Prague (55 page)

Years laler. pick an age for John, pick a city somewhere, and another New Year's Eve begins with acquaintances and drinks at his new apartment. They ask about the pictures hung on his walls, carefully framed and transported memorabilia of his world travels, the first thing he unpacks and places in each new home. And when the strangers stop in front of the moody black-and-white of the piano in the smoky room with the old woman and the boy side by side, someone asks who took it and someone else asks who is it. and John (answering both or neither) says. 'An old friend." Polite curiosity touches on the antique photo of the crying baby, and then another guest (an acquaintance's newly introduced husband, whose name has still not adhered to John's memory; a ja/z fan and a trivia buff and something of an incorrigible know-it-all, he and John will grow to dislike each other irreparably before the night is over) says, "Well,

MR i nun
  
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if you ask me, I'd say that's Dexter Gordon," and the conversation swings into jazz stars of the mid-twentieth century.

To go back, John was far into his ocean crossing now, with no sight of— and no interest in—landfall. He was very drunk and therefore alternately sullen, sappy, disoriented, chatty. "I don't even know her last name," he was complaining to Nadja when Nicky was far across the room photographing something. "Can you believe thai? I mean, I've seen it, but I've never heard her say it. I can't even pronounce it. Symbol there somewhere, if you can find it. because I can't. , ." The next instant, both women were sitting in front of him laughing. When Nicky had arrived, he had no idea; she had just been far across the room, and what was so funny anyhow?

"That's the fucker hit me with a rock." John squinted at a man sitting at the bar, plainly an American, talking with a plain American girl. "That's the fucker, Nic, hit me with a rock." The man sneezed often, and the bar in front of him was bumpy with bunched-up cocktail napkins. "Whom hit me. Let's you and me go kick the shit out of him." Nicky laughed as John advanced, blinking and talking before his enemy had even noticed him. Nicky's shutter clicked and clicked. "You want to hit me with a rock? You can't just hit me with a rock. I'll show you how to hit me with a rock."

The man turned his head toward the angry drunk wobbling in front of his traveling companion, a childhood friend reeling off a messy divorce ending a very short marriage. "I'm sorry?" the tourist said in response to the little he had heard ("himmy wihuh rah"). His voice was soft, stuffed from his cold, slightly apologetic.

"Not good enough, chum. Too late to be 'I'm sorry.' Not good enough at all."

"Do we know you?"

"Oh there are lots of us I suppose hard to keep us clear, all us rock catchers." John lunged at his sworn foe but could not maintain his balance, and he fell to one knee, grabbing the man's arm as he descended. When that arm was instantly shaken free ("Hey, guy, get your hands off me"). John continued his fall and struck his lip—with sharp, incisive teeth perfectly angled behind it—against the woman's foot and then was led off in another direction by Nicky.

"Save it for me, darling," she consoled him. "My feet need ferocious biting, too."

Nicky sat him in a booth, tipped a glass of ice against his mouth from time

to time, and watched it slowly turn cloudy red. "I'm in no condition to fight, to be honest," John admitted, and the glass fell over and ice and pink water turned black on the table's surface. "Hey, listen." He could not open his eyes, but something in him compensated; his eyebrows, his lips, the muscles of his cheeks all became enormously expressive so that he resembled a very agitated, blind vampire as the blood dribbled from the corners of his mouth. "Hey, listen. I think I gotta say this now. I really, I love you, Emily. I knowyou don't want to hear that right now, but I do."

"Thai's very sweet. Thank you," she said, and John passed out for a while. Later, Emily must have left because, slumped against the booth, no different in posture from when he slept but for his half-open eyes, he saw Nadja speaking to Nicky. They laughed and smoked a few tables away, their heads together, and John knew he must be dreaming because those two had never met. He watched them touch each other's hands when they spoke, watched Nicky snap close photos of the old woman's face and hands and shoulders, watched them point to him in his booth and make unhelpful, pitying faces—a moment so cliched and cinematic that part of him wondered about the paucity of imagination such a dreary dream must imply. Later, that concern was allayed by a long and feverishly hot round of REM that seemed to go on forever, at ever decelerating speeds, and he woke alone to 1991 in the turpentine steam of Nicky's apartment, dressed and sticky on her bed with unrecollected resolutions and low-resolution recollections and a wheeling, circling desire to feel that this year might, in some unspecifiable way, be his year.

EARLY
 
IN
 
JANUARY
 
JOHN
 
NOTICED, WITH
 
A
 
SURPRISINGLY
 
SHARP
 
SADNESS,

a certain fleeting science-flctiony feel to the dates at the top of newspapers. He thought of Mark simply leaving, just knowing this place was not good for him and somewhere else would be better and so decisively departing in a certainly temporary moment of strength. John considered, staring at the improbable, odd date stuttering its way across the hotel's newspaper display table, whether Ibis place was good for him. whether he shouldn't go away. But he had too much to do here, too many ties.

Outside, large-flaked snow materialized just above his head from out of the monochrome gray, as though the low sky were being rubbed against a cheese grater. lie stood on the Chain Bridge and remembered kissing Emily Oliver here,

months ago. It was months old now, that cherished memory, though of course a split second later it provoked a wince of shame, since that cherished memory was atomically fused to the stinging memory of the awful moments that followed it, and the stupidity he had displayed to her for months, and her secret that he still proudly, dumbly guarded. (And the kiss hadn't even been on this bridge, he only then recalled.) Months had passed since then; he hadn't even seen her since Halloween. What right did her ghost have to enter him as she pleased? And if that doomed bridge kiss had not been the last? If tonight he held her asleep against his chest, so close that Ihe stream of breath from his nose brushed her eyelashes. Or if she stood here now and he leaned in to kiss her, but again she said no and so he simply pushed her hard over the rail and she cried slightly as she fell, vanished into the comforting mist long before he heard the delightful, distant splash.

He needed a change, just like Mark, a break from the same old people, (hough his circle had been shrinking month by month since the social high point of his arrival last May. He needed to go where he would be encircled by friends of the right sort. He belonged in Prague; he had known this for almost a year. Life waited for him there, waited with some goal achievable yet elegant and thrilling.

Instead, that afternoon Editor assigned him a story that took him to an outlying suburb at the crack of a bright and freezing dawn. He shivered until his jaw ached and his spine spasmed between his knotted shoulder blades. He waited and watched at an outdoor training facility surrounded by frozen, crunching flatland and garbage piled behind fences.

"I saw you cold this morning with your little pen and your little notebook—unh—and you were wishing to be inside the dressing building. You could not suffer cold."

"True,"

'And—unh—I watch you ask questions of coach very cold and you were very unhappy. I knowed exactly then your problem. Do you know what your problem?"

"My problem?"

"Listen—unh—I tell you a story."

"Now?"

"Yes, yes—unh—now."

He was safely back in his apartment now, warmer, since on top of him

crouched a nude speed skater, displaying Olympic stamina and competitive verve. Her hands (and most of her weighl) pressed down on John's shoulders, effectively pinning both his torso and his arms; he could only lift his head an inch or two. Her thighs pivoted forward and back from the knees at a fierce, metronomic clip.

"Listen, boy. when I go to training in winter morning and we arc outside in the ice, it is bloody cold. You only do'd it once and you know." She breathed easily despite her athletic pace. "To warm us, the coach say, 'You do two-thousandtivehundred meter fast as can.' We do this, we skate a long way. And then—unh—we do it again. After the seventh time of twothousandlive-hundrcd meter, it really is hurting, and I think my legs never hurl so bad. I got to stop."

John lifted his head as far as was possible and looked at those legs now. The triangular (nearly pyramidal) sculpted calves lay parallel to his thighs, and her own thighs were folding up and down al an extraordinary rate. At the apex of her action, the thighs emerged from the knees at nearly a ninety-degree angle and, from his viewpoint, seemed like enormous pulsing pistons, engineering achieved on some brighlly lit, 99.999-percent-dusl-particle-free. laser- and robotics-equipped conveyor belt in Hamburg.

"But I go on through pain—unh. It is how you get great and go to the Games and win gold. I know this. So I just not think of pain and skate. Finally, after two more twothousandfivchundrcd meter. 1 say, 'Coach, my legs burn too much now.' He looks at me—unh—like I make fart, you know? And he say, 'Yes of course they burn. This is good. Sprint another twothousandfivehundred meter. Do not stop, because you know what comes after the burning?' Do you know this answer, fohn? Do—unh—you know what comes after the burning?"

"No, I don't think I do."

"1 said no also. 'Coach, what comes after the burning?'—unh." She released his left shoulder just long enough to brush a few straggling, sweaty bangs off her forehead. Her hand returned lo its position; her fingers fell naturally onto the white marks they had left behind. "He said, After the burning comes agony, okay? Now, skate.' And he shoots his gun. He has a gun always at the training to start races and also inspire. He uses always the—unh—the real bullets."

"What? How do you know that?"

"He—unh. unh—one time trying to make us skate faster and he point up

in the air and shootcd and a bird fall on the ice—unh. That is for you, too— unh—John. After burning comes the agony. You must—unh, unh—you must reach all the way to the agony, because who knows—unh, unh, unh—what waiting for the brave on the other side!" The rocking accelerated further, to inspirational speeds. "Now, boy! Now!"

As she rolls off, she suddenly becomes almost human: Her lips are a little parched; there is a white something at the corner of her eye that he wants to wipe away for her. When she turns away, puts her legs over the side of the bed, sits up, and switches on the bedside lamp, the yellow light filters through her dangling hair. She pulls the damp strands together and wraps a rubber band around them, and the movement of her hands reminds John of someone, he can't quite think whom. Her hands are, after all, not hyperdcveloped but like a girl's. The curve of her back as she sits on the edge of the bed just out of reach, and her head, turned now to the lamp and her shoulder, the corner of one eye just visible over that shoulder and her arms locked and her palms pressing hard and flat against the mattress: He knows she is waiting for him. He can almost think of the right word now to bring her to him and they can begin, but then John has fallen asleep.

Later she was talking again. "I mean this. What I said. You are like me, I think, but you need to drive harder forward. I see this when you standed cold with your little notebook. And later, too, when you say some things. You know, he is the best trainer in the world. Do you understand I talk not only about skating now?"

He watched her dress, one elbow shoring him up on the too-acquiescent soi'a bed. Across the room, she seemed convincingly human hut too far away to take very seriously. She wore jeans, rolled several times at the ankle and also folded over the top of her wide, black leather belt, tightened to a handmade hole well past the final factory-punched option. Too long and too big at the waist, the jeans still Ihreatcned to burst at the thighs. (That morning in her silver leggings they had resembled two pieces of ridged, hard-shell carry-on luggage.) She put on her bra, a gauze of pink purchased during an hour's break from training, racing, sleeping, and carefully quantified but voracious eating on a three-day trip in eastern France.

He hoped she wouldn't quiz him on what she had said, as he couldn't remember any of it, not two words except for the part about the unlucky bird, but he did feel a last flicker, a snuffed-wick fondness for this girl as she daubed some makeup and gathered her coat and bag: he quarter-wished she'd stay the night