Falling In Love At Fatty George’s Saloon

Just before my 21^st birthday in 1980, I went to spend six months in Vienna as part of my university degree course. I had a place at the Wirtschaftsuniversität to study banking for one term, followed by a three-month internship at a small paper-manufacturing company. Two friends from my university course in England were also on placements in Vienna at the time, and we all stayed in rented student accommodation in the southern part of the city. I was particularly lucky as I got to share a large room with an English student from another university called Hannah, who played the guitar and sang, and who was full of exciting, spontaneous ideas.

All the others were already on their internships so I spent the first few days journeying by myself to and from the university, which was at the other side of Vienna from where we lived. I did that until one of the most prominent and popular professors, who also taught one of my classes, made a pass at me. He had invited me and a few other students in my class to dinner at his apartment, and while the others were carrying the dishes into the kitchen afterwards, he grabbed hold of me, put his hand up my sweater and in one swift movement removed my bra and grabbed a breast. I stopped going to the university after that.

We celebrated my 21^st birthday in the Heurigen, the local wine restaurants which are plentiful in Vienna, and particularly in the southern district where we lived. It was there and then on that night that Hannah decided I needed a boyfriend, and she knew just the chap – her boss. Hannah worked at the most prestigious bank in Vienna, the Zentralsparkasse, which in 1980 was The Bank To Bank With. The Viennese have a strict social and professional hierarchy, in which those with both social and professional titles are attributed due respect. Where you work and live play an important part in this system, as does being seen at the right places with the right people. And Hannah’s boss was placed quite highly in a lot of these categories.

Hannah worked in the legal department of the “Z”, as the Zentralsparkasse, a bank that today no longer exists as such, was known back then. Her boss was a lawyer and he was called Dr. Roland Brunner. (That wasn’t his real name of course. His real name was Dr. Richard Binder. No, just kidding). Anyway, she always referred to him as just “Brunner” (or rather his real name) and throughout our subsequent relationship, for some reason I also referred to him as “Brunner”, never by his first name. And I never even called him by his first name, except for once, when, after I had eaten some margarine from his fridge that was past the expiry date and woke up in the middle of the night with stomach ache, I said, “Roland, I’ve got stomach ache”, and he, in a panic went and phoned the poison center.

Anyway, Hannah told Dr. Roland Brunner that I was looking for someone to go to the theater with and also, I believe, that I was a hot little number, and that got Dr. Brunner very interested. He asked Hannah for my phone number (we had a landline in our room) and called me up and asked me out. And because I really liked older men, and he was nearly 11 years older than me, and because Hannah said he had a nice car and lots of money and would show me a good time, and because he had a very nice, deep, sensual voice on the phone, and a very polite and charming manner, I said yes.

Dr. Roland Brunner came to pick me up from our student home one evening in the middle of April 1980 and he just bowled me over. Despite several years of fruitless attempts, never had I managed to bag a man so sophisticated and charming, or, it has to be said, with such a nice car. It was a dark blue Ferrari-type of vehicle, of the type used by Simon Lyons in the story “Flambeaux” in another part of this blog. In fact, Dr. Roland Brunner was about the closest you could come to Simon Lyons without it being Simon Lyons himself. He treated me like a princess and to boot, he spoke perfect English, which was excellent as I really was having tremendous difficulty understanding anything the Viennese said at all. And on that evening I wore a pretty velvet dress, the original little black dress, with a black jet bead necklace, and black high heels.

On that first evening, Dr. Roland Brunner took me for wine in a chic little bar in the center of Vienna, followed by dinner at a charming old restaurant in the Graben, and finally dancing at Fatty George’s Saloon. I had only ever been dancing at discos. Fatty George’s was a jazz club, and in 1980 Fatty George himself had just opened it for the second time. It was absolutely the place to be. A live jazz band played and if you paid a lot of money you could get a table out on the dance floor right up near to the stage. I was dazzled. It was beautiful, exciting, so much fun and incredibly glamorous. I had never been anywhere so glamorous in all my life. It felt like being in a movie. Dr. Brunner asked me if I would like to dance, and of course he meant the old cheek to cheek. But I wanted to disco dance – well it was 1980. Dr. Brunner thought that was very funny. And in Fatty George’s Saloon, on that night in April 1980, I fell completely head over heels in love with Dr. Roland Brunner. And I wanted to go to Fatty George’s Saloon every night of the week, although we never went again.

However, it appeared that Dr. Roland Brunner also fell in love with me. We saw each other most evenings, and in the mornings he drove me back to a station in the city before carrying on to the Z, and every weekend I stayed over at his apartment. He did earn quite a lot of money, and he proceeded to spend a fair portion of it on taking me out. Vienna is all about going out: eating, drinking, theaters, events. We drank wine in the Heurigen, ate dinner in Austrian restaurants and moved on to Hungarian restaurants to eat Palatschinken for pudding. We sat in Biergärten or went to the cinema or to the fair at the Prater. Every Sunday we went to the Wienerwald to his parents’ house for lunch. Dr. Brunner had to act as an interpreter then. I truly did not understand one word his parents were saying to me.

One evening after we had eaten dinner in the city, we were sitting talking in the living room of Dr. Brunner’s apartment when the phone rang. The phone was out in the hall and usually, Dr. Brunner would talk freely on it with the door to the kitchen open. The kitchen was in between the hall and the living room. But on this evening, after answering the phone he closed the kitchen door, and spoke in a very low voice.

He was on the phone for a while, so I decided to get myself a drink from the fridge in the kitchen. I saw that the door had swung open a little again, so I went to close it. I assumed it was a business call and he wanted some privacy. On my way to the fridge, I walked past the door and gave it a light tap, but the door slammed shut. There must have been a draught somewhere. I wanted to apologize but at the same time I didn’t want to disturb him. So I went back to the living room and waited for him.

When Dr. Brunner came back from the phone, he was furious. He claimed that I had deliberately slammed the door because I was angry that he was on the phone. Nothing could have been further from my intentions. But he refused to accept my explanation, and we ended up rowing. That was our first row.

A few days later, on a sunny Saturday morning at the end of June, Dr. Brunner called to ask if I would like to meet for lunch. We had not seen each other the evening before because Hannah’s parents had come to stay and taken us for dinner. I said I would, and he turned up an hour later than agreed, which put me in a bad mood. But over the course of lunch, I realized it was he that was in the bad mood. Something was very wrong. And after our Palatschinken, he took me back to his apartment and finally told me what it was.

Apparently, Dr. Brunner had been having an affair with a married woman for many years. He knew that she was never going to leave her husband, and she also had a daughter – even now I can remember that the daughter was 4 years old. And he hadn’t heard from her for a while, which was why he had taken up with me. But a few days ago, she had called and wanted to see him. So he had met her – the night before, and told her about me, and she had said that she could not bear the thought of him seeing me, and that he must stop if he wanted to see her again.

Now Dr. Brunner told me he was in love with this married woman and so the long and the short of it was, it was an awful situation.

I swallowed all this and I remember that I suddenly had a feeling of complete numbness all around me and inside me, and I knew that I just had to leave immediately. So I stood up and packed up the Scrabble board that I had brought with me, quite calmly, and started to leave the room. And Dr. Brunner, in a really desperate voice, cried out and asked me where I thought I was going, and I said, well, I’m leaving.

That was when Dr. Brunner broke down. In fact he put on quite a good show of actually crying, with his head in his hands and everything. And it was all so terrible, he said, and that wasn’t what he wanted at all. He didn’t want to see her and he wanted me to stay. He had even gone so far as having our wedding invitations designed, he said, and he couldn’t bear to lose me.

Well. That just took my breath away. Although I was really in love, I just had not planned any further at all. I was a student, and I was going back to university. I wanted to stay together with Dr. Brunner, but I hadn’t thought through the logistics of it. I just hadn’t thought about anything. I had been having such a lovely time, all the dinners and dances and theaters and drinks and glamor, I hadn’t ever thought about the love affair suddenly going to stop, either because of another woman or because it would end in marriage. And you know that line that you always hear in American movies, that every little girl is planning her wedding day from the time she is 8 years old? Well, that just so wasn’t me. I never ever wanted to get married. And I never ever thought about having a wedding.

But from that moment on, I did. I wanted to marry Dr. Roland Brunner, with his designed wedding invitations, in Vienna. He had known exactly how to hook me and make me stay.

Of course, I guess Dr. Roland Brunner just wanted to finish with me on his own time. He needed a few days to think about things and I guess he met the married lady a couple of days later and made his mind up. Because on the next Tuesday, he called me up and asked if I would like to go to the cinema the following evening. He would pick me up an hour before the movie started, he said. But on that night, he never ever came.

That evening, after Dr. Brunner never turned up, I went as fast as I could by tram to his apartment, and rang the bell for several minutes, but he never answered. Then I went and sat in a restaurant near to the apartment and drank a glass of red wine, and went back to the apartment later. But he never came back. And every evening for the next week I tried to call him, but either he didn’t answer at all or just put the phone down when he heard my voice. My heart broke and broke over and over and I cried so much I thought I would be sick.

One day I was at the station Wien Mitte, which is in the center of Vienna, and I was waiting for the train. And I can still remember watching the train travel into the platform from the right, and wanting to throw myself in its path. I got so very close to throwing myself in front of it that I still feel scared when I think about it, even though it was over thirty years ago.

Sometimes, over the next two or three months, Dr. Brunner would either call me up or he would stay on the phone if I called him, and then we would meet up. There were no more dinners or dances, and especially not at Fatty George’s Saloon, but sometimes we would go for a drink. Mostly though, Dr. Brunner just wanted me to come to his apartment and have sex with him. There was no more love involved. It was strange how he had been so in love with me before, I thought, and then suddenly, it was all gone. In fact he was very cold towards me and no longer treated me like a princess, or indeed with much respect at all. I didn’t understand about the married lady, because he wasn’t really doing what she had apparently said she wanted him to do. And he didn’t even seem sad. He seemed very relaxed and happy, albeit in his own little world, not relaxed and happy towards me. But clearly he wasn’t together with the married lady either. In fact, he never mentioned her again.

I went back to England and to university in October. I couldn’t forget Dr. Brunner. In fact I thought about him most of the time. Over the next few years, although I had boyfriends and even one serious relationship, my Viennese lawyer was always the standard by whom I was measuring the others. And I was still so in love with him that there was simply no space left over for anyone else to really occupy.

Three years later, when I met the man I fell in love with and married, it felt that as if by loving him, I was erasing Dr. Brunner from my memory, and that I was finally able to lift a great physical weight from my shoulders. Sometimes I thought that I fell in love with my husband in order to be able to let go of Dr. Brunner. And I always felt a little guilty about that.

And then something happened, after I had been with my husband for just over a year. One morning, there was an article in our local newspaper about a car accident that had happened near our city. There was a picture of the smashed car, and a few lines about the driver, who had been killed in the accident, a Dr. Roland Brunner of Vienna. Except that of course the article stated his real name, which was a little more unusual than the pseudonym of Roland Brunner.

I jumped right out of my seat when I read it, and my heart seemed to leap right out of my throat, and I wanted to call Dr. Brunner’s number immediately. But my husband would not allow it. He gave all sorts of reasons why he stopped me, but basically, I think, it was down to jealousy. He hadn’t known about Dr. Brunner before, and he didn’t like hearing about him then. So I didn’t call Dr. Brunner, and I suffered alone and in silence, never knowing whether he was alive or dead.

When my husband and I split up a few years later, one of the first things I did was to call Dr. Brunner’s number, but I got an old lady who just said that Dr. Roland Brunner didn’t live in Vienna any more, and she didn’t know where he was. Well, wherever he is, I hope he is enjoying a Palatschinken and a glass of red wine. And a dance at Fatty George’s Saloon for me.