Eric Puchner - Model Home

“Jesus, Dad. Christ. Are you trying to fuck up my life forever?”

The recording studio was small and dank. Mikolaj leaned over the microphone, doing his best — in gawky, imperfect English — to recite the new script Camille had written, clarifying that the kids in T-shirts weren’t actually on sports teams. He was having trouble with “fallopian.” The accent was a problem, but she thought it would be less distracting than if the voiceover switched to a woman’s voice for no reason. Camille hunched over the mixing board, trying to synch Mikolaj’s words to what was happening on the monitor. Even though they were sitting across from each other, separated by a few feet of table, she could smell the Listerine on his breath.

“‘These children re -present the sperm, swimming up the Philippine tube.’”

“Not ‘ re -present,’” she said. “‘Represent.’ Like ‘rescue.’”

“What rescue?”

“That’s how you pronounce it. The first syllable.”

She was ready to give up on the whole thing, to quit her job and burn the movie before anyone could see it. Friday was the deadline for submitting it to the board. It was well past lunch already; she’d been here since yesterday, rewriting the script, catching a few hours of sleep on the break room couch. Her only ally, a Polish alcoholic, thought “fallopian” was a nationality. What’s more, it was unseasonably cold and half the office seemed to be out on vacation. She realized now, worrying the fringe of her shawl, that the situation was grave.

Her eyes burned; she was so exhausted that she was beginning to question her own pronunciation. Annoyingly, Mikolaj grinned. He leaned into the mike again, clutching his chest and emitting a hair-raising shriek from his throat. It took a second before she realized he was singing. “ I come to your. Emo tional res cue .” Camille laughed.

“I make you laugh,” Mikolaj said. “This is a day of brave new thing.”

“I laugh all the time,” she lied.

“I was thinking you’re like communist. Too busy making sure you are happy.”

Mikolaj’s ponytail had come undone, fanning his shoulders in greasy squiggles. His forehead, Camille noticed, was stippled with tiny scars. Even bloodshot, his eyes were strangely beautiful, green as could be, like something from the insides of a rock.

“Do you mind it if I smoke?” he asked.

Camille shook her head. Happily, Mikolaj pulled a bag of tobacco from his jeans pocket and rolled a cigarette. His lighter’s flame genuflected toward the tip as he sucked on the other end.

“Why do you look at me?”

“Nothing,” she said. “You just remind me of someone.”

“I am the reminder of no one,” he said proudly, smoke curling from his nostrils. “Would you like I make you one?”

“No, no. I have my own.” Camille reached into her purse. There were only two cigarettes left in her pack. She pulled one out and let Mikolaj light it for her, and immediately felt more relaxed.

“We are the only smokers who work in this place,” Mikolaj said casually.

Camille was queerly flattered. “My family doesn’t like it.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t fit their image of me, I guess.”

“Ah, okay. Your true self is in secret place.” He stared down at the table. “Just like I want to make movies, famous ones, but I am here speaking of tubes.”

Maybe he wasn’t drunk. Maybe Polish people were always like this: they spoke of true things, secrets, all the embarrassing gunk on the surface. She’d heard about babies being born with hearts outside their bodies. There were specks of dandruff, like ceiling dust, in his eyebrows.

“Is something wrong?” he said kindly.

Camille had an overwhelming desire to confide in this unem barrassable stranger — perhaps even to talk about Warren’s affair — but then remembered the note in her desk. “My daughter almost electrocuted herself,” she said instead. “With a radio. I told her not to keep it by the bath, but she wouldn’t listen.”

“This daughter, how old?”

“Sixteen.”

He leaned back again, leaving a haze of smoke between them. “Well. She is at not-listening age. This is her specialty.”

“When she was little, I thought we had a special connection. More than most mothers and daughters, I mean. I used to sing to her all day long, everything that we were doing, like an opera. What’s the word? Besotted. She would just watch me with those big blue eyes. Thing to me, thing to me, as if it wasn’t really happening unless I turned it into a song.” Camille took another puff of her cigarette, the smoke warm as sunlight in her lungs. “Did you know that lions sometimes eat their own cubs? By accident? They go to lick them and get carried away and end up eating them.”

Mikolaj looked at her strangely. “You wish to eat your daughter?”

“No. Ha. I just mean that’s how I felt sometimes.”

“Wow.”

“ Feel . Even when she’s making fun of me.”

He seemed impressed. “In Poland we never eat our children. Only symbolically.”

He dunked his cigarette stub in a cup of old coffee, a pleasant sizzle. Camille stood up to cue the video again. She was worried Mikolaj might start confessing things, too: she didn’t actually want to know anything about him. It might interfere with the fantasy she’d constructed. In the fantasy, Warren lurked jealously outside the window, watching her smoke a cigarette with a sad-faced European who left her tragic love notes.

“I like you in this jacket,” Mikolaj said when Camille returned to the mixing board, nodding at the shawl.

“You do?”

“Very much. You are like fashion cowboy.”

She decided to interpret this as a compliment. “My husband hates it.”

“Ah,” Mikolaj said sadly.

She blushed. “It was too expensive, I think.”

“Your husband should move to USSR. He does not know what money is for.”

Camille frowned. “We should get back to work. It’s nearly five.”

“Okay. Yes. American way. No time to be dust collector.”

He pounded his fist on the table, like a gavel. It was a big hand, tense and lonely as an animal. Without thinking, she reached down and touched it. Mikolaj seemed startled, the lines in his forehead raveling together. He looked upset. She hadn’t thought of what to do next. Earnestly, Mikolaj edged around the table and grabbed her squarely below the shoulders, lifting her like a bookcase. He pressed his lips against hers, his mouth strong and hard and blundering, tongue bumping into hers like a fish, a taste of mouthwash giving way to something stale, white wine left too long in the sun, as unsteadying as the knobs of the mixing board jabbing in her rear — was she sitting? falling? — and then he pulled away and the kiss was no longer there, gone as quickly as it had come, the fierce squeeze of his fingers still burning in her arms.

They were breathing quickly. She glanced down and saw the childish bulge in his jeans. There was a smell, suddenly, of singed wool.

“Your cigarette!” he said.

“What?”

“It ruins your jacket.”

Camille jerked her hand away, dropping the cigarette to the floor. A hole, big as a nickel, had burned through her shawl. As if to underscore the moment, the phone rang next door in her office. She hurried from the studio to answer it. The empty hallway seemed different than she remembered, a brighter shade of yellow, though the walls didn’t smell of paint.

“I have to go,” Camille said, returning a minute later. She gathered up her things without looking at Mikolaj. “My husband’s in jail.”