In the Globe, as Tee opened a book about Prague’s river sprites, he sensed someone behind him. He was almost afraid to turn around. He remembered the spell of the syllables, how simple his adoption had seemed to him as a boy. His father had fallen in love with him — in the hospital in Korea, after watching his birth mother die — and had taken responsibility for Tee’s life. Even that time Tee got sick, when a priest arrived to give the last rites, his father had walked in, put one hand on the priest’s shoulder and the other on his son’s cheek, and stopped death.
A statuesque Czech stooped under the archway separating the steps down to the bookstore from the open space of the café. It was Rockefeller.
Back when Tee had started modeling, Rockefeller had helped him rent an apartment across the hall in the same building in Karlín, an up-and-coming district east of the Jewish Quarter. As neighbors, they had formed a hesitant friendship. Tee remembered drinking with Rockefeller after the protest against the former prime minister’s acquittal, the one that Pavel and Katka had also gone to. They had to meet aboveground, not in one of the wine cellars Tee was drawn to. Rockefeller stood a thick six foot six, with cabbage-sized shoulders and a shock of brown hair like a toupee, which often displaced light fixtures. By the third Budvar, Rockefeller was bragging about how he had used his university’s press to print samizdats full of Pavel’s paintings — before anyone knew Pavel other than by his father. “You know how he got name Picasso?” Rockefeller asked Tee. The waitress passed by, and Rockefeller lowered his voice, as if they were in danger, and said he had used his parents’ Party connections. He had tricked them and leaked a samizdat to the foreign press.
Tee didn’t know what to make of this brag. Rockefeller was clearly tricking himself. His parents had been high-level Communists who fled the country after the Revolution. They must have known that Communism would end. They had given Rockefeller his name by special permission.
Rockefeller ordered another round. Tee doodled the Czech flag on a napkin, then slipped the napkin into his wallet, as if it would work away there, writing over his Americanness.
In the Globe, Rockefeller’s head hung forward and he held the lapel of his sports jacket closed. He led Tee away from the stacks to a table by the main entrance — the Globe was in a century-old building with bronze banisters and a vaulted ceiling in the front section. Rockefeller ordered them beers and pulled from his bag a hand-drawn blueprint of his and Pavel’s future café. “Advising me,” he said, that same Shakespearean heft to his accent, as if aping the artist. “I want that everyone will come. Americans will come, then everyone.”
His eyes never wavered from Tee’s, two round bulges above his caved cheeks and square chin: a face that seemed composed more of a theme than of genetic traits. Sometimes Tee liked feeling swept along in the current of Rockefeller’s self-assurance. Yet the relentless eye contact, those cabbage shoulders, the way Rockefeller rattled the blueprint in Tee’s face and asked for money, unsettled him. Tee regretted mentioning his inheritance as proof he could pay his rent.
“I told you I’m not an investor,” he said. “My uncle died just six months ago.”
“You’ll changing mind. Here, look at this. I’m putting space for talking here. Real talking needs this shape of room. And Pavel’s paintings. Here, on wall, Picasso.”
There was beer on Rockefeller’s breath, and he could go on about Pavel Picasso for hours if drunk. Tee had to change the subject. But he said, “Paintings of Katka? I’ve seen them in the museums. Are they all of her?”
Rockefeller touched thumb to forefinger. “I’m putting them together.”
“A perfect couple?” Tee asked.
Tee couldn’t picture this giant match-making. Rockefeller smoothed his lapel and asked how anyone could be perfect. Then, as if he had just thought of it, he said, “Why Prague? Why not you going to Korea?”
Tee had heard this question from the bookstore staff, from Pavel. He sketched spire after spire on his coaster, under an empty sky. In Korea there was nothing for him that wasn’t already buried deep underground. “Stop drawing,” Rockefeller said, covering the pen with his hand.
“Pavel and Katka aren’t perfect?” Tee asked again.
“Proč?” Rockefeller said. “Why, you wanting her?”
Tee was relieved he’d already reddened from the alcohol. His Asian blush.
Rockefeller pulled his hand away and studied the blueprint, laughing. But after a sip of beer, he fell silent. Tee’s breaths quickened. For some reason he couldn’t look up. He scooped the drawing into his lap. The café seemed to grow louder, busier. Then a woman walked in — the daughter of Pavel’s art dealer, a New Yorker full of the indifference of skyscrapers — and glanced around until she found them. She adjusted her skirt and waved. Rockefeller crumpled the blueprint in one bearish paw.
“What’s Vanessa doing here?” Tee asked.
The paper lay crippled on the table as Vanessa strode toward them. “I need that money,” Rockefeller whispered, “please.”
That same evening, Tee sat on the edge of his bed, in the dark, as Rockefeller knocked at his door. Tee recalled how Rockefeller’s fingers, on the café table, curled into fat fists. On the bed lay the blueprint, the creases smoothed flat. Tee had taken it. He shivered, aware of how stupid it was to be hiding, and from what? He would run into Rockefeller the next day, or the next.
When the knocking stopped, Tee waited for fifteen minutes, and then he called Ynez and got out of the building. Ynez said she had wanted him to call for a while, but wasn’t he going to America soon? They talked and talked, until it was clear he was not returning to his apartment.
VII
On the last day of March, Tee would again meet the artist and the artist’s wife in Old Town Square. He was walking back to Karlín, not watching where he was going, when a colorful wing dropped on his shoulder. The Thai Massage parrot grinned and repeated that Tee was Thai. It was so sudden that Tee slipped and caught his hand on the cobblestone. His container filled. He wished to accept this strangeness, but for some reason he could not. At that moment, someone shouted in Czech and the parrot flapped off, fearing the tall woman — it was Katka. Like on New Year’s, she had appeared when Tee needed someone. She helped him up, and his pulse sprang to her touch. Pavel walked out of a nearby shop. She squeezed Tee’s hand. They were running errands, shopping for Pavel’s café. He and Rockefeller were going to choose a location the next morning. Tee said casually that he could keep Katka company while Pavel was out. Pavel stomped his cigarette, closed his hands in his armpits, and said they could have a “see you alligator” party.
That night, Katka appeared in Tee’s dreams again and again, until he could see her flaws. The hint of cruelty in her stare. One side of her body slightly longer than the other. In one dream she was Korean. She led him up to a rooftop. From the roof Tee could see Boston, his ex-girlfriend mouthing, “Wrong woman.” His nose itched, and he scratched until it fell off in his palm. Upon descending the staircase, he and Katka were inside his apartment in Karlín. He switched on the lights; she switched them off. When he tried to speak, the words exited his lips, like tiny scraps of paper, and entered hers. He woke aching with desire.
In the morning, he rode the tram to Malešice. The entire winter, his painted selves had hopped out of their canvases and into his sleep as if to offer other lives, or as ghosts of lives he’d already lived somewhere else. He wondered which of those canvases Katka would say was most like him. He trusted her instinctively.