When Andrea cooks, as I mentioned before, it's a big momentous affair. She has a singular talent for cooking large elaborate meals but she also has a singular talent for eating them.

You thought I was bad? I have never seen anyone consume the sheer volume of food she can, only to complain of hunger an hour later. Her stick thin rock climbing figure burns through starches like a potato cremating machine, annihilates fats, and feverish sucks up vitamins and minerals. It's freakish. It's fascinating.

"I've got pork chops," Andrea announced with a knock on my door. "You want some?"

"Uh, no ... I couldn't."

"…and mashed potatoes."

I love mashed potatoes. I cannot describe my love affair with the delicately whipped side dish accurately. Since childhood I have buried a lump of salted butter deep in the center of my carefully sculpted mountain of mash and let it sit there as I finished off the other matters on the plate. When at last I come to the potatoes they have become a bubbling volcano of flavor. My mother would scold me for playing with my food, but even she understood this isn't playing. It is art.

It is evident in other ways too how badly I fetishize my foods. The way I calculate exactly where the tastiest bits should be, the ratios of spice and sweet, the perfect texture and consistencies: I reserve these for last.

"So that you can carry that taste in your mouth the longest." Martin ―a student of mine―often remarked on these habits. He was freshly out of college, working his first job for an architectural firm. An utter delight to teach, his perception did half the work for me.

"Yeah," I smiled, precisely removing the chocolate crust and whipped garnish from my slice of cake. Fret not, I'm not one of those crazy people who eats selectively. I just organize, prioritize and isolate.

"When I was in ... High school?"

I nodded, even though in truth the Czech Republic has no high school system but a marriage between trade and prep schools that fills their needs. Still it's good that he was trying to become more accustomed to cultural translations.

"My grandfather told me 'oh you eat like that but the military will break you of that.'"

"I didn't think you were old enough for compulsory military service."

He shook his head. "It continued up until a few years ago. They had to stop it because every boy would show up with a forged doctor's card and some excuse. 'My fingers are clubbed', 'one leg is shorter than the other', 'I have bad vision' or 'juvenile arthritis'..."

"It's like a chapter from Good Soldier Švejk."

Švejk ... the name then, and even as I utter it now, disturbed memories of a better time―a lovely time―from the murky bog that has consumed them. But all this you shall learn of in greater detail later.

Anyway. Andrea would often offer to cook for us, that is largely how I got to know Jan. I became friends with Andrea, and not wanting to seem rude we would drag Jan out by his ears and stuff him full of pork and mashed potatoes. Or pasta in a cream sauce. Or pineapple chicken. Or whatever Andrea happened to be making at the time.

Andrea had been living in France prior to coming here. The visa situation was impossible there for Americans, so she had to leave behind her friends and her French boyfriend and wait for an opportunity to come back. What kind of opportunity? It's difficult to say exactly. If a language school was willing to carry the fees to hire outside the Union she would have had her bags packed within seconds, but presumably she was waiting for her boyfriend to graduate from college so that they could get married.

At least that was the only possible road available towards a long term future with him. And she intended to have a long term future with him.

"This is him." She slid his picture―an old pass from a French ski resort she had kept―across the table for Jan and I to examine. "His name is Flo."

"Flow?" You can imagine the bad jokes dancing in my head I suppose.

"It's short for Florence."

"Ah."

I thought to myself 'there's something oddly grandmotherly about his face'. He had thin, fine aristocratic features and an afro puff of blond wild hair. He seemed a little bug eyed, but it's silly to judge from an ID picture.

She smiled nostalgically. "We met rock climbing, I said 'wow man that was really good!' and he said 'no it wasn't really' and just ... we went from there."

I will tell you something because I suspect only you will understand. You and perhaps one other, but I can't tell him for reasons that should be obvious. I envied her and admired her then, not because I cannot approach guys (as sure you are completely aware of how utterly flirtatious and bold I can be) but because things have never just HAPPENED like that for me when it came to romance. Well that's not entirely true, it happened once or twice when I was just a child, but since then there has been a quiet understanding between guys and me that I am not for them. This is a perfectly psychotic thought, but have you ever felt as if you were reserved for something? That all the failures in your life were not misfortune but rather life desperately trying to keep you from veering off course as you seem determined to do? So all the relationships I have had in my small time on this planet have been quite different from Andrea's, quite different from what I see on TV and in movies: contrived, arranged, choreographed. I've grown sick of them and kind of resigned myself to the reality set in front of me. 

----------------------------

Jan likes American movies. In the beginning he would sit on the couch and watch one every night. I would invite myself to join him, which freed Andrea from the burden of it. Although he never expressly invited us, we could tell by the way he would deliberately place his selection for the night on the table and the way he would sit in the small armchair―leaving the vastness of the couch open and waiting―that he preferred not to be alone. Jan was a very lonely person. And here’s something I didn't understand until later, it is a type of loneliness people cannot fix. Maybe that is the reason he never actually asked us to keep him company, we were just the drugs from which the hangover festered.

He showed me his movie collection the first night I spent in the apartment.

"This shelf is for Czech movies. See ... This one is good. This one is good too. This one is very good." He pulled them out an inch as he spoke of them. In time I would learn all their names and develop special favorites (Pelísky!!).

"Oh! I love this movie!"

He seemed truly surprised that I had seen Želary, that heartbreaking WWII love story I told you about just before I left. The one I saw with Stani and Vicki? Secretly my motivation for watching it was because it was a Czech film and I wanted some taste of the country I would soon call home. Yes I had been planning this since way back then.

Actually I harbored fantasies of not telling anyone: just up and disappearing one day and calling family and friends from the airport.

"Yes, that is a very good movie too."

"Oh my God, you have The Interpreter! And A Beautiful Mind! And Frida! -- how is it you have all of my favorite movies?"

Jan shrugged and blushed a little. "I buy a lot of them."

I examined the DVD collection a bit more, making note of all of the movies that I had not seen and all of the ones I could stand to see 60 more times. "Why is it you have an entire shelf of Hugh Grant movies, followed by an entire shelf of mobster movies?"

He did not understand the question, or else he did not see why it would be odd to have the Godfather collection next to the entire Bridget Jones series.

"You're missing the best ones though ... No Four Weddings and a Funeral ... No Two Weeks' Notice?"

"No ... Well I like this one." He plucked Love Actually off the shelf. "Have you seen it?"

"My friend swears by it, but no. What's it about?"

He carefully opened the DVD case. "We should watch it tonight. I've seen it 10 times already."

10 times??? Now safely in the arms of retrospect I can ask: what kind of person watches a movie like Love Actually 10 times?!?!

There were many occasions like this, but I'm sure you realize I had to cut down on my side comments significantly because Jan would stop the DVD and trigger a twenty minute conversation so that he could better understand my wit. I was never really satisfied with this arrangement, you know me, so typically New York. I like the freedom to raise my hands and challenge a movie with a good 'what the fuck?' when the plot takes a contrived turn, or mock a character I find particularly insufferable.

To be honest, I can't actually remember any conversations Jan and I might have had during movies. It seems off that there weren't any because I forge bonds with people through a sticky paste of commiserating comical complaints and sarcastic jokes. I felt comfortable with him immediately and how could that be possible without my toolbox?

Was I just so happy to be there? Just so happy to be in the Republic, in Prague, and employed, that my euphoria numbed up my social awkwardness? Or was it that I picked up on how desperately Jan wanted us to like him? Charmed by the way he confuses generosity with kindness? The part of me that is strong responded to the part of him that is weak and carried us both through to a place where I can sit and watch a movie without talking.

It was nice.

One night I came home to two thin black DVD cases with plain white covers and translated titles scribbled in Sharpie marker. Andrea was humming away in the kitchen, enticing smells following her in and out. Jan was hiding in his room, the faint tap-tapping of his keyboard confirming that he has not fallen asleep or expired in his big leather computer chair. Jan owned his own business and it fills the apartment with tittering sounds and piles of computer parts, like the faint pulse of the new capitalist economy. Through the walls we can hear Jan on his phone:

"Hello Milan? Čau Čau ... No tak ... No ... Hela Milan.."

"What are these?" I studied the Czech titles carefully as if decoding ciphers.

Jan pushed his chair away from his desk, far enough for his head to poke out of his room. "For tonight."

"Tonight?" Andrea likewise appeared. "I have to lesson plan tonight."

"Oh."

His disappointment was palatable.

Always overeager to bring people together and micromanage the diplomatic affairs of the people I care about, (my inheritance from my mother) I moved to recover.

"We can watch them tomorrow right?"

"No, actually, uh ... they have to go back tomorrow."

"Oh..."

"Ah it's okay. You do your work."

I couldn't let him sit alone in the dark watching a movie meant to be shared.

"You don't have to lesson plan tonight ... do you?"

Andrea and I shared the same look: wanting to move mountains and change planetary alignments just to have a couple more moments around our kitchen table.

"I can do some of it tomorrow. I mean it's for next week."