End of the Jews Page 17

  “Shit, Pigfoot. My daddy mopped floors in a nursing home. You think I’m not proud of him?”

  The elevator dings and opens. Nina stays right where she is. “You know how many cats who were professors and architects and doctors back in their home countries come here and end up driving cabs?” The doors begin to close, and Marcus blocks them with his foot. “Come on. Go see your old man.”

  She shuts her eyes. “Just give me a minute, okay?”

  “Sure.” Marcus gives the hands-off sign, spins on his heel, walks across the hall to the water fountain. A moment later, Nina hears his footsteps coming closer, and looks up in time to see Marcus thrust a piece of paper at her, its bottom third fringed into tear-off slips.

  Philosophy Tutor Available, it reads in large hand-drawn block letters. Undergrad and graduate levels. All topics. Thirty years teaching experience, published author, Ph.D. On the slips are Miklos’s name and what must be his home phone number.

  Nina stares at the flyer for a long time, as if she expects this advertisement to account for nine missing years all by its lonesome. She hits the elevator button, then changes her mind and barrels down the stairs.

  Nina busts in like a gunfighter entering a saloon, and scans the room. This library has none of the majesty of the one in which she logged so many hours as a girl. It’s got more in common with the one at the prep school in Pasadena where she and Devon spent an afternoon last week, teaching the kids about jazz. Students hunch over blond-wood tables, half of them half-asleep. Backpacks dot the ground like gumdrops. Ancient green-screened computers hum; metal carts of books sit marooned in aisles. A white-haired woman in a ratty cardigan pushes a sliding ladder across a wall, about to reshelve the thick tome in her hand.

  For the second time in five minutes, Nina approaches a total stranger and asks the whereabouts of her father. “He’s in the break room,” the boy behind the main desk tells her, pointing behind him at a closed door labeled STAFF.

  “May I?” Nina passes before he can answer, curls her hand around the cool brass knob. She takes a moment to collect herself, turns it a fraction of an inch, and stops. Voices murmur on the other side. One male, one female. And they are speaking Czech. Nina yawns to clear her ears, then listens harder. She makes out a few disjointed words—almost, weekend, movie, napkin—and throws open the door.

  A man and a woman sit opposite each other at a small table in a bare Formica-countered room that smells of stale coffee, both of them biting deeply into what look like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on whole-wheat bread. A Ziploc bag containing two more lies between them. They look up, startled.

  The man swallows, then dabs at his mouth with a paper towel and turns in his seat. It is Miklos all right. He’s thinner than she’s ever seen him, about ten pounds up from gaunt. A plaid flannel shirt that might once have stretched snugly over his belly hangs baggy instead. A network of thin wrinkles surrounds his caved-in eyes, like minor streets on a road map, and his hair and beard are a dull gunmetal gray, with not a glint of silver. His bifocals are off a drugstore rack.

  “Can I help you?” he inquires. The woman takes another bite.

  “Hello, Dad,” Nina says in Czech.

  He blinks at her, then stands up so fast, his plastic chair falls over backward, clatters against the floor.

  “Nina? It’s really you? My God!” He laughs the laugh Nina remembers: a big round sound like shouting into an empty barrel, undiminished by the loss of untold pounds.

  Before she knows what’s happening, Nina finds herself wrapped in a long, airtight embrace, breasts pressed flat against his chest, face buried in the shoulder of his shirt. He smells first of cigarettes, second of sandalwood, and third of old sweat. Slowly, she brings her arms up to his shoulders and hugs back.

  “I can’t believe it!” He rocks her from side to side, then steps away and clasps Nina’s forearms with his hands. The same hands I remember, Nina thinks, looking down at them. She realizes she’s seeking out the unchanged in her father, dwelling on what weight and time have not transformed.

  He looks her over, then twists at the waist without letting go. “My daughter,” he proclaims to the woman, who is standing now, shaking out the pleats of her long skirt and smoothing down her bunned-up hair. “She is beautiful!”

  Miklos turns back to Nina and grins, revealing a row of yellowed teeth. She does not return it, fixing him instead with a hard, expectant look she slapped together while his back was turned.

  Miklos sees it, and his exuberance drops away. He picks up Nina’s hand, holds it in both his own. “Every day I’ve wondered where you were, how you were doing.” He stares at her with wide bloodshot eyes, as if imploring her to search them and confirm his sincerity.

  Nina switches to English. “Then why haven’t you called, or written?”

  Miklos hangs his head, nods, sighs so hard that his shoulders rise to his ears, then slump almost to his rib cage. It’s a ridiculously oversized gesture, and yet one that seems to acknowledge its own failure to convey all it seeks to.

  “For a long time,” he says, shifting to English, too, and his accent is stronger than Nina remembers, far stronger than it should be, “I simply could not. It was too much of a risk. And then, by the time it wasn’t…”

  Miklos looks up at her, his face so slack with shame that for a moment she actually fears for him, worries with an abrupt, intuitive concern that getting through the next few moments may be more than her father can bear. “Then, Nina, I had nothing to say.”

  He looks around, as if this break room is the physical manifestation of his fate in America. “I had failed. Our plans had come apart, and I had trapped myself here, with nothing.” Miklos tries to laugh, but he cannot. “A college kid’s job, shelving books. You and your mother were better off without me.”

  “We just wanted to talk to you. We just wanted to know you were okay.”

  “I was not okay, I’m afraid. I became very depressed. And in my depression, I began to drink. Only when I met Rayna—” He beckons to her, and the woman steps forward and stands at Miklos’s side. “Her name is Rayna, too,” he says apologetically.

  The woman extends her hand to Nina and says in Czech, “I have heard all about you.” Nina takes her hand and shakes, stuporously, barely looking at her, waiting for Miklos to go on.

  “Only when I met Rayna did I see what I was doing to myself,” he resumes after overseeing the handshake. “She got me in a program. I’m sober three years now.” Miklos looks at the floor as he says it. If he’s proud, he doesn’t want to appear that way.

  “How is your mother?” he asks after a moment, with an awkward formality. “She is here with you, perhaps?” Nina watches Miklos’s face brighten and then darken as he gives further thought to what he will be in for if she is.

  “No. Mom is still in Prague. She’d kill me if she knew I’d come here.” She pauses, then decides that he deserves it. “You ruined her life. You know that.”

  Her father touches his beard, glances skittishly at the new Rayna.

  “She is a strong woman.” His eyes shuttle from Nina to his sandwich to his shoes, aimless, like a fly alighting on whatever seems to offer harbor. “I’m sure she is all right. Her father—your Deda—he is still alive?”

  “He died six years ago. She’s not all right. She’s fucked-up. How do you even have the balls to say that? How the hell would you know?”

  Tears sit in the corners of her father’s eyes. He blinks through them. “What I have done is unforgivable. I know that.”

  “Nothing is unforgivable,” Rayna chimes in. “God forgives all.”

  “Shut up,” says Nina. “Who asked you?”

  Rayna crosses her arms, retreats into herself.

  “I never meant to hurt you,” Miklos declares. “None of this is how I meant for things to be.”

  Nina nods. She wants to be fair. The power she has over him is too much; it’s become something she’s afraid to wield.

  “Please, Nina. I’v
e missed you so much. Tell me about yourself. What you’ve been doing.”

  “Since I was twelve?”

  Miklos can’t seem to figure out how to respond. “Yes,” he says, opting for a kind of hungry grandiosity. “Yes. Tell me everything.”

  “Well, let’s see. Mom pretty much went crazy after you left, what with supporting the two of us and worrying about you, and agents trying to swindle her out of the house. I took care of myself, basically. Um…started taking pictures for Lidové Noviny, met Devon Marbury when I was seventeen and came to New York with him. Been working as his assistant photographer ever since, and traveling with his band. I’m twenty-one now, in case you’ve lost count.”

  “Of course.” Her father taps his watchless wrist. “Today.”

  “Right,” she says softly.

  “Is it a happy birthday, Nina? Are you sorry you found me?”

  The question is an arrow shot from Nina’s childhood, whizzing through time and finding its mark. She remembers her father’s habit of presenting her with moral dilemmas, of randomly requesting emotional self-evaluations. Would it be right to steal a loaf of bread if you were starving, Nina? Do you feel happy today? Happier or less happy than yesterday? How do you know? He never made her feel that there was any motive behind the questions, or any judgment of the answers. Nina enjoyed responding because it seemed like grown-up talk, reminded her of the way Miklos was in his classroom. How strange that she’d forgotten all about it until now.

  “No, Dad,” she hears herself reply. “I’m not sorry.”

  “You don’t hate me, then? Like your mother?”

  The weasel. It’s a force play, a gambit out of Marcus Flanagan’s old bag of tricks. If Miklos is brave and wretched enough to ask, she is supposed to be gallant enough to lay aside the minority share of her feelings and reassure him.

  “Yes and no. I don’t think you understand what you’ve done to me.”

  Rayna steps forward, tries again. “Your father is a good man.” She reaches for Miklos’s hand and interlocks her fingers with his. “He thinks about you all the time. God has brought you together again, after all these years, so you can both make a fresh start.”

  “I brought us together,” Nina snaps.

  “Well then, why did you?” Rayna retorts, and the three of them stand silently for a moment before Miklos speaks.

  “Nina,” he says, “we have much to discuss, you and I. Far more than we can hope to in the few minutes we have now. Please, let me take you to dinner tonight. To celebrate your birthday. If you will still be in town.” He clears his throat. “I am still your father, and I love you very much.”

  Nina looks at her father and sees a man with nothing left to offer her. He’s hollow, he and his excuses both. She feels tears forming, and catches herself before any can rise. “I love you, too. And I’m sorry that I can’t have dinner with you. This is the only time I could get away.”

  “Take my phone number, Nina. You’ll call me, and we’ll talk.”

  She pulls the crumpled flyer from her purse. “Already got it.”

  “Ah. Yes.”

  “I should go.”

  They each step forward. Another tight hug. Nina backs out of it. Miklos lets go reluctantly.

  She pauses at the door. “I have your camera. I still use it. It still works.”

  “I hope soon I will have a chance to see your work.”

  “I’ll send you something. Good-bye, Dad.”

  “Good-bye, Nina.”

  She nods at Rayna, who nods back.

  Marcus is waiting just outside the library. By the time Nina finds him, tears are streaming down her face. She walks into his arms and Marcus holds her, rocks her, strokes her hair with a hand almost the same hue as her own. She doesn’t want to let go, and so they make their way back to the car in a kind of mobile hug, with Nina’s head tucked just below his chin, her arms wrapping his middle. His smell is dark and safe.

  “You must be hungry,” Marcus says, and Nina jolts awake. Last she remembers, she was staring out the car window, replaying the meeting in her mind, trying to work her way through it and getting impossibly forestalled in the image of Miklos with his face buried in that idiotic peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

  “No. At least I don’t think I am. Where are we?”

  “Almost home.” Meaning the hotel, she thinks. “You eaten anything today, Nina?”

  She shakes her head, and for some reason remembers how she used to shake it as a little girl: chin to shoulder, like a model in a shampoo commercial, at a speed that made her hair sweep gently across her cheeks. She undoes her ponytail and tries it now, losing herself in the experiment and then in the forgotten feeling.

  She slips out of her shoes and hugs her knees to her chest. The action makes her skirt ride up and bare her thighs, but Nina tells herself she doesn’t notice. “I don’t wanna eat,” she pouts, dropping her forehead to her knees and watching Marcus out of the corner of her eye.

  He plays along. “You’ve got to eat.”

  Nina speaks into her legs. “I’m not hungry,” she says, and a bit more of her childhood returns. How high the stakes were in arguments like this one, when your sole power in the world was that of gatekeeper to your own body. And even that contested.

  “We’ll see,” Marcus tells her with a smile, and they speak no more. Nina tries to think young, wonder-filled thoughts, but nothing comes. Ten minutes later, the car shoulders into the parking lot. Nina stays put, waits for Marcus to come around, open her door, offer his arm. She’s not sure anymore what part she’s playing, whether this is the act of a child too sleepy to walk unassisted from the car to the front door, or that of a diva awaiting escort from her limousine.

  “Now I’m hungry,” she tells Marcus as the hotel elevator closes.

  “We’ll get some room service. Okay?”

  Nina nods and clasps her hands in front of her, her arm still linked with his. “Okay,” she whispers. And then, louder: “I want mashed potatoes. Lumpy. And lots of gravy.”

  “We’ll get you some.”

  “And macaroni and cheese.”

  “Of course.”

  “But only if they have Trappey’s hot sauce.” The door opens.

  “I’ll run out and get some myself if they don’t.”

  “Red Devil would be okay, too. And some wine. Some good wine.” Nina slides her key into the lock.

  “I hear that.”

  She flops facedown onto the bed and props a pillow underneath her chin. Marcus orders comfort food for two, and a cabernet the waiter on the other end of the phone claims is the region’s best. Nina stares down at the bland tan carpet. The feeling of Marcus trying to cobble together some kind of comforting, philosophical assertion is as palpable as the sensation of blood rushing to her arms.

  “You know, we’re all just human—”

  “Please. Don’t.”

  She rolls onto her back, kicks off her shoes and lets them sail over her head and thud onto the floor.

  “Here.” Marcus has liberated a six-dollar chocolate bar from the minifridge. “Have an appetizer.”

  Nina places the square beneath her tongue to melt, extends a palm for more. Marcus breaks off another chunk. By the time the bellboy knocks, he’s fed her the whole thing.

  They pull two chairs up to the table on wheels, pluck the metal covers from the plates, and pour the wine. Nina drinks hers in two gulps, hardly tasting it. Marcus gives her a refill. There’s the slightest hint of remonstration somewhere in the angle of his eyebrows, and so rather than lift the glass again, Nina unrolls her silverware from the cloth napkin and swoops down on the mashed potato mountain with a spoon. The Trappey’s bottle is new. Marcus breaks the plastic seal and douses his portion of mac and cheese in the vinegary orange concoction.

  The urge to speak with a mouth full of potatoes is too great for Nina to resist. “I feel,” she warbles, smacking her chops, “like a little kid.” She pauses, realizes this is a lie, and reaches for the wine. “A
little kid would never say that, huh?”

  Marcus smiles, noncommittal but supportive, the way a therapist might. He shifts his weight, hitches his pants at the knee, and crosses his legs in that mannered, Michael Corleone way he has. A full second beforehand, she could tell he was about to do it. Before Marcus himself, probably. Such precognition is the greatest intimacy Nina knows.

  “Fuck feeling like a kid. That’s how he’s made me feel all these years. I’m over it. I wanna feel like an adult.”

  She stares at Marcus hard, tipsy, emboldened by her own words, half-jellified by the serial rush and retreat of adrenaline through her system all day. Make love to me, Marcus, she thinks, daring him to read her mind. Her heart is thudding just as hard now as it was this morning when she turned that corner and came face-to-face with what she thought would be her father’s office; the same brew of power and fear suffuses her.

  But she’s learned something today: better to focus on the power. That’s what being wanted is. The thought is anathema to the entire construction of her sexual self, and thus it takes on the sheen of revelation. Marcus’s desire means that Nina is in charge.

  It’s just like the music. His love or lust or whatever—who gives a shit which it is right now—is the drumbeat, the foundation of the song. Marcus is locked into his rhythm. Nina is the bass. She can play behind the beat, drag everything down to a standstill, or she can push the tempo. There are thrills to be had here, thrills and cruelties and God knows what, and all she has to do is say fuck fear and take command. What is there to be afraid of anyway? She’s sick of running from what everyone else is pursuing, from what being a goddamn independent grown-ass human being is all about.

  This is the world to which Nina alone, of everyone she knows, is denied entry. Not jazz, not America, not blackness. Constructs, all of them. What separates Nina is sex, and fantasy—virginity and the stupid, secret, make-believe realm in which her father is a UC professor of philosophy sitting in a plush corner office. As one ends, so must the others. They are embarrassments, not treasures.

  “Marcus. I want to get laid. Make love to me.”