PROLOGUE
“Tell us your name, boy!” the fat man shouted.
The youngster froze; had they caught him out?
He was underage for the beverage room of a hotel, barely fifteen
in fact. He was skipping school, too.
Did it matter? He was a street kid, the offspring of indigent
and alcoholic parents, a mongrel (half French Canadian, a quarter
each Ukranian and Jewish). He had flunked English and history.
It was Depression-era Toronto; the teachers had him down for a
life of petty criminality.
“Rizler’s the name,” he answered, as adultlike as possible,
“Mr. Arthur Rizler.” He had a book and a newspaper under his
arm (he used them to appear older than he was); he sported a
chic jacket and a flamboyant cravat (both shoplifted).
“Why, Arthur Rizler looks like an aspiring writer,” the fat
man ventured. The speaker was Edmund Wilson, the American
belletrist; this speculation was addressed to his friend Morley
Callaghan, a local novelist.
Wilson continued, “Come here, son, and rhyme a sonnet for
us!”
“Or an ode,” Callaghan added.
“I . . . I can’t as such really . . . write,” he stuttered.
“Don’t be modest!” bellowed Wilson.
“No, no, I failed it at school, penmanship. Can’t read much
either. Paper’s mostly for the sporting news.”
“And the book—Paradise Lost?” asked Callaghan.
“Oh, I picked it up out of the trash. I sell that sort of thing
for a nickel here and there, for my drinks.”
Wilson now displayed the indignation of a social reformer.
“A decade of so-called schooling and a teenager who can’t write—
or read, so it seems! I could teach this young fellow in weeks
what the public schools have been unable to impart in years.”
“Really?” queried Callaghan in a pointedly sober tone of voice,
“how would you do that?”
“By machine. The typewriter!” announced Wilson. “Shortcut
all the fancy penmanship for young ladies and gentlemen of
quality, we’ll teach him the kind of composition that will allow
him to earn a living in the industrial age.”
And they took it on together, Wilson and Callaghan, as their
project for the coming month.
Rizler’s troubles involved reading and writing backwards
certain letters of the alphabet, and combinations of letters. Wilson
taught him how to make out characters by touch not sight,
through their location on the keyboard. What was confused
became clear—Wilson was a whiz.
Before heading back down to New York, Wilson bestowed a
present on Rizler; it was the Underwood portable with which
they’d been drilling him. Wilson also supplied two pieces of
advice. “Get an education,” he exhorted, “and, above all else, get
out of Canada!” Shaking his head, Wilson pointed to his friend
Callaghan. “In any civilized country this man would be revered as a
genius, a Hemingway, perhaps even a James Joyce. Here he remains
the talk of a few dinner parties and radio commentators.”
His difficulty sorted out (today we’d call it dyslexia), Rizler
devoured Wilson’s and Callaghan’s writings; from there, he went
on to Conrad and Hemingway. Using Wilson’s gift, he started
composing his own stories, inspired by the neighbourhood yarns
of misadventure that had so delighted him as a child.
But he lacked a means of supporting the literary habit. The
higher education that Edmund Wilson had prescribed was but
a pipe dream—not only unaffordable, but cut off as well due
to his spotty report card. He enrolled in the merchant navy. In
his spare hours at sea, he began a novel. A couple of years later, he
had a first draft.
CHAPTER ONE
“Mr. Arthur Rizler is waiting. Where are you? We’ve
been expecting the ambassador.”
The fourth wife of Arthur Rizler shouted these words into
an airline courtesy phone. Carrie Michaelman, the cultural attaché
of the American embassy, was getting a piece of her mind. The
plane landing early took Michaelman by surprise. He had been
counting on the usual delays; it was Eastern Europe, after all, and
not everything had changed just because the communists were
gone. Now he’d have to race out to the airport.
Caught in traffic on the edge of Prague, Michaelman dialled
his intern; she recited Arthur Rizler’s bio, cooked up in DC by
the United States Information Agency.
“Greatest living novelist without a Nobel or Pulitzer Prize . . .
Canadian by birth, a high school dropout, Arthur Rizler began
writing when he was a merchant seaman during the Second World
War. He obtained a university education in Chicago, at an
extension program for returning servicemen. After his first novel,
Washed Ashore, was published in 1949 to critical acclaim, Rizler
spent a year in Paris on a fellowship, where he befriended many
of the leading artistic and intellectual figures of the time. It was
in the New York of the 1950s and 1960s that Rizler crafted his
major works. These are bold, kaleidoscopic books about ethnic
striving in urban America, from the stockyards in Chicago to the
fate of German émigré philosophers in the Ivy League seminar
rooms. Two of his novels are American classics, staples of the
liberal arts curriculum.”
Those Michaelman remembered fondly from college—
American lit class at Amherst.
Rizler’s more recent activities were another matter. He had
resurfaced as a mouthpiece for the Reagan revolution, a
neoconservative; now, in the last decade of the century, he was
defending the Canon against French deconstructionists and
postmodernists on his own side of the Atlantic.
A lecture about Mozart was the official reason for his visit to
Prague. (How music went downhill after the Classic Age?) Bornagain
Christians—the Horton Bland Foundation—were bankrolling
this venture. They had furnished Rizler with a princely, six-figure
sum; all he had to do was give the Old World a dose of real
Western culture.
Pulling up at curbside, Michaelman recognized the author at
once. The spitting image of his book jacket photos: the elevated
brow, over which a brilliant shock of silver hair fell with no little
drama; a wide and nobly sculpted forehead; the thinker’s
capacious, oval skull tapering toward a square jaw, ruggedly male.
Maya Svobodnik Rizler couldn’t be much more than half
her husband’s age. She reminded Michaelman of the icons in
Eastern Orthodox monasteries: There was beauty, but it was
austere and static—devoid of human plasticity. Only the lines
on Maya’s face foretold the onset of middle age; they were jarring,
like cracks in the paint surface of an old master. Michaelman
noticed the elegant summer ensemble (Prada?), the fitness club
toning on her upper arms and her calves. But he also detected
symptoms of peasant ancestry: a wide pelvis and low hips, held
up by short legs. No matter how many dance lessons, she’d never
have the carriage of a blue blood.
“Tired, very tired,” Rizler whined, letting his body slump
into the embassy sedan’s plush back seat. With his blazer, he
organized a makeshift blanket then pulled a well-worn Greek
fisherman’s cap over his eyes. Despite Maya’s chagrin, Rizler was
pleased the welcome party had been downgraded from
ambassadorial rank; it meant he could avoid the social grace of
small talk. (Who cared about Michaelman?)
The voyage from Chicago had taken its toll. First class hadn’t
really made things better. Rizler’s body was compact; he didn’t
need the gigantic seat, which was proportioned for bloated tycoons
and basketball stars. The champagne tempted him, but he couldn’t
yield; Maya had vetoed any in-flight tippling, for health reasons.
He was already in his midseventies—could he blame her for
making an issue of his diet and drinking?
“Try the opera channel. It’s Mozart, The Abduction from the
Seraglio,” she had suggested; she was easily affected by his
restlessness. “Too close to the ears for me, those headsets,” Rizler
had complained. That silenced her into reflection. As usual, she
limned for the deeper meaning—was he saying something about
culture in the age of in the age of mass electronic reproduction?
But his grievance was physical. He couldn’t stand the buzz,
right inside his aural cavity.
He was sensitive even to minute changes in the sonic and
visual environment. Onboard, every variation in the engines’ pitch
and torque captured his attention. So did the occasional dimming
or brightening of the cabin lights, and the passengers’ reading
lamps flickering on and off.
He had tried to discern rhythms and order in all of this, the son
et lumière of the night flight. He hadn’t been able to close an eye.
The Envoy Hotel, their address in the Czech capital, towered
above a northern industrial suburb. All mirrored glass and
glimmering steel, the thirty-storey structure was a phoenix of
capitalism rising from the ashes of communism. The crumbling
charcoal grey concrete of Stalin-era factories surrounded the
Envoy; some were abandoned, others still running, the
smokestacks spewing acid rain or worse. A shrub with the hue of
Kentucky bluegrass functioned as a buffer zone, setting apart
western-style luxury from the surrounding world of industrial
decline.
Between that hedge and the hotel façade, Prague was adrift
in a sea of Mercedes Benzes, Land Rovers and Lexus SUVs, BMW
station wagons. Vehicles were valet-parked and un-parked; sentries
in Hapsburg costumes ushered busy modern people through the
revolving doors; these patrons seemed not to notice the smell of
Eastern Europe in the warm early evening air: coal, acrid cigarettes,
un-neutralized human body odor, a unique staleness. But Rizler
breathed in deeply; the scent bespoke otherness and adventure,
perhaps danger. “The smell of Eastern Europe”—he fancied that
turn of phrase, from a movie by a great Hungarian director.
He and Maya had the penthouse suite. Worldwide, such
quarters usually bore a title of grandeur. “Royal” or “Presidential”
most likely. This time it was the “Kaiser.”
The decor was eclectic, ersatz. The furniture aped Scandinavian
Modern—clean, sleek geometry of the ’50s with a touch of
Bauhaus fantasy. By contrast, dainty floral patterns adorned the
drapes—the kind of thing you might run across in Georgia or
Tennessee, at a colonial-style inn or guesthouse.
Once unpacked, Maya booted up the laptop, readying it for
Rizler’s words. Now, he dictated everything.
Before Maya, he had favored a manual typewriter. Back then,
his girl Friday had handled the mail and kept his calendar. But
Rizler had insisted on taking care of the Underwood portable
himself. He scrubbed the keys with a brush, like a pro. Maya
took over from the girl Friday; she got rid of the Underwood, as
well. “The dinosaur,” she had called it (thinking the same, he
surmised, about his venerable assistant).
“Better to stay up, if you want to beat the jet lag,” Maya was
urging him. Rizler placed his arm loosely around her shoulder, a
tentative love gesture. She met his move with a start and a grimace;
they had serious work to do. She refastened the top button of
her blouse—it had somehow popped open in the car—and
donned a pair of half-moon reading glasses.
Maya recited the embassy fax, portending disaster. “Due to
other high level guests in Prague, we can have only modest
expectations re official attention to Mr. Rizler’s presence.”
The competition was the Rolling Stones, a benefit concert
for Bosnian children under the sponsorship of the Castle, the
Hrad (meaning the Czech President and his circle). A state gala
for the Stones overlapped with the lecture. Mick Jagger was
routing Mozart.
Rizler couldn’t resist a wisecrack. “So the forces of decadence
have made a preemptive strike.”
She was unmoved by his levity; their mission to the Czechs
could be a wipe out, a non-event. “Michaelman, he seems weak,
inefficient. Snobbish state department hack, probably with an
axe to grind over the conservative revival. We need to go higher
up—the ambassador or the number two.”
He objected, “Aren’t Clinton people in those jobs? I thought
Matilda Horvat was a feminist battleaxe.”
“Not so bad,” Maya briefed him. “In the seventies and eighties,
Horvat was tough on the Soviets. She worried about the missile
gap and human rights in the East bloc. She almost joined Democrats
for Reagan.”
“I can’t very well ring her up and plead for attention.” The
idea of begging annoyed Rizler, but he raised his voice only
slightly. He wanted to put his foot down, but without
provoking a spat.
Maya backed off an inch or two. She said, “Let me first try
pushing Michaelman. Then we’ll see about the ambassador.” She
pointed to her Rolex. “It’s your bedtime, Arthur.” Rizler was
thus dismissed from their parley. She would join him later, after
catching up on email. “Dream of Mozart!” she added.
Maya searched again for the silver filigree pendant that had
eluded her when they unpacked; it was a keepsake from her
grandmother, and of no small sentimental value. She had emptied
everything onto the floor, and the item wasn’t there.
She had thrown it in on top at the last minute, along with
the other stuff from their bedside table. Had a thief been through
the luggage? Why take only that?
She had been on edge before leaving Chicago. Spots—
discolorations—had recently appeared in odd shapes on Arthur’s
skin. First, the family doctor checked him out; then specialists
were called in. Maya had insisted on scans with the latest
technology. Mysterious images turned up, requiring analysis and
explanation.
A day ahead of their flight, he got a clean bill of health. And
then she had remembered all that needed attending to before
their departure.
Pruning her Yahoo account, for example.
Another message from Jeremy Stuart, tagged “urgent.” She had
spurned Stuart twenty years ago, when he made advances to her
in a philosophy seminar. He hadn’t gotten over it. He was tracking
her. Now he was threatening to show up in Prague around the
time of Arthur’s lecture. “We might bump into each other,”
suggested the email, ominously.
He was a success story—an international lawyer, a jetsetter.
He bragged about his conquests and connections. Why did he
bother her? Toronto was ancient history for both of them.
Maya’s thoughts reverted to the missing jewellery. Should
she file a report, if only for the insurance? They were in Eastern
Europe; the language wasn’t anything she could recognize. Who
would take a complaint seriously—the airline, the hotel, the
police, the embassy? Thanks to the Stones, Arthur’s Mozart gig
was in enough trouble. Better not be distracted.
She had a hunch: perhaps the unaccounted for object had
dropped on their bedroom floor and never made it into the
luggage. Tomorrow, she was going to call the cleaning lady in
Chicago.
Rizler woke up in the wee hours; he puzzled over Maya’s
absence from bed (she had fallen asleep on the couch). What
kind of unwelcome nocturnal behaviour was he guilty of: mere
snoring or something worse? Just being an old man, Rizler feared.
His muscles were still firm but the skin surface was leathery, and
blotched with the spots that the doctors now assured him were
harmless. For occasional lovemaking, this could easily be finessed
by the proper drama of sheets, incense, and candles. Nearness to
death and decay staring out through hours of the long night—
that could be the real challenge.
He had been dreaming of Marie-France, his first bride. The
time she had gone down on him in a private box at the Paris
opera house, during a production of Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutti.
Marie-France had worn a short black cocktail-type dress; it draped
onto her slender, almost waiflike body with a suggestive casualness.
It was designed for jazz clubs and sin and was out of place, even
shocking, at the opera. Marie-France had been making a
statement: The war is long over, so we should be young again,
and free spirits.
The Foundation certainly wasn’t paying him to speak about
these associations with Mozart. But, then, what could he say?
He felt in Mozart the exhilaration of beauty breaking away
from conventions and creating its own rules. A release that never
lasts long, and for which the escape artist usually ends up paying
a price. An epiphany of liberation, always needing to be re-conjured
by art and punished by society. Like Don Giovanni’s seductions.
Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni was commissioned for performance
in Prague (Casanova apparently attended the opening). The piece
would have been too racy, too politically iffy, for ecclesiastical
and official Vienna, the center of the Empire.
The margin freer than the center. An idea to be dictated, yet
Rizler didn’t want to wake up Maya. He wondered what the
Horton Bland people would think. Did it sound too
postmodern?
Once back in dreamland, Rizler didn’t rise until noon. Starved,
he snuck off to the bathroom. He furtively consumed some
cheese and crackers; he had lifted these Maya-prohibited items
from the in-flight desert tray and, later, concealed them behind
the whiskey and schnapps in the minibar. Cholesterol-drenched
gorgonozola and camembert. He didn’t want the crunching of
the crackers to give him away, so Rizler ran the tap and flushed
the toilet twice, camouflage techniques that he had learned as a
masturbating adolescent.
Maya had been on the job for hours. She would soon bring
him up to speed. “It’s arranged, I’m meeting Michaelman at the
embassy this afternoon. So you can stay here, get some more rest
if you like.”
“I’m off to the pool,” Rizler announced. “See you in a couple
of hours.”
“Be good!” Maya said with a little grin; a typical goodbye—
hinting about the various dietary and other restrictions.
SUMMER READING—the sign in the gift store window
caught Rizler’s eye as he crossed the lobby—an inviting image of
a young woman beneath a parasol, stretched out on a beach
blanket, poolside. She was contently perusing a paperback.
He went in and discovered a large fiction shelf, all Englishlanguage.
He instinctively checked for his own works. He was
sandwiched between Dorothy Parker and Philip Roth. His first,
Washed Ashore, was there, and so was Blumberg’s Predicament,
the bestseller of 1960. To his surprise, he had been put in the
series with the black covers. He was no longer framed by the
bolder, brighter hues reserved for demanding twentieth century
writers; instead, he was among the deadmen, the “classics.” Not
even Conrad or Hemingway had been issued between those
somber jackets—nor James Joyce or Virginia Woolf.
Who took such decisions? Rizler wondered. They hadn’t made
any effort to consult him on this elevation to immortality (or
perhaps Maya had handled it on her own—the reprint date was
recent).
The checkout clerk, a youth with an intelligent, studious
demeanor, had been intermittently staring at Rizler—peering out
from under her textbook every so often. Rizler thought, don’t I
come off as too old and well-heeled to be taken for a cutpurse?
He picked up a translation of Stefan Zweig stories and took
it to the register. He signed the bill to the Kaiser Suite. The clerk
asked him to print out both names in block capitals under his
signature (which was difficult, if not impossible, to read).
Watching as his hands slowly and awkwardly formed those
characters, she exclaimed, “Yes, Rizler! I thought I recognized
you. We have several of your books here. All the important ones,
if I may say so.”
“So how do you know these?” Rizler followed up.
“I am a graduate student at the Middle European University,”
she replied. “They’re part of our core curriculum; we study everything
in English.”
“You’ve read them?”
“No, no—I mean to say that those who take the core program
all read them. Myself, I am in international business law. My
boyfriend takes the core. He’s waiting to be accepted to
engineering. I’ll tell him I met you. He’ll be amazed.”
In a gesture that struck Rizler as confident if not brazen, she held
out her hand for the shaking, and said, “I’m Irina. Welcome to
Prague.”
Not that he should be noticing such things, but she had a
thin, elegant body—much like his first bride, Marie-France. He
stole a glimpse of her hard, contoured stomach (her blouse stopped
before the waist, exposing the midriff ). How had she avoided
the Imperial costume required of the other staff? Probably the
gift shop was contracted out.
“I know you must be awfully busy,” she said, “but I’m part
of a book club, just a bunch of my girlfriends. Could you join us
Saturday afternoon, if you’re still in Prague? The café across from
the National Theatre.”
“What are you discussing?”
“Last time, it was Corelli’s Mandolin. But now we’re on to
Conrad—The Secret Agent.”
Saturday? That was just before his lecture. It could work. But—
“The Rolling Stones?” he queried. “Your friends aren’t going?”
“That’s your generation,” Irina replied.
She had just made him fifteen years younger.
“I’m honored,” he said, “and I think it will work out. I’ll let
you know.”
“Maybe next we’ll read one of yours!”
“That would be fine,” he answered, accepting with grace the
implied flattery.
“Well, you know where I am,” she concluded.
For some reason, he shook her hand again, giving a couple of
squeezes before he let go; he noticed her dark, intense eyes, full
of young adult brightness and longing.
Rizler held the brochure tightly in his hand, as if he were
Shylock clutching the bond of Antonio. “Olympic-sized, three
diving stations, snack bar, sauna, and Turkish bath”—but it didn’t
exist.
Turning his own copy of the flyer on its back, the assistant
manager pointed to a statement in large black letters: TO OPEN
IN DECEMBER. “I’m sorry Dr. Rizler. The hotel is not in
business officially until the end of the year.”
A disclaimer! Like in Vegas, or Lauderdale. Now they had
American-style legalism in Prague.
The deskman elaborated, “There was at one point a very bad
shortage of rooms in the city. Under pressure from the local
authorities, we booked those that were finished, while continuing
the construction of the rest.”
“Why is no work going on now?” Rizler queried.
“The clients we were able to accommodate didn’t want to
put up with the noise and dust. So we are a third full, and blocked
from building more. But I can do this for you as a favor: we will
send you in our minibus to a private club and you will have a
membership there for your stay in our hotel.”
Rizler knew better than to feel special. He, Arthur Rizler,
was just another American Express card number here, albeit a
Gold Card renting the Kaiser Suite. They probably thought the
money came from golf carts or diet pills.
There was the title “Doctor.” But every Verkaufsenginier or
notario would get that—Herr Doktor or signor dottore, as the case
might be. Mick Jagger, though, would be another matter. It
would be grand: Lord Jagger, Graf Jagger.
Rizler couldn’t risk crossing Prague to get his swim; Maya
would be irked if he went AWOL. So he made for the coffee
shop in the lobby, full of chattering businessmen. They were
downing the espresso that Maya counselled him against—the
caffeine jolt could speed up the heart, she had heard, and make it
go out of control.
He settled for an orange juice. It appeared on a silver tray, in
a half-full glass with a large plastic swizzle stick; on the side was a
carafe of flat water. Rizler sipped the lukewarm nectar slowly; he
could have done with a little ice, but asking for it would seem
crassly American.
The commercial travellers came and went, snapping open
and shut their laptops and flip phones and attaché cases. Charts
were studied, cards exchanged, orders taken and contracts signed.
Rizler envied their apparent sureness of purpose, the focused
activity; much less clear what he was after in Prague, with his
Mozart talk, and all. It couldn’t just be the honorarium. Saving
the West is what Maya would have claimed.
He had mounted that hobbyhorse in the ’80s.
New York had become too much—AIDS, junk bonds,
Schnabel, Madonna. He dumped his shabbily elegant brownstone
near the Columbia campus and fled to the woods of Maine,
close to the Canadian border.
Out there, he cleared leaves; he shovelled snow. He cycled along
country paths, dodging the squirrels and chipmunks, even braving
the winter slush. He played Handel and Mozart on the stereo.
The purity of that life made the urbs seem even sicker than
he had grasped before.
He steered clear of the critics. None rated him poorly. Rather,
the typical epithet was “leading realist writer in America today.”
“Realist” wasn’t a bad label. Balzac and Henry James were called
that. But was there also a subtle reproach—that his writing lacked
twentieth century depth and imaginative range? Sticking close to
what he observed on the surface, had he been able to reach fully
the tormented depths of the Modern Soul?
In the countryside, he cranked out a single opus; politely
received, then ignored. The Sunday book reviews and the
magazine covers were full not of Arthur Rizler, but of Anthea
Chapman, a twentysomething African American who narrated
the experience of femaleness in the ghetto. And the image also,
of Lynn Kraut, author of Fearless Journey—a winding gritty
postmodern tour through Lower Manhattan; cocaine, kinky sex,
corporate raiding. A black woman and a white one who wore
only black, these had completely upstaged his latest work.
His finest prose celebrated immigrant striving and success.
The underdog proved himself in an America that gave special
privileges to none. But today’s new fiction reeked of special
pleading, claims to victim status, sour grapes. Ask not what you
can do for your country, but what your country can do for you.
A chair opened up at the University of Chicago, on the
Committee of Humane Studies. Rizler’s New York friends, the
neoconservatives, urged him to accept. No less was at stake than
America’s will to survive as a civilization of freedom. The political
correctness Gestapo had the campuses under siege. Truth and
Traditional Values needed a strong voice.
Thus called, he had to report for duty—high time to leave
the countryside and do battle with the Enemy.
Maya was now hovering over Rizler’s table in the coffee bar, a
nervous, uniformed bellhop at her side. Rizler picked up the tension
beneath her forced smile. The trained happy face was imposed by
her mother’s ideal of female etiquette—the notion that in public a
well-bred woman never fully sets aside her charm, no matter what
trials and tribulations. How different from the frowning and sweating
hotel worker, with his exploding acne and tremulous limbs.
When Maya, calling in, had asked to be connected to the pool,
the clerk explained about the construction delays. This information
was startling. Then came the surmise that Rizler had been driven to
some spa far away. Finally, while Maya waited on the line for the
deskman to call over there, another functionary tipped off the
receptionist that an American answering to Rizler’s description was in
the lobby bar. Maya quickly commandeered a taxi back to the Envoy.
“Dear Arthur, you should have let me know,” she chided.
Damn! She was dragging the staff into the little drama of
overprotecting him. He blurted out gruffly, “Well, we don’t have
a cellular, do we? And I thought that the general line for the
embassy would be terribly busy.”
“Never mind, Arthur, the embassy is a zoo. Artists, poets,
philosophers, they’re all trying to get through Michaelman’s office.
He has absolutely no conception of your importance. It’s first
come, first served. Except probably for the Hollywood drug
addicts who bankrolled Clinton’s campaign.”
“What now?”
“Call the ambassador.”
“She’s a Clinton appointee—we’ve been through that before.”
“Arthur, phone her!” Maya was laying down the law, making
a demand that was non-negotiable.
Back in the suite, a flashing red light awaited them. Maya
retrieved voicemail. “It’s our faithful Nadia,” she reported, “I thought
maybe I’d lost that old silver necklace on the way over from
Chicago; I asked her to see if I’d forgotten it in the apartment.
She was telling me its back there, safe.”
“Well, that’s good news!” he offered. He saw that she was
put at ease—a welcome change of mood.
Clearing her throat, Maya continued, “There’s something
else that I’ve been meaning to say to you, Arthur. That crazy exsuitor
of mine could show up here, even at your lecture.”
“He’s been in touch?”
“He’s figured out my Yahoo address.”
“Isn’t that top secret? How did he get it?”
“I’m not sure.”
Rizler couldn’t believe that Stuart heading for Prague was a
coincidence. Within the last half year or so, they had bumped
into him several times; his loud greeting—“Small world, eh!”—
and his boasting self-description as “an old friend of Maya’s.”
“He’s after you,” Rizler put it to her.
“I’d bet he’s stalking half the entries in the World’s Who’s Who,”
Maya retorted.
Rizler had his own brushes with unwanted attention. Obvious
wing nuts, mostly, wearing their kookiness on their sleeves. Stuart
did not fit this pattern. Rizler suspected, instead, a rationally selfinterested
agenda of some sort. But he couldn’t figure it out.
For Maya, Jeremy Stuart was the only remaining link—albeit
tenuous and bizarre—to the world she had given up in becoming
Mrs. Svobodnik Rizler.
Her circle of friends from college days in Toronto now had a
radius of zero; the graduate school set she’d killed time with at
Chicago had become null. For those old acquaintanceships, her
husband’s celebrity was the final nail in the coffin. Arthur being
the august figure he was, she could hardly share confidences about
what he was like in bed—even less, his private views on faculty
colleagues.
When the Rizlers entertained, it had to be people of prominence,
in the arts, or politics, or the media. This glitter didn’t produce
any new intimacies for her; to the notables, she was Arthur’s
chattel, a prized possession, like a Ferrari or a Matisse.
These days, even her sister Amy was distant; a marine biologist
on the West coast, absorbed by the breeding habits of sea horses,
and breeding her own brats, too.
“I love you, Arthur,” Maya purred while putting her arms around
him, “and you will ring the ambassador, first thing tomorrow
morning, won’t you? If she doesn’t get back to you, fine. We’ll
cancel for health reasons, and spend a couple of days with my
parents while they’re at the festival, in Salzburg. Then we’ll go
back home.”