A Summer In Europe

by Marilyn Brant

  “Oooh! Did you hear that?” Matilda pronounced, in the midst of an energetic game of canasta with Dr. Louie. “The captain says we’ve dipped to 30,000 feet. A little more than four-fifths of our cruising altitude during his last announcement.”

  “And can you feel the deceleration?” Dr. Louie remarked, discarding a three and drawing a more favorable ten and queen.

  “A reduction of at least twenty-five percent from our previous speed of approximately 500 miles per hour,” Davis replied, glancing up at them from the puzzle he was working on in a level-six Sudoku Master Challenge workbook. As one of only a few S&M members who qualified for the competition in Belgium, he had to be ready.

  Gwen, accustomed to far more quiet time than she was getting that day, was starting to feel as though she may have made a terrible mistake in coming—European adventure or no. She gazed across the compact seats to look out of the windows. The point of their numerical scrutiny was that they’d be landing in Rome in less than an hour. For the past two hours, she’d been forced to overhear the three of them debating the Boeing 747’s position, location, elevation and speed with stunning absorption.

  Aunt Bea, who was sitting just across the aisle from her, was snoring softly in the seat next to Connie Sue. Alex was next to his wife, wide-awake and staring out the window.

  Gwen took a deep breath, closed her eyes and pretended to listen to her iPod, which needed recharging because it had run out of juice somewhere over the Atlantic. While the music had been playing, she’d been all right—she’d felt much as she had at home, in her kitchen, listening to her soundtracks and preparing for her day. Without the songs, though, she felt immediately just how far away from Iowa she really was. And from Richard.

  Richard, who, when she’d called him to tell him about her aunt’s gift, had said, “Four weeks in Europe? What on Earth are you going to do there for that long?”

  “It’s technically five weeks,” she’d replied, having had a chance to study the itinerary at some length. “And we’re going to visit famous sites. Bunches of them.” She’d been reading up. A lot. She already knew a fair bit of European history and welcomed the chance to learn more, but she couldn’t help but fear this book knowledge wouldn’t be enough to fully understand the experience. She’d only left her home state a handful of times in her life. The S&M members were world travelers compared to her. What would the people she encountered in Europe think of her when they realized just how very noncosmopolitan she was? She probably shouldn’t venture an opinion aloud—on anything—for the first week at least.

  There was a pause on the line. “But what about the Fourth of July? You won’t be able to come to the picnic.”

  “I’m afraid not, Richard.” She didn’t say, although it was implied, that they wouldn’t get to “hang out” that weekend, either. Perhaps, if they’d actually been engaged, she would’ve had the nerve to turn down her aunt’s offer, but Gwen didn’t have the ready excuse of needing to spend the summer making wedding plans. (And that was Richard’s own fault.) She couldn’t bear to see Aunt Bea’s joyful expression turn to disappointment without some really good reason. “You’ll be so busy over the next month, you’ll hardly have a chance to miss me,” she told him, hoping this wasn’t true, but suspecting it might be.

  He cleared his throat. “Of course I’ll miss you, Gwendolyn.”

  “Well, I’m glad we got those passports now,” she said, thinking he’d be pleased to hear this. He’d had a conference scheduled last summer in Ottawa, and he’d asked her to drive up there with him. She’d been really excited to go, and they’d both gotten passports. But when the conference dates were changed, he’d canceled the trip, and they’d ended up not going anywhere together. Not even to Canada.

  “Yeah. Yours will come in handy now,” he replied, his voice almost tart.

  Was he envious? Perhaps he was really sad to see her leave.

  “Hey,” she’d said. “I have an idea! Don’t you have a few days of vacation left this summer? Why don’t you join us for a little while?” Buoyed by this rare burst of spontaneity, Gwen held her breath, awaiting his reply.

  Richard kept her waiting for at least twelve seconds. She’d counted. “I’ll think about it,” he said finally. “But it would have to be somewhere English-speaking.”

  And, so, they’d left it that, maybe, he’d join the group for their final days in London, since that was where the tour concluded. The possibility of this reunion with him, and the romantic closeness it might inspire, was what had kept her going for the past forty-eight hours. She mentally gripped her daydream of that moment, clung to it like a lifeline.

  A sudden jolt caused by an air pocket—“Clear-air turbulence,” Matilda informed them, evidently figuring they ought to know the technical term—jerked Aunt Beatrice awake.

  “Good morning, Gwennie,” her aunt said with a yawn.

  “More like ‘Good afternoon,’ ” Davis inserted, after a peek at his wristwatch. “We’re on Italian time now.”

  Aunt Bea chuckled. “So we are.” She yawned again, stretching her bony arms far enough to knock both Connie Sue and Alex in the head, had they not shifted away just in time. “I’m looking forward to finally seeing the others.”

  Gwen squinted at her. “The others?” she asked, already worried that being on a plane with such an offbeat cast of characters might be resemblance enough to a plotline from Lost. She didn’t need there to be “Others,” too.

  “Oh, yes,” her aunt answered breezily. “Our friends from our English sister city are flying down from the U.K. today. We’ve only met online so far. Tournaments. Facebook. You know.”

  Gwen didn’t know. Or, more accurately, she only vaguely remembered. “Dubuque, Iowa, has a sister city?” she asked slowly. “In England?”

  “It does for our club!” her aunt exclaimed.

  “They’re really into S&M there,” Dr. Louie said with his booming baritone. The flight attendant walking up the aisle swiveled around and shot him an odd look. Most of the passengers in rows 23, 24 and 25 abruptly stopped talking. Half of row 21 craned their necks to glance back at him. Gwen slunk down in her seat.

  “Hey, where do these people live?” some random guy, sitting two rows behind them, asked with a laugh.

  “Surrey, dear,” Aunt Bea called to him.

  “Like the carriage,” Connie Sue piped up.

  “Or the show tune,” Matilda supplied helpfully.

  Dr. Louie, who was seated between Matilda and Gwen, tossed down his playing cards and all but leaped up to wave at the guy who’d asked the question. With a frighteningly delighted look on his face, he burst into song, much like some teen in Glee or High School Musical, only not. “Hens and mice and sheep better scurry-yy, when I take my friends in my surrey-yy—”

  Aunt Bea laughed, but Matilda interrupted him. “Oh, stop it, Louie! There were no sheep in that song. There were chicks and ducks and geese, I think, and maybe a cow somewhere, but I know—”

  “Then join me!” Dr. Louie enthused, half lifting a startled Matilda out of her seat and getting her to lead the midsection of the plane in the first verse and chorus of “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top.”

  It was like a Twilight Zone version of a musical come to life. Gwen was sure the ghosts of both Rodgers and Hammerstein were spinning in their graves and, quite possibly, planning for Flight 435’s crash landing and consequent fiery destruction just off the coast of Corsica. Good thing Richard wasn’t along. He’d be horrified by the spectacle.

  But was the flight attendant doing anything to curtail this display? No. She was laughing. And when Louie and Matilda went on to butcher the song “Oklahoma!” next, the woman in uniform actually joined in the singing, as did at least sixty percent of the passengers in the economy-class section. Dr. Louie had snatched Davis’s pen away from him and was using it as a conductor’s wand. On top of that, instead of the wind sweepin’ down the plain the wind was sweepin’ cross the plane, with Dr. Louie pretending to blow a gus
t of air across the aisles from the windows on one side to the windows on the other.

  Gwen’s self-consciousness rose to unparalleled heights. Although she knew every verse of every song they sang, she didn’t have the nerve to exhibit herself that way. Didn’t this prove they were nuts?! She’d never be someone who’d get coerced into impromptu karaoke-like singing in public, no matter how much these wacky seniors tried to cajole her into joining them.

  And, furthermore, this trip that she’d expected to be a semiseri-ous learning experience was turning out to be far less like a European documentary than a continuously looping sitcom. Their flight, already an eternity, seemed to drag on even longer.

  Aunt Bea paused long enough in her warbling to say to Gwen, “Isn’t this fun? And we’re not even in Rome yet!”

  After disembarking, they were greeted at the international arrivals terminal of Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci Airport by a short, older gentleman wearing a plaid cap and chunky glasses. The portly, bespectacled man spoke in brief sentences with a thick Italian accent and introduced himself to the group as “Guido.”

  “He’s the hot tour guide Cynthia was going on and on about?” Zenia hissed at Connie Sue.

  Connie Sue shook her frosted blond head. “Can’t be.”

  Gwen’s aunt, standing near her friends at the back fringes of the crowd, shrugged and said, “Anything’s possible, but he doesn’t look at all like Cynthia described him.”

  “Or like his Twitter profile photo,” added Zenia, unable to disguise her resentment.

  In Gwen’s opinion, Guido did not look like the kind of person who would embrace social networking of any kind. He looked like the beefy security guard at her bank—one whose conversational exchanges were limited to intense nonverbal glances that said, “Step away from the vault” and “I’ll use this Taser if I have to.” She cleared her throat. “Um, who’s Cynthia?”

  “She’s one of the Brits, dear,” Aunt Bea explained. “Cynthia Adams. She’s in her early forties but still single. She likes to travel. Hopes to find ‘The One’ someday.”

  Zenia rolled her eyes. “Stupid goal.” But then, Zenia, Gwen knew, had been happily divorced for thirty-one out of her sixty-two years. She didn’t have much use or patience for the male segment of the species. Not that she was above a one- or two-night stand every now and again.

  “She took a tour through Spain and Portugal with this company before, honey,” Connie Sue told Gwen. “She was the one who recommended it to us.”

  “What a mistake.” Zenia dropped her carry-on bag on the noisy tile floor, sighed heavily and crossed her arms. “She’s a dolt if she thinks that man is in any way fling-worthy.”

  Gwen was imagining Cynthia as a forty-something Bridget Jones, flaky and a little chubby, perhaps, until her aunt said, “She’s not a dolt. She’s a tenured mathematics professor at the University of London.”

  Huh, Gwen thought. Not so Bridget-Jones-like, then.

  Hester strode up to them, indignant and as fast as her spindly ninety-year-old legs could carry her. “Cynthia promised us our guide would be a really foxy dude.” She shot Guido an accusatory glance. “He’s not tall or Austrian!”

  Gwen studied Guido from a distance of a few yards. He was speaking in short but commanding bursts of Italian to a couple of members of the airport staff. Something about baggage claims, Gwen gathered.

  “Seems there’s been a little-bitty change,” Connie Sue murmured.

  “I’ll text Sally and Peter,” Zenia informed them, pulling out her special, just for Europe, pay-as-you-go cell phone and punching a few buttons with rapid-fire thumb action. “Maybe they’ll know what’s going on here.”

  Gwen was almost afraid to ask, but she said, “Who are Sally and Peter? More Brits?” She had no idea how she’d be able to keep all of these new people straight without an attendance list and a seating chart. Invaluable tools in a classroom of eighth graders but, perhaps, even more necessary here.

  “Yep,” Aunt Bea said. “The Bentleys. They finally saved up enough for their honeymoon trip.”

  “That’s so nice,” Gwen said, relieved there would be at least a couple of people closer to her age on the tour. Her aunt’s elderly friends, while certainly lively, weren’t exactly the kind of company she was looking for—even when they weren’t crooning their way through musical numbers in public places. “How long have they been married?”

  “Forty years,” her aunt said.

  “Oh.”

  Aunt Bea looked at her with an expression that could only be described as compassionate. She reached out her thin fingers to grasp Gwen’s arm. “Don’t worry, Gwennie. I’m sure there will be someone you’ll find interesting on the trip. If not on the tour, then in the cities we visit. Grand European vacations are made for adventure. Romantic and otherwise.”

  “Romantic?” Gwen blurted. “But I’m with Richard.”

  Her aunt shrugged. “Of course you are, dear, but you never know. Life’s full of surprises, possibilities and changes—both pleasant and unpleasant—but that’s better than the alternative, right? Got to stay flexible, keep yourself open to experience.”

  “Yep,” Zenia said, pulling her gaze away from the rotund Guido for a moment. “Plus, if someone’s really good, they’ll hold their own against the competition. Just like Ridge beating out his half brother Thorne for Brooke’s affection in The Bold and the Beautiful a few seasons ago.”

  “And if they don’t,” added Connie Sue, “it’s a surefire better thing to know about it sooner rather than later.”

  “Here, here,” chimed Hester.

  Gwen forced a smile at them, despite their usual—and mostly benign—meddling. She wasn’t oblivious to their game, even though she was becoming increasingly annoyed by it. She understood they were trying to broaden her experiences and give her a chance to see men besides Richard and view the world beyond the borders of Iowa. She could appreciate that. Really. But it was scary to be so far away. Exciting, yes, but also overwhelming. She’d watched The Wizard of Oz with her mom when she was a little girl. She knew there was no place like home.

  Eventually, they emerged from the entropic chaos of the airport and found themselves deposited, along with their luggage, in the heart of the city of Rome. The Hotel Adriatica was located on the famous and expensive Via Veneto, not far from the Spanish Steps and the Piazza Barberini. As Guido wrestled their bags off the bus, they were met in the hotel lobby by a lean-muscled, six-foot-something, very well-dressed blond gentleman who went by the name “Hans-Josef.”

  “Oooh,” Hester hooted. Leaning in toward Aunt Beatrice and Gwen, she whispered, “Finally, the Austrian.”

  Zenia, who’d been unable to reach the Brits via text, grinned in relief. “So, I won’t strangle Cynthia after all.”

  Hans-Josef informed them that he’d worked for the tour company for eleven years, spoke “five languages fluently and three adequately” (English was, ostensibly, one of the fluent ones), was a native of Salzburg and would be their guide through Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Germany, France, Belgium and England. He assured them they’d “take a big bite out of Europe” and do everything from visiting famous museums like the Louvre to climbing the Swiss Alps to going for a dip in the balmy Mediterranean Sea.

  “I think I’ll just have to take a big bite outta him,” Zenia said, smacking her lips as their guide spoke.

  Connie Sue whistled softly behind Gwen, Aunt Bea and Zenia. “I can’t wait to see that darlin’ man in swim trunks. Or out of them.” She sighed. “How many days until we get to the French Riviera?”

  Her husband gave a faux offended huff. “I’m standing right here, sweetheart.”

  Connie Sue snorted. “Oh, relax, Alex, he’s half your age.” She turned away from him and tapped Zenia on the shoulder. “Is sixty-nine too old to be a MILF?”

  Zenia smirked. “Lordy, I’d say sixty-nine is great for a lot of things.”

  Aunt Bea erupted with laughter, loud enough that Hans-Josef st
opped talking and blinked his blue eyes at them. “Everything here is good, ja?”

  “Ja,” Aunt Bea said, barely unable to contain her chuckles.

  “Oh, ja,” Connie Sue and Zenia chorused.

  Gwen couldn’t help but feel awkward around them. These women, decades older than she was, were so comfortable with themselves and their sexuality. Even though she had a hard time imagining her widowed aunt in bed with anyone—nor did she want to!—she knew Beatrice and Uncle Freddy had a healthy sex life before he died. It seemed her aunt had always been blunt, though. Never speaking in hushed euphemisms like she and Richard did. Would Gwen eventually outgrow her embarrassment, too? Once she hit forty? Sixty?

  As she considered this, Hans-Josef continued making his introductory speech in precise Germanic-toned English. Guido, who, it turned out, was their bus driver for the duration of the tour up until the ferry crossing to England, dragged in the last few suitcases and turned them over to the hotel bellhops.

  “I am pleased to say that most of our group has arrived.” Hans-Josef consulted his clipboard and made a few tick marks on one side. “There will be a few late arrivals this weekend, but we are in great shape.” He said “vill” instead of “will” and “ve” instead of “we,” but Gwen was pretty impressed by his command of the language. She’d taken a couple of semesters of German in high school and succeeded only in being able to ask, “Where is the post office?” and “How long is the train ride from Munich to Vienna?” and, topping the charts on usefulness, “May I have the Wienerschnitzel, please?”

  “So, you will change your clothing, ja? Freshen up and relax for”—he checked his watch—“one hour and twelve minutes. Dinner will be at seven-thirty.”

  Dr. Louie prodded Davis about something, and Matilda began to ask about room keys, but Hans-Josef snapped his fingers. Everyone in the group stopped moving and talking. “Don’t be late!” He paused, then broke into a smile that infused his well-chiseled face with light. Even Gwen had to admit that he was quite attractive. “I will get the keys now. Oh, also. For anyone not”—he paused as if searching for just the right phrase—“suffer-ing from jet lag, you are most cordially invited for a first view of Rome at night. We go after dinner.”