He shouldn’t have hung up so abruptly. What would Pavel do if Vanessa told him she had seen Tee and Katka together, alone? Tee remembered the shattered mug, the night of the attack. That was nothing compared to what Pavel could be capable of now, an artist who would burn his own art.
Katka leaned toward him. The scent of cocoa butter. “Remember that day,” Tee said, “in Vyšehrad, with the dogs? Pavel and Rockefeller appeared, and then you took off and pulled me along, and they ran after us. I didn’t even know why we were running.” Several dogs had jumped their leashes and joined the chase. Strange Prague everydays. “I’ve always been ready to follow you.”
Her expression hardened. “Follow? Is that why you climbed the tree? That day in Vyšehrad, you rescued a girl no one else would, remember that? The dog had her in its jaws, and you let it snap at you so she could get free. Even her dad would not do that. On New Year’s you seemed brave, going under the fireworks nude.”
“Naked,” he said. He remembered doing those things, only he hadn’t seemed himself then.
“I had not thought you needed to follow,” she said. “I thought you were more mature than your age, you were different than anyone else. You left your home behind. You left Korea. You left America.”
People stared now, as her voice rose. And he was reminded, horrifyingly, of his mother. Like always: an Asian boy with an older white woman. Katka gripped his hands, and he wanted to let go, but he didn’t.
She seemed to be accusing him. She brought his hands to her cheeks, as if he would slap her. “You’re so young,” she said, but she didn’t look away. He knew by now that this was desire, an attempt to distance herself from what she wanted. She brushed his fingers over her lips. He knew what he’d agreed to by meeting her here, by climbing the maple. He leaned in and kissed her.
She shook him off and stood. “I have got to go,” she said suddenly.
He shoved back his chair. Then he stepped in front of her, not caring who saw them, and kissed her again.
V
They got out of the cab in front of his building in Karlín, the rain coming on, and she said, “No one will know who we are. The rain will hide us.” On the stairs, they shushed each other. They put their fingers to each other’s lips. He went first to check that Rockefeller’s door was closed. Then he waved her up. His heart thudded like a third pair of footsteps. He recalled what she’d told him about the truth, hard and soft cartilage. He rested his finger on her nose.
Wrong women. But he was defying, not repeating, the past. He touched Katka lightly on the arm, and she shivered. At the top of the stairs stood two ghostly feet. He stopped short. The feet didn’t move. They weren’t Rockefeller’s. And Katka couldn’t be in two places at once. Tee touched her arm again, solid and real. When he kept moving, the feet were no longer there.
In his bedroom, he whispered with a sharp ache, “This is right.”
“No,” she said, “promise me we will not pretend.”
He pulled her toward him. He twisted her blouse in his fingers, and lifting it off, brought his darker skin to her lighter skin. He ignored the ghost passing his doorframe now. Katka moved his palms to her ribs, her breasts. He imagined his desire gathering her up, piece by piece. In her closet those pieces had been separate, a conspiracy of art. Now she was in his arms, whole. His fingers brushed the curve of her waist. Goose bumps rose on her cold chest. She kissed him harder, then softer, than before. He could hear the change in her breath. He bit her nipples, and she tugged his hair. He tried to make her same deep sounds, to hold nothing back. When she moved her mouth over his skin, she left cold, wet spots where her breath had been. She kissed his neck, he called her name, and she pulled him on top of her, locking her legs around the small of his back.
Afterward, they lay naked, staring out at the rain-scratched sky, hoping the storm would last. He traced a finger down her thigh, and she shuddered and said again, “Tell me something about you that no one else knows.”
He opened his palm as if to wave hello. And then he knew what he could tell her.
“I heard my fortune once,” he said, “after my Korean friend translated my birth mom’s last words. My dad had said it was a name: Kang Seul Peum. But what it meant was ‘river of sorrow.’”
He had left his friend with the words shattering in his lungs. “There was this restaurant in Chinatown someone had told me about, where a woman told the future. One look and you believed her. That woman said the break in my life line meant an early death or a coma, and my love line was so deep, I would never let anyone go.” He brought Katka’s fingers to his sternum.
“See these five scars on my chest? After the fortune-telling, I called my mom, remembering when I was six and almost died. Chicken pox and pneumonia. I had thought of my dad as saving me. A priest had come to say the last rites, and my dad stopped him. I guess I thought of it like adoption, a second time he kept me alive. But Mom said she was the one who made him go in that day, that Dad had thought I was a goner.”
They made love again. The ghost stomped around in other rooms. He could hear it banging in his kitchen, but he didn’t care.
VI
In the morning, Tee worked up the nerve to stop by the Globe. He’d been skipping his shifts. A man with horse teeth sat at Ynez’s desk. The expats in Prague changed weekly.
“Tee,” the man said — he was Irish.
“Do I know you?”
“I’ve heard of you. There aren’t many Asians in Prague who come in here.”
“I’m American.”
The man winked. “Didn’t know the word Asian would ruffle your feathers.”
“Maybe you could take a message?” Tee had wanted to apologize to Ynez, but now he didn’t know how. What message could he possibly leave?
“I heard you were with that artist the night he got beat,” the man continued as if Tee hadn’t spoken. “You and that big oafish lad who comes into the café, Rockefeller. Countrymen of yours, wasn’t it? I hear that artist is plotting against you lads.”
Later, Tee called back on his cell.
“You should talk to Ynez,” a new voice said.
“I want to.”
“Except she doesn’t want to talk to you. She quit two days ago.”
A cruel trick.
Tee wondered what Ynez had said when she left. He should have felt better to know that she was moving on.
After he hung up, he studied the objects in his dresser drawer: the blue thimble and the piece of the statue from Vyšehrad, the pewter Golem from the house in Malešice, the husk of the rocket from Old Town Square, the Pilsner and Budvar and Staropramen and Gambrinus and Krušovice coasters, two shot glasses, a few matchbooks, pencils and pens, stray buttons, an empty photo frame, a crumbling brick, a rabbit’s foot from God knows where. Was this what he filled his container with? Or was it simple proof of where he’d been?
He spread the objects out on his bed. He remembered the shavings from his uncle’s beard, the ash and bone in the urn. He remembered the Easter after he was accepted to Boston College, when his aunt had told him about her freshman year, the first time any of the adults in his family had ever talked openly about sex. Suddenly she had touched her cheek and said sex was all an act — she still dyed her hair every month, for men — and as she turned toward the living room, he was aware of a vulnerability he had never known before, in anyone. “All of this wanting and wanting,” she’d said, nearly crying. “All of this not knowing what you want.” At first he’d been embarrassed for her, trying so hard to connect with his youth when he couldn’t help feeling put off by her sexuality. Later he’d been unable to shake the feeling that they had shared something, that she was keeping some secret for him, and he owed her.