“Burroughs said kissing someone is like sucking on a thirty-foot tube, at the end of which is a sack of shit.”
The comment snapped our lips apart. Sven smiled down at us as though his comment had been a joke, but I sensed nothing well-meaning in his display of teeth. He set two glasses of amber fluid onto the table and sat across from me.
“You drink Scotch?”
I looked at the glass, not knowing if I should accept.
“Monika knows I hate this club. That’s how I knew you’d be here tonight. Monika has these people in her blood, from her mother. Me, I’m one-hundred percent Danish. You ever read Burroughs?”
“You mean the guy who wrote Naked Lunch? Saw the movie.”
“What about Bukowski?”
“Sure. Mickey Rourke in Barfly. I didn’t think you were the type to read.”
“Sven writes. Poetry,” Monika explained.
I couldn’t have been more surprised had I learned an ape could dance a polonaise. It appeared Sven was a brute with a sensitive soul. I asked, “Publish anything?”
“That’s what I like about you. Straight to the point. Am I successful? Do I make money. Not as much as screenwriters, I can tell you that much. All the poetry in Europe combined doesn’t pay as well as one Hollywood screenplay. Come on, drink up. I’ll make a toast.”
I picked up the glass, expecting a cruel joke or insult.
“To my sister.”
Innocent enough. I drank. The Scotch tasted rough and bitter. Some swill of a bar brand, distilled anywhere but Scotland. Sven drained his to the clear bottom of his glass and asked, “Have you fucked her yet?”
Monika said, “Don’t do this to me, Sven.”
“He should know. That’s his right. He should know the risk he’s taking.”
I downed the last of the Scotch, fought the urge to bolt from the table, smiled at Sven as though sincerity could win him over. I said, “The way Monika and I feel about each other, it isn’t just sex.”
“You’re not going away together.”
“We’re leaving tomorrow,” Monika confessed.
“You know what happens to the men who go away with you.”
“Nothing happens. Nothing at all.”
Sven stuck a cigarette between his lips and struck a match. The light seared into my cerebrum. I rubbed my eyes, fighting a precipitous and inappropriate fatigue. Sven smiled at me, pleased about something he didn’t care to share with the table.
“She told you about her family, I’m sure. That romantic story of everyone dying young and tragic. It’s all true. Everybody around Monika comes to a bad end, except me.”
“You shouldn’t listen to him,” she warned. “He gets like this whenever someone is interested in me. He just wants to scare you.”
“Did she tell you about the terrible luck of her boyfriends? They always seem to meet with accidents. They fall off things. Get hit by cars or trains or buses. Cops find them in alleyways, robbed and beaten, sometimes stabbed.”
“Every time I meet someone, you come out with these crazy stories.”
“He needs to know the truth. It’s only fair he should know the risk he’s taking.”
“You’re being a bore.”
“I’m sure she told you she has death in her past and death in her future. It’s my feeling she overplays that part. Too melodramatic, even for Hollywood.”
“You’re not supposed to say that.”
“You started to care for this one a little more than the last ones.”
Monika rose from the table and nearly pulled Sven off his chair. “I need to talk to you, alone. Now.”
Lethargy seeped like anesthesia into the nerves lacing my brain. My vision began to blur. I said, “Monika.” She turned to me and when I looked at her it was like looking at glass.
“I’ll be back in five minutes,” she said.
Monika’s black minidress vanished in the crowd. I thought about getting up to follow, but I couldn’t convince my legs to support the weight. It seemed that I was suddenly and horribly drunk. I cradled my head in my hands to keep it from dissolving. In the distance, I saw myself sitting alone at a table surrounded by Gypsies, and the figure that was me kept getting smaller, as did the Gypsies, until I could no longer distinguish myself from the others. We were all diminishing together, a dot surrounded by darkness that promptly extinguished to darkness itself.
9
Sometime later, the brutality of individual consciousness returned. Nerve cells synapsed up and down my spine, reporting the particulars of weather conditions and suspected damage to body parts. A careful analysis of conflicting sensory data concluded that my face lay flattened against a pebbly surface and the rest of my body twisted behind in the unnatural angles of a bombblast victim. I blinked the grit from my eyes to a diffuse gray light. A few minutes before dawn. Cold. A sour smell of puddle at my lips connected to a memory of vomiting. I rolled onto my back. The movement unloosed a miasma of nausea and pain. A tumor had gorged itself on the vital tissues of my cerebrum and begun to seep poisonous cells into my stomach and small intestines. I crouched on hands and knees and retched a spidery gruel. When breath returned I stood on trembling legs and attempted to hang memory to the hook on which I had awakened. I had spent the night amid a cluster of garbage cans. My Armani coat was gone, and with it my wallet. Could I have left my coat in the Gypsy club, too drunk to safeguard my possessions? I felt pockets. My keys were missing. A circle and band of bare skin chilled my wrist where a watch had been. I had been stripped like a corpse of my shoes. I dimly recalled the previous night’s altercation with Sven and the horror of being too drunk to remain conscious.
I walked cautiously to the nearest street. The ground was intolerably hard and cold and studded with broken glass. I had no idea where I was. Some housing estate on the outer circle of the city. The Communist architects had cleverly flanked the neighborhood with facing mirrors, which reflected ad infinitum the same littered pavement and block of concrete buildings. I tried to read a street sign and could make no more sense of it than a bowl of alphabet soup from which all the vowels had been eaten. I saw neither dog, taxi, nor human being. Nothing moved on the streets at that hour except stray bits of windblown paper and myself. I walked on, certain by the dreary sameness I walked circles. Eventually, I crossed parallel grooves cut down the length of a street. I followed the grooves to a signpost, and soon after that the first tram of the morning rattled to a stop at my feet. I crawled into the seat at the rear of the car and fixed my gaze out the window to avoid the stares of those boarding at subsequent stops. I did not think about what happened to me. I let my mind go willfully blank.
That the door to my apartment was ajar resolved the problem of how to gain entrance without kicking out the locks. My keys had been thoughtfully dropped on the foyer floor. The contents of my suitcase, ready for a weekend romance in the quaint historical town of Český Krumlov, lay strewn across the covers of the bed. The suitcase itself was gone and, with it, the Hasselblad camera. The cozy writing corner I had constructed beneath the courtyard window was missing the architectural elements of computer and printer. Across the room, patches of bare shelving encircled by dust proved my portable electronics had been accurately named. I hurried to the kitchen and with scrabbling nails popped the lid of the coffee tin in which I kept my counterfeit bills. The roll remained intact. I glanced at the kitchen clock. Six A.M. Plenty of time to catch my morning train. I dropped onto the bed to rest my eyes and sank into a sleep so oppressive I did not free myself of it until well past noon, missing my train by four hours.
I wasn’t naive enough to believe that lodging an official complaint would lead to the arrest of the perpetrators and the return of my goods, but this did not prevent me from taking the nearest taxi to the police station, where at my loud insistence Inspector Zima was summoned from home. I sought to prove by my victimization my innocence of the earlier crimes of which I had been so unfairly if accurately accused.
Contemp
lating many of my actions then from this cold distance of time and geography, I find that I always acted with a perverse logic others might confuse for irrationality. In my outrage I wanted Zima to acknowledge that I had been robbed in his country, and as a representative of law and order he was personally responsible; I did not then realize he might find the incident ironic. Far from resentful at this interruption of his weekend, Zima was at first solicitous of my misfortune, wanting to know how much I had lost and if I had been assaulted. He listened to my description of the crime behind drifting clouds of cigarette smoke and, when I had finished, asked, “You were drinking?”
“Not enough to pass out.”
“How many drinks?”
“I don’t remember.”
“So many?”
“Just two or so. Double Scotches, on the rocks.”
Zima made note of the supposed facts of the case on a small red pad. His eyes looked out at me half dead with understanding. He asked, “Can you remember when you passed out? What time?”
“About two. But I didn’t pass out. I think I was drugged.”
“Who drugged you?”
“The Gypsies, of course.”
“You must tell me which of one hundred thousand Gypsies in Prague drugged you. Then I can arrest him.”
“There was a fellow drinking next to me. He was the only one close enough to put something in my drink.”
“Please describe this man.”
“Dark hair. Dark skin. Bad teeth.”
“Nothing else?”
“I didn’t pay much attention.”
When Zima finished writing my response, he took a lungful of smoke and silently read what he’d written. A brief tightening of his lips betrayed he’d come to some conclusion. He glanced up sharply. “Your friends, why they leave?”
“They had an argument.”
“With you?”
“No. With each other.”
“Their names?”
“I don’t see how that’s important.”
“Perhaps they know this man with”—Zima glanced down at his notes to deliver an exact quote—“dark hair, dark skin, bad teeth.”
“I’m certain they can’t tell you anything.”
Zima set his pen aside as though waiting for a better answer. Divulging Monika’s name seemed a betrayal. No quicker way to end a romance than to sic the cops on your lover, even if she plays the innocent role of a witness. I said, “If they want to give evidence, I’ll have them call you.”
Zima dug through a desk drawer to his right and handed a form across the desk. I scanned the form and found not a single word of English. He said, “Fill out and return to front desk.”
I carefully folded the form into unusable sixteenths. The gesture was not wasted on Zima. With his slack skin and pouched eyes, he looked slow and watchful as a basset hound. He asked, “Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“Yes. Look for a Gypsy wearing a herringbone Armani sport coat and new Italian loafers.”
“With this excellent description, we will try our best.”
“I have every confidence your investigation will end the moment I leave,” I said, and with a curt nod, stood and moved to the door.
“Mr. Miller?” Zima called.
I stopped, turned, grunted with impatience.
“You had with you address of apartment? Written on slip of paper in wallet or in coat pocket?”
“Just in my notebook, but I left my notebook in the apartment that night.”
“I ask only because something confuse me.”
He stared at me and waited.
“What confuse you?” I asked, exasperated not just by the atrocious grammar but by his relentlessly plodding manner.
“When Gypsies stole your keys, how they knew where you live?”
Of course I had written my address down on a slip of paper in my wallet, or perhaps even inked it on the inside label of my sport coat like the mother of a forgetful five-year-old. I simply couldn’t remember the details. Other issues concerned me more. I needed money. Twenty thousand Czech crowns and five one-hundred-dollar counterfeit bills had been stolen with my wallet. My credit cards were still safe in a drawer—no reason to carry them in a town that did not accept credit—but no electronic tellers existed from which to draw a cash advance. For the next few weeks it would be unwise to change counterfeit bills in Prague: too great a risk of being recognized.
I called Father at home, seven in the morning Los Angeles time. Of our dreary conversation, I wish to record little. I had hoped to speak with Mother first, as she is by far the easier touch, but Father reported she was out of the house on her morning walk, though quite likely they were arguing again over Father’s mistresses and she had gone to spend the weekend with her sister.
No. I mislead out of spite. Father is as faithful as an old dog.
We simultaneously tried to speak, stopped, began again in a second clash of voices. Satellite bounce, the split-second delay between speaking and hearing, an acceptable if obvious metaphor of our strained attempts at communication. Into a sudden gap of silence I blurted, “I’ve had a little trouble here, was hoping you could help me out.”
Father chose not to hear and said, “Several dentists have been calling for you. Claim to be investors in some project of yours?”
“Oh, that,” I said, remembering something I’d hoped would be forgotten by all concerned.
“They threatened to report you to the police.”
“We all took a gamble and lost. No law against that.”
“Your mother and I think you should come home for a while. Your therapist, that nice fellow …”
“Dr. Quellenbee?”
“He’s been asking about you. He wants to see you again.”
“But I have no interest in seeing him. I called to tell you I’ve been robbed.”
A conspicuously long silence preceded Father’s question.
“Are you okay?” His concern might have gratified me, had it not been delivered in the cautious tone of speaking to someone whose veracity was doubted.
I said, “No. I’m not okay. I could have been killed.”
“This underscores my point. You’re not safe. You should come home.”
I’d given the wrong answer. The trick was to make light of it. I wasn’t in any serious trouble. I just needed a little help. I imagined myself a few years hence, laughing over the story with friends. We’ve dined sumptuously on a meal prepared by my private chef and sit around the fire, drinking brandy. The most interesting thing happened to me one night in a Gypsy club on the outskirts of Prague, gentlemen. Have any of you ever been intimate with a Gypsy woman? I said, “Crazy story, what happened. Just one of those things. I went into a Gypsy club. It didn’t seem such a bad place. Rather interesting, actually, from an anthropological point of view. I went there with a girl, part Gypsy herself, funny enough. She left early. Long story why. I had a few drinks, woke up the next morning in the alley, stripped to my underwear.”
“Had you been drinking that much?”
“You misunderstand. I was drugged.”
“You were foolish to go in the first place.”
“I was dragged there.”
“You already said that.”
“What?”
“That you were drugged.”
“Not drugged. Dragged.”
“If you were dragged to a place like that, the last thing you should have done was get drunk.”
“I didn’t get drunk. I was drugged. I was dragged there and then drugged.”
“Your mother will be very upset to hear you’re taking drugs in Gypsy bars.”
Impossible. Talking to Father was like that children’s game in which one child tells a story to another child who tells yet another, until the story that circles back to the first child bears little resemblance to the original. Whatever I told Father returned to me unrecognizably altered by his opinions of my character and capabilities. I said, “Father, I need some money to tide m
e over till my next check.”
“You know the rules.”
“But I was robbed!”
“I’ll buy you a return ticket home any time you want.”
“With my money you’ll buy it. My money, that grandfather gave me.”
“He appointed me executor of your trust fund for good reason.”
“You just want to humiliate me. You want me to grovel.”
“Your mother and I both just want you to be responsible.”
“I refuse!”
“Shouting won’t solve anything.”
“Just send me the fucking money, you fucking bastard!”
The telephone line crackled in the sudden absence of voice. I don’t suppose I’d ever shut Father up so completely. That alone was almost worth the risk I’d taken. For over twenty years I had suffered his calm and smothering authority with whining angst and the occasional rebellious act. It hadn’t occurred to me to shout obscenities at him.
Father said, “Yes. Fine. I’ll advance you one month’s stipend. After that, consider all payments suspended until your thirtieth birthday, when the fund reverts to you in its entirety, and you can spend it however you like.”
“Father, you have no right to do that.”
“One month’s advance will be deposited in your account this afternoon. After that, you’re on your own. Any time you want to return home, your mother and I will gladly purchase a ticket for you.”
The line went dead. I slammed down the phone. He had no intention of ever relinquishing control of Grandfather’s money. His lawyers had probably already found a loophole through which to rob me of my inheritance when I turned thirty. Not satisfied with his own considerable fortune, he now wanted mine as well. Had he not given me the perfect excuse to hate him by being my father, I could have admired his trickery. In another week, I would call again, thank him graciously for advancing next month’s stipend, and report some fictitious good news to sway him back to confidence in my character.
Gypsy Hearts Page 9
