The Adults Part 23

"Don't tell me what to do!" Laura snapped.

"And why not?" I asked.

"Because you are the Bunny Friend," she said. "Which is basically the same thing as the maid. Get us some tea, please, Bunny Friend!"

There were moments when Laura looked at me like she was trying to tell me how much she hated me. When she didn't understand quite who I was, when she admired and despised me all at the same time, and wrapped her arms around me and put her cheek to my chest just to feel the cold spots in my heart.

"Laura, go get washed up for bed," I said. "It's already nine."

"Oh, come on, Emily," Jonathan said. "I was just about to get more pudding."

"Come on, Emily," Laura mimicked. "It's time for more pudding. Don't be a bore."

Sometimes, she looked at me like she was already disappointed in what I could be. Children can make you feel like such a fraud in this way.

"All right," I said. "Eat the pudding." I looked at Jonathan. "But you'll have to put her to bed when she can't sleep."

Jonathan opened his mouth wide for pretend pudding, while I pretend smiled and, after, Laura rolled on the floor actually flipping up her skirt.

At ten, Jonathan put her to bed. He laid her body down on the mattress as though he had done such a thing before, his hand behind her head. "I love you," Laura said to him. "Not as much as Peter Pan, but I still do love you, very very much."

When Jonathan came out, he said, "Wow."

"What?" I asked.

"She is a spitting image of Mark," he said. "Her gestures, her smile."

"She's my sister too," I said, suddenly possessive of Laura.

"I know that, sweetheart," he said, and kissed me softly on the lips.

Later, when we heard Laura snoring, Jonathan and I climbed into the master bedroom, and Jonathan broke out a warm bottle of wine and I consented to the wall. Nothing ever really changed, I thought. Me in the master bedroom, Laura next door, and the wine was always warm. So I said, "No," to Jonathan. "Turn me around, I want to see the whole room. I want to see the room."

We were face-to-face. "I'm going to put my c.o.c.k inside you," he said in my ear, and I pressed my nose into his shoulder. He put my arms against the wall, and as much as things might have looked the same, everything was different, like a discussion, upright as humans who had to carry their own weight.

"I am in loveski with you," he said after, under my father's silver sheets.

"How do you know that you loveski me?" I asked.

We tumbled over each other, thrilled to be in the master bedroom.

"I just know," he said. "I know like I know there are hairs growing out of my head."

"So when you're bald, I'll know it's over."

"Exactly."

26.

Jonathan and I were going to meet at nine in Stare Msto. He was leaving in a few days, and my skin already felt cold and dry as though he had gone. I was listening to one of Ester's CDs and thickening my lashes.

Laura was on the floor watching me apply makeup. Ever since Jonathan's comment about her face, I couldn't stop thinking of her as Mark. Like Mark was behind me, staring up from the ground, asking, "Why are you putting tar on your eyes?"

"Makes my eyes stand out more," I said.

"That makes no sense," she said.

Ester was behind me as well, watching from the table. I got the feeling that Ester wanted to come with me, as though watching me apply mascara was reminding her of a certain kind of happiness. Then she looked at my father, as if she were saying, Oh, I'd better not, I'm dating someone who is so responsible he'll probably wear his tie to bed. But then she went into her room and came back in a puffy blue dress.

"How do I look?" she asked. It occurred to me that she wanted to look attractive. That she could very well find Jonathan attractive. They were, after all, closer in age than any of us.

"Like you're about to blast off to the moon," Laura said, and I laughed. "Ester the astronaut, blasts off to Planet Snot!"

Ester grabbed her purse.

"Oh, you guys," Ester said. "Please don't hate me."

Ester and I went to Stare Msto and sat on wicker chairs, waiting for Jonathan. Ester was crossing her legs and telling me her opinion on the most upsetting births of 2002. I wore black velvet stretch boots that I borrowed from my mother before I left, a black chiffon dress that bunched at the breastbone, and my mother's red paisley scarf, and I was so overdressed I felt like I was somebody's grandmother trying to get laid for the last time. I was so overdressed that when my father came into the apartment, he saw me standing at the fridge with my back toward him and accidentally said to me, "Hi, honey, I'm home."

"When is he coming?" Ester asked, looking at her watch. Sometimes, when I felt dry and worn-out, old and useless, I focused on the differences between me and Ester. Ester sprayed herself with too much perfume and wore a watch, while I just looked at the sun for guidance, and shrugged my shoulders and mumbled, "Soonish."

I drank two martinis before I could even feel them bubble down my throat and got drunk fairly quickly. I thought Ester was overdressed too, but she said this was impossible. She said that earlier we walked by a water fountain that was lined in golden horses, and being overdressed in front of golden horses in Prague was like being too prepared for the SAT.

"It's like wearing too much black to a funeral," I said.

"You can't wear too much black to a funeral," she said, like she was the authority on blackness and funerals.

"Yes you can," I said. "I've seen it."

Ester asked me if I was going to be protagonistic all night.

"You mean antagonistic," I said.

"See?" she said.

At the bar, I started talking to two Americans named Craig and Vince. Craig and Vince were in Prague on a business trip and they missed America. They worked with Nestle. Craig handled the accounts and Vince handled negotiations. They hated cookies and they hated negotiations about cookies and they hated Prague, they said. Too many f.u.c.king cafes with too many cookies. Too many f.u.c.king places to sit down. Encourages nothing. What if they didn't want to sit down? And how the f.u.c.k do you say "cheese" here?

"Sr," I said.

"That's ridiculous," Craig said. Craig and Vince were hot all the time, like sweaty, they said, in the armpits especially, and everyone smelled like rotten cauliflower, and did we notice how the wine seemed watered down, like it was just another form of juice?

"You're drowning in specificity," I said. I had heard a tall blond woman make that comment about an exhibit at the Kafka Museum; she leaned into an older man's shoulder and said, "Frederick, this man was drowning in his own specificity."

Ester laughed. Ester was getting drunk as well.

We had been drinking for over an hour now and no sign of Jonathan. "Well," Ester said. "Who knows why men do what they do."

"He didn't change his mind," I said. "He's coming."

"Right," she said. "He is coming. Like my ex-husband is coming. Any second now, he's going to appear. White horse. Giddy up. Bulls.h.i.t."

She told me that if her husband hadn't left her for being gay, he would have left her cleft chin.

"He didn't like my cleft chin," she said. "I said, 'I always had a cleft chin. I had a cleft chin when I married you, a.s.shole.'"

I took a sip of my drink.

"He said, 'Doesn't that make it more upsetting or something?'"

Ester told me that he was concerned she would mother children with a million little cleft chins. That they would run around town and look like Harvey Birdman's offspring. "I don't even know what that means," she said. "Who is Harvey Birdman? Am I supposed to know who that is?"

"He's a cartoon," I said.

"You kids," Ester said. "You and Laura, always running around talking about s.h.i.t I know nothing about. I'm sick of it."

"Well, we're sick of you," I said. "You and my father always running off to the opera. Always eating gelato. What's wrong with ice cream? Do you two ever listen to music?"

Ester laughed hysterically. "You're funny," she said. "You're just like your father."

I smiled.

"Not like Laura," she said. "Don't you think? She's so different."

"What do you mean?"

"Oh, I don't know," she said. "She's just different from you guys."

"Different how?"

"She says strange things," Ester said.

"Well, she's eight."

"And her widow's peak," Ester said. "It's pretty distinctive, don't you think?"

Laura had an incredibly severe widow's peak. That was why she looked so much more like Mark. My father didn't have a widow's peak, and neither did I. But Mr. Resnick did. He had a very severe widow's peak and I knew that because at a party when I was little he had come over to me and said, "Quick! A widow's peak, or a man's peak?"

"What's a widow's peak?" I asked.

He pointed to his. "A man's peak. Got it from my father. Not the only thing I got either. And I did my duty and gave it to Mark. It's the Resnick Peak, pa.s.sed down through generations of us."

"She's not his daughter," I said aloud to Ester. "Laura is not my father's daughter."

Ester paused midmartini.

"You mean it's true?" I asked, not really believing my own theory.

She shifted her weight a few times in the chair before she began talking again.

"Please don't tell your father I told you," Ester begged. "He would kill me."

She told me that, at first, when Mrs. Resnick announced she was pregnant, my father had a.s.sumed it was his. But they had a DNA test done because my father wanted to be sure, and he was right for doing so-it wasn't my father's. But Mrs. Resnick was a wreck. Mr. Resnick had just killed himself, and she couldn't find the will to brush her teeth anymore, let alone raise a child with a dead father.

"She didn't have enough money," Ester said. "Not to raise Laura like she wanted to. So she guilt-tripped your father into fathering her."

"How?"

"She cried, banged her head against the bathtub, apparently."

Mrs. Resnick told my father he had to claim Laura as his, said he couldn't leave her alone like that, but my father said he couldn't lie to a child for the whole of her life. Then, Mrs. Resnick had looked my father in the eye and said, "We killed her father, Victor. We killed him. Now you need to be her new father." And he agreed, just like that.

"And my father told you all of this?" I asked.

"Yes," she said.

"That doesn't sound like him," I said. "Are you saying this just because you don't like Laura?"

"No," she said. "It's the truth. And I like Laura."

I felt sick.

"You can't say anything, Emily. This is a secret. This is serious stuff."

My tongue was damp and thick. "Are you okay?" Ester asked.

I went outside. I looked for Jonathan down the street. He's coming, I thought. Heads everywhere, but none of them Jonathan's. I went back inside and had the bartender call his hotel room. I listened to the phone ring. I went to the bathroom to splash water on my face, then looked in the mirror, and just like that, I was alone again.

27.

European interiors," Kritof said during our first cla.s.s of European Interiors I, "advanced with the help of royalty."

"That is why Europeans trust their tastes," he explained, "while the Americans are always wasting everybody's time just trying to identify good taste." Europeans knew how to create their own private style, while Americans followed the latest trend. "Even if it meant lining your couch with baby's foreskin," Kritof said, and the cla.s.s laughed.

My father the atheist, my father the capitalist, my father the man who was never trying to prove anything. I was often amazed at how little he tried to prove. He never hung paintings unless Ester made him. Ester said he didn't even have a mirror until she moved in. His curtains were dark brown, and he had curtains only because he couldn't sleep with the faintest hint of light. He never cleaned, and never defended the filthy apartment when we had guests (which was rare), not the way everyone else I knew always said, "Excuse the apartment, I'm in the middle of something." Once, I told him living there was like living inside a cardboard box with running faucets. "I left everything I loved about the inside of a home in America," he said in return.

"That's sad," I said.