The Adults (27 page)

“That was nice of him,” I said. I heard my father’s knees crack when he stood up, folding the newspaper into quarters. “What movie were they seeing?”

“
Mrs. Doubtfire
,” my father said, his voice coming from the kitchen. “The Robin Williams one.”

“Oh,” I said. “I saw that movie when I was eleven.”

“You couldn’t have been that young,” he said.

“I was,” I said. “I know for sure. I was at the theater with you.”

I remembered that day specifically because on the way out of the theater Mark didn’t hold the door for me, and it slammed in my face, and I thought this was a sure sign he didn’t want to be my husband, and afterward in the car, I was glad when my father lectured Mark on what it meant to be a gentleman. “You open the doors, you pay for the meal, and you drive,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s your goddamn grandmother or your wife, you got that?”

I heard my father place his teacup in the sink and leave the room.

“
Kde je hrob Franze Kafky?
” the teacher said. It was our second class together. “Like,
Where is grave of Franz Kafka?
”

“
Kde je
,” she repeated. “Where is . . .”

The class was silent.

“
Židovský hřbitov na Olšanech
,” the teacher said. “In case any of you are interested in visiting it. The Jewish Cemetery at O.”

The class was even more silent, if that was possible.

“Oh, don’t be afraid,” she said. “Czech is not as terrifying as it looks. And we do have grammar, despite what any Germans might be telling you on the street. All you need to know, really, is that once you learn the alphabet, you’re all set because every letter in Czech is always pronounced the same. And you pronounce, most of the time, every single letter in the word.

“For example,” she said. “It is Thursday. It is
Čtvrtek
.”

She led us through the word phonetically: Ch-trv-tek.

“Oh,” Jonathan said loudly, as though he were still the teacher in the front of the classroom. “That explains it.”

Everybody laughed. When somebody finally pronounced it correctly, she dismissed us.

Jonathan and I set off for the miniature museum. The miniature museum showcased microscopic exhibits like Kafka’s head carved into a poppy seed, or a golden train sculpted on a strand of hair. Jonathan and I looked up the address of the museum and set off to find it. We walked for an hour until the snow started to accumulate on top of our hats.

“Maybe it’s microscopic,” I said. I stopped walking. “Maybe you can’t actually find the museum without a microscope.”

Jonathan put his mouth close to my ear in front of the St. John of Nepomuk statue. He whispered something I couldn’t hear. It was something important, I know that, because it made him lift up my face with his finger. He kissed me, and it was new and welcome and familiar. I was electrified. Finally. The snow had started to melt; rain was running over our feet like rivers. Jonathan’s skin was smooth and his dimples deep. The details of the city were emerging. Below St. John of Nepomuk, an angel appeared, her stone finger over her lips.

“That statue is supposed to grant you a wish,” I said. “You’re supposed to touch it and it grants you a wish.”

Jonathan reached out his hand and touched St. John of Nepomuk. He closed his eyes. “I wish I wasn’t such a dumbass.”

I laughed. We began walking.

“Let’s go get some absinthe,” Jonathan said. “Have you had it here yet?”

“No,” I said.

We went to the Café Louvre. Café Louvre was a giant restaurant with so much space it was like eating in a really beautiful department store.

“Hello,” the waiter said when we sat down at our table. The waiters in Prague always spoke in perfect English, but I liked to respond in Czech for practice.

“
Dobrý den
,” I said.

“We would like to have some absinthe,” Jonathan said. “Not the cheap stuff. And a
pivo
.”

The waiter took our menus and left.

“So how long have you been a lawyer?” I said.

“Too long,” Jonathan said.

“You don’t like it?”

“I like it the way I like stable things,” he said. “It’s boring. I do product liability. It pays well. Sometimes it’s exciting. Sometimes it’s not. Sometimes all I talk about all day is a fence.”

The waiter came back with our absinthe. He put two cups of green liquid in front of us. It looked like antifreeze. He ripped open two packets of sugar and poured them into two spoons. He dipped the sugar into the absinthe, and then lit the sugar on fire. A flame grew over the spoon like electric mold, and the sugar caramelized. I laughed while Jonathan stared into my eyes. The waiter poured the flaming sugar into the absinthe and stirred. Jonathan and I picked up our glasses, toasted to nothing except transformation, which felt like enough. I swallowed the absinthe, and it was huge and hot down my throat. It felt like swallowing the sun whole, like a giant mistake.

“Am I different?” he said. “Sometimes you look at me like I’m different.”

“You are different.”

“I am,” he said. “You’ll be disappointed, I’m sure.”

“I don’t have very high expectations,” I said.

“I like it here,” he said. “I like who I am here. With you.”

“Sometimes it’s nice to get away,” I said. “You take a step back from your real life. You find out things you didn’t, couldn’t, possibly know before.”

I felt like I was lying, even though I was barely saying anything at all.

“What’s wrong with what you know?” Jonathan asked.

“Don’t you want to know what you don’t know?”

“What
don’t
you know?”

“Why the universe started as a singularity,” I said to him. “For instance.”

He laughed. My whole body was tender. If Jonathan reached out to touch me in that moment, he would have left hand imprints all over my body.

“What the fuck is a singularity?” he asked. “Can you explain to me, right now, what a singularity is?”

“It’s infinitesimal.”

“I still don’t get it.”

“Yeah, neither do I,” I said.

“Well if you find out, do let me know. I’ll be hanging off the edge of my fucking seat,” he said.

He smiled to let me know his swears were always compliments.

The walls of the hotel served as lit storage cabinets designed to look like a giant, illuminated checkerboard. In the white spaces, thin statues of gaunt men and women were stretched at their heads and feet. There were stacks of round dinner plates and bunches of steel firewood. Maybe it was the absinthe in my blood, maybe it was the Marshmallow Sofa, but something about the room just didn’t feel right.

“That’s my sofa,” I said, pointing to the black Marshmallow Sofa in front of the coffee table. “I picked out that sofa.”

Jonathan sat down on it.

“Does it make you question everything you thought you knew about sitting down?” I asked.

He ran his hand over the leather. “I don’t know anything about sitting down,” he finally said. I laughed.

He took my hand and pulled me into his lap. My whole body felt limp. His touch had always been too powerful a thing. His touch was something I assumed I’d find in other men, but never did. He smoothed my hair away from my face. It was all happening again. Just like it used to. Except when we used to sleep together, Mr. Basketball always wanted me on my back, on a bed. He touched my breasts while he moved inside me, held my forehead down with his other hand. Jonathan sat upright and slid my underwear down my legs. “Is this all right?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. I nodded. “Please.”

He unzipped his pants, and they dropped to the floor. I could see through his boxers that he wasn’t hard. Mr. Basketball was always hard. Mr. Basketball was hard even when he was on the other side of the room reading the dictionary. Jonathan didn’t get hard until we were both naked, until he was against me, and even then he wasn’t fully extended, and as if to change the subject he said, “You don’t shave anymore.”

We were both embarrassed. I was embarrassed not for being unshaven, but for the way I had shaved when I was younger. I had been too scared to cut myself, so I only shaved the upper part and he had once said it looked like Bert from
Sesame Street
.

“Can we have this discussion after, please?” I asked. He laughed, took my face in his hands, kissed me, relaxed now that he was inside me, we were together again, and I thought, I can’t believe Mr. Basketball is inside me again.

By the end, he was shaking.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I haven’t had sex in eleven months.”

“That’s okay,” I said. Eleven months?

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 penis 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 sex 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 fucks 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 class.”

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
class. 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-to–white sauce–to-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.

A
t 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 & Stitch
, and Ester cried at the part when Lilo sends Stitch 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.”