When I heard Monika’s voice I climbed from the tub and eased open the bathroom door, paranoid that she had sneaked someone in during the night, until I realized she spoke to the telephone. Would she be calling someone in Denmark? If so, she spoke English. The possibility that Monika had unseen resources worried me. Perhaps she and Sven had been setting up another sucker in Prague when I propitiously appeared, and they had made the tactical decision to take me and spare the other; she spoke to him now, arranging a fallback in the event I disappointed. I pressed my ear to the crack in the door. She said Sven’s name, then paused, and before she hung up, “No new message, thank you.”
I banged around the bathroom, flushed the toilet, and ran the taps. Didn’t want her to think I’d been listening. Yawning vigorously and my hair suitably tousled, I stepped into the main room. She lay on my bed, face to the wall, shamming sleep. When I tiptoed into the kitchen to prepare a pot of coffee, I heard her rise and latch the bathroom door. If it had been her intent to wound by avoiding me, she succeeded. I lifted the pillow on which she had slept to my face and inhaled as though I held a bowl from which ambrosia recently had been spooned. A fleeting impression attached itself to the scent, like a dream imperfectly remembered; Monika wasn’t a goddess but an agent of the goddess, a Fury sent to torture me for my sins against women. The smell of her infused my mouth, lungs, and groin: exquisite torture, the olfactory equivalent of a siren’s song.
The whistling kettle called me back into the kitchen. Fine thing if Monika had opened the bathroom door to discover me smelling her pillow like some bicycle-seat-sniffing pervert. I prepared the coffee and carried a cup with me to the table by the window. Better if she finds me hunched over paper and pen, working to recapture The Prague Conspiracy, that great American screenplay-in-the making which had been stolen with my portable computer. Hemingway’s lost manuscript hadn’t stopped him. I scribbled those elements I remembered, such as the title and opening scene description. When the bathroom door opened and Monika emerged, she not only failed to notice my industriousness, she didn’t bother to acknowledge my presence on her way out of the apartment. The exponential irritations of sleeping in a wet tub, being ignored, and having to begin all over again with my screenplay loosened my tongue to a rage that shocked me as much as Monika. I railed about her inconsiderateness, her lack of feeling, and accused her of denying the world a future masterpiece when she stole my computer. She had never seen me lose control, and as I vented my feelings I noticed wonder if not admiration in her eyes. When reason fails, the director must outshout even the most vocal prima donna, a lesson I hadn’t properly learned until meeting Monika. I had feared my anger would provoke hers, but just the opposite; she only truly listened to frequencies of high passion.
“You weren’t my partner then, so how can you blame me?” she reasoned. “Of course I stole everything I could find. Sven made three hundred D-marks from that computer alone. You should be proud I was good enough to take you.”
“But my screenplay! Paramount Pictures! Gone!” I protested.
“A six-figure development deal, you said when I met you.”
“That’s right.”
“Then why are you wasting your time robbing poor Czech fools?”
Monika stared at me with faux wide-eyed innocence.
“Research,” I said. A great idea. Why couldn’t it be true? “The screenplay is about two young Americans who con their way through Central Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall.” The perfect pitch line! Love, intrigue, an international backdrop as big as the end of history! I had to restrain myself from grabbing pen and paper and beginning to write.
“And the CIA, the KGB agent?” Monika asked, her question punctuated by three sharp notes from the downstairs buzzer. I wasn’t expecting anyone. Could it be the police, come to harass me again over some minor indiscretion? What if Zima knew I had staked out the money-changing booth and planned to rob it? The buzzer blared again. Bortnyk might be back in town, or one of a dozen women I’d met and escorted through Prague.
“Subplots,” I said. Monika probed my face for veracity. Her eyes were sharp and precise as a surgeon’s biopsy needle. It was all true enough if I believed it. I edged for the door. I imagined it was Andrew on the street below, leaning on the buzzer for a good ten seconds. If it was Andrew, I could introduce him to Monika and he’d understand why I had acted oddly at our previous meeting. I bolted out the door. Cruise and Roberts as the American couple, of course, myself as Tom Cruise and Monika as Julia Roberts. There would be rumors in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter that the story was autobiographical, and arm in arm with Monika at the Oscars I’d deflect suspicions with a witty remark—We’re just two average folk out for a night on the town, do we look like a couple of thieves?—leaving just enough mystery in my voice to give the rumors credence. The scenario so engaged my imagination I neglected to pause at the bottom of the stairwell and spy out who waited behind the glass at the front door. A figure cheerfully waved. I stopped and peered. If a heart could be a ship, mine would be the Titanic. He’d already seen me. No chance to slink unseen back up the stairs. I wedged a smile between my teeth and flung open the door, crying with fraternal glee, “Cousin Dickie! What a surprise!”
“Cousin Nix! What’s goin’ down?”
Dickie held out his hand and our palms groped one another in the ritual greeting of our generation. Timberland boots, faded 501’s, L. L. Bean windbreaker, San Jose Sharks cap, and a JanSport frame backpack big enough to furnish a small apartment informed me Dickie was roughing it through Europe the summer after graduating from college.
“You got my letter?” he asked.
“No, this is a complete surprise,” I said, and not a pleasant one. I didn’t dislike Dickie. Though we had little in common except approximate age, I’d always considered him one of my favorite relatives. His parents were pillars of Newport Beach surf-and-turf culture. Uncle John managed the family dealerships in Orange County. Aunt Buffy dabbled in real estate and home redecorating. With his shaggy blond hair, tanned face, hipster goatee, and taste in appropriate-brand casual wear, Dickie was a mutation, a failed experiment, what happens when nature crosses a preppie with a surfer. We stood awkwardly by the door, Dickie waiting to be invited in and me trying to figure out how best to get rid of him. I’d completely forgotten his letter, only half read and crumpled into a ball. His timing couldn’t have been worse—much better if he’d dropped by earlier, when I was in Budapest. I’d have written his parents a nice note saying I’d been out of town on film business and how sorry I’d been to miss him.
“Yes. A big surprise,” I repeated, then swung the door open, made a halfhearted grab at his backpack, and said, “But always great to see you. How are Uncle John and Aunt Buffy?”
“Just fine,” he said, staggering under the weight of the shouldered pack. “Everybody is, like, real curious what you’re up to over here. “
“I’ll bet they are.”
Rapidly descending footsteps met ours climbing the stairs. Monika swept past as though we were columns on the balustrade. I stopped her at the bottom of the stairs with a shout. By her glance I knew she was irritated at being delayed.
“What about our dinner tonight?” I asked, telegraphing a wink to Dickie.
She flung the answer at me—8 P.M.—and hurried out the door.
“Sorry not to introduce you, old man,” I said in conspiratorial tones. “That was Monika. A temperamental actress, as you can tell. We’ve been spatting all morning.”
Your girlfriend? What a beautiful woman, I imagined him saying, and laughed with the sensual daring of a tiger tamer. But he said nothing. I shooed him inside the apartment. “As you can see, the place is quite small, particularly with Monika staying here.”
He set his backpack down and collapsed onto the sofa bed. I hurried into the kitchen to pour him a cup of coffee. When I returned, his eyes were closed and he looked on the verge of sleep. “Must be jet lag,” he said. “Is it cool if I crash
here for a couple days?”
“Sorry. Only one bed.”
“That’s all right. I can sleep on the floor.”
I stared slack-jawed. He meant it. I said, “No, it’s not cool.”
“It’s just that I was, like, hoping to economize, you know?”
I knew. Uncle John and Aunt Buffy had given him a round trip plane ticket and Eurail Pass as his graduation present. My parents had done the same for me when I graduated. He’d want his European summer to be a long one. If he hadn’t saved from his monthly trust fund allowance during the school year, his finances would be tight. By the look of his goatee and home barbering, Dickie was going through his Bohemian phase, defined as a one-year hiatus between school and employment in the family business, in which the family turned a collective blind eye to excessive leisure time as a sign he was finding himself. But where would he find himself? In the company uniform on a company lot at the end of the year, shorn of distinctive features and smiling a company smile, selling used cars. He wouldn’t stay on the lot for long; after a humbling year of learning the salesman’s brash art, he’d be moved to the front office, where he’d be trained to manage his own lot, one of the twenty or so the company owned. Then he’d be able to brag to his children that he’d started from the bottom, washing cars as a teenager (as we’d all done), moving up through the company ranks by sweat and merit. I’d been dodging such a future for years. Dickie was soft and malleable. They’d catch and mold him into a life-size replica of his father. He hadn’t a chance.
We passed the hour drinking coffee and chatting about Prague’s appeal to the young visitor, which lay primarily in the copious quantity of good and reasonably priced alcohol and the abundance of what Dickie quaintly called “cooze.” I entertained him with a few anecdotes from personal experience, circled the clubs on his map which offered the most promising combinations of booze and cooze, and, as the end of the hour neared, suggested a cheap but nice little hotel I knew as preferable to the lice-and backpacker-ridden youth hostels he was initially inclined to approach.
As we walked to the Merkur, Dickie asked the questions the family had dispatched him to ask. Descended from the male line and four years his senior, I outranked him in the family hierarchy, but as my Bohemian phase had stretched three years past the family maximum, Dickie enjoyed the family’s trust whereas I did not. He had been sent as a family agent, entrusted to pull me back into line. I asked the obligatory questions about his side of the family and received the usual blather about Aunt Buffy’s misadventures with the new house, Cousin Mandy’s baby, and Rafe’s substance abuse problem.
“Uncle Monty and Aunt Winnie had me over for dinner last week,” Dickie remarked. Monty is the diminutive of Montgomery, my father’s given name. It’s the name he uses in all the TV spots, if you’ve ever stumbled into the surreal world of late-night television in Los Angeles. Winnie is a mutation of Gwendolyn coined by my cousins, whose young mouths could not form the necessary gutturals to pronounce her name correctly and thus named her Winnie, which they continue to call her despite an assumed improvement of language skills.
“And how did they look? Well, I hope?” I said, sounding appropriately filial.
“They’re really pissed. Uncle Monty told me about your trust fund. I understand you wanting to be, like, independent, but don’t you think you’ve gone a bit radical?”
“Best thing I’ve ever done,” I said, in the spirit of a testimonial. His immense backpack prevented me from throwing a fraternal arm over his shoulder. I imagined myself astonishingly successful, giving sound guidance to a confused and directionless younger brother. “Nothing like the fear of poverty to get you moving. I’m tougher, more aggressive, and, the truth is, quite ruthless if the situation calls for it. In fact, Father is punishing me for the very same traits that made Grandfather great. I think Grandfather would be proud of me, and it was his money, see what I mean?”
Dickie didn’t, of course. I explained for him the irony of my father, a middling bureaucrat, denying the inheritance of a visionary grandfather to his visionary grandson. It was pure jealousy. Maybe my father saw too much of Grandfather in me, and, still hung up on his own father complex, wanted to punish me for Grandfather’s sins against him. Dickie nodded, seemingly sympathetic. There was something spongelike about his eyes. I expected him to soak up what I told him and then pour it into the lap of my father. I hoped the spill was ice cold. What Dickie thought about it later didn’t matter; he’d believe me until my father or his father filled him with a different opinion.
The desk clerk at the Merkur likely feared the hotel’s faded reputation would be further tarnished by a backpacking guest of Dickie’s caliber and, after collecting his passport and money, assigned him an obscure room in the back of the hotel, overlooking the expressway. I tried to escape at the base of the stairs, but Dickie insisted on inviting me up, where from the bottom of his backpack he dug two items he’d brought to me from the States. The first was a small package from my mother containing a pair of nail clippers and a box of Immodium. An accompanying note admonished me to be careful of the water “over there” and asked if I was in any danger because of the trouble in Bosnia, which she seemed to think was a suburb of Prague. The second was a sealed blank envelope. I ripped it open. A letter from my father. I stuffed the letter back into the envelope, unread, and thumbed the official-looking document clipped to it. The seal of the State of California was imprinted at the top, my name and various legal codes inscribed in the middle, and an official signature at the bottom. A warrant for my arrest. I showed it to Dickie and asked, “You knew about this?”
“Everybody knows about it.”
“Father broadcast the news far and wide, I’m sure.”
“It’s not what you think, Nix,” he responded. The recrimination in his voice surprised me. “Dr. Cariz dropped Mom as his patient because of this. Nobody in the family can get so much as their teeth cleaned because of this crazy film scheme of yours.”
The Cavity of Dr. Caligari had been one of my more successful fund-raising efforts, though the project had eventually collapsed due to creative differences. The concept was simple but brilliant: An oral surgeon secretly hired to implant computer chips in the dental work of CIA agents becomes the target of assassins and goes on the run to discover who wants to kill him and why. I’d read the statistics. Dentists were a depressed lot lacking in self-esteem, killing themselves with greater frequency than any other profession. I pitched the idea to a hundred tooth doctors in L.A. and Orange County—a glamorous thriller about a character much like themselves, in which they might mingle freely with stars such as Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer. Just imagine, I’d say, you’re at the wrap party—that’s the party thrown for the actors and cast members when the picture is finished shooting—and you’re in a group of people with Harrison Ford and more than one beautiful starlet, and someone says, “What do you do?” And you say, “I’m a dentist, just like the character Harrison plays, except of course I don’t work for the CIA.” The line never failed to get a smile. All I needed was $100,000 to put together a script, attach it to a director and actors of suitable star quality, and what studio wouldn’t snap it up for a hefty seven figures? I may have mentioned that Joe Eszterhas was a personal friend of the family—he’d bought a car from us before making it big—and he was so in love with the idea that he’d agreed to write the script for a token sum. The allegations of fraud in the arrest warrant were a complete misunderstanding. Eszterhas hadn’t been interested in writing the script after all, and without him I couldn’t get Harrison or Michelle, so the studios would have turned the project down had I developed it. The development money was spent on overhead. Sure, some dentists were unhappy that the project didn’t meet their expectations, but that’s Hollywood.
“It’s not that funny,” a petulant Dickie cried when I chuckled at the notion that the family was being deprived of local dental care. “Sure, not everybody in the family has been perfect, but nobody’s b
een arrested. This is, like, serious. People are calling the house, demanding their money back.”
“And every car our family sells is a good car and all our customers are satisfied customers, is that right? Don’t be such a child, Dickie.”
“Nobody is threatening to put Dad or Uncle Monty in jail because they sold a lemon.”
“I feel the hand of my father in this,” I said, holding the document up against the light to examine its authenticity. “How do I know this isn’t forged? I wouldn’t put it past the old bastard.”
“The family thinks you should come back and face this.”
“I’m busy right now. I’m not going to drop everything just to answer a bogus set of charges.”
“The family thinks you need professional counseling.”
“Professional counseling?”
“Sure, you know, like a lawyer, and a—well, you know, maybe a—” No matter how many approaches, Dickie could not leap the boundary of the word he wished to pronounce.
“Are you trying to say shrink?”
He meekly nodded, afraid of offending me.
“Fuck the family,” I said.
Dickie’s lower lip drooped, a sign, I think, that I’d shocked him.
“My father cut off my trust fund because I had the nerve to stand up to him! Did you know I had been robbed and beaten by a gang of Gypsy thieves and when I asked Father for a little advance on my trust fund, so I could go to the fucking hospital because I was still fucking bleeding all over the fucking place, Father said no? Go ahead and bleed to death for all I care, you’re not getting another red cent. And the family, does it care about me at all? No! It just listens to Father, and when Father says, Nix needs to be taught a little discipline, he’s embarrassing the Family, does the family come to my defense, does it say, Nix has a special talent and we should support him in his efforts to follow it? No! It sends you to tell me I should willingly present myself to be handcuffed and trundled off to prison or the lunatic asylum!”
Gypsy Hearts Page 16
