“Better? I am not sure what you mean.”
They sat for a while in the silence his question had raised. The waitress came, and he ordered a cheese platter.
“You did not answer me yesterday,” she said finally, twisting the stem of her glass. “What do I mean to you? Why did you climb that tree?”
“I like you,” he said. “I told you already. Why did you climb it?”
“Do you want me to say because of Pavel?”
Tee started to apologize.
“I told you,” she said. “Do not be sorry.” She took his hand, her skin unusually warm, as if she had been drinking already.
But he did need to hear about Pavel, for some reason. He didn’t want to sound whiny, young, but he needed to know. His fingers, under hers, seemed bony and thin, as if his skin had grown transparent. Had his aunt seen through his father like this?
The waitress delivered their cheese, and before they ate, Tee clinked his glass to Katka’s. Neither of them let their eyes drop. She’d told him that breaking eye contact while toasting meant bad intentions. “Tell me how you met,” he said.
“Tell you how I met who?”
“You know who I mean.” He tried to stop himself. He had seen that foot change direction, though, and he had to follow it to an end.
She drew a breath and seemed to decide. “After I graduated university,” she said, “I ran messages for the artists and writers leading the protests. Pavel’s father had just died in jail, and Rockefeller had printed their drawings side by side in a samizdat. I knew Rockefeller from when I was a girl, from before his family moved to Prague. His parents were important Communists, so no one suspected him, or they pretended they did not.” Her other hand rubbed a stain on the table.
“He arranged a message. I took a letter to Pavel — that was how I met him. I believed in him then as an artist and a hero and a politician, though he only ever wanted to be one of those. I begged Rockefeller for the chance to meet him. I was like all the others: I listened to Plastic People of the Universe, I followed the news out of East Germany.”
Three months before the Revolution, she said, she’d gone to Pavel’s house and met a young man the same age as she, with shaggy hair and a jutting chin. He stood to the side and read suggestions from the artist Vašíček — she’d opened the letter out of curiosity — an old friend of his father’s. He was stooped and timid at first, and she was disappointed. But once he finished reading, he said Vašíček’s was an old aesthetic, and he wouldn’t paint like his father. He would represent youth. As he ascended into surety, the fear she’d originally had, that she might embarrass herself before him in some way, pleasantly returned. His wiry frame seemed to grow sturdy before her, and when he asked her opinion of his art, her voice betrayed her. Only her body would react — she turned him around by the shoulder, so he couldn’t see her. Then she pressed a single fingernail to the back of his T-shirt, and electric with boldness, wrote her name. He arched in a way that embarrassed her, though no one was around, and he spoke her name aloud.
“After we married,” Katka said, “the May after the Revolution, he said I had hurt him that day. He said he had been afraid I would be able to do anything to him, and he would want it to happen. That was what we were like.”
They had been Tee’s age when they met. “Thank you for telling me,” he managed.
“Sometimes you look at me like that.”
In one of the oldest home videos of Tee’s mother, she was washing dishes, and with each plate finished, she batted her eyes as if waiting for Tee’s father to step out from behind and help her. After a few minutes she put down the sponge and pulled him in front of the lens and kissed him. Tee thought of that now, against his will.
“Why did you climb up to me?” Katka asked again.
“When I was a child,” Tee said, “I was very sick once and almost died. In my sickness, I dreamed my dad took me to Manhattan and up to the roof of a skyscraper. He refused to wait in line for the Empire State Building. A woman rode the elevator all the way to the top with us, without talking, and when we got off, I held my dad’s hand in fear. The wind blew so hard you could feel shapes in the shifting air, and I felt the woman run past us before I could see her face. She ran to the edge of the roof, and then she leapt off, arms out like she was diving into a pool.” Tee tore off the top layer of his coaster. Katka wrinkled her eyes, confused, but she knew suicide.
“After I got better, I couldn’t get the dream out of my head, it was so real. I bothered my dad until he agreed to a trip to New York. I don’t know why he indulged me. In the end, after hours of walking, we found the same building, exactly as I had dreamed it, and we went up to the roof and the rooftop was the same, too, and I knew something had happened there. I’d known it all along. I’m not so easy to understand.”
“You had a girlfriend,” Katka asked after a pause, “in Boston?”
“There was a girl I thought loved me once. But she was just in my head.”
“What do you call that? Puppy love?”
Katka finished her glass and the waitress came by. Tee’s face was hot. He wondered what had made Katka mention her father so early on and then never again. As the waitress wrote down their orders, she stared at Tee; finally she asked if he was American.
“Truth?” she demanded when he nodded. He frowned and drank the rest of his beer. “You have phone call.”
Katka pinged her wineglass with her fingernail. Tee hadn’t told anyone where he was. She swept her hair over her ear and glared as he followed the waitress to the front desk.
Could he simply ignore the call? Maybe Ynez was in another chamber, hating him. Or Rockefeller had seen him leaving the apartment building and followed for some reason — but why phone? Maybe one of the regulars at Rockefeller’s parties had spotted them and suspected something. Tee had nothing to hide.
“Prosím,” he said, picking up the phone.
“You said you wouldn’t tell her about us,” whined a woman with a New York accent.
“I’m sorry?”
“Come on, Tee, I saw you in there. You promised you wouldn’t say anything.”
“Vanessa?”
“Listen,” Vanessa said.
“I’m not going to tell anyone about you and Rockefeller. Where are you?”
There was a pause, and then: “Then what are you two talking about, the day after she climbs a tree and her husband burns his art?”
“Good-bye, Vanessa,” he said, and hung up.
He looked around but couldn’t see her. There was no reception underground, which was probably why she hadn’t called his cell phone. Rockefeller had trusted him with their secret relationship back in March. Vanessa had said her father hated her dating and would sell Pavel’s art on eBay or something if he found out. The last of Pavel’s unsold paintings, still intact, were at her father’s apartment.
Back at the table, the drinks had arrived before Tee. He thought about what he could say to Katka, but she didn’t ask. She wiped her lips and drained her second glass of red.