“You guess how I am doing it,” Pavel said, waving his casts at Tee. “You guess.”
Tee stepped backward, his stomach twisting. The casts couldn’t create detail. What Tee saw was more like half a silhouette. Above were the ripples of yellow, tints from gold to dust, as if Pavel had dropped her in a yellow pond.
“It is his best,” Katka said reluctantly.
Pavel wiped his casts on an already yellow towel and said he wanted Tee to talk to his dealer for him, instead of Rockefeller, about a new series. In the corner, a smaller canvas leaned against the wall, freckled by the same texture but a dark shadowy gray, a depiction of anger, or fear. It was as if Pavel had started painting himself and then switched to his wife.
“You wanted me to see a naked painting of Katka?” Tee asked.
Pavel’s eyes narrowed and he sucked in his cheeks. Tee wanted to say more, but he was suddenly afraid, more afraid than he could explain. The yellow painting of Katka, the gray painting pushed to the corner. Tee leaned his shoulder against the wall. “This art,” Pavel said, “is something new. Tell Rockefeller — how you say it? — he is dead to me.”
Tee heard a faint grinding that seemed to come from the small, dark painting. Then he caught Pavel’s jaw shifting back and forth, his earlobes wobbling.
When Tee got home that day, he had a voice-mail message. “Why don’t you answer?” came his mother’s voice. “You and your dad were always running or hiding from me.” He pictured the expression where her face went from gentle to cutting in an instant, as if even her freckles rearranged. That look had cured him of his nail-biting, another of his father’s habits. “Ignore that. I just wanted to hear your voice.”
Tee’s lights flickered, and in the dark, he remembered his mother hovering at his elbow when he was eight, as he held a homemade card over a candle for the first time. Halfway through, she snatched the card away, so that the last two edges burned more neatly. When Tee complained that the girl he liked would know he hadn’t done those sides, his mother’s eyes seemed to unfocus — as if she had another set behind the first, through which she really saw — and she said, “Because of these two sides, she will know you did some of it.” As if mistakes were what people knew him by. He hadn’t known how to undo her logic.
Was it that night, he wondered, the card tucked into his backpack, that she had determined he was too old for bedtime stories? She set a folding chair beside his bed instead of climbing in with him, and said it was time he read to her. He stumbled over words; she didn’t correct him. She kneaded her palms as if she wanted to touch him but couldn’t bring herself to. He wanted to tell her he loved her, but his voice was in her hands. When he woke in the middle of the night, the chair was still there, the lamp still glowed. He put a finger to the seat. It was warm.
He realized now: the glow of the candle flame, of the lamp, of Katka rippling through the painting, of the ghost that wouldn’t leave him alone — somewhere in his mind, they were all the same.
Tee imagined Katka sprawled on the studio floor, nude and covered in dust. Pavel balanced on his chair above her and swiped his casts across the canvas. The bed propping up the painting stood in the middle of the room. They hadn’t moved the bed in years. Underneath it, they’d found the layers of filth in which Katka now posed.
The dust itched; it stirred into the air; it made her cough. But Pavel painted a beauty she had never — even during the Revolution — seen in his art before. She modeled for him because she was cheating on him with Tee.
Pavel had been searching for undestroyed art and had reached under the bed with his cast. When his arm came out gray-yellow, he’d called to her, shouting dimensions. For his art, she’d bought the canvas and a dozen buckets of paint and batches of cheap towels. For his art, she’d cleared the room and pulled out the bed and set the open paint buckets around the chair and stacked the towels beside him, in two piles, one wet, one dry. To change colors, Pavel wiped his casts on a wet towel, then dried them, then, the space around his skin sealed with modeling clay, dipped his arm into a new bucket of paint, up to the elbow. She itched on the floor. At the end of each session, thirty towels went into the wash, gallons of yellowed water swirled down the drain into the Vltava.
In the evening after Tee had seen the painting, Katka arrived in the rain and they lay in bed talking. She told him how each time she posed and itched, she admired Pavel again. Though she longed to wash off the dust, then to let the rain wash her, then after meeting Tee, to wash again. Suddenly she was crying. He imagined the constant water meant baptism, meant forgiveness. Once, she had actually gotten off the metro to go back to Malešice, before a clap of thunder reminded her that Tee was counting the seconds. He didn’t know how to respond to this — the ghost was about to appear, he could feel it. There were footsteps in the hall. He took Katka into his arms.
Tee imagined Katka watching Pavel climb onto a chair to work on the top of the canvas, jump down to work on the bottom. Pavel hadn’t been this energized in a long time. He had grumbled and sat up in his sleep, panting, scraping his casts along the bed frame or the walls. Katka had asked him what would make him happy now. He’d rested his casts on her shoulders, one on either side of her neck. “If I found those Americans,” he said. “I would kill them one by one.”
X
The day before the flood, the day the ghost disappeared in Prague, not to reappear again until the hospital in Boston, Tee received the following e-mail from his mother:
You asked if I am happy to be divorced. Well. I’m happy to stop pretending to be happy. I’m happy to stop waiting for your father to love only me. Can I give you some divorcée advice? Do not deny what you know. There is a reason I’m telling you this, of course — as there is a reason you asked. I must tell the whole truth before I stop myself. You have always asked to know more about yourself, I believe. You were curious about us, your dad and me, from the moment you could talk. You used to ask us, “Is Mom my real mom or is Dad my real dad?” as if one of us must be. You used to ask us to tell you the story of your adoption again, and I would listen to your father miss details he had given before. I remembered everything — you did too, then. You pointed out his errors! How could you forget that? Isn’t memory a trespasser to the heart? I have to admit, I’ve imagined telling you this many times. I used to ask your father, too. Ask why we didn’t go through any adoption process. Ask why you looked so much like him. Ask and ask and already know the answer. Of course he was the same cheater in Korea as he was in America. He will always need other women. He will always hate himself. He will never satisfy whatever there is in him telling him he hasn’t suffered enough. I’m sorry he, and later, I, pretended our secrets didn’t affect you. I’m sorry I have to tell you like this, when I’m a little drunk. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before, when you and your father and I were all in the same house. But now that I’m divorced, and trying to be happy, I’ve realized — we need to know as much as we can about ourselves. You’re your father’s son, Tee. I mean his biological flesh and blood. You would have found out eventually.