me. I’ll follow anywhere you choose to lead.”
Sonja blinked at him a moment, genuinely startled, then laughed in his face. “Eager to get your spats dirty, Herr Toula? I don’t imagine Papa would approve. He always speaks of you in the most lofty of terms!”
It was at this point—as he described it, later that evening, to his frankly incredulous brother—that Kaspar was visited by genius.
“To hell with your papa.”
The blood left Sonja’s face. “What was that?” she murmured. “I’m not sure I heard you correctly.”
“Your father is a mediocre scientist, fräulein, and a blowhard besides. I couldn’t care less for his good opinion.” He raised the stein to his lips, downed the last of his pilsner, and set it down between them with a thump. “You might almost call him the Makart of physics.”
“You’re a bum crawler,” Sonja said, wide-eyed. “You’re an ingrate. You’re a hypocrite.”
“I’m a Czech,” my grandfather said simply.
Within the week the two of them were lovers.
I REMEMBER WHEN I first saw you, Mrs. Haven. You were trapped inside a Möbius loop of admirers at an Upper East Side party, backed against the kitchen counter like a convict bracing for the firing squad. You wore your hair short then, in a vaguely hermaphroditic schoolboy cut, and you looked as though you never went outside. A man in a boater said something to you, then repeated it, then repeated it again, and you nodded in a way that reduced him to dust.
I should have taken this as a warning—I understand that now. Instead I took it as a kind of cue.
I was standing in the home entertainment grotto, slack-jawed and helpless, gawking at you through the open kitchen door; you returned my stare calmly for exactly six seconds, then covered your upper lip with your ring finger. A mustache had been drawn between your first and second knuckles in ballpoint pen—a precise, Chaplinesque trapezoid—making you look like a beautiful Hitler. You held it there a moment, keeping your face set and blank, then solemnly tapped the right side of your nose. The air seemed to thicken. A signal was being transmitted, a semaphore of some kind, but I didn’t have a clue what it could mean. Perverse as it seems to me now, the image of you there, hunched stiffly against the counter with that obscene blue mustache pressed against your lips, will remain the most erotic of my life.
The apartment belonged to my cousin, Van Markham, the only member of the Tolliver clan who’d succeeded in adjusting to the times. His living room yawned snazzily before me, an airy product showroom accented by a sprinkling of actual people. I crossed it in a dozen woozy steps. The idea that just a moment earlier I’d been alphabetizing the DVD cases, counting the minutes until I could leave, seemed outlandish to me now, beyond crediting. Creation itself was blowing me a kiss, tossing me my first and only blessing, and all I had to do was let it hit.
The man in the boater was still droning on when I reached you, but now you sat crouched on the floor with your back to the fridge, so that he seemed to be complaining to the freezer. It might have been a suggestive pose, scandalous even, if you hadn’t been so obviously bored. I glanced at him in passing and saw that he’d clenched his eyes shut, like an eight-year-old steeling himself for a spanking. He was a giant of a man, a colossus in seersucker, but I was past the point of no return by then. I knelt down beside you and you gave me a nod and we hid ourselves under the counter. I’d foreseen all this happening—I wouldn’t have had the courage otherwise—but the fact of it was still beyond belief. Not a word had passed between us yet.
“I’m Walter,” I said finally.
“You look uncomfortable, Walter.”
“To tell you the truth, I’m not usually this limber.”
You smiled at that. “I’m Mrs. Richard Haven.”
You saw the shock register on my face—you must have seen it—but you didn’t let on. You might as well have been married to Godzilla, or to Moses, or to some medium-sized Central American republic. By now, as you read this, you know the significance the name Haven holds for my family; perhaps you even knew or guessed it then. I should have stood up instantly and sprinted for the door. Instead I shook your hand, and said—if only to say something, to make some kind of noise, to keep you there with me under the counter—that you didn’t look like Mrs. Anything.
“That’s kind of you, Walter. I guess I’m well preserved.”
“How old are you?”
You waggled a finger, then sighed. “Oh, what the hell. I’m twenty-eight.”
I bobbed my head dumbly. In the light of the kitchen your skin looked synthetic. I felt an odd sort of pain as I watched you, a seasick alertness: the sense of something massive rushing toward me. For an instant I wondered whether I might be the victim of some elaborate prank, and studied the legs of the people around us, trying to identify them by their socks—I remember one pair in particular, striped red and blue and white, like barber poles—then realized I didn’t give a damn. You were still holding my hand in both of yours.
“He’s gone,” you said. “That’s something.”
“Who’s gone?”
“You know who. The Sensational Gatsby.”
“The Great Gatsby, I think you mean.”
You shook your head. “I’m married to him, Walter. I should know.”
The weariness in your voice was both an invitation and a warning, and I felt the helpless jealousy then that only someone else’s past can trigger. The years that lay behind your weariness, with all their hope and risk and disappointment, were utterly out of my reach: as long as time ran forward, I would never see or touch or understand them. But the knowledge was pale and drab with you beside me.
“Whose party is this?”
Your question caught me by surprise, if only because you seemed so perfectly at ease under the counter. I noticed for the first time that you spoke with the hint of a lisp.
“Don’t you know Van?”
“Eh?”
“Van Markham.” I pointed into the living room. “The man in the gabardine shorts.”
You made a pinched sort of face, as though trying to make out something far away.
“Go easy on him, Mrs. Haven. He isn’t as bad as he looks.”
“Let’s hope not.”
“For the sake of full disclosure, he’s my cousin.”
“That explains you,” you said vaguely. You seemed to be thinking about something else already.
“What do you mean, that explains me?”
“Your being here, that’s all. At this kind of a party.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I kept my mouth shut. You yawned and looked past me and I felt the first stirrings of panic.
“What’s your last
