Prague

by Arthur Phillips

  This internal photo—so jarring to the expected retrograde progression (professor to courtier to older portrait still)—usually won the work more attention than a quick walk-by. In his happy examination, Mark realized that the seventeenth-century painted courtier, like the twentieth-century photographed professor, was in fact Nicky. Mark understood this first, but at the same moment that he was asking, “Isn’t that your friend, too?” John was saying, “Oh man, that’s Nicky, I can’t believe it,” except John was pointing at the gloomy red-haired woman taking it from behind.

  “Oh my,” said Mark.

  “Hello, handsome,” said her voice behind them, and her hand slid into John’s hip pocket and squeezed. She kissed him long on the mouth. “Do you like it?” she asked with her eager and unironic appetite for praise, slightly manically heightened by the event-ness of her opening night. John’s hand skimmed her scalp, and she looked at both men with unblinking concentration, her wide, round black eyes openly hoping for love.

  “Absolutely. Of course,” said John. “What’s not to like?”

  “You are an original,” said Mark. “I love it.”

  “Oh, Johnny, I love your pal! Thank you! It’s not really done until it’s purchased, of course. To really be finished, you have to imagine a fourth person: some proud owner who stands here, like this, and points to it for his friends with the same pride as Elizabethan guy.”

  “Yeah, great, great, great,” said John. “But oh yeah, say, who is this?” He pointed to the ecstatic, tiara’d man, nestled securely behind his red-wigged girlfriend.

  The artist wound her arm around John’s waist and smiled conspiratorially at Mark, who was plainly enchanted by her. “Listen to Mr. Prude,” she singsonged to the Canadian. “I happen to know he’s sleeping with me and with Karen, our office airhead, and he’s jealous of a painting.”

  Which comment left John several steps behind the conversation. “It’s a photograph,” he said, for lack of better options.

  “Look carefully. Take away the beard and the coiff and it’s . . .”

  “Oh hey, it’s you, isn’t it?” Mark clapped his hands.

  “The head at least, anyhow.”

  “And the body?” asked John, unconvincingly offhandedly.

  “Gentlemen,” she responded in a professorial tone. “Look closely! Exercise your critical faculties. Note”—she pointed at the stud’s chest—“the dark, oddly geometric equilateral triangle of chest hair. Note”—she pointed at the two hands, just visible over the rise of her hip—“the fine, almost journalistic fingers clutching my ass.”

  “Oh,” said John.

  “Yes, my sweet.” And she tugged at John’s earlobe with her teeth.

  “Those are very fine fingers,” Mark agreed.

  She happily told Mark of the “delightful little visit” John had made a few weeks earlier. She hadn’t finished this one section of the piece, and, to her permanent frustration, she could not fill it with her own form. She wanted the encounter to look natural, though, so she snapped a few shots on a timer, then added new heads to both bodies (“I wasn’t quite that bored”). John sifted through a handful of thwarted emotions: He couldn’t get angry (it wasn’t really his face); he couldn’t feel complimented (it wasn’t really his face); he couldn’t be embarrassed (et cetera); surely he saw the humor, artistic statement, whatnot.

  “I’ve heard all about you from our mutual friend,” she told Mark, wrapping an arm around each of their waists. “You’re the nostalgia queen, right?”

  Nicky guided them past others’ photographs (at which she emitted murmurs of quiet scorn) until she halted them in front of her second entry in the show. Quite small, this one openly proclaimed itself a photo collage. A woman in a sundress and straw hat reclined in a white wooden gazebo, caressed by the sun and shade of a green and perfect English garden. She and the gazebo had certainly been clipped from a catalog of some sort, some clothing store trading profitably on the ever-viable English country house fantasy. She stretched lazily, lengthily, on the shelter’s pillowed banquette and gazed onto the park and garden through the latticed slats of the gazebo’s decoratively carved walls. Her expression read as some variety of commercially appealing boredom. A few feet in front of her, there on the emerald grass dappled with the shadows of leaf and branch, she observed two mangy mongrel dogs engaged in a spirited display of copulation. The top dog was curved almost double, and one of his back paws had come off the ground in his avidity. His eyes rolled upward (where they appeared to focus hungrily on the fruit of an apple tree arching over the gazebo’s red, conical roof ). His black and dripping lips were frenziedly, unevenly pulled back, undressing white-and-yellow fangs, foamy saliva, mottled pink-and-black gums. The female dog, however, looked as bored as had Nicky in her red wig, and seemed to be making eye contact with the British lady in the gazebo. One had the irresistible feeling that the two females were sharing a moment of sympathy and communion. For this small work, Nicky had chosen a carved, gold-painted wooden frame, appropriate for a museum-prized old master. She had purchased it from a Budapest antique store, cutting up for collage scrap the painting it had held.

  “I love your work, I love your work,” Mark repeated several times to the reward of Nicky’s increasing joy.

  “I was taking pictures of the Soviet troop withdrawal. They’re leaving now, you know, turning over these filthy bases they’ve sat in for forty years. The Russian guys were whistling and hooting as I was taking pictures of them, and I thought it was for me, but then this one Russian points behind me and I turn and see these two going at it. I just fell in love with these two, humping along as this pathetic parade of old tanks was going by.”

  She excused herself to greet other people—rival artists, potential buyers lingering in front of her works, friends unknown and unintroduced to John, a whole community and life about which he knew nothing and from which her ever proliferating house rules excluded him. She commented extravagantly on her work with obscure references and provocative, imaginative profanity to some demi-comprehending Hungarian art critics, then said her good-byes to the event’s organizers. She returned to the men: “Let’s get drunk and screw, boys.” Her hand re-entered John’s hip pocket, and she massagingly steered him out the door of the cinema, with Mark following close behind. They coasted down Bajcsy-Zsilinszky Boulevard, past the state-owned Cuban restaurant where the goulash came with black beans and rice, past the new discos named, in international-trademark violation, for hip brands of American clothes, and they docked at a sidewalk table of a café-bar. John ordered them six Unicums.

  By the end of his second, he had begun to relax again. Nicky was answering Mark’s renewed compliments with sisterly tenderness, the same woman who only minutes earlier was having to invent new profanity in order to express her thoughts, and John felt great fondness for her. The sensation of being in Nicky’s hands was different than resting in Nádja’s, but they were good hands, trustworthy guides, providers of lifelike excitement. “I can see why you didn’t want me around for your last-minute preparations,” he said. “I may have protested the unlicensed use of my likeness.”

  “Oh, don’t you be worried about your precious little privacy. No one will ever know it’s you.” Nicky signaled for another three shots, and he wanted her with sudden and rumbling hunger, as soon as possible, for as long as she would keep him.

  “You should be honored,” Mark said, “modeling for great art. I’d buy loads of it. The more she makes, the more I’ll buy. I’ll be so modern.”

  “Mark, the first time I slept with John, he squeaked. Literally. Like a mouse. I thought he was joking. I’d never made a man squeak before, as far as I can recall.” Tremendous bilateral gaiety ensued.

  “The bed might have creaked. I’m sure I didn’t squeak, exactly. I probably moaned, you know.”

  “You squeaked, Johnny.”

  “Squeaker,” Mark clucked, shaking his head. “Squeaker.”

  John retreated inside to the bathroom.
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  “Do you love him?” Mark asked her with childish frankness as John disappeared inside.

  “Not quite my life-mate type.” She paused and sipped her drink. “A little too mushy. We’re just entertaining each other. Honestly? I think my heart is elsewhere. As of late. I think.” She laughed, rolled her eyes. “My God, I think that’s the most boring thing I’ve ever said. What about you? Do you love him? Okay, forget it. I’m going to fall asleep, this conversation is so stupid—us and our little secrets. So answer me this: How does a nice young Canadian become a nostalgia queen?”

  “When your parents first caught you smoking, what did they do?”

  “I don’t remember exactly. Grounded me. Pictures of diseased lungs. How could I be so stupid, et cetera.”

  “Precisely,” said Mark. “My parents gave me a cigarette holder. Ivory and ebony. An antique. When I was fourteen, I smoked every night with my parents and I wore a red velvet smoking jacket, spats, and a monocle. That’s the kind of people they were. They did this to me.”

  Another tray of Unicum arrived, compliments of an impatient John passing the bar on the way to the bathroom. “You’re lying, aren’t you?” she said. When John returned, they were laughing so hard that Nicky was crying and Mark was coughing violently.

  “Actually, if you want to know, I’ll tell you. I don’t know how it started, is the short answer. I’d like to blame someone, but I think it’s just me, actually. I do remember when I noticed it. Do you really want to hear this? It’ll be pathetic.”

  “Pathetic,” said Nicky. “Yes, please.” John, not knowing the topic under discussion, knew she was collecting garbage to feed her ravenous, drooling Muse, and loved her for her open use of people, even himself.

  “I remember very clearly when I was about four or five, I was riding on my dad’s back in our parlor. He was on all fours, a horse. We did this every night when he came home from work. So, okay, one night he said, very nicely, just a throwaway line, laughing and very kind, he said, ‘Whew, you’re getting so big, eh? Soon you’ll be too big for me to do this!’ And that was that. I just couldn’t believe it: There would be a time—soon—when our nightly horsey ride would be over, a fond memory of better days. And I just knew: Everything good dies. Before it’s barely begun, it’s already gone. A law of nature.”

  “That’s so pathetic.”

  “I did warn you, but all right, here’s a better story. This is when I knew definitively that I was different from the rest of the world.”

  “No, please,” protested John, “not another sensitive young homo emerging from his cocoon.”

  “No,” agreed Mark. “God, not that. That’s nothing. This was much more important. You remember the Maurin Quina posters from the 1930s? No, I don’t suppose so. They were advertising posters for this French apéritif. I don’t think the drink has been around for decades now, but the posters are sort of legendary. Anyhow, the point is, I saw this poster for the first time when I was eleven or twelve and I fell in love with it. Head over heels. I was looking through a book of old advertising posters and this one just killed me. The poster has this green devil, and he’s struggling with a corkscrew to open a bottle of Maurin Quina. He’s entirely green except for this long, thin red mouth and bright red eyes. He’s got wild, sharp green hair shooting off in all directions and a green tail with an end like a little shovel. And he’s grinning and sort of skipping, floating through the air as he tries to open this bottle. And then you notice his feet: He seems to be wearing green ballet slippers. Not like a devil, you’ll admit. Then you notice he’s a little paunchy. Then you realize, this isn’t a real devil. This is a drawing of some plump guy who has dressed up as a green devil, probably for a costume party or something, and now he’s trying to open the Maurin Quina for the party. I loved this poster. I couldn’t sleep sometimes, I loved it so much. I still have to remember not to look at repros of it right before bed. This was a picture of a good time, when you had costume parties and people went all out to dress up as a bizarre green devil, a time of great fun. Yeah, okay, so life was actually just about getting drunk and trying to get sex, but when you went to this kind of effort, it made it seem more important, sophisticated. I know now that none of this exists anymore, that all the good stuff really is in the past. But when I was twelve, I still had hopes I might live to see these good times. So, okay, Halloween 1975. I work very diligently in secret. My parents ask me, ‘What are you going to dress up as?’ but I keep it sub rosa. I gather my materials, do a lot of painting, sewing, dying, so forth, yeah? So, okay, I start the evening at a kids’ party. I go up to the bathroom there, and it actually takes about a half hour to get my green hair and everything in order. I do it perfectly. Green ballet slippers. I’ve already got this paunch. I have a corkscrew and a cola bottle I painted like the old Maurin. I float, I skip downstairs, and no one has any idea what I am. ‘Oh look, Marky Payton is a little monster!’ says one mum. ‘Mummy, Mark is scary!’ says a little girl, and she starts to cry. I try to explain to them, ‘I’m not scary, I’m all about good times, great parties, cool old advertising.’ No response. ‘Hey, look! Conrad Davis is a race-car driver! Jean MacKenzie is an astronaut!’ I just kept thinking, An astronaut? Are they joking? But I remembered, hey, they’re mostly just kids. I’m going home tonight to my parents and they’re having a dinner party, and I’ll make a great entrance—”

  “And everyone will say, ‘Look, it’s the fat green devil from those wonderful posters of fifty years ago’?”

  “Well, yes,” Mark admitted. “I was twelve. I thought grown-ups would understand. I got dropped off at home, and as I walked toward the house, I thought, There will be a sophisticated group here, brilliantly costumed, handsome people, sipping champagne from tall glasses. I’m not actually clear why I thought this; my parents were pretty lame, very conventional suburban Toronto bourge-o’s. Anyhow, I came into a table full of people in bad suits and flowered dresses asking, ‘What are you supposed to be, dear? What poster is that, dear? Malcolm (my dad), Malcolm, the boy’s an incipient alcoholic by the sound of his obsessions, hahahahahaha.’ And so forth. My mum asked me what the other children had dressed as, and I said, ‘Horrible modern things. A space suit or something.’ ‘Really?’ she said. ‘An astronaut! How exciting!’ I was so disgusted with all of them. And then I knew. I knew there was something wrong with me, or something wrong with everybody else.” Mark drained a glass and reflexively laughed enough to make the other two comfortable again, watched John hold Nicky’s hand.

  But it was wasted on Nicky; she had spotted something across the street and sat very still, just squinting her eyes and following something a hundred feet away, a newly tickled anger on her face. “Hold on a sec.” She pushed back her chair and ran across the boulevard to the far sidewalk, holding up her palm to braking traffic.

  “I have to tell you, I just love her. I’m totally in love with her, actually. Really, John.” Mark sighed and rubbed his eyes. “She’s who you should be with, I guess.”

  “Love who?” John answered distractedly. Between rushing and parked cars, he periodically saw Nicky on the far sidewalk, standing in front of a window with a short-circuited neon sign that fritzed and blinked some word in green that would have been illegible even if he knew Hungarian. Nicky talked and gestured excitedly to a young couple. After a few moments, she forcefully shoved the man; he stepped backward with an expression of surprise, anger, some amusement. The girl at his side screamed something John couldn’t quite make out, then she pawed at the lapel of Nicky’s blazer and slapped the artist hard across the face.

  “Whoa,” whispered John, and Mark sat up at once. “That’s different.”

  The blow momentarily immobilized Nicky, but then she punched the girl in the stomach, collapsing her in two at the waist, so that from John’s seat it looked as if Nicky had deflated her opponent by pulling a plug at her navel. Nicky spat at the astounded man, who had placed one hand on his companion’s back, then she turned to walk slowly back acr
oss the street, a fireworks display of imaginative profanity again sparkling from her mouth. Standing, she called the waitress over and ordered three more Unicums. Seated, she gently squeezed Mark’s cheek and John’s crotch. “Sorry about that, boys. Old business.”

  “Who was that?” asked John.

  “As I believe I just said, old business, okay?” Her cheek nearest John bore a very clear impression of four white fingers, a phantom admirer marveling at the softness of her skin, and she drank her share of the next tray quickly. “No good to wallow in the past, right, Marcus?”

  Mark blinked hard to focus his eyes, wipe away the summer haze, and fend off the late-night shrivel of his contact lenses. “Can I interview you for my research? You’re my new hero.”

  “No can do,” she said, standing and pulling John by the hand. “Because after a fight, Mark, I like to get laid. So I need Johnny here to take me home now. I’d invite you to join us, but a lapsed heterosexual is of no use to me this evening.” She began to place forints on the table, but Mark refused them and told her he meant to buy the larger of her two photographs as well, that he would contact the show’s organizers tomorrow to arrange it. She literally jumped up and down twice, clapping her hands. She kissed him on the forehead, plainly moved, stroked his cheek, and looked as if she might cry. She thanked him and thanked him again, then took her date in hand toward Andrássy út.