Prague

by Arthur Phillips

  “It’s basically a big fuck-you to my dad,” Nicky offered offhandedly before adding, “or really anyone who tries to own me.”

  “It’s very disturbing, as I’m sure you intended,” Emily said a little priggishly. She passed the photo to John. “You obviously have a very active imagination,” she backhanded.

  John was disoriented. As usual, he hadn’t the faintest idea what to say about one of Nicky’s mysterious works, and suspected she had been trying to tell him something with the mention of people owning her, but Emily was undeniably hostile. He had never seen two women detest each other so quickly, and he did not dare allow himself to believe what he so desperately wanted to believe. He had to bite his lips not to speak; he held power over her at last.

  “So why does your father deserve a big . . . you know?” Emily asked, a society matron thrown into unavoidable conversation with a gate-crashing hooker.

  “That’s very sweet,” Nicky purred. “You won’t say ‘fuck you.’ That’s very fucking sweet. That’s the most fucking endearing thing I’ve heard in who the fuck knows how fucking long. I’m growing fucking misty-eyed, for fuck’s sake.”

  “I’m sorry. I guess I’m funny to you. I just wasn’t raised to cuss all the time.”

  “Cuss? You weren’t raised to cuss? Oh my fucking Christ, that’s delicious. Johnny, where did you find this angel? Whatever. My dad deserves a big you know because of the usual boring shit: booze, emotional ’n’ physical abuse, incest, blah, blah, blah.”

  “Well, you’ve had a very difficult life, obviously,” Emily said in her sweetest tone. “That’s terribly sad.” John and Charles, head-pivoting tennis fans, glanced at each other to be reassured they still existed. “On the other hand,” Emily said, striding boldly but quietly forward despite the red tint to Nicky’s bald head, “maybe he made you strong.”

  “Made me strong? What are you, some kind of Nietzsche freak?”

  “I just mean maybe your special gifts, your artistic talents, your evidently very flamboyant personality, all come from your ambiguous experience with him, and he made you who you are.”

  “What?” Nicky began to stand, but John grabbed her arm. “Get your hands off me,” she spat at him, pulling her hand away in a fist. But she did sit, although a little fleck of saliva jumped from her lips onto Emily’s shirt. “So he made me? Fuck you, farm girl. I made me. Can you even understand what that means, sweetie? I made me. I. MADE. ME. Ladislau didn’t make shit. His participation ended with the sperm, thank you very fucking much.”

  The angrier Nicky grew, the calmer Emily became, and John thought he saw a gleam of pleasure in her sudden taunting mastery of the enraged artist.

  “Well, who’s up for dinner, then?” Charles asked.

  “No, I was heading home. Fuck this.” Nicky stood and gathered her things. “You know where to find me when the itch comes,” she said to John, standing directly behind him. She bent over the top of his head and kissed him upside down, deeply if necessarily awkwardly. She pulled away, a line of saliva connecting their mouths like an echo of the kiss. She whispered something acid and sticky in his window-side ear, then spoke to the others: “See you around, Charlie. Bye-bye now, Sister Mary Catherine.” She left them in a silence punctuated by Charles’s laughter.

  John’s intended trio walked into the cool darkness of Vörösmarty Square, cut past the Kempinski scaffolding into Deák Square, up Andrássy in search of food. His thoughts knotted, tousled in the wind: Emily’s cold and pointed provocations, Nicky’s whispered venomous send-off: “Lose the farm dyke and come to me tonight.” He had savored the spectacle of the two women fighting over him, and enjoyed watching Charles watching. But in her combat calm, Emily seemed to accuse him of insincerity, for how could he be with Nicky, someone so unlike Emily in every way? Emily walked in this oppressive, accusatory silence (but for her conversation with Charles). They read a menu on a rusty metal stand in front of a restaurant and Charles vetoed the establishment. Emily obviously thought Nicky had attacked out of jealousy or because John had instructed her to, had invited Emily there precisely for this sort of infantile ambush. (And here they were trying to pick a restaurant on Andrássy as if nothing had happened.) But Emily had fought; she was jealous. And side by side, how marvelous she had seemed: energized, calm, serene, essential, while Nicky was a mess, a spiky ball of jagged, ingrown fears and uncontrolled appetites. And tonight Emily had risked candor by fighting for him, tipped her heart just far enough for the light to reflect off it. She had said as much as she could say to let John know she was ready for him. (She and Charles laughed at something in a doomed and dusty shop window display.)

  An overture of a few raindrops drummed the pavement, and then the entire untuned orchestra crashed its clumsy way through the clouds. Charles shouted something about the sanctity of his creases and ran into the first restaurant he could. Emily moved to join him, but John took her hand as Charles disappeared into the dimly glowing doorway, and the two of them were left half under a streetlight and fully under the falling cold. “What are you doing?” she yelled over the downpour, and he saw one half of her face in shadow, one half in dripping light, and he understood why this was so. He put his hands on her cold wet cheeks and he kissed her. “What are you doing?” she repeated (the same volume but with different accents), and pushed him away, the second woman in fifteen minutes.

  “You baffle me,” he granted.

  “Evidently.”

  “But it doesn’t have to be like this anymore. I think you’ve been trapped—”

  She nodded. “Let’s go inside and get something to eat,” she concluded for him.

  “Come home with me,” he said, and took her hand. “Come home with me. I know you—”

  “What? John. Enough. Please.” But her hand still lay in his, and that was not nothing.

  “No,” he said. “This is me talking. Listen to me. I’ve never been more serious about anything. You have to believe this.”

  She took her hand away and, saying something inaudible under the spill of rain against the shining pavement, turned toward the restaurant, and he knew that now was such a moment as men wait all their lives to face. “Emily, wait. I’ll tell you. What if I told you I knew? I’ve known for ages. I’m a journalist. I could’ve told the world what you really are, but I haven’t. I understand you.”

  “What I really am? What did that idiot tell you? Why would you listen to her? She’s plainly a pervert, she’s a lunatic.” She pushed wet bangs off her forehead, breathed deeply, even smiled slightly. “But fine, go ahead. I’m very curious to hear what she said.”

  “Do I have to spell it out? Fine. I’ll speak for both of us. Hide if you want, just know that you don’t have to hide from me. You can’t hide from me. I care about you. I don’t care that you’re a spy.”

  Emily stood entirely still for a moment, seemed to stare past John, and John saw that he had reached her at last. Another moment passed, and she spoke so quietly he had to lean toward her to hear: “Fuck you, John, you little prick.”

  X.

  A CASE COULD BE MADE THAT THE WHOLE EVENT HAD BEEN A VALUABLE icebreaker, a steam valve. One more push and they would be past it all, beginning at last. The next morning: the rain symbolically past, blue sky, yellow stone bridge, birdsong above carsong, perpetual motion river, cloud wisps like eyelashes just parting after sweet conjugal sleep. (Yet some shapeless doubt tickled the inner ear, hummed just out of view, made rude faces when he was not quite looking away.) He composed his speech to her, and the Danube’s rumble and splash were audible from this best of all possible bridges, providing a tympani roll to the avian oboes and the automotive strings. Just ahead of him, elderly orange-vested municipal sanitation workers stooped and swept the sidewalks with stiff bound-twig brooms, fairy tale props. As John passed, one sweeper leaned against his staff and caught his eye, expressionless. John wished him a Hungarian good day. The old sweeper hmph’d an ambiguous response and returned to sweeping into a heap tiny pieces
of blue and white sky—bits of mirror smashed and sprinkled over the walkway.

  Ahead of him on the sidewalk, in the shadow of the Parliament, knelt a young woman, her back to him, her head hanging low. Walking by her, looking over his shoulder without slowing, he saw she was petting a cat, who lay on the sidewalk with its head in her lap. The young woman wept quietly, and the cat’s innards slumped damply out onto the pavement. The cat’s half-open orange eyes sluggishly followed John as he passed, but the poor creature had no energy left to move its head or paws. The woman stroked the animal’s still, soft head. She seemed to John unafraid, even though in tears, though she had no options, could not call on a flying squad of crack mobile cat surgeons. She wept and stroked the animal, and John did not have the words to ask what had happened, to be of any help or comfort at all. He walked on, shaken, and tried to concentrate on the written message to Emily (a fallback if she could not be lured down to the lobby to hear his principal address).

  He reconsidered his prepared remarks (I would never do anything to . . .). He rehearsed and made slight changes as an unknown marine called upstairs (I only said what I said to show you I . . .). “She’s on leave,” the Alabama-accented, microphone-muffled voice filtered through the bulletproof Plexiglas. “Yep, as of today. Naw, didn’t say how long. ‘Scheduled leave’ is all they said. Wanna leave a message, sir?” On the walk back toward the river, he edited the appeal that had now been redocketed for her bungalow (I just need you to see how . . .). On the way he stopped into the newsroom and graciously rehearsed her responses on her behalf (Of course I’m not mad at you, come here, these things happen, mmm, you are terrible . . .).

  “Excellent. A surprise visit from Proyce. A moment of your time, sah.” Editor’s manner had lately been modeled on that of a Dickensian headmaster, and John laughed at this summons—the stern eyebrow, the crooked beckoning index finger slowly curling and uncurling as if Editor were studiously tickling the chin of an invisible and frightened child. Editor shut the door, sat down lightly, and began marking pages heavily. “Very good. Price. You’re fired. Everything off your desk and out of here in—let’s be fair—fifteen minutes. And no: no references.”

  John dropped into the extra chair and rubbed his eyes, still dry and itchy after a relatively sleepless night (Would you have really wanted me to be an aching virgin?). “Man, I’m beat. I haven’t slept right in ages. Oh, before I forget, the stripper piece is going to take one more day, I think. It’s almost done.”

  “Won’t be necessary,” Editor mumbled, and violently scratched out a line.

  “Oh, don’t pull it. Really, just one day. I have an appointment this afternoon with this quartet who do a desert orgy thing. I promise—finished tomorrow.”

  Editor looked up from his scribbling. “Are you still here? Were you listening? Fifteen minutes started when I said fifteen minutes.”

  “Also, I had another idea. What do you think about a series of ambassador profiles, very social-like. Tennis with the U.S. Hopeless restaurant-hunting with the French. Sex clubs with the Danish. Sad, impoverished window-shopping with the Bulgarian and North Korean.”

  “Have you gone barking mad? It’s a very simple transaction. Take your belongings. Leave mine. Go away. Don’t enter my line of sight again.”

  “Are you angry about something?”

  “Mr. Price. If this is how you want to spend your”—dramatic displacement of cuff, inspection of black plastic watch face, mental calculation, replacement of cuff, interlacing of fingers on desk—“thirteen minutes, so be it. Did you think the embassy would not complain? Did you think I’d defend you? Or that you’d pass for a symbol of the free press? It’s a crime to print the names of embassy employees and say they’re spies, even to threaten to do it. The embassy gets angry if you get it right or not. And I would be liable.”

  “They said I said I’d—I didn’t say I’d . . .” For a long moment, John stared at the unblinking man. The very dim possibility that she had massively misunderstood, had then told someone above her, that they had called Editor . . .

  “Are you still here? You’re not going to bore me with a free-press lecture, are you, my young moron? You’ve more sense than that. Just go.”

  John sat very still and tried to think. “You want me to call somebody to explain or whatever?”

  “No. I want you to leave. Now.”

  “You’re going to fire me for this? This is ridiculous. I had a fight with my girlfriend and you’re firing me for treason? That’s absurd.”

  “Are you still here? Fine, Mr. Price. Apparently you think I’m a monkey. I admit this is not the bloody Times or the Prague Post, but we are not, you know, absolutely corrupt, you little twat. Have you or have you not written profiles for this organ in exchange for payment from your subject?”

  “That is completely out of context. You’re getting this wrong, whoever your source is. The tone of it—this was not this serious thing you seem to think.”

  Editor picked up speed, and his nostrils took on an animated life of their own. “Are you still here? Very well. Mr. Reilly, the undereducated, oververbose embassy security person who woke me from a dead sleep last night also informed me that this is not your girlfriend, Mr. Price, but that you have been, and I quote the unfortunate man, ‘predatorily stalking the young lady in question up to this point in time.’ So you have to excuse me, Mr. Price, if I ask you again, are you still fucking here?”

  “That is one hundred percent nonsense. Categorical lies.”

  “Delicious. A stirring denial at last. Felonious sexual blackmail? Sort of. Violation of this paper’s trust? Yes, but it wasn’t serious, more a matter of tone. Stalking? Definite no. Mistah Proyce, are you still here?”

  Finally, no. John wasn’t. The large clock that hung in the newsroom comfortably settled its minute hand, with a booming click, on the number three, fifteen minutes after his arrival, and John walked out the front door with the three items he could rightfully claim as his own. Just outside the door, Karen Whitley stopped him, kissed him, whispered, “If there’s anything I can do . . .” and hurried back into the office.

  Despite several efforts over several hours, no one answered at her strangely empty bungalow, and so, with dreamy speed and sudden nightfall, the set changes and John is now knocking on a door back across the river, in Pest. (He took a different route on the return; he couldn’t risk seeing the cat.) He realized—with that evanescent clarity which could be forgotten an instant later—that he had made a mistake of categorization: Emily was not serious but a little off balance. He knocked at the door of the only serious person he knew. She would provide unemotional, even-keel straight talk, shower cold reality on the gooey unreality of the day.

  She opened the door and left it open. Without a word, she walked back across the room to her work. She perched atop a paint-stained wooden stool, picked up a brush but immediately put it down again. With a twist of her hips, she spun the stool to face him. “So what happened last night? Did you fuck the farm girl? Did you?”

  “Why are you mad?”

  “You did. I can’t believe this.”

  “Stop it. I came here because I, I just need to talk. I just got fired, I’m a little—”

  “Please. Stop. Just stop. Steady that little waver I hear, okay? Explain something to me: How did I become the person you come crying to? Once, okay, but that was a weird little exception. I’m the least qualified person in the world for the job. I don’t think there could possibly be anyone less interested in it, okay? This is exactly why we have house rules.” She spun from her hips again and picked up her brush.

  “Are you jealous?”

  She threw the brush end over end across the room, where it struck a dirty full-length mirror with a feeble tick-click-tick and two smears of blue on the glass. “Oh my God. You people kill me. You people fucking kill me. If I’m jealous, believe me it’s nothing to be proud of, stud. I couldn’t be more disgusted with all of us.”

  “Please talk to me. I fe
el like—”

  “Really, John, whatever you feel, well, that’s life, and not even nearly the most interesting part. So spare me.”

  He fell backward onto her bed and tossed a crusty, paint-splattered tennis ball at the ceiling, catching it just above his face. “Since you ask, no, I didn’t ‘fuck the farm girl,’ though why you of all people would care, I’m at a loss to figure. I’ve known her longer than I’ve known you. I’ve always felt about her, I don’t know, like—”

  “Christ almotherfuckingmighty.” With a clatter, the easel dove to the floor and slid along its back into its fast-approaching reflection. John caught the falling tennis ball and remained paralyzed, one hand clutching the yellow fuzz as if he were a yarn-batting cat turned to stone. “Listen, dumb-ass, we’re all in love with someone else, okay? Everybody is. Every last idiot I know. It’s a bit of a bore. If we all talked about our secret little aches, they wouldn’t be secret anymore and we’d all be so similar, we’d probably kill ourselves.” She stared at him and took a deep breath. Her tone changed to something quieter and forcibly kinder: “Please, please, please get out of here and let me work.”

  He lay in his own bed. Emily’s bungalow had persistently proclaimed its emptiness, and her telephone its unreceptive solitude. His own answering machine played no less than fifteen clicking hang-ups and one long, menacing message from “Lee Reilly, want to converse with you about some complaints from a numerous number of the female-gendered members of the embassy staff, had several complaints, in fact, sir, filed by many of our ladies regarding what can only be termed—” He shut off his machine. He lay in his own bed, and the words of that favorite song ran through his head, albeit with a Hungarian-accented voice he didn’t recognize. He dipped in and out of sleep, like a child negotiating cold seawater. Nádja entered through the French window from his balcony, and she carried moonlight with her. “It’s a matter of willpower, John Price,” she said in her leathery movie-star voice. “Because strong people just don’t.” “Which?” he asked her. “Don’t feel it or don’t talk about it?” “Exactly,” she said, and sat on his chest with a faint but distinctive cracking noise. Slowly, caressingly, she ran her young, transparent, moonlit finger over his closed lips. Slowly, gently, she worked the finger into his mouth, using first her transparent, moonlit nail, then her ancient fleshless knuckle—at first a gently sexual probing. John suddenly began to grow fearful, but he did not know how to manipulate the muscles in his jaw to prevent her intrusion. She sliced her fingernail through his tongue with a ripping noise, then, with the lightest of glancing touches, caused his teeth to crumble. With his punctured, twitching tongue held in place, the teeth tumbled down his gagging throat, except for one outsize molar atop two arching walrus-tusk roots, which she pulled from his mouth and held between thumb and forefinger for his wide-open, weeping eyes. “Something to include in the report,” she whispered, and brushed an elderly hand over his groin, walked out the way she came, through the closed French window, taking the moonlight with her.