Men in Space (11 page)

Nick sees her, waves back, then looks away towards a smartly dressed short guy who’s walked in from the antechamber and is also waving up at him. Nick seems to attach more importance to this guy than to her: seeing him, he screws the lid back on his kiddie bubble-tube and starts climbing down the ladder. He walks over to this guy, shakes his hand, yanks a piece of paper from his pocket and hands it to him, which seems to make the smartly dressed short guy all happy. Nick leads him over to her, kisses her on both cheeks and introduces the smartly dressed short guy to Mladen, then to Roger.

“I’ve seen you earlier today,” the smartly dressed short guy tells Roger.

“Oh yes?” Roger says.

“Palmovka. By the car market. You were taking pictures.” His accent is foreign but not Czech.

“Right,” Roger tells him. “I was filming.”

Then Nick introduces the smartly dressed short guy to her. His name is Anton, and he tells her he knows a lot about Philadelphia but not Vermont. She asks him where he’s from but the music’s quite loud and he doesn’t hear her right, because he says:

“Philadelphia. My uncle lives there. We’re going to move there too: me and my wife. We’ll have American babies.”

“Here, check this stuff out,” Nick says, holding up the tube. “It’s called ‘Bublifuk’.”

It’s true: the letters, wet with sticky liquid, swim in pink and blue across the label. International marketing potential: zero. Mladen says:

“You must go blow that over Ivan Maňásek,” and jerks his thumb towards the antechamber.

“Is that him under the duvet?” Nick asks.

Mladen smiles and nods.

“And who …”

Mladen shrugs.

“We should run a sweepstake,” Roger says. “Give odds. Everyone puts in a hundred crowns to guess who Maňásek is making underneath the duvet and whoever wins gets a year’s supply of Bublifuk.”

“Bubbly fucks for one whole year,” says Mladen, chuckling. “Yuuu!”

“I’d like to meet with Ivan Maňásek,” Anton tells Nick. “Can you introduce me to him?”

“Yes, you said. He seems quite busy at the moment.” Nick, Mladen and Roger are all falling about laughing. Heidi laughs too, to let them know she thinks it’s funny – although she doesn’t think it’s
that
funny, only having met this Ivan Maňásek one time, when she visited Nick in his top-floor studio with angels hanging everywhere and junk over the floor. Mladen says:

“Bursting bubbles,” and they double over some more. Sure: enough already.

The band are pretty loud: they’re almost shouting at one another. Roger points over at two kids on the far side of the room: David and Jana, twins, whose faces, Roger reckons, look like the faces of the peasants on the hundred-crown note. He’s right: they have that classic kind of Commie-heroic
look – and the same face, two versions of it, one male, one female. Heidi raises her voice above the music to agree:

“They’re just like replicas of one another.” Anton says to Nick:

“So do you think Ivan Maňásek will want to take some work on for a client?” and Nick tells him:

“I think so, like I said on the phone. Get him a drink and he’ll take on anything. Is it a portrait?”

“A more religious style.”

“He told me he spent months renovating some old fresco,” Nick says. “And anyway, he graduated from the Art Academy and that’s all they teach them there. The first-year students spend their whole time copying classical and religious paintings, and when they finally get to draw models they make them stand in the same boring postures. One leg forwards, both hands on hips, like this.”

He strikes up a pose. Heidi knows he models for the students at the art school, and has dropped
heavy
hints that if he could take her with him one day and let her meet the professor and ask him if he wanted a young female model she’d be
seriously
grateful. But Nick told her each time: “If you want to see my dick you’ll have to take my trousers off yourself,” sometimes adding “With your teeth” which ha ha asshole
you
try teaching English see if it’s much fun. Nick’s pointing at this black guy Tyrone’s gun and telling a story about some guy with a gun who cheated him at cards on a boat and there was buzzing or humming like the feedback through these amps or something; she’s not really listening, sort of zoning out what with the music and her lack of interest in Nick’s story. She wishes Nick would go away now because Roger’s not really talking to her any more: well, he’s
talking
to her – but without any flirtiness or exclusivity now. Anton starts telling a joke about sailors on a boat, how they all need new uniforms – a joke Heidi’s heard before; she decides to go crack another beer, but still waits for the
punchline before asking Roger, Mladen, Anton and Nick if they want one too …

Back in the antechamber the Cal stoners have abandoned their guitars and started rolling joints. The duvet is still writhing and contorting. More people are arriving through the main door – including Barbara, one of Heidi’s students. She’s got a man with her: an older man, looks slightly surly as he holds her arm; must be her boyfriend. Barbara’s kind of cute in a Czech way: wide face, all innocent. She sees Heidi, says hello and introduces the man she’s with as Jaromír.

“How come you’re here?” asks Heidi.

“I’ve model for Jean-Luc,” says Barbara.

“Modelled,” Heidi corrects her – then, feeling stupid for doing that, corrects her own line: “Models, everywhere! You guys want a beer?”

Barbara says yes; Jaromír nods surlily.

“You can put your coats over with those canvases and all that wood,” Heidi tells them as she opens the fridge door and pulls out – how many? There’s Roger, Mladen, Nick, herself, that Anton and now these two, equals seven. She’s passing the beers on up to Barbara when there’s a sudden muffled but still pretty loud shriek from somewhere in the antechamber. She spins round: it came from underneath the duvet, and it wasn’t a shriek of pleasure. A second shriek, this time less a shriek than the sound of someone being
seriously
angry, comes out, followed by a string of Czech curses, words she doesn’t need to have come across in
Colloquial
to get their gist …

Everyone in the antechamber’s turned round to look at the duvet, which now springs back, carried from beneath by Ivan Maňásek who’s scrambling to his feet as a girl in a leopard-skin, or possibly fake-leopard-skin, coat emerges, also from beneath the duvet, shouting at him. Her coat is spread open; her shirt is too, and her skirt has ridden right up to her waist. No sooner has Ivan Maňásek sprung to a safe distance than her fist swings at him, missing his nose by
less than an inch. He finds his feet and, duvet still wrapped round his shoulders, leaves the scene of whatever terrible thing he’s just done and moves towards the fridge. The girl shouts something after him, then looks down at her shirt and pulls it back to cover up her tits, which at least are still in their bra, and then does ditto for her legs with her skirt. The stoners, directly above her, are in fits of laughter. She hears them, rises to her feet and looks like she’s fixing to swing at them too – then, seeing they’ve got five-skinners lit up in their hands, changes her attitude and asks one of them for a draw, which, well, he’d have to be quite brave to say no to this request …

Ivan Maňásek comes over to Heidi and is obviously asking for a beer, but in a complicated Czech way which she can’t quite find the grammar to respond to. She starts the whole exchange again with straightforward vocab and asks him if he wants a beer – but of course Ivan Maňásek switches to English and says:

“I would be sincerely grateful if you were to see your way to passing to me one of those beers.”

She finds this very funny: him speaking so formally and even bowing his head slightly as he says this with his hair totally dishevelled, wrapped in a duvet. She pulls out one for him and says:

“I know you. I’m Heidi, a friend of Nick. We met in your place once.”

Ivan Maňásek bows his head again and says:

“A pleasure to meet you again.”

He takes her hand and kisses it, giving it some tongue to boot, which
wow
, then looks back at the girl he’s been doing whatever it was to, who’s now sitting with the stoners on the bars.

“A bitch!” he says. “Czech girls have no imagination.”

She figures that it would be wisest to get him out of the same space as this girl, hands him three more beers and says:

“Can you help me carry these to the main room? They’re for Nick and some other people.”

“Nick is here?” Ivan Maňásek asks. “That English scoundrel opts to vandalize my magazines!” Then he adds, bowing yet again: “Of course. My pleasure.”

So she’s wondering, in light of I.M.’s serious apparent animosity towards Nick, if she will be preventing a violent encounter after all by shepherding him away from this Czech girl with no imagination apparently, or just doing the old frying-pan/fire transfer – but hey, too late now. They make their way back through the door and into the main room, where the real band from the radio is playing a song called
Spin Me Round
– or at least she figures it must be called this because these are the only words in the whole song. Roger’s got a new film rolling which shows Earth from space, which is appropriate because, well, Earth spins: she figures they must have planned which songs to play with which film. Nick sees I.M., takes his hand and threads it into Anton’s and says:

“Ivan, this is Anton – Anton, Ivan.” He ducks nimbly round the duvet, takes his beer and asks her:

“So who was it then? We never got our sweepstake going.”

“Oh, that,” she says. “Some girl with no imagination. And a leopard-skin coat.”

“Angelika!” Nick, Mladen and Roger chime in chorus, mouths wide open.

“No imagination?” Roger asks.

She shrugs. Barbara and Jaromír have wandered into the main room. Mladen waves to them and they come over: turns out he knows Barbara too. He introduces them to Roger, Nick and her and so she starts explaining how they’ve just met in the antechamber and how Barbara’s her pupil, although even as she says this she wishes she could also say she was her model or her film-making assistant or something more, you know,
authentic
. Mladen starts talking to Jaromír and her, but she’s not really listening to him because she’s looking
over Jaromír’s shoulder back at Roger and Barbara who are chatting away together. Roger’s standing considerably closer to Barbara than he was to her – and, get this, he’s asking
her
if she’ll let him film her talking about something. He even rolls out the same “visually fascinating” line, which, asshole, could at least have changed the terminology … Noticing she’s watching them, he flips over into Czech, then leads Barbara off towards the middle of the room where all these other people are dancing, leaving Mladen to man the projector.

Heidi doesn’t want to turn around and watch them because that would be obvious and pretty humiliating, so she fixes her attention on the bedsheet screen. It’s showing a lunar capsule falling down towards the ocean, which is kind of how she feels right now. The band have gone into a Grateful Dead-type wall-of-noise mode, which she wonders how anyone can dance to – although she kind of has this question answered as Jaromír suddenly stops listening to Mladen and strides over to the dancing area. She can’t resist turning round now: turns out Barbara and Roger have progressed beyond the dancing stage and are now making out. Jaromír cuts in and pushes them apart and Roger goes flying backwards into a chair in front of one of these unfinished paintings, the Ithacus-Somethingstein one – a chair on which a small paint can is sitting; the can jumps up and splats its contents across the canvas. And now Jaromír is coming at Roger again, but fortunately Michael the big-toothed older guy apparently in advertising steps in to prevent him, several other people step in too, and Tyrone waves his pistol in the air shouting:

“Order! Order! I’ll shoot if I have to! I’ll shoot every one of you, women and children first!”

He’s whooping out those laughs, which is he stoned or
what
? And this is what makes this a truly bohemian party and
totally
different from those frat events she used to go to back home: the band
plays on
, and even picks up pace and comes out of their wall-of-noise mode back into the melody.
Everybody’s dancing again, apart from Barbara and Roger, who are getting ready to make like babies and head out, gathering their coats while Roger gives Mladen instructions to carry on playing the old films beneath the table. While these two make their way from the atelier, this scruffy thin guy she thinks might be Jean-Luc sways on his feet as he looks at the damage on the painting. Jaromír is kind of apologizing to him for it, but not very graciously, implying it was all Roger’s fault, which well he’s got a point, she thinks, but still … and Tyrone is swinging his black pistol round the air
yee-haw
ing as though it were a lasso, and her beer is finished: she goes back to the antechamber, pulls back the fridge door and finds, what’s this, an uncracked Stoli bottle in the freezer comp. Why not? …

Five, ten minutes later she’s still knocking Stoli back with Mladen. Mladen’s going on about how a nasty situation has just been defused while they watch the film pictures of this capsule floating down towards the sea. Tyrone is still
yee-haw
ing – but he stops as he catches sight of the image, comes over to her and Mladen and, pointing his pistol at the screen, asks them:

“Did you hear about the Soviet cosmonaut?”

“No,” she says. “Is it a joke?”

“A joke? Honey, maybe it is. Isn’t history one big motherfucker of a joke?” He says this in a camp voice, like he’s quoting something: a line from a famous film perhaps, some reference Heidi should pick up but doesn’t. She says:

“Tell it to me, then.”

Tyrone rolls his eyes heavenwards as he explains: “There’s a Soviet cosmonaut stuck up in space. Orbiting round and round.”

“Yes … and? …” she asks him.

“That’s it, Vermont Baby!” he screams. “That’s the whole thing. The poor sister can’t come down because there ain’t no Soviet Union to come back down to!”