“This is a disaster!” I said when she picked up.
“Tomás?”
“She’s barely talking to me.”
“You got in a fight?”
“Of course not.” Right then I wanted nothing more than to confide in Katka about what I’d just done, but it felt too terrible to say aloud. “Daniela’s impossible to read. And to be honest, she’s getting on my nerves a little — the whole too-confident-to-notice-I-exist thing is a bit much. She’s hardly asked anything about my life — and you two talk about me?”
“She’s probably just stressed.”
“What does she have to be stressed about?”
“I don’t know, Tomás. Sounds like a relaxing weekend to me.” Katka’s voice drifted. She sounded bored. “Where is she?”
“She went to bed. What twenty-four-year-old is in bed at ten?”
“Can she hear you?”
“I’m outside,” I said, but suddenly I worried that Daniela could. Living alone, I never had to consider this. I ran across the lawn and let myself into my hatchback. The interior still smelled like Daniela’s buttery lotion. I reclined the seat and closed my eyes, the way I did after takeoff. “Have you been in all night?”
“Sam and I were at a concert earlier.” Her boyfriend of the past few months.
I could see Katka as clearly as if she were in front of me, sprawled on her sofa in an oversized sweater and ankle socks, one of those crime dramas she liked on mute. It was always so comforting to slip back into Czech with her, and in the beginning I’d wonder if sitting on the phone long enough we could begin to feel like us again — not the “us” in Vermont but the “us” that was good, back on Bo
ivojova Street — but it never happened; she told me about Sam and all the other men she dated with loose, offhand ease, as if she could barely remember why she had married me in the first place.
“Listen,” I said, “just tell me what the play’s about.”
“I honestly have no idea.”
“You expect me to believe that? Daniela probably lets you read her diary.” I looked out the window at the clear night. I caught my reflection in the glass, warped and blurry. The critics, I knew, would call the father character “unsympathetic” and “unreliable.” My neighbors would read about it in the paper. My students would laugh. In one night in some dim Off-Broadway theater, Katka’s version of the story would become the official one. My entire legacy as the Quietest Man would be erased and for the rest of my life I’d be known as The Egomaniac, The Itinerant or maybe, simply, The Asshole.
“I asked her,” Katka said, “but Daniela said talking about her work too early would kill it.” She said the last two words as though she were wrapping air quotes around them. But I knew it made her proud to hear our daughter trying to sound like an artist, and suddenly Katka seemed to be purposely flaunting their closeness. That’s how I felt this past summer in New York, anyway, seeing them together at brunch. Over waffles Daniela had talked about her temp job and the new play she was working on. She’d just read Catastrophe, and watching her enthuse over Beckett, I remembered first encountering Anna Akhmatova’s poems and feeling like I was sliding back into a conversation I’d been having for years with the writer. Even the new vocabulary Daniela was trying out — she kept talking about the “exhibitionist nature of the theater”—was offset by her genuine ease at the table: she was so animated, talking with her hands, moving the salt and pepper shakers around to enact her favorite parts of the play. Katka seemed to be reveling in every second of it, and for the first time I wondered if our daughter’s desire to be a writer allowed Katka to finally accept the fact that she no longer was one. As I watched them, squeezed in the corner booth, swapping food off each other’s plates without even asking, it seemed as though their relationship had morphed into a genuine friendship.
I knew that should have made me happy, but I hated the way Katka had kept mentioning Daniela’s friends by name that morning. I hated the way Daniela talked about the professors she’d stayed in touch with after graduation, and when she said she was going to see one of them read at the National Arts Club, I wondered if she was intentionally rubbing it in that I’d never been invited to talk there (though how could she have known?). Even Katka’s supposedly nice gesture of heading back to Queens to give us time alone had felt like an aggressive challenge: how would we fill the day?
But Daniela seemed to have it all planned out. The moment her mother said goodbye, she led me down Amsterdam, pointing out her morning running route and the Greek diner where she stopped after work. We walked and walked, long after I craved refuge in some air-conditioned store, and before I knew it, we were in the theater district.
She stopped in front of a theater, small and brick with a ticket-seller who waved to her through the glass booth, then went back to reading his magazine. “I’ve been ushering here a couple nights a week,” she said. “They let me see free shows.”
“That’s nice.”
“The guy who runs it, he said he’ll read my script when it’s done.”
She was staring up at the marquee, and I knew that if Katka were there, they’d already be fantasizing about her play being sold and all the glorious things that would follow. But I was afraid it would have been cruel to indulge the dream. This was the theater that would end up taking her play, but I didn’t know that then. That summer afternoon, it didn’t seem possible that my daughter would have her name up in lights. I didn’t doubt she was intelligent — she’d always done well in school; all her life teachers had commented on how hard she worked, how creative she was, how nicely behaved. But she had always presented herself to the world in too apologetic a manner for me to take her ambitions seriously — because it hadn’t yet occurred to me that it was different to be an artist or writer or thinker here in America. That one didn’t need to be a persuasive speaker, or have a charismatic presence, as so many of my colleagues had back in Prague. Daniela simply needed to live as an observer, sitting discreetly in a corner, quietly cataloging the foibles of those around her.
“I know it’s not one of the fancy places,” she said. “But it has a history. Yulian Zaitsev did his gulag plays here.”
“Zie-tsev.”
“What?”
“Zie,” I repeated. “You’re pronouncing it wrong.”
Daniela didn’t respond. She looked like such a mess in a loose black t-shirt with her hands stuffed in her denim cutoffs, her face blotchy and raw in the heat. “This is my life,” she said, quietly.
I could barely hear her. I felt as if we were on the loudest, most obnoxious street in the world. Cabbies were having detailed conversations with one another entirely through their horns, and throngs of people kept pushing past us, their foreign, sweaty arms rubbing against my own.