“Take these fellows,” he said, indicating the bachelor party, as one of them stood and led the others in an incomprehensible fight song. The bachelor himself and one of his buddies, not fans of the team the song honored, but entertained by the performance, feigned looks of disgust. They pointed at each other across the table and pretended to puke.
Manny extrapolated, using these men to annotate his argument.
I interrupted him to say that he had a point, but that the way he stated it, in absolutes, made him sound more full of shit than he was. If he was using that strategy in his dissertation he was fucked.
He said that to be authentic was to be assolutamente pieno della merda.
I said that he was the real thing, then.
He pointed at me across the table and pretended to puke.
The waiter returned with three beers: the two that Manny had ordered and the one that I had. Manny talked about Italy, Italians, and the Italian language. “Italiano is so precise,” he said. “La mia birra. Le miei birre.”
He drank his second beer and then he drank the extra.
When the bill came he reviewed it, stopping his finger at every item. He handed it to me and said that this establishment didn’t accept the two credit cards he carried, how unusual. I took out my wallet. He didn’t offer to pay his part in cash, he didn’t ask if I could cover him, he didn’t say he’d pay me back. What he did was wait for me to pay.
Outside I smelled the roasted-meat stink of the restaurant on myself immediately. The sun hadn’t set. Wide shadows pushed bright banks down the block. Manny stretched, touching his toes, and said that if he didn’t take an after-dinner constitutional, his modeling career would be compromised. Somehow he was drunk. I bought a big bottle of Krušovice from a man working a food stand. A nearby pair of backpackers, sitting on a curb beside their packs, ripped into fried cheese sandwiches.
I imagined my brother and his ex, Guillerma, eating their own fried cheese sandwiches on their own patch of Prague curb a few years ago. I remembered the easy cut of their breakup.
“It was like there was a time limit,” my brother had said when it happened, amazed. “We played hard for all four quarters. Then the whistle blew. We shook hands and went home on different buses.”
I had liked Guillerma and I felt sad, sadder than my brother did.
“Don’t worry,” he’d said, noticing, laughing. “You’ll get over it.”
I followed Manny up a long road. Tourists slopped in and out of restaurants. City workers stepped down from networks of scaffolding attached to façades. Manny’s eyes bugged with boyish joy. What was practiced here was not the restoration of history, he said, but history’s maintenance. Did I consider what this difference implied about this culture? What prudence! What usefully employed pride! We came to a big pedestrian bridge. It cleared the river from out of some other century, carrying with it what looked like three dozen religious statues, set up on plinths and parceled out like the stations of the cross. Stout watchtowers with archways straddled both bridge-ends. People squeezed across its avenue in dense streams, dulled by or in awe of the scene they made, staring and pointing and arguing, laughing, pausing to take pictures of their faces in front of what they were seeing for the first time. I’d read about this bridge but couldn’t remember its name. The dark river, the name of which I did remember, the Vltava, gave up no odor, no sour water sewer-waft. Manny evaluated each musician, artist, jeweler, and panhandler we passed. They advertised aggressively, their pleas personalized. We left the bridge and followed a street that shot uphill, climbing high into a corridor of closing gift shops, the customers puttering. A puppet show played out on a booth-like one-man stage. Manny announced the Castle, closed, and the St. Vitus Cathedral, closed. We came to a courtyard with a low wall. From there we saw the city as it appeared on the internet, its red roofs storing golden sheets of setting sunlight. Before us blazed a full-color catalogue in which one could find architectural exemplars of every style that was of consequence, said Manny. Did you care to admire the sturdy willpower of the Romanesque? The Gothic’s vertical might? The voluted gables and sgraffito figures of the Renaissance? There stood the Baroque, the Rococo, the Imperial, the Classicist, the overrated-by-Americans Art Nouveau! Were you satisfied? You were satisfied? The sun set.
I’d never seen Manny this way.
“This little mother has claws!” he shouted, in his quoting-from-something voice. “Mystical, big, silent! Praha, nazdar! Ganz Praha ist ein Goldnetz von Gedichten!”
I swung my arms to stretch them, one at a time, and made sure to remember the route to this view. I would take T here. She would shudder with loving it. She would pin me with a hug.
“T might want to come here every night,” I said.
Manny barely stopped himself from blurting out a response to this.
On our walk back down he maintained a busy silence. I felt him working out a monologue, preparing phrases. He tripped twice on cobblestones. At the bottom of the hill I shot my empty bottle like a free throw—it banged clean into the garbage can, no rim. I don’t know how. I had hoped to miss.
Manny stopped in front of an alley.
“A confession,” he said. “I am very skilled at ‘reading’ people. It is only rarely that I find that I have misjudged a social dynamic. My colleagues appreciate this—I am counsel to many men and women older than myself—however, when I met you, I could not determine what brought you to T and T to you, to say nothing of what keeps the both of you together. What interpersonal mechanic is in place? By what socio-romantic exchange system do you operate? I did not know. But now, tonight, after several hours with you, the truth is made obvious: you are that cliché of clichés, attractant-opposites! Initially I didn’t trust this insight—to ‘read’ such a stereotypical arrangement seemed, to me, to indicate the malfunction of my judgment, or worse, the onset of intellectual laziness—but no, neither, all is confirmed: as your romantic opposite, T provides you, Stanley, with an interesting instability. Which you lack. Because you are boring. And you, as her romantic opposite, provide her with an uninteresting stability. Which she lacks, largely, but is made to think by various social forces that she requires. How can I dramatize it? You give her grocery store flowers. You give her a sunset over the city and a walk back the way you came. But T—T gives you a mad dash into the alley!”
He mad-dashed into the alley.
“Witches’ fingers!” he said, waving his arms. “Bent and grown-broken! Mágico più nero della notte!”
Several feelings fell on top of me at once.
The first, the heaviest, was hope. From what Manny had said about me and T, and how he had said it, with disdainful admiration, I guessed that T hadn’t told him about my rejected marriage proposal and her move-out and our break. If she hadn’t mentioned these things to her old best friend, it might be because she was open to restarting our relationship.
The second feeling, which I felt at the same time as the first, was a stupefying out-of-body fear that the relationship I’d thought of as mysterious, challenging, and rewarding was in fact as simple as “opposites attract,” “she’s a catch,” “you’re a dud.”
The third was that the first two feelings showed how much I needed to grow up.
The fourth was jet-lag drunk.
The fifth was me beginning to swerve away from myself.
The sixth, more thought than felt, was that the version of me and T that Manny imagined, “attractant-opposites,” wasn’t correct but was close, much closer than versions of us imagined by my brother, who called us “one hundred percent complementary,” or by Torrentelli and Barton, who saw us as “somehow compatible,” or by T’s friends, who could only comment on how “super-supportive” we were of each other, or by my dad, who said, “Good for you,” or by my mom, who implied that I should under no circumstances whatsoever break up with T, ever, even in the probable event of her cheating on me with a lawyer or a doctor, or by Aunt Abbey, who declared us “same-sighted.”
Uncle Lech had only said: “Love is eating in the dark.”
T would tell me to stop right there. She’d say: You’re suggesting that what other people imagine is where we should be looking to figure out who we are.
No, I’d say. But we can learn from what other people think they see.
Stubborn Stanley, Angsty Wangsty Stanley: we’re the experts on us! We know what no one who isn’t us knows. Think about the things you’ve done that your friends and your family and me don’t, can’t, and won’t imagine that you’d ever do, the things that we’d out of love or shock bet against you ever doing, the things that prove to you, if you take the time to think about them, that to a certain eerie degree everyone we know thinks we’re someone we’re not.
Yes. But what we mean when we say “I know you” accounts for those unknowns. That’s the best we can do. That’s knowing.
You’re saying that now, but that’s not what you believe outside this argument. That’s not what you believe in real life!
Everything is real life!
Follow Manny!
I followed Manny into the alley. The buildings the alley cut between shot up, slivering the sky. No graffiti, no garbage. I didn’t sprint to catch Manny but I hustled enough to keep him in sight.
A trio of hip young men passed him and then me, saying, “Marijuana, hash hash hash, marijuana.”
“Ha!” said Manny.
I called his name.
We came to a nightclub with a short loud line. A man with a scabby head barked in an I’ve-got-your-back voice that he’d not only get us in, he’d get “hotties to sit with their butts in our laps.” We crossed a narrow street dense with cars, a mini traffic jam, stereos pumping Top 40 and trance and Europop, one limo vibrating with cranked-up classical. Sketchy men beckoned us from passenger seats. Manny took every flyer he was offered and dropped them all dramatically. He paraded into another alley, this one darker.
I felt a furious worry that I did not want to feel for someone like Manny.
“Slow down,” I shouted.
Six women, clearly prostitutes, white, black, Asian, high-heeled up to him. He stopped. They touched his head, his shoulders, his hairy arms, his waist. In English they praised his Czech. They picked his pockets.
I caught up. Four of the women clopped my way, smiling, glittery and glossy, smelling of fruits and soft spices. I told them to go fuck their mothers.
One said, “You would like that?”
The others left in a casual hurry.
“Yes?” said the one still there.
Her expression had changed so gracefully that I couldn’t remember what its meaning had been when directed at Manny. To me she was trusting, sincere.
I didn’t work hard enough to look away.
Her face said, With you I can be myself.
Will you let me be myself?
Let me—
Her mouth opened. She stepped toward me.
I grabbed an unresisting Manny, who’d been grinning, and hauled him into walking away, saying, “They picked your pockets, are you stupid, check them, check your pockets.”
When I was sure that the prostitute hadn’t tailed us, I let go of Manny’s shirt. We were the only two people in the alley, but I smelled a cigarette being lit, the special fragrance of a first drag. I stopped. I let myself imagine what it would be like to smoke a pack straight through. I let myself imagine smoking this pack straight through in the bedroom of my apartment, what had been T’s and my apartment, sharing cigarettes, using cigarettes to light more cigarettes, the hot smoke curling out of our mouths and into our clothes, our clothes coming off, our clothes off, T laughing, T touching my chest, T laying out the logistics of a trip we would take to California in which we would dodge the Chicago winter and rent a convertible with racing stripes and gun it on the 101 to beaches and mountains and cities and campsites while listening to show tunes she’d make me sing along to, You will sing, she sang to me, You will sing sing sing, she sang, pulling me into her and gasping. I gasped.
Manny was staring at me.
His condescending smile had been bent by pity. The pity was for me.
I shouldered him like he was a door I needed down. He staggered from the hit, stunned. I stepped up and shoved him and he fell on his ass. His glasses stayed where they were exactly. It took more than it should have to stop myself from kicking him in the side of the head.
“There is nothing in my pockets!” he screamed. “I left my wallet at the apartment on purpose!” he screamed. “You are a fuck!” he screamed.
We walked to the apartment on main streets, our positions reversed. He muttered insults at my back, revising them.
“Cretin.”
“Cretinous thug.”
“Cretinous neanderthug.”
At the door to the apartment I struggled with the lock. It required force and concentration. I paused to refocus, to better ignore Manny, and noticed that the rows of door buzzers were all labeled with the same name: mine. Only the slot next to my apartment number was blank, an empty space.
“Stanley,” said Manny as I unlocked the door, his voice warped. My name rolled off his tongue like a square.
I opened the door.
“Look,” he said, pointing down.
35
Stanley Reluctantly Observes the First Figure, Which, for Reasons That Aren’t Clear to Him, Reminds Him of Barton
A chalk drawing: the life-sized outline of a body, as seen in old detective films.
Depicted as if collapsed across the threshold, the arms in the lobby, the legs in the alley. The proportions realistic. A man of under-average height and slim build, on his side.
36
Stanley and Manny Enter the Apartment Building
Manny squatted and touched the lines that suggested the head. “I believe that this is chalk,” he said, trying to muffle his fear.
I stepped over him, whacking his arm on accident, and took the noisy stairs thinking that if I saw the made-up man I’d hook him into a headlock and crush him unconscious and hurl him down the stairs with a murderous howl. I felt afraid of myself. This fear, I’m ashamed to say, made me proud.
“It is chalk,” shouted Manny from below.
I walked the hall to the apartment, passing the lantern-style fixtures that cast overlapping cones of dusty light. The ones nearest the door were out.
37
Stanley Reluctantly Observes the Second Figure, Which, for Reasons That Aren’t Clear to Him, Reminds Him of Torrentelli
A chalk drawing: the life-sized outline of a body, as seen in old detective films.
Depicted as if on its stomach, reaching for the apartment door. The proportions realistic. A woman of average height, one arm crossing the threshold of the door and disappearing into the apartment.
38
Stanley Enters the Apartment
I unlocked and opened the door without looking at the rest of the second figure and saw a large purse on the kitchen table. It could accommodate two skulls. I pulled a beer from the fridge, a pilsner, and sat on the couch. The couch was silent.
“This figure is meant to be holding a purse,” said Manny, bent by the door. He stood up. “There is the purse.”
I searched for the remote.
Manny clapped at me, as if seeking the attention of a pet.
“Do not think that I agreed to stay in this apartment without knowing that it would become the epicenter of a pretentious work of performance art. But do not think that my decision in any way absolves you of responsibility, Stanley.”
I turned on the TV. Four stations, four species of static.
Manny marched over, holding the purse the way you’d hold a dead thing by the tail. He dropped it on the coffee table. Its skinny lip was snap-buttoned shut. “Your uncle!” he said. “Your arrangements! Your predicament, whatever it may be, is placing me—and possibly others!—in a predicament. Open this purse!”
I turned off the TV and looked at him.
He smac
ked the beer out of my hand. It gurgled and spluttered on the floor.
I said that if he hit anything out of my hand again I’d punch him right the fuck in the face.
He tapped the lip of the purse, an order. He wasn’t afraid of me but he was afraid.
I snatched it up. What was in it was hard and heavy. I walked to the window, opened the screen, took two steps back, wound up, and shot-putted the purse straight out. It slapped onto a roof across the street.
“I’ll take the couch,” I said, taking the couch.
Manny, incredulous, declared that he’d be gone in the morning.
He slammed the bedroom door—it bounced open, spitting flecks of paint. The frame was swollen. He wrestled the door as closed as he could, hissing, then huffed into the bed, which was as squeaky as the stairs.
I sat up to shut the window. Then I walked to the open door and stood in the hall. The lights by my doorway, which had been off, were stuttering on. No sounds of any sort mumbled or bumped from the other units on the floor. The silence felt enforced—in it was the sense of men behind doors, holding their breath, waiting for signals.
I closed the door to my apartment nearly all the way and set the beer bottle on top.
From the bedroom, a cell phone tinkled. Manny groaned.
I went to my laptop, which was where I’d left it, folded shut on the coffee table. It had been given its own chalk outline. Under the fluorescent light the chalk had a dim shine, a ceremonial glow. I hesitated. I didn’t want to open my laptop if doing so meant collaboration with my uncle’s project, but I didn’t want to keep my laptop closed if doing so meant the betrayal of my principles of self-protection. I wanted to refuse to cooperate and I wanted to refuse to allow my actions to be influenced. I wanted total untouchability. I was drunk. I said to myself, Which of the available actions is the action that is the most “me,” which was something I hadn’t said to myself since high school, when I said it daily, when it served me in a way I didn’t understand—when it led me to believe in a self that was true, a self-aware self, honest and genuine, achievable by honest, genuine, and self-aware actions, even as I simultaneously believed in its opposite, the presented self, every action false, every self a conscious or subconscious “act”—and in thinking these thoughts thought left me and I was lifting the laptop out of its outline and I was opening it and I was sitting on the couch. The background had changed again: a black-and-white picture of me from behind, in Prague, crossing a street, headed for the hard darkness of an alley. I looked like I was on my way to commit a crime. No email from T. One email from my brother titled, “Tip #4: Shadow Puppet Sex Show!” and then another titled, “Tip #5: Anti-Hangover Garlic Soup, a Czech Tradition” and then another titled, “Mom’s in Krakow!” and then another with no subject, and then another titled, “You and T broke up?”
The Made-Up Man Page 9