Nick, Mladen the real Yugoslavian and Nick’s friend Gábina who’s very beautiful and swung him the job at the art school — these three are sitting at a table on the far side of the café. It’s a tall, ornate room with cornicing around the ceiling and huge paintings of women on the walls — or, well, not paintings, but they’re glazed into the large ceramic tiles, the women, like a great big jigsaw so that each woman starts at about head height and goes up all the way to the ceiling, with her hair hanging down her back. So that’s art deco, then. Nick’s got three enormous bags, or one bag and one big green trunk and then a smaller bag and then a shopping bag as well; how’s he ever going to get all that shit out of the train when he gets to Amsterdam? They’re stacked up round the table, the three smaller ones on top of the green trunk, and this waiter’s saying something to Mladen as he walks by, pointing with his finger that he can’t get by to take stuff to the tables, which bullshit he can’t. The waiters are such assholes here in Prague: they’ll complain about anything and do anything just to be — what was the word she had to explain to her class the other day? Contrary. Nick’s looking away, laughing, ignoring the waiter; he must be glad he won’t have to put up with that crap any more. It’s Gábina who first sees Heidi as she’s walking up to them; she kind of starts, perks up and nudges Nick: Your friend’s here. Nick gets to his feet, sways slightly, takes her by the shoulders, kisses her hello on both cheeks, and oh boy has he ever been drinking, and not beer at that: it’s something sharp that rolls right from his mouth in waves of vapour. He says:
“I’m really glad you came. Hey, Mladen! Tell that guy to bring another round. Old Penguin there.” And he starts explaining how the waiter looks kind of like a penguin with his black-and-white suit, and the way he waddles if you watch him — which is true, he does, and Heidi says:
“His suit matches the black-and-white mosaic floor,” and Nick gets all excited and starts going on about this café he knew when he was a student:
“The floor was black and yellow. Black and yellow, right? You with me?”
And they all nod yes, so he continues:
“In big squares, black and yellow. It was called Brown’s, just to make things complicated. But the point is that the floor …”
“This we know. Black and yellow,” Mladen says, and she can tell he’s quite drunk too. Nick says:
“Right. And guess who used to hang out there? Beside me and some other students, I mean. Guess who was in there every time I went inside there. Every fucking time.”
They all look at him, smile and slightly shake their heads. Nick waits, then leans forwards, like he’s confiding some great secret to them:
“Traffic wardens!”
“Traffic what?” Gábina doesn’t get it. It’s hard to tell if she’s as drunk as the other two but if Heidi had to bet one way or the other she’d go for yes. Nick raises his voice and throws his hands up:
“Traffic wardens! Wardens! They go around slapping tickets on your windscreen if you park on yellow lines. Oh, right, you won’t know this, none of you, but in London they wear uniforms of black and yellow. Black with yellow stripes. There’s, I don’t know, ten, twenty cafés to choose from and they go for the one with the black-and-yellow floor. It’s as though the colour drew them there. In fact, I think it did. And what’s even better, the … the icing — no, the fucking cherry on the cake is this, right: once I saw a bee there, black-and-yellow stripy bumblebee, crawling on a traffic warden’s hat which he’d put on the table top beside his coffee. Isn’t that just …”
His eyes are watering. The memory seems to make him really happy. Heidi likes Nick, ultimately. For all that he annoys her sometimes, he’s good people. And then the whole Ivan’s-death episode has brought them closer, with them crying together afterwards and all that. Not close enough for her to tell him that she’s late, though. It’s almost two weeks now. She’s been late like this before, but only when she was like fifteen, sixteen; since then she’s been regular, give a day or two either way. It’s got to be Ivan: she hasn’t screwed anyone else recently. There was that drunken fumble with Jeffrey at the teachers’ party in November, lasted about thirty seconds as she recalls, but she’s been on since then — about ten days before the party at Jean-Luc’s in fact, which makes it all the more likely that some little Ivan-tadpole’s gone and hit home. After all those years of Sex-Ed and condoms handed out in coffee rooms and bars in little baskets like free candy, or stuck to the back of student newspapers which all had AIDS ads in them anyway on every second page — after all that, not to use a condom: what was she thinking? Although actually she knows exactly how her mind was working when she let him come in unwrapped: all that stuff, her logic went, the HIV and pregnancy and herpes and VD — that shit was to do with the scene stateside. It was something that lived in that whole milieu (that’s a good word, she thinks as Nick talks about bumblebees some more: not one she uses much, at all in fact; she should try sometime to slip it in) — that milieu of high-school dating, rock concerts and proms, then frat parties and clubs; it was native to that scene, just like green swamp monsters are native to B-movies from the Fifties, can’t exist outside them. So when she left Vermont and flew here trying to memorize that line about not breakfasting eagerly which she still hasn’t gotten to use, she left that milieu and its slimy pitfalls for a different world, the Magic Kingdom, where sex won’t give you AIDS or get you pregnant …
But then, the weird thing is, she’s not freaked out. She’s thinking about it non-stop right now, sure, but the point is that it’s not making her unhappy. What it makes her feel is what Ivan made her feel in the first place: real. Even when he blew her out by fucking that ugly Czech bitch Klárá (then he used a condom: she must have insisted, had her own whole repertoire, another nice word she should use sometime, of images associating sex and danger, gleaned from the equivalent Sex-Ed films they showed in Czech high schools, like Young Comrades Don’t Get the Clap or whatever), it gave her a sense of living, not this half-ass wanting or pretending trip the English teachers and in fact come to think of it virtually every American of her age and race and class she’s ever met are so caught up in. So with Ivan’s death this realness has been multiplied, and exponentially: that she had sex with a Czech artist, a pretty well-known one at that, who’s since died violently and in weird circumstances is, wow! And then to think she might be carrying this realness with her, in her …
Nick’s got something brewing. He’s watching the waiter as he places vodkas down in front of Mladen on the table, and his eyes are kind of glinting still. Eventually he says to the waiter, in English:
“You’re ambiguous, you are,” and bursts out laughing. The waiter turns around and goes, but Nick’s still laughing at his joke, which is what it turns out to be, as he explains to them: “I mean amphibious. Penguins are amphibious. Land and water. Oh Heidi, before I forget: that casserole.”
And he reaches behind him for the shopping bag, which movement makes his chair tip backwards and it’s only because Gábina catches it and pushes it forwards that it doesn’t go right over. He passes her the shopping bag across the table, holding it up high so that it doesn’t knock the glasses over. Heidi takes it, rests it on her knees and draws the plastic sides back to find a red cooking pot inside. Nick says: