There's Something I Want You to Do

He dug into his pocket and pulled out a nickel, holding it as if he were about to drop it into her hand. Then he took it back. “We just got here. It’s not lunchtime. We got out of bed less than two hours ago. I love you,” he said matter-of-factly, apropos of nothing. “Did I already tell you this morning? I love you like crazy.” His voice rose with an odd conviction. The other tourists in the chapel glanced at them. Was their love that obvious? Outside, the previous day, sitting near a fountain, Susan had seen a young man and a young woman, lovers, steadfastly facing each other and stroking each other’s thighs, both of them crazed with desire and, somehow, calm about it.

“Yes,” she said, and a cool wind passed through her at that moment, right in through her abdomen and then out the back near her spine. “Yes, you do, and thanks for bringing me here, honey, and I agree that we should go to the Kafka Museum, too, but you know what? We need to see if we can get tickets to The Marriage of Figaro tonight, and anyway I want to walk around for a while before we go back to that hotel.”

He looked down at her. “That’s interesting. You didn’t say you loved me now.” His smile faded. “I said I love you, and you mentioned opera tickets. I hope I’m not being petty, but my love went out to you and was not returned. How come? Did I do something wrong?”

“It was an oversight. No, wait a minute. You’re wrong. I did say that. I did say I love you. I say it a lot. You just didn’t hear me say it this time.”

“No, I don’t think that’s right,” he said, shaking his head like a sad horse, back and forth. “You didn’t say it.”

“Well, I love you currently,” she said, as a group of German tourists waddled in through the entranceway. “I love you this very minute.” She waited. “What a poor excuse for a quarrel this is. Let’s talk about something else.”

“There,” he said, pointing to a baby-angel. “How about that one? That one will be ours. The doctor says so.” The angel he had pointed to had wings, as they all did, but this one’s arms were outstretched as if in welcome, and the wings were extended as if the angel were about to take flight.

After leaving the chapel, walking down a side street to the old city, they encountered a madwoman with gray snarled hair and only two visible teeth who was carrying a shopping bag full of scrap cloth. She had caught up to them on the sidewalk, emerging from an alleyway, and she began speaking to them in rapid vehement Czech, poking them both on their shoulders to make her unintelligible points. Everything about her was untranslatable, but given the way she was glaring at them, she seemed to be engaged in prophecy of some kind, and Susan intuited that the old woman was telling them both what their future lives together would be like. “You will eventually go back to your bad hotel, you two,” she imagined the old woman saying in Czech, “and you will have your wish, and with that good-hearted husband of yours, you will conceive a child, your firstborn, a son, and you will realize that you’re pregnant because when you fall asleep on the night of your son’s conception, you will dream of a giant raspberry. How do I know all this? Look at me! It’s my business to know. I’m out of my mind.” Eli gently nudged the woman away from Susan, taking his wife’s hand and crossing the street. When Susan broke free from her husband’s grip and looked back, she saw the crone shouting. “You’re going to be so terribly jealous of your husband because of the woman in him!” the old woman screamed in Czech, or so Susan imagined, but somehow that made no sense, and she was still trying to puzzle it out when she turned around and was gently knocked over by a tram that had slowed for the Malostranské stop.

The following commotion—people surrounding her, Elijah asking her nonsensical diagnostic questions — was all a bit of a blur, but only because everyone except for her husband was speaking Czech or heavily accented English, and before she knew it, she was standing up. She looked at the small crowd assembled around her, tourists and citizens, and in an effort to display good health she saluted them. Only after she had done it, and people were staring, did she think that gestures like that might be inappropriate.

“Good God,” Elijah said. “Why’d you do that?”

“I felt like it,” she told him.

“Are you okay? Where does it hurt?” he asked, touching her professionally. “Here? Or here?”

“It doesn’t hurt anywhere,” she said. “I just got jostled. I lost my balance. Can’t we go have lunch?” The tram driver was speaking to her in Czech, but she was ignoring him. She glanced down at her jeans. “See? I’m not even scuffed up.”

“You almost fell under the wheels,” he half groaned.