Prague (44 page)

And on that awful flight home months later, bumping down into Lincoln Airport, still not sure what she was going to say to her father, not sure herself if she had quit or been fired, feeling the weight of his heart and her mother's death in her hands, she still felt (at least for right now, until she saw his face) that Saint Istvan liberated from Communism was a more apt symbol than a drain.

ONE
   
HAZY
   
MORNING,
   
NOT
   
LONG
   
AFTER
   
NADJA
   
EXPLAINED
  
TO
   
HIM
  
THE

woman he loved, John sat in the Forum Hotel lobby. He thought of Emily's secret life, how he would guard the truth for her until, perhaps, such an exercise might teach him something that would make him more like her, more appealing to her. He understood that this was pretty pathetic.

"... Because the Jews did that to Hungary." Imre shrugged and mopped his forehead with a silk paisley pocket square. John studied his notebook to see if any of the mandarin jottings there could delicately wrap Imre's icy comment in some warming context. His attention having wandered, large swaths of this interview had been lost, and his notebook offered only the indecipherable scratches of a long dead civilization. He might have been quoting. He could have scornfully been voicing the opinions of others. He could have been making an ironic point. Charles could have paid him to say it for entertainment's sake. These possibilities all came at once, one on top of the other, until their sheer tangled mass sufficed, and John—recalling Imre the juggling street performer and pornogra-pher to the good, horny citizens of Bonn, recalling the money at stake for all three of them—blamed his own lapsed concentration and dismissed the comment as not serious.

Imre dabbed his brow again and turned his chair away from the late afternoon glare of the river-view wall of windows. "I've a terrible headache—these vile televisions everywhere in these days," he muttered, and waved his damp handkerchief at the large screens wheeled into the lobby to provide constant coverage of the dogs of war snarling and peeing in the faraway desert. A Ger-

man tourist was disputing his bill at the front desk, decrying the supplemental phone charges, the cable television surtaxes. His young son began to cry, then scream. The boy's mother seized him around the waist and loudly told him to be quiet. The child screamed with more force. "It is really too much," Imre told his two young companions, and wrestled with the knot of his tie as if it were actually blocking air. "Outlandish."

"Nein! Nein!" the tourist was yelling.

"The view: one of uncertainty, but one of readiness," bawled a young woman standing on the pitching deck of an aircraft carrier, trying to make herself audible over the scream of jets and the roar of water somewhere classified in the Mediterranean.

"Bitte, mem Herr," tried the deskbound concierge.

"No! No! No! Let me go!" screamed the little boy in German while his mother attempted to soothe him by striking his bottom with an open hand.

"Karoly, perhaps business later," Imre mumbled.

Charles rose from the lobby coffee table, strode to the desk, spoke German to the tourist and Hungarian to the concierge, smiled on the little boy, and within two minutes had the family out the door and the concierge warmly shaking his hand. He tipped a bellboy, who turned down the televisions' volume, and peace completed her reconquest of the Forum lobby. John watched admiration kindle and glow on Imre's face and marveled that it could take so little.

After his interview and their shared meal, Imre held court in the hotel lobby: Over five and a half hours, Charles presented to his partner six tentative investors with lingering questions. The investors—all of whom had read John's ironical but apparently grudgingly admiring profile of Charles in BudapesToday—took their turns examining this investment opportunity, talking about themselves while Imre nodded and Charles and John walked around and around the block. They had a drink in the John Bull English Pub, then stood by the sunset-frosted river in front of the hotel, leaned against the railing, and watched their business mutely unfold at the lobby table behind the huge picture window and their own ten-foot shadows, watched Imre charm the salt heiress, impress the sporicidal-efficacy-validation-equipment manufacturer, and listen with evident interest to the discount lawn products magnate.

At the end of these audiences, John took the elevator to the fourth floor and returned with his colleague from the Times, whom he introduced to the subject of that journalist's next insightful story, which, echoing John's own col-

umn on Imre, would run in the Times three days later and be picked up by the International Herald Tribune the day after that.

"Am I excused now, please?"

"You are excused, my Hebraic conniver," said Charles. "Exquisite work, by the way. Heroic, really." And as Ted Winston and Imre Horvath leaned toward each other over the glass-topped table behind the glass wall, John left Charles on the Corso and walked slowly through the gathering evening to a cracked and colorless building on a deliciously charmless, no longer desirable little street not far from A Hazam.

"Yes, you can stay," she said at the door, kissing him and wiping turpentine from her hands with a fuzzy multicolored rag. "You're cute, and I even admit to missing you lately. But you're out of here first thing in the morning, because the show goes up the day after and I'm hanging stuff all day tomorrow. No grumbling." He moved from lamp-illuminated brightness to shadows, dropped onto her bed, and watched her clean her brushes, wondered if he might not be in love with her. "But will you come to the show?" she asked in a different tone of voice entirely. "Will you? I really want you to. Please come."

VISIBLY
  
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AMID
  
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SUM M ER-OF-'90
  
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EXPAT
  
HIP-

sters at "The New Americans" opening night, John and Mark sidled slowly through the gallery lobby of the old movie theater, past art photos hung from corrugated cardboard partitions, while from stereo speakers on the ashtray floor Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto's duet fondled the memory of tall, tan, young, lovely, unwinnable women who strolled the beaches of 1960s Brazil. The men gulped sour white wine from plastic cups, smoked, and periodically stepped aside to let Hungarians reach the movie theater's concession stand or ticket booth. (That evening's double feature was selling well: Battleship Potemkin and Battlestar Galactica with accompanying music composed and played live by a Hungarian rock band.) The photos on display were, for the most part, reasonably accomplished renderings of the accepted artistic subjects of the day, comparable to similar hangings in New York: black-and-white close-ups of genitals, tattoos, old people, factories. Against this stark background, Nicky's two entries outstood sharply.

Her first was of an epic size, easily seven feet tall and four across: the small

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price tag next to the work quietly requested a buyer of substantial means. Glossy black plastic framed the complex self-portrait. Nicky herself, lifesize, posed as a variety of art professor: a tweed, leather-elbowed jacket over a black, ribbed turtleneck, corduroy slacks, loafers. She wore a thick brown mustache, oval spectacles, dark and rebellious eyebrows, and her own bald scalp. Her expression was pedantic. She stood, unaware of the photographer, in what appeared to be the gallery of a museum. In the midst of giving a lecture, she pointed with a stick at a large painting, opulently framed, hanging from a dark-wood-paneled wall to her left. This painting (Holbein? Dou? Teniers?), which she evidently described for unseen students, portrayed a type of seventeenth-century courtier: a young man in buckled shoes, dark hose, puffed and slashed slops, a jeweled dagger at the belt, jerkin, starched ruff collar, a pointed beard, and thin mustache. He, in turn, stood with one leg turned outward, stiff in the style of the era. The tiny black filament cracks of the painting's age appeared most visibly on his face, collar, and hands. Unlike the professor who described him, he stared directly at the viewer. With his left hand, he made an iconic, stylized gesture of sincerity, his fingers resting on his heart, and, with his right hand and an expression of haughty pride at owning such a valuable object, he invited the viewer to enjoy yet another framed work of art, this third item resting on an ornately carved easel to his right. This small work—equidistant from the professor and the courtier—was framed in dark wood, counterbalancing the gold-painted frame surrounding the courtier himself and the glossy black plastic that framed the entire piece. This second painting—the painting within the painting within the photograph—was in fact plainly a photograph, and unabashedly, unenjoyably pornographic: a couple, photographed head-on, engaged in a variety of posterior interconnection, the man kneeling behind the woman, who rested on all fours. They both faced the camera and the viewer, as if in obedience to their seventeenth-century owner. The man performed open-mouthed with half-closed eyes and a tilted-head, exalted expression of ecstatic enlightenment; the woman stared blankly, anti-titillatedly bored. Her long red hair, parted severely in the middle, framed her supporting arms, which, in turn, framed her exposed breasts. Her mounter—his upper arms and torso behind and above her hips, his legs visible only to the knee behind and between her supporting thighs, his hands on the points where her buttocks melted into her foreshortened back—sported a diabolical beard and mustache identical to that of the proud seventeenth-century "possessor" of the photo, but also a lush head of blow-dried blond hair. Under a toy tiara.

This internal photo—so jarring to the expected retrograde progression (professor to courtier to older portrait still)—usually won the work more attention than a quick walk-by. In his happy examination, Mark realized that the seventeenth-century painted courtier, like the twentieth-century photographed professor, was in fact Nicky. Mark understood this first, but at the same moment that he was asking, "Isn't that your friend, too?" John was saying, "Oh man, that's Nicky, I can't believe it," except John was pointing at the gloomy red-haired woman taking it from behind. "Oh my," said Mark.

"Hello, handsome," said her voice behind them, and her hand slid into John's hip pocket and squeezed. She kissed him long on the mouth. "Do you like it?" she asked with her eager and unironic appetite for praise, slightly manically heightened by the event-ness of her opening night. John's hand skimmed her scalp, and she looked at both men with unblinking concentration, her wide, round black eyes openly hoping for love.

'Absolutely. Of course," said John. "What's not to like?" "You are an original," said Mark. "I love it."

"Oh, Johnny, I love your pal! Thank you! It's not really done until it's purchased, of course. To really be finished, you have to imagine a fourth person: some proud owner who stands here, like this, and points to it for his friends with the same pride as Elizabethan guy."

"Yeah, great, great, great," said John. "But oh yeah, say, who is this?" He pointed to the ecstatic, tiara'd man, nestled securely behind his red-wigged girlfriend.

The artist wound her arm around John's waist and smiled conspiratorially at Mark, who was plainly enchanted by her. "Listen to Mr. Prude," she singsonged to the Canadian. "I happen to know he's sleeping with me and with Karen, our office airhead, and he's jealous of a painting."

Which comment left John several steps behind the conversation. "It's a photograph," he said, for lack of better options.

"Look carefully. Take away the beard and the coiff and it's ..."

"Oh hey, it's you, isn't it?" Mark clapped his hands.

"The head at least, anyhow."

'And the body?" asked John, unconvincingly offhandedly.

"Gentlemen," she responded in a professorial tone. "Look closely! Exercise your critical faculties. Note"—she pointed at the stud's chest—"the dark, oddly geometric equilateral triangle of chest hair. Note"—she pointed at the two

hands, just visible over the rise of her hip—"the fine, almost journalistic fingers clutching my ass."

"Oh," said John.

"Yes, my sweet." And she tugged at John's earlobe with her teeth.

"Those are very fine fingers," Mark agreed.

She happily told Mark of the "delightful little visit" John had made a few weeks earlier. She hadn't finished this one section of the piece, and, to her permanent frustration, she could not fill it with her own form. She wanted the encounter to look natural, though, so she snapped a few shots on a timer, then added new heads to both bodies ("I wasn't quite that bored"). John sifted through a handful of thwarted emotions: He couldn't get angry (it wasn't really his face); he couldn't feel complimented (it wasn't really his face); he couldn't be embarrassed (et cetera); surely he saw the humor, artistic statement, whatnot.