Matthew Salesses: The Hundred-Year Flood

He told himself to shut up. Was he trying to relate to her or to warn her? He knew, suddenly, how he gazed at her, why he had dreamed of her. Yet he had chosen Ynez.

“You can tell me what was on it,” she said, sliding her hand over the table onto his with scary timing.

“Forget it.” He dipped a dumpling into the sauce and ate it. “It’s not something about me, it’s about my dad.”

He remembered hooking up the old projector as his father had taught him. He had known from the tightness in his chest, even before the film flickered on, to lock the door.

“I will not force you to talk,” Katka said. Her hand was cold.

“On the film was my dad telling my aunt that my mom couldn’t get pregnant.”

After a moment Katka said, “And?”

Tee coughed with surprise. He tried to move for his beer, but Katka held him still. “You want to know?” he said. His father’s dream had always been to make films, documentaries where the camera was the eye of the beholder. He was obsessed with this idea, a way of seeing twice. The film Tee had found held two perspectives: his father’s and his aunt’s. The screen shook as his aunt recorded his father.

I married Zoe because she understood me. But that wasn’t enough.

Tee tried to reach for his beer again. Katka didn’t let go. She wanted to stand beside him in his memories. She wanted his past. When his aunt had come on screen, her sunken cheeks, she had said, It’s not your fault . Then her arm had stretched out, and the screen went black.

Katka held Tee’s hand until he didn’t think of pulling away anymore. He kept silent. He had come to Prague to resist. “The thing,” he said finally, “no one else knows about me is that I like you.”

He refused to blush or look away.

Her grip tightened, and then it eased and she began to sweat. He had rattled her for a second. “So young,” she said softly. “Come on. I want to show you something.” And like in his dream, she led him into the bedroom.

She’d cleaned the paint-specked newspaper off the floor. The hardwood gleamed. When she opened the closet, he saw immediately. Inside were dozens of paintings, each of a part or the whole of her body. She flicked on the light and pushed him in, though there was barely room to stand. She surrounded him, the same ivory of her skin, the same sharp cheeks and penetrating blue irises. He was in a room of mirrors reflecting only her.

“Pavel painted these,” he said.

She nodded.

“Why are they hidden away in here?” To his left, her pink nipples winked at him.

“He does not think they are good enough.” She came up behind him and lifted his elbow. His fingers brushed one of the canvases. Her face and neck and shoulders. He felt the rough brushstrokes that made the smooth look of her skin. Her hand moved up his forearm, nudging him closer. “He has always painted me. From the very beginning. The paintings of me in museums are distortions. These are the truer ones, which he refuses to show.”

Tee saw how important Pavel’s art was to her. Pictures of her had helped make a revolution. That was love. She would never let that go. She was sharing a secret, but a secret between her and Pavel. On the back of the closet door hung a long sketch of her body, nude.

“You do not know what he was like then,” she said. “He was brilliant. People responded to him, and he took the attention and turned it into something useful. Art was useful then. His more than any other.” She touched a spot on the painting, too, tenderly, like she’d never touched it before. An inch above where Tee’s finger had been. He was reminded that she was a little taller than he. Then she swept her arm out as if to include all the paintings in what she had said.

“Rockefeller told me,” Tee said. “Pavel is someone to entrust a nation to.”

“He was.”

As Katka lowered her arm, Tee registered the tense. Is. Was. “So sweet and so young,” she muttered. Then she was kissing him, her tongue parting his lips, her hands already clutching his back. He shut his eyes and leaned into her. He pushed her up against the images of herself, or she drew him down on top of them. She was a rough kisser, biting his lips. She said something he didn’t catch. She tasted like almonds, though they hadn’t eaten almonds. It was strange, how he could feel his veins. He had never felt his veins before. She made him more aware of himself. She slipped one hand under his belt. She licked his throat and wrapped her fingers around his limp penis. Then across the frame of the door darted someone’s shadow. Katka stroked him, trying to make him hard, but the shadow glowed in the hall.

“Stop,” Tee managed. “Your husband.”

She bit his earlobe. “Do not be stupid.”

He pushed out of her closet, past the images of her body and into the bedroom. In the hall he dusted off his clothes as if his desire had stuck to him.

No one was there.

“What is wrong with you?” she said, behind him.

He remembered Pavel’s father imagining the Secret Police at the door. She spun him around, and he thought now she would continue kissing him and he would never be able to stop. But she only glared and told him to get his coat.

Tee took a cab from the airport. The Massachusetts Turnpike gave way to tree-lined streets and then the big brown farmhouse where he had grown up. Their driveway was full of cars he’d never seen before, the lawn full of people. A yard sale. When he got out of the cab, he found boxes full of his father’s things. This was the reason his mother couldn’t pick him up.

He’d surprised her, coming home. He hadn’t wanted to call from Prague, to hear her voice echo off the cobblestone. Now the familiar smells of a Boston spring — the leaves that had fallen in autumn at last thawing and decomposing, the firm soil still cold with the memory of snow, and, of course, the flowers — surrounded him.

Tee pecked his mother’s cheek. The couple browsing his father’s DVDs eyed them. An Asian kid kissing an older white woman. Wrong women. “When is Dad getting home?” he asked. “Does he know about this?”

His father was in Oregon, surveying land for a thermal spa, supposedly his last job for a while. His mother was sorry the sale had to be today. It was the start of April, spring-cleaning, and she had been planning this for weeks. Tee stacked up old film reels and carried them past her pitying glare into the house.

His father’s office was completely bare. A pale square on the wall marked where the projection screen had hung, always down, in use. Tee had watched his father’s first film, POV , on that screen. His father’s idée fixe: dozens of scenes from different viewpoints — their neighbors’, Tee’s uncle’s, his mother’s, his aunt’s. In high school Tee had spent hours secretly poring through old home videos, going back in time from middle school debates to their rare family vacations, to his birthday parties at mini-golf courses, to his parents moving into the farmhouse for the first time, their life together still full of hope. In one of the early videos, his mother turns to the camera: “I’m tired of this.” Whirling and sighing. “Today I’ll play the role of the wife who finally says what she thinks. I’m skipping ahead. Damn your brother for buying you that camcorder. I want to be more than an imaginary woman.” The focus is up close. When she moves, his father has to follow quickly, has to anticipate where she’s going — yet he never seems in danger of losing her.

“He moved into a hotel about a month ago,” his mother said now, from the doorway, brushing her forehead as if to sweep away the freckles. “He stays there when he’s in town.”