Prague (11 page)

The Hungarian pulled on his Rolling Stones concert tour T-shirt and slumped into the chair to put on his socks and Nikes. "What the hell, man? What is that—a question for some study book? I just say we aren't British or German or old Communists. We will just be people now. You are not understanding what I mean, but"— he stood and put on his varsity-style letter jacket as Mark lifted his own hips and slid off his boxer shorts—"but that's your thing, I think. Ciao."

"Ciao," said Mark quietly, naked. Laszlo turned away: 1972 FREE MY VALUE TIGERS it said in English on the back of his jacket in the swooping sewn-on typeface of American high school sports teams. The door closed and Mark listened to Laszlo walk past the window, alongside the courtyard, down the steps.

Mark Payton lay on his back, and though he cried until the pillow collected two wet spots on either side of his head, he also had to admit that he found the whole thing very, very funny. He struggled to remember the exact wording of the ludicrous jacket; that would be essential for retelling.

BY THE
 
END
 
OF
 
JUNE,
 
HIS
 
PRIMARY
 
REASON
  
FOR
  
HAVING
 
MOVED TO
 
BUDA-

pest growing increasingly unattainable and more and more ridiculous to him anyhow, John Price had developed a habit of saying good night to his wife and child before bed. Sober or drunk, he would stop to visit with them at their permanent positions atop the cable box and on the bedside table. He would kiss his fingers and place them on their lips or brows. When he was sober, the entire ritual was, of course, a comedy. "Sleep well and dream of me, doll face," he would say to the woman in the dress. "Tomorrow is another day, tiger," he told the incurably unhappy baby.

When he was drunk, however, the ritual was more complicated. To an observer (of which there were none) it would not have been absolutely clear that John understood these photographs were not truly of his family. There would be no irony in his tone as he described his day to the black-and-white photo-, graph of the woman in front of the tree. He might sit in the chair across from her and lean forward with his legs apart in an effort to stay awake. He might doze for a minute, then half open his eyes with a muttered apology. He might say he had made a mistake in moving to this foreign city—it had seemed like a good idea in California, but now where else could he go? He would explain in grim detail how Scott had been an intolerable and intolerant figure for much of his youth, how Scott was disappointing him every day now and seemed to be enjoying it, then quickly laugh and do imitations of his editor or other people at the paper, trying to make her laugh, knowing it was only a photograph and yet still speaking to her as if a relationship existed, or perhaps just practicing for Emily. Hours might pass in which he slept in the chair and then he might awaken, some degree closer to sober, and as his eyes opened slowly and painfully, he would see her picture spotlit under the bedside lamp, just a few feet away from him in the darkness, like the end of a long journey just now in view, just a little farther on, and he would smile. 'Are you still awake?" he might ask in the intimate whisper of 3 A.M. lovers who half arise, warm and happy, to find they have been in someone's company during all those lost hours of sleep. And he would stumble to the still folded sofa bed.

The next mornings, none of this remained, no memory, no idea, no anger toward Scott, no warmth of having slept in another's company, only the tired ache and sour stomach, the dry gums and eyes and balled-up tissues, the warm

muuut i in

and suspect spring water in plastic bottles, the cracked porcelain of the ancient sink, the fruitless search for an interesting cable channel, the first cigarette on the balcony and the accompanying first thought about Emily.

JOHN HELD NOT o N E religious belief, was not a painfully closeted homosexual, boasted no particular physical deformities. Intelligent enough, interested in the world around him, not raised under any particular regime of antisexuality, not matrimony-mad, attracted to women in general and some women in particular, John Price was a virgin.

A healthy American male, born in 1966, navigated adolescence and coeducational college and reached July 1, 1990, age twenty-four, a virgin?

From well before puberty, from well before the first time he noticed a girl's distinctive shape and perfume, from well before his first horrifying playground misinformation about the pertinent mechanics, from well before his first pounding, merciless erection, which threatened to drain the blood from his brain until he passed out, John Price had liked to read.

An avid and precocious reader like his brother before him, from books he extracted pithy life lessons, which he kept in a small notebook, whose cover bore a picture of Willie Stargell, the charismatic captain and first baseman of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Opening in the sloppy printing of an eight-year-old, advancing to the cautious cursive of a ten-year-old, developing into the reckless swoops of a twelve-year-old trying to mimic his father's hand, and then arriving at the sloppy printing of a college freshman, John inscribed lessons such as:

age 8:
  
avoid sea travel (Treasure Island)

age 9:
  
as you get older, it's harder to have any fun (The Lion, the

Witch and the Wardrobe)

age 9:
  
don't go looking for trouble (The Hobbit) age 10: it takes a lot of money to get out of trouble (The Count of

Monte Cristo) age 11: sometimes it's better to just leave well enough alone (Dr.

Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) age 12: if you're not really, really careful, you'll grow up bitter

(Moby-Dick) age 13: always know where your escape routes are and what you

can use as a weapon in case of trouble (Heart of Darkness)

age 13: don't read too much (Don Quixote)

age 15: it's better to die, even to die slowly, than to get married (War

and Peace)

age 15: a lot of people feel like I do, but they've learned to hide it (The Stranger), because they're phonies (The Catcher in the Rye)

age 16:1 want to live inside a glowing circle of love and romance (title never included; entry violently scratched out with black ink shortly after being written) age 17: once it's past, forget it; it won't help to think about it (The

Great Gatsby)

age 19, last entry, freshman year of college: No one cares. And why should they? (No Exit, Nausea)

Some of these lessons were forgotten, consciously rejected, quietly out- • grown, or modified for later use. But some weren't. In his tattered notebook*! among more than two hundred entries, one maintained vigorous control ofi John's behavior for many years.

It was written at age eleven, just about the same time he was forced tol share Scott's bed, because their father had been exiled to John's on his way out j the door for the first of many times: "Sex makes men behave how it wants, not | how they want. Sex turns men into idiots and should be avoided, though this 1 seems to be difficult." (The supporting examples were entered over several 1 years, in all those different handwriting styles: Mike Steele and the Cleanest I Killer, The Three Musketeers, Sherlock Holmes' A Scandal in Bohemia, Ivanhoe, Genesis, Lolita, Exodus, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Deuteronomy, Swann's Way, and so on, through his freshman year of college.)

There was something about that creepy Mike Steele thriller, something about the betrayals, fumblings, and uncertainties of d'Artagnan and Athos a year later, something about Sherlock (trusted, solid Sherlock!) mooning around after that ridiculous Irene Adler, not to mention Mr. Price. Somehow, at age eleven, and with some real pride, John Price had perceived, entirely on his own, what he took to be his first observed law of human nature. In book after book, story after story, sex corrupted principles, derailed careers, intruded into peace, tempted heroes into idleness and silliness. For a while, reading became literally sickening to him as hero after hero turned into buffoon, as nearly every book mapped the same tragic terrain. The eleven-year-old boy knew willpower

1-KUliUt
  
I
  
fti

would have to be engaged and sacrifices made, but he was ready: He would not have any of this sex.

He had derived a very comprehensive plan by the time he was fourteen: Despite countless efforts to protect themselves with little "moralities" and "guidelines," people (not least his parents and, lately, gargantuan Scott) continued to make fools of themselves: therefore, the only safely dignified sexual behavior, the only moral behavior—if you insisted on that word—was complete, uncompromising, lifelong no-sex-at-all.

John adopted this view as an expression of his truest self. He shaped it into a coherent, publicly held policy that, even into high school, he would propose to and defend from his friends, first flabbergasting then exasperating then just impressing and frightening them with his extreme and unpopular position. By the time he entered college, he was unsurprisingly tired of being the sole defender of human dignity. The transition from a Southern California high school to a Northern California university seemed an optimal time for personality overhauls, so John consciously decided never to discuss his position again. But if his evangelical urges were curbed, his dumb, head-shaking wonder at other people's behavior was not; the array of foolish semi-ethics still surprised him in this new world, where bunk beds and thin walls made sex an audible and ubiquitous reality. People still spoke loudly and frequently of their ideals, their philosophies, their rock-solid (until later that night) dividing lines between right and wrong. Even as they rejected their parents' sexual rules as the naive products of an imaginary 1950s, they insisted on declaiming their own, and John knew he alone was calm and happy while everyone around him went mad with lust, love, or loneliness.

But for this one quirk, John led a normal life at school. He did drink rather more than his friends, but that was hardly frowned upon. He achieved sexual release in the time-honored, private fashion his philosophy grudgingly tolerated, often concluding the practice with a half-serious, half-spoken "There. That ought to hold the bastard for a while." He went to parties, danced, and even dated slightly. And of course he did think less often of his theories. Unlike in high school, weeks would pass without even one thought of avoiding sex and, slightly drunk at a party, he might find himself kissing a girl with whom he had just danced. But years of theorizing had hardwired him: Without a thought for human dignity or heroic natures, and despite his attraction to the girl, he would blink as if coming out of a trance and murmur the words every woman longs to hear: "I should probably go." His principles were in place with-

ttl:

out his ever having to think about them. Alcohol made the mechanism work more smoothly: He would feel hot, flushed, and unsteady (a common side effect of mixing alcohol and someone else's saliva) and would need air and solitude at once. A cool and sober kiss outside would have been fatal, but somehow John was never exposed to that variety.

A MURAL COVERED THE BLUE JAZZ CLUB'S SKY BLUE WALLS AND CEILING.

Painted by two students of the Hungarian National Academy of Fine Arts, deceased legends of jazz chatted, smoked, drank, and played in heaven. The de- 1 parted musicians, dressed as they had been in life, also wore angel wings of f varying styles. Billie Holiday—restored to the fresh beauty of her youth, in a silver evening gown, the trademark hibiscus in her hair—sang into a crystal microphone atop the ridges and rolls of a golden-white cloudscape. To her side, 1 peeking out from under his porkpie hat, Lester Young played, his tenor sax | twisted high off to one side like a giant's flute. Duke Ellington hunched over a transparent grand piano while Billy Strayhorn penciled changes to the score in 1 front of him. Off to their left, Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins swirled their I amber lowballs and laughed as two dimple-buttocked cherubim—their faces 1 copied from Raphael's Sistine Madonna—attempted to produce sound from the I men's saxophones, though the horns were too large for the tottering putti to 1 hold. Just to the side of the stage, Chet Baker lay on a cloud, on his back, his un- 1 obtrusive wings discreetly attached to a lightweight blue canvas jacket, zipped halfway. The afterlife had been kind to him, too, and his youth had returned J without grudge. The marks of abuse and suffering had been erased and he
 
J looked again as he had in the 1950s, like a native of these clouds. He wore khakis and white shoes without socks, and he was playing his trumpet and
  
1 staring straight upward, as if heaven were okay but there might be a better
  
f place just a little farther up. Behind and beneath him, on a bank of clouds sculpted as cumulal thrones, the Virgin Mary and a half-dozen female saints (recognizable by their traditional emblems) sat or stood in a group, enraptured by the sight of Chet and the sound of his trumpet: Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, her basket of roses on her lap; Saints Gisella and Petronilla half swooning against their brooms; and matronly Saint Anastasia—her double chin in her fleshy palm, her moist, swollen eyes fixed on Chet, her huge legs plodding heavily even here (straining the cumulo-ottoman they rested on)—briefly