Prague (38 page)

John leaned against the cool rock of one of the statues' pediments and scratched his back against it. The conversation moved slowly, but he no longer followed it, just broke off pieces at random and held them briefly to his ear.

"... how many times people want to buy this national memory, this responsibility of us, and it cannot be bought, all of us face this, this temptation, Karoly, yes—" Imre bent back and gazed to the top of the horse-bound Magyar king prancing in the center of the square, bit the corner of his lip, and suddenly sneezed with explosive noise.

John walked slowly backward over the labyrinthine tiles of the square until his foot felt the curb behind him and he turned sharply to watch the cars gust right past him, close enough for him to touch their stumpy side-view mirrors as they blurred.

He entered the Blue Jazz alone sometime later, after one last glance: From across the street he saw Imre and Charles and Mark had put their arms around each other's shoulders and were performing an unsynchronized soft-shoe routine behind the traffic.

The interior of the club initially refused to focus. When it surrendered at last, he was relieved to see her at once. It must have been late: It was a Friday, but there were only a few people left: a game of pool, three smokers webbed in their own blue breath, the band—the bald Americans—at the bar taking their payment in food and drink, a couple newly in love in one corner, twisting around each other's lips and bodies like the two snakes on Caduceus's staff and, in another corner, another couple, but this one about to disintegrate permanently, their voices rising high, then crashing to silence every few minutes, like the surf outside a beachfront hotel window late at night.

"Do you think I live a work of art?" he asked, growing slowly sober now in leaps and backsteps, sliding onto the piano bench and gently, kiddingly, bumping his hip against hers. She wore the same dress as on the night he had met her.

"Wicked boy, I am trying to play the piano. No maudlin drunks welcome tonight." She kissed his near cheek, and he smiled with calm relief.

"THIS
  
IS
  
IT:
  
I
  
AM
  
NEVER
  
COMING
 
TO
 
THIS
  
PLACE
  
AGAIN.
  
END
  
OF
  
AN
  
ERA,

baby. Time to just fade away, let it go. Let. It. Go." Scott Price was speaking to none of them in particular as the four men and Emily burrowed their way into

216 I
 
ARTHUR PHILLIPS

A Hazam, the last hot night of an unusually hot July. Cash Ass was performing in the basement to a standard-size mob, but even upstairs there was hardly the necessary space to move or air to breathe. The cigarette cloud hung low tonight, only a few feet over their heads; one could bury a hand in it down to the wrist. "Who are all these people?" Scott grumbled. "These are not us, these people. Can they all be tourists? This is just sad. You know, Maria says this place was never taken seriously by the Hungarians."

The bar noise was five parts English and three parts Hungarian, strained through mingled accents. Male elbows and female cleavage were equally potent weapons in acquiring bar space, but then only crenellated fistfuls of crispy forints held high could win the bartenders' coolly diffuse attention. Efficiency demanded ordering several drinks at once, so the five of them clutched multiple glasses, stood swiveling their heads, gazed with pioneer squints to find space to sit.

"The worm has turned, boys and girl," Scott sighed. "We are a dying breed, and the foreign devils have invaded our grasslands."

The loudspeakers slathered British and American dance music everywhere, and the effort to move across the room toward a just-abandoned couch (oops, too late) was like passing through an animal's close, moist digestive tract, the thumps of the music like the thumps of its amplified, proximate heart. With every twist and turn through the throng, sufficiently loud bits of conversation were coughed up and strewn in their path: Hungarian, Hungarian, Hungarian ... our sound will be the sound... Hungarian... once I get around to writing it out, then I'll pitch it to studios . . . she's on fucking fire . . . back to Prague ASAP, please ... Hungarian .. . can I crash with you just for... the thing about Hungarians and Hungary that you have to understand... no, Fin-de-Sides: they're like Pop-sides but shaped like... Hungarian... then screw the States... do you want to come back and I'll draw you . .. dude, go to Prague; you'll forget this scene in twenty seconds . . . Hungarian . . . two days here, two days in Prague, then the fast train to Venice, I don't know, we talk about way east, like Moscow... technically, I billed them twice, but keep it to yourself... no way, because the hostel is, like, hostile... Hungarian . . . Cash Ass rules, you gotta hear these guys, they're foolish . . . she was a Betty and a tamale with three and a half oil cans . . . how do you say "kiss me" in Hungarian . . . Hungarian ... I'm a poet, poet vagyok, like Arany Jdnos . . . baby, Prague is so far beyond... csokolj meg!

From within the cacophony and squeeze, Mark saw a sofa and table slowly, dubiously abandoned and, with a vault and a splay, he arrived first on

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the scene to secure them. "Who are all these people?" Scott said to Emily in irrepressible ill humor. "Who told them to come here? Our people should not—" Charles told him to shut up. "No. Foushutup."

From the sofa, John watched Emily sitting on the table, leaning in to speak to Mark. He debated whether to mention the bridge kiss or pretend it had never happened, tried to calibrate precisely his attentions to her this evening, and then, uncertain himself what had happened on the bridge, strained retrospectively to replay, time, and determine the emotional function of each individual lip-muscle response. He listened to her describe a Julie's suitor to Mark, and he couldn't help but feel her description cryptically reflected her own feelings toward John: "Julie" disguised Emily; "Calvin," John. Julie was frustrated, Calvin was everything she—impossible to hear under Charles's braying to Scott about business. But I think about how Calvin has been—if Horvath, on the other hand. She definitely feels like Calvin is really the only way to secure Horvath's trust to get the deal done if she tells him that where does that leave her? Or should she? Not with the State Privatization Agency being run by monkeys.

Two hands gripped his shoulders from behind, and a voice whispered in his ear, "The great joy in life is the unexpected." With laughter and amazement, Bryon—a dashing Korean-American who had, eight years earlier, been notorious in Scott and John's high school for throwing a Marquis de Sade party—appeared, shrouded in coincidence, shimmering into reality, and John, feeling instantly the diminishment of stature and appeal that befalls the person who introduces someone new to a group, introduced him to the group. Bryon stopped short when John said, 'And of course you remember Scott."

John savored the barely concealed look of terror on his brother's face as Bryon tried to reconcile this muscular, handsome jock with the obese, hopeless sap of a dozen years before. "Of course. Man, you look great" was all he said, and John felt distinctly ripped off.

In Budapest on a two-week vacation, Bryon sat on the table next to Charles and the rows of waiting drinks. He related his six years since last seeing John in under ninety seconds: After college, he had spent a summer working at the "crappy M. C. Escher House theme park" in his hometown, doing construction work, which mostly meant nailing staircases upside down to ceilings. From there he went back to New York to try acting one more time but could only get modeling jobs, and then only the lowest, most humiliating kind: picture-frame

n i ii u n

modeling. He spent six months being photographed hugging women under trees, pushing kids in swings, looking off in the misty distance, enjoying a New Year's Eve toast in a spangled, conical hat and even doing period work, in which he would dress up in turn-of-the-century "Chinaman's clothes" and pose in front of a dusty black curtain, looking somber for an old black-and-white camera that took ten seconds to register a photo, all of which work was commissioned by picture-frame companies to fill their frames in photo-supply stores with appealing fantasy suggestions. Bryon claimed, incidentally, to have been invited on a first date, a home-cooked meal in the apartment of "an eerily lonely, very unattractive" woman in New York, and on the shelf over her bed was a square, brushed-silver four- by six-inch frame that still held its factory default picture of him (in a cable-knit sweater, kicking through some leaves, a wistful, autumnal scene). "I was on top of her, about to finish up, and I look up and there I am pondering autumn. It was a real high point, I must say. There was something strangely beautiful about it. This woman, for one night, really did have a picture of her boyfriend over her bed, wearing a cable-knit sweater just like boyfriends are supposed to wear, but she never even knew it."

Giving up on acting, Bryon ended up in advertising, and he was still at it, with great success. "If I told you how much money I made, Johnny, you'd start coughing up blood like a consumptive." He described his work in the creative section of one of New York's largest agencies, in a division that targeted "what we categorize in our eleven-group schematic as Lone Wolf Aspirants. Basically, every single person's consumer habits can be identified as belonging to one of eleven types. This is a scientific fact. Everybody on earth. Real lone wolfs, of course, don't respond to advertising, but there aren't more than a dozen of them on the planet. Lone Wolf Aspirants, however, are something else. A very big responsibility, billions in buying power."

John watched Emily's attention stream toward the intruder, and the intruder lean in to lap it up. "The key with LWAs is to exhort rebelliousness, excessive eccentricity, and antisocial or even pathological rudeness. These are what we call the Internal hallmarks of the LWA's self-assessment.' So, like, for Pepsi, I wrote the ad—well, to be fair, it was a team thing—the one where the guy is leaning against the fence with his arms crossed and you can't see any cola at all on the screen, the guy just looks really irritated, and he says, 'Get off my back with that slick garbage. I'll drink whatever I want, because I drink it for me, not for some Madison Avenue jackass who thinks he knows all about my

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so-called generation.' And he holds up his fingers, like this, to put quotation marks around generation. And then he spits, and the screen goes blank and then you just see the Pepsi logo. Very hot."

Everyone, even Charles, tilted toward Bryon as he spoke, as if he were a newly arrived emissary from the Old World to the New World's tedious, forested swampland, bringing news of loved ones, cities, the court.

"Still a virgin?" Bryon asked him in front of everyone.

"Yeah, pretty much," John replied, horrified, with a species of laughter he hoped would somehow mask the conversation and hypnotize his friends. "You too?"

"Unbelievable!" Scott bellowed when an elbow of the crowd eddying around the couch jostled his drink hand.

Bryon excused himself to go to the bar and returned a few minutes later with a drink and a boy no older than nineteen or twenty. "These are the people you should talk to," he said. "These are your best sources," and he introduced Ned, who was in Budapest for three days to update the Hungarian chapters of the budget travel guide published by the students of his college. Ned had a lazy eye, enervated further by jet lag, smoke, sleeplessness, and road-trip hilarity. He wore an old seersucker jacket over cutoff shorts and a T-shirt with the three Greek letters of a fraternity triangulating around a drawing of three wolves, smoking cigars, licking their lips at the sight of a lamb, who wore a tasseled blue beret with holes for her little black ears. Each of the wolves wore the same T-shirt as Ned, and so on ad infinitum, or at least to the physical limits of silk-screen resolution. John relaxed: Ned was Bryon's lover and Emily was safe. "Hey," Bryon shouted to Emily, apparently just thinking of it. "Do you want to go downstairs and dance?"

The four men remained with Ned, who, as the newcomer, was encouraged by Charles to offer to buy them all a round of drinks, an offer the four men heartily accepted. He came back with the drinks and yelled over the noise that he was in a tough spot because he didn't really know anyone who actually lived in Budapest, just other backpackers like himself, and so he had asked that guy Bryon out of the blue just now (oh no), because he looked so at home, but he was a tourist too, it turned out, and this was the third of his three days and tomorrow he had to press on to the big attraction (Prague) and would they mind helping him out with his book updates?