The Adults Part 19

"The bus? How'm I getting on the bus?"

"Yes, the f.u.c.king 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 f.u.c.k outta here," he said, and laughed.

I stood up and pretended to leave. "Get the f.u.c.k 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 f.u.c.king laugh," he said on the way back to my father's apartment. "What the f.u.c.k 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 f.u.c.king doubt that, like. Who's ever been like, gee, I'm so f.u.c.king happy because I'm so f.u.c.king 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 h.e.l.l 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 f.u.c.king 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 f.u.c.king computers," he said.

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

23.

In the afternoons, I worked on the hotel. The Crowne Plaza. I was on seating duty. My job was to find a different a.s.sortment 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. Kritof 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," Kritof 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.

Kritof Marens was hired as part of the redesign team, and during the first few weeks of graduate school I had become an a.s.sistant to the cause. "You American, no?" Kritof 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."

Kritof wasn't very nice so I took this as a compliment.

Kritof wanted me to find seating that called into question the nature of sitting down. Chairs layered in blown gla.s.s that were actually comfortable to have s.e.x 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. Kritof 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, Americnka," Kritof said to me after, filling my tall gla.s.s 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 Kutna 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 a.s.semble them in the church. "The chandelier contains every bone in the human body," Kritof 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 G.o.d?" Ester asked us, looking down at the water below.

"I never said I didn't believe in G.o.d," 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.

"That's strange," I said.

"It's not strange," Ester said. "It's just how it is. Her son died seven years ago in a car accident. She's very upset that she can't remember what it sounded like in the car. If it was a bam! Or a smack! Or a crash! The chaos makes sense to these people."

Ester got too drunk. Ester told me that she thought her first husband was a closet h.o.m.os.e.xual because he didn't fondle her b.r.e.a.s.t.s with the determination to really get to know them, and he cried once after they watched Sleepless in Seattle. She figured that since she didn't, she might be a lesbian. Ester said she was sick with the idea that her husband even watched the movie with her in the first place.

"But then I met your father," she said.

"My father cried once while watching The Wizard of Oz," I said. "When Judy Garland sings 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow.' It was the same song that they played at my grandmother's funeral."

"I see."

"So do you think my father's gay?" I asked. "Because he cried over his dead mother?"

"Emily," Ester said, "of course I don't think your father is gay. That song has a beautiful range. It would be nearly impossible not to cry while one's emotions are enhanced by the death of a loved one."

"Then why did you think your first husband was gay?"

"Because I caught him f.u.c.king another man in our bed."

"Oh," I said.

"Very intuitive of me," she said. "I stood over the two of them and said, 'Robert, I am starting to get the feeling that you are gay.'"

"You did not say that," I said.

I was right. She said she threw a pot, then cried for ten hours.

We were quiet for a moment. Then we burst out into laughter. Ester ran into the other room, holding her stomach, trying not to pee in her pants, saying, "I threw a f.u.c.king pot!"

Laura ran out on the balcony, her hair flipped upward from the pillow, saying, "Raisinet! Raisinet!"

Laura hurried us to the bottom of the stairs, where Raisinet was having another seizure. Laura was crying and knelt down next to the dog.

"I don't think I love him anymore," Laura said, like that was the tragedy of the situation, and not Raisinet, drooling from the corners of his mouth, or Ester, who was still trying to smother her giggles behind me.

To be honest, sometimes I did hate Laura a little bit. I hated her when it was late at night and she cried while we were finally having a good time, or when her voice cracked with emotion over her apple-sauce that she refused to eat if there were lumps. I hated her when she left a ring of milk on the kitchen counter and when she got her brown hairs stuck in the toothpaste on the sink. I hated her when my father was on the phone, and also throwing out the garbage, and also putting on his shoes, and she would look at him as though he was the maid and say, "Dad, hand me that marker," and I would look at her and say, "Can't you see he is busy?" but really what I wanted to say was, Can't you see that he is my father? Can't you see that we have the same exact nose, that we share a vocabulary? Can't you see that we have a history you will never understand? She tugged on Raisinet's fur like he was a doll and not a living thing that was suffering and she left my bobby pins in the shapes of crosses all along the coffee table. She spit on her palms when her hands were dry, and she blew out candles before the night was over and got scared in the dark. She'd look over at me from across the room like I wasn't enough protection and say, "Where is my dad?" and I would have to correct her and say, "Where is our dad, Laura." I hated her when she looked at Raisinet and then at me, and said, "I don't love him anymore," and I wanted to scream at her, even though she was just a child. Even though I did love her, and sometimes at night, she would draw a little mouth on her hand and sing me the Cheeseburger Song, or sit on my lap and ask me if I had ever heard of s.e.x before, and I would laugh and tell her that of course I had. Even through all of this, sometimes I wanted to lift up her chin and say, "Don't you see that is your dog?" Don't you see how we didn't want to have to love you, Laura? Don't you see how you have to love things forever anyway, no matter if it shakes, or drools, or barks in the middle of the night, or throws up food, or dies, because even in death, he is still your dog? You picked him out of a group and said, that is my dog, and the dog you picked shakes and drools and barks in the middle of the night, but you named him. And for that reason you should never want to give him up, you should always be grateful since your dog is one of the few things in life that you actually can choose as your own.

"He's a boy," she said. "I didn't know it was a boy when I chose him. I should have asked."

I took her teary little face in my hands.

"You should always always ask for what you want, Laura," I said.

I wasted too much of my life not asking for what I wanted. I didn't even know how to pray properly. When we were at St. Vitus Cathedral, after we had purchased our prayers, we each got a candle to light. I had never been much for prayer because most of the time I wasn't sure what I was supposed to expect for myself. What did we have the right to expect? I took a match to my candle. I lit the wick, and we stood in a circle around the candle display and watched our prayers burn into tiny stubs, drowning in the white wax, and I thought of what I wanted, what I had always wanted those four years in college I spent undressing to the entire soundtrack of Moulin Rouge after theater parties, kissing various boys with spotty beards and dirty fingernails, half-naked architects who wouldn't shut up about Frank Lloyd Wright or the weird thing they just found on their p.e.n.i.s, boys who ate pizza with joints hanging out their mouths, boys who held me and licked me like I was covered in wounds as they played Portishead and asked me questions late into the night, like would I rather have to kill my whole family or the whole state of Ohio, and I said, "Does the state of Ohio know I murdered them?" and they looked at me and said, "That's four million people, Emily, that's genocide," and I hated them, these boys with uncombed hair and too-short ties who didn't understand that it was all just a game.

Mr. Basketball. Jonathan.

This was why all those women sat on those stools in our high school auditorium and shook their fingers and said, girls, don't let them touch you, girls, don't let them hold you, because even if you hated them, even if their proximity made your heart pound in fear, when they were gone and you were alone, you could hardly feel your pulse.

I lit my candle and I prayed.

A man walked by and my candle was blown out by the wind. I took a picture of it, with Laura's face behind the candle. On the way home, I took pictures of things I didn't think anybody would ever want to remember, like the underside of a black bench in the middle of the city where the word "rain" was written in Wite-Out. A half-eaten sandwich thrown on the street. A sign that read food store. An old man who got his foot stuck in a revolving door and didn't even notice until someone pointed it out to him. Until I put down my camera and said, "Mister, your foot," but he flinched like I was about to mug him since he didn't know any English, and I was coming closer to him, and I wanted to say, Why are we always so scared of everything, why am I so scared of the watermarks on the buildings, or the silence on the night trams, or to sit down with my father and have a proper conversation? but the man was gone, grumbled something in French and walked in the door.

Why could we never speak? Why could I never ask for what I wanted?

I got my photo alb.u.m from my bedroom. It was full of all the images I never wanted to remember but carried around with me so I'd never forget. "A poem is a record of change," Mr. Basketball said once, and this felt true to me; I was a record of change, and this photo alb.u.m was a record of change. My father and Mrs. Resnick in the woods at his birthday party, Mr. Basketball's red gym shorts, my mother on the couch holding a martini. I put the picture of the bench with the word "rain" in an envelope and sent it to Mr. Basketball. I didn't know why exactly, or if he even had the same address, or if I was just sending something out there to the universe, but it seemed to me that he was the only person who would understand exactly what I saw in all of this. Image, was all I wrote. Then I signed my full name: Emily Marie Vidal.

My father and I didn't get to spend that much time alone together, except when he took me out to dinner on Wednesdays, and when he ordered Shiraz, he always said, 'Let's celebrate,' like Happy Wednesday, Daughter, hope it was better than Tuesday, though I hope your Tuesday was great too, and I never asked what people clapped about during the middle of the week and he never held out his gla.s.s to toast anything. We just liked to say things: "Hi, Father," I said with a grin. "I'm your daughter Emily and we just like to say things."

He laughed. Sometimes I loved my father more than anything.