Prague (17 page)

Emily stood at the fireplace, quite naked now (with newly focused detail), but she covered her breasts with crossed hands. She smirked at naughty, fickle John. She pouted in mock disappointment, sniffled away a nonexistent tear, then dropped her hands and beckoned again—

"Are you ready again?" Bounce. "You are, aren't you!"

Karen lies asleep on her side, her back to him. The sheet clings to and imitates four legs. Work is very far away, and Emily too. He is up on one elbow. He traces the most remarkable discovery of the day: the landscape curve of her side from the bottom of her rib cage to the top of her hip. The afternoon light has turned soft. The room is uniformly laid over with a light gray shadow that he has never seen before, as if an entirely new kind of light has recently been discovered. Through the open window, over her tousled hair and slow breathing, he can see all the way across the street. A street width and half a bedroom away from him, in a recently repainted nineteenth-century apartment building brightly lit by the sun, which hangs somewhere over Karen's building, the stocky top half of a prematurely old Hungarian woman plants her elbows on her windowsill, leans into the glare, into an entirely different kind of light (and world), and watches street life five floors down. She pushes back an errant strand of gray hair and sips from a tall glass. She seems to mean something. New scents pass in the air and mingle with familiar ones—shampoo, deodorants, vanilla. A fly has found its way into the apartment and cannot find its way out, dances with itself on the mirror, then tracks lipstick footprints down the side of a glass to wade in warm lemonade. Do you remember this feeling forever? John wonders, hopes. He's supposed to meet Scott soon. He can't remember where he put his watch.

THE PRICES WALKED SLOWLY DOWN THE BUDA STREET TRIMMED WITH

plane trees. "I need oxygen replenishment," said Scott, and so they set off toward Margaret Island in silence. John spun a cigarette over and under his knuckles from finger to finger, a sleight of hand he had learned in eighth grade with a ballpoint pen. They walked on, past Moscow Square and the market

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stalls, crossed the trolley rails and the traffic of Martfrok utca. The bus station and subway and tram stops and vegetable markets gave them something to do with their eyes.

"How's Maria?"

"She's good."

"Do you have a light?"

"Are you kidding?"

The afternoon smog nibbled his nose hairs, and Scott sometimes lifted his hand to cover his mouth. John patted his pockets for a truant book of matches. "So what's the story with you guys?"

"Who guys?"

"You and Maria, the lovingest dovingest pigeons in all Pigeontown."

"Story? I don't know. Hard to, hard to say."

"Is she Jewish?"

Scott laughed unpleasantly. "I have no idea. Tip-top question though, bro. I'll get right back to you on that, and you can send home your report to Mom about Scotty's latest crimes, you rotten little shit."

"You really think that?"

"No, of course not, why would I? Water off a duck's back, baby."

Paralysis crept over John's thickening tongue. He had left Karen's and walked across the river to pick up his brother for another of the stilted, tangential, droll, useless weekly dinners he had initiated, all the while spinning and massaging a little statement into shape to present to Scott—a damp and sticky confession of confusion, loneliness, excitement, fear, pride. And yet now he couldn't find the moist clay pot he had so lovingly crafted. No sentence would start. None of his feelings merited the exertion necessary for a single syllable, and everything wafting off Scott told him to keep his mouth shut. If he felt dramatic when he walked out of Karen's building, when he squinted and put on his sunglasses, if he felt pleased with himself on her boulevard as the cars coughed in sympathetic unison and the architecture seemed almost as important as Mark madly insisted, if he felt a mildly funny pang of regret at his vanished and ridiculous principles, if, a block later, he wondered what this meant for him and Emily (did it retroactively downgrade her or prove her relative importance, make her more meaningful or meaningless, was he shallow or manly, had he made himself strong or thrown away something of irreplaceable value and where did he get these antique notions), if, near the new Burger King in the Octagon, he was suddenly swallowing down an actual urge to cry, an urge that

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was finally transmuted into a slightly forced chunk of laughter as he crossed the Chain Bridge, if he stopped twice between the bridge and Scott's school to leave stupid jokes on Emily's answering machine, if he opened the door to the school praying that Scott would explain everything even as he knew Scott would do no such thing, well now, stepping from Margaret Bridge onto Margaret Island, following the footpath to a green opening where a group of young boys was playing soccer, he felt only a growing compulsion to get something, anything, definitive from his brother, even rage: "So are you in love with Maria?"

"That sounds like a song cue from West Side Story."

The children tripped and struggled to maintain control of the soccer ball. "Have you met her family?"

"John, are you kidding? We basically just got together, okay? Now, cut it out."

Kick, miss, fall down, grab knee and wince, stand up, run upfield to be in place for potentially heroic goal. Wait there, pick nose. "So how is it? What's it like?"

"How is it?" Scott scratched an ear. He watched the game. "It's like a spring rain-shower. It's like Rome under the stars. Box seats for opening day. Your name called from across a crowded room."

"Sounds serious."

"Oh yes, deadly serious. Psychologically complex. Troubling French film stuff. Knock-down, drag-out brawls. Lots of threats. It will all end in tears and yet somehow we can't let go."

"Sounds fun."

"That too. Fun-loving. Kooky. Wacky. Kisses in the rain. Tossing bread crumbs to the pigeons. We've got the world on a string, dontcha know."

"You're pretty happy, then?"

"Excruciatingly. Never knew what the word meant until now. Never glimpsed it, never smelled it, never had a clue, but now I light up from the inside, you know, like I carry a little nightlight in my belly that glows right up inside my happy little head."

"She must be a hell of a woman."

"Salt of the earth. Charms the birds right out of the trees. Can't help loving dat girl. Moxie and spunk, tinsel and Teflon. That's my baby."

"Sex must be pretty extraordinary."

"Oh yes. Kinky. Loving. Communion of souls. Deepest bond. Language

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without words. Return to Eden." Scott rubbed his eyes. "Body-mind unity. Vulnerable, immutable, you name it. Pfff ... secrets of the Orient. Techniques from lost scrolls. What exactly do you want from me?"

"Nothing. Forget it."

"Consider it done."

The soccer ball escaped the children's tenuous control and rolled toward the brothers' bench. John kicked it back into play. After another minute or so, it finally rolled between two balled-up windbreakers at the far end of the green, and the small boy whose foot had inadvertently last touched it sprinted on his little legs in a wide, exuberant circle. He pumped his fist and waved his wee index finger while absorbing the intoxicating but inaudible screams and cheers of the World Cup crowd. "Magyarorszdg! Magyarorszdg!" the child yelled as he completed his circuit of the stadium. His teammates embraced him and hoisted him precariously on their little shoulders for another lap. The brothers added their four hands to the applause.

"That is precisely how I feel all the time," John said.

"Yeah, it's genetic."

They crossed over to Pest and walked down the riverfront to the Blue Jazz. The club had developed a doorman in the last week, and he asked the brothers something in Hungarian. "Nem beszelek magyarul," the Prices mispronounced their ritual greeting simultaneously.

"Fine. Americans?" the bouncer asked in English. "Dinner and music?" he grumbled, and took their entry fees.

As the rooms slowly filled, the club's new house pianist played. On the handwritten chalk sign propped outside, she was simply NAojA. She looked about seventy, a thin and breakable woman in a flowing red gown that, although it fit her well, had done so for many years. As she moved slightly to her music, she resembled an exotic species in an aquarium, a brightly colored swath of tattered material floating and swaying in her own private current. On the cracked and ringed lid of the aging upright piano sat an ashtray, a package of Mockba Reds, and a silver lighter. She played an odd and ceaseless medley that skittered across decades and styles: now a jazz standard recognizable to anyone, 'All of Me," played in a very traditional manner with gentle improvisations in the style of the era; then a Scott Joplin rag, memorized and reproduced verbatim; suddenly a bebop tune, Charlie Parker's "Yardbird Suite," with a chorus or two of proficient bop soloing; "Watermelon Man," a jazz-funk tune from the 1960s, with the original album's standard piano groove and Dexter Gor-

don's saxophone solo transposed for her right hand; 'Angel Eyes," "Everything Happens to Me," and "The Night We Called It a Day" in quick succession, a tribute to a forgotten songwriter; a Chopin prelude, only about two minutes long but performed with careless ease; then a Broadway hit and, as it was "Maria" from West Side Story, Scott and John put away their pool cues and moved to a table to watch the elderly hands tap and hammer the elderly keys.

As the tune ended, the brothers applauded with about the same spirit as they had the soccer game. This was the first acknowledgment the pianist had received since she'd begun an hour and a half earlier. She turned to her fans and dipped her head, a gesture John found strangely moving; it hit him with inexplicable force and significance; he felt it was the answer to his day, to the questions he had been unable to phrase to his own brother. A faded old woman bows ironically to joke applause, he thought with a calming sensation. Emily and Karen were immediately viewed from a far-distant perspective, as if on a sunlit hillside, and they looked fine there. John very much wanted to meet the pianist.

The bartender flipped a switch and filled the club's air with the smoky scratches of an early Louis Armstrong recording. Nadja rose, collected her cigarettes and lighter, and glided toward them. John was unreasonably excited even as he heard Scott mutter, "Oh Jesus."

"I suspect you gentlemen are American," she said in the raspy voice of a golden-age movie star. John stood and lit her cigarette. He shook out the match and offered her a seat, introduced himself and his brother.

She emitted a slow, fine stream of smoke and conversation waited for her. "An intriguing pair," she murmured. "One brother Jewish, the other Danish. How did this come to pass, John Price?"

As a rule, the sound of a European-accented voice merely saying the word Jewish was enough to set John on edge, but now he was charmed to acknowledge the disparity that had for some twenty years previous been an instant conversational bore, family reunion tedium. "I make it a practice never to exchange genetic histories with a woman I've just met, at least one whose name I don't know," John replied after taking time to light his own cigarette.

She not only set him at ease, but somehow, with her thin and elderly arms, she was lifting him high up in the air. Her faded elegance and fraying dress, her peculiar employment, her graceful manner and instant mastery of the situation, her glamorous directness: John felt a flutter of fear that she would soon

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leave the table, and strove to keep her there. Scott watched his brother's transformation and said very little.

"Quite wise, John Price. But what about the melancholic Dane? Will he explain the dissimilarity?"

"I doubt he'll be able to," John replied. "Our parents swear lifelong fidelity. Would you like a drink?"