CHAPTER
FIVE

Her first month in America, Nina is not allowed to take a single picture. “Just watch,” says Marcus. “Get your bearings. You’ll be working soon enough.” A thousand times, her hands dart to her rib cage, wanting to lift a camera that’s not there. Nina doesn’t complain, although it feels like an insult. Would a new trumpet player be forbidden to touch his horn? Marcus tells her she’s being trained to pay attention, that she’s got to understand what’s going on before she can know how to shoot it. Photography is more than composition, it’s communication. Why be so quick to talk before you listen?

Nina does her best to be chastened, and to trust him, but her camera is the only thing she has to justify her presence. Without it, she feels as if she’s being winked about—as if the band suspects apprentice to be a code word for something else. Marcus doesn’t seem overly concerned with correcting such impressions. If anything, he encourages them. He stands proprietarily close to Nina when others are around, speaks in confidential tones when none are necessary, touches her forearm or the small of her back. Never when they are alone. Then, Marcus is all business. Nina bides her time, waiting for things to work themselves out.

Everything’s too new: the rules, the country, the people. The variety alone is dizzying—thirty TV channels in every hotel room, vegetables she’s eaten only out of cans, tasteless and mushy, laid out in long, fragrant rows in every supermarket. The cats laugh at her when the bus pulls off the highway to stock up on snacks; they dump pretzels, chips, trail mixes on the conveyor belt—itself a marvel, like a miniature version of the moving walkways at the airports, America a land of automated movement for humans and food alike—and Nina brings up the rear, clutching heads of broccoli and bags of miniature carrots to her chest.

Day by day, she’s decoding the illogic of English as a spoken language. After a week, she determines that the proper way to respond to “How’s it going?” or “How you feeling?” or “What’s up?” is not by accounting for your emotional or physical state, or your current activity, but by repeating the inquiry. Americans smile without provocation or sincerity; Nina trains herself not to be freaked out by all the flashing teeth, internalizes the fact that the default demeanor that passes for serious back home comes off as dour in this land of fluorescent produce.

The malaprops are unavoidable, though. A mound of jackets in the corner of an ill-equipped Pittsburgh dressing room prompts her to assert that what they need are some hookers; Nina has to stand and smile patiently for a full five minutes before the laughter dies down enough for Devon to explain the difference between the things you hang your coat on and the word she just said.

Thank God for Devon. Sometimes days pass without the two of them sharing more than a few moments, and Nina has to take her instruction amid the hustle-bustle, in the form of offhand comments, minuscule gestures, a whole lot of eavesdropping. But at least once a week, the two of them stay up late together on the bus, and Nina is privy to one of the trombonist’s long, low ruminations on America, his voice as soothing as the hum of the big engine.

“Listen, Pigfoot,” he tells her, “the first thing you gotta understand is this: the legacy of black folks in America is so profound that it functions as a metaphor for all humanity.” Devon reclines in his plush captain’s chair, stares out the window as the highway chugs by. Nina curls into the seat beside him, hugging her knees to her chest. “That’s why all kinds of people love this music. It’s like the great man said: every American is part black.”

Nina has no idea who the great man is, but she believes him great. Of course, all she knows of America are its clubs and restaurants and airports, and every nook and cranny of the custom-fitted thirty-five-foot vehicle in which the octet rides whenever the distance between gigs spans fewer than a thousand miles. “The men who built the music traveled this way,” Devon explains, “and the chemistry of those bands owed plenty to the tour bus. Besides which, I hate flying—and not just because Ellington did, the way Sparkplug likes to claim.”

When Nina professes to have developed only a vague impression of the country thus far, and blames her diet of hotels and concert halls, Devon wags a finger. “You gotta pay attention, ’Foot. You can find some of a place’s character even in a hotel or a concert hall. A club in Portland and a club in New Orleans are like noon and midnight, know what I mean?”

Nina resolves to. Something else to mull over, another concept to try to understand. Occasionally, it all hits her at once: how much she has to learn and how much of it these men were practically born knowing, how hard it is and will remain. And even if she learns it all—if that is even possible—she’ll still be an outsider. Not black and not a man and not a musician, her one ability the trick of showing them who they are, reflecting their images back at them. How lonely it is, here on this dark bus, when you are small and female and unable to sleep, surrounded by the sounds and tremors of big, slumbering, indifferent men.

Nina drifts off herself, and awakens when the bus jerks to a halt. She lifts her head, expecting to see a swarm of bellboys, but outside the window is only the grassy shoulder of the highway.

“We break down?” she asks groggily, thumbing the sleep out of her eyes.

“Naw,” says Torrence, one of the horn players, as he passes. “Recreational stop.” Nina follows him off the bus, into the sharp early-morning air, and finds the octet, plus Marcus and Greg, the bus driver, ambling over a small incline.

On the other side, just barely shielded from the highway, sits a lonely cement basketball court, complete with rusting poles and chain-link nets and faded yellow paint. What it’s doing here, in the dead center of nowhere, is anybody’s guess, but Devon keeps an eye peeled for such things.

He’s on the court already, ball in hand, facing off against the drummer, Rasheed, the tallest and youngest member of the band.

“You know”—Devon feigns left, gets his man to lunge, then crossover-dribbles behind his back—“the only thing sadder than your inside game is your outside game, ’Sheed. You a goddamn waste of height, bruh. I was tall as you, I’d be in the NBA instead of out here bullshitting with you no-music-playin’ motherfuckers.” He turns his head and sees her. “Uh-oh, look who made it off the bus. They got basketball behind the Iron Curtain, Pigfoot?”

He whips her a no-look pass. Nina catches it.

“Of course. I played in gym class.” She steps onto the court, takes a few dribbles, and tosses the ball at the basket—a push shot, from the chest; even Nina can tell her form is terrible. It clangs against the backboard hard enough to shake the pole, and falls into the hoop. The chain net caresses the ball, and it drops into Pipe Man’s hand. He fires a two-handed pass back at her, and she shoots again. Another two points for the girl from Prague.

“You gonna break that backboard, Pigfoot. Damn. Shoot like—”

“A girl?” Nina shows her palms to Pipe Man, and he scoop-tosses her the ball.

Devon smirks. “I was gonna say ‘photographer.’ All right, me and No Game here are captains. Call it in the air, ’Sheed.” The coin flashes in the sun, falls into Devon’s palm.

“Tails.”

“Tails it is.”

Rasheed points. “Pipe Man.”

Devon appraises the field. “Torrence.” The reed-thin reed player jogs to his side.

“Greg.”

“Teo.”

“Antonio ‘Human Highlight Film’ Graves.”

“Hackmaster General over here,” Devon says, pointing to Conrad, the bassist.

At last, only Nina and Marcus stand unchosen. It is Devon’s pick.

“Youth or experience?” he muses. “A proven waste of court space, or the chuck-happy Creole rookie?” He deliberates a moment. “Come on, Pigfoot. You can sub in, Plug.”

Nina bends to tie her sneakers. When she looks up, Marcus is hunched over her. “They’re going to think you’re a dyke,” he whispers fiercely.

Nina stands and looks him in the eye. “Good.”

Marcus shakes his head and stalks back to the bus, not to be heard from again that morning. Six hours later, when the octet pulls into Detroit, he tells Nina she can use her camera.

         

Looking back, she cannot identify the moments when things changed. Strange, since that is what she does, what she believes: that no matter how fast or slowly life unfurls, the crucial instants can be pinpointed and captured. Perhaps it’s a failure of memory, then, or perspective, or perhaps there are exceptions, processes that defy perception. Maybe the only way to document the eighteenth and nineteenth years of Nina’s life would be with some kind of time-lapse photography. Set cameras to go off every five days, analyze the stills, and you might be able to see her and Marcus’s shoots together evolve from clumsy tutorials—the teacher impatient, the student awkward and indignant, the space always a bit too small—into duets of shared sensibility, the two of them reading each other’s minds and bodies and emerging with the images to prove it.

Perhaps with proper data, you could isolate the instant when their comfort with each other began, take a wax pencil and circle the day Nina and Marcus became capable of sitting shoulder-to-shoulder without speaking at all. Or the night they started arguing with the kind of fearless vehemence that only families and lovers usually dare employ—a ferocity born of the certainty that no matter how foul the invective, they will still be bound to each other come daylight.

Could it be that there’s simply a quota? That intimacy comes automatically once you’ve logged five thousand hours with someone, or fifteen thousand miles? Once you’ve seen someone puke ten times—thus learning that Thai cuisine and Oklahoma City are a bad combination—or clicked off twenty-five thousand exposures? Once you’ve shared enough darkrooms, met enough deadlines, seen your names printed together in enough brochures and catalogs?

It doesn’t matter. That closeness, that love, is natural, what the road, the gig, the life are all about. The real question is how it went from that to what it is now, in the fall of 1990, six weeks shy of her twentieth birthday. Nina has barely eaten in days. The stress is ravaging, finally too much, and so here she is walking to Devon’s berth at the back of the bus two hours before dawn and leaning down to wake him with a whisper and a nudge.

“Bruh.”

One of Devon’s many talents is the ability to be sound asleep one instant, totally alert the next: a by-product of his tendency to keep late nights and use the morning’s first phone call as an alarm clock.

His eyes pop open. “Yo.”

“I gotta talk to you.”

He doesn’t say another word, just wraps the blanket around his shoulders like a shawl and follows her up front. It delights Nina to know that she can yank the Prince of Jazz from his bed and he will ask no questions, simply accept that she needs him. Just as he has awakened her countless times, sent Nina on myriad late-night and early-morning errands without so much as a pleasantry by way of coaxing.

Devon seldom even bothers to tell Nina her schedule, just assumes she can walk out the door at any time on half an hour’s notice to shoot one of his elementary school visits or accompany him to a TV taping so he has someone to talk to in the car. Taking photographs is only half of what Nina, as the juniormost member of Devon’s entourage, is expected to do. She’s been a messenger, a secretary, even a liaison between Devon and a few of the more demanding women in his vast collection.

He slides onto a built-in bench, pulls the blanket over his head, and hunches forward, elbows on the table.

“I can’t take his shit anymore,” Nina whispers. “Look at this.” She points to her forehead. “I’m breaking out.”

“You call that breaking out? Shoulda seen me at your age.” He rubs his eyes with the heels of both hands. “Look, sis. I told you before, you gotta deal with it yourself. Tell him, ‘Negro, leave me the fuck alone.’”

“You think I haven’t tried? He doesn’t listen to me, Devon.” She looks over her shoulder at the shadowed bunk where Marcus is presumably sleeping. “He listens to you.”

“So make him listen. If you can’t get people to listen to you in life, sis, that’s a major problem. Cuz it won’t be the last time a motherfucker wants some toonyan.”

“He doesn’t just want some toonyan, bruh.” It is one of a hundred synonyms Nina has picked up, and learned to toss around as casually as any one of them. “Pipe Man just wants some toonyan. That I can deal with. Marcus wants to leave his wife for me.”

Devon cracks a smile. “I’ve known Cherokee Slim since I was born, Pigfoot. Trust me. That brother just wants some toonyan.”

Fuck you, thinks Nina, surprised at how much the assertion offends her. “Just talk to him.”

Devon shakes his head. “If he was popping shit in public, I could step in. But he’s not.”

The bandleader is right about that much. As soon as Marcus got it in his head that the two of them should be together, the displays of intimacy stopped. Now he waits until they are alone, then tells Nina how beautiful she is, how deeply he admires her talent, how much he loves her, how badly he wants her. What an amazing team they make, and how they could travel the world together, lovers and partners, shooting project after project, book after book, from Mozambique to Japan.

He doesn’t do it every day, or even every week. As unsettling as anything is the way Marcus’s entreaties rise out of nowhere, return as fervent and flowery as ever just when Nina thinks she’s made herself clear and the two of them have fallen back into a shit-talking, fraternal rhythm. She’ll find him staring at her, feel her face grow hot, force herself to turn and ask, “What?” because Marcus will go on staring like that until she gives him an opening, and the sooner it begins, the sooner it’ll be done.

The next day, as Nina is sitting on her hotel bed, going over contact sheets with a magnifying glass, she senses him looking up from his own paper, feels his eyes set on her. Nina looks like crap; she’s wearing a bulky pair of Devon’s sweatpants and a billowing bright blue T-shirt from some festival they’ve played. Smudged glasses, coffee breath, a pen lodged in her hair to hold it in a bun.

“What?” She sounds as irritated as she knows how.

Marcus affects a wounded, romantic murmur. “You know what, Nina. I can’t do this anymore. It’s killing me.”

She continues to work, hoping to look impervious and bored. “You’re married, Marcus.” A beat, and Nina turns her head and looks over her glasses like a schoolmarm. “You’ve been married longer than I’ve been alive.”

“I’ll end it. Give me the word, I’ll end it right now.” He snatches the phone off the desk and holds it in the air.

“Put it down, Marcus.”

“I know you love me.”

“Not like that, bruh.”

“You’re not attracted to me?”

“Of course I am.” It has taken months’ worth of these confrontations for Nina to admit it, for fear of encouraging him. But lately, her strategy has changed. Now she thinks that if she gives him this much, he will realize that attraction is irrelevant, that it poses no challenge to Nina’s will and thus the whole thing is a dead end.

“You’re a very handsome man. That’s not the point. You’re married, we work together, and I’m way, way too young for your old ass. It’s not going to happen, okay? Just stop. You don’t know what you’re doing to me with this shit.”

“You know what you’re doing to me?” he retorts, sulking. Every time, Marcus manages to act freshly heartbroken. His frustration grows darker, uglier by shades, as if he’s working up the venom to change tack. Already, there’s a hint of menace to him, like some evil, brooding prince thrown over for a virtuous stable boy early in a bad movie.

“I can’t do this anymore,” he mumbles after a moment.

“You said that already,” Nina snaps. “Is it a threat now, or what?”

She’s playing with fire; Marcus has more control over her fate than anyone, even Devon. If he won’t work with her, Nina’s out of a job. She’s his assistant, and it’s not like Devon’s going to fire the venerable Uncle Sparkplug and replace him with a nineteen-year-old Czech girl, even if he thinks she’s twenty.

Nina doesn’t even have her own darkroom, just keys to Marcus’s. That’s where she crashes when they have a few weeks off: on a cot amid the gear and files and boxed-up ephemera filling his Brooklyn studio. Which is just as well, since all Nina does in New York anyway, during her alleged free time, is print. She can’t even cash a goddamn check; Devon writes Marcus one each month from a discretionary fund, and Marcus gives Nina cash. Or, just as often, buys her what she needs, like a fucking pimp.

“Why would I threaten you?” he replies, offended but not answering. “I’m just saying, Nina, the way I feel, I don’t know if I can be around you if you don’t feel the same. It’s too painful for me.”

“So what, Marcus?” she demands, growing frantic. “If I don’t sleep with you, I lose my job? If that’s what you’re trying to say, at least have the balls to say it.” She crosses the room and stands by the door, unsure whether she’s about to kick him out or leave herself.

“That’s not what I’m trying to say at all.” He’s still sitting in his chair, pencil in hand, looking stricken—shocked and ashamed that she can think such things of him. And then Marcus’s face softens, and he regards her with vast, calm sympathy, as if realizing how tenuous and scary her world is. He seems desperate to comfort her, to shield Nina from the ugliness of her own thoughts, and sad that she is so confused as to see treachery where there is nothing but devotion.

“Come here.” He says it as if she’s seven years old and his only desire in the world is to turn on her bedroom lights, show Nina that the monster is really just a pile of laundry sitting on a chair. “I’d never do that. Listen.”

She takes a deep breath and exhales, the panic dissipating. This is not going to be the final showdown Nina’s been dreading. But she still isn’t going for his I’m-so-misunderstood routine. The only thing Marcus regrets is having his hand forced.

“I’ve got to go,” she says, cold but not as cold as she could be. “I’ll see you at the club.”

A minute later, she stands before Devon’s suite, staring at the DO NOT Disturb sign dangling from the door handle. It means one of two things: either he’s composing or he’s fucking. It’s noon, and the remains of a room-service breakfast for one sit on a tray against the wall, but Nina will not knock and risk being wrong. The sound of Devon yelling “not now” from the bed, the sight of his flushed face between the door and jamb, even the thought of him in there is too much to bear.

Nina turns and walks back the way she came, reflecting that as long as she is with the band, her chances of meeting anyone herself are nil. Marcus would cock-block in a second, and if he wasn’t available, Devon would do the same. Any of the guys would, really; the ones who don’t act like older brothers act like older brothers’ friends. Protective or proprietary, a secret brotherhood charged with protecting the sacred treasure of Nina’s virginity—not that anybody knows she’s a virgin, thank God. That would be the living end.

The problem is bigger than road life and the octet. Bigger, even, than Marcus Flanagan and his bullshit. Nina knows nothing about flirting except what she’s picked up by watching Devon—and his vocabulary of cool, just-short-of-condescending banter and sly, sexually charged presumption is guaranteed to translate poorly.

Nina has assimilated just as much of Devon’s language, his dogma, as anybody in the band: become the latest member of the growing jazz-world population to emerge from the trombonist’s tutelage sounding like baby Devons, mixing and matching words like soulfulness and nobility, greatness and sophistication and conception, mouthing opinions they haven’t studied hard enough to comprehend fully, much less disseminate.

For Nina, though, such mimicry lends a much-needed authority. She’s built a persona that discourages advances and commands respect, but in so doing, she’s desexed herself. You’d have to spend the kind of time with her that Marcus does to realize just how beautiful Nina is—see past the insipid, unflattering clothing and the broad, mannish body language she’s developed as a way of taking up sufficient space among the kind of dudes who eat until the food is gone and spread their legs wide on crowded subway cars.

With Devon not to be disturbed and Marcus probably still waiting in her room, Nina has nowhere to go. She decides to write her mother. It’s been six months since Nina last sent a letter, and her country has changed completely. She watched it happen like a foreigner, spent the last two weeks of November perched before television sets in a string of hotels, watching the Velvet Revolution the way the octet watches the final minutes of a football game. The total transformation of Czechoslovakia unfolded in a stupefying flurry. November 16: the student protests; November 17: the riot on Národní Street; November 18: the student strike; November 19: Havel, the Civic Forum. By year’s end, Marxism had been stricken from the Constitution. The People’s Militia had been disarmed, its every action since 1948 declared illegal. The files of the secret police smoldered; the barbed wire that had once lined the Austrian border was a jumble of scrap metal. Censorship was finished. Now, the president’s a playwright.

Nina’s exhilaration has been cut by an awareness of just how much maneuvering, how many thousands of secret meetings, must have laid the groundwork for this bloodless coup—all of it unbeknownst to her for the entire seventeen years she plodded through the Socialist Homeland. The knowledge multiplies the thousands of miles separating her from Prague. She’s not a part of that, either. She wishes she could have photographed it, but it wouldn’t have been worth waiting for, even if Nina had known what was coming. She wouldn’t swap her liberation for Czechoslovakia’s, this freedom for that one.

Letters from Rayna pour into Devon’s office, where his secretaries add them to the bulky packages awaiting the band at the front desk of every new hotel. Her neat script fills pages and pages of the rough gray paper Nina grew up writing on—who knows, even now some international corporation is probably shipping tons of eleven-by-fourteen blue-ruled American-made legal pads over there, and this low-quality stuff will be forgotten.

What seems to excite Rayna most is not the parliamentary elections or the nascent availability of books long suppressed, not the possibility of visiting her daughter or the fact that Nina can now return to the city of her birth without risking imprisonment. Instead, to Nina’s consternation, the thing her mother goes on and on about is the new religious freedom. I can be as Jewish as I want, she writes ecstatically, in a hand grown slightly bigger, swollen with elation. President Havel’s trip to Israel, accompanied by a planeload of Czech Jews, is recounted in great detail. Rayna describes planned museums celebrating the life of Kafka and commemorating the Jews killed at Theresienstadt as if she herself is slated to curate. Jewish study groups are forming, and Rayna plans to join one. Not because I intend to become observant, she writes, as if anticipating the face Nina will make. Because I can.

Nina grabs a pad of stationery off a table in the lobby, retreats to a corner of the empty hotel restaurant, and orders a fresh-squeezed orange juice and a croissant, paying with Marcus’s name and room number. Dear Mom, she scrawls, then finds herself staring into space, confronted with the same problem that has aborted every attempt at writing back. It is ludicrous, shameful, but a part of Nina resents the revolution for scouring away her past, rendering her trials irrelevant. The ogre that stole away her father, poisoned her mother, locked Nina away in a dark tower, scattered her family like bread crumbs: the motherfucker’s body lies dust-covered in the town square, brought down by a band of villagers wielding torches. The dead student who started the upheaval isn’t even dead—in fact, he’s rumored to be a KGB agent. This is what they cowered before, hid from, whispered about?

Nina pushes the pad away. It’s not her mother she wants to talk to anyway. It’s her dad. Miklos is the first man she ever knew, and now that she’s surrounded by men—smothering beneath them, it seems sometimes, like a fumbled football at the bottom of a pileup—Nina sees her father more clearly. She remembers a gentleness she hasn’t felt since, and to think of it now, at a time like this, is to invite tears.

Marcus almost understands. His whole wounded-loverman seduction routine is intended to seem gentle. But Marcus’s slow-and-careful is not the slow-and-careful of somebody picking up a wounded baby bird. It’s the slow-and-careful of a hunter stalking prey. He wears it like a tactic, a tuxedo he can’t wait to shed; his eyes say that the caveman club would be far easier. Perhaps the only man in the world who can be gentle to a girl is that girl’s father. Nina’s always known what she needed. And even though he’s gone, she cannot imagine Miklos any other way, were she to present her bedraggled self on his doorstep. Provided he has one.

Nina’s gnawed the cheap Bic pen to bits. It’s full of drool. Fuck this. She drops it on the pad, disgusted, tucks her head to her chest, and advances on the door to her room. Throws it open, hard. It hits the rubber doorstop and shudders.

Sure enough, Marcus is sitting right where he was, as if the whole exchange has left him too distraught to move. Except that the TV clicker is in his hand, so really he’s been watching the Lakers play the Suns.

“Please get out,” Nina says flatly, and to her surprise, Marcus stands and begins gathering his things. She seats herself on the bed, back to him, takes the phone from the nightstand, and holds it in her lap. It’s old and clunky, as heavy as a newborn baby. The door shuts behind Marcus; Nina’s kingdom is reclaimed. She is Penelope and Odysseus rolled into one.

The operator picks up on the second ring. “What city and state,” he asks.

“San Francisco, California.”

“What name?”

“Hricek. Miklos Hricek.”

“Can you spell the last name, please?”

“Sure. H-R-I-C-E-K.”

There is no such listing. The operator offers her a Vassili Hricek on Jersey Street and a Hricek Hardware in someplace called Castro Valley. Nina thanks him, hangs up, redials.

“What city and state, please?”

“Los Angeles, California.”

There are two Hriceks in greater Los Angeles, both female.

There are no Hriceks at all in San Diego.

The trail’s gone cold. She could dial 411 and browse phone books forever. The clicker woos her from across the room, where Marcus set it down. Why not slide beneath the fresh, clean hotel sheets with it, anesthetize herself with some dumb movie, then pass out? Nina gives in, snatches it, pulls back the covers.

The television is a dim convex mirror; she can see herself reflected there as she points the remote. There’s something cold and executionerlike in the gesture, as if pushing the power button will kill the girl inside the frame.

She drops her arm, looks at the phone. Why is everything in her life a machine? It makes Nina feel like an invalid, all this metal and plastic and rubber and glass, all these gleaming, essential, unfathomable devices. Her best friend is a camera, and damned if she knows how it works, or how to fix it if it breaks. Nina picks up the receiver and listens to the dial tone. It’s soothing, the sound of possibility—until that hostile off-the-hook beep takes over, a reminder that opportunities must be grabbed up quickly.

A thought strikes her, and Nina presses the redial button.

“The University of California, please.”

“Which campus?”

Nina requests the main number, if there is such a thing. She is connected, no surprise, to a machine. “If you would like Admissions, please press one. Financial Services, please press two….” Nina presseseight: Human Resources. She enters the first three letters of her father’s name on the telephone keypad, then listens to a litany of men and women whose surnames correspond to 474.

And there he is. Miklos Hricek, nestled fifty-plus names into the interminable list. Nina is so surprised, she fails to catch his phone number, has to call back and listen through the whole sequence again. And then it’s over, and she holds a ten-digit map in her quivering hand. Nina memorizes it but does not call.

         

It gives her strength, just knowing that she could. When the parabola curve of Marcus’s ardor begins to crest, as it does every six or eight weeks, Nina recites Miklos’s phone number to herself, a reminder that she has options. She can leave anytime—her father is a professor of philosophy at the University of California. She can see him now more clearly than ever, fat and magisterial behind a thick oak desk in a dark, messy office full of books. A pronounced accent to his sonorous English, a beard gone mostly gray. A faint sadness cloaks him; he seems stooped beneath some invisible weight. Students and colleagues ponder it, but they aren’t close enough to ask. Miklos keeps to himself now, doesn’t preside over dinner parties anymore, is well liked but thought aloof. It is chalked up to his homeland, his intellect. At most, one or two close friends know the truth. A photo of his wife and daughter stands amid the clutter on the desk, but Miklos has learned how not to look at it. Still, on every walk through campus he peers at the female undergraduates from beneath the brim of his fedora, and wonders what his little girl looks like today.

Now and then, Nina calls the University of California’s information number, just to make sure Miklos is still listed. But nothing more. Life on the road improves with time; she turns twenty in New Orleans, and Devon throws her what he thinks is a twenty-first birthday party at his parents’ house. His mother, Sondra, cooks for the whole band, bakes Nina a sweet potato pie in lieu of a cake.

There is champagne. Marcus and Devon make lovely, warmhearted toasts. So, too, surprisingly, do Torrence and Pipe Man. The whole band, it seems, is fonder of the young photographer than she knows. Nina gets to hear stories about herself—actual committed-to-memory, fully embroidered tales that take on new and uproarious dimensions in the retelling. She drinks enough to get tipsy, and for the first time feels like a full-fledged member of the band, the family. Devon’s mother and father take to her like long-lost grandparents from the moment their son brings her through the door.

“Mom, Dad, this is Nina Hricek. We call her ‘Pigfoot.’”

Jenkins, it seems, has run its course. Nina’s earned her surname back.

“Found her in Prague, but she’s Creole three generations back.”

Nina likes that immensely—especially after she learns that Sondra, too, is half Creole. To Devon’s delight, she begins deploying the line herself when people ask, which is all the time. Nina’s ambiguous features and green eyes and honey skin, her hard-won attitude and the slightly foreign, slightly southern jazz lilt of her voice make an ethnologist of everyone she meets. Soon, it’s become a standard riff in both their repertoires.

Halfway between her twentieth birthday and her twenty-first, Marcus backs off. Not entirely, but mostly. It’s as if he’s decided his window of opportunity has closed. Very astute of him, because after Nina’s party, something shifts and settles. She’s at home now, finally certain that if she fell backward, she’d be caught. The realization frees her to look up, look around, appraise her life, and all in all it’s pretty fucking excellent, and nowhere near as lonely as it once was. She’s visited every jazz town in North America at least five or six times now, traveled the circuit enough to have people she looks forward to seeing all over the place.

In St. Louis, Raleigh, and Columbus, Nina feels a huge fondness for the cadres of elderly musicians hunkered down at the back tables of the clubs where the octet plays; they pat her hand with avuncular affection, call Nina “dear” and “sweetheart” and tell her stories about Bean and Papa Joe and Lester Young. In Miami, a rich art collector and his wife invite the band over for sumptuous lunches whenever they pass through; Marcus told Nina the first time to bring her portfolio, and since then the couple has bought six prints from her. In Boston, two senior members of Harvard’s African-American Studies Department always make the scene, along with their spouses. Some of Nina’s most memorable conversations have been with them, in the lobby of the Charles Hotel, downstairs from Regattabar.

A few of Nina’s friends are even hers alone. A young woman in Austin, Texas, an aspiring photographer, looks up to her like a big sister; she’ll drive halfway across the gargantuan state just to meet Nina for dinner. When the band is off the road and she is able to escape the darkroom, Nina can take in a movie with Grace, Devon’s newest secretary and a casual girlfriend, or simply savor the experience of strolling through a museum alone. She’s even gone jogging with Torrence a few times in Prospect Park.

But Nina’s acculturation does nothing to remand her father’s phone number to the far recesses of her mind. Rather, the more secure she feels, the more soberly she contemplates making the call. No longer would meeting him be freighted with the dread of expectation; Miklos doesn’t have to represent the means of escape, because Nina needs no rescue. And the image of him gazing across his desk at a confident, accomplished young artist is far more attractive than the image of Miklos receiving a refugee desperate for asylum. Especially since there is no way of knowing whether he would grant it.

This is the crux of the problem: she has no idea who Miklos Hricek is anymore—or who he ever was. Informant? Victim? Deserter? Betrayer? Betrayed? Until she finds out, there is a part of herself Nina can never know. Still, she’s glad she has waited. Come strong or don’t come at all, as Devon would say. She’s built a life without her father twice, and if Miklos wants back in, he’ll have to prove that he deserves it.

His area code, 530, is northern California. The closest the octet will ever be is at Yoshi’s in Oakland; they arrive there two days before Nina’s twenty-first birthday, for the last week of a monthlong West Coast swing. And so on Nina’s final night as an underage drinker, she returns to her hotel room after the show, drops her Styrofoam take-out box of salmon teriyaki on the bed, and lifts the phone, nervous even though there’s no way Miklos would be in the office at this hour. She’s calling for clues. Something on his answering machine is bound to tell her where to find him.

The phone rings eight times, and then Nina hears a mechanical click, and the sound of empty air, as if whoever recorded the message was bumbling his way through unfamiliar technology. Another moment passes, and then “This is Miklos Hricek at Kroninberg Library. Please leave me a message.” A muffled fumbling noise. A beep.

Even at such distance, and with such dispassion, his voice brings her to tears. It bends the line of Nina’s life into a circle—posits the uplifting, terrifying notion that the past can be reckoned with instead of merely fled.

She heaves a shuddering sigh and swipes a wrist across her nose. To find herself crying is a worrisome surprise, but maybe she can get it all out now. Nina squeezes her eyes shut, then blinks rapidly, trying to stimulate the ducts. It reminds her of the way she used to shove sadness down her throat those first few years after he left, when she considered it her duty to mourn his absence. A few forced tears used to lead to gallons of real ones. But not anymore. So fuck it.

Nina walks to the bathroom, splashes a handful of cold water on her face, and heads downstairs to find the concierge. She asks the tall, round-faced young man what university houses the Kroninberg Library, and he bends over some obscure book full of maps, flips a few laminated pages, and tells her UC Davis. He says it as if hoping that by answering quickly and correctly he’ll advance to a more difficult round of questions. Nina obliges, asking where Davis is and how to get there.

At least an hour and a half to the northeast, he tells her. She’ll need a car. Shall he arrange for her to rent one?

Shit. Nina is licenseless; just one of the many ways in which true independence still eludes her. She thanks the concierge, then jogs across the street to Yoshi’s.

When she left, Devon was just sitting down to sake and tempura with the club’s owner. Nina finds them on folding metal chairs in the dressing room, fluorescent ceiling bulbs splashing brightness against the banana yellow walls. Why every jazz club decorator seems to feel that the starkest, most unflattering lighting imaginable is a backstage necessity on par with a minifridge ranks high on the list of questions Nina would like answered someday, but now is not the time.

Devon looks up when she enters, and raises a tiny ceramic cup in greeting. A pair of chopsticks is scissored in his other hand.

“Hey, girl,” he says, chewing. “You want some sake?” The owner rises a few inches off his seat, gives Nina a minute bow, then picks up the thin decanter and pours her a trickle.

“Thanks.” Nina curls the cup to her chest. “Sorry to interrupt.”

Devon lifts a piece of battered broccoli. “It’s cool. What’s up?”

“I need tomorrow off, bruh. Me and Sparkplug both.”

“We got a master class at Berkeley, Pigfoot. You know that.” He pauses, lowers the morsel until it hovers just above his plate. “You and Marcus both?”

“Yeah.”

Devon shakes his head. “I need one of you, for sure. Told Berkeley they’d get some images. Flip a coin or something.”

“Please, bruh. Have I ever asked you for a day before?”

“No, you haven’t, because you know how things work in my band. Why do you and Sparkplug—” Devon stops short. “Tomorrow’s your birthday, huh? Damn, sis, almost forgot. Tell you what. We’ll celebrate after the gig, all right?”

“Devon, I need the day. For both of us.”

He smirks. “Don’t tell me you finally decided to give Old Man River some toonyan?”

Nina had hoped to get out of this conversation without telling him what’s going on, but he isn’t giving her much choice. She’s never mentioned her father to any of them, and it feels too late to bring him up now—like an insult to their friendship, that she’s kept something so important hidden for so long.

Nina takes a deep breath. “I need Marcus to drive me to UC Davis to see my father.”

Devon stares at her for a long time, and Nina steels herself, wondering how succinctly she can fill him in, should he ask.

“Your father.”

“He’s a professor there.”

Devon leans his chopsticks against the lip of the plate, clasps his hands over his folded leg, and resumes staring. Nina waits it out.

“I didn’t know that,” the trombonist says at last.

“Neither did I.”

“You could’ve asked me. I would have driven you.”

“You’ve got a master class.”

“I would’ve canceled it.”

Nina smiles. It’s pure Devon, this blend of care and competition.

The bandleader pours himself another drink. “Just be back in time to hit. And bring your daddy. I’d like to meet the man who brought Pigfoot Hricek into the world.”

“We’ll see.” She steps forward, plants a kiss on Devon’s cheek, then turns to leave.

“Hey, sis.”

Nina halts. “Yeah?”

“You’re sure you wanna take Sparkplug? I mean…If you can wait, I’ll go with you on Friday.”

Friday is three days away. And Nina knows from playing college gigs that university weekends begin on Thursday night. She could miss Miklos entirely.

“Thanks, bruh. But I don’t think I can.”

She walks straight to Marcus’s room and lifts her fist to the door, then reconsiders, retreats down the hall to her own room, and calls him instead.

He answers on the first ring. “Flanagan.” Nina hears the TV in the background, and pictures him lying on his back in bed, wearing his Bill Cosby old-man pajamas.

“Hey, I need a favor.”

“Sure.”

“Drive up to Davis with me tomorrow. I already got us out of shooting the Berkeley thing.”

“What’s in Davis, besides a whole lot of nothing?”

“I’ll tell you tomorrow. Meet me at the concierge’s desk at nine, okay? He’ll get us a car.”

“Make it ten.”

“Fine, ten. Good night. And thanks.”

“What time is it right now?”

Nina glances at the clock on her nightstand, certain that Marcus’s room is equipped with an identical one. “Half past twelve.”

“In that case, happy birthday.”

         

“I always wondered what your mother said to you that night,” says Marcus, running his free hand down the bristles of his beard as he pilots the rented Chevy up the sunbaked freeway at seventy-five miles an hour, with the air conditioner on full blast.

Nina stares into her lap. Marcus steals a glance over the shoulder of his driving arm. “Relax. I guarantee you he’s gonna be blown away by what a beautiful, amazing young woman his little girl turned into.”

For once, Marcus’s flattery is without ambition. “I’m glad you’re with me,” Nina tells him.

“Honored to be here.” He settles demonstratively into his seat and turns his attention to the road, leaving Nina by herself. The strength of their partnership fills the car, and props her up; she finds herself marveling at it instead of thinking about her father. Marcus has positioned himself with great delicacy: distant enough to be unobtrusive, but grim and focused as a bodyguard.

They travel the rest of the way in silence, and arrive at UC Davis just before noon. Marcus parks at a two-hour meter, drops some coins into the slot. The hand leaps halfway up the dial.

He hangs his thumbs from his pockets. “You got any change?”

“No. But an hour might be plenty.” Nina squints at him through her shades, then raises the flat of her hand to her brow. The whole climate’s different here, seventy miles inland, dry and stagnant and oppressive.

Marcus leans against the driver’s door. “Want me to come?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I should see him by myself. No—yeah. I do want you to come. I guess.” She walks over and links her arm through his, as if it’s he who needs encouraging. “Come on. Let’s just go.”

A campus map directs them to a modern five-story building just off the main quad. Engraved on a low bronze plaque, just left of the entranceway, is THE ALFRED KRONINBERG LIBRARY OF PHILOSOPHY. CORNERSTONE LAID May 12, 1951.

“Guess we found it,” Nina says fake-breezily. She waits a moment, as if hoping a boulder might drop from the sky and block the door. When none does, she squares her shoulders, adjusts her skirt, and walks into the cool, dark lobby. Marcus follows, a pace behind, and trails Nina to a directory mounted beside the elevator, a black plastic board with movable white letters like an old-fashioned theater’s marquee. The department of philosophy is on the top level, above the two-floor library. Nina jabs the elevator button, clasps her hands behind her back, then tires of waiting and rings for the lift again. She glances back at Marcus, half-expecting him to say something about patience, but he is quiet.

Hello, Father. That will be her line, Nina decides as they glide upward. She’ll say it from the threshold of his office, and she won’t move. He’ll have to come toward her, carry his disbelief across the room. Perhaps other students will be waiting in the hall to see him. Maybe another professor, even, will be sitting in Miklos’s office, chatting with him, when Nina appears.

The elevator opens. Twenty-five feet to the left, linoleum gives way to carpet and the hallway terminates in a circular suite of faculty offices, set behind dark wooden doors. Twenty-five feet to the right is the glass-walled departmental office. Nina can see a wall of mailboxes, some copy machines, a few secretarial types milling about.

She turns left, and by the time the carpet muffles the clunk of her footsteps, the pounding of her heart is just as loud—so strong, she feels the pulsing in her throat. A name is stenciled on each door. Grey, Wilkerson, Glenz…Nina turns away from them and nearly bumps into Marcus.

“What the fuck?” she demands, throwing an arm at the names. “He’s not here. There’s no Hricek.” Hysteria churns in her stomach. “What the fuck?”

Marcus pats the air in front of her. “It’s okay. He’s probably just on a different floor. Let’s ask.” He points down the hall. Nina nods, stalks off. Pushes open the door, pastes a smile on her face, and bends over the chest-high cubicle of the first secretary she sees.

“Excuse me.”

The woman looks up over a pair of rainbow-framed reading glasses. “Yes?” She sounds about a pack short of a tracheotomy.

“I’m looking for Professor Hricek. Could you tell me where his office is, please?”

The secretary squints at her. “Professor who?”

“Hricek. Miklos Hricek.”

The woman interlocks her knob-knuckled talons, rests them on the desk, and leans forward. “Miklos Hricek works in the library, dear. The circulation desk. Third floor.”

Nina backs out the door, too stunned to answer. Miklos Hricek works in the library?

Marcus is waiting by the elevator. “Well?”

“He’s not a professor,” she hears herself say in a monotone. “He works in the library.”

“Great!” Marcus presses the button. “Which floor?”

Nina whirls toward him, furious. “What do you mean, ‘great’? He’s supposed to be a professor, not some fucking librarian. He had an office in Prague as big as this whole floor!”

“Who cares what he does? He’s your father, and you found him. That’s the important thing. Right?”

Nina crosses her arms over her chest.

“Shit, Pigfoot. My daddy mopped floors in a nursing home. You think I’m not proud of him?”

The elevator dings and opens. Nina stays right where she is. “You know how many cats who were professors and architects and doctors back in their home countries come here and end up driving cabs?” The doors begin to close, and Marcus blocks them with his foot. “Come on. Go see your old man.”

She shuts her eyes. “Just give me a minute, okay?”

“Sure.” Marcus gives the hands-off sign, spins on his heel, walks across the hall to the water fountain. A moment later, Nina hears his footsteps coming closer, and looks up in time to see Marcus thrust a piece of paper at her, its bottom third fringed into tear-off slips.

Philosophy Tutor Available, it reads in large hand-drawn block letters. Undergrad and graduate levels. All topics. Thirty years teaching experience, published author, Ph.D. On the slips are Miklos’s name and what must be his home phone number.

Nina stares at the flyer for a long time, as if she expects this advertisement to account for nine missing years all by its lonesome. She hits the elevator button, then changes her mind and barrels down the stairs.

Nina busts in like a gunfighter entering a saloon, and scans the room. This library has none of the majesty of the one in which she logged so many hours as a girl. It’s got more in common with the one at the prep school in Pasadena where she and Devon spent an afternoon last week, teaching the kids about jazz. Students hunch over blond-wood tables, half of them half-asleep. Backpacks dot the ground like gumdrops. Ancient green-screened computers hum; metal carts of books sit marooned in aisles. A white-haired woman in a ratty cardigan pushes a sliding ladder across a wall, about to reshelve the thick tome in her hand.

For the second time in five minutes, Nina approaches a total stranger and asks the whereabouts of her father. “He’s in the break room,” the boy behind the main desk tells her, pointing behind him at a closed door labeled STAFF.

“May I?” Nina passes before he can answer, curls her hand around the cool brass knob. She takes a moment to collect herself, turns it a fraction of an inch, and stops. Voices murmur on the other side. One male, one female. And they are speaking Czech. Nina yawns to clear her ears, then listens harder. She makes out a few disjointed words—almost, weekend, movie, napkin—and throws open the door.

A man and a woman sit opposite each other at a small table in a bare Formica-countered room that smells of stale coffee, both of them biting deeply into what look like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on whole-wheat bread. A Ziploc bag containing two more lies between them. They look up, startled.

The man swallows, then dabs at his mouth with a paper towel and turns in his seat. It is Miklos all right. He’s thinner than she’s ever seen him, about ten pounds up from gaunt. A plaid flannel shirt that might once have stretched snugly over his belly hangs baggy instead. A network of thin wrinkles surrounds his caved-in eyes, like minor streets on a road map, and his hair and beard are a dull gunmetal gray, with not a glint of silver. His bifocals are off a drugstore rack.

“Can I help you?” he inquires. The woman takes another bite.

“Hello, Dad,” Nina says in Czech.

He blinks at her, then stands up so fast, his plastic chair falls over backward, clatters against the floor.

“Nina? It’s really you? My God!” He laughs the laugh Nina remembers: a big round sound like shouting into an empty barrel, undiminished by the loss of untold pounds.

Before she knows what’s happening, Nina finds herself wrapped in a long, airtight embrace, breasts pressed flat against his chest, face buried in the shoulder of his shirt. He smells first of cigarettes, second of sandalwood, and third of old sweat. Slowly, she brings her arms up to his shoulders and hugs back.

“I can’t believe it!” He rocks her from side to side, then steps away and clasps Nina’s forearms with his hands. The same hands I remember, Nina thinks, looking down at them. She realizes she’s seeking out the unchanged in her father, dwelling on what weight and time have not transformed.

He looks her over, then twists at the waist without letting go. “My daughter,” he proclaims to the woman, who is standing now, shaking out the pleats of her long skirt and smoothing down her bunned-up hair. “She is beautiful!”

Miklos turns back to Nina and grins, revealing a row of yellowed teeth. She does not return it, fixing him instead with a hard, expectant look she slapped together while his back was turned.

Miklos sees it, and his exuberance drops away. He picks up Nina’s hand, holds it in both his own. “Every day I’ve wondered where you were, how you were doing.” He stares at her with wide bloodshot eyes, as if imploring her to search them and confirm his sincerity.

Nina switches to English. “Then why haven’t you called, or written?”

Miklos hangs his head, nods, sighs so hard that his shoulders rise to his ears, then slump almost to his rib cage. It’s a ridiculously oversized gesture, and yet one that seems to acknowledge its own failure to convey all it seeks to.

“For a long time,” he says, shifting to English, too, and his accent is stronger than Nina remembers, far stronger than it should be, “I simply could not. It was too much of a risk. And then, by the time it wasn’t…”

Miklos looks up at her, his face so slack with shame that for a moment she actually fears for him, worries with an abrupt, intuitive concern that getting through the next few moments may be more than her father can bear. “Then, Nina, I had nothing to say.”

He looks around, as if this break room is the physical manifestation of his fate in America. “I had failed. Our plans had come apart, and I had trapped myself here, with nothing.” Miklos tries to laugh, but he cannot. “A college kid’s job, shelving books. You and your mother were better off without me.”

“We just wanted to talk to you. We just wanted to know you were okay.”

“I was not okay, I’m afraid. I became very depressed. And in my depression, I began to drink. Only when I met Rayna—” He beckons to her, and the woman steps forward and stands at Miklos’s side. “Her name is Rayna, too,” he says apologetically.

The woman extends her hand to Nina and says in Czech, “I have heard all about you.” Nina takes her hand and shakes, stuporously, barely looking at her, waiting for Miklos to go on.

“Only when I met Rayna did I see what I was doing to myself,” he resumes after overseeing the handshake. “She got me in a program. I’m sober three years now.” Miklos looks at the floor as he says it. If he’s proud, he doesn’t want to appear that way.

“How is your mother?” he asks after a moment, with an awkward formality. “She is here with you, perhaps?” Nina watches Miklos’s face brighten and then darken as he gives further thought to what he will be in for if she is.

“No. Mom is still in Prague. She’d kill me if she knew I’d come here.” She pauses, then decides that he deserves it. “You ruined her life. You know that.”

Her father touches his beard, glances skittishly at the new Rayna.

“She is a strong woman.” His eyes shuttle from Nina to his sandwich to his shoes, aimless, like a fly alighting on whatever seems to offer harbor. “I’m sure she is all right. Her father—your Deda—he is still alive?”

“He died six years ago. She’s not all right. She’s fucked-up. How do you even have the balls to say that? How the hell would you know?”

Tears sit in the corners of her father’s eyes. He blinks through them. “What I have done is unforgivable. I know that.”

“Nothing is unforgivable,” Rayna chimes in. “God forgives all.”

“Shut up,” says Nina. “Who asked you?”

Rayna crosses her arms, retreats into herself.

“I never meant to hurt you,” Miklos declares. “None of this is how I meant for things to be.”

Nina nods. She wants to be fair. The power she has over him is too much; it’s become something she’s afraid to wield.

“Please, Nina. I’ve missed you so much. Tell me about yourself. What you’ve been doing.”

“Since I was twelve?”

Miklos can’t seem to figure out how to respond. “Yes,” he says, opting for a kind of hungry grandiosity. “Yes. Tell me everything.”

“Well, let’s see. Mom pretty much went crazy after you left, what with supporting the two of us and worrying about you, and agents trying to swindle her out of the house. I took care of myself, basically. Um…started taking pictures for Lidové Noviny, met Devon Marbury when I was seventeen and came to New York with him. Been working as his assistant photographer ever since, and traveling with his band. I’m twenty-one now, in case you’ve lost count.”

“Of course.” Her father taps his watchless wrist. “Today.”

“Right,” she says softly.

“Is it a happy birthday, Nina? Are you sorry you found me?”

The question is an arrow shot from Nina’s childhood, whizzing through time and finding its mark. She remembers her father’s habit of presenting her with moral dilemmas, of randomly requesting emotional self-evaluations. Would it be right to steal a loaf of bread if you were starving, Nina? Do you feel happy today? Happier or less happy than yesterday? How do you know? He never made her feel that there was any motive behind the questions, or any judgment of the answers. Nina enjoyed responding because it seemed like grown-up talk, reminded her of the way Miklos was in his classroom. How strange that she’d forgotten all about it until now.

“No, Dad,” she hears herself reply. “I’m not sorry.”

“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!

Nonetheless, hostility is Nina’s gut reaction to this voice. “Her daughter. Who is this?”

“Nina! It’s me, Vasek. Good to hear your voice, child!”

“Vasek?” she says like a half-wit, unable to process the notion that her father’s friend, her former boss and booster, is on the other end of the line. “How—What are you doing there? Is everything all right?”

The silence stretches past the two seconds it takes her words to travel five thousand miles, and answers Nina’s question. She can see him standing in her mother’s bedroom with one hand on his hip, puzzling together a reply, a towel wrapped around his waist and his stout belly falling over it.

“Your mother and I have…found each other. Perhaps I’d better give the phone to her. One second. A big hug, Nina.”

“Big hug,” she hears herself repeat. Then Rayna is on the line.

“Nina! Happy birthday, sweetheart. I would have called, but I didn’t know where to reach you. We drank a toast to you last night, Vasek and I.”

“You and Vasek, huh? That’s…that’s great, Mom. Quite a surprise.”

“Isn’t it? I can’t believe it myself,” Rayna says with an uncharacteristic little giggle that crackles over the line. Nina smiles.

“I did just what you told me to,” her mother goes on. “I said yes to the first man who asked me out to dinner.” In the background, Nina hears a laugh. “And it was Vasek. I only had to sit in his café every day for a week before it occurred to him.

“I’ve always thought him very handsome, you know,” Rayna says, and Nina realizes she is a tertiary member of this conversation, that Rayna is looking at her lover as she speaks into the phone. “Even when he was aiding and abetting in your delinquency.” Behind Rayna’s voice, another laugh.

“This must be brand-new. You didn’t say anything in your last letter.”

“It had barely started when I wrote it. Perhaps a week before. So no, I thought I’d better keep it under my hat. In case he jilted me for some silly young thing. But Nina, I am very happy. He’s going to move in.”

“That’s wonderful, Mom.”

“I’m glad you approve. I wasn’t sure you would. I don’t know why. And how about you? Are you having a happy birthday? Tell Devon I love his new album, by the way. Thank him for sending it.”

“Listen, Mom, I have to tell you something. It’s about Dad.”

“Hold on.” Her mother asks Vasek to put on water for coffee, slice some bread and cheese. When Rayna returns to the phone, her voice is muted, dark.

“You’ve seen him.”

“Yes.”

“I knew you wouldn’t listen to me. So? No, forget it, I don’t want to know.” A pause. “Is he all right? What in God’s name is he doing?”

“He’s okay. He’s a librarian. Super-skinny. I couldn’t really stand to be around him, to be honest. I couldn’t stand how sad he is. Nothing has really worked out for him, Mom. But he’s…okay.”

She stops, unsure whether to mention Miklos’s girlfriend. Nina is inclined against it, but the portrait of her father’s life will be too bleak without her. “He’s met someone. A Czech woman. She seems to look after him. He was drinking, and she made him stop.”

“I see.”

Nina waits, but her mother offers nothing more.

“I’m sorry, Mom.”

“It was never fair of me to make you promise. I just wanted to protect you, Nina. And now he’s hurt you again.”

“Not really. I was glad to see him. It’s better than not knowing. And Mom, he didn’t inform on us. There’s no way.”

“Of course he didn’t. I know that. Of course.”

“Good.”

“I realize you didn’t have to tell me that you saw him. Thank you.”

“You’re handling it better than I expected.”

“Well, it’s been years and years. At some point, we have to move on, right?”

“Sure.”

“He’s not coming back here, is he? He could, I suppose. There’s no more danger. Not here, I mean, but to Prague. If he’s doing so badly, perhaps he should come home. A librarian, you say? He must be miserable. Here, he could at least teach, if he’s still able.”

“I don’t know. I doubt it.”

“Not that I ever want to see him again. He’s still a bastard, even if he’s miserable.”

“I’m almost out of time, Mom. I’m calling from work.”

“When will you come and visit, Nina? Soon? The museum is opening in May.”

“I don’t know, Mom. If I can.”

“Happy birthday, dear. I’m sending kisses.”

“Thanks. I love you. Bye.”

“I love you, too. Be safe. Good-bye.”

Nina hangs up, recrosses her arms, and walks back toward the club.

Well, good, she thinks. We’re all moving on.