* * *
Like Judita before her, I can’t help seeing Marike as an outsider might, standing at some distance, as if she’s not me. But I’m glad she is. I like the way she dresses and styles her hair. I like the cafés she goes to and the food she orders. And I like what Marike is not. She is not angry or devious and unkind. Marike is a cork. Bobbing from day to day, always on life’s surface.
That night after the dinner with Henri and his boyfriend, I walk across the bridge to the Buda side just as the clementine-orange sun is setting behind the hills. There’s a gallery I’d heard about that has live music on Thursdays and Fridays. It takes me a long time to find it, what with the streets a rat’s nest over there. I even ask directions in my crude Hungarian and am proud of myself that I understand the answer.
A half hour into the first set, I arrive at a shabby warehouse. A girl guarding a cooler just inside the front door sells me a bottle of mineral water. In the corner, a wild-haired trio plays bass, drums, and grunting baritone sax. The crowd is around my age, college students in T-shirts and jeans, and they sprawl out on the floor, drinking beer from bottles and passing joints between them. I find a place near the back, sit cross-legged on the dirty concrete, and close my eyes.
The trio is a bleating, glorious mess, with a melodic line I have to hunt for amid dissonant harmonies and a rhythm the percussionist hammers out on everything from a gong to a plastic bucket. But no, I discover after five minutes, not a mess. Exacting perfection, just in a way the rest of the world can’t hear unless they listen for it. Perfection for its own sake, well hidden within chaos that isn’t chaos at all.
Math music. That’s what I used to call it. Like a calculus problem you can hear with your ears and feel in your chest. I open my eyes again and drag my gaze over the others in the audience. They nod along with the music, staring into the middle distance as if thinking. My eyes move to the art on the walls, paintings and photographs, childish, shitty, disciplined, wonderful.
When the set ends, I wander along the edge of the gallery, stopping at a black-and-white photograph of a woman’s shoulders and back as she lies on a bed. One arm is pulled up under her head, disappearing beneath tangled dark hair. The light follows the contours of muscles and folds of skin on her back, undulations of highlight and shadow and all the gradations in between. She’s beautiful, but maybe she doesn’t know it, only the photographer does. A mole, a scar from a burn—she’s a little ashamed of these things, but here they are, gorgeous to whoever took the picture.
I suppose it’s possible someone else in the world has a mole just there, with a scar from a curling iron she got when she was thirteen right above it. Still, it surprises me how long it takes to recognize myself. And when I do, I’m still not entirely sure. I look at the little notecard pinned to the wall beside the frame. Sleeping Woman. Albumen print. Carlo Frei.
The next set is starting, but I make my way to the girl at the entrance. I point to the photo.
“Who is Carlo Frei?” I say.
She raises her eyebrows.
“Ki Carlo Frei?”
She holds up a finger for me to wait, then comes back with a beat-up brochure for a photographic printing shop. At first, I wonder if she understood, then she taps it with a fingernail painted black. “Carlo Frei,” she says.
* * *
At the train station in Geneva, I’d said Budapest, when the clerk said Where to? I’d never been, after all, and remember someone telling me once it was one of the world’s perfect cities. Hard not to fall in love there, is how she put it, I think.
Thus my presence in front of Foto Jó, a shabby little storefront in the Jewish Quarter, around the corner from the big synagogue. Hasidic guys in yarmulkes and beards and side locks, the fringe from their prayer shawls peeking from beneath white shirts, argue in front of the yeshiva next door to the shop. They pay me no attention, used to all the hipsters who’ve moved into the neighborhood lately.
Wrong to surprise Terrance at work. I’m a ghost to him, and maybe an unwelcome one. It takes special concentration to remind myself he didn’t betray me, that the voice I heard in the Ore Mountains lab wasn’t his. It’s the way you’re angry at a friend who did something cruel in a dream—I know, in my head, he’s innocent; but my heart and gut haven’t caught up yet.
So I linger out front, watch the shadows shift as day becomes evening. At five o’clock a woman comes out—pretty face, pierced nose, hair clipped short on the sides of her head, long and dyed electric-blue on top. She lights a cigarette, checks her phone, then the door opens again and Terrance comes out. He’s grown his hair out a little, and he wears glasses with big plastic frames. He puts his hands in the pockets of tight jeans and the two of them start walking together toward a wide boulevard just a few blocks away. I follow at a distance, overhearing snatches of conversation every so often. He’s trying to communicate something in Hungarian, but it’s rough and self-conscious, like mine is, and the woman keeps laughing and switching over to English.
A Hasidic boy in his teens, red-cheeked with a patchy beard, shouts hello to Terrance, and Terrance shouts hello back. The two continue on, walking very close to each other, then they stop before a store window and discuss something they see. Terrance makes a point, and she makes a counterpoint, touching his arm as she does so. Boy, she laughs a lot. What he’s saying can’t be that funny, my friend, so knock it off.
It’s crowded on the busy boulevard, and I have to get closer so I don’t lose them. At a subway entrance the two stop again. She stands up on the toes of her red Doc Marten boots and gives him a kiss on the cheek. He squeezes her arm, smiles, and follows her with his eyes as she gallops away down the subway stairs.
So what, I tell myself. So what if he is. So what if they are. He has a right to whatever happiness he can find. Terrance heads down a side street, stops at a street vendor, and buys some kind of breaded sausage that smells delicious.
Must be nearing the end now. This is a cheap residential block, filled with people just like him in cool glasses and tight jeans. Just the right place for a printmaker to live. But Terrance keeps walking, edging closer to the Danube. I stay a half-block behind, always keeping at least a few people between us. Then, up ahead, a crowded streetcar stop on a line that heads over the bridge to the Buda side. Terrance quickens his pace to a jog, then a run. I keep up. A streetcar pulls in, disgorges passengers, swallows more. He’s nearing the stop, twenty meters away, fifteen—
The doors close, a bell sounds, and the streetcar jerks forward. Terrance slows, puts his hands on his hips, follows the tram with his gaze. Resigned to a long walk, he heads toward the bridge, and I follow.
The hills of the other side of the river are silhouetted in the gathering darkness. Behind them, the sun burns gloriously, rays visible through the smog like spotlights searching for someone. The wind is picking up, and in the shadows of the Buda hills, cold arrives. I zip my leather jacket, huddle down, and see Terrance do the same ten paces ahead.
I had no plan and have none now. Follow him. See where he goes. Read his mind if I’m able. That was the extent of it, but now here we are, the both of us. The Buda castle, grand and golden, springs to life, its evening lights coming on and turning it into a sun of its own. A tourist couple stops; the woman pulls out a phone to take a picture. I hurry past them, not caring that I’m ruining their shot.
I call after him, his new name, Carlo Frei, Carlo the Free. But we’re headed into the wind and he doesn’t hear. I pick up my pace, feel the lace from my right boot lash against my left shin, feel my father glowering from wherever he is, reminding me just how dangerous an untied shoe can be. But my father’s not here, and Terrance is, so my jog turns into a sprint, and I call his new name again, Carlo!
He turns with near panic, then realizes it’s just a solo someone. An acquaintance from a gallery maybe. Or a customer from Foto Jó. Terrance blinks at me. Confusion only. No fear.
I nearly trip as I come to a stop, then I laugh. As for when he
sees that it’s me, when the moment of recognition actually arrives, I can’t say because my vision is blurry. There are no words, just gasps as our chests pull together and rock back and forth there on the bridge between Buda and Pesht.
Part Five
EPILOGUE
Thirty-Six
It all worked out, didn’t it? The ending I wanted, or close to it. Even if there’s too much history between Gwendolyn Bloom and Terrance Mutai IV for things to ever really be okay, there isn’t any history at all between Marike Saar and Carlo Frei. They can start fresh. New lives in a new city. And as for the woman with the blue hair, it turns out, she’s nothing to him. A coworker with a crush. How tidy.
But here’s the thing about endings. They only happen one way, and it isn’t this way. To end a story at a particular point is to tell a lie. Because lives continue until they don’t, and there’s no such thing as a fresh start.
I learn that immediately. Right there on the bridge. Terrance invites me back to his apartment, but really, what else could he do? When we get there, he boils water for tea on a hot plate on the floor. I take a glass from him—one of the two glasses he owns—and sit cross-legged on the couch, which is also a mattress, which is also on the floor. It’s good, though, whatever’s in Terrance’s tea. Mint, licorice, the label is in Hungarian, so neither of us can really tell.
He apologizes once again for how small and dingy his place is. Once again I tell him it’s fine, nice actually, bohemian and cozy. He sits on the mattress next to me and drinks from his glass.
“It’s done now,” I say softly. “I think done. Anyway, it’s done as far as I’m concerned. Over, I mean. All that.”
The words just bubble out, and I hope he understands them. I want him to touch me, just a shoulder, or an arm, but he doesn’t. Hasn’t since the bridge.
“What—what did they do to you?” he says. “I mean, if you want to tell me.”
“They kept me, four months, I guess.” My voice is flat, barely audible. “In a—cave thing. A CIA black site. Underground. A research facility is what they called it.”
He looks at me from the corners of his eyes. “Jesus.”
“There was this … psychological thing. Sounds. Images. Torture. At first. Then, drugs. Well, a drug. Then…” My voice trails off. The tension radiates from him like a fever, his desire for none of this to be happening. I stand, but in the tiny space, feel like I’m looming, so I sit again, this time on the floor across from him. “Doesn’t matter. Like I said. It’s done now.”
He breathes in deep, lets it go. “You can talk about it. I don’t mind.”
“Maybe later.”
“What are you going by these days?”
“Marike Saar,” I say. “I like it.”
“What is it, Dutch or something—Finnish?”
“Estonian.”
“Do you speak Estonian?”
I poke him playfully. “Alas, no. Marike grew up in Paris.”
“Good bit,” he says. “A little convenient, though.”
“A little,” I say. “And you—Carlo Frei.”
He nods. “Weird name. Means ‘free’ in German apparently.”
“Frei,” I say. “Like Stadtluft macht frei.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Something I saw on TV. ‘City air makes you free.’” I touch his forearm, just two fingers’ worth, and am glad when he doesn’t pull away.
“You found your thing, didn’t you? Working with, what’s his name, Jó.”
“Miksa Jó,” he says. “He started me with cyanotypes, other kinds of contact prints. Worked up to albumen.”
“Cool.”
“Platinum prints. I’ll learn those in, I don’t know, a year or two. They’re pretty hard.”
I pinch my lips between my teeth. There’s genuine happiness seeping out in his words. “That’s how I found you, you know. You had a print at a gallery. Of me. I was so flattered.”
He looks down, lets out a laugh that ripples the surface of his tea. “It’s like—fate.”
Something in the way he says this, that fate isn’t always for the best. Or maybe that’s just me, reading into it. I look up at the wall behind us. It’s an orderly grid of pinned-up black-and-white prints.
“These yours?”
He nods. “Yeah. Practice.”
Street scenes. A portrait of a Hasidic guy holding hands with his daughter. An old lady being helped onto a streetcar by a conductor. A woman, pretty face, pierced nose, long hair on top, sides clipped short. “Very good,” I say. “I mean it. You’re—these are exceptional.”
He follows my gaze. “Marta. You’d get along well. She’s a coworker.”
“I’m sure I would.”
“Really into jazz. Like you.”
“And like you,” I say.
His eyes are on mine—I feel them—but I can’t bring mine to his. Instead, I cheat, focus on the skin just beneath. “I don’t know what we’re supposed to do,” I say.
“Me neither.”
“You’re happy here.”
“I am,” he says.
I’m happy for his happiness, every bit of my soul meaning it, and feel bad that all I can do is nod and force a smile. “Anyway,” I say. “I have a—well, there’s lots of things. We should talk. I mean, some other time.”
He pats the mattress next to him. “Come here,” he says.
* * *
Sometime after three in the morning, I get up to pee, trotting in bare feet down the hallway to the shared toilet, leaving the door to his apartment propped open with a shoe so it doesn’t lock behind me. My eyes are red and hurting, and so are his, but this is from lack of sleep. At no point did either of us cry. At first, I was glad for that, but as the hours wore on, it made me angry. Maybe we’d simply run out of our lifetime supply. Or maybe something inside both of us had broken and crying just wasn’t a thing we could do anymore.
The toilet seat is cold, and someone left a pair of underwear bunched up in the corner. I’d whispered into Terrance’s ear a fifteen-second version of the Geneva Freeport story, leaving out the part about how much I’d gotten, but telling him it was enough to be comfortable. His response was a shrug, a quiet That’s great, really. It wasn’t sarcastic the way he said it, or bitter, just a thing someone says when good fortune falls upon someone they don’t know very well.
I pull my phone from my pocket, check the time. By now I’d expected to be—I don’t know—back in love. Or at least naked and next to him. But maybe that part of us has broken, too. I wipe, pull up my jeans, and rinse my hands and face with cold, brassy water from the tap. Let’s be rich together, Terrance, I say to the reflection in the mirror. Or just together.
When I slide back under the blanket, his eyes catch the light. They’re serious and tired but not at all sleepy. He drapes an arm over me, runs a finger idly along the fabric covering my collarbone.
“Terrance, if you—need anything. Money. You can have whatever you want. You should consider it yours, too.”
He breathes in and out calmly for a moment. “I’m set. You should keep it.”
I close my eyes, fighting back irrational anger. Fucking rich kid, even if he’s not anymore.
“What do you mean, you’re ‘set’? How can you be ‘set’?” I say.
He shrugs. “I’m—good. I’m happy. Like this.”
“Bullshit. You always had money. I didn’t.”
“Okay,” he whispers.
“It’s not like—look, you don’t understand.”
“Okay,” he says again.
I slow my breath, try to just feel him there. What makes him ‘set’? The woman, Marta. Or maybe his job. That’s all he’s after, all he wants.
I reach up, squeeze his forearm. “Sorry,” I whisper. “I’m just—I don’t know.”
“It’s all right.” He presses his mouth to my temple, not sensual or sexy, but just to do it. “So,” he whispers into my hair. “How long are you in Budapest?”
* * *
By morning there’s nothing left to say, neither about the four months behind us, nor whatever time—a week or five minutes—is ahead of us. At dawn, we decide to eat something, and so we head out into his neighborhood. At a corner table in a café that has just opened for the morning, we eat fresh bread and drink coffee and wait for the pastries to be done. The waiter is a dick, upset at our intrusion into what I guess must usually be a quiet hour.
“Your dad,” Terrance says as the waiter retreats into the kitchen. “How is he? Have you—have you heard from him?”
I shake my head.
“No? So what are you going to do?”
I don’t look up from the bread I’m buttering. “He has to wait.”
“For what?”
“Until I get tired of—grocery shopping. And taking care of a houseplant.”
A confused smile flickers on his face. “I don’t understand.”
“Know what my biggest worry is? Know what keeps me up at night? Hungarian verb conjugations.” I focus on the movement of the knife across the bread. “Selfish bitch. You can say it.”
“Gwen, it’s your life. Your life.” He reaches across the table, squeezes my hands. “It belongs to you. You don’t owe it to him. Do you think he wants you to die for his sake?”
I look away.
“He’d rather you be here, rather you be happy. So stop feeling guilty.”
An old man comes through the front door, tweed coat, hat, newspaper under his arm. He calls out a familiar good morning to the waiter, who calls a familiar good morning back. There’s a jokey line from the old man as he takes his seat—his usual seat, I imagine—and the waiter laughs. Outside, the sun is coming up and little wisps of steam rise from the streets.
“You like it here? In Budapest?” I ask.
“I stay careful,” he says. “There are nationalist militias in the streets now. Jobbiks. They beat up immigrants, blacks. Jews sometimes.”
The Greed Page 33