Authors: Arthur Phillips
"Every movie!" The thinner one stepped forward, regretted having allowed her friend such easy conversational prominence. "We have seen every of your movies!"
"Really?" said John. "Which one's your favorite?"
The girls laughed uproariously. "I do not know the name in English," said one, slightly panting. "It was showed last month at the Corvin. Where you are lost in the outer spaces with the blond girl and the two funny little dogs."
"Of course, of course," said John. "That's my favorite, too."
"She is not really with you in the real life is she, this blond hair in the cinema?" asked the thinner girl, ignoring Mark's laughter.
"She is not the right one for you," said the fatter girl seriously, and her friend berated her in Hungarian.
"Okay, we leave you alone now, but thank you. We love every of your movies. But wait, we want to say this, too," said the thinner. She looked at the ground, then at her friend for support, then at John from under a wrinkled brow. She spoke quickly and seriously. "We read this in the paper. Please, because we are loving your movies we say this. Stay off of the drugs, please. You are so good a cinema actor and a very beautiful boy, even in the real life. Please no more, the drugs. We know they will kill you if you do not stop them. We know it is hard."
"We know it is hard," agreed her friend, "but they will put you back in the prisons if you do not stop. Please."
John was moved by their concern, had never had young women nearly in tears over his well-being. He knew he couldn't make any promises; that would be unrealistic with a problem of this scope. He thanked them again, said only that he would do his best. They stood shyly one moment more, until one asked if she could kiss his cheek and the other quickly applied for the same favor. John hoped Mark would report this to Emily without being instructed. He waved back each time the girls looked over their shoulders as they walked arm in arm down the dark street.
Laughing, neither Mark nor John could guess what actor he had been, but for a tick or two of alcohol time, he still felt warmed by his fans' attention, until the next wave of migrating club-folk herded onto the street and slowly melted away, revealing Charles Gabor, kissing the tiny woman who had groped him in
82 I ARTHUR PHILLIPS
the basement. His head and neck drooped low to meet her upturned face. She stood on the tips of her toes and kept her balance by clutching his ass with both hands. He bent his knees slightly and helped stabilize her by pressing one hand against her back and massaging her chest with the other. John and Mark silently watched their friend lick the short girl's neck and speak Hungarian with her. Spring-loaded by lust, the girl leaped up, wrapped her legs around Charles's stomach and her arms around his neck. They kissed again, his head now stretching up to meet hers, and Charles stumbled down the street like that, blindly, toward a boulevard and a cab.
"You hate to see something like that," Mark said, standing and heading across the square. "Come here, I want to show you something."
The road quickly quieted, as if a door had been closed, as they left the club behind. John followed Mark onto a small side street, where Hungarian drifted out from open ground-floor windows. Under Trabant and Skoda tailpipes, puddles trembled, overlaid with gasoline rainbow spirals like tiny stray galaxies.
"I love your columns, you know," Mark said. "They feel like the subject of a future legend about some lost, glamorous time. 'Remember those columns back in the early nineties?' "
"Thanks," John said distractedly, not in the mood at all. "What did you want to show me?"
"A lot of things. I want to show you a lot of things. I'm curious if you—this street, to start." Mark ran his fingers through the red hair at his temples, pulled it until it stood straight out to the sides, like feathery tufts on a sickly bird. "That's what got me into this research, since you ask. Actually, I guess it was Emily who asked, but I'm drunk enough not to distinguish. I love everything about this little street. The lives that used to be lived here. The way people felt here. What it felt like to stand here and be in love. Can you imagine standing right here and being in love and seeing the world how it looked before movies existed, before movies made you see everything a certain way?"
Mark walked backward down the middle of the street, his head tilted back to examine the buildings he was passing. He pointed out architectural details to his semi-willing tour group, described in equally zealous tones the planned and unplanned features; neither was superior for him: delicate cornices and bullet holes, carved dates and crumbling stonework, once elegant upper-story stone balustrades now missing one or two urn-shaped pillars, gaping like sparsely toothed old crones whose charms only Mark could detect. "Please, please tell me you know what I mean."
"Oh yeah, yeah. Buildings."
"I love that this little street is so perfectly run-down, but you can still see what it looked like when it was a new development, probably the 1890s or so. Look how the street is laid out so it delivers the opera house for maximum surprise and drama." He stopped just where the street began to reveal Andrassy and the opera. "Alternately, you come this way, after a romantic night at the opera, and just a few feet away from the lights and the carriages, you have an intimate setting for a lovers' stroll. You'd walk down this street and feel perfectly happy, perfectly alive, and you'd never wonder why. But the city planners did it on purpose. You know, there are very few places in the world where I am at home. Isn't that pathetic? And there are actually fewer of them every day, too. And they're shrinking. Does this happen to you? There is going to come a time when there will only be a very small space. And that's all I'll have. I'll have to remain very still and only look in one direction, but then I'll be okay, actually." He laughed. "You know what I mean, John?"
And John laughed, as he assumed Mark meant him to.
They turned onto Andrassy, away from John's apartment, onto the long stretch of tree-lined boulevard leading to Heroes' Square. Mark's face glowed briefly green under a neon sign hanging in a ground-floor shop window: 24 ORA NON-STOP announced a grocery store and snack bar, and John followed him into the fluorescent dazzle and onto a tall counter stool.
"Egy meleg szendvicset, kerek szepen," the Canadian said to the fifty-year-old woman who materialized behind the counter. John ordered the same and an Unicum. His shirt stank of other people's cigarettes and his eyes hurt; he wondered what time it was. The woman turned to a small toaster oven on the shelf and began cooking two pieces of rye bread with melted cheese and slices of pink ham. She poured John his black digestif. They watched her in silence, looked at their own half reflections in the window. John ordered a second.
"Do you ever wonder why artists hung around cafes?" Mark asked in a quiet voice, staring at the woman's apron as she licked a bit of melted cheese from the back of her thumb. "This is what I did all day today, and I kept thinking of you for some reason, that you in particular would like this. Really. So why did poor artists originally hang around in cafes?" He waited for an answer, and when none came, he said this was serious, that the answer mattered.
"I don't know. Inspiration from the atmosphere."
"Ha! No, you've been tricked, too, just like the rest of us. Cafes didn't have inspirational atmosphere at first. That only came later, when you knew artists
had been hanging around in them. First they were just rooms with coffee in them. No more atmosphere than this place."
"Amerikai?" asked the counter-woman. Her hair was the color of much-turned brass doorknobs, and her breasts hung against their faux angora restraint like overweight sloths.
"Nem, kanadai," responded Mark. She nodded, satisfied with the conversation, and turned to straighten items on the shelves: liqueurs, packaged cakes from Norway, German breakfast cereals with German cartoon mascots, French contraceptives bearing explicit instructional and marketing photographs.
"All the way back, I can follow them," Mark said. He rattled off dates and names and events with an expert's ease, starting slowly, then building in excitement: 1945—Lenoir hopes cafe life will be just like it was before the war and even organizes a group to assure that the best cafes stay open, with the same hours and menus and tables; 193 6—Now, before that war, Fleury sadly decries how much the cafes have changed since before the last war. He is too young to know this as an observed fact, but he writes it in his journal nevertheless. He also writes, with childish delight, about actually seeing Valmorin one day at his cafe. He's amazed to see his idol standing there, in the flesh. "He thought Valmorin would never come to the cafe anymore because of its supposed decline," said Mark. 'After that day, he never wrote a word of complaint until Valmorin died. Then, of course, he declared the cafes well and truly dead, though he still went all the time. That was 1939."
Nineteen twenty: Valmorin himself, in a letter to Picasso, writes that perhaps cafes aren't as important to the art world as they were in Cezanne's day. Eighteen eighty-nine: Cezanne writes in his journal that he feels unwelcome in the cafe because of his break with someone whose name escaped Mark just then, despite hitting his forehead repeatedly in an effort to dislodge it. But Cezanne has to make his appearance at the cafe nevertheless. He writes that the whole cafe scene is a professional necessity, but an embarrassment, a farce played out by monkeys. "That was his word, John," Mark said with admiration. "Monkeys. And back it goes," he continued. "It's a perfect chain. Everybody cites some dead guy for why he has to go to the cafe. Everyone says the cafes worked well at some point just before their own birth. But go back to that date, and someone else is saying the heyday was a few years earlier. And then I actually found it. My discovery. Mine. You will be amazed by this. I memorized it. I read it over and over again, like, for an hour or two, actually. I could hardly
believe it when I found it. It was so ..." Here he could only shake his head. He described a letter to Jan van den Huygens, dated 160 7.
Van den Huygens was an innkeeper and artist, a specialist in painting drunks and prostitutes, since, in his inn, they were plentiful and cheap, often forced to pose to pay off bar tabs. He would dress them in fanciful costumes of ancient Rome so that they could pass for Bacchus and Venus, safely sellable canvases at the time. The finished products, however, lacked that classical something. "They just look like sad, broken-down people in bedsheets," Mark clucked, "with a drunken grin and red cheeks or an exposed tit or two. Van den Huygens didn't sell more than a few of the things his whole life, actually, but he painted acres of them. They turn up now in some of the less choosy Dutch provincial museums and in U.S. and Canadian college collections hungry for anything that can pass as an Old Master."
John signaled for a third Unicum and Mark waited patiently.
"Van den Huygens receives a letter in 1607 that should by all rights have been immediately thrown away. Instead, thank God, it survives for four centuries, because van den Huygens dies less than a week later. He dies, and his widow has a canny realization: A sale of her husband's paintings and papers might bring in some ready money, actually. I think she has a gift for seventeenth-century P.R., because in less than a month she manages to sell all the paintings of a man who never managed to sell more than a few during his life. She sweetened the deal with the late artist's 'papers.' His diaries and his letters—including this one from 1607, which happened to be still warm on a table when he keeled over—get sold, and the buyer (an art dealer who always, always, always backed the wrong horse) catalogs every scrap of paper that the widow van den Huygens sells him. The papers are bound in fine leather, with gold embossing. And that's that."
Mark was entirely unaware that he had lost his audience: John was savoring the ringing in his ears, the pleasant scrape in his throat, the flashes of color and shadow behind his eyeballs—all the desirable effects of a third quick-succession Unicum. Technically, he was listening to Mark's rambling story, but minor characters were taking shape in his mind as people he knew. Specifically, Emily Oliver, a seventeenth-century Dutch lady of pleasure, was staring at him from behind a rough, low wooden table in front of the enormous, blazing fireplace, a spitted hog dripping into the chatty, licking flame. Emily wore only a toga and laurel wreath. A still life was spread before her on the table: green
glass goblets of golden wine, bumpy half-loaves of bread, sliced lemons with dimpled flesh, mackerels glowing platinum, violins varnished into mirrors, silver scalloped bowls of fire-lit grapes and ridged nuts, a skull or two supporting guttering candles. Emily selected a single red grape and stretched one bare arm skyward. She tipped back her head, bent her arm, took the grape between her teeth. She widened her eyes and bit gently down, pressed her teeth just perceptibly against the grape's skin, just hard enough to make the fruit change shape but not so hard as to burst its delicate coat. John placed his dry palette next to his blank canvas, tossed his floppy hat aside, approached his model. She took two slow steps backward, laughing through the tooth-clenched grape, and let fall her toga.
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