Prague (33 page)

"No, that's certainly true."

Ed held her eye until she looked away. "Everything else good for you?" He leaned forward and his chair creaked under the weight. "You liking the work?"

"I love it. I'm honored to do it."

The two sides of her supervisor's personality alternated dominance according to strict scheduling. Outside of secure areas, in the vast surveillable outside world, his ear constantly but discreetly to the ground, Edmund Marshall did not simply appear to be but truly was a round and shaggy-bearded bon vivant, a wheezy jokester, often nearly drunk, loving life and the occasional off-color story, frequently and loudly thanking heaven and his evening's hosts for his diplomatic career, since it kept him near great foreign food. He also kept himself surrounded by a mist of artificial but very credible rumors that his job was in danger, that he had recently been disciplined again for some overindul-gence or another. During office hours, however, behind lead doors, he was the most humorless, unsmiling co-worker conceivable, obsessive about the accuracy of paperwork, untiring in constructive self-criticism, with an insatiable appetite for discussing the ambivalences, layers, motivations, and counter-motivations of sources and potential sources. He was universally admired by his staff for his sincere, rare, and impassioned vocation for identifying human weakness, doubt, and corruptible ideals. Neither of his two personalities was put on, only perfectly segregated for maximum usefulness, and Emily knew that this ability to put one's entire personality to work was an accomplishment one should aspire to.

"Are you happy here?" he asked her.

She looked up. The question astounded her. "Of course." She left her su-

190 I ARTHUR PHILLIPS

pervisor's windowless office—swallowing with difficulty the mild rebuke that had then segued into the vaguely illustrative (and self-critical) story of her father in a very different Berlin—and considered the implications of his odd question. No one had ever asked her such a thing before, because no one had ever had to; she had certainly been brought up never to consider such a selfish question, or to put anyone in the position of having to ask her. She didn't know what could have prompted such a question or what conceivable difference the answer could make.

On the other hand, she hadn't heard that story before and couldn't help but feel another flush of admiration for her father, followed closely by an uncharacteristic rage at Ed's probing and prodding, and at his baffling and really completely unfair comment that her Analyses of Human Motivation in the contact reports she filled out after every interaction with any foreign national were still displaying—despite his previous complaints, corrections, and frustrated tutoring—"a callow lack of nuance, tone color, and depth measurement." And so it was with some relief when the marine called from downstairs to say that a John Price was in the lobby to see her. John and Mark lived in some relaxed and rootless parallel universe, where no one inquired after you to make sure you were appropriately happy, holding you up against some mysterious standard of behavior. She wondered how it must feel to float like John must float, all day.

They walked around the block, then sat on one of the old green benches in the middle of Liberty Square, watched the line for visas wind around the side of the embassy. "How did you decide not to join the military?" she asked him after talking about nothing. "What? Why is that funny?"

"Decide? Well, how did you decide not to become a sumo wrestler?"

"Really? It wasn't like a statement or something? You just never thought about serving?" She sat quietly. John's presence confused her just now, his untetheredness, his belief in nothing in particular. He was so unfocused, she felt fuzzy simply being near him. Things she was certain of a few minutes before now seemed questionable. "I've never asked my brother Robert if he's, you know, well, happy in the Corps. Do you think that I should have? Is that strange? Gripes, what time is it? I gotta go back in."

John had come to the embassy with an invitation meant to reveal something of himself to her, to open a private space in which they could be alone together. "There's someone I really want you to meet," he finally managed to say

as they stood in the lobby under the eyes of two marine guards and several cameras, visible and invisible. "She's amazing. You'll love her."

She agreed to meet him at the Blue Jazz, better than a night catching up on contact reports while wondering if she looked sufficiently happy to pass mysterious muster, better than wasting valuable time with the pointless Julies. She fingered the plastic I.D. card clipped to her lapel, examined John: She wondered if he was happy in a way she was not, wondered if there were some dangerous telltale betrayal of her father or of her principles that showed on her face but not in a mirror. And she retreated through the self-locking double glass doors to do her shy ambassador's bidding.

He watched her disappear. Now fearing he had answered her enlistment question incorrectly (and needing one more column for this week anyhow), John moved across the lobby to the marine guard booth. He salvaged Todd Marcus's name from the touch football game on Margaret Island a thousand years earlier. The marine pushed a button that permitted his voice to squawk distort-edly through the Plexiglas wall of the guard station.

SCOTT
   
HAD
   
MADE
  
THIS
  
TRIP
   
BEFORE,
  
WITH
   
NERVOUS
   
GIRLS
   
IN
   
OTHER

worlds. He had traveled back in time with them, had entered a childhood home with a college or post-college girlfriend of some maturity or style and then watched in happiness as she split in two: into a girl younger and younger the further they penetrated the house, and into a woman made somehow strange by the experience. He watched in scientific wonder as they grew shy or uneasy or punchy or aroused or irritable. Best of all, when closely watched, these symptoms grew more acute, so that by merely walking very slowly down a hall, turning his head very slowly from a photograph of sweetheart in tears on Daddy's lap, age three, to sweetheart standing right there, looking peculiar, almost nauseous, age twenty-three, he could induce even more peculiar nausea without himself ever feeling a thing but scientific splendor and a certain frothy omniscience.

Sweetheart herself—so stylish, sultry, self-contained just this morning— would weaken, diminish ever so slightly, under the glare of swimming trophies, stuffed animals permanently alert in plush formation, dollhouses, ribbons for horseback riding, collages of photos of good times with grade-school pals,

192 I ARTHUR PHILLIPS

pasted with significant one-word clippings from teen magazines: BOYSHEART-SECRET. He would stand behind sweetheart and kiss her neck, catching her eye straight in front of him in the same pink-framed mirror in which she had first learned to braid her nine-year-old hair, in which Mom had floated over her shoulder and stroked her head and reassured the crying thirteen-year-old that she was beautiful, so very beautiful no matter what those other silly children (who were just jealous) said.

To see the bedspread she chose when she was twelve, which had served her for all the years before him. Did she exist before they met? How truly strange that she did, and that she looked like that, that she wore that skirt and played with these toys and entertained those friends and imagined this or that future for herself and butterflied her way to third place in the girls under-fourteen 4 x 100 relays, when really, all those years, she was sitting warm in her cocoon becoming a butterfly for him.

With each room they grew more and more uncomfortable, which he found more and more arousing. Sweetheart would slow down and linger to avoid entering the most embarrassing rooms, or speed up and try to pull him away when she saw something in his eye, some laughter or new understanding as he fingered and inspected the little-girl lives trapped in the hardened amber of her bedroom.

After these little history museums, they would approach the central chamber, her parents' room, where there could be no question that something would happen on someone else's conjugal bed, the very soil whence she had blossomed.

Today he received his threshold kiss just outside the door, and then the key turned and the door squeaked open and the hallway awaited him and he already knew what he would find. But he did not find it, and its absence made him light-headed.

There were photos in the hall, but none of her. Here an older brother, an officer in the Hungarian Army. There a black-and-white of (late) Dad, bowing his head as a ribbon was hung around his white neck. And this must be Grandfather here—ah, happy days with army buddies, buddies from different armies, including, ah yes, I suppose that would be the case.

He turned to her, but this time no embarrassment awaited him. She looked up at him with the same smile and affection she always showed, but today, something more, something like an inspection of him, some curiosity as she watched him examine her family's photographic residue. A glass case: That

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I
  
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same ribbon Dad was bowing his head to accept just over there, a medal stamped with Hungarian words and a bust of, ah yes, I suppose that would be the case.

There were no horseback-riding prizes, no trophies for swimming, just more pictures of a strange-looking family incapable of smiling for photographers. Whenever Scott began to speed up for the next room, she slowed him down, made him linger, slid her arm through his, pulled him close, and watched as he looked.

She made him look at every room. There had been five of them here once. With two elder brothers gone and father dead, now only Maria lived there with her mother and three cats. The apartment was smaller than any place he'd ever known a family to be raised, and he inferred, wrongly, poverty. The brothers' little cube was unchanged since their departures: no rock star posters or college pennants, just stern young soldiers, official portraits in plain picture frames, old dumbbells and elastic bands with handles, a few books in Hungarian and Russian, and a small bulletin board pinned with snapshots of tanks and artillery pieces and jet fighters.

She's just like me, he thought. She comes from nothing, too, a stranger to these people who surrounded her from birth. She had never looked so beautiful as at that very moment, in front of a picture of a Russian attack jet unfurling sharp vapor. He had finally found the only other citizen of his country.

Her room was smaller still, painted a light blue some time ago. The bed, the chair, the desk, the shelves crowded with illegible books, the weird Eastern European crafts and dolls made of un-plush, unlovable substances. On her desk sat the homework he had himself assigned her. On her little bulletin board were stuck two pictures of Miami and one of Venice Beach cut from a magazine; a reproduction of a Manet; a black-and-white picture postcard of a U.S. sailor kissing a woman in Times Square; a picture of a Rodin sculpture, plaster-white and erotic; three photos of her with friends, but none that showed a girl any younger than the woman he knew. On a small table next to the bed was a photo of him taken from a low angle: He was leaping in the air, nothing but blue sky and clouds behind him, flying like a god, his extended arms suspending him from an ascending American football (launched from out of frame by Mark Payton), while two hands (all that was visible of his brother) clutched uselessly at Scott's old college T-shirt, in a vain effort to pull him back to earth. "I wish I could show you my childhood bedroom right now."

"I would like this very much."

ivi i MKI HUK

"No, you'd hate it, but you'd understand why we're so perfect together." She smiled and pulled him past the chair and desk her grandmother had taken from a neighboring apartment when the residents moved away (leaving all their belongings behind), pulled him toward her mother's old single bed, its intricately carved headboard a distinct luxury and, to a trained eye, evidence of privilege and unusual buying power.

LATER, WITH
 
CROWDS
 
STILL
 
MILLING
 
AROUND VACI
 
UTCA
 
AS
 
GRATES WERE

pulled over windows and as peasant women began gathering off the pavement the scarves and fleece-lined vests they had not sold that day, and with the sun low enough to stretch the ice-cream vendor's shadow all the way to the end of the street, John reported to the first of the two dates he had arranged that morning. He shrank, notebook in hand, into a booth at the New York Amerikai Pizza Place Etterem, and greeted Gunnery Sergeant Todd Marcus and his three comrades, the men he hoped could teach him something elemental (if undeniably foreign) about Emily.