Prague

by Arthur Phillips

  John adopted this view as an expression of his truest self. He shaped it into a coherent, publicly held policy that, even into high school, he would propose to and defend from his friends, first flabbergasting then exasperating then just impressing and frightening them with his extreme and unpopular position. By the time he entered college, he was unsurprisingly tired of being the sole defender of human dignity. The transition from a Southern California high school to a Northern California university seemed an optimal time for personality overhauls, so John consciously decided never to discuss his position again. But if his evangelical urges were curbed, his dumb, head-shaking wonder at other people’s behavior was not; the array of foolish semi-ethics still surprised him in this new world, where bunk beds and thin walls made sex an audible and ubiquitous reality. People still spoke loudly and frequently of their ideals, their philosophies, their rock-solid (until later that night) dividing lines between right and wrong. Even as they rejected their parents’ sexual rules as the naïve products of an imaginary 1950s, they insisted on declaiming their own, and John knew he alone was calm and happy while everyone around him went mad with lust, love, or loneliness.

  But for this one quirk, John led a normal life at school. He did drink rather more than his friends, but that was hardly frowned upon. He achieved sexual release in the time-honored, private fashion his philosophy grudgingly tolerated, often concluding the practice with a half-serious, half-spoken “There. That ought to hold the bastard for a while.” He went to parties, danced, and even dated slightly. And of course he did think less often of his theories. Unlike in high school, weeks would pass without even one thought of avoiding sex and, slightly drunk at a party, he might find himself kissing a girl with whom he had just danced. But years of theorizing had hardwired him: Without a thought for human dignity or heroic natures, and despite his attraction to the girl, he would blink as if coming out of a trance and murmur the words every woman longs to hear: “I should probably go.” His principles were in place without his ever having to think about them. Alcohol made the mechanism work more smoothly: He would feel hot, flushed, and unsteady (a common side effect of mixing alcohol and someone else’s saliva) and would need air and solitude at once. A cool and sober kiss outside would have been fatal, but somehow John was never exposed to that variety.

  XVI.

  A MURAL COVERED THE BLUE JAZZ CLUB’S SKY BLUE WALLS AND CEILING. Painted by two students of the Hungarian National Academy of Fine Arts, deceased legends of jazz chatted, smoked, drank, and played in heaven. The departed musicians, dressed as they had been in life, also wore angel wings of varying styles. Billie Holiday—restored to the fresh beauty of her youth, in a silver evening gown, the trademark hibiscus in her hair—sang into a crystal microphone atop the ridges and rolls of a golden-white cloudscape. To her side, peeking out from under his porkpie hat, Lester Young played, his tenor sax twisted high off to one side like a giant’s flute. Duke Ellington hunched over a transparent grand piano while Billy Strayhorn penciled changes to the score in front of him. Off to their left, Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins swirled their amber lowballs and laughed as two dimple-buttocked cherubim—their faces copied from Raphael’s Sistine Madonna—attempted to produce sound from the men’s saxophones, though the horns were too large for the tottering putti to hold. Just to the side of the stage, Chet Baker lay on a cloud, on his back, his unobtrusive wings discreetly attached to a lightweight blue canvas jacket, zipped halfway. The afterlife had been kind to him, too, and his youth had returned without grudge. The marks of abuse and suffering had been erased and he looked again as he had in the 1950s, like a native of these clouds. He wore khakis and white shoes without socks, and he was playing his trumpet and staring straight upward, as if heaven were okay but there might be a better place just a little farther up. Behind and beneath him, on a bank of clouds sculpted as cumulal thrones, the Virgin Mary and a half-dozen female saints (recognizable by their traditional emblems) sat or stood in a group, enraptured by the sight of Chet and the sound of his trumpet: Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, her basket of roses on her lap; Saints Gisella and Petronilla half swooning against their brooms; and matronly Saint Anastasia—her double chin in her fleshy palm, her moist, swollen eyes fixed on Chet, her huge legs plodding heavily even here (straining the cumulo-ottoman they rested on)—briefly paused at her loom, leaving unfinished a tapestry of (almost) this exact moment: Chet on a cloud, on his back, his unobtrusive wings discreetly attached to a lightweight blue canvas jacket, but his trumpet floating unused next to him while he passionately kissed a not at all matronly Saint Anastasia.

  At the back of the room, Mingus, Monk, and Parker chatted just over the round table where John Price and Emily Oliver sat side by side listening to a peculiar band finish “I Cover the Waterfront.” Pool balls clicked from the club’s other room just to John’s right, and from the bar, at his left, came the love calls of glasses and bottles and charged hoses. He wore his one blazer and drank Unicum from a glass labeled with the name of an American rum and flicked the ash from his Mockba Red cigarette into a plastic ashtray that advertised the Western smokes preferred by obsessive lovers and tough-minded individualists.

  A few days earlier (after another game of Sincerity in which Emily had performed dismally or enchantingly, depending on one’s point of view), John had mustered the nerve to propose this date, which opened at the Tabán Rooster: chicken paprikás, rice, cheap red wine. John spent his few new words of Hungarian to order the meal, and an elderly busboy chipped in his handful of English to make up the difference. Emily apologized for not being much assistance, but she explained she hadn’t been paying the closest attention in her class and had been relying pretty heavily on the ambassador’s driver and cook for help in performing those of her tasks that required fluency.

  She laughed easily, was somehow different from the woman waking under the tree; the word shinier occurred to John. Conversation wandered effortlessly from the paper to the embassy, through expatriate existence, the pleasures and lunacies of Budapest life. She held her wine in both hands and laughed when the Gypsy violinist in a spangled black vest accepted John’s forints in exchange for playing farther from their table. John played up the complications of the deal (the exact price stated in feet from the table per forint) to keep her laughing. She complimented him on his first few columns, and he thanked her, quietly pleased that she had read them at all. She described her days—errands and calendars, hostessing and apologizing—with a sort of quiet sincerity that John took for intimacy. The widowed ambassador was a good man, she said, but lonely, and he needed a woman’s advice on certain matters. He tended to ask a lot of social-protocol questions, surprisingly, and lately he was starting to trust Emily about his wardrobe, “specifically the troubling mysteries of necktie selection,” she reported. He was a career diplomat, not a political appointee. His name—so rich with old money—did not seem to her a very accurate guide to his personality or his style; his confidence flagged at funny moments, and he even stuttered when unprepared for conversation. She had been expecting a cold boss, but she was fond of him, enjoyed having him rely on her more and more. “Lucky ambassador,” John allowed himself, and she rolled her eyes and said, “Oh please.”

  How John sees them after dinner: They are walking across the Chain Bridge—the city’s postcard superstar—crossing the Danube toward the new jazz club he has recently discovered and instantly dedicated to their first date. He’s walking backward a few feet in front of her and leaning slightly toward her. His hands gesture in support of a funny story he’s telling, and she walks with her hands in her jacket pockets. Her head tilts back when she laughs, and John remembers her like that (even as it’s happening): walking toward him forever, forever laughing. The Chain Bridge’s lights have painted its pocked stone bricks a soft yellow and Emily’s hair a dark gold, and the river stops flowing for John to memorize it, to count the blue and white lights sprinkled over the roll of its immobile waves, and the passing cars go silent an
d emit no exhaust, so that the only sound is her laugh and the only scent, her perfume.

  They played pool, then sat under Mingus, Monk, and Parker, drank Unicum, and listened to the music. A white American woman about twenty-five, billed as Billie Fitzgerald, wore a hibiscus in her hair and sat spotlit on a stool with a microphone in one hand and a lowball of Scotch in the other. Her band was a nineteen-year-old Hungarian pianist in a T-shirt and an old tuxedo jacket, corduroy cutoff shorts, and blue plastic flip-flops stamped with the logo of a German sporting goods company; and fifteen-year-old Russian twin brothers, one massaging an ancient upright bass with albinic patches of fading stain, the other swishing brushes over a minimalist drum kit pieced together from several donor kits: a red snare, a few cymbals of different makes, and a blue glittering bass drum with the name of some rock ’n’ roll band written in Cyrillic lettering across the head.

  “I Cover the Waterfront” came to a quiet bass-and-piano close. The singer cleared her throat with an amplified crack and swigged her drink. Emily checked her watch and excused herself to call her roommates. “They’ll want to know what time I’ll be home. Back in a flash! This group is good, aren’t they?” She moved away to the phone on the far side of the bar.

  “That’s the last time we’re going to do that tune, though it is pretty,” the singer said to the crowd in English, in a smoke-sanded alto. “It’s another one of those tunes that make women seem pathetic, always waiting for their man to pay attention to them. I don’t like how often those Tin Pan Alley guys showed women waiting for love, waiting for their man to treat them right. So we don’t do those tunes anymore.” She took another hit of Scotch, crunched a piece of ice, and spit half of it back into the glass. The audience, mostly Hungarian, seemed to be listening politely, and John was trying to gauge if she was serious or not, but he was distracted by watching Emily pick up the receiver, examine and deposit coins, dial, talk. Her back was to him now. Her neck arched out of her collar as she cradled the phone against her shoulder. She took something out of her bag. John imagined walking up behind her and touching his lips to her unoccupied ear or to the curving, throbbing cords in her neck. “Individuals have to make a stand in the workplace. This is my workplace. This is where I make my stand, and all my backup musicians agree with me or I wouldn’t hire them. Right, guys?” Her Eastern European musicians nodded and she counted off the next tune.

  As the sung chorus to “Love for Sale” gave way to a piano solo, John watched Emily, still on the phone, her back to him, about thirty feet away, inaudible over the music and the bar noise, facing the phone’s antiquated graymetal wall attachment. He approached her back, and began to hear just the slightest sounds of her conversation, not yet words, just the faintest murmuring cadences under the music, cadences just vaguely foreign. The drum solo started with a cymbalic crash, causing Emily to look back over her shoulder, where she saw John approaching. “I will,” she was saying. “The band’s pretty neat. Old stuff, like jazz music and stuff, but it’s a neat bar. We should hang here sometime. Yeah, okay, I will. See ya, crazy!” She hung up. “The Julies say hi. Okay, it’s a school night, guy,” she continued, “so let’s have one more drink, but then I gotta get home.”

  When they approached the bar, the bartender—who had been watching the band from his post near the phone—turned first to Emily and said something quick and unintelligible in Hungarian. She made the face of noncomprehension, shrugged the shrug. “Nem beszélek magyarul,” she laughingly, laughably managed to produce in her strong Midwestern American accent. The bartender laughed and again expounded in rapid Hungarian. Emily shrugged again, said, “Sorry,” with a smile, and returned to the table.

  “She is Hungarian, yeah?” the bartender asked John in English, his face a mixture of puzzlement and offense.

  John returned to the table with drinks as the singer was accepting applause and introducing her bandmates. “The bartender thinks he knows you or some—”

  “We should buy the band a round, shouldn’t we? That’s like traditional, and it would be so fun, wouldn’t it?”

  Men on first dates generally do what they are told; a few minutes later, Billie graciously accepted another lowball of brand name Scotch; Kálmán, the pianist, joined John and Emily in an Unicum; and Boris and Yuri, the Russian rhythm section, had colas. “Real Coke! Not Pepsi, yes? Real Coke. Please,” Boris insisted, while Yuri pleaded for Pepsi.

  He returned again from the bar, pressing the bouquet of glassware together for his strange companions. Two cola-addicted Russian children, a freakily dressed piano player, and a showily politically conscious jazz singer surrounded his date, and it required an act of will not to throw the glasses to the floor and ask what in the name of holy hell she was doing entertaining the Misfit Symphony when the two of them could be out in the night air, kissing under the stars, dancing on the riverfront, planning a life and a future where they—. There she sits, though, listening to that madwoman talk about misogynistic jazz. She listened to me like that at dinner, and now she’s escaped me. She can just move in and out like that. And there she is, easily being with the band. How to jump across whatever this is and arrive, on the far side, sitting next to her without a thought but that? This is my fault. I lack something or else I would be here without a thought, like her, on the other side of whatever this is. And then it’s over, we’re done, yes, nice to meet you, too, we really enjoyed your music, absolutely, yeah, great. Shall we? A walk to the door, a mouthful of summer night, and, at the mere sight of her, a taxi sprouts from the ground and opens to embrace her. Yeah, I had a nice time, too, good. So I’ll see you at the July Fourth party, I understand you’ll be working, but we’ll get a chance to talk there, great, no problem, no, please, I had fun, too, so don’t thank me, the hesitation and then the cheek. And done. Still on the wrong side of whatever this is.

  He leaned against the lamppost in front of the noisy club and lit a cigarette as her cab entered the stream of light and fume toward Buda.

  A moment sticky with clichés: a young man leans against a lamppost, blowing cigarette smoke into the night. Music spills out with a wedge of light from the open door of a jazz club and it creeps into the circle of yellow that he occupies under the lamp, and he watches the cab drive off with the woman who has wedged her way under his skin, the woman whose heart is a mystery to him.

  Self-consciousness arrives in fast and merciless stages: First he assumes that clichéd position under the light without giving it a thought, the natural physical expression of his ache and hunger and thwarted efforts, but hardly has he struck the match before he notices what he’s doing, how he looks. As the first vine of smoke winds up the pole toward the light, John’s very stance—the bend of his knee—belongs to a private eye fed up with it all or a heartbroken crooner on the cover of Music for Lonely Nights. John is a supremely, expertly cynical adman’s most masterly condensation of fifty years of images of love, loss, solitude, and self-disgust. Even his grunt of disgust at this discovery—he knows before it has faded—sounded just like a gumshoe’s disgust at the treachery of broads or Bogey’s hard-won knowledge that this war is making fools of us all or the crooner’s amazement that he’s lost at love again, oh, oh, oh, he’s lost at love again. And then, at last, John is anointed with the soothing balm of irony: When even his spontaneous grunts are impossibly and automatically insincere, he can only laugh. As in front of a tailor’s triple mirrors, he sees the silliness of seeing the silliness of it, feels the pleasantly dry, infinitely regressing amusement he can feel at his own expense. It is only now that he finally loses sight of her cab as it blends into traffic. (Part of him is stunned that it can blend at all, that it isn’t marked with some sort of phosphorescence.)

  And as she vanished, a little seesaw that John had unknowingly been constructing in his heart over the last month tipped to the other side: He was in a cab giving his brother’s address before he knew why. He crossed the bridge, watched the lights of the next bridge upriver, inhaled the warm wind, and
realized that he could now provide Scott what they both needed: a matter of deep personal importance without any tie to the past, to their mutual grievances, griefs, resentments. He would meet his brother in the present, looking straight ahead, humbly coming for help and candor. He would describe what he had found in their friend Emily, would even plot romantic strategy and tactics with his brother, since Scott always seemed to have girlfriends, even back when he was grotesque and embarrassing and the girls were, too.

  Scott opened the door barefoot, in jeans and a T-shirt, holding upright a margarine-shiny spatula. “Hey, good. Listen, I really want to talk to you about—”

  “Bro!” Scott bellowed. “Enter! My pleasure at seeing you chokes me with emotion!” John followed him to the kitchen, and the smell of something strange drove from his brain all his reasons for coming. A beautiful young brunette, also barefoot, sat on a tall stool. She wore an oversize white shirt that hung low over gray sweatpants emblazoned with the name of Scott and John’s high school (only the last syllable of which was visible under her shirttails). She had rolled the sleeves several times to reveal her small hands, and the sweats were bunched at her naked ankles.

  “Johnny, Mária. Mária finished the school’s Beginners Two course today, so we’re having a celebratory meal.” Scott stood at the stove and scraped at something. “Mária, this would be John, my birth brother.”

  “I am very happy to knowing you.”

  “And since it’s kind of a private celebration,” Scott said, smiling broadly and intentionally talking too rapidly for his date to understand, “I really look forward to catching up with you soon. That would be fantastic. I really look forward to that. And be sure to call first, as a rule.” The door closed behind John, who considered calling Charles Gábor to have a drink but then thought better of it before hiking down the dark, suburban, cab-free hill toward the distant river.