Destination, Wedding!

by Xavier Mayne

  If Imre were surprised that Donnelly was known to the waiter, he gave no sign, as if being recognized by the help were a normal part of life. “So tell me,” Imre said once they were alone again. “What brings you on this long, uneventful voyage?”

  “I’m going to Normandy,” Donnelly answered. “My grandfather landed on the beach on D-Day, and I’ve never been. I figured this was a fitting way to make the trip.”

  Imre nodded. “It’s a beautiful site, especially this time of year.”

  “I’ve read some of the books and seen the movies, but I don’t think I’ll ever really understand it until I’ve seen it for myself.”

  “It was a tremendous sacrifice. I wonder if we’re capable of such undertakings anymore. Humans, I mean.” Imre looked out the window for a moment, frowning slightly, but then seemed to shake it off and return to the conversation. “Was your grandfather able to return?”

  “He went for the fiftieth anniversary ceremonies. I think it helped him, in a way. Afterward he was finally able to talk about what he’d done in the war. It’s like I got to know a whole new person.” Donnelly sighed, which Sandler had recommended he do when talking about his invented grandfather. Now it was time to bring it on home. “We lost him a few years later,” he said, putting a little thickness in his voice. “He was a good man.” It was Donnelly’s turn to gaze morosely out the window, and he felt Imre’s unblinking eyes on him as he did so. Perfect.

  “May I, sir?” The waiter had returned with tea and a plate of sandwiches. Donnelly nodded, and the server poured a steaming cup of green tea and set the pot on the table. “Will there be anything else?”

  Donnelly shook his head, and the waiter bowed and retreated.

  “How’s the tea?” Imre asked after Donnelly had tasted his first sip.

  “Very nice,” Donnelly replied. He set the cup down. “Are you traveling for business or…?” He looked down at Imre’s stack of paperwork. “Business it is, I guess.”

  Imre smiled, clearly charmed. “Yes, I’m afraid so.”

  “Well, I won’t distract you, then,” Donnelly said, sitting back in his chair and looking again out the window.

  “No, please,” Imre said immediately. “A distraction is just what I need at the moment. And I cannot imagine a more pleasant one than a nice cup of tea and some stimulating conversation.”

  Donnelly smiled warmly and leaned in, elbows on the table. His napkin dropped to the floor as he did so. “I shall try to be stimulating,” he said with a raised eyebrow. This is what Brandt referred to as his “secret weapon,” and sometimes Donnelly thought he could get anything he wanted if he asked with a raised eyebrow. In this case, as at home, he seemed to be correct. A delicate color came into Imre’s cheek as he returned Donnelly’s smile.

  Across the corridor, Sandler would have seen the napkin drop. The plan was underway.

  “Are you traveling with family or friends or…?” Imre asked as he set his cup back down onto its saucer. He didn’t meet Donnelly’s eye as he waited for an answer.

  “No, quite alone, I’m afraid,” Donnelly replied with a note of sadness in his voice of which he was quite proud. “None of my friends were very interested in spending a week floating across the ocean to visit a beach where something happened more than seventy years ago.”

  “I pity those with no interest in history. Without it, there are lessons that have to be learned by every generation. Often at great price.”

  “I’ve often thought the same thing, just not as eloquently.”

  Imre’s expression of flattered humility looked, to Donnelly’s eye, a bit practiced—like an art history professor being told he had opened yet another student’s eyes to the true genius of an Old Master. But then again, there was something genuinely charming about him that Donnelly began to glimpse under the diplomatic reserve.

  “So, what do you do?” Donnelly asked.

  “This, mostly,” Imre answered, casting a downward glance at his tidy stack of papers. “Endless paperwork, punctuated with stilted conversation at unspeakably tedious formal events while being strangled by a black bowtie.”

  “You must be one of the diplomats everyone’s been talking about around the ship. It sounds awful, by the way. Why do you keep doing it?”

  “It wasn’t what I set out to do,” Imre said, tracing with impeccably manicured hands the intricate patterns of lace that ringed the doily in the middle of the table. “I became a cultural attaché to help bring culture to people who don’t have access to it, and who could benefit from it. I had no idea that it would involve so much paper.”

  “Sounds like you’re living the dream,” Donnelly replied with a chuckle.

  “Well, given that my father toiled in a mine from the age of twelve and then died in a car crash before the age of forty, I guess it’s not so bad.”

  “Wow. That’s really sad,” Donnelly replied. He knew the outline of Imre’s story, of course, but was struck by the blunt retelling. There was sorrow in Imre’s voice, but it sounded like an objective sadness, as if he were describing bad things that happened, in general, to other people. “I lost my dad when I was twelve, and it’s still hard.”

  “I didn’t really know mine,” Imre replied. “I don’t mean that in a new-agey ‘I didn’t know the real person’ way. It’s more in a ‘he spent every waking moment underground’ way. I think he provided for us the best he could, but it was a hard life.”

  “What about your mom?”

  “She was with him in the car. They’d only had it a week. It was a beat-up old Lada that my father inherited out of the blue from a relative he’d never even heard of, much less met. But he wasn’t one to look a gift jalopy in the mouth, so he took my mom out for a spin on that very Sunday afternoon. They never came back.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Donnelly said. “I can’t imagine what that must have been like.”

  Imre shrugged, not carelessly but as if adjusting the weight that had been laid on his shoulders at the age of ten. “I don’t know what would have happened if my grandfather hadn’t appeared as mysteriously as that death trap Soviet sedan.”

  “Did he take you in?”

  Imre gave a wry, dismissive flick of his head. “It was more like he took me on—as a kind of obligation he was only theoretically interested in. As a matter of fact, I saw him only once, when he came to the village after the accident and packed me off to Switzerland for school.”

  “It’s too bad you never had a chance to develop a relationship with him,” Donnelly said.

  “He’s not much for relationships. He is, in fact, still very much alive and very much alone, and he appears to like it that way.” Imre, who had been gazing at his tea leaves, suddenly seemed to remember he was sharing tea with the attractive man opposite him. “Listen to me, rabbiting on about my sad family. Not the kind of light chatter one expects over tea.”

  “It’s been very nice,” Donnelly said. “But I’ve imposed too much. Thank you for sharing your table with me, Imre.” He stood, and extended a hand.

  Imre rose as well and smiled with what seemed like unabashed delight at again seeing the full extent of Donnelly. They were precisely the same height, and their builds were remarkably similar as well—strong and lithe without excessive bulk. Imre was perhaps ten years older than Donnelly but kept himself remarkably fit.

  “Gabriel, I hope you don’t think me too forward,” Imre said once they’d shaken hands. “Do you have plans for dinner? I’d like a chance to prove I can talk about things other than my bizarrely self-destructive family.”

  Donnelly felt the shy smile emerge, the one he’d practiced in the mirror with Sandler before coming to tea. That he now had a chance to use it meant that their preparation had been to good purpose. “I’d like that,” he said. “Queen’s Grill at eight?”

  This was a risky move, taking charge of their dinner arrangements. Sandler had coached him that Imre had a reputation for managing his personal relationships with as much authority as his diplomati
c responsibilities. But something gave him the inkling that he should turn the tables—as someone who didn’t know he was dealing with the cultural attaché of the British Embassy might.

  Imre’s smile let him know he had made the right choice. “Queen’s Grill,” he said. “Well.”

  Donnelly saw the change in his expression, the one that signaled Imre’s estimation of him was shifting. He had shown up as a passenger who had wandered into the tea room from steerage, a man who might be relied upon to offer bland and not terribly challenging conversation. But having casually mentioned the first-class dining room, Donnelly had provoked a new focus in Imre’s eyes, as if he were now viewed as something approaching an equal.

  “I’ll see you at eight, then,” Donnelly said. He turned and walked from the room with a callipygian stride that would have made Ankur proud—and perhaps a little jealous.

  Ferry, North Sea

  THEIR ACCOMMODATIONS on the ferry were to be in the only space available—a rather expensive stateroom that boasted, the port agent said with manic delight as if the very idea thrilled him to his core, its own bathroom.

  Bryce was less impressed, as he made clear when he stalked away from the desk with a scowl. “What do the other passengers do? Squat over a bucket and then throw it overboard? It is simply scandalous that they charge so much for the privilege of lurching across the North Sea in that thing they call a ship.”

  “But you always say you love the cruising,” Nestor said.

  “Well, yes, when we’re in the park looking for hot dads who want to go behind a tree and take a little break from heterosexuality. But cruising on the actual sea is going a bit far, in my mind.”

  It was at that moment that a couple of dashing men in sailor’s garb walked purposefully through the ferry terminal, through the staff doors, and out to board the ship. Bryce watched them go, tracing the crease in their sharply pressed white pants up to the point where it broke over their buttocks.

  “I may have been hasty in my judgments,” he said thoughtfully. “I’m sure we will have a delightful passage, and the cost isn’t all that much when you consider that we have flown so far for free.”

  A little while later, they were settled into their cabin, and the ship embarked on its overnight passage to Newcastle.

  “One shudders to think of the cuisine that might be on offer, but I cannot remember the last thing I ate that wasn’t dangling from a man,” Bryce said after confirming in the mirror that his hair was still perfect. “Shall we go looking for our own Captain Bolt over dinner?”

  “I too am hungry for the pirates,” Nestor replied.

  “That’s the spirit, dear.”

  They walked the length of the ship and down a couple of decks to what was billed as the best restaurant on the ship. “Though in terms of achievement,” Bryce confided, “‘the best restaurant on the ferry’ seems on par with ‘the smartest Kardashian.’”

  Their dining experience began inauspiciously when they found there were no tables for two available; the best that could be done was to place them at a table for four where an elderly woman sat stoically staring into the middle distance, her hand around a tumbler of deep amber liquid. The dining room host delivered the boys up to her with a simper, as if he’d brought around the dessert tray for her delectation. He handed them menus and evaporated.

  “Well, it’s marginally better than eating out of a vending machine and drinking ‘beer,’” Bryce muttered to Nestor with a shudder as he perused the menu, searching for something edible.

  “Not much,” croaked their elderly tablemate.

  “Oh, how lovely, you’re conscious,” Bryce said, peering over his menu. The old bird regarded him with ancient but sharp eyes and lifted her glass to her lips. “Is there something you’d recommend as being the least poisonous? Seeing as you have many, many more dinners under your belt than we do.”

  She swallowed her drink and narrowed her eyes. Then, without warning, she slammed the glass down and tipped her head back, letting out a guffaw that seemed to rise from somewhere deep in her diaphragm, down where tobacco and spite conspired to render her voice a reedy rasp. Her laugh was a rusty axe blade, wielded with reckless disregard.

  “Well aren’t you a saucy little miss,” she spat when she had ceased her mirth-tinged hacking.

  “Why thank you,” Bryce replied with a tight smile. “That’s high praise indeed from someone who must have met so very many people over the last century.”

  “But one thing never changes, you frivolous little butt monkey,” she seethed. “Young dandies like yourself convinced you know everything because you think you invented cocksucking.”

  A waiter who had been approaching the table stopped dead in his tracks, then took a faltering step backward.

  “We didn’t invent it, you ancient darling,” Bryce replied tartly. “But I daresay we’ve perfected it.”

  She looked Bryce dead in the eye. “Horseshit.” She turned and waggled her empty glass at the clearly terrified waiter, who took it and scurried away. With a stately leisure, she turned back to Bryce. “Now, listen to me, you dim-witted sack of glitter. I knew men who were sucking cock when your grandfather was a mere boy out fucking sheep. Men who bent over and took it like a vicar and risked prison for the privilege. Men who weren’t afraid to put on a dress and entertain a dozen sailors on shore leave and still show up for their twelve hours at the iron works the next day. Pfft,” she concluded with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Pansy needs to learn respect.”

  The two of them, Bryce and the ancient lady, stared at each other for a long moment—long enough that Nestor, biting his lip and fidgeting, seemed ready to faint from the stress—until finally they broke into raucous laughter. Across the table they grasped hands as if they were long-lost relatives at a reunion dinner.

  “You are a delight, you withered old bat,” Bryce said, wiping a tear of hilarity from his eye.

  “And you are an empty-headed sass-basket, God bless your soul,” she replied. “Please, love, call me Mags. Everyone does.”

  “I’ll remember because it rhymes with bags,” Bryce replied.

  “And fags,” she chimed in, “with whom I’ve surrounded myself since Churchill’s day.”

  “I’m Bryce, and this lovely gentleman is my companion, in travel and in life, Nestor.”

  Nestor, confusion at this turn of events evident on his face, nevertheless extended a hand across the table to shake Mags’s.

  “Lovely to meet you, dear,” she said grandly. “Now, let’s see what a lady has to do to get a bourbon around here.” She gestured to the waiter, conveying her abject thirst through an arid pantomime.

  “Yes, let’s,” Bryce said. “It’s been minutes since you’ve had a drink.”

  “A lady doesn’t drink alone,” Mags replied, waving three fingers at the bartender, who immediately nodded and leapt into action. “We’re in this together, possums.”

  The bartender, clearly terrified to risk making the lady wait, rushed back to the table bearing three tumblers brimming with bourbon. He set one in front of each person at the table, then scurried away before Mags could glare at him so fearsomely again.

  She raised her tumbler and nodded imperiously at Bryce and Nestor to do the same. “To the journey, and the men who make it worthwhile,” she said, then took a significant swallow of bourbon.

  Bryce and Nestor attempted the same but were overwhelmed by the high proof and utter lack of subtlety in the alcohol and sputtered a bit as they set their glasses down. Mags didn’t seem to notice.

  “Now, how did the two dandies before me come to be on this tub bound for Newcastle? I insist on being entertained with a story both thrilling and improbable before my salad arrives, which,” she said as she turned toward the waiter, “had better be any second now!”

  The waiter let out a whimper and crashed into a busboy as he tore off toward the kitchen.

  “Well, it just so happens that our story is both thrilling and improbable,” Bryce sai
d excitedly. “It’s full of rough and ready truck drivers, men in uniform, and an Olympics’ worth of gymnasts showing shocking flexibility.”

  “And blow jobs. Many blow jobs,” Nestor added.

  Mags cackled like a henhouse afire, then threw back her bourbon. “Well, get to it!” she demanded as she slammed her again empty glass on the table.

  Behind her Bryce could see the bartender leap into action, slamming into the waiter who was bringing the salad, sending lettuce flying as if shot from a confetti cannon. Mags had no clue that cherry tomatoes were rolling in all directions behind her, and Bryce was not one to distract a captive audience by taking notice. “Our story begins in a churchyard, where one strapping state trooper proposes marriage to another….”

  By the time Bryce’s story wound its way to the present moment, their third dessert had arrived. All of the other diners had long since turned in for the night, but the waitstaff was too cowed by Mags to even suggest they be allowed to close the dining room for the evening.

  “So you’ve traveled east by traveling west,” she summed up, waving a fork bearing the last bite of chocolate cake, “and managed, until now, to pay for the entire journey with sexual favors? Outstanding!” she thundered, slapping the table for emphasis, and then put the chocolate cake down the hatch to mingle with the quart of bourbon that had gone on before.

  “We’ve simply made do with the humble talents we possess,” Bryce replied with what he hoped sounded like false modesty.

  “Humble my ass,” Mags retorted. “You boys must be blessed with the sphincters of angels.”

  “They have inspired many to call upon the deities of their choosing, I will grant,” Bryce said, dabbing daintily at the corner of his mouth with a napkin. “So now you know our story. You must tell us yours. Feel free to jump ahead to recent times—the last fifty years or so.” He winked broadly at Mags.

  She laughed volcanically. “My, aren’t we the impudent whore? Let’s retire to the bar, where we won’t inconvenience these jackasses any further,” she said, jerking her head at the cowering waitstaff.