The Adults (24 page)

“Cray-
on
,” Laura said. “Like a marker. But not.”

“I do not understand,” the waitress said.

“She doesn’t need one,” Ester said.

For the rest of the night, I couldn’t think of anything to say to anyone except the Russian cabdriver, who smiled and said, “You Americans so quiet because you Americans don’t know anything for real. You know your gas prices, you know your baseball numbers, but do you know that no piece of paper can be folded in half more than seven times?”

Even though we all had our own bedrooms, Laura ran into mine at night.

“I’m scared,” Laura said. She got under my covers. Her bangs were stuck to her forehead with sweat.

“Don’t you want the breeze?” I asked her, lifting up the comforter. Her eyes shone in the cave.

“No,” she said. “The moths are coming inside the house. And they sit on my nose.”

“That’s right,” I said. “To come and kiss you good night.”

She started crying.

“No,” she said. “They are coming in to touch everything. They are going to crawl in my nose.”

“They won’t,” I said. “I’ll swat the moths before they reach you. Just fall asleep.”

I put the comforter back down. “Wait!” she cried, poking her head out.

“What?”

She looked around the room. “Ummm,
strč prst skrz krk
.”

Laura fell asleep quickly after that in my bed and snored like a kitten when it had a cold. I pushed her bangs off her forehead and traced her hairline with my finger, and she shifted toward the wall. I closed my eyes, but couldn’t sleep with Laura next to me. I couldn’t sleep on the couch either. The leather was too sticky, like Saran Wrap on my skin. So I left the apartment. I went to the nearest bar, called Alcohol Bar. It was a bar for tourists, with a New York sensibility, where businessmen, or me, or anybody in an outfit, really, strolled in with a headache from being awake so long. They took off their jackets arm by arm as if to say,
I hate the day
. They wore thick lipstick and messy hair. They all sat on steel stools drinking malt whiskeys or Krušovice.

“Becherovka,” I said to the bartender. “With tonic.” A man named Patrick was loud and Irish in my ear, wearing a hooded sweatshirt backward so the hood was directly under his chin.

“Why are you wearing your sweatshirt like that?” I asked him.

“I’m just trying to make a statement,” Patrick said.

“I don’t get your point,” I said.

He told me he was just kidding; he didn’t know why he was wearing his sweatshirt backward, honestly, it just felt like the right thing to do at the time. I laughed. I took a sip of the Becherovka. I was embarrassed at how rude I was to a man just as accidental as I was, who was very attractive, with proportional features and brown hair that reminded me of Charlie Brown and suddenly turned me soft.

“Do you know how American you sound?” he asked.

“Do you realize you are not pronouncing your th’s?” I asked.

I asked him to say other things. “Ask me how I am,” I said.

“How you getting on?” he asked.

“The bus? How’m I getting on the bus?”

“Yes, the fucking bus!” he said.

“Ask me if I want a cup of tea,” I said, leaning over the bar.

“Do you want a cuppa?” he asks.

“A cuppa what?”

He punched me on the arm. “Get the fuck outta here,” he said, and laughed.

I stood up and pretended to leave. “Get the fuck back in here!” he said.

By three in the morning, we were drunk and had talked about everything from astrophysics (we both had cousins who swore they were involved with it) to Mexican restaurants in Prague (optimism reaching new heights every day) to Eskimos.

“Now, there’s a fucking laugh,” he said on the way back to my father’s apartment. “What the fuck are they doing up there, like?”

“It’s like they don’t know we have electricity down here!” I said.

“Someone should let them know.”

“Though, there’s a chance they could be happy as they are.”

“I’d fucking doubt that, like. Who’s ever been like, gee, I’m so fucking happy because I’m so fucking cold!”

“You’re right,” I said. “You’re right right right. The women have to gnaw on the men’s shoes after they come back from hunting to melt the ice. By the time they are old their teeth have usually worn away.”

“How the hell do you know that, like?”

“My teacher used to talk about them a lot.”

“What else do you know?”

“Well we watched a video on how miserable their lives were. How the men have to sit in front of the ice and wait for a whisker to move slightly because that may mean there’s a seal underneath them, so they go to stab it but if there’s nothing then they likely go home hungry to die. But also, they have fun too. They showed a naked baby and his mother dangling a stick in front of his face and the baby was laughing.”

“You fucking Americans.”

We made out on my father’s couch for an hour. His teeth turned out to be too large for his mouth, my first instincts about him were right, and when my lips got sore I pulled away and asked questions.

“What do you do?” I asked. “Do you work?”

“I work with fucking computers,” he said.

Fucking computers sounded complicated. I asked no more questions. Ester came into the room, sleepily, to get a glass of water. She saw us on the couch and rolled her eyes. Ester was a Catholic and thought I was a slut, but since she was also a psychologist, she was careful never to phrase it like that.

I
n the afternoons, I worked on the hotel. The Crowne Plaza. I was on seating duty. My job was to find a different assortment of chairs, love seats, benches for the entrance, the rooms, the pool, the restaurant, the patio, which meant I was never actually at the hotel. I was always somewhere else, at another hotel, taking notes about the furniture. Krištof Marens, my Belgian thesis adviser, said our goal was to make the hotel look Modern with a capital M, not modern for efficiency’s sake. A kind of Modern that was more about extravagance, that took time and planning and careful cutting and amazed the world with its impossibility.

The Crowne Plaza was famous for preserving its social realistic design. But after the Crowne Plaza was damaged in the flood, it was temporarily closed, and the new owner decided to use the opportunity to modernize the hotel. It was 2003 and no longer a time for statues of Russian war heroes guarding the entrance. “Russia has no hold on this country,” Krištof said. “Or this country’s buildings.”

The owner said that most of the statues of Russian soldiers had already been destroyed all over the city, “So, why must my hotel be imprisoned in the past? Like it is some
museum
?” Especially since the guests at the Crowne Plaza were mostly rich businessmen, foreign yuppies in Italian business suits who wanted to walk into a building that promised them the most contemporary of living accommodations, colorful and glossy banisters, futuristic green hues lining the entranceway, countertops that were also mirrors, and a fitness center with bright yellow walls so everybody could exercise in peace without the legacy of Communism literally hanging over their heads.

Krištof Marens was hired as part of the redesign team, and during the first few weeks of graduate school I had become an assistant to the cause. “You American, no?” Krištof asked when I met with him in his tiny office about registration. I was the only American in the program. “You know how to destroy history. You know modern. You don’t even
understand
Communism. A perfect fit.”

Krištof wasn’t very nice so I took this as a compliment.

Krištof wanted me to find seating that called into question the nature of sitting down. Chairs layered in blown glass that were actually comfortable to have sex in. I couldn’t find any. I told him such a thing didn’t exist. After weeks researching, I found the Nelson Marshmallow Sofa. The Marshmallow Sofa looked like it was made out of a bunch of very elegant black marshmallows joined together at the corners. Krištof was disgusted. “The Marshmallow Sofa?” he said, as though I had offended him. “You fat Americans.”

But when I sent him the picture, he wrote back saying, “Not terrible.”

The French owner loved them. He eventually purchased forty for some of the suites. “I knew you would do it, Americănka,” Krištof said to me after, filling my tall glass with pilsner. “Leave it to the Americanka to deliver the Marshmallow Sofa.”

Ester was a woman who believed in favorites. Favorite dinner: breakfast. Favorite street: the main ones. Favorite people: the sad old men on benches who have nothing to do with their hands. Favorite nighttime activity: visiting the old chapels.

“We should go to the bone church,” I said.

“Bone church?” Laura asked. “What is that?”

“It’s a church built out of more than thirty thousand skeletons,” I said.

It was in Kutnà hora, an hour outside the city. After the plague took out more than half of Europe, thirty thousand bodies were left without a burial. A monk collected all the bones, and a wood-carver was hired to assemble them in the church. “The chandelier contains every bone in the human body,” Krištof said. “Now, that’s interior design.”

“Ew,” Ester said. “Why would we want to see that?”

“Because it’s remarkable,” I said.

“Is remarkable the same thing as portable?” Laura asked.

“No,” I told her.

“Not while Laura is here, Emily,” Ester said, suddenly like a mother. As though she had to protect Laura from me. “We can’t bring a seven-year-old girl to a house made out of bones.”

“I’m eight!” she said. “I
have
bones.”

Instead, we went to the St. Vitus Cathedral, the largest church in Prague, where we bought prayers for twenty crowns each.

“A bargain!” I said.

“You mean prayers aren’t free?” Laura asked.

“Think of it as a donation,” I told her.

After, we went to the Vltava and when we fed the ducks leftover bits of bread, it didn’t bother me to watch Ester the way I had imagined it would bother me to watch my father’s lover stroll around Prague all night in Gucci shoes, buying spinach paninis that she couldn’t bring herself to fully consume, asking us questions about our “schoolwork.” Sometimes Ester hummed the tunes to songs I didn’t know and I barely even got annoyed. I was too tired from walking around all day to do anything but admire her stamina.

“How can you look out at such a thing and not believe in God?” Ester asked us, looking down at the water below.

“I never said I didn’t believe in God,” I said.

“It’s just too amazing,” she said. “Impossible to think that no one planned this. That’s what I keep telling your father. Your father the atheist.”

It was a long way to the water below. I tried to imagine what it would feel like floating to the bottom of the river. There didn’t seem to be anything lonelier than a flood, a city of no sound. There were watermarks on the sides of the yellow and pink buildings and Ester, our tour guide, would point to the watermarks on the buildings and exclaim, “See that mark? See this? Last year, this whole thing was underwater,” like drowning was some kind of an achievement. The river had gotten into every crack, and most of the life that was carried through the city was either dead or debris, broken storefront signs and wooden kitchen spoons floating at the top of the river, people at the bottom. Even after the water had drained and evaporated, homes and stores and parks had been dampened from the carpets to the ceiling, the streets to the clouds, leaving a thick film all over the city, and for a long while nothing could be understood or seen without using the watermarks and the damp scent of must as a benchmark. Life had been a certain way “before the flood.” Nothing’s been the same “since the flood,” not the color of the walls or the feel of our hands against the brick.

When we returned to the apartment my father was still not home. Ester and I drank wine and waited on my father’s balcony. Ester got drunk. She took large gulps of her wine and it occurred to me for the first time that she was nervous around me. She was drinking fast, playing with a strand of red hair, telling me about her clients.

“I’m starting to get so bored by my job,” she said. “That’s really the worst thing that can happen to you, I think.”

I could think of worse things, but I let her continue uninterrupted. She seemed to feel strongly about this. She said she was bored by everybody’s displacement. She wanted to be challenged by something other than what was so obviously different. Something other than herself, something wild.

“I used to be wild, Emily,” she said. “When I first met my ex-husband. I was in the doctoral program at Charles University, and I’d spend my evenings cruising around with my friend Sylvia from Italy in her twenty-year-old car with no vinyl siding on the inside of the doors.”

They’d park the car, smoke some weed, and she’d call her husband from the nearest pay phone. He would sit up late at night, waiting for these phone calls because he loved her so much, and listen to her talk about her patients.

“What kind of clients do you have?” I asked.

“Not very crazy ones,” she said. “Like this girl, two weeks ago, who told me about how she was driving her car, and she was like, ‘Ugh, I’m driving again.’”

“I can sympathize with that,” I said. “Sometimes, when I’m brushing my hair, I think, Here we go again . . .”

“Clients who say they need an affair,” Ester said. “People who feel no rush with their husbands. People who feel like nothing ever happens to them anymore.”

But nothing does happen, I thought. Not really. Nothing had happened to me in years, not in the way that Mr. Basketball had happened to me, and on the balcony listening to Ester talk, the wind felt empty against my cheek. It felt like the air could hold nothing here. The wind carried nothing around all day. I can’t explain how terrifying that felt.

“Like, what is supposed to happen?” I asked.

“That’s what I always ask. So I tell them to go paddleboating.”

“What’s the weirdest thing you’ve heard?”

“This woman can’t stop going to the town square. She’s addicted to the chaos that she feels when she’s there, watching the clock. Surrounded by all that
stuff
,” she said.