The Foreigners - Maxine Swann [19]
“But the truth is I can’t imagine any of these women throwing soirées for artists from abroad,” she said under her breath, pulling me aside. Even as she talked, I could tell that she was assessing my clothes, which had seemed fine when I’d left my apartment earlier but now, compared to hers, looked rumpled and mismatched. Her own look was the opposite, everything pressed, fresh, clean, with touches of both milkmaid and matron. “Don’t you see? They could never give a glamorous cocktail party in their lives, never really glamorous. They wouldn’t know what to wear, who to invite.” We were standing by the floor-to-ceiling windows, looking out. “How I would die to have an apartment like this.” She turned to me with her generous schoolgirl smile. “I’d give wonderful parties, wouldn’t you?”
In the elevator downward, she was still in a buoyant mood. “We’re going to get coffee, right? But first come with me for a second. I want to show you my new cards.” Stepping outside, she led me to a copy shop down a side street. Her cards were ready. “See,” she said. The card was cream-colored with italic script: “Concierge international artistique.”
There’s a pretty place with a garden right this way,” Isolde said, leading me to the Museum of Decorative Arts. We sat down outside at small iron tables under the tipa trees.
“So how long have you been here?” I asked.
“Four months in this part of the world. My friend Sabina and I went to Uruguay for the summer season. Then, at the end of February, we came here. She went back after a few weeks. But I stayed on.”
“And you like it here?”
“Oh, yes, there’s wonderful culture.” She leaned nearer, and spoke behind one hand. “And everything’s so cheap. I actually have tickets to a concert at the opera house tonight. Do you want to come?”
“Oh, I ... can’t tonight,” I said. I didn’t have anything else to do, but that seemed like a long day to spend with someone I’d just met. “I’d love to another time.
“Have you met nice people?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, wonderful people.” She gazed off distractedly.
But Isolde’s show of reserve was only momentary. A few more questions and the whole of her story came tumbling out. Although I wasn’t yet aware of it that afternoon, I was soon to find myself in the role of her primary confidante.
I solde, thirty-five, was from a small Austrian village. The men in her family were veterinarians with modest but dependable veterinarian incomes. She had a sister. I imagined from what she told me that the girls were lovely, strong, on the side of being big-boned. They were sporty and always known to be among the prettiest in their classes at the village school.
It was the elder sister who from a golden girl turned one day into a dark figure. Her parents had had great plans for her—she was to be the first woman in the family to go to college—but then things didn’t work out as they’d hoped. The sister botched her college entrance interviews. Her male admirers were soon turned away by her aggressive habits. It was said that she had a mental disease. She stayed at home, locked in her room, only coming out at mealtimes to tyrannize the family. She had a child with a man, who then ran off. She brought the child to live with her in the house, another golden girl, but whose life was shadowed from the start by her troubled mother with whom she shared a room.
Isolde was apparently a simpler character, lovely but not so lovely as her sister, without such a feeling of entitlement, the good-natured one, innocent, hopeful, someone to whom life happened, one thing led to the next, with minimal forethought on her part. She was in a sense the face of the family. Though utterly inexperienced, she would step out and represent them in the world. This was, at least, how her parents seemed to feel, now that their dream daughter had failed them. Obediently, Isolde took on this role, going to college in Salzburg, studying commerce, getting a job in a bank. None of these things did she do particularly well, even by her own estimation, but she did them. In college, she fell in with a different