The Adults

by Alison Espach

  “He’s a boy,” she said. “I didn’t know it was a boy when I chose him. I should have asked.”

  I took her teary little face in my hands.

  “You should always always ask for what you want, Laura,” I said.

  I wasted too much of my life not asking for what I wanted. I didn’t even know how to pray properly. When we were at St. Vitus Cathedral, after we had purchased our prayers, we each got a candle to light. I had never been much for prayer because most of the time I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to expect for myself. What did we have the right to expect? I took a match to my candle. I lit the wick, and we stood in a circle around the candle display and watched our prayers burn into tiny stubs, drowning in the white wax, and I thought of what I wanted, what I had always wanted those four years in college I spent undressing to the entire soundtrack of Moulin Rouge after theater parties, kissing various boys with spotty beards and dirty fingernails, half-naked architects who wouldn’t shut up about Frank Lloyd Wright or the weird thing they just found on their penis, boys who ate pizza with joints hanging out their mouths, boys who held me and licked me like I was covered in wounds as they played Portishead and asked me questions late into the night, like would I rather have to kill my whole family or the whole state of Ohio, and I said, “Does the state of Ohio know I murdered them?” and they looked at me and said, “That’s four million people, Emily, that’s genocide,” and I hated them, these boys with uncombed hair and too-short ties who didn’t understand that it was all just a game.

  Mr. Basketball. Jonathan.

  This was why all those women sat on those stools in our high school auditorium and shook their fingers and said, girls, don’t let them touch you, girls, don’t let them hold you, because even if you hated them, even if their proximity made your heart pound in fear, when they were gone and you were alone, you could hardly feel your pulse.

  I lit my candle and I prayed.

  A man walked by and my candle was blown out by the wind. I took a picture of it, with Laura’s face behind the candle. On the way home, I took pictures of things I didn’t think anybody would ever want to remember, like the underside of a black bench in the middle of the city where the word “rain” was written in Wite-Out. A half-eaten sandwich thrown on the street. A sign that read food store. An old man who got his foot stuck in a revolving door and didn’t even notice until someone pointed it out to him. Until I put down my camera and said, “Mister, your foot,” but he flinched like I was about to mug him since he didn’t know any English, and I was coming closer to him, and I wanted to say, Why are we always so scared of everything, why am I so scared of the watermarks on the buildings, or the silence on the night trams, or to sit down with my father and have a proper conversation? but the man was gone, grumbled something in French and walked in the door.

  Why could we never speak? Why could I never ask for what I wanted?

  I got my photo album from my bedroom. It was full of all the images I never wanted to remember but carried around with me so I’d never forget. “A poem is a record of change,” Mr. Basketball said once, and this felt true to me; I was a record of change, and this photo album was a record of change. My father and Mrs. Resnick in the woods at his birthday party, Mr. Basketball’s red gym shorts, my mother on the couch holding a martini. I put the picture of the bench with the word “rain” in an envelope and sent it to Mr. Basketball. I didn’t know why exactly, or if he even had the same address, or if I was just sending something out there to the universe, but it seemed to me that he was the only person who would understand exactly what I saw in all of this. Image, was all I wrote. Then I signed my full name: Emily Marie Vidal.

  My father and I didn’t get to spend that much time alone together, except when he took me out to dinner on Wednesdays, and when he ordered Shiraz, he always said, ‘Let’s celebrate,’ like Happy Wednesday, Daughter, hope it was better than Tuesday, though I hope your Tuesday was great too, and I never asked what people clapped about during the middle of the week and he never held out his glass to toast anything. We just liked to say things: “Hi, Father,” I said with a grin. “I’m your daughter Emily and we just like to say things.”

  He laughed. Sometimes I loved my father more than anything.

  “What can you do with linguini?” my father asked me when our meals arrived. This was a game we used to play to pass the time when I was little. What can you do with a blank? What can you do with a stone? Step on it, put it on your desk, stick it in your pants and try to drown. What can I do with your mother? he’d sometimes asked. Put her in the closet, I’d say, take her to the moon, make her a ham sandwich, draw her a picture of the Grand Canyon.

  “Spell your name with it,” I said.

  “Make a statue out of it.”

  “Feed it to the dog.”

  “Tie it all together and use it like a string.”

  “Wear it like a wig.”

  My father touched the top of his head. He was severely balding. He was balding in the front, the hair left around his head fitting like a horseshoe. “I’m getting old,” he said. He sighed.

  “You’re not old,” I said. “At least not old in the way that Betty Ford is old.”

  “I’m old,” he said. “I’m old in the way that my back hurts as soon as I open my eyes in the morning. I’m old.”

  24

  Winter approached. Jonathan was in the living room of his suite at the Crowne Plaza about to drop his pants in front of the zebra statue. It had been four years since I had seen him and he was so comfortable unbuttoning his jeans in front of me that I was forced to look past him and think about the way the zebra’s mane covered its face entirely, except for the right eye, which was peeking through the hair and emphasized like red lipstick on a child. I was reduced to obvious body language.

  “I’ve got to shower,” Jonathan said. “It was a long flight.”

  I told him there was soap and shampoo in the bathroom. He walked to the door in his boxers and exclaimed, “Ah yes, soap and shampoo in the bathroom.” I sat on the couch and listened to him sing soft melodies through the shower door and felt a bit calmer. This is my hotel, I told myself, and that voice is only Jonathan’s. Jonathan was staying at my hotel. I got him a slight discount, but he said he would have stayed there anyway since the law firm was paying for his trip. I’m looking forward to being surrounded by you, he had written before he came.

  It wasn’t until Jonathan showed up in Prague that I realized I hadn’t really known anyone in Prague. I knew my father and Laura and Ester and Krištof and a few of my European classmates who had all left over winter break to go to the Swiss Alps, where someone always had an available cabin, or to Milan, where somebody’s grandmother was always dying.

  I felt lonely in Prague, but not quite sad. In October, the snow started falling and I welcomed it on the tip of my nose. There was something about being in a foreign country that validated and glorified your own sense of isolation. My loneliness felt epic, and the Romanesque buildings all around me only affirmed this.

  And then Mr. Basketball wrote to me. Jonathan, as Mr. Basketball described himself in his letters, was a lawyer in Manhattan now but still lived in his Fairfield condo. He had sent me a picture of a courtroom, a man in a suit wildly flailing his arms in front of the judge, who was yawning without covering his mouth. Ennui, he had written on the back.

  I wrote him explaining that I was a not-yet-certified interior designer. That I was living in Prague, indefinitely. That living in Prague sometimes felt like a way to remind myself it was impossible to be happy anywhere. There was too much pressure to be spontaneous and in the moment and eating and touching and enjoying everything every second.

  He didn’t write back.

  So I had Krušovices all month long with men in jungle-green blazers, thin ties, and ankle pants, men who mostly spoke Czech so our conversations sounded a little bit like, “Well-hello-how-are-you-do-you-cook-yes-but-only-with-easy-to-pronounce-vegetable-names.”

 
; I ate dumplings and cabbage and felt constricted. In the morning, I drank Algerian coffee for the first time and I liked how drinking it required all of your attention in order to keep the coffee grinds settled on the bottom of the cup. I liked how walking around in Prague required your attention; you put your head down, and then before you knew it, you were completely lost. You were at the crest of the river, the end of a road, and above you, the sky was overwhelmingly fresh looking.

  You felt the same way in Connecticut, Jonathan finally wrote back. Don’t you remember?

  Who are these people who go to Europe to find themselves? I wrote. I’ve never felt more like my unself. People should really say, I’m going to Europe to find out who I’m not.

  I read The Trial and felt ashamed about my lack of appreciation for everything that came before me, so I followed Kafka’s footsteps around the city and tried to memorize inscriptions under different statues and smile at old people. I fed the ducks that congregated at the bottom of the Vltava and sometimes I liked to pretend that we were all at a business meeting discussing fourth-quarter revenue. “Quack,” one of the ducks inevitably said. “I disagree entirely,” I said, and shook my head. I thought of my mother walking through Fairfield, trying on wedding gowns that were no longer too expensive for her. I imagined her feeling lonely in a pleated bodice. I went to talks given at my father’s university by Arnošt Lustig. I cried over other people’s pain. About boys who died in the Holocaust as virgins, and boys who didn’t. I bought scarves for two hundred crowns because they were pretty and soft around my neck.

  People should say, I’m going to Europe to act outside the confines of my character, he wrote.

  I’m going to Europe to participate in nonevents, I wrote.

  I’m going to Europe to expel negative energy.

  I sat in parks and watched the dogs. In Letenské there was an old man with two long-haired schnauzers that came every day, and he called them both Ferdinand. “Ferdinand, come here,” he said. “Ferdinand, stop licking Ferdinand.” I stood in front of glass food booths and made decisions between cheese, blue cheese, and ham-and-cheese paninis. I could never decide how much cheese I was ready for but always chose a ham-and-cheese panini that Vladímira with the black hair served to me begrudgingly every day. I never had the correct change and this bothered her. We didn’t joke, and she never smiled because the fact that I never had the correct change really really bothered her.

  I’m going to Prague on business, he wrote. I’m going for three weeks over Christmas. I’m representing an American company that is being sued for making combs so thin they have become choking hazards. Correction, I’m going to Prague to see you. Let me know if that’s not all right.

  Was it all right? I wasn’t sure.

  It was December now and the sun hung low in the sky like a pendant lamp and everything about my life these past four years suddenly seemed so fake; I was sure of it. Here was Jonathan walking out of the shower and into the common room and he was real. He left wet footprints on the rug and ruffled his hair with a towel. I was slowly remembering this man, his hair wet and playful like a seal.

  “Well?” he said.

  It was Tuesday so I took him to my Czech language course. On the way, we walked by buildings with stones from the seventeenth century and I started to feel confident in the fact that four years ago was not as far away as I had previously thought.

  Outside, it was winter in the most serious sense. There was snow, and sleet, and hail, and then snow again. Every day that week had been a thorough snowstorm. There was ice on the tram tracks. There was an implied curfew by the sun that set so early the town might as well have been a movie set, a white wonderland that existed only from nine to five. We walked through it anyway, all the way to Charles University on the other side of the bridge. We tried not to touch each other on the way. But there was ice and sidewalks were slippery, and then we brushed arms while trying to open the door of the school, his hand catching the ends of my hair when he moved past me into the elevator.

  Jonathan sat next to me in the classroom with impeccable posture, like a man who was used to being called upon. He was the first person to make this language course feel like a very casual meeting between friends.

  “I’m a fucking lawyer,” Jonathan said. Then he sighed. “I need to learn some basic Czech so I can function while I’m here.”

  On the other side of me was a thin brunette from Ireland.

  “My name is Natalie Mullan,” the girl said. “I’ve never really taken Czech before, but I’m in a singing group and we want to write a song in Czech. You can buy our other songs on iTunes. And, well, I guess the thing to know about me is that sometimes people call me boisterous.”

  “Your kapela,” the teacher said. “Your band. What’s your kapela’s name?”

  “Hot Pocket,” the girl said.

  Jonathan and I exchanged smiles. When he smiled he looked about thirty. When he frowned he looked about forty. He was thirty-one now. He was a lawyer now. He wore white oxford shirts and genuine leather shoes now. He parted his hair with a comb now. He had more wrinkles around the eyes now, which were still powder blue. When I first saw him walk down to greet me in the lobby of the hotel, I remember thinking, We still have the same eyes. I had never met anyone whom I felt this way with, and honestly, I didn’t even know for sure what my eyes looked like or if having the same eyes as someone else even mattered. It was just an intuitive feeling. He had my eyes.

  “I am your učitelka,” the teacher said, and wrote it on the board. “Your teacher.”

  We learned greetings. Hello. Good-bye. Dobrý den. Nashledanou. Jak se máte?

  “Like, don’t actually tell me how you are; just tell me that you’re good,” my teacher said.

  Kolik je hodin?

  “Like, What time is it?” she said.

  Je jedna hodina. Like, It is one o’clock. We learned basic travel items. Deodorant. Dětský pudr. Baby powder. That’s a basic travel item? Class dismissed.

  Nashledanou. Or ciao.

  “Depending on how well you know the person,” I explained to him softly in his ear.

  “See that space over there?” I said to Jonathan at the tram stop after class. “That’s where Stalin’s body used to be.”

  “His body?” he asked.

  “Not his real body. There was a giant monument built in honor of Stalin. They blew it up after he turned out to be a mass murderer.”

  The 23 arrived. We stepped on the tram and held on to the red poles as we headed to the city center. He was looking at me the way my mother often looked at her favorite foods in the grocery store if they suddenly had a different packaging, turning it over and then asking me, “Is this the same one I have always liked, Emily?”

  “You are different,” Jonathan said.

  “Well, of course I’m different,” I said. “I’m four years older,” I added, but this advertisement of maturity only made me feel younger. “How am I different?”

  “In the beginning,” Jonathan said, “you were the good but flawed one who fought to stay alive. The mild-mannered quiet girl who’s always around but isn’t noticed right away when the other characters are engaging in activities.”

  The trams in Prague were mostly quiet, except for the soft murmurings of another language and the American who was always speaking. When an American talked on the trams, it felt so noticeable and understandable to me, as though Jonathan was a violin playing the melody of a song, while the rest of the orchestra was on the verse.

  “But then you’re actually,” Jonathan continued, “without anyone taking notice, the boisterous, please note my word choice, feisty, won’t-take-no-for-an-answer heroine who always ends up doing the right thing, unless it takes too much effort, in which case you just sit around and make fun of other people.”

  “That classic, timeless character,” I said.

  “Like Ophelia,” he said.

  “The mild-mannered quiet girl?”

  “Yes.”

&nb
sp; “Who turns boisterous?”

  “But not crazy.”

  “But she was crazy.”

  “I contend Ophelia was actually the hero of Hamlet,” he said. “She was the only one with a pure heart. And I only called you Ophelia because that’s the only female character from Shakespeare that I still feel comfortable referencing. Besides Lady Macbeth.”

  “I see.”

  “But you’re not her,” he added.

  “And who are you?” I asked.

  “Well, I suppose I’m like Othello. Though I’ve never read Othello so I don’t actually know. Do you have any idea what Othello was like?”

  “He was black,” I said.

  “Let’s get some oběd,” he said. “I want to buy you some food.”

  At Apropos Restaurant, a woman’s tiny dog was gnawing on her foot. She was trying to kick it away.

  “How do you say ‘bark’ in Czech?” Jonathan asked.

  Hafhaf. That was how you said “bark” in Czech.

  “‘Ruffski,’” I said. That was how Laura addressed Raisinet now. “Ruffski!”

  “Of course. Ruffski,” Jonathan said. As soon as I said it, I regretted it. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  The waiter gave us menus.

  “What are you going to get?” Jonathan asked with a mocking smile on his face. “The three cheeses on the hard board?”

  It was the cheapest thing on the menu at Apropos Restaurant and the translation made us laugh.

  “I’d like the four fruits on a plate, next to the spinach, inside the restaurant, thanks,” I said.

  When we were done eating he said, “Let’s do something Prague-ian. Let’s find some Gypsies or something.”

  “The Gypsies are all gone,” I said. “Or at least, leaving.”