The Adults Part 22

Eventually he stopped shaking. Eventually, we were lying next to each other and ran our hands over unexpected body parts. The spine. The ear. The nostril. The underside of a wrist. His p.e.n.i.s was smaller than I had remembered, but I was bigger than I had used to be. Part of growing up was watching the world get smaller, and I convinced myself the s.e.x felt better this way, smaller, softer, on a nice padded leather seat. It never hurt. So he took me to the floor of the bathroom and we made love on the white marble tile. He said he wanted me to feel him all over my body. He said he missed me so much he couldn't understand it. Neither could I. I ached in my tailbone, but I pressed him closer anyway. He kissed me each time he pulled back inside me, and his mouth was different now. His lips were harder and stronger and more potent in taste. He was more restrained and careless all at the same time, louder with his noises, as though he felt better when he announced who he was touching, who he was headed toward: Emily Marie, Emily Marie, he moaned.

The bathroom was so pearlescent, it was possible to consider the idea that we both had died.

Naked, on the bathroom floor, I stared at the large raised Roman-style tub, while Jonathan told me about his childhood in Greenwich and how he was always jealous of people who lived in the desert and had nothing to wear. "Why?" I asked. But sometimes he didn't answer questions, which made me wonder if I was using the right intonation. Instead, he told me he used to be a drug dealer in high school. "But it's okay, because I only sold it to rich f.u.c.ks who would have found it elsewhere."

He told me about all of the girlfriends he had between me because he could tell just by looking at me that I needed to know everything about the gap.

"I dated this girl once who was really into rap music," he said. "It was weird. We'd be sitting around and she'd be like, 'Who was your favorite rap artist of 2000?'"

"And you'd say, 'The one with the woodwinds,' of course?"

We laughed and when we stopped laughing I said, "Tell me the truth. Did you ever sleep with Janice?"

"Janice?" he asked. "Who is Janice?"

"That girl," I said. "That girl with the gum. She was always chewing gum in our cla.s.s."

How tragically we are reduced in time. My childhood best friend. That girl with the gum.

"Emily," he said. "I didn't sleep with anybody in your cla.s.s. Who do you think I am?"

The last time I saw Janice was at the grocery store right before I left for Prague. She looked shocked to see me, like she had expected me to be dead by now or something. She told me she was finishing her fifth year at Boston College, where she studied biology. "Yeah, I don't know why I study biology," Janice said, rocking her cart back and forth. She was wearing her hair short. "It's the worst place in the world to go if you want to study biology. Even my professors know that. Sometimes, they look at us like, seriously? Like, this is a Catholic liberal arts school. We have one rat, and we've done all of our experiments on him. He's got about seven tumors by now. Like, do you ever see us smiling?" I laughed hard, and then her expression changed. "Well, see you around," she said quickly, and walked away. "Wait!" I almost shouted out, but instead turned the cart and went to get yogurt.

"I'm hungry," Jonathan said. "Let's go get a sandwich. You eat sandwiches?"

"That's like asking, 'Do you eat things in conglomeration?'"

"No, it's like asking, 'Do you eat meat slices in between bread?'"

We picked up two packaged sandwiches from the grocery store that were called Stripsy. We paid for them. "Nashledanou."

"This sandwich," I said, biting into the stale bread and the fried chicken, "all at once, is intimidating."

"Suddenly, spicy," he said. "And then an unexpected white sauce that confuses as much as it cools."

"Is it good? It's okay. Was I expecting better? Maybe."

"Is there lettuce falling everywhere, including but not limited to the ground, my shirt, that guy over there? Yes."

"But where can we apply blame?"

"Maybe to Prague as a whole, for settling," I said.

"Prague," Jonathan repeated, but in a movie-announcer voice. "Where the meat is never fully pressed into the crevice of the bread. Where there is no satisfactory meat-to-cheese-towhite sauceto-lettuce-to-bread ratio."

We held hands and I remembered feeling something in the pit of my stomach, something like love or terror or the need to possess him, like a woman who is never and always alone, the terror of a woman who is in love all the time.

25.

At home, Raisinet was having a seizure, and my father was on the couch holding him. Laura stood by the microwave crying. "Jesus," Ester said, and grabbed my hand. "We're going to the movies, Victor."

Along the way, Ester and I picked up feathered hats and stroked pashminas as we walked by the street vendors and one of us always said, "Soft," while one of us always agreed. A crazy man approached me and asked if I would eat his Pringle. "No, thanks," I said. Ester laughed. We were getting closer. Most days, we drank a different flavored coffee, and we made up hypothetical relationships between the vendors. Merchant Love, Ester liked to call it.

The only nondubbed American film playing was Lilo & St.i.tch, and Ester cried at the part when Lilo sends St.i.tch away. "I just can't take it when cartoons are cruel to each other," Ester said. "It's harder to take than when real people are cruel. I think that means something is wrong with me."

On the subway, she told me what it had felt like to be married.

"You know," she said, "the only way I can describe it is that I could walk through our kitchen at home and, when it was clean and organized, feel nothing but depressed. Everything was so clean, and the Tupperware was back in the cabinets and the sauce had been picked off the stove and here I thought that was what the problem was, but standing in the middle of the kitchen, everything felt clean and wrong. I had all the answers to all the questions I ever had and everything still felt wrong. I knew everything about my husband and he knew everything about me. I knew that when he woke up in the morning it took him ten minutes to brush his teeth, five minutes to yell at me for leaving a scarf on the stairs, even if he didn't fall or trip on it or anything, it was always the principle of the matter that mattered."

"That's what my father used to say when I left a sock on the floor," I said. "I'd say, 'Dad, it's just one sock, it barely takes up any room.' And he'd say, 'Emily, it's the principle of the matter.'"

Ester said that when you were married, there was no sense of urgency anymore. "Like when one of us was leaving on a trip, we wouldn't even have s.e.x. I would say, 'You didn't even try,' and he would say, 'You're on your period.' And I would say, 'You wouldn't even know that because you didn't even try,' and he would say, 'Ester, I can see the garbage can.'"

"Sheesh," was my only response.

"Anyways," she said, "that's what it's like to be married."

"It's like having tampons in a can and somebody you love noticing?"

"It's like putting up a giant scoreboard in your living room."

"Then why would you want to get married again?" I asked.

"Because," she said. "Sometimes, you win."

ODKUD JSTE? This was what the teacher wrote on the board in big white letters during our fourth cla.s.s. "Like, Where are you from?"

"Jsem z Ameriky," I said to the cla.s.s.

"Jake je vae povolani?" she asked. "Like, What do you do?"

"Jsem obchodnik," I said.

Like, I am a businessperson.

"That's just so not true," Jonathan whispered in my ear. "Jste. Lha."

Like, You are a liar.

"Jste jen lovk," he said.

You are only a person.

"Jste jen the Little Mole."

The Little Mole was a Czech book of cartoons that Jonathan and I stumbled upon in Shakespeare and Sons one day, two weeks into his trip, about a mole who never spoke but traveled around town solving crimes in the spirit of socialism.

"He's so cute," Jonathan had said. "He reminds me of you."

Then we overheard some Frenchwoman yelling at her son, who was peering under books, making them fall to the ground. "You are just like le Little Mole!" she screamed. The boy cried.

Afterward, on the street, Jonathan pretended he was yelling at me, a little child, "that was mute and inquisitive and politically active!" Jonathan said. This made us laugh so hard, Jonathan started calling me le Little Mole.

And when I opened the door to my father's apartment to let Jonathan inside, Jonathan said, "Le Little Mole!" I had thought the nickname was just a joke that bonded me and Jonathan until my father approached, stuck out his hand, and said, "Please don't refer to my daughter as a mole."

This should have made me feel better but it felt the same way when my father and I used to sit around making fun of our noses, and my mother would say, "Victor, her nose is fine." It only confirmed everything that was wrong with my nose: long, lumpy at the top, overall much too eager. And when my father had said, "Don't call my daughter a mole," it confirmed it: there was something inherently mole-like about me that needed defending.

I had convinced Jonathan to come over and babysit Laura with me while Ester and my father went to the opera. "I don't want to meet your father," he had protested at the hotel. "It's too weird. I'm nine years older than you."

"He won't care," I had said. "His fiancee is almost twenty years younger than him." But as soon as I said this aloud, I knew it didn't matter. I knew I was wrong, the same way I had been wrong when I brought my Barbies to Mark's house as a child, and Mark asked, "Won't my dad think it's strange that I'm playing with Barbies?" to which I said, "No, he won't care. I promise."

"I'm Jonathan," he said, and stuck out his hand to greet my father.

"I'm Emily's father," my father said as he shook his hand slowly. It occurred to me then that my father had never met a man I dated before. It occurred to me that neither of us knew what to do. My father looked strangely at Jonathan and did not let go of his hand.

"We've done this before," my father said.

"Pardon?" Jonathan said.

"We've shaken hands before. I know you. I've done this with you before."

"I apologize, sir, I don't quite recall."

My father let go of his hand.

"You are a teacher at Webb High," my father said. "I remember you from the graduation. You were talking to Emily. We shook hands."

And the most surprising thing about this was that I was pleased; my father remembered my life.

"Oh," Jonathan said. "I was, yes. But I'm a lawyer now."

"But you were Emily's teacher, no?"

I chimed in. "No. We didn't know each other until I was in college."

We were silent. It was an obvious lie. Ester walked into the room with Laura.

"All right, Victor," Ester said. "The opera waits for no one except Pavarotti, and even then . . ."

She stood in front of the door and eyed Jonathan, who I realized was about her age, and this was humiliating for some reason, perhaps mostly for Jonathan, the two people in their thirties, one off to the opera and the other the babysitter.

"Wait," my father said, grabbing his coat and hat.

"Don't go, Dad!" Laura shouted all of a sudden. She fell at his feet with a rubber cheeseburger and banana in her hand. "Let's play Eat!"

Laura was obsessed with pretend. My father had gotten her a pretend kitchen, and she tugged on his arm and asked if we would all play Eat with her.

"I already ate, sweetheart," my father said, trying to peel her off of him.

"That's why we won't eat too much," Laura said.

My father looked at me for help.

But I stood there with my arms crossed, angry that my father called us out. Laura is your responsibility, I thought. You had her.

"What are we going to eat?" I asked as I scooped up Laura from the floor.

"You can eat the banana," she said, and stuck out her hand that held the rubber banana. "I'll have the cheeseburger."

"How come I get the banana?"

"Because I'm the princess and you are just the Bunny Friend."

The logic of eight-year-olds. I put her down on the couch.

"Bunny Friend?" I asked. "What do you mean?"

She put on a tiara. She handed me a headband with rabbit ears. I put it on my head.

"Bye, girls," my father said.

"Wait! Want to see my skeleton?" Laura asked, and lifted up her shirt, sucking in so hard her ribs hung carelessly over her hipbones. "Look at my skeleton!"

My father walked over, swooped her up, and hung her upside down by her feet until the vein in the middle of her forehead popped out from laughing so hard. "I'm going to shake your bones out," he said. My father was a different father around Laura. He was like a loving big brother, whereas sometimes, I felt like my father's business a.s.sociate. I remember when I was younger, and my father and I were at one end of the dinner table, a bamboo plant between us, and we were making up lists of words that rhymed with our last name. Midol, I had said. He laughed. That's not a real word, he said. Then what is it? I asked. If it's not a word, what is it?

You got me there, he said, and we both took sips of his bitter coffee.

My father put Laura down. "Good night, girls." He looked at me and then at Jonathan. "You all be safe now," he said, closing the door.

To play Eat, you sit on a floor and you hold your head over plastic dishes with plastic carrot slices on them, then after, you throw the plastic carrot sticks behind your head and shout out, "All done!" only so you can ask for more plastic food to throw behind you, so you can ask for more plastic food to throw behind you, etc.

"This is getting silly," I said to Laura, chucking a stalk of plastic broccoli behind my head.

"You're right," she said. She sat down next to Jonathan. "I'll feed you pudding."

Jonathan opened his mouth. He was her prince, and princes, Laura said, should always be spoon-fed.

Jonathan seemed to like this idea. He smiled and said, "The best d.a.m.n pudding I ever had."

Raisinet trotted happily into the room. Laura glared at him. "Go away!" she shouted. "Ruffski!"

"Laura," I scolded. "Be nice to the dog."