The Little Book by Selden Edwards Page B

levity.
    Wheeler smiled back. “It’s not the Wild West, you know.” He gestured to the broad open room. “But nothing like this.”
    “I told you, my geography is terrible west of the Hudson River,” she said.
    “You’re going to visit, remember?”
    She looked genuinely pleased with the invitation. “I’m still absorbing Vienna. I don’t know if I will ever leave here.”
    “What is it you find so compelling?”
    “I’m really here for the music.”
    “Any music in particular? This city seems alive with it, reverberating in every nook and cranny,” he said, quoting from the Haze’s revered City of Music , the “Little Book” by Mr. Jonathan Trumpp that he always read from with such loving care. “Echoing, you might say, off every grand marble exterior.”
    “Oh my,” she said, impressed. “You have a way with words, Mr. Truman. ”
    “No,” he said. “Not my words. I am just quoting again, this time from one of my favorite works, referred to often by the mentor I told you about.”
    She paused and assessed him for a moment. “Actually, I’m writing,” she said. “But nothing as grand as your mentor’s favorite work. Mine is just a humble series of articles on the new composers.” She was amazed that she had said it. “But it’s sort of confidential, and I wish no one to know. I am using a pseudonym.”
    “I have no one to tell,” Wheeler said. “I’m in Vienna alone.” If she only knew, he thought.
    “Oh, I didn’t mean to imply.” She stopped. “I just saw you meeting Arnauld and his friends.”
    “Secret’s good with me, ma’am,” he said, and it made her laugh.
    “You have a very different manner, Mr. Truman. I must say, I like it.” Wheeler suspected that she was blushing again.
    “Well, perhaps we can hear some Viennese music together.”
    “I would like that very much,” she said with a sudden rush of candor. “Now, I must go. I’m expected back at my pension.” She held out her hand, and Wheeler took it and felt its soft warmth, then she turned and walked away, but then turned back before she had left the room. “Mr. Truman,” she said, framed against the baroque molding of the expansive doorway to the next room. “You have remarkably kind eyes.”
    Wheeler watched her turn again and disappear around the corner, his heart feeling an incredible lightness. What a striking woman , he thought.
    That evening in Vienna, distracted by the limits of his circumstance, Wheeler again ate modestly and moved even deeper into the old city to find an even cheaper room. His clothes were beginning to feel rumpled, and he longed for a shower. His money was nearly gone.
    At the end of the second day, he began seeing in his new neighborhood a part of the Imperial City he would not have imagined. There was more of the poverty and wretchedness than he had seen before, the stench of crowded and abject conditions. As Wheeler walked deeper and deeper into the city he became even more aware of people asleep in the streets, uncared for, unwashed, crowded, and miserable, a homelessness and depression that had simply not come through in the Haze’s stirring descriptions. There were prostitutes everywhere. Wherever he walked women of all ages, as old as sixty and as young as twelve, as comely and as haglike as one could imagine, approached and offered company and specific services. Some of the more aggressive actually took his arm and walked a few paces with him until it became clear he was not a prospect.
    Later in the day, in the clean, well-lighted comfort of the Café Central, he would ask Kleist about the wretched conditions. He was sitting at the usual table with the usual Jung Wien group. “It is not a problem if one does not see it,” the young Kleist said cheerfully. “There are not enough jobs and not enough homes. That is one reason coffeehouses like this one proliferate. People need a place for comfort. I know it might come as a surprise to you, but some of the gentlemen at