CHARLOTTE

Psychobabble was never her thing, but it was true: Zdenĕk was yang to her yin. He was light. She was shadow. If not for him she would have worked all the time. He pulled her out of the studio to sit in noisy restaurants in the Village surrounded by crowds of people she didn’t know, most of them arguing and laughing in a language she didn’t speak, so full of life, loud, arms and heads constantly moving, making this point, or that. But sad, too, they had come, but couldn’t go back. They’d lost families, and businesses, and for some, self-respect. Maybe that’s what made them so fierce, so utterly unafraid to speak their minds. They’d already lost everything, they had nothing left to lose except themselves, so they shouted each other down, said anything and everything just to be heard, to say to themselves, if to no one else: Look at me. I still am.

Zdenĕk’s family was locked behind the Iron Curtain. Nine brothers and sisters, a mother and father, aunts and uncles; most of them puppeteers. He wrote to them, sent them clothes, and food, and money, what little he had. And his love. He told endless stories about them, made elaborate plans.

He told Charlotte, “If I could just get my brothers here we could open theaters in Chicago, Philadelphia, even LA. They will love our puppets in LA. They love those Muppets. They’ve even made movies starring the frog.”

“Those are movies for kids,” Charlotte said. “I’m not sure your characters would manage to pull a G rating, or even a PG-13. I don’t think Hollywood is ready for an R-rated flick starring Vítek and Vûra.”

His trilogy—Part One: The Courtship; Part Two: The Wedding; and most recently, Part Three: The Wedding Night—was a comedy of sorts. Part Three included a sex scene so lurid a producer of blue movies offered him big money to film an expanded version. Zdenĕk refused.

He was so much more comfortable in a crowd than she was. She called her reticence the curse of the only child. But what did she really have to complain about? He had no one except her and the other refugees. She had her parents in upstate New York, a home to go back to, even if it was the last place she wanted to be. Maybe that was why it scratched at her that Zdenĕk was crazy about Hap and Marion, and they were crazy about him.

The first year she took him home for the holidays he helped Marion decorate the tree. He wasn’t satisfied until she told him the boring history of every ornament.

“Charlotte made this one out of an egg crate in the first grade.”

It was a replica of Santa’s sleigh with pipe cleaner runners and a picture of Santa that Charlotte had cut out of a magazine.

Marion dangled a glass icicle in Zdenĕk’s face. “And this one is a real relic. It belonged to Hap’s mother.”

When he followed Charlotte down to the basement to look for tinsel, he came across a shelf full of her old dolls, still in their cardboard boxes and cellophane, never played with; Marion said they were more valuable in their original wrapping. Before she could stop him, he carried them upstairs into the living room.

“Hapgood,” he called to her father. “Mrs. Marion. Come here. I found all of these people. What is this? They can’t breathe.”

As Charlotte watched in horror, he ripped the dolls out of their packages, removed the hairnets from the girls, and the collar stiffeners from the boys. He walked them across the floor, made them dance and do flips and splits. When Hap and Marion hurried into the room they both gave a little gasp. Charlotte had stopped breathing. Zdenĕk was sprawled out on the floor.

“Come. Come, both of you, sit by me.”

Charlotte was speechless, watching her mother and father stretch out on the floor with him. Marion, in her perfectly pressed shirt-dress, giggled like a schoolgirl. Charlotte stood paralyzed with anger and grief watching her mother and father play with her dolls.

Charlotte stood at the sink in the powder room at her parents’ house and struggled to regain her composure. She stared at herself in the mirror.

“You’re being an asshole.”

“You’d think you’d have gotten over them now.”

“It’s not like they beat you.”

“They were more or less unconscious.”

“You mean you felt invisible?”

“Not exactly invisible. Transparent.”

“Now you’re getting in over your head.”

“Time to take a deep breath and swim.”

In the years since that Christmas, Zdenĕk had made her trips back to Buffalo bearable. He was a buffer between her and her parents that brightened her visits. The few times they came to New York, they spent more time with him than they did with her. The longer she was with Zdenĕk the more she felt incomplete. He wasn’t what was missing; he was proof it. Life oozed out of him; he let it overflow onto his friends, onto her, onto her family. Charlotte hemorrhaged her life into her work. She kept none of it for herself. Her only consolation was that even if she never felt fully present day to day, her pictures were. They were infused with the spirit she couldn’t muster anywhere else.