The Dinner Party Page 17

  “I don’t doubt that,” she said. She turned to the dresser, but only to stand there at an open drawer, stirring things around uncertainly.

  “You’re not leaving now, are you?”

  “What choice do I have? We’ve talked about this and talked about it,” she said, sounding tired. “I thought we were making progress.”

  “We were,” he said. “We are.”

  “And your cell phone?”

  He shook his head.

  “You call that progress?” She shook her head, so full of disappointment in him. “I ran into Trish at the bagel place,” she explained. “Charles is going back to Texas. No one will say a word to Marie about the baby. And then she tells me that she and Teddy are getting married and she wants me to be her maid of honor. Before I know it, we’re in that little bridal shop around the corner. I just lost track of time. That’s it, Nick. That’s all.”

  “I tried to call you.”

  “My phone was here!”

  “I kept texting you.”

  “I was just running out for bagels!”

  Exasperated, she sat down on the bed. Feeling stupid, he drifted away.

  Not long after, from the guest bedroom, he saw the light go on in the kitchen. He heard her taking things down from the shelves. The refrigerator door opened and closed. A minute later, she began to chop. When something hit the pan and sizzled—he pictured her running her finger down the length of the blade, sliding the garlic into the hot oil—he was reminded of what, in fact, was best in life. It was Naomi’s garlic crackling, the smell filling the apartment, and the bottle of wine she would open. That beat all else, the garlic and the wine, hands down. Could she blame him for going out of his mind at the thought of it ending?

  He walked to the kitchen and stood in the doorway gloomily and waited for her to speak.

  “Who was it this time?” she asked finally, without looking up.

  He shrugged. “Someone I met at the gala.”

  She lifted her head. To look at him, she had to move the hair out of her eyes, which she did awkwardly, with the wrist of the hand holding the knife. “You just abandon me, Nick,” she said. “I never know where you’ve gone.”

  “I never really go anywhere,” he said.

  “You drive me so crazy,” she said.

  But then she sighed, and the fight left her body. Still shaking her head in dismay, she allowed a little smile. Without another word, he stepped into the kitchen and pulled down his own knife, and took up an onion and began to chop. He chopped for his life, hoping to be forgiven by the time dinner was served.

  Life in the Heart of the Dead

  Gray skies. A silver tray of individually wrapped cheeses. Bad coffee in boardrooms. That was Prague to me, that “city of a hundred spires.” And I might have boarded the plane knowing nothing more had Antonin not turned to me during that final dinner and said, “If you are free tomorrow, perhaps we go on walking tour?”

  Mop-brush mustache, bald head brown as a liver. Was he with the embassy? He was with us for at least two of those endless meals. The tourism bureau?

  I did not want to go on a walking tour. But I was boozy and delirious from lack of sleep and didn’t know how to decline with any grace. “Great idea. But let’s not do anything before ten o’clock.”

  Jet lag. It is never the hours you don’t sleep, but all the years that seem to have passed since you last felt awake, that make it so unbearable. I woke like a lightbulb at three in the morning, ready to shower and get on the highway. But I wasn’t in Cleveland. I was in Prague, and the only one alive. I lay there feeling sorry for myself, and a little frightened, until a glow appeared at the edges of the curtains.

  I didn’t know a thing about Prague when I arrived at Václav Havel Airport. I don’t know anything about it now. We lost our pitch to the Dutch and moved on to Montreal, where we did better than expected until the most recent downturn. If you asked me what Prague was like, I’d tell you about the Costa Coffee down the street from my hotel, where the coffee was hot and the Wi-Fi decent.

  One night, hoping to restore my sleep, I tried jogging. I ran down Ostrovní Street in the dark and crossed over to the riverbank. For half a mile I saw one car only, a lonely taxicab. Was it four in the morning? Or two, or three? The road forked, and I went down a service drive to the water. I was told the market there on Sunday mornings was lively, but I didn’t see a soul. I passed empty riverboats and rusted barges. The lights along the cobblestone path strained against the darkness. I was short of breath. I felt old and fat. I took a seat on a rain-logged bench. Dark waters. Still boats. The suggestion of beauty, if only I could see past the terror. Would anyone notice if I just keeled over?

  So that was a bust. Still, I took my time getting back to the hotel. There was a man there who made me uneasy. An employee of the place, frighteningly tall. A giant, in fact.

  I have a shallow understanding. I don’t like to admit it, but there you go.

  At dinner one night, I was seated next to a woman from the embassy. She was a Czech native, fluent in about a hundred languages. A stalwart blond, of middle age or more, with fat fingers and a sallow complexion. I could just picture her during Communism, in gray coveralls, singing the workers’ chorus and hating the West. But in fact she’d been a resistance fighter and a signatory and a whatever else.

  What I remember best about this woman, whose name is long gone, had to do with a flower. She had been the one to greet us at the embassy when we arrived for a tour. We went through a courtyard and up the steps to the first of three terraced gardens. Two groundsmen in matching jumpsuits were out on the lawn, one peering into the tank of his lawn mower. I was sleep deprived, already winded and ready to move on (but to what?). I thought going up that hill just to come back down again was a total waste of time (better served how?).

  At the top, we stood on a pavilion taking in a panoramic view. Everyone oohed and aahed. Directly before me, red gabled rooftops were huddled together like knockabout boats in a crowded harbor. Eventually we started down again. The woman from the embassy—I was now behind her in line—was naming the flowers as we went, complimenting the groundsmen for keeping the gardens beautiful, when suddenly she swooped down on a tulip or whatever and plucked it. I was shocked. Wasn’t that breaking the rule—if not a formal one of the embassy’s, then one shared by us all—about leaving helpless little flowers in the fucking ground? I wondered what she’d do with it now that it was hers. Would she take it inside, put it in some water?

  She gave it a whiff and tossed it aside. It landed on the lawn and began to die. Life was cheap. It scared the shit out of me.

  Anyway, we were eight (ten? twelve?) at dinner a few nights later, when I found myself seated next to her. There was a castle outside the window, a really big one. Black as a void, terrible looking. First time I’d noticed it. Was that the castle? And what did I mean by that, the castle? Was there a moat? Were there dungeons where the worst of the medieval tortures took place? Were they taking place still? Did people live there, work there? What had the Communists done with the castle when they were in power? All week I’d gone around asking what the Communists had done with this and what the Communists had done with that. Where had the Communists bought their hand luggage, how had the Communists opened their wine?

  “Hey, tell me something,” I said to the woman from the embassy. “What is that?”

  She stared at the castle through the window as if noticing it for the first time, too. When she turned back, she cocked her head at me and said, “You’ve been here for three days now, and you still don’t know what that is?”

  “Looks like a castle,” I said.

  “It’s Prague Castle,” she said. “And by the way,” she added, just when the whole table, and really the whole restaurant, seemed to go completely silent. “For some reason, you keep calling it Czechoslovakia. You understand, I hope, that it isn’t Czechoslovakia anymore. It hasn’t been Czechoslovakia for twenty years. It’s the Czech Republic now. If
you really hope to”—she searched for the right phrase—“blanket the city with billboards, you might want to keep that in mind.”

  Someone dropped a fork on a plate. Then Baxter, my second-in-command, said in a loud voice, “Anyone for dessert?”

  An hour later, our little group parted out on the street. “Try to take an interest in things,” she advised me.

  Jesus Christ—what the hell sort of thing was that to say to a person? She really hated me, I think.

  I don’t know where I got the idea—Ohio, probably—that I had nothing to fear in Prague. But after parting from my colleagues and returning to the hotel alone, I got lost inside a maze of foreign streets, all dimly lit and scarred with tram tracks, from which I could have easily disappeared without a trace. As I tried to find my way out again, it struck me that my safety was simply a matter of luck—the luck of the times. An official representative of the state had found me offensive. From as little as that there might have followed, in a different era, surveillance, menace, and death.

  But back to Antonin.

  I woke up the morning of our tour feeling terrible. Did I need to vomit, or was I just hungry? What I really needed was a dozen strong cups of hot coffee. Then I remembered what I had agreed to. I groaned and fell back in bed. See, I’m not just shallow. I’m lazy, too. I didn’t give a damn about Prague. I’d see it next time. And if there was no next time? Even better.

  But I was too lazy to cancel, and an hour later, when Antonin called up to my room, I had no choice but to drag-ass it down to the lobby.

  “How did you sleep?” he asked, rising from a drab wing chair. Tweed suit coat, no tie, taller than I remembered. No longer young, but trim and handsome.

  Who was he? He might have known how I fit in, but I had no clue who he was or why he was sacrificing a Saturday morning to parade me around the city.

  “Like the damned,” I replied.

  He smiled. Then his amusement faded and he furrowed his brow. “Do you mean…like the dead?”

  Yes! That was it—the dead. But I liked my version better. I had slept like the damned, the soon-to-be dead, and told him that was what I meant.

  “Doesn’t sound good,” he said.

  “No,” I agreed, “but if I get some coffee in me, who knows, I might just live.”

  The desk clerk had stepped away. There was no one to take my room key except the giant. He was seven and a half feet tall if he was an inch, the sort of man you turn to have a second look at when he walks by you in the street. The sort of man who plays freaks and henchmen in the movies, who in real life becomes a porter in a hotel.

  “Can I leave this with you?” I asked him.

  He came around the counter with great reluctance, ducking his head as a matter of course, as other men do only inside airplanes. He had the floppy blond hair of a skateboarder and a mousy little mustache. He took the golden key from my hand and hung it up, then turned back to stare cadaverously at me across the counter. I had the urge to request he give the key back just to make him do it, but there was a little voice: “Don’t provoke a man of that size!”

  Out on the street, I said to Antonin, “I don’t think he likes me.”

  “Who—the golem?”

  I laughed. “Yes—whatever that is. He thinks I take advantage of your women.”

  “Oh?”

  I gave Antonin an abbreviated version of the incident I had in mind. Two nights earlier, awake and restless, I’d left my room for a smoky pub just down Ostrovní, where I made conversation with a woman at the bar. I returned to the hotel a few hours later with my new friend. When we entered, I detected a look from the giant: “Ah, here we go, another asshole adulterer.” (With Antonin, I kept that fact to myself.) But how could the giant know I was married? No, it was just a look of old-fashioned jealousy. The giant was duty bound and bored at his lonely post, while the American was heading upstairs with a woman.

  I did tell Antonin the worst part—for the giant, that is. He made the night possible, as she put her fingertips on the small of my back, when he was forced to hand over my room key.

  We took a left, then a right, then another left…or maybe a right and then a left. Either way, I was lost in no time and at Antonin’s complete mercy.

  “We don’t do a lot of walking in Cleveland,” I told him. “Easier just to drive everywhere.”

  “Hmm,” he said. “Yes. Gas guzzlers.”

  “I don’t suppose there are any sights you’d like to see by car, are there?”

  “Better to go on foot, I think. Is it okay?”

  “Sure,” I said. “It is a walking tour, after all. But should we stop for coffee first?”

  “Best coffee in Prague is on same route I take us,” he said. “Trust me, you don’t want this Starbucks.”

  He made a sour face and pointed.

  Because there it was, in among the stalls and chintz shops on that cobblestone street: a spanking-new Starbucks! And yet we made no move to stop, to enter, to order! It was getting away! Were we out of our minds?

  Well, when in Rome. Here we come, best cup in Prague. Though just then I would have happily chugged cold Folgers from a gas can.

  One thing became clear. Antonin didn’t take his guiding duties lightly. We started in the town square, and within two minutes he was gushing facts: dates, names, conflicts, invasions, cruel deaths. I stood there feeling self-conscious. When he didn’t stop, it dawned on me. This wasn’t just some casual stroll through Prague. It was a damned history lesson! Antonin and I were going to go deep while standing upright! My heart sank. I wasn’t in the mood. The guidebooks tell you to soak up the history, but that stuff just beads on the surface and runs right off me. Here’s all I knew about history. Year after year in Cleveland public school, the teachers trotted out the same two events—the Boston Tea Party followed by the Gettysburg Address—and there did dull dead history start and stop.

  Antonin turned and began to walk backward over the cobblestones, beckoning for me to follow as if I were a group of Japanese tourists.

  “And here we have very famous statue of Jan Hus,” he said, “reformist cleric from fifteenth century who, as you may know, was first to—”

  But I knew nothing and let my mind wander until he said something that caught my attention.

  “Wait a minute—isn’t that just a figure of speech?”

  “No.”

  “He was literally burned at the stake?”

  “Yes.”

  “This guy here?”

  I pointed, and Antonin nodded. Tall and thin as a Czech Abraham Lincoln, the martyr before us made an ugly statue. I studied his face. With the exception of the moral courage etched there, and the divine purpose in his bearing, he was a man no different from me. Happy to be home, he takes off his shoes and wiggles his toes in front of the fire, when suddenly there’s a knock at the door. Next thing he knows, he’s tied to a stake and his toes are smoking, fucking smoking.

  “His poor toes,” I said.

  Antonin looked at me uncertainly and smiled. “Shall we go to cathedral now?”

  “What cathedral?”

  He pointed to a dome in the distance. It seemed a long way to walk just for a church.

  “Do we have to walk?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Seems far to me. What do you think? I guess we could walk it.”

  We walked it. A half hour later, I was running for the exit.

  “What the fuck is a human bone doing nailed to the inside of that church?”

  “Forearm of thief,” he explained. “A man who is stealing all the golds of the Madonna, so—” He made a terrible noise—it was half–table saw, half–wrung neck—as he ripped an imaginary forearm from an imaginary thief.

  “Was this recent?”

  “No, long time ago in history.”

  “This is why I don’t have anything to do with history,” I said. “People fall into the wrong hands and just get eaten alive. Martyr, thief, it makes no difference. It could happen to anybo
dy, even a nobody like me. No, thanks. Better to stay locked inside the hotel.”

  He laughed. “But what is happening then to participation?”

  “Participation in what?”

  He gestured. “The world.”

  He hauled me under the shadow of the astronomical clock—not a real shadow but a palpable gloom. Drab pigeons flew across the clock face, which was fastidiously hampered with fancy orbs and dials. He launched into another spiel. I fell asleep a tiny bit standing up, like some kind of horse.

  “Wait,” I said, jerking awake. “The clock maker was blind?”

  “No, was blinded,” he said, “by very jealous city elders of Prague, who are wanting him never to build another clock like this one anywhere else.”

  “What do you mean, blinded?”

  He told me what he meant.

  “Fuck me!” I cried. “That happens?”

  “Excuse me,” a woman’s voice said in just about the most perfect English imaginable. “Do you mind keeping your voice down? There are children.”

  She wasn’t kidding. She had about ten of them all around her.

  “Oh, sorry,” I said. “Jeez, you don’t expect that to happen to you in Prague.”

  “Shall we stay for show?” he asked, explaining that some grand performance took place at the top of every hour.

  “That depends,” I said. “Do they come around with coffee?”

  A minute later, saints of some kind began to rotate in an upper window while figures of vice, like Death and the moneylender, leered at us from a lintel. It was a cautionary tale and primitive animatronics show. The crowd cheered. They raised their iPhones and digital cameras, a hideous beast of a hundred limbs, to record it all and prove they’d been to Prague. If I had been Death looking down on us, I would have been frightened out of my mind.

  A few minutes later my attention was captured by the many young men on Segways in that square soliciting tourists to go for a spin. Remember those early boasts about the Segway, how it was supposed to forever alter the history of human transportation? Well, now it’s just another thing blighting the tourist traps of the earth, alongside the pigeons and fanny packs.