End of the Jews Page 15

  Could it be that there’s simply a quota? That intimacy comes automatically once you’ve logged five thousand hours with someone, or fifteen thousand miles? Once you’ve seen someone puke ten times—thus learning that Thai cuisine and Oklahoma City are a bad combination—or clicked off twenty-five thousand exposures? Once you’ve shared enough darkrooms, met enough deadlines, seen your names printed together in enough brochures and catalogs?

  It doesn’t matter. That closeness, that love, is natural, what the road, the gig, the life are all about. The real question is how it went from that to what it is now, in the fall of 1990, six weeks shy of her twentieth birthday. Nina has barely eaten in days. The stress is ravaging, finally too much, and so here she is walking to Devon’s berth at the back of the bus two hours before dawn and leaning down to wake him with a whisper and a nudge.

  “Bruh.”

  One of Devon’s many talents is the ability to be sound asleep one instant, totally alert the next: a by-product of his tendency to keep late nights and use the morning’s first phone call as an alarm clock.

  His eyes pop open. “Yo.”

  “I gotta talk to you.”

  He doesn’t say another word, just wraps the blanket around his shoulders like a shawl and follows her up front. It delights Nina to know that she can yank the Prince of Jazz from his bed and he will ask no questions, simply accept that she needs him. Just as he has awakened her countless times, sent Nina on myriad late-night and early-morning errands without so much as a pleasantry by way of coaxing.

  Devon seldom even bothers to tell Nina her schedule, just assumes she can walk out the door at any time on half an hour’s notice to shoot one of his elementary school visits or accompany him to a TV taping so he has someone to talk to in the car. Taking photographs is only half of what Nina, as the juniormost member of Devon’s entourage, is expected to do. She’s been a messenger, a secretary, even a liaison between Devon and a few of the more demanding women in his vast collection.

  He slides onto a built-in bench, pulls the blanket over his head, and hunches forward, elbows on the table.

  “I can’t take his shit anymore,” Nina whispers. “Look at this.” She points to her forehead. “I’m breaking out.”

  “You call that breaking out? Shoulda seen me at your age.” He rubs his eyes with the heels of both hands. “Look, sis. I told you before, you gotta deal with it yourself. Tell him, ‘Negro, leave me the fuck alone.’”

  “You think I haven’t tried? He doesn’t listen to me, Devon.” She looks over her shoulder at the shadowed bunk where Marcus is presumably sleeping. “He listens to you.”

  “So make him listen. If you can’t get people to listen to you in life, sis, that’s a major problem. Cuz it won’t be the last time a motherfucker wants some toonyan.”

  “He doesn’t just want some toonyan, bruh.” It is one of a hundred synonyms Nina has picked up, and learned to toss around as casually as any one of them. “Pipe Man just wants some toonyan. That I can deal with. Marcus wants to leave his wife for me.”

  Devon cracks a smile. “I’ve known Cherokee Slim since I was born, Pigfoot. Trust me. That brother just wants some toonyan.”

  Fuck you, thinks Nina, surprised at how much the assertion offends her. “Just talk to him.”

  Devon shakes his head. “If he was popping shit in public, I could step in. But he’s not.”

  The bandleader is right about that much. As soon as Marcus got it in his head that the two of them should be together, the displays of intimacy stopped. Now he waits until they are alone, then tells Nina how beautiful she is, how deeply he admires her talent, how much he loves her, how badly he wants her. What an amazing team they make, and how they could travel the world together, lovers and partners, shooting project after project, book after book, from Mozambique to Japan.

  He doesn’t do it every day, or even every week. As unsettling as anything is the way Marcus’s entreaties rise out of nowhere, return as fervent and flowery as ever just when Nina thinks she’s made herself clear and the two of them have fallen back into a shit-talking, fraternal rhythm. She’ll find him staring at her, feel her face grow hot, force herself to turn and ask, “What?” because Marcus will go on staring like that until she gives him an opening, and the sooner it begins, the sooner it’ll be done.

  The next day, as Nina is sitting on her hotel bed, going over contact sheets with a magnifying glass, she senses him looking up from his own paper, feels his eyes set on her. Nina looks like crap; she’s wearing a bulky pair of Devon’s sweatpants and a billowing bright blue T-shirt from some festival they’ve played. Smudged glasses, coffee breath, a pen lodged in her hair to hold it in a bun.

  “What?” She sounds as irritated as she knows how.

  Marcus affects a wounded, romantic murmur. “You know what, Nina. I can’t do this anymore. It’s killing me.”

  She continues to work, hoping to look impervious and bored. “You’re married, Marcus.” A beat, and Nina turns her head and looks over her glasses like a schoolmarm. “You’ve been married longer than I’ve been alive.”

  “I’ll end it. Give me the word, I’ll end it right now.” He snatches the phone off the desk and holds it in the air.

  “Put it down, Marcus.”

  “I know you love me.”

  “Not like that, bruh.”

  “You’re not attracted to me?”

  “Of course I am.” It has taken months’ worth of these confrontations for Nina to admit it, for fear of encouraging him. But lately, her strategy has changed. Now she thinks that if she gives him this much, he will realize that attraction is irrelevant, that it poses no challenge to Nina’s will and thus the whole thing is a dead end.

  “You’re a very handsome man. That’s not the point. You’re married, we work together, and I’m way, way too young for your old ass. It’s not going to happen, okay? Just stop. You don’t know what you’re doing to me with this shit.”

  “You know what you’re doing to me?” he retorts, sulking. Every time, Marcus manages to act freshly heartbroken. His frustration grows darker, uglier by shades, as if he’s working up the venom to change tack. Already, there’s a hint of menace to him, like some evil, brooding prince thrown over for a virtuous stable boy early in a bad movie.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” he mumbles after a moment.

  “You said that already,” Nina snaps. “Is it a threat now, or what?”

  She’s playing with fire; Marcus has more control over her fate than anyone, even Devon. If he won’t work with her, Nina’s out of a job. She’s his assistant, and it’s not like Devon’s going to fire the venerable Uncle Sparkplug and replace him with a nineteen-year-old Czech girl, even if he thinks she’s twenty.

  Nina doesn’t even have her own darkroom, just keys to Marcus’s. That’s where she crashes when they have a few weeks off: on a cot amid the gear and files and boxed-up ephemera filling his Brooklyn studio. Which is just as well, since all Nina does in New York anyway, during her alleged free time, is print. She can’t even cash a goddamn check; Devon writes Marcus one each month from a discretionary fund, and Marcus gives Nina cash. Or, just as often, buys her what she needs, like a fucking pimp.

  “Why would I threaten you?” he replies, offended but not answering. “I’m just saying, Nina, the way I feel, I don’t know if I can be around you if you don’t feel the same. It’s too painful for me.”

  “So what, Marcus?” she demands, growing frantic. “If I don’t sleep with you, I lose my job? If that’s what you’re trying to say, at least have the balls to say it.” She crosses the room and stands by the door, unsure whether she’s about to kick him out or leave herself.

  “That’s not what I’m trying to say at all.” He’s still sitting in his chair, pencil in hand, looking stricken—shocked and ashamed that she can think such things of him. And then Marcus’s face softens, and he regards her with vast, calm sympathy, as if realizing how tenuous and scary her world is. He seems desperate to c
omfort her, to shield Nina from the ugliness of her own thoughts, and sad that she is so confused as to see treachery where there is nothing but devotion.

  “Come here.” He says it as if she’s seven years old and his only desire in the world is to turn on her bedroom lights, show Nina that the monster is really just a pile of laundry sitting on a chair. “I’d never do that. Listen.”

  She takes a deep breath and exhales, the panic dissipating. This is not going to be the final showdown Nina’s been dreading. But she still isn’t going for his I’m-so-misunderstood routine. The only thing Marcus regrets is having his hand forced.

  “I’ve got to go,” she says, cold but not as cold as she could be. “I’ll see you at the club.”

  A minute later, she stands before Devon’s suite, staring at the DO NOT Disturb sign dangling from the door handle. It means one of two things: either he’s composing or he’s fucking. It’s noon, and the remains of a room-service breakfast for one sit on a tray against the wall, but Nina will not knock and risk being wrong. The sound of Devon yelling “not now” from the bed, the sight of his flushed face between the door and jamb, even the thought of him in there is too much to bear.

  Nina turns and walks back the way she came, reflecting that as long as she is with the band, her chances of meeting anyone herself are nil. Marcus would cock-block in a second, and if he wasn’t available, Devon would do the same. Any of the guys would, really; the ones who don’t act like older brothers act like older brothers’ friends. Protective or proprietary, a secret brotherhood charged with protecting the sacred treasure of Nina’s virginity—not that anybody knows she’s a virgin, thank God. That would be the living end.

  The problem is bigger than road life and the octet. Bigger, even, than Marcus Flanagan and his bullshit. Nina knows nothing about flirting except what she’s picked up by watching Devon—and his vocabulary of cool, just-short-of-condescending banter and sly, sexually charged presumption is guaranteed to translate poorly.

  Nina has assimilated just as much of Devon’s language, his dogma, as anybody in the band: become the latest member of the growing jazz-world population to emerge from the trombonist’s tutelage sounding like baby Devons, mixing and matching words like soulfulness and nobility, greatness and sophistication and conception, mouthing opinions they haven’t studied hard enough to comprehend fully, much less disseminate.

  For Nina, though, such mimicry lends a much-needed authority. She’s built a persona that discourages advances and commands respect, but in so doing, she’s desexed herself. You’d have to spend the kind of time with her that Marcus does to realize just how beautiful Nina is—see past the insipid, unflattering clothing and the broad, mannish body language she’s developed as a way of taking up sufficient space among the kind of dudes who eat until the food is gone and spread their legs wide on crowded subway cars.

  With Devon not to be disturbed and Marcus probably still waiting in her room, Nina has nowhere to go. She decides to write her mother. It’s been six months since Nina last sent a letter, and her country has changed completely. She watched it happen like a foreigner, spent the last two weeks of November perched before television sets in a string of hotels, watching the Velvet Revolution the way the octet watches the final minutes of a football game. The total transformation of Czechoslovakia unfolded in a stupefying flurry. November 16: the student protests; November 17: the riot on Národní Street; November 18: the student strike; November 19: Havel, the Civic Forum. By year’s end, Marxism had been stricken from the Constitution. The People’s Militia had been disarmed, its every action since 1948 declared illegal. The files of the secret police smoldered; the barbed wire that had once lined the Austrian border was a jumble of scrap metal. Censorship was finished. Now, the president’s a playwright.

  Nina’s exhilaration has been cut by an awareness of just how much maneuvering, how many thousands of secret meetings, must have laid the groundwork for this bloodless coup—all of it unbeknownst to her for the entire seventeen years she plodded through the Socialist Homeland. The knowledge multiplies the thousands of miles separating her from Prague. She’s not a part of that, either. She wishes she could have photographed it, but it wouldn’t have been worth waiting for, even if Nina had known what was coming. She wouldn’t swap her liberation for Czechoslovakia’s, this freedom for that one.

  Letters from Rayna pour into Devon’s office, where his secretaries add them to the bulky packages awaiting the band at the front desk of every new hotel. Her neat script fills pages and pages of the rough gray paper Nina grew up writing on—who knows, even now some international corporation is probably shipping tons of eleven-by-fourteen blue-ruled American-made legal pads over there, and this low-quality stuff will be forgotten.

  What seems to excite Rayna most is not the parliamentary elections or the nascent availability of books long suppressed, not the possibility of visiting her daughter or the fact that Nina can now return to the city of her birth without risking imprisonment. Instead, to Nina’s consternation, the thing her mother goes on and on about is the new religious freedom. I can be as Jewish as I want, she writes ecstatically, in a hand grown slightly bigger, swollen with elation. President Havel’s trip to Israel, accompanied by a planeload of Czech Jews, is recounted in great detail. Rayna describes planned museums celebrating the life of Kafka and commemorating the Jews killed at Theresienstadt as if she herself is slated to curate. Jewish study groups are forming, and Rayna plans to join one. Not because I intend to become observant, she writes, as if anticipating the face Nina will make. Because I can.

  Nina grabs a pad of stationery off a table in the lobby, retreats to a corner of the empty hotel restaurant, and orders a fresh-squeezed orange juice and a croissant, paying with Marcus’s name and room number. Dear Mom, she scrawls, then finds herself staring into space, confronted with the same problem that has aborted every attempt at writing back. It is ludicrous, shameful, but a part of Nina resents the revolution for scouring away her past, rendering her trials irrelevant. The ogre that stole away her father, poisoned her mother, locked Nina away in a dark tower, scattered her family like bread crumbs: the motherfucker’s body lies dust-covered in the town square, brought down by a band of villagers wielding torches. The dead student who started the upheaval isn’t even dead—in fact, he’s rumored to be a KGB agent. This is what they cowered before, hid from, whispered about?

  Nina pushes the pad away. It’s not her mother she wants to talk to anyway. It’s her dad. Miklos is the first man she ever knew, and now that she’s surrounded by men—smothering beneath them, it seems sometimes, like a fumbled football at the bottom of a pileup—Nina sees her father more clearly. She remembers a gentleness she hasn’t felt since, and to think of it now, at a time like this, is to invite tears.

  Marcus almost understands. His whole wounded-loverman seduction routine is intended to seem gentle. But Marcus’s slow-and-careful is not the slow-and-careful of somebody picking up a wounded baby bird. It’s the slow-and-careful of a hunter stalking prey. He wears it like a tactic, a tuxedo he can’t wait to shed; his eyes say that the caveman club would be far easier. Perhaps the only man in the world who can be gentle to a girl is that girl’s father. Nina’s always known what she needed. And even though he’s gone, she cannot imagine Miklos any other way, were she to present her bedraggled self on his doorstep. Provided he has one.

  Nina’s gnawed the cheap Bic pen to bits. It’s full of drool. Fuck this. She drops it on the pad, disgusted, tucks her head to her chest, and advances on the door to her room. Throws it open, hard. It hits the rubber doorstop and shudders.

  Sure enough, Marcus is sitting right where he was, as if the whole exchange has left him too distraught to move. Except that the TV clicker is in his hand, so really he’s been watching the Lakers play the Suns.

  “Please get out,” Nina says flatly, and to her surprise, Marcus stands and begins gathering his things. She seats herself on the bed, back to him, takes the phone from the nightstan
d, and holds it in her lap. It’s old and clunky, as heavy as a newborn baby. The door shuts behind Marcus; Nina’s kingdom is reclaimed. She is Penelope and Odysseus rolled into one.

  The operator picks up on the second ring. “What city and state,” he asks.

  “San Francisco, California.”

  “What name?”

  “Hricek. Miklos Hricek.”

  “Can you spell the last name, please?”

  “Sure. H-R-I-C-E-K.”

  There is no such listing. The operator offers her a Vassili Hricek on Jersey Street and a Hricek Hardware in someplace called Castro Valley. Nina thanks him, hangs up, redials.

  “What city and state, please?”

  “Los Angeles, California.”

  There are two Hriceks in greater Los Angeles, both female.

  There are no Hriceks at all in San Diego.

  The trail’s gone cold. She could dial 411 and browse phone books forever. The clicker woos her from across the room, where Marcus set it down. Why not slide beneath the fresh, clean hotel sheets with it, anesthetize herself with some dumb movie, then pass out? Nina gives in, snatches it, pulls back the covers.

  The television is a dim convex mirror; she can see herself reflected there as she points the remote. There’s something cold and executionerlike in the gesture, as if pushing the power button will kill the girl inside the frame.

  She drops her arm, looks at the phone. Why is everything in her life a machine? It makes Nina feel like an invalid, all this metal and plastic and rubber and glass, all these gleaming, essential, unfathomable devices. Her best friend is a camera, and damned if she knows how it works, or how to fix it if it breaks. Nina picks up the receiver and listens to the dial tone. It’s soothing, the sound of possibility—until that hostile off-the-hook beep takes over, a reminder that opportunities must be grabbed up quickly.