G’ma said it was like her two sons married versions of each other. Mom the quiet, tolerant girl; Auntie the restless, yearnful one. Each other’s shadows. Doubled legends. A woman and a ghost. I have to stop this. Stop doubling the past with the present. They’re two things in a line, not two versions of something else.
One evening when it didn’t rain, Tee knocked on Rockefeller’s door, and inside, he found Vanessa. She was a year older than he, an honest girl with a barely reserved mean streak. She had graduated from NYU and flown to Prague to assist her father. Rockefeller’s hair stuck up in back, and the room stank of sweat. Vanessa lit a cigarette with a deliberate spark. What was Rockefeller trying to tell him…? Tee didn’t feel trusted now. He felt as if they had gone back to a time when one awkward visit meant your name on a list.
“How’s life,” Vanessa asked. Before he could answer, she pulled him into the hall, poked a finger into his chest, breathed smoke past his ear, and scowled. “What is your plan? To get with Picasso’s wife? You’re even more lost than I am.”
Later Tee would wonder which afternoon Rockefeller found them out.
August 4:
Today I forgot to buy water and K mumbled to herself like Mom. Bit her teeth like Mom, too, that same click. Or did I imagine that? I remember, that time I got lost in Stop & Shop, I found Mom by that click. She was watching a man at the pay phone in front of her. She snapped her teeth together, and I heard it from all the way down the aisle. I couldn’t call out to her, though. She had this sneakiness about her. When I got close, I knew why. The man at the phone was Dad. He didn’t know she was there. She had forgotten I was there. “I hate you,” she said under her breath. “I hate you. I hate you.” And then, “I love you.”
Tee would picture, later, Rockefeller walking across the street for a coffee, too lazy to take the metro to Flora where his own café was under construction. Maybe as he walked back, a woman ran out without an umbrella, and he thought he recognized her.
Or maybe he saw Katka as she arrived. A woman went up to the door ahead of him. He only recognized her when she stood too close to the building, which she did so that no one at their windows above could see her, or when she checked inside first before entering, or when she didn’t look back to hold the door. Rockefeller paused then, not yet knowing why, before following a minute behind. In the stairwell, he heard sounds from Tee’s apartment, a voice he knew.
For three straight days, it didn’t rain. Tee drew Katka inside a raindrop. He worried about Pavel finding them out and burning the house this time. Tee took the coasters from the drawer and tossed them out the window like flying saucers. He slipped the Communism Museum matchbook back under Rockefeller’s door, and left the rabbit’s foot in an Internet café. The third night, he saw the ghost around every corner, always a step ahead of him. Katka herself was nowhere to be seen. He turned off the lights, and the sun behind the gray clouds outside seemed no brighter than the glow inside. The past — if that was what a ghost was, the past that haunted the present — should have stayed fixed as it was, suspended by time. But whenever he got near that glow, it was already coming from another room. When he couldn’t take this game of tag anymore, he went to an Internet café and e-mailed his mother.
Tell me, are you happy now — divorced? I keep remembering the trip we all took together to the monuments in DC–I think I was 8? In the video Dad saved, we’re like caricatures. Me a lovesick kid running to Dad or Uncle H. or Auntie only to return to you. Dad a lens on each of us just long enough not to seem pathetic. Uncle H. a soft-spoken vet who paid for everything as if embarrassed by $. Auntie, as soon as the attention left her, stuck in a mood, her color waning. You either pulling Dad or me aside or lingering at the back, always scarily aware. I remember maybe 2/3 into the video, the shots got shorter. Dad was running out of film. He tried to conserve and kept missing the action. In the scene I can’t forget, Auntie has a rubber egg from some novelty shop and is squeezing it behind you — did you know about this? — somehow so lewdly. “If I had a baby,” she says to me. I take the egg from her and throw it down the street. When you kneel beside me, you tuck in my shirt but never ask why I did it. I was always missing something. There was that day Dad took me to the library when he was supposed to be watching me at home. You came around your counter, as if you had expected us, and told Dad to go. He kept acting like he’d won something, but what? After he left, you put me in a corner with a book about geysers. Remember that? “Learn about your dad,” you said. What was I supposed to learn? I am serious. I am okay. Love, Thomas
Maybe Rockefeller saw her on one of these days:
On the first, Katka stood at the kitchen counter, slipping mandarin slices into her mouth two at a time. She ate everything two bites at a time. “I know him again,” she said. “He is painting again. He does not realize I am with you, because he is too busy thinking. He believes I am giving him time to paint.”
“What do you do when he kisses you,” Tee asked quietly.
“I make him believe I still want him. What else can I do?”
They made love that time too furiously, perhaps.
On the second, she said, “I think he has never done a better painting”—she was Pavel’s subject again; he’d started to use the casts as brushes, started to return to art—“so how can he hate us?”
“How can he hate us?” Tee wondered how she could think their impact was less than it was. Less real than life.
Was that the time Rockefeller saw her, as Tee walked her out? Promise me we will not pretend, Tee had thought, shuttling her into the rain with an arm around her twitching shoulders. Three weeks and she had stopped taking her own advice.
VIII
These are the things Tee learned about Katka before the flood:
She ate well, a strong appetite always.
When she wasn’t with Tee, she liked to go outside after dinner, briefly, for the changing light. Not to walk, though she liked walking. Not to garden, though she liked gardens. Sometimes, to stretch. She didn’t like organized exercise, but she would exercise spontaneously.
Her father had studied butterflies. Her mother had studied literature.
She knew her neighbors, though they seemed surprised that she did, as if she was the type not to know.
She hated to lose. She was hardly ever jealous, but she was competitive. She avoided games. If she played games, she would exploit the rules ruthlessly.
Her puzzles were a way of recovering meaning. She enjoyed the work of physically rebuilding what her mind had already interpreted.
She could be simultaneously anxious and composed — her nervous tic was to brush her hair back over her ear, cleaning away her face.
She believed Hanuš had saved his clock, not destroyed it.
IX
Pavel was indeed painting again. He even invited Tee to see. “I had nothing to do with this,” Katka said on the phone. On the tram to Malešice, a crowd got off in Náměstí Republiky and a leg glowed between them. Shouts carried from the square, but Tee didn’t try to follow now. He went straight to Pavel and Katka’s house, and Katka met him outside by the brown patch of earth where the paintings had burned. She warned him to be careful. She burrowed her heel into the patch and went to tussle his hair — he could tell — and stopped herself.
In the bedroom, Tee choked on dust. Pavel stepped down from a wooden chair. Behind him stood a giant canvas, eight feet high and four feet across, propped up against the bed. Tee wondered how they’d gotten it into the house. Bands of yellow, as wide as Pavel’s casts, swept across the surface, one after another. The color bothered Tee. He recognized the curve: it was Katka, lying on her side. Katka again and again, slightly altered each time but always her. He could almost feel her hips. Pavel’s casts were coated in yellow. The mess in the studio, if it had ever been there, was gone.