The Prague Orgy

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“Your novel,” he says, “is absolutely one of the five or six books of my life.”

“You must assure Mr. Sisovsky,” I say to his companion, “that he has flattered me enough.”

“You have flattered him enough,” she tells him. A woman of about forty, pale eyes, broad cheekbones, dark, severely parted hair — a distraught, arresting face. One blue vein bulges dangerously in her temple as she perches at the edge of my sofa, quite still. In black like Prince Hamlet. Signs of serious wear at the seat of the black velvet skirt of her funereal suit. Her fragrance is strong, her stockings laddered, her nerves shot.

He is younger, perhaps by ten years: thick-bodied, small, sturdy, with a broad, small-nosed face that has the ominous potency of a gloved fist. I see him lowering the brow and breaking doors down with it. Yet the longish hair is the hair of the heartthrob, heavy, silky hair of an almost Oriental darkness and sheen. He wears a gray suit, a faintly luminous fabric, the jacket tailored high under the arms and pinching a little at the shoulders. The trousers cling to a disproportionately powerful lower torso — a soccer player in long pants. His pointed white shoes are in need of repair; his white shirt is worn with the top buttons open. Something of the wastrel, something of the mobster, something too of the over-privileged boy. Where the woman’s English is heavily accented, Sisovsky’s is only mildly flawed, and articulated so confidently — with oddly elegant Oxonian vowels — that the occasional syntactical contusion strikes me as a form of cunning, an ironical game to remind his American host that he is, after all, only a refugee, little more than a newcomer to the tongue mastered already with so much fluency and charm.

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