Juliska
Taking a seat at one of the tiny metal tables favored in Soho cafés, she smooths her skirt and resists the urge to do the same to her hair. Instead, she folds her hands on the table, creating a designed appearance of patience, of calm that she does not feel. She has come early because she wants to watch Milos arrive, to capture every nuance of his appearance and his body language, to witness the momentary expressions that cross his face, seemingly beyond his control. It is not that Juliska hopes that any good can come from the meeting. She believes that both of them have moved on, that their lives have become irreconcilably divided in the long year since he left. Rather, she wants as much information as possible so that she is not surprised by anything.
For years, she had reluctantly accepted Milos’s incrementally imposed, unusual terms for their marriage—not only his philandering but also having to witness his conquests secondhand through his fiction. She had thought that she knew the boundaries of his betrayal, but she had been completely taken off guard by his departure. She had been utterly shocked because, after all the effort she had put into reconciling herself to his betrayals, he had defied their one silent accord. He had left her, not fleetingly for another body, but permanently for another partner. That had felt like a sucker punch. So now she is hypervigilant, feeling a pressing need to anticipate any further moves he might make.
She is sitting in Juggernaut!, a café that is simultaneously ultra-modernist and wondrously childlike. She is probably the oldest person there by twenty or thirty years, but she does not care because she adores the quirkiness of the place. It has lovingly rendered portraits of imaginary rocket ships on the walls and strange futuristic silvery-metal frontages decorating all of the otherwise functional aspects of the business, from the silver space creature on the cash register to the missile rocket water dispenser. She chose it for its whimsy, but she thinks that perhaps it also represents the strange voyage they are on, reaching into the unknown.
She twists her water glass around and around with one hand, running her forefinger along the edge of the glass, and feeling an almost indiscernible chink in the rim glide by with each turn. She thinks about the significance of minor details, and how little attention Milos pays to them in real life, compared to the close attention he gives to his writing. She thinks perhaps the term ‘real life’ is inapt—really Milos’s real life is his writing and everything else constitutes the space in between. He can write whole paragraphs about the movement of dust in the air, noticing the play of the light and describing in detail the floating of a tiny particle, yet he misses huge details about their life, and about her feelings about their life. It is more correct to say that he can not notice, and perhaps that not noticing is a strategy of partitioning his literary life from his ordinary life. Or perhaps he simply saves his energy for his work, to the exclusion of all else.
She catches herself analyzing him, continuing to assess what drives him. It is an activity she has foresworn. But a groove worn over more than thirty years is hard to resist slipping into. And even after more than a year apart, she realizes she still talks about their life in the present tense. There is no ‘their life’ now.
Deciding not to appear to be waiting for him, she gets up and orders a coffee and an enormous buttery pastry. But when she sits back down, she reproves herself for this affectation, for any pretense of indifference. After all these years, Milos and Juliska are beyond artifice. Through the years, they have forged a code. Created silently, by implicit agreement, constituted by symbolism and shorthand, it can invest a quick glance or a brief eye movement with emphatic meaning. So she knows there will be no misunderstandings between them. But that remnant familiarity will also prevent any space for any sympathetic misunderstanding or generous reinterpretation, and the breathing space that could allow them at this time of friction.
Juliska is not an enemy of artifice—artifice is the cause of her existence. Her half-Jewish mother only survived World War II by her fair hair and her angular Slavic blue-green eyes. It allowed her to hide in plain sight. When Juliska was young, she had quickly developed dark hair, almost black eyes, large and round. She looked so much like the woman she saw in her mother’s one surviving photograph of her own mother. Her mother often took Juliska’s chin in her hand, smiled melancholically, and commented, “Ah, my dear, you would not have survived the war.” From a young age Juliska knew that her mother was referring to the Nazis’ absurd penchant for Aryanism, and that she was taking a dark pleasure in the fact that, despite all that she had lost in that barbarism, she had tricked them and won. But Juliska has no need to hide behind any veneer. She will not mask her hurt from Milos—he deserves to see its full depths, to experience her anger and to witness her grief. She will lay bare her wounds before him.
Her coffee and her sugary treat are ready. As she waits for the coffee to cool, she takes a corner of the sticky pastry, where it has hardened under the heat of the oven, and she dips it through the foam and into the hot liquid. The coffee softens the pastry to the point where it is almost caramelized. As she tastes the perfect blend of bitter coffee and sweet dessert, she thinks how easy it is to give herself pleasure, these sublime albeit fleeting moments, and for an instant she forgets that she is even waiting for Milos.
Her mind drifts back to the day that Milos left, and how far she has come since then. After he had given his weak explanation, she had sat at the kitchen table, stunned into inaction. They had sat there shortly before as a couple, as a pair who faced the world together; and then suddenly, they were not. At first she had felt numb, then she was overwhelmed by sorrow and hurt and she had wept disconsolately. Initially, she had stayed at the table and cried among a growing pile of tissues. Time had passed—was it hours? It was long enough that she had grown stiff, sitting there weeping, her head down, her hands raking her hair. When she finally registered how physically uncomfortable she had become, she shuffled to the bedroom, kicking off her shoes and climbing into bed in her clothes. There she had recommenced her weeping. After some time, as the sun set, she fell asleep and she did not wake until late the next morning.
She got up and urinated for a desperately long time. Then she stood in the bathroom, looking at herself, ragged from crying. She splashed cold water across her face. As she stood there, her stomach growled loudly, continuing its machinations despite her indifference to these bodily needs. Sighing, she trudged heavily into the kitchen and made some tea and toast. She took them back to bed, ate them unenthusiastically, and then returned to intermittently snoozing, crying, and blowing her now-inflamed nose. She stayed there for the rest of the day.
That night she could not sleep, and she cursed Milos for infecting her with his disease of insomnia, previously alien to her. She lay in bed staring at the ceiling, tentatively touching her puffy eyes. Eventually, she realized that despite the grief that felt all-consuming, she was starting to become bored of her own misery.
She got up, went into the living room and dragged the television into the bedroom, placing it at the foot of her bed, on top of the chest that held their blankets and sheets and other mundane marital goods. The television was large and heavy, and she was panting by the time she set it down, feeling weak from lack of food in the last day and a half. She gave a hiccup of sorrow, wondering who would help her do the heavy lifting now. Then she thought: to hell with him, the real heavy lifting had always been her responsibility anyway. She spent the dark hours of the night watching one gloriously crappy program after another, getting up at one stage to fix herself some bread and cheese, bringing them back to a bed now filled with crumbs and tea ring stains.
She awoke in the late morning with the television still humming away. She squinted at the room, partially lit by bright morning sunshine spilling in from behind the heavy drapes that she had never fully closed. For a moment, she felt guilty about the state of the bed and having a television in the bedroom, where Milos swore never to allow one. He had said it was because televisions herald the death of sex, but she knew it was because he worried that it could lull him to sleep too well, interfering with his insomnia-driven creativity regimen. And in a moment of horror mixed with excitement, she realized that she was totally free—not only to have the forbidden device in the bedroom, but to break all of the unstated rules that his dysfunctional routine had demanded.
She got up and turned up National Public Radio loud enough that she could hear the full timbre of the mellifluous voices. Previously, she had had to understand the content largely through hints and inference. She had always played it so quietly in the morning so as not to wake Milos after he had spent the night up and down, scribbling and snoozing during the night’s dark magically inspired presence, only finally sleeping heavily after the sun had begun to peek through.
She poached two eggs and lay them atop large slices of multigrain toast piled high with avocado and tomato. She fashioned a multicolored fruit salad with one of each of the now quite ripe fruit that had been sitting neglected in the bowl for days. She took the time to froth the milk for her coffee, which ordinarily she seldom bothered to do unless Milos was joining her because the contraption needs washing and it is hardly worth using for only one person. She was ravenous but she forced herself to eat slowly and deliberately, enjoying the variety and the depth of the tastes. She was savoring the ongoing flavor of life that still existed despite Milos’s absence, in spite of his rejection of all that was beautiful that she had built to make a full life for them together.
Then Juliska took a long shower and painted on her favorite lipstick. For a moment, her mind went back to a day when Milos had managed to find her lipstick, a rarity in communist Hungary. It was ruby red, and she had gleefully applied it to her plump lips; when he had approached to kiss her, she had offered her cheek, not wanting to waste it, but he had gently pulled her face towards him, kissing her passionately, unbuttoning her shirt and smearing the transferred lipstick onto the white flesh of her breasts with his reddened mouth.
She shook her head, willing the memory aside. She chose a stylish and expensive outfit. She took a car to the cat shelter, a place she had only ever eyed longingly from afar, as Milos had always claimed to have allergies. She was nervous, expecting it to be dreary and depressing, but when she went in she discovered that it was well lit and the cages were clean. Some of the cats rubbed themselves against the bars. They reminded her of the prostitutes she had seen when she and a friend had once dared to sneak down the street forbidden to women in Hamburg, where whores in the titular red lights stood in windows like prizes for sale, or more sadly, for rent. Other cats were shy, with a few hiding fearfully at the backs of their cages. Many were asleep. A large orange tabby caught her eye; when he saw her, he stood up from his bed and walked determinedly to the front of the cage, holding her gaze. He took a single sniff of the air, sizing her up, then began to rub his whiskers on the wire cage. She asked an aide to open his cage and let her meet him, and when she picked him up, surprised by his weight, he immediately pressed his long torso against hers. He put his arms around her neck and buried his face in her hair, breathing short breaths into her ear. She patted his long, soft sleek body and began whispering to him, and within a brief moment, he started to purr in her ear. They had chosen each other.
*
She had discovered this café with her closest friend, Sylvia. Together they had enjoyed the optimistic decor and colors, which had been such a welcome relief for both of them that it had become one of their favorite coffee spots.
They had met years ago, in a watercolor painting class that Juliska taught, mostly to non-artists, middle-aged women looking for a new hobby. Sylvia had no technical artistic background but she had brought great creativity in approach that Juliska helped her foster. In a landscape, Sylvia had split the painting in half horizontally, leaving a two-inch white band of uncolored paper cutting through the middle of the scenery. She let the edges of the watercolors bleed into fine wrinkles on the otherwise crisp white line separating the flowing watery foreground from the land and sky above. Juliska had been so impressed that Sylvia had given it to her as a present, framing it in a simple wooden frame, and Juliska had happily accepted the work into her home, and had forged a place for Sylvia in her life.
It was Sylvia to whom Juliska had poured out her late-night heartache, the telephone receiver wet with tears and sticky with snot. Sylvia had listened patiently, murmuring gentle reassurances to Juliska and issuing harsh condemnations of Milos, according to what she assessed Juliska needed most on a given day.
Previously, Juliska had been resigned to grief, but on the day when they had found the café, that grief had morphed into anger, and she had launched into a diatribe against Milos’s selfishness. For some time they had enjoyed tearing Milos apart, with Juliska giving examples from their life and Sylvia egging her on, reminding her of various wrongs that Juliska had previously described to her. But then suddenly Juliska fell silent.
She looked down into her lap, then said quietly: “Oh God, I have to stop this.” She huffed out a long breath, dismayed with her own self-pity, and annoyed for allowing Milos to dominate, even in his absence.
“I’m sorry, I’ve become one of those women who only talk about her man, her no good man who she has wasted enough emotional energy on. We hate those women, don’t we?” she asked with a weak smile.
“Juliska,” Sylvia soothed her, “we are not talking about Milos, we’re talking about you, about your feelings, about your pain. It just happens that it is Milos who has caused it,” adding, as if in an aside in a play, “no surprise there.” But then she continued, more seriously: “Don’t feel bad for how you feel, how you feel is bad enough.”
Juliska felt a wave of affection for Sylvia, for her kindness. But she thought Sylvia was wrong—she had let Milos continue to run her life, to dictate the very contours of her thoughts.
“No,” she said firmly. “Thank you, my darling friend, but I don’t want to talk about him anymore, or even about me. I’m being boring, and selfish. Tell me what is going on with you. How is your mother?”
Juliska saw relief in Sylvia’s eyes and she recognized that her obsessive grinding on her own pain had become a burden to her friend. Friendship is about sharing that burden, but it was still tiresome, she knew, and Sylvia had her own challenges.
But as Sylvia started to talk about those problems, Juliska told herself that she should not feel overly guilty for her self-indulgence, since their roles had regularly been reversed. Nonetheless, she knew it was good for her to exercise some self-restraint. She listened attentively as Sylvia told her the latest about her ninety-six-year-old mother, whose own grief was still defining her almost two years after her husband’s death. Sylvia feared that her fragile mother might gradually float away on old age and grief if Sylvia was not there to will her on, daily. Sylvia was obsessed with maintaining the old woman for as long as possible.
Juliska had always thought that grief was felt somewhat proportionally to the youth of the lost one. She knew that was simplistic but she had watched friends, devastated by the loss of their life partners, nonetheless soldier on and eventually be happy again. In contrast, after the death of a child, it was as if the surviving parent was hollowed out. And those who lose their parents very young often never fully recover. Each year they seem astonished that another anniversary of the loss has passed, and when they find themselves middle-aged, outliving the age of their lost parent, the pain can still seem incredibly raw. Whereas adult children know that their older parents’ death is on the horizon—it is expected, it is natural. Or so Juliska had always thought. What she has seen in the last two years, however, was that at sixty-five, Sylvia was so used to having her parents around, so used to presuming the concreteness of their partnership—the exemplar by which her own relationships always suffered in comparison—that the loss of her father was a shocking blow. Despite his age, his death was such a change that she had continued to cling desperately to her elderly mother, refusing to grant her the reprieve of letting go. Juliska listened to the rhythm of the conversation that she had shared with Sylvia many times, and she felt her guilt further assuaged about her own repetitiveness—not only because she had listened to Sylvia many times, but because she knew that there is comfort in the repetition, for both of them. Juliska thought that having that conversation, over and over, was Sylvia’s way of preparing for her upcoming, inevitable loss. The tedium from the familiarity would eventually make the matter slightly more mundane, more acceptable.
*
What, she asks herself now, does she want to say to Milos? She does not expect to find any such comfort in them reiterating the cause or effect of the demise of their marriage. In previous months, there had been so many things she had wanted to say, so much anger and sadness to express. She still feels those emotions regularly, but over time her feelings have softened, and she now has less need to make Milos truly comprehend how badly he behaved—an urge that had obsessed her initially. Now she questions whether there is any point to this meeting, to a backward-looking conversation—which this will necessarily be, as that is all that they have now.
When Milos eventually arrives at the café, he makes only a token effort at small talk: he apologizes for being late and asks how she is, but then does not wait long enough for her to give an answer.
Then he says “You look beautiful, absolutely luscious.”
She bristles at his choice of words, with its implicit contrast to the waiflike Amelia. She looks at him with pursed lips and deliberately lowered lids, hoping that her coolness is apparent.
Quickly, he launches into the purpose of the meeting: “Juliska, let me tell you how sorry I am. I have made a terrible mistake. Every day I regret leaving you. It is the greatest error of judgment, the greatest betrayal of my heart. I’m an old fool, and you know it, but I hope that I am a fool whom you can forgive. Please take me back.”
She had thought that this could be a possible reason for their meeting. It certainly came as no surprise that a love affair with a woman half his age had not worked out. Yet hearing him actually say the words, she is somehow still taken aback. Perhaps she has grown so used to not hearing the words, when she had expected to for so long, that to hear them now does not seem real.
She says nothing; she just sits there and blinks repeatedly. The surprise combined with having to look at Milos feels like too much and her brain needs a moment of extra processing time.
In response to her lack of reply, Milos tries another tack, making light of his own regret. “Juliska,” he begins. He always starts a sentence with her name when he is trying to persuade her of something. Now he says it twice: “Juliska, I cannot tell you, I am not the same man now, I cannot even fart in front of Amelia! Everything is so horribly perfect in that condo. I want the comforts of our marriage, I want you to pick the blisters from my feet, I want to return to how we’ve always known each other’s thoughts as well as we know each other’s bodies.”
All she can manage to say is “Milos, it’s not that easy. You cannot simply come back as if nothing is changed. I have changed, and I’m sure you have changed.”
She wants to say much more than this, but she is unsure of her own reactions, the reliability of her own voice. She does not want to cry—she is done with crying.
At this, Milos becomes more sincere, speaking forcefully and, seemingly, honestly: “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t joke, it’s just that what I feel is so intense, I have to make light of it.”
He pauses, looking intent, as if trying to find the right words. “The truth is, I feel empty without seeing you daily. I feel empty without sharing my life with you. My mind is vacant, my heart is hollow. I am lost.”
And at this moment, when he is describing his pain, his voice cracks and he begins to cry.
“I weep,” he says, “and I am unashamed to weep in public for you, Juliska.”
And he does. He cries as they sit there and anger rushes into her.
She responds: “I weep every day, and that is life; you weep once and it is a tragedy.”
A range of emotions cross his face. His eyebrows raise momentarily in shock, unused to her hardness, surprised out of his crying. But soon he drops his eyes in shame, and tears begin to flow again, silently this time, less dramatically, with seemingly true regret crinkling his face in upon itself. She thinks then that, perhaps for the first time, he truly realizes what he has done to Juliska, not only to himself.
Milos wipes his nose on his sleeve and tries to explain himself. “The only reason I left is that I felt so impotent, so useless, I could not write. And I’m not only talking about the usual difficulty,” he says delicately, like a doctor talking euphemistically to a parent in front of a sick child.
He waves his hands around, as if attempting to physically grasp for the right words. “I felt utterly lost, completely without any capacity to write, to live, to know how to feel. And when I met Amelia, suddenly I had an idea for the first time in so long. And I think I just got . . . caught up in the excitement. I confused my feelings for this new novel for my feelings for the person. I forgot your importance to me, I took you for granted.”
Her brief spurt of anger is gone, and she feels only melancholy. She interrupts him, laying her hand briefly over his and saying gently, “You don’t need to explain, Milos, I understand you perfectly.”
At this he looks momentarily hopeful, but then she continues, saying “That is why I am so betrayed.”
This last phrase she says in Hungarian. When they had moved to the United States, they had abruptly switched to talking to each other in English—at first as practice, then as a form of identification with their new homeland. It represented an enjoyable form of discovery, a joint puzzle that they solved together, as well as a gleeful embrace of everything American—though she always suspected that for Milos it was also a way to distance himself further from Hungary. But for this last comment of the conversation, she consciously switches back to her native tongue so that her meaning will be completely clear—that their moments of tenderness are over. Saying goodbye to him in the language in which she said hello to him seems only right, and it puts a clear line under all of their different forms of togetherness.
She cannot forgive him, in part because she understands him too well. She knows why he left her: consciously or not, he blamed her for his inability to write. He had so often called her his muse, his inspiration, and yet he was empty—how could that not reflect on her? But it was more than that: the fact is that she is incontrovertibly bound up in his concept of his homeland. Not only because they are both Hungarian, not just because they fled together, were exiles together, forged a new life together while trying not to look back. It is because, in the process of promoting him, editing him, publicizing him, and supporting him, she absorbed his version of their homeland. Hungary, that once powerful empire, is now a sideline country even within Europe; it is so little known to outsiders, especially Americans, that the Magyar nation became how he defined it to the world. And Juliska herself gradually personified the image of the Hungarian wife, the perfect dissident author’s spouse. She was so full with it that it blotted out all other separate existence she had previously had. And now he has repudiated the idea of ever writing of his homeland again.
She touches his face lightly, smiles sadly, and then she leaves. From outside the café, Juliska watches as Milos, distraught, lays his head on the table. At this, she hesitates—she cannot leave him like that, so bereft, just because that is how he left her. She vacillates, unsure of what to do. But after watching him for a few moments, she sees him make a familiar jerk of his head then stare into the distance, and she knows that he has an idea. No doubt, in thinking about their interaction, he has begun musing about some duality, such as the nature of loss and joy, or dread versus regret. She watches as he looks around for something; he calls over the busboy, who gets him a pen and paper. In a fervor, he starts scribbling. Soon he needs more paper, and he seeks a larger scrap from a neighboring table. But the inhabitant appears to recognize him, and within moments of her leaving the café, he is caught up in a conversation with a woman clearly praising him. Juliska has seen this many times before but is nonetheless astonished by the rapidity of his switch from devastated regret to inspired scrawling to preening acknowledgment. It confirms what she knows: even at his moment of greatest loss of her, Milos can still be cheered by using it as fodder and by the admiration of another woman.
She rolls her eyes and laughs at herself for being surprised. Writers, she thinks, are the ultimate parasites, feeding off the lives of friends and family. There is no intimacy to be had with them because there is no privacy. Juliska is an artist, and her favorite form is the portrait. A simple pencil drawing of the face can express so much of a person’s emotions, but it need not garishly exploit their most painful memories, their embarrassing fumblings, their tortured losses, or their secret fears. Milos’s stories reveal much more of her, regardless of his token efforts to conceal her identity—changing her name and her age, the color of her hair—than any painting that she might make of him. Her first menstruation was retold by him in one of his early stories, in all of its confused mortification. Often, he relayed the most private confidences they had spoken to each other during sex, not to mention the number of times she has had to read about other women’s labia and orgasms. She recognized in Milos’s pages her wrinkles, her sagging ass, and her feelings of gradual loss in her own physicality. She learned a long time ago to live without privacy, but now she feels that she lost more than that. It simply is not possible to be truly loved by an author, because the perfection of creation always takes priority over the flawed reality of the individual. She walks away quickly, freshly determined.
Later that evening, he calls her again, begging to return to her. Still stinging from what she observed that day, she takes a shameful secret pleasure in telling him that it is not possible, as she has adopted a cat. Earlier that day, she had tried to be gentle but firm, but now she wants him to feel, even for a moment, the sense of rejection she has suffered under for so long.
The truth is that it is no coincidence that the cat’s presence in their old home prevents his return. She had always wanted a cat, but she had gone to the shelter partly as a means of ensuring that she could not take him back. It was her commitment strategy, to bind her future self against what she knew might inevitably be the temptation of letting him return to her. Then she had been surprised by the quick depth of her love for the sleek, soft creature, and by the surprising extent to which he filled, not all, but some—more and more—of the void left by Milos.
*
The next morning, a courier arrives, presenting a large cat scratcher with an enormous red bow, and a card saying I will wear an oxygen mask. For once, Milos is offering to share, to compromise. She thinks of her favorite easel, laid treacherously where his computer used to reign, his writing studio converted into her ancillary art studio, and she chews the inside of her lip.
Milos had once written her a brief story and folded it up in a birthday card. He gave her the card containing the story and said she had to guess after reading it what the gift was. The story was about a rebel force that is having trouble controlling its people because people love each other. No matter how much they believe in the cause, they love their families and do things to save each other, contrary to the leadership’s plans. They cannot abide their loved ones becoming cannon fodder and this makes them disobedient. So, the leadership decides to wipe everybody’s memories and reassign their beds within the camp, to make everyone forget whom they love. There is a tearful farewell between the hero couple; they swear to find a way to remember each other. After the memory wipe, everything is a haze; they know something is missing, but they do not know what. They find their new designated cots, far from each other, but the regime had not accounted for the faith of their dog, who runs back and forth between them and reunites them. Milos wrote the story as a love note to Juliska when he gave her a dog, Zotyi. She had wanted a cat, of course, but she had loved that dog for fourteen years—they had each carried him up the stairs as he became too doddery to walk up and down himself. Thinking of Zotyi as she pets the cat, who she has named Bársony, meaning velvet in Hungarian for his lustrous mane that she enjoys endlessly stroking, she softens for a moment toward Milos.
She muses on what to do. She snuggles down into the cozy comforter with Bársony, but she cannot get comfortable. She wants to change position and at first she moves around the sleeping cat, but eventually she gently shifts him out of his warm cushion. He stretches sleepily and then reorders himself, curling up against her in her new spot. She laughs, thinking that she never had such freedom with Milos. And she realizes that finally, after over a year, she does not miss him.