The Made-Up Man

by Joseph Scapellato

  My aunt spatulaed kolaczky off the cookie sheet and onto a rack. A few flipped awry, to the floor. Neither of us made a move to pick them up.

  Instead of saying, “What did T tell you,” I said, “I’ll be right back.”

  The bathroom was partly open. I knocked and nudged the door, finding the space unoccupied, just the sink and the toilet and the stand packed with foreign-language tour guides to the United States. On the wall was a hand-drawn shadow of a man in a hat and trench coat. He held a purse as if it were a briefcase. When I turned to close the door the doorway was full of Uncle Lech.

  He snapped a picture with an old camera, the flash explosive.

  I slammed and locked the door. The figure of my uncle stayed in my vision in searing negative. Pissing, I felt the echoes of my father’s anger—I saw my father smashing the camera, smashing Uncle Lech, and smashing through the door on the way to his truck, to traffic, to the condo he’d built himself and hated.

  I flushed the toilet. My father would never do the things that I imagined.

  “Stasiu,” said Uncle Lech as I opened the door.

  Instead of the camera he held the bottle of Chopin and two shot glasses. His shirt and tie evoked the 1940s or ’50s. He had a serious, pale, and pitted face, and a sloppy mustache that hid his mouth. He looked like a handsome actor who’d been made up ugly.

  His eyes were blue lights on broken ice.

  He said, “I offer proposal.”

  Every now and again he pitched “proposals” to my dad and brother, and because my dad refused to speak or listen to him, I’d get the scoop from my brother, who always listened, laughing, as Uncle Lech invited him to spend an afternoon wearing a tape recorder while riding the Red Line from Howard to Ninety-Fifth and back, or a day modeling for an inspirational rags-to-riches mural he planned to paint on a train car he’d found knocked over near defunct tracks on the West Side, or a night in an office chair on the roof of the Stock Exchange wearing suits and eating steaks. In the four years we’d known him this was the first he’d asked me. Whatever I’d felt about being photographed in the bathroom hardened inadvisably into pride.

  We sat on stools at the breakfast bar. Aunt Abbey powder-sugared kolaczki at the counter, not looking at us.

  Uncle Lech filled the glasses. They were doubles. He chewed on his mustache hairs, clicking them with his teeth. “You suffer unemployment?”

  I’d been unable to score a full-time job since dropping out of grad school and everybody knew it.

  “You have not yet traveled out of country?”

  I hadn’t.

  “You desire to travel out of country, to gain employment?”

  I asked him where.

  “Prague.”

  I must’ve gone as red as my aunt.

  He raised his glass. “It will not be that you will be in over your head,” he said. He drank. I didn’t. He licked vodka droplets from his mustache, observing me. I wanted him to know that I knew what he was up to, that if I agreed, it’d be because I’d position my own interests before his, at the cost of his. I did my best to press this into how I stared back.

  He belched.

  Aunt Abbey set a plate of kolaczki between us: cherry, almond, poppy seed, prune.

  “Dziękuję,” he said tenderly, touching her waist.

  I couldn’t remember another time I’d seen him thank her.

  “Thanks,” I said, wanting her to look at me.

  She looked at no one and said nothing and left the kitchen for the backyard. The screen door whapped. My brother hollered something silly. My body clenched: I wanted badly to be outside. Not so much to know what joke had just been made, but to be taken away from myself by it.

  Uncle Lech put his hand on my shoulder like my brother had. His fingers were hot. He explained that he’d invested in a Prague apartment near Old Town Square, an expensive venture. He needed someone to apartment-sit and to facilitate the move-in of a tenant. He’d come to trust me.

  “You are actual,” he said.

  He would pay for my round-trip ticket. For three days I would stay in his apartment, my duties minimal, and on the last day the tenant would move in and I would move out. I could stay abroad as long as I liked—to visit other cities, other countries—and my return flight could be arranged from anywhere. He’d need me there at the end of August. He’d pay five thousand dollars.

  I drank my vodka. “T is going to be in Prague then. But you knew that.”

  “When I was young man,” he said, “I did not know why I did action. I pretend I did. Make money, make art, make love. Crack a man. Immigrate. Pick up broken garbage and put them where you live. Lie. All because of hiding and pretending! The man in the basement behind the noise door that is locked and eating the one key himself while shouting, No, this is not what I am doing. Now I am not young man: the reason why I do action is that I do not know. I do not know! I love Abbey—I do not know how—I do not say that I know, saying some thing that is made up—I very basically love her. I kiss her on the mouth. We touch. It is observed. This is my development, this is not your development: you understand. You are actual, Stasiu. Today you know why you do action. You go to graduate school, it is not good to you, you leave. Your mother talks, it is not good to you, you leave. What is it that you cannot leave, when you, the actual man, are knowing?”

  This was an inventive misinterpretation of my personality.

  I asked him what Aunt Abbey thought about the proposal.

  “Hand wash hand,” he said. “Leg support leg.”

  I gripped his arm, like he’d gripped my shoulder, only harder, and in doing so I elbowed the plate of kolaczki off the table. It broke on the floor with a bang.

  I said, “I know what you’re doing. You’re fucking with me. That’s fine, that’s expected. But T has to have nothing to do with this. If you involve her in any way, I’ll lose my shit. Me losing my shit will be bad for you, and your artists, and whatever your fucking project is, and me.”

  His face transformed, stage by stage: disarming warmth, distant wisdom, paternal fondness. It was like watching a mask get made.

  I asked him if he understood me.

  “I do,” he said, but the way it came out, he might as well have said, “I love you.”

  His intensity was unnerving.

  I leaned over to pick up the shattered pieces of the plate, but he stopped me.

  “I will fix it,” he said.

  30

  Stanley Recalls the Flight to Prague

  The plane hummed. My head felt vacuum-packed. I tugged open a bag of peanuts and they all jumped into my lap. The teenager in the middle seat, who hadn’t once looked at me, looked at me and scowled. She was wearing pajamas and eye shadow.

  My brother had said that there were seriously awful things we didn’t know about Uncle Lech and that it was probably pretty dumb for me to go to Prague. “I know you know that,” he said. The L whoosh-rattled in the background. He was downtown, strolling back to the office from his lunch break at the Pittsfield Café, a diner he’d invited me to meet him at on more than one occasion. I sensed, not for the first time, that our dad, who had given us the impression that he knew disturbing secrets about Uncle Lech—disturbing secrets he kept from us, a protective parental act for which he expected (but never outright requested) respect—had shared some of what he knew with my brother. My brother must have promised not to say anything to me. Because he always kept his promises, I didn’t hassle him. His discomfort was evident. I also sensed that although he thought it was pretty dumb (and possibly dangerous) for me to go to Prague, he wanted to believe that it’d be nourishing for me, just like he wanted to believe that it was nourishing (though dangerous) for me to get into fistfights in high school. “Just think about it this way,” he said, persuading himself, “because you know the kind of shitshow you’re walking into, you should be able to ignore it okay, to step away from all the crazy scheming and shake out a few good times.” He reminded me that a few years ago he’d toured
Prague with Guillerma, his ex-girlfriend. He said, “You’ll dig the dark history.”

  “Would you go,” I said.

  “You should ask Mom. She goes to Prague like every other year! Hey—when you’re there, she’ll be in Kraków, not too far away.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Our circumstances are different!” said my brother.

  “If they were the same.”

  “The violin does not play for everyone,” he croaked, imitating Busia.

  He laughed, I didn’t.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Probably. Yes.”

  My father had said that I was stupid, more stupid than he’d imagined, and here in one decision was all the proof he’d ever needed.

  I asked him why my decision was so stupid.

  He said that the question itself was stupid.

  I said, “What happened to your neck.”

  “Work.”

  “You must be stupid enough to think that I believe that.”

  He stayed silent to make me listen closely. Then he hung up.

  I called him back and left a voice mail in which I said that his habit of not telling me or my brother important information about himself and Mom and Aunt Abbey and Uncle Lech was stupid, more stupid than he could imagine, and although to him it might seem manly, it was in fact cowardly. It was a go-fuck-yourself. Go fuck yourself.

  This wasn’t the first time I’d said something like this to my father, but it was the first time I felt I might puke afterwards.

  I thought of how Aunt Abbey had been evasive and embarrassed, of how she’d looked at me in her kitchen and hadn’t looked at me later. I started to feel pre-betrayed by her, a feeling that sawed at my insides. I didn’t want to call her but I did.

  “There is nothing like international travel to remind you that you are thoroughly American,” she said.

  None of the embarrassment that had clung to her at her party was sticking to her voice. It was as if we’d bounced back to where we’d always been.

  When she was my age, she explained, she’d gone to Gdańsk for an arts festival. A locally famous painter invited her to dinner. They discussed American and European history, and through that, American and European politics, and the only thing that they agreed on was the fact that almost all of their underlying principles, individually speaking, were opposed. At the end of the night he asked her where she’d learned to speak the Polish that she knew. She said she was Polish-American. He shook his head: “You are American-American.”

  “That man told the truth,” said my aunt.

  Someone near her tuned a trumpet.

  I said, “T told you that I proposed to her. She told you that she said no and moved out.”

  The trumpet oomped and blarted.

  “Because you know what happened,” I said, “you persuaded Uncle Lech to propose that I go to Prague at the same time that T will be there for her show. You were thinking that this could help me and T’s relationship, but now you’re having second thoughts. You’re worried that the project is going to get too dangerous. You feel bad about what’s going to happen to me or to T when we’re there, but not bad enough to tell me what to expect. Or that I shouldn’t go.”

  “That’s almost right,” she said.

  I was shaking.

  “If I shouldn’t go, you need to tell me, right now.”

  She asked if I remembered the time at a Logan Square gallery when we saw a blindfolded performance artist place her hand on the white wall by the entrance to an empty exhibition space, press hard, and trace the perimeter by dragging her fingertips slowly, the invisible line gradually darkening into visibility with her blood. Did I remember how no one in the audience followed her the whole time, including us—at her pace, it would’ve taken her two or three hours to get back to where she started—and therefore, how the only witness to the entirety of the piece, thanks to the blindfold, was the piece itself?

  “Your aunt is for the art, for the art above it all,” she said. “If I lose that I lose my means of re-seeing myself.”

  In her voice was a plea.

  I stayed silent to make her listen closely. I said, “It’s good that it’s too late for you to have children.”

  She didn’t speak. I hung up.

  This was the first time I’d said something like this to my aunt. I rushed to the sink and gripped the rim, prepared to puke. Nothing came up.

  I wrote an email to T about the trip. She wrote back that I was nuts to agree to three days in my uncle’s apartment, a closed set that he could so completely manipulate—did I really think that anything good would come of this?—but yes, of course, why not, between shows she’d look forward to a cup of coffee or a drink. I selected my flights. Work picked up, an apartment-complex renovation in the South Loop. Every morning, Niko pointed at what he wanted me to rip out. He’d say, “Have at it.” On the L to and from the site, clacking through neighborhoods I’d never been to, I thought of T in Prague. “Prague” was independent of “Chicago,” of the Chicago places where T had been and now wasn’t, of the Chicago places where T now was. “Prague” was a place that was a word, a word that I would try to make mean “a do-over.” It had a history and a culture that I didn’t intend to understand. I didn’t pretend to want to know what “Prague” was like, but I pretended to know how T and I would be when we were there: we would be the very best versions of ourselves. I busted up a countertop and I tore out a sink. I dragged an oven down a driveway. “You’re a monster!” said Niko. T texted me: there was something she needed to talk about, it was complex, could I meet in person? I ducked out of earshot of Niko and called. On the L I called again. At home I texted. The next day she emailed to set up a drink at the Hopleaf. The night of the drink, she canceled. She apologized and rescheduled. She canceled the reschedule. Then she emailed to say that she was sorry to ask, but would it be okay if Manny crashed with me at my uncle’s place in Prague? It wasn’t unusual for T to suggest logistical rearrangements, but it was unusual for her to suggest them on someone else’s behalf, especially when she herself was not involved in the rearrangement. I texted, “Call me now please.” I waited a day, and called; I waited three days, and called again; I waited a week and called and left an angry voice mail in which I said that I knew she’d told my aunt about the marriage proposal and the move-out, I wish she hadn’t, but she could do what she wanted to do including deciding to participate in my uncle’s project without telling me about it. “I want to be wrong about this,” I said in the message. “Tell me I’m wrong.” I gouged a wall by walking past it with a crowbar on Monday, and I whacked my thumb with a hammer on Tuesday, and I rear-ended an old lady’s station wagon in the parking lot of the Jewel on Wednesday, and I stayed home “sick” from work and sat on the floor in front of the TV thinking about what things meant and how they mattered and where they matched up with what I wanted versus what I thought I wanted on Thursday. On Friday I texted T and said, “Manny can stay with me.” She texted back that I’d guessed right—she’d talked to my aunt after a show and had said some things to her she maybe shouldn’t have, she’d been drunk and high and sad, not that those were excuses, and then a week later my uncle approached her as she was walking out of her apartment late one night, he was wearing a wet trench coat even though it wasn’t raining, and he invited her to play a role in his Prague project, which he said would be his most meaningful work to date, which involved me. She of course refused, she said. Then my uncle offered to pay to keep her from telling me that he’d contacted her at all. It was a lot of money. But everything about it struck T as icky, and she was sorry to say that even the encounter with my aunt, in hindsight, felt conspiratorial. So she told him no. Manny’s visit to Prague, though, was outside of this. She would’ve been happy to put him up herself, but she was staying with her cast and crew in a dinky rented apartment in which there’d be no room for even one more person. Manny was arriving on the same day I was and only planned to stay a night or two. But she understood
my reaction, she said, who was she to ask for a favor when we hadn’t even met for lunch like we said we would, it’d been how long since the move-out? Which reminded her, had I found a roommate to help with the rent yet, her offer to pay half for another month still stood. I said that if Manny staying with me in my uncle’s apartment in Prague meant that I would see her, then Manny could stay with me. She said you’re sure? I said see you there, break a leg. She said sorry for the imposition. But thank you. And be careful.

  I received texts from my uncle (pictures of dummies in dark suits and dresses), and texts from an unknown number (pictures of tables piled with film equipment and desktop computers), and texts from a second unknown number (pictures of spreadsheets and call sheets), and voice mails from a third unknown number (I didn’t listen to them).

  More texts and voice mails from more unknown numbers followed, a new one every other day, and then a new one every day, and then a new one several times a day.

  I deleted the pictures and messages, I blocked the numbers.

  A week before the flight, I texted Torrentelli and Barton. It’d been some time since we’d all met up at Huettenbar. I arrived early and claimed a table up front, under broad windows opened to the street. Men and women passed by on Lincoln, tugging dogs and shoving strollers. This was the time to tell my two friends that I was the owner of an unwanted engagement ring, that I’d been living alone for almost a month, that I was trying to believe that a “break” was different from a “breakup,” and that I’d allowed my aunt and uncle and possibly T to manipulate me into traveling to a foreign country to supply material for a performance art project that would almost certainly produce nothing but a complicated spectacle of confusion, humiliation, and rage. I ordered an easy golden beer. Torrentelli and Barton came through the door together, laughing. They both worked in the Loop. We caught up—Torrentelli, a paralegal, had switched firms for marginally better pay and a much better boss; Barton, a manager, had been promoted to what he’d hoped would be a more stimulating position within his company but was turning out to be even more mission-less and soul-damning; that morning I’d sledgehammered a wall between two bedrooms. “Does the beard make your dick bigger?” said Barton. “Let’s ask T,” said Torrentelli, texting. I turned to the window. “Aren’t actors supposed to date people with full-time jobs?” said Barton. “Or at least people who look good in beards?” Torrentelli ordered Jägerbombs. “Look, we’re in college!” said Barton. “Stan is,” said Torrentelli, proud. Barton cupped his hands over his mouth and said to our bartender, “Stan studies dead people because Stan is a dead person, metaphorically.” Torrentelli’s phone babbled. She rolled her eyes. “It’s Mickey,” she said. “You guys don’t know Mickey.” “Nope,” said Barton. Torrentelli answered with “What happened?” and stepped outside. She loitered at our window. By her occasional glances, she signaled to us that this unknown friend of hers was not only boring, but also self-absorbed and annoying. The guilt that I felt at that moment was so sharp and hard that I stood up to leave. Barton, thinking I was going for another beer, bought me one. He gave me a worried frown. “You just keep taking it,” he said. “What the fuck is up?”