A Curable Romantic Read Online Free

Ecksteins again that night. Still, I lingered beneath a streetlamp as couples and groups hailed cabs or drove off in private fiacres, in the hopes that I might.
    Eventually, even the actors emerged in their ordinary clothing. Their faces still partially rouged, they bid each other good night in their large voices, their gestures not as bold as before, although still somewhat affected. Finally a workman in shirtsleeves fastened a velvet rope across each of the theater’s doors, and I made my way home, my hands thrust into the pockets of Otto Meissenblichler’s coat.
    Though much about myself at that time embarrasses me still — the little mustache and goatee I wore in an effort to appear not more masculine, but less feminine; my unruly hair, worn in the Bohemian style; the little trinkets and fobs dangling from my vest, which, with the rest of Otto’s ensemble, made up my apparel for the evening — there’s but one thing I continue to scold my younger self for, and that is the alacrity with which he once again surrendered to his cravings for love.
    Ah, just look at him! The poor fool! At last, he knows the beloved’s name: “Fräulein Eckstein … Fräulein Eckstein!” It sweetens his tongue like a lemon drop when, in an ecstasy, he whispers it to himself: “Emma … Emma … Emma …” Why, he’s practically dancing on the benches in the Stadtpark, swooning against the gas lamps, gibbering at the gibbous moon! No one is abroad at this late hour, and so he feels himself the only man awake in Vienna, the only man alive in the empire, or perhaps in the entire world, the lone vertical figure crossing the planet’s horizons as it spins in its ethers, aroused by the perfumed caresses of Beauty herself.
    (Oh, what an idiot I was!)
    I knocked softly upon Otto Meissenblichler’s door and, receiving no answer, let myself in. Crossing the rug in the half-light, I removed mysuit and exchanged it for the one I’d left hanging there. Self-dramatically running my hand through my hair, I slipped back into the passageway and entered my own rooms. Tossing my hat onto the table, I flung myself, fully clothed, across the bed.
    “O Noble Room!” I cried out softly. (How I cringe to report this!) “Witness for so long of my bitterest solitude! May you now serve as a sanctuary to my new and tender love for Fräulein Emma Eckstein!”
    The evening restages itself, a delightful comedy this time, in the theater of my mind, and I watch it over again. With its sparkling lamps and its incandescent chandeliers, the Carl is an empire of light. The murals on the ceiling are neckbreakingly beautiful, adorned with harps and trumpets and a whirling zodiacal wheel. There are depictions of Nestroy in costume and of the Muses in none; and beneath it all, there he is, young Dr. Sammelsohn, his heart and eye aroused to a frenzied pitch, delighting in the brilliance of it all.
    (Who could have known then that, only a few months later, the fool would learn to his peril that the heart, like the eye, is drawn not only to light but to the soothing ambiguities of darkness as well?)

CHAPTER 2
    I tended, in the meanwhile, to my chores at the Allgemeines Krankenhaus, fiddling, for instance, with the Helmholtz ophthalmoscope and the Graefe knife, instruments whose uses I’d yet to perfect. Not that I needed to. The majority of my patients were simple malingerers feigning nearsightedness in the hopes of obtaining a government dispensation or a military deferment, and my most frequent prescription was a sternly worded lecture: “Let me assure you, Herr Whomever,” I might say, “that I have no time for these sorts of duplicities and neither does the emperor or his generals!”
    However, nothing could have been further from the truth. I was an unmarried man, living by himself in a city full of strangers: I had nothing but time. My hours were indeed so empty, I could hardly fill them. As a consequence, I was incapable of arriving anywhere late, a source of