The Adults (26 page)

People should say, I’m going to Europe to act outside the confines of my character
, he wrote.

I’m going to Europe to participate in nonevents
, I wrote.

I’m going to Europe to expel negative energy.

I sat in parks and watched the dogs. In Letenské there was an old man with two long-haired schnauzers that came every day, and he called them both Ferdinand. “Ferdinand, come here,” he said. “Ferdinand, stop licking Ferdinand.” I stood in front of glass food booths and made decisions between cheese, blue cheese, and ham-and-cheese paninis. I could never decide how much cheese I was ready for but always chose a ham-and-cheese panini that Vladímira with the black hair served to me begrudgingly every day. I never had the correct change and this bothered her. We didn’t joke, and she never smiled because the fact that I never had the correct change really really bothered her.

I’m going to Prague on business
, he wrote.
I’m going for three weeks over Christmas. I’m representing an American company that is being sued for making combs so thin they have become choking hazards. Correction, I’m going to Prague to see you. Let me know if that’s not all right.

Was it all right? I wasn’t sure.

It was December now and the sun hung low in the sky like a pendant lamp and everything about my life these past four years suddenly seemed so fake; I was sure of it. Here was Jonathan walking out of the shower and into the common room and he was real. He left wet footprints on the rug and ruffled his hair with a towel. I was slowly remembering this man, his hair wet and playful like a seal.

“Well?” he said.

It was Tuesday so I took him to my Czech language course. On the way, we walked by buildings with stones from the seventeenth century and I started to feel confident in the fact that four years ago was not as far away as I had previously thought.

Outside, it was winter in the most serious sense. There was snow, and sleet, and hail, and then snow again. Every day that week had been a thorough snowstorm. There was ice on the tram tracks. There was an implied curfew by the sun that set so early the town might as well have been a movie set, a white wonderland that existed only from nine to five. We walked through it anyway, all the way to Charles University on the other side of the bridge. We tried not to touch each other on the way. But there was ice and sidewalks were slippery, and then we brushed arms while trying to open the door of the school, his hand catching the ends of my hair when he moved past me into the elevator.

Jonathan sat next to me in the classroom with impeccable posture, like a man who was used to being called upon. He was the first person to make this language course feel like a very casual meeting between friends.

“I’m a fucking lawyer,” Jonathan said. Then he sighed. “I need to learn some basic Czech so I can function while I’m here.”

On the other side of me was a thin brunette from Ireland.

“My name is Natalie Mullan,” the girl said. “I’ve never really taken Czech before, but I’m in a singing group and we want to write a song in Czech. You can buy our other songs on iTunes. And, well, I guess the thing to know about me is that sometimes people call me boisterous.”

“Your
kapela
,” the teacher said. “Your band. What’s your
kapela
’s name?”

“Hot Pocket,” the girl said.

Jonathan and I exchanged smiles. When he smiled he looked about thirty. When he frowned he looked about forty. He was thirty-one now. He was a lawyer now. He wore white oxford shirts and genuine leather shoes now. He parted his hair with a comb now. He had more wrinkles around the eyes now, which were still powder blue. When I first saw him walk down to greet me in the lobby of the hotel, I remember thinking, We still have the same eyes. I had never met anyone whom I felt this way with, and honestly, I didn’t even know for sure what my eyes looked like or if having the same eyes as someone else even mattered. It was just an intuitive feeling. He had my eyes.

“I am your
učitelka
,” the teacher said, and wrote it on the board. “Your teacher.”

We learned greetings. Hello. Good-bye.
Dobrý den. Nashledanou. Jak se máte?

“Like, don’t actually tell me how you are; just tell me that you’re good,” my teacher said.

Kolik je hodin?

“Like,
What time is it?
” she said.

Je jedna hodina
. Like,
It is one o’clock.
We learned basic travel items. Deodorant.
Dětský pudr
. Baby powder. That’s a basic travel item? Class dismissed.

Nashledanou
. Or
ciao
.

“Depending on how well you know the person,” I explained to him softly in his ear.

“See that space over there?” I said to Jonathan at the tram stop after class. “That’s where Stalin’s body used to be.”

“His body?” he asked.

“Not his real body. There was a giant monument built in honor of Stalin. They blew it up after he turned out to be a mass murderer.”

The 23 arrived. We stepped on the tram and held on to the red poles as we headed to the city center. He was looking at me the way my mother often looked at her favorite foods in the grocery store if they suddenly had a different packaging, turning it over and then asking me, “Is this the same one I have always liked, Emily?”

“You are different,” Jonathan said.

“Well, of course I’m different,” I said. “I’m four years older,” I added, but this advertisement of maturity only made me feel younger. “How am I different?”

“In the beginning,” Jonathan said, “you were the good but flawed one who fought to stay alive. The mild-mannered quiet girl who’s always around but isn’t noticed right away when the other characters are engaging in activities.”

The trams in Prague were mostly quiet, except for the soft murmurings of another language and the American who was always speaking. When an American talked on the trams, it felt so noticeable and understandable to me, as though Jonathan was a violin playing the melody of a song, while the rest of the orchestra was on the verse.

“But then you’re actually,” Jonathan continued, “without anyone taking notice, the boisterous, please note my word choice, feisty, won’t-take-no-for-an-answer heroine who always ends up doing the right thing, unless it takes too much effort, in which case you just sit around and make fun of other people.”

“That classic, timeless character,” I said.

“Like Ophelia,” he said.

“The mild-mannered quiet girl?”

“Yes.”

“Who turns boisterous?”

“But not crazy.”

“But she was crazy.”

“I contend Ophelia was actually the hero of Hamlet,” he said. “She was the only one with a pure heart. And I only called you Ophelia because that’s the only female character from Shakespeare that I still feel comfortable referencing. Besides Lady Macbeth.”

“I see.”

“But you’re not her,” he added.

“And who are you?” I asked.

“Well, I suppose I’m like Othello. Though I’ve never read
Othello
so I don’t actually know. Do you have any idea what Othello was like?”

“He was black,” I said.

“Let’s get some
oběd
,” he said. “I want to buy you some food.”

At Apropos Restaurant, a woman’s tiny dog was gnawing on her foot. She was trying to kick it away.

“How do you say ‘bark’ in Czech?” Jonathan asked.

Hafhaf.
That was how you said “bark” in Czech.

“‘Ruffski,’” I said. That was how Laura addressed Raisinet now. “Ruffski!”

“Of course. Ruffski,” Jonathan said. As soon as I said it, I regretted it. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

The waiter gave us menus.

“What are you going to get?” Jonathan asked with a mocking smile on his face. “The three cheeses on the hard board?”

It was the cheapest thing on the menu at Apropos Restaurant and the translation made us laugh.

“I’d like the four fruits on a plate, next to the spinach, inside the restaurant, thanks,” I said.

When we were done eating he said, “Let’s do something Prague-ian. Let’s find some Gypsies or something.”

“The Gypsies are all gone,” I said. “Or at least, leaving.”

The Gypsies were fleeing to Canada. The rumor was that Czech officials were even trying to help them buy plane tickets, so they could tear down their “housing units” as soon as possible.

We wandered around town. I told Jonathan I had always wanted to get my tarot read by a Gypsy with a haunted deck, and I wanted her to sit across the table from me and say in an accent that represented a life lived in more than one place, “There is a draining force in your life. Do you know anybody who wants to drain you?”

“Let’s do it,” Jonathan said.

But we couldn’t find any Gypsies, only Asian tourists traveling in packs looking for cosmetics, old men sitting over lumpy plates of stew like they were about to eat the last piece of meat that would finally destroy them, and thin-legged Czech men with jewel-encrusted numbers on their jeans. We walked around the street vendors in the Jewish district and Jonathan joked about buying me absurd things: a three-dimensional head of a fox that also served as a brooch.

“I wonder what kind of music Hot Pocket makes,” I said.

“Irish pop from the looks of it,” he said. “Irish Pop Pocket.”

We didn’t find any Gypsies but we found a tourist shop with a girl named Marva who read tarot, who said she was an ex–graduate student from the University of Ohio who had fled to Prague halfway through her dissertation. Jonathan liked her immediately. “Some people flee,” he said. “Some people become lawyers.”

“Well, I’m not very qualified to read tarot,” Marva said.

“Well,” Jonathan said, “give us our fortunes anyway.”

“Okay. Though I must warn you,” Marva said. “I’m going to tell you things that you normally would not have thought to do before I told you. I’m putting ideas in your head that would never have been there. So just watch for that.”

Marva put out three front cards. Those, apparently, meant everything.

“Ah, the Magician,” she said to Jonathan. “A very interesting card. You see, the Magician is of this world. The Magician is young in his craft, he’s, like, a magician that doesn’t understand his own tricks.”

“I don’t know what the fuck that means,” Jonathan said. We laughed.

“You will,” Marva said. “You’ve got to figure out what you’re doing. Because you don’t want to stay the Magician forever.”

“Oh, thanks,” Jonathan said.

Then it was my turn. “The Devil,” she said, and of course. I knew it. Why even play the game? I sat and listened to Marva explain how people misunderstand the Devil card. It was really not a bad card. It was just a sign of extreme attachment to earthly pleasures. Right, I said, and I nodded like I understood, as I glared back at the Devil, with his blue flesh arms spread wide, and the two child figures underneath him, attached at the skin.

“See how they are attached at the skin?” Marva said. “It’s like they choose to be there, it’s an earthly attachment, not an eternal attachment. So don’t despair really. It doesn’t mean you’re going to
hell
.”

I nodded again. Right, I said, as I looked at the Devil blowing fire into only one of the children’s backs. The boy’s face was sort of sad, but almost vacant, as if he felt the pain but couldn’t understand the reason his skin seemed to be on fire.

“I’m scared,” Laura said, coming into my room later, tugging on my arm.

Laura had strange, thick wrists, and sometimes at night, she barely looked human to me.

“Not tonight, Laura,” I said. I was frustrated in bed, thinking of how Jonathan walked me to my father’s apartment at the end of the night and didn’t even lean in to kiss me on the cheek or hold my hand. How I put my arms around him, and felt he was heavier now, with flab around his waist like a thick belt. “You have to sleep in your own room.”

“I don’t want to!” she screamed.

I picked Laura up and took her out of my bedroom into the living room. My father was still up, reading the paper. “Dad,” I said. “Here is your child.”

I draped Laura over my father’s lap, and we both laughed a little.

“Hello, child,” he said to Laura.

“Hello, old person,” said Laura, who had stopped crying.

“Now, that’s just mean,” my father said.

The fireplace was lit, and the da Vinci painting looked nice in the firelight. It was midnight. Sometimes, I felt calm and happy with my new family. I sat down next to my father and Laura and closed my eyes.

“What are you reading?” Laura asked.

“A story,” my father said, turning the page.

“What kind of story?”

“A very long story about many different kinds of people.”

“What’s it called?”

“The newspaper.”

Laura laughed. “Read it to me,” she said.

My father dramatically opened
The New York Times
to the business section. “Once upon a time, in a faraway land, lawmakers promised that their opposing viewpoints would not harm safety-net programs—”

“Dad!” Laura giggled. “No more.”

“I’m not finished yet . . .,” he said.

“Tell me a real story,” she said. “Tell me how you and mom met again.”

“I’ve already told you,” my father said.

“But Emily doesn’t know,” she said. “Emily, do you know?”

I looked at my father, but I wouldn’t open my eyes. I couldn’t look at them.

“No,” I said. “I don’t know.”

I didn’t really. When did they meet? Was it twenty years ago, across the lawns at a block party? When did they fall in love? It could have been anytime, anywhere, in front of my face.

I heard Laura bang her fist on his knee. “Dad, tell us.”

“Well,” he said, “frankly, it’s late, and I’ve got to get up early tomorrow.”

“Daaaaaaad,” Laura said. Laura banged her fist on my knee now. “They met at the movies.”

“Oh yeah?” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady and calm.

“My mom started crying halfway through the movie because the movie was sad. She still does that. Dad took her hand and said, ‘Don’t worry.’” Laura picked up my hand and laced our fingers together. “Like this.”