his Charles looks like, but she didn't think he looked Greek. No, it's not that she looked like Charles.
“Blue,” she says.
“Beautiful,” he says. “Extraordinary.”
This time she believes it, almost. She shifts to indigo, slides in beside him in the bed. Maybe she will leave tomorrow. Or maybe in the spring.
Or maybe he's too strong to break.