Mark was entirely unaware that he had lost his audience: John was savoring the ringing in his ears, the pleasant scrape in his throat, the flashes of color and shadow behind his eyeballs—all the desirable effects of a third quicksuccession Unicum. Technically, he was listening to Mark’s rambling story, but minor characters were taking shape in his mind as people he knew. Specifically, Emily Oliver, a seventeenth-century Dutch lady of pleasure, was staring at him from behind a rough, low wooden table in front of the enormous, blazing fireplace, a spitted hog dripping into the chatty, licking flame. Emily wore only a toga and laurel wreath. A still life was spread before her on the table: green glass goblets of golden wine, bumpy half-loaves of bread, sliced lemons with dimpled flesh, mackerels glowing platinum, violins varnished into mirrors, silver scalloped bowls of fire-lit grapes and ridged nuts, a skull or two supporting guttering candles. Emily selected a single red grape and stretched one bare arm skyward. She tipped back her head, bent her arm, took the grape between her teeth. She widened her eyes and bit gently down, pressed her teeth just perceptibly against the grape’s skin, just hard enough to make the fruit change shape but not so hard as to burst its delicate coat. John placed his dry palette next to his blank canvas, tossed his floppy hat aside, approached his model. She took two slow steps backward, laughing through the tooth-clenched grape, and let fall her toga.
“Until the letter is included in a biography not of van den Huygens, whose biography no one will ever write, I promise you, but of the letter’s writer, Hendrik Müller, a truly significant artist. That’s where I read it, though the biographer completely missed its significance.”
Mark smiled and now spoke very slowly and quietly, regaining John’s attention briefly. “Müller writes, ‘Jan—The winter months are brutal cold. Working in my studio during the day is bearable, but holding discussions there at night is unfeasible. Can you arrange to hold a regular table for me and some friends by your fire? We will buy food and wine, and perhaps you can lower the price for it if we promise to come every night until April or May.’ ”
Mark recited from memory this poem of unsurpassed eloquence and emotional power. All the world at that moment for Mark Payton was to see John Price understand this letter and, by extension, Mark. He spoke very quietly now, his fingers laced tightly behind his neck. “Understand, John. Müller—an acknowledged genius—is speaking to us. To you and me. He is in the room with us now. He . . . he is touching you on your shoulder like this. He’s a friend of ours, Müller. We love his work, of course, but so does everyone, that’s not what’s important to us. No, I love him because, oh . . . how well he holds his liquor. Or because he’s such an open book to us. He dances quite badly, unless he’s drunk. Or how he looks up to his asshole brother, or, or—” (Mark took his hand off John’s shoulder, faced the counter again) “—anyhow, he says to us, ‘Guys—John, Mark—my apartment is cold, y’know?’ And we do know, don’t we? We’re there all the time.”
Emily was removing her toga and standing in the slithering, tentacular glow of the seventeenth-century fire. She bit through the skin of the grape and John tore the loose white shirt from his body with a grunt, managing, however, to ask: “His apartment’s cold?”
“Yes. Freezing.” Mark stretched the word freezing into two elastic syllables. “ ‘It’s so cold in my apartment, actually, that I think I should meet somewhere more comfortable with my friends and students for our daily talk about painting. Why not in my friend Jan’s inn, where there’s a big fireplace and food and wine?’ ” Mark spoke in a possibly Dutch accent, and waited for the magnitude of what he was saying to dawn on his audience.
“It would be warmer, I suppose,” John offered.
“Yes! He went to van den Huygens’s inn—to a café—because it would be warmer! Only that. It would be warmer. You see? John, do you see? All over Europe at that time, painters must have realized that an inn—that is, a café—would be warmer. A whole world of people going to cafés because it would be warmer. Their students, perhaps, even continue the practice—not a tradition, no, just a practice—because they would be warmer . . . But their students or their students’ students . . .” Mark’s voice became lower, slow. He blew air out from puffed cheeks. “They, they go to cafés because that’s what painters do. Now do you see?” Mark asked this of John directly, and in his heart, he could not even bear to hope that John or anyone else—friend, lover, or stranger—would ever see Hendrik Müller as a hero, a man who acted without a glance to the oppressive past, to any longed-for golden age. Mark could hardly find the words to express to himself Hendrik Müller’s shattering significance. To feel at home. To be at peace. To know one’s desires are truly one’s own and not inadvertently, unavoidably, just the desires of one’s forebears long dead or, worse—worst of all—the manipulations of faceless Habit, Style, Tradition, History. To go somewhere because it would be warmer, to live and just to be. With the right person for the right reason, like this very moment, so that even this place, this historyless little grocery could glow with the importance of the past, right now, tonight. One last try: “You, of everyone I know, John, you should see how amazing this discovery is.”
“I can see you’re a complete maniac, if that’s any consolation.”
XVIII.
WHEN JOHN ENTERED THE NEWSROOM THE NEXT DAY, HE SCATTERED HIS hellos and slid in front of his computer to type up his notes from the U.S. embassy’s July Fourth party. They longed for freedom for forty years, he wrote, then stared at this improbably precise and insightful sentence, and at the screen’s blinking cursor. He alternately deplored and savored the frequency with which Emily would storm into his brain, displace something more relevant, taunt him. His jaw slackened and he stared at the unfinished, unbelievable generalization on the computer screen. The cursor blinked more and more slowly, lazy and arhythmic, an occasional sigh. Blink. His hands rested immobile on the keyboard until he recalled Emily in her toga, the night smells on the street, her closed eyes when she danced with him, her rapid escape with the Julies, and his hands typed, of their own accord, asdfjkl; and set the cursor panting like a blood-maddened hyena.
“I think you and I should go to lunch today.”
The frenetic voice was Karen Whitley’s (Arts, Restaurants, Nightlife Listings, Want Ad Sales). She sat at the adjacent computer and was hanging up her telephone. The noise shocked him into typing.
They longed for freedom for forty years, asdfjkl; and yesterday selected members of the recently oppressed watched us celebrate our two centuries of liberty and free markets like the dashing old pros we are. Red, white, and blue cake and small talk, which, of course, are the benefits of freedom. Still, this week you could feel some mutual doubt at the U.S. Embassy’s annual July 4th party. VIP Hungarian thoughts were easy to read: “Is this all there is, after our sacrifices? This is what we were taught to fear, but instinctively loved? This is all there is?” And from the other side of the divide, “What have we done lately to deserve this cake? If it demanded a rebellion against tyrants, would we have it in us?” Which side was tired? Which was ready for the future? Who had won? And what came next? Is this a thousand words yet? What about now? asdfjkl;lkjfdsasdfjkl;lkjfdsasdfjkl; I have a great insight coming, I have a great insight coming, here it comes—
“Let’s go to lunch when you finish that,” repeated Karen, but this time she was not on the phone.
Karen Whitley had introduced herself to John on his first day of work, only moments after he had emerged from his torturous interview with the editor. She toured him through the office and shared her secret discovery (source confidential) that Editor (who shed his definite article for those in the know), despite his Australian accent, was from Minneapolis, a journalism minor and the second son of one of the world’s richest office-equipment manufacturers. “Electric staplers are bankrolling this little venture,” she disclosed in her highspeed, former-champion-high-school-debater rat-a-tat. The next moment, she slid her arm through John’s to introduce him to other
staff, like the hostess at a fabulous party. The rest of their conversation then fell into a pattern that, although relatively new to John that day, grew comically familiar as Budapest’s spring turned to summer: how they got to this odd place at this odd moment of history, what they hoped for from their obviously temporary jobs, what they dreamed of doing with their lives in this sudden window of possibility—the same intensely personal conversation John came to have with expatriates all the time, often immediately before never seeing them again. And sure enough, since that first day of excited mutual frankness, John saw Karen as little more than a piece of speaking furniture.
After producing a feasible if creakily portentous draft, he found himself with Karen in a restaurant near the office, one of the dozens of old state-run places sleepily serving identical, just tolerable fare. The co-workers sat with command-economy salads and five-year-plan paprikás, and John waded in and out of Karen’s peppy monologue. She needed very little conversational fuel to keep her boilers steaming. He listened, mm-hm’d. She described childhood in New York, college in Pennsylvania, sketched a Hungarian boyfriend. No, not a boyfriend precisely, “a brief encounter,” she sighed, world-weary, leaving a forkful of red-orange chicken to hover just outside her mouth, “which I’m starting to think is all the Hungarians are good for, you know? You must know. I can see it. You know. Oh, yes sir, you know. Listen to this example of enlightened Magyar manhood. True story, this: This happened to a girlfriend of mine. Real life. She’s with this guy, they’re undressing each other, and he goes, ‘What’s that smell?’ And my friend is thinking, Oh cool, okay, he likes this perfume. She was wearing this all-over vanilla body spray, right? Which is, I think, you know, a little sweet but very pretty. So she says, ‘Oh, it’s vanilla,’ or whatever and he says, real life, this guy goes—and remember, okay, this is, like, their second date and only their first time, so you know it’s like, hey, guy, be a little sensitive, right? He goes, ‘Vanilla?’ ” Karen adopted a fair Hungarian accent: “ ‘Vanilla? Listen, I want to fuck a woman, not a piece of candy. Shower.’ He says, ‘Shower’! Can you believe that?”
“Fuck a piece of candy?”
“Exactly. So my friend kicks him out, but he’s, like, lecturing her on the way out the door about Americans’ fear of the body and its natural odors and blahblahblah, you know that old tune. So my friend calls me right away, double time, quick-quick, and tells me this story, and we’re just laughing our heads off, like, no tomorrow. But I asked her if I could use that line in my movie, and she said I should use his full name.”
And she skittered into neighboring territory, a discussion of the screenplay her Hungarian experiences were already producing, the solid, solid stuff she was seeing every single day, her notebooks, how she was careful not to let Editor see her working on it, how she was writing in a café and was going to start a salon, and—
And Emily stood, a single grape between her teeth. She bit it to nearly the bursting point. Fireplace shadows stroked her arms and danced along her neck. She loosened the shoulder knot of her toga—
“Because somebody needs to tell this generation of ours what it’s for, you know. Do we stand for anything? Or against anything? Well, I tell you, I’m game: I’m starting that conversation right now, in this film. It’s all about just that—us—our generation, because it’s our time now, we can’t wait any longer, we have to redefine before someone else—someone older and already corrupt—does it for us. We have to stand up, you know, and say, ‘Hey, we don’t think that, we think this—’ ”
Emily’s hand crossed over her chest, toying with the last crossed ends of the slipping sheet’s vanishing knot. The sound of the fire grew pronounced, each click and pop filled the room—
“Ask me. Go ahead and ask me. I’ll tell you: The last time any generation was in our situation was 1919. That’s a fact; that’s a socio-historical fact. You can prove it. With numbers. We are as lost as any generation has ever been lost before, and I for one love it, mister. Look at our cultural signifiers, how every interaction is framed by—”
And the toga—the tie at the shoulder, the sheet tight across her breasts—fell away, melted away, shimmered backward from her stomach, as though a magician were revealing her with an impossibly gradual flourish of a dissolving cape, her head thrown back, her hair blown by a strong but sourceless wind—
“And besides, this paper is not going to be profitable in our lifetime. Free tip, there. Editor’s bonkers if he thinks he’s going to make his fortune on this rag.” She paid the waiter for the meal. “It’s absolutely on me. You get the next one.” She tapped her teeth with her coffee cup. “Besides, one can’t really be expected to work for an expat newspaper forever and ever, right? Although there is something amusingly fin-de-siècle in that notion, you know? Which reminds me, I know a guy from home who is living in Prague now, the lucky bastard, and he’s trying to start a business making frozen desserts shaped like Proust and Freud, and like velocipedes, and they’re called Fin-de-sicles—”
Quite nude now, behind the long, low table, she bit the grape and swallowed it with just the slightest lift to one corner of her mouth. She beckoned him—
They stood from the table. “Thanks for lunch,” he said.
Karen smiled, tried not to laugh. She gestured with a downward tilt of her head, and a simultaneous lift of her eyebrows. “I hope that’s for me.” She widened her eyes. John was wearing boxer shorts under loose-fitting khakis.
XIX.
A CHILD’ S MICROSCOPE KIT: A SLIDE AND SLIDE COVER. THE SLIDE: A REC-tangle of glass the size of a Band-Aid and the thickness of a quarter. The slide cover: a square of glass the shape and thickness of a postage stamp. To use the microscope, a child pipettes a drop of fluid onto the slide and then presses the cover on top of it. The cover skates over the surface of the slide, separated from its secure base by the fluid, slipping and gliding as the child tries to press the two pieces of glass firmly enough to make them adhere. The two pieces float as close to each other as possible, without ever, in fact, touching, hovering a cell’s depth of fluid apart.
John could not dislodge this memory during his first, brief sexual intercourse, just after lunch on July 5, 1990. He was maddened—with lust, yes, but also frustrated almost to tears. Is this all there is? he thought, even as he spastically clutched handfuls of Karen. This is as close as two bodies can be?
At the same time, he was amazed by how much everyone weighed, that she weighed anything at all. In his imagination, women had been weightless and infinitely malleable. One could lift them, roll them, push them from one sexual tableau to the next, from one gyrating friction to another. Instead, here was this superabundance of gravity—another, denser planet precisely the size of a bed. Parts were pinned, hair was pulled, access was blocked, walls chose to impinge, sheets conspired to interfere, springs squawked to distract and mock him. “I love it when you swear,” she said, and swore right back at him.
He lay underneath her standing naked form, a little foot pressing the mattress on either side of him. “You were hungry, John Price. You haven’t eaten in a while, have you? We’re going to have to work on you. Like, focus that enthusiasm a bit.”
She jumped up and down; her feet bounced a tiny inch or two from his hips. “What a delight to get to play with all that enthusiasm, John Price! I have so many lovely things to teach you! Lovely!” Bounce. “Lovely!” Bounce. “Lovely lovely lovely!” Bounce bounce bounce.
Emily stood at the fireplace, quite naked now (with newly focused detail), but she covered her breasts with crossed hands. She smirked at naughty, fickle John. She pouted in mock disappointment, sniffled away a nonexistent tear, then dropped her hands and beckoned again—
“Are you ready again?” Bounce. “You are, aren’t you!”
Karen lies asleep on her side, her back to him. The sheet clings to and imitates four legs. Work is very far away, and Emily too. He is up on one elbow. He traces the most remarkable discovery of the day: the landscape curve of
her side from the bottom of her rib cage to the top of her hip. The afternoon light has turned soft. The room is uniformly laid over with a light gray shadow that he has never seen before, as if an entirely new kind of light has recently been discovered. Through the open window, over her tousled hair and slow breathing, he can see all the way across the street. A street width and half a bedroom away from him, in a recently repainted nineteenth-century apartment building brightly lit by the sun, which hangs somewhere over Karen’s building, the stocky top half of a prematurely old Hungarian woman plants her elbows on her windowsill, leans into the glare, into an entirely different kind of light (and world), and watches street life five floors down. She pushes back an errant strand of gray hair and sips from a tall glass. She seems to mean something. New scents pass in the air and mingle with familiar ones—shampoo, deodorants, vanilla. A fly has found its way into the apartment and cannot find its way out, dances with itself on the mirror, then tracks lipstick footprints down the side of a glass to wade in warm lemonade. Do you remember this feeling forever? John wonders, hopes. He’s supposed to meet Scott soon. He can’t remember where he put his watch.
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