A Summer In Europe

by Marilyn Brant

  Gwen shot him a puzzled looked. “How do you know that she doesn’t know—”

  Thoreau cut her off. “Because she’s made advances at a number of us. Emerson. Hans-Josef. Even me. And that’s on this trip alone. I’ve observed her trying to hook up with a dozen different blokes back in England. I don’t know the personalities of all of those men, but speaking of the three of us here, we couldn’t be more different underneath the skin. To behave as if she wants all of us is, actually, to want none of us. She’s not being properly discriminating.” He shrugged. “She sees men who are tall, well-educated, reasonably cultured, and she springs into action, completely missing important things like my brother’s dark side, our tour guide’s bizarre attachment to his pet rodent, my catastrophic relationship history. She’s not interested in a flesh-and-blood man. She’s after an illusion.”

  Gwen swallowed at his words and at the undisguised bitterness behind them. She wouldn’t admit this aloud, of course, but she felt a sudden spark of empathy for Cynthia. In Gwen’s case, there were only two men she’d been concerning herself with—Emerson and Richard—but they were different enough to have her questioning whether she knew what she wanted in a man. She comforted herself with the certainty that she at least hadn’t been oblivious to Emerson’s darker side. She’d caught him in serious moods and conflicted moments. She knew he wasn’t always the fun-loving extrovert he appeared to be.

  Not that she was prepared to discuss that with his brother, either.

  There was, however, a part of Thoreau’s confession that required greater candidness from her than she typically felt comfortable sharing. She touched her Mouth of Truth pendant, took a deep breath and prepared to be honest. “I’m not sure of the accuracy of my memories either. For my boyfriend,” she whispered. “He’s going to be here soon, at the end of the trip, and I—I’m a little afraid of what it’ll be like when we see each other again. We’ve been together for two years and have never been apart for more than a couple of days. But now—”

  “Now your eyes are open to the wider world,” he finished for her, nodding. “It happens. It’s rather like being a teenager, is it not? How we all think we know everything at fifteen or sixteen, but then we eventually leave home for work or university and, suddenly, we realize how many experiences are left untapped.”

  She bit her bottom lip and bobbed her head. Much as she didn’t want to admit this, even to herself, Aunt Bea may have been right. Gwen probably did need to see more of the world, more of life, before making any big decisions.

  To her, this realization trickled down her spine like midnight sweat. Like the terror she might’ve felt in the hour before taking a final exam in math—one where she’d thought she’d been well prepared because she’d studied everything in her algebra notebook—only to find out that the test included geometry, trigonometry and calculus, too. And she hadn’t even gotten notes for those yet.

  It was a good student’s nightmare.

  Real perspiration beaded up on the back of her neck, which she quickly swiped away. Thoreau, however, seemed not to notice that.

  Instead, he grinned at her, as if finally connecting a couple of puzzle pieces. He threw his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close. She stiffened slightly in surprise.

  “Wouldn’t it be simpler,” he said in a low voice, “if we could just get together? You and I? We’re friends. We can talk to each other without all of that relationship angst,” he reasoned. “No Amanda and her issues. No—what’s your boyfriend’s name?”

  “Richard,” she said, laughing and allowing him to lean into her a bit more.

  “No Richard and whatever his annoying traits are. No people making unwelcome romantic advances at us.” He nodded comically in the direction of the threesome ahead, and Gwen laughed again. Thoreau was funny, although she wasn’t sure she’d necessarily term Emerson’s kiss as unwelcome, just unanticipated.

  “We could actually enjoy our sightseeing without all of those aggravating undercurrents on the trip or worries about people waiting to bawl us out back at home,” he added, devilishly bringing his face closer to hers as if to rub cheeks. “Wouldn’t it be nice if—” He stopped talking. He stopped walking, too, and so abruptly that Gwen was inadvertently yanked backward. “Uh-oh.”

  She followed Thoreau’s gaze and immediately encountered a lethal glare from Emerson, directed like a burning solar flare at his brother. The trio had paused to look in a shop window, but Emerson wasn’t yakking it up with Cynthia and Louisa anymore. He was standing in the middle of the sidewalk, arms crossed tightly, looking very, very irritated.

  Thoreau made a show of removing his arm. “Now we’ve displeased him,” he said, far too delightedly, and Gwen was again reminded of the sibling chess rivalry currently in progress.

  “Nice,” Emerson hissed, not quite under his breath to Thoreau when they reached him. Then he turned his attention to her, his harsh stare softening, but his eyes still troubled. “Hello, there,” he said.

  “Hello.” Gwen smiled carefully at him, the pull of her attraction to him warring with her desire to be a principled person, one who honored her commitments to other people. But she was having a harder and harder time determining right from wrong when she was around him. And she didn’t know what to say or do when in his company.

  Cynthia appeared to be not nearly so conflicted. “Pay attention, Emerson,” she demanded, stepping away from the shop window and playfully slapping him on the chest. “Louisa keeps insisting that the necklace in the corner is tanzanite.” She pointed toward the display they were ogling. “I think it’s tourmaline. Could you just take a peek—” She paused and glanced at Gwen and Thoreau. “You two, as well. I would like to know what this is.”

  Clearly, the discussion of accessories had not yet ceased.

  Gwen glanced at the necklace but wasn’t certain what it was. To her, the gemstone looked like a cross between sapphire and aquamarine in color. Emerson hazarded a guess that it was tanzanite, but he didn’t look very closely. Thoreau studied it far more carefully and took Cynthia’s side. “It’s tourmaline,” he proclaimed. “Of the Brazilian indicolite variety. Beautifully cut.”

  “Well, thank heavens we know the truth now,” Emerson murmured dryly. His brother shot him a cool, triumphant look, but the two other women appeared oblivious to their antagonism.

  The rest of the walk to the park went quickly, all five of them clustered together like an imbalanced molecule—Thoreau ahead with Cynthia and Louisa, Emerson with Gwen just behind. But their pilgrimage to Vajdahunyad Castle was stymied by an unusually early closing time for visitors that day. It housed the city’s agricultural museum, and there was a private event scheduled. So their excursion morphed into a full tour of the City Park instead.

  “At least we can look at the building from the outside,” Louisa said, taking several steps back from it. “That section over there is quite sinister.” She indicated the façade that, according to Thoreau, most resembled the castle in Transylvania.

  Gwen studied its gothic architecture and, as the sun hid momentarily behind the clouds, she could almost see Dracula escaping from the imposing building and into the darkening night, black cape flying behind him. Too bad Richard hadn’t joined them on the trip sooner. He could have had the perfect setting for his “serious” Halloweenesque proposal.

  The mental image of Richard with a vampire cloak and fake teeth offering her an engagement ring never ceased to amuse her. She laughed aloud and Emerson, still by her side, said, “What’s so humorous?”

  She shook her head. “Just a memory that never happened.”

  He eyed her with surprise. “A very poetic way of phrasing it. I was hoping you’d say it was a highly explicit sexual fantasy involving neck biting.”

  She laughed again, but didn’t reply. She’d let him think what he wanted.

  He was still staring curiously at her. “Fine, don’t tell me. But I like the sound of your laugh. It’s charming.”

  “Um, tha
nks,” she managed, but she could feel herself blushing at his words and his attention. She tried to remember if there had been anything Richard had ever said to her that had made her blush. She couldn’t, but it had been a long time since their early days of dating. And, besides, Richard wasn’t an outrageous flirt like Emerson. He never set out to make her feel self-conscious and unnerved.

  Before Emerson could make any new embarrassing comments, Thoreau pointed out a statue of a man with a pen in the nearby courtyard.

  “It’s famous in Budapest,” he said. “It’s called Anonymus, and it’s, apparently, the anonymous notary of one of the kings. Probably King Béla III, who wrote the first history books on Hungarians, mostly based on legends.” He pointed at the pen held in an eternal grip by the man in bronze. “One local superstition is that you’ll have good luck if you rub the pen.” He raised his eyebrow, walked over to it and caressed the pen tip with his fingers.

  Cynthia and Louisa immediately followed suit. Gwen, feeling the pinches of peer pressure and, also, not willing to turn down any good luck she might get, dutifully stroked the pen, too.

  Emerson, of course, had to be contrary.

  He shrugged at his brother, crossed his arms, sighed heavily and acted no better than a petulant kindergartner. “I’m lucky already,” he said with an arch glance.

  Thoreau strode by him, murmuring loud enough for only Gwen and Emerson to hear, “Ah, but not as lucky as you want to be.”

  Gwen noticed a decided shift in the air after that. The atmosphere between the men felt charged with a more competitive edge than usual. The brothers—typically assertive and frequently oppositional in regards to their interactions with each other—had become silent but uncompromising. It was like being the knotted rope in the center of a tug-of-war match. Both sides trying to wordlessly draw the knot closer, but neither man fully succeeding in wrestling the advantage from his opponent.

  And then, of course, there was the problem with the map. A problem the Edwards brothers claimed didn’t exist.

  The five of them had meandered around the City Park for, perhaps, a half hour, and then for a half hour more into the neighborhoods at the outskirts of it. Caught up as she was in their explorations, and distracted by the nonverbal jousting of the brothers, Gwen had lost track of their precise location and had simply trusted the others to know how to return to familiar roads. She was not the only one holding this false assumption.

  “Where is our hotel from here?” Louisa asked, an innocent enough question to Gwen’s ear.

  But Thoreau sent her a momentarily offended glare, and Emerson, who’d been entrusted to snag a city map from Guido’s stash on the bus before they parted from the tour group, waved the folded paper in the air at her like a fan. “No worries. It’s not far.” Without so much as a glance at the map, he pointed down one of the nearby streets. “We can start walking toward it.”

  His brother, however, seemed to want to autocorrect Emerson’s directions, like a GPS device dead set on “recalculating” at every turn. After yet another half hour had gone by, Gwen couldn’t help but notice that they’d been traveling in an odd stair-step pattern, first in one direction and then in the other. She recognized a few buildings she knew they’d passed, and she realized, with a bolt of shock, that the guys didn’t actually care about the direction they were headed. In studying them silently for a few turns, as they chattered at the three women (although they exchanged not a word with each other), it dawned on her that their interest was in testing whose leadership was more persuasive. In determining who could more often steer the women down one street or other simply by the magnetic pull of his personality.

  Fascinating? Yes.

  Conducive to getting them back to the hotel on time? No.

  She shot each brother a warning glance before pointing at her watch and saying, “We only have an hour left before the bus leaves to the show. Perhaps we need to check the map now. Just to make sure we’re going in the right direction. I’m pretty sure our hotel is by the river.”

  Emerson laughed off her suggestion without comment. Thoreau pretended not to hear her and led Louisa around another corner ... onto a street that Gwen knew would take them back toward the City Park and away from the Danube.

  Cynthia shared a concerned look with her as the certainty of their whereabouts—or lack thereof—became as evident to the British woman as it was to Gwen.

  “Gentleman, Gwen had a clever idea about checking the map. Or, if you’d rather, we do know the name of our hotel,” Cynthia said reasonably. “Shall we just hire a cab and ask the driver to take us—”

  “No,” both men said together, cutting her off.

  She blinked in surprise and eyed Gwen again as if to say, What the hell?

  Gwen rolled her eyes and Cynthia actually smiled and mouthed, “Men ...” Then, to the guys, she said, “Well, Hans-Josef would know how to get us back the fastest way.” She pulled out her mobile phone threateningly. “I’ll ring him and—”

  “Not necessary, Cyn,” Thoreau said, his voice, perhaps, a touch too sharp.

  And Emerson swiveled around and bit his lip before shrugging and pulling out the paper map in resignation.

  Gwen stifled a snicker. She had to hand it to Cynthia. Effective tactic. She nodded approvingly at the other woman, who nodded back and motioned for Louisa to come join the two of them.

  “The Edwardian games are afoot,” Cynthia murmured to Gwen and Louisa as Emerson studied the map several yards away and Thoreau, standing as far away from him as possible, studied the bark of some roadside tree.

  “Do they get like this often?” Gwen asked.

  “Only when they’ve spent too much time in one another’s company,” she whispered with a soft laugh. “Christmas is usually the most dreadful. They try to score points off each other during the entire Yuletide season and will play with anything, or anyone, in their path. They bat everyone around like a cricket ball.”

  This time Gwen looked at Cynthia more seriously and realized Thoreau had been dead wrong in his assessment of her. Cynthia saw him. And Emerson. And probably Hans-Josef, too. She saw them all very clearly ... but, for some reason, she just liked them anyway. Liked each man despite his faults. And in spite of—or, maybe, because of—his differences from the others. Liked them without bitterness, even when they were using her. Or dismissing her.

  “They’re rather intense,” Louisa agreed, as the three women watched Thoreau reach the limit of his patience.

  He pushed away from the tree he’d been faux inspecting, strode over to his brother and snatched the map out of Emerson’s hands.

  “Bloody bastard, don’t just grab—” Emerson began.

  “This is in fucking Hungarian,” Thoreau said with incredulity, pointing at the paper. “Why the hell didn’t you—oh, here’s a bright thought—get a map in a language you can read? You know enough of them.”

  Emerson said something distinctly unflattering about his brother, first in German, then in Italian and, finally, in French.

  “What? Saving the Arabic and Russian insults for later?” Thoreau muttered.

  Emerson replied with a string of obscenities in a language Gwen couldn’t identify. Then he crumpled up the map, lobbed it at his brother and took several purposeful steps away from the path he’d been heading. “I know where we are and precisely how to return us to the hotel,” he insisted, a point which Gwen almost believed. At least, she believed he believed it.

  Men from around the globe were united by one common conviction: They’d rather be put to death by fire than ask anyone else for directions. Or even read a stupid map.

  Which was why she was in no way surprised when Thoreau, instead of uncrinkling the map and piecing together their location based on the few landmarks they could identify in Hungarian, tossed the paper out, surveyed the streets and the position of the sun critically and then grudgingly agreed that Emerson was, at last, heading in the right direction.

  By the time they reached their hotel, s
ome of the brothers’ steam had dissipated, but the bus was just pulling away from the front drive. It had to be clear to everyone in their tour group that the five of them were nowhere near ready to go to an operetta. All of them were still wearing their street clothes and a few perceptive tour members likely guessed they hadn’t even eaten their dinner yet. Hans-Josef was understandably ticked.

  He had Guido stop the bus and open the door. Dressed in a stylish navy suit that complemented his eyes and offset his fair hair, he descended the steps quickly. “You are very late,” Hans-Josef said, arms crossed, enunciating every word with precision laced with annoyance. “I left your tickets with the concierge, but we must go now. Join us ... or not.”

  Emerson was the first to step forward and offer an apology. “It was my mistake. We’ll change and arrange to go to the concert hall as soon as humanly possible.”

  Thoreau cleared his throat. “Thank you for waiting as long as you did. We appreciate it. We will do our best not to be disruptive when we come in.”

  Their tour guide was slightly mollified. He shrugged, reentered the bus and nodded seriously at them once as the tour group pulled away. Gwen caught sight of Aunt Bea’s jubilant expression through one of the windows. Gwen waved to her elated relative and tried very hard not to sigh at the obvious enthusiasm.

  They agreed to meet back in the lobby in a half hour—time enough only to wash up quickly, change into something semiformal and eat a snack to tide them over until after the performance.

  “We’ll treat you ladies to a nice meal when the operetta ends,” Thoreau told them before they dashed off to their rooms. And Emerson demonstrated his wholehearted agreement by not arguing with his sibling for once.

  When they reconvened, it was as a changed and oddly bonded group. Cynthia, looking stunning in a black, low-cut, sequined cocktail dress with a gauzy matching shawl, leaned over to Gwen, who was wearing a simple but classic tea-length ivory silk, and said, “You look lovely.” And Louisa, dressed boldly in a dazzling red gown, nodded approvingly at the other two women as the guys approached them.