End of the Jews (20 page)

“You don't hate me, then? Like your mother?”

The weasel. It's a force play, a gambit out of Marcus Flanagan's old bag of tricks. If Miklos is brave and wretched enough to ask, she is supposed to be gallant enough to lay aside the minority share of her feelings and reassure him.

“Yes and no. I don't think you understand what you've done to me.”

Rayna steps forward, tries again. “Your father is a good man.” She reaches for Miklos's hand and interlocks her fingers with his. “He thinks about you all the time. God has brought you together again, after all these years, so you can both make a fresh start.”

“I brought us together,” Nina snaps.

“Well then, why did you?” Rayna retorts, and the three of them stand silently for a moment before Miklos speaks.

“Nina,” he says, “we have much to discuss, you and I. Far more than we can hope to in the few minutes we have now. Please, let me take you to dinner tonight. To celebrate your birthday. If you will still be in town.” He clears his throat. “I am still your father, and I love you very much.”

Nina looks at her father and sees a man with nothing left to offer her. He's hollow, he and his excuses both. She feels tears forming, and catches herself before any can rise. “I love you, too. And I'm sorry that I can't have dinner with you. This is the only time I could get away.”

“Take my phone number, Nina. You'll call me, and we'll talk.”

She pulls the crumpled flyer from her purse. “Already got it.”

“Ah. Yes.”

“I should go.”

They each step forward. Another tight hug. Nina backs out of it. Miklos lets go reluctantly.

She pauses at the door. “I have your camera. I still use it. It still works.”

“I hope soon I will have a chance to see your work.”

“I'll send you something. Good-bye, Dad.”

“Good-bye, Nina.”

She nods at Rayna, who nods back.

Marcus is waiting just outside the library. By the time Nina finds him, tears are streaming down her face. She walks into his arms and Marcus holds her, rocks her, strokes her hair with a hand almost the same hue as her own. She doesn't want to let go, and so they make their way back to the car in a kind of mobile hug, with Nina's head tucked just below his chin, her arms wrapping his middle. His smell is dark and safe.

         

“You must be hungry,” Marcus says, and Nina jolts awake. Last she remembers, she was staring out the car window, replaying the meeting in her mind, trying to work her way through it and getting impossibly forestalled in the image of Miklos with his face buried in that idiotic peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

“No. At least I don't think I am. Where are we?”

“Almost home.” Meaning the hotel, she thinks. “You eaten anything today, Nina?”

She shakes her head, and for some reason remembers how she used to shake it as a little girl: chin to shoulder, like a model in a shampoo commercial, at a speed that made her hair sweep gently across her cheeks. She undoes her ponytail and tries it now, losing herself in the experiment and then in the forgotten feeling.

She slips out of her shoes and hugs her knees to her chest. The action makes her skirt ride up and bare her thighs, but Nina tells herself she doesn't notice. “I don't wanna eat,” she pouts, dropping her forehead to her knees and watching Marcus out of the corner of her eye.

He plays along. “You've got to eat.”

Nina speaks into her legs. “I'm not hungry,” she says, and a bit more of her childhood returns. How high the stakes were in arguments like this one, when your sole power in the world was that of gatekeeper to your own body. And even that contested.

“We'll see,” Marcus tells her with a smile, and they speak no more. Nina tries to think young, wonder-filled thoughts, but nothing comes. Ten minutes later, the car shoulders into the parking lot. Nina stays put, waits for Marcus to come around, open her door, offer his arm. She's not sure anymore what part she's playing, whether this is the act of a child too sleepy to walk unassisted from the car to the front door, or that of a diva awaiting escort from her limousine.

“Now I'm hungry,” she tells Marcus as the hotel elevator closes.

“We'll get some room service. Okay?”

Nina nods and clasps her hands in front of her, her arm still linked with his. “Okay,” she whispers. And then, louder: “I want mashed potatoes. Lumpy. And lots of gravy.”

“We'll get you some.”

“And macaroni and cheese.”

“Of course.”

“But only if they have Trappey's hot sauce.” The door opens.

“I'll run out and get some myself if they don't.”

“Red Devil would be okay, too. And some wine. Some good wine.” Nina slides her key into the lock.

“I hear that.”

She flops facedown onto the bed and props a pillow underneath her chin. Marcus orders comfort food for two, and a cabernet the waiter on the other end of the phone claims is the region's best. Nina stares down at the bland tan carpet. The feeling of Marcus trying to cobble together some kind of comforting, philosophical assertion is as palpable as the sensation of blood rushing to her arms.

“You know, we're all just human—”

“Please. Don't.”

She rolls onto her back, kicks off her shoes and lets them sail over her head and thud onto the floor.

“Here.” Marcus has liberated a six-dollar chocolate bar from the minifridge. “Have an appetizer.”

Nina places the square beneath her tongue to melt, extends a palm for more. Marcus breaks off another chunk. By the time the bellboy knocks, he's fed her the whole thing.

They pull two chairs up to the table on wheels, pluck the metal covers from the plates, and pour the wine. Nina drinks hers in two gulps, hardly tasting it. Marcus gives her a refill. There's the slightest hint of remonstration somewhere in the angle of his eyebrows, and so rather than lift the glass again, Nina unrolls her silverware from the cloth napkin and swoops down on the mashed potato mountain with a spoon. The Trappey's bottle is new. Marcus breaks the plastic seal and douses his portion of mac and cheese in the vinegary orange concoction.

The urge to speak with a mouth full of potatoes is too great for Nina to resist. “I feel,” she warbles, smacking her chops, “like a little kid.” She pauses, realizes this is a lie, and reaches for the wine. “A little kid would never say that, huh?”

Marcus smiles, noncommittal but supportive, the way a therapist might. He shifts his weight, hitches his pants at the knee, and crosses his legs in that mannered, Michael Corleone way he has. A full second beforehand, she could tell he was about to do it. Before Marcus himself, probably. Such precognition is the greatest intimacy Nina knows.

“Fuck feeling like a kid. That's how he's made me feel all these years. I'm over it. I wanna feel like an adult.”

She stares at Marcus hard, tipsy, emboldened by her own words, half-jellified by the serial rush and retreat of adrenaline through her system all day. Make love to me, Marcus, she thinks, daring him to read her mind. Her heart is thudding just as hard now as it was this morning when she turned that corner and came face-to-face with what she thought would be her father's office; the same brew of power and fear suffuses her.

But she's learned something today: better to focus on the power. That's what being wanted is. The thought is anathema to the entire construction of her sexual self, and thus it takes on the sheen of revelation. Marcus's desire means that Nina is in charge.

It's just like the music. His love or lust or whatever—who gives a shit which it is right now—is the drumbeat, the foundation of the song. Marcus is locked into his rhythm. Nina is the bass. She can play behind the beat, drag everything down to a standstill, or she can push the tempo. There are thrills to be had here, thrills and cruelties and God knows what, and all she has to do is say fuck fear and take command. What is there to be afraid of anyway? She's sick of running from what everyone else is pursuing, from what being a goddamn independent grown-ass human being is all about.

This is the world to which Nina alone, of everyone she knows, is denied entry. Not jazz, not America, not blackness. Constructs, all of them. What separates Nina is sex, and fantasy—virginity and the stupid, secret, make-believe realm in which her father is a UC professor of philosophy sitting in a plush corner office. As one ends, so must the others. They are embarrassments, not treasures.

“Marcus. I want to get laid. Make love to me.”

From the look on his face, you'd think Nina had asked him to donate a kidney. Marcus brings his napkin to his lips. The gesture buys him only a moment, but it is enough time for Nina to begin to loathe herself, and to start to understand what it means to be the pursuer.

“I think maybe you ought to get some rest,” he says.

“After.” Nina rises; this is not a conversation to hold over dirty plates. She arrays herself before him, takes a deep, courage-summoning breath she hopes is invisible, crosses her arms in front of her, and grasps the bottom of her shirt. In one slow, continuous motion, she pulls it up over her head. The bruise-colored garment slinks to the floor, and Nina is standing in her bra.

“I want to lose my virginity to you.” She slips one strap down off her shoulder as she says it, then reaches slowly for the other. She wonders if he's hard, and glances deliberately down at his crotch. Yes.

Nina runs her fingers along the blade of her shoulder—shuddery with nerves, but not so much so that she isn't savoring this moment. It is nothing short of life-affirming to give in to sexiness, to occupy these tropes she's always shied away from, to know that she, Nina Pigfoot Jenkins-Hricek, is the woman in this room, the woman showing herself to this handsome man, watching him watch her. The woman sliding off her bra and feeling the caress of the warm air, charged with lust. The woman approaching him now, bold, unmindful of consequence.

He starts to stand, to meet her, but she straddles his lap before he can, thrusts her breasts into his face. She wants him to kiss them before he kisses her; it will render turning back impossible somehow. He takes one in his mouth, traces a circle around her nipple with his tongue, and Nina sucks in a sharp shock of breath, already learning things about herself, her body's cravings. She cups his face, lifts it to hers, and kisses him as hard as she knows how, wrapping one arm around his neck and reaching to fumble at his belt buckle with the other.

Marcus chases down her hand, traps her fingers with his own, pulls back and looks her in the eyes. “Let's do this right,” he whispers. “There's no rush. Right?” Nina nods, flushed. He touches her lightly on the back of the neck, bends forward, shuts his eyes. The kiss is elegant and slow this time, under Marcus's stewardship, barely related to the lip-mashing, tongue-down-the-throat fervor that was Nina's attempt at communicating passion. She resolves to let herself be taught.

Forty minutes later, the lesson has ended, and Nina lies beneath cool, fresh white hotel sheets, pressed tightly to Marcus, head resting on his chest, mind racing. Even without a point of reference, Nina cannot help thinking that he is a wonderful lover: gentle in all the right ways and moments, worshipful and tender and yet burning. She runs her hand over the damp curlicues plaiting Marcus's chest, unable to believe how close she feels to him—her best friend, mentor, and lover—and how unexpectedly…
spiritual
an experience can be that's literally the opposite, the quintessence of physicality and instinct and biological imperative. Among the many things she feels right now, most of them warm and languid and expansive—plus a few, such as the fact that Marcus is as married as he's ever been, or the fact that the moment he stopped acting like a suitor and started acting like a father is the moment she chose to make love to him, that are too fraught to venture anywhere near—is a stunning, abject foolishness for not understanding all this years ago. Marcus tried to tell her, show her, lift the two of them to the next level, and she rejected it, and him, time and again. There's more to it, obviously; this analysis might not stand up to sober reasoning, but at the moment it feels very real. It feels as if she's found what she's been looking for.

         

That night, when the second set begins, Nina slips out of Yoshi's and buys a phone card at the liquor store up the block. She's dressed for work, for a room insulated by the warmth of two hundred bodies, and she has to walk with her arms crossed over her chest to keep from shivering as she scours the empty blocks for a pay phone. The conversation she's about to have will be difficult enough without a backdrop of coitally twisted bedclothes.

Nina punches a long succession of metallic buttons, then checks her watch and adds nine hours. It is 7:30 the next morning in Prague. Her mother will be making breakfast before dashing off to class. Good. Rayna will have work to distract her from thinking about Miklos. As always.

Three rings, and then “Hello?” A man's voice, deep and pleasant. Shit. Half her phone card wasted on a wrong number.

“I'm sorry, I must have misdialed. I'm looking for Rayna Hricek.”

“Who may I tell her is calling, please?”

Really, this is fantastic: a man in Rayna's house at 7:30 in the morning, comfortable enough to answer her phone. Every time Nina calls her mother—and she's only marginally better about calling than writing—she winds up delivering a pep talk, telling Rayna to get out there and meet someone. Sometimes, Nina manages to do it jokingly, as when Rayna reports on the legions of young American ex-pats now swarming over the city, opening bagel shops and sports bars and deciding with a communal mind that they will descend upon a particular café and render it uninhabitable by locals, and Nina responds that her mother should snatch up a cute one and school him in the arts of European living. Other times, it is in earnest, Rayna sounding close to tears and Nina trying to balance sympathy with relentlessness, build Rayna's confidence and at the same time take advantage of her mother's pliability to give a direct order:
Next time a man asks you to dinner, Mother, just say yes!