“Youth can tolerate such meals,” Imre was saying. “Mr. Payton here can drink four different wines and his expressions remain as calm and serious as when he begin. I have a very distant relation who entered a monkeyhouse, and he—no, this is not the word, is it?” he asked, and with the others laughed loudly, wiping his eyes. “Thank you, Károly. He went into a monastery,” he said the word in three syllables, “and he taken vows to be a moderate ascetic. I don’t think this would be suiting any of you, except perhaps you, Mr. Payton,” and everyone laughed again.
“A moderate ascetic? That’s a little extreme, isn’t it?” asked John. “If you’re into denying yourself things and then you deny yourself even the pleasure of denying yourself things, that’s got to hurt.” Imre laughed the loudest, and John felt a rush of pride.
“What is the word in English, John—” Charles asked with the hint of a Hungarian accent as the crumb-sprinkled dessert plates floated away and a third round of sweet Tokaj wine appeared in small glasses—“for …” Charles waved his hand in the air to capture the word, brush away distractions. “Mi az angolul, hogy megelégedettség?” he asked Imre, and Imre nodded and said in English, “Exactly, exactly so, Károly.”
“I first drank Tokaj wine at the Gerbeaud with my mother. I remembered this when you and I first met there, Károly. Life was actually very pleasant in the 1930s here in Budapest. I fear I am beginning to speak in ways of my father. He always would say, ‘If you did not live before the First World War, you cannot possibly know how pleasant life can be.’ To be honest—”
“I’m sorry, but that’s horseshit,” said Mark, breaking a moody silence nearly half as old as the lengthy meal and knocking over an empty glass without noticing. “Complete horseshit.”
“Shut up, Mark,” snapped Charles.
“No, really. ‘You cannot know how pleasant life could be if you did not live in Belgium before the First World War.’ Victor Margaux, 1922. ‘If you were not here in Virginia before the War Between the States, you cannot imagine how pleasant life could be.’ Josiah Burnham, 1870. Talleyrand twice, if you can stand it. First, ‘He who did not live before the revolution did not know the sweetness of life,’ and then, rethinking things, ‘Qui n’a pas vécu dans les années voisines de 1789 —he who did not live during the revolution cannot know what is meant by the pleasure of life.’ ‘Sir, you cannot know what is meant by a pleasant life if you did not live in green England before those Germans came here to roost.’ The Marquess of Westbroke, 1735. Horseshit, horseshit, horseshit.” Mark’s voice rose with each example, and a second glass, this one with remnants of an early-evening red wine, tumbled to the floor, sprinkling Horváth’s loosened tie as it spun and dove.
“Imre, please excuse me for—” Charles began in Hungarian.
“No, no! Not at all!” Imre was staring at the Canadian in fascination.
“I tried to tell you he’s been a little nuts,” John laughed at Charles’s efforts to remain calm as Mark fumbled to pick up a glass and refill it, horseshit-horseshit-horseshitting all the while.
“No, no.” Imre grasped Mark’s shoulder. “He is brilliant man and very right, our scholar in our little club. How do we expect to grow up and make a better world if we are all sadly aching for some other?”
“Exactly my point,” said Mark, pouring and missing.
Imre grew distracted by a wine spot on his Hermès tie, then pulled himself away from it to stare at Charles with a raised eyebrow. “Fire,” he said intently. “Fire and a stomach to say, ‘No more!’ This is what youth offers, and I think today’s Western youth more than any other. You who grew up with everything are ready now to demand more, to say no more!” He spoke to all three of them, and never had he seemed to John more of a performer and, what’s more, a wonderful performer despite outrageously weak material: “I fear this country, our MK, has lost that stomach but we will come home, Károly and I, and we will give it to them. ‘Here is your stomach back,’ we will say!” He raised the first glass at hand, a water glass with a cigarette butt submarine diving and resurfacing under the command of an indecisive skipper. “To the Hungarian stomach and all you can teach it, men of the youth, men of the energy, men of West!”
Four glasses clinked and slightly spilled.
“Enough,” said Imre, more dignified in his cups than the others. “Now we go home.” Charles, the host, considered protesting this usurpation of his privileges but let it go as Imre said to him, “Tomorrow you and I must talk again.”
They filed precariously down the stairs. The act of standing and moving shook all of them significantly, and they paraded in wobbly single-file silence into the empty main dining room, where, under lowered lighting and the sound of dishwashers both human and automated, tired waiters sat and stood smoking in unbuttoned, stained black vests and undone bow ties, dangling and symmetrical like bat-hide stoles. The restaurant’s violinist and accordionist, in black-and-gold traditional costume, had put aside their instruments and now sat at a corner table deep in conversation, a single table lamp illuminating half of each of their faces. They turned their heads only slightly, darkening them, as the four drunks fumbled out the restaurant’s door and the lock clicked behind them.
Fresh air and the smell of the park’s trees shuffled the sensations in their heads and legs and stomachs. The men swam through the humidity and headed toward the towering gallery of Heroes’ Square. For a minute or two longer no one spoke, until Imre bellowed into the night—not a word, just a youthful holler that sounded strange to all of them after the cacophony in the little dining room and the silence since. Charles laughed and yelled a nonsense grunt, too. “Horseshit!” the publisher shouted in response, in an accent that floated between Budapest and London, and he tousled Mark Payton’s damp red hair. The Canadian laughed an odd, gasping laugh. “Horseshit!” he concurred at the top of his voice. They came into Heroes’ Square, an empty, spotlit semicircle of enormous pillars and statues, arching over the top of Andrássy út.
John leaned against the cool rock of one of the statues’ pediments and scratched his back against it. The conversation moved slowly, but he no longer followed it, just broke off pieces at random and held them briefly to his ear.
“… how many times people want to buy this national memory, this responsibility of us, and it cannot be bought, all of us face this, this temptation, Károly, yes—” Imre bent back and gazed to the top of the horse-bound Magyar king prancing in the center of the square, bit the corner of his lip, and suddenly sneezed with explosive noise.
John walked slowly backward over the labyrinthine tiles of the square until his foot felt the curb behind him and he turned sharply to watch the cars gust right past him, close enough for him to touch their stumpy side-view mirrors as they blurred.
He entered the Blue Jazz alone sometime later, after one last glance: From across the street he saw Imre and Charles and Mark had put their arms around each other’s shoulders and were performing an unsynchronized soft-shoe routine behind the traffic.
The interior of the club initially refused to focus. When it surrendered at last, he was relieved to see her at once. It must have been late: It was a Friday, but there were only a few people left: a game of pool, three smokers webbed in their own blue breath, the band—the bald Americans—at the bar taking their payment in food and drink, a couple newly in love in one corner, twisting around each other’s lips and bodies like the two snakes on Caduceus’s staff and, in another corner, another couple, but this one about to disintegrate permanently, their voices rising high, then crashing to silence every few minutes, like the surf outside a beachfront hotel window late at night.
“Do you think I live a work of art?” he asked, growing slowly sober now in leaps and backsteps, sliding onto the piano bench and gently, kiddingly, bumping his hip against hers. She wore the same dress as on the night he had met her.
“Wicked boy, I am trying to play the piano. No maudlin drunks welcome tonight.” She kissed his near cheek, and he smile
d with calm relief.
VII.
“THIS IS IT: I AM NEVER COMING TO THIS PLACE AGAIN. END OF AN ERA, baby. Time to just fade away, let it go. Let. It. Go.” Scott Price was speaking to none of them in particular as the four men and Emily burrowed their way into A Házam, the last hot night of an unusually hot July. Cash Ass was performing in the basement to a standard-size mob, but even upstairs there was hardly the necessary space to move or air to breathe. The cigarette cloud hung low tonight, only a few feet over their heads; one could bury a hand in it down to the wrist. “Who are all these people?” Scott grumbled. “These are not us, these people. Can they all be tourists? This is just sad. You know, Mária says this place was never taken seriously by the Hungarians.”
The bar noise was five parts English and three parts Hungarian, strained through mingled accents. Male elbows and female cleavage were equally potent weapons in acquiring bar space, but then only crenellated fistfuls of crispy forints held high could win the bartenders’ coolly diffuse attention. Efficiency demanded ordering several drinks at once, so the five of them clutched multiple glasses, stood swiveling their heads, gazed with pioneer squints to find space to sit.
“The worm has turned, boys and girl,” Scott sighed. “We are a dying breed, and the foreign devils have invaded our grasslands.”
The loudspeakers slathered British and American dance music everywhere, and the effort to move across the room toward a just-abandoned couch (oops, too late) was like passing through an animal’s close, moist digestive tract, the thumps of the music like the thumps of its amplified, proximate heart. With every twist and turn through the throng, sufficiently loud bits of conversation were coughed up and strewn in their path: Hungarian, Hungarian, Hungarian … our sound will be the sound … Hungarian … once I get around to writing it out, then I’ll pitch it to studios … she’s on fucking fire … back to Prague ASAP, please … Hungarian … can I crash with you just for … the thing about Hungarians and Hungary that you have to understand … no, Fin-de-Sicles: they’re like Popsicles but shaped like … Hungarian … then screw the States … do you want to come back and I’ll draw you … dude, go to Prague; you’ll forget this scene in twenty seconds … Hungarian … two days here, two days in Prague, then the fast train to Venice, I don’t know, we talk about way east, like Moscow … technically, I billed them twice, but keep it to yourself … no way, because the hostel is, like, hostile … Hungarian … Cash Ass rules, you gotta hear these guys, they’re foolish … she was a Betty and a tamale with three and a half oil cans … how do you say “kiss me” in Hungarian … Hungarian … I’m a poet, poet vagyok, like Arany János … baby, Prague is so far beyond … csókolj meg!
From within the cacophony and squeeze, Mark saw a sofa and table slowly, dubiously abandoned and, with a vault and a splay, he arrived first on the scene to secure them. “Who are all these people?” Scott said to Emily in irrepressible ill humor. “Who told them to come here? Our people should not—” Charles told him to shut up.
“No. You shut up.”
From the sofa, John watched Emily sitting on the table, leaning in to speak to Mark. He debated whether to mention the bridge kiss or pretend it had never happened, tried to calibrate precisely his attentions to her this evening, and then, uncertain himself what had happened on the bridge, strained retrospectively to replay, time, and determine the emotional function of each individual lip-muscle response. He listened to her describe a Julie’s suitor to Mark, and he couldn’t help but feel her description cryptically reflected her own feelings toward John: “Julie” disguised Emily; “Calvin,” John. Julie was frustrated, Calvin was everything she—impossible to hear under Charles’s braying to Scott about business. But I think about how Calvin has been—if Horváth, on the other hand. She definitely feels like Calvin is really the only way to secure Horváth’s trust to get the deal done if she tells him that where does that leave her? Or should she? Not with the State Privatization Agency being run by monkeys.
Two hands gripped his shoulders from behind, and a voice whispered in his ear, “The great joy in life is the unexpected.” With laughter and amazement, Bryon—a dashing Korean-American who had, eight years earlier, been notorious in Scott and John’s high school for throwing a Marquis de Sade party—appeared, shrouded in coincidence, shimmering into reality, and John, feeling instantly the diminishment of stature and appeal that befalls the person who introduces someone new to a group, introduced him to the group. Bryon stopped short when John said, “And of course you remember Scott.”
John savored the barely concealed look of terror on his brother’s face as Bryon tried to reconcile this muscular, handsome jock with the obese, hopeless sap of a dozen years before. “Of course. Man, you look great” was all he said, and John felt distinctly ripped off.
In Budapest on a two-week vacation, Bryon sat on the table next to Charles and the rows of waiting drinks. He related his six years since last seeing John in under ninety seconds: After college, he had spent a summer working at the “crappy M. C. Escher House theme park” in his hometown, doing construction work, which mostly meant nailing staircases upside down to ceilings. From there he went back to New York to try acting one more time but could only get modeling jobs, and then only the lowest, most humiliating kind: picture-frame modeling. He spent six months being photographed hugging women under trees, pushing kids in swings, looking off in the misty distance, enjoying a New Year’s Eve toast in a spangled, conical hat and even doing period work, in which he would dress up in turn-of-the-century “Chinaman’s clothes” and pose in front of a dusty black curtain, looking somber for an old black-and-white camera that took ten seconds to register a photo, all of which work was commissioned by picture-frame companies to fill their frames in photo-supply stores with appealing fantasy suggestions. Bryon claimed, incidentally, to have been invited on a first date, a home-cooked meal in the apartment of “an eerily lonely, very unattractive” woman in New York, and on the shelf over her bed was a square, brushed-silver four- by six-inch frame that still held its factory default picture of him (in a cable-knit sweater, kicking through some leaves, a wistful, autumnal scene). “I was on top of her, about to finish up, and I look up and there I am pondering autumn. It was a real high point, I must say. There was something strangely beautiful about it. This woman, for one night, really did have a picture of her boyfriend over her bed, wearing a cable-knit sweater just like boyfriends are supposed to wear, but she never even knew it.”
Giving up on acting, Bryon ended up in advertising, and he was still at it, with great success. “If I told you how much money I made, Johnny, you’d start coughing up blood like a consumptive.” He described his work in the creative section of one of New York’s largest agencies, in a division that targeted “what we categorize in our eleven-group schematic as Lone Wolf Aspirants. Basically, every single person’s consumer habits can be identified as belonging to one of eleven types. This is a scientific fact. Everybody on earth. Real lone wolfs, of course, don’t respond to advertising, but there aren’t more than a dozen of them on the planet. Lone Wolf Aspirants, however, are something else. A very big responsibility, billions in buying power.”
John watched Emily’s attention stream toward the intruder, and the intruder lean in to lap it up. “The key with LWAs is to exhort rebelliousness, excessive eccentricity, and antisocial or even pathological rudeness. These are what we call the ‘internal hallmarks of the LWA’s self-assessment.’ So, like, for Pepsi, I wrote the ad—well, to be fair, it was a team thing—the one where the guy is leaning against the fence with his arms crossed and you can’t see any cola at all on the screen, the guy just looks really irritated, and he says, ‘Get off my back with that slick garbage. I’ll drink whatever I want, because I drink it for me, not for some Madison Avenue jackass who thinks he knows all about my so-called generation.’ And he holds up his fingers, like this, to put quotation marks around generation. And then he spits, and the screen goes blank and then you just see the Peps
i logo. Very hot.”
Everyone, even Charles, tilted toward Bryon as he spoke, as if he were a newly arrived emissary from the Old World to the New World’s tedious, forested swampland, bringing news of loved ones, cities, the court.
“Still a virgin?” Bryon asked him in front of everyone.
“Yeah, pretty much,” John replied, horrified, with a species of laughter he hoped would somehow mask the conversation and hypnotize his friends. “You too?”
“Unbelievable!” Scott bellowed when an elbow of the crowd eddying around the couch jostled his drink hand.
Bryon excused himself to go to the bar and returned a few minutes later with a drink and a boy no older than nineteen or twenty. “These are the people you should talk to,” he said. “These are your best sources,” and he introduced Ned, who was in Budapest for three days to update the Hungarian chapters of the budget travel guide published by the students of his college. Ned had a lazy eye, enervated further by jet lag, smoke, sleeplessness, and road-trip hilarity. He wore an old seersucker jacket over cutoff shorts and a T-shirt with the three Greek letters of a fraternity triangulating around a drawing of three wolves, smoking cigars, licking their lips at the sight of a lamb, who wore a tasseled blue beret with holes for her little black ears. Each of the wolves wore the same T-shirt as Ned, and so on ad infinitum, or at least to the physical limits of silkscreen resolution. John relaxed: Ned was Bryon’s lover and Emily was safe. “Hey,” Bryon shouted to Emily, apparently just thinking of it. “Do you want to go downstairs and dance?”
The four men remained with Ned, who, as the newcomer, was encouraged by Charles to offer to buy them all a round of drinks, an offer the four men heartily accepted. He came back with the drinks and yelled over the noise that he was in a tough spot because he didn’t really know anyone who actually lived in Budapest, just other backpackers like himself, and so he had asked that guy Bryon out of the blue just now (oh no), because he looked so at home, but he was a tourist too, it turned out, and this was the third of his three days and tomorrow he had to press on to the big attraction (Prague) and would they mind helping him out with his book updates?
Prague Page 28
