A Summer In Europe

by Marilyn Brant

  Thoreau was, without question, attractive. He was a classically tall, dark and handsome man. Strong bone structure. Eye-catching physique. Warm smile, when not scowling at his kid brother. Intelligent expression in his eyes.

  But, to Gwen, Emerson was a different kind of attractive. He had many of the same physical features as Thoreau, save for the shade of his hair color and a few additional inches in stature, but her internal response to the totality of Emerson created an altogether distinct chemical reaction. Like when a scientist mixed two clear, liquid compounds in a beaker and ended up with something that immediately turned a shocking violet. Had he mixed either of those clear liquids with something else, they would have remained unchanged or, at most, the clear one would have taken on the hue of the other compound, had it been tinted. But get the right two chemicals together and—

  “Ready to go, ladies?” Emerson asked them, but he was looking directly at her.

  She, Cynthia and Louisa said they were set.

  “Good,” Thoreau said. “We rang the desk from our room. They should have our taxi waiting.”

  They made it to Vigadó Concert Hall—a “place of merriment,” according to the cabbie’s translation—in record time. They missed only the opening song or two and, during the applause, they were discreetly ushered to their seats.

  Gwen found herself positioned between Thoreau and Emerson, directly in the middle of the fivesome. Cynthia was to Emerson’s right and Louisa sat to Thoreau’s left. Hans-Josef and most of the tour members were in the row just ahead of them. Their guide glanced back at them and smiled briefly. It lit up his face, but there was something more to it. A delight in his expression that was new. Gwen didn’t understand why at first. Then she looked more closely at the program.

  “Operettenkonzerte,” it read. “Die schönsten Melodien aus Lustige Witwe, Zigeunerbaron, Zirkusprinzessin ...”

  Ah, German. The orchestra was from Budapest, but the songs, Emerson explained, were going to be performed in Hans-Josef’s native tongue. Gwen gathered that, after weeks of Italian, Hungarian and altogether too much English, their tour guide was craving a little bit of home.

  Their highlighted selections featured music from four composers—two Hungarians, Lehár and Kálmán; and two Austrians, Strauss and Stolz—but Gwen didn’t understand a word from any of the solos or duets in the program.

  She did, however, appreciate the energy and spiritedness of the performers, and she truly liked the setting. The hall was warmly lit and the concert stage relatively small but tastefully decorated with long-necked vases and pastel floral arrangements. An intimate place for a show compared to some of the great auditoriums of Europe, but it was this very quality that made the performance so unique. So personal. The strings were like a lively row of perfectly in-sync seamstresses, each flick of their bows like the pulling of yarn through fabric as they wove through the melody. She watched them, mesmerized.

  Yet, even these musical delights were not enough to completely block out the interpersonal drama she was—quite literally—in the middle of when it came to Emerson and Thoreau. Their movements were an exercise in subtleties and nearly imperceptible gestures. If she happened to whisper a comment to one brother or even lean more toward one of them, the other would invariably counter with a word or a motion intended to bring her closer to him instead. She was the knot in the center of their tug-of-war rope again but, thankfully, smart enough to know it wouldn’t have mattered who was sitting in her seat. Anyone in her position would have gotten this unenviable role. Even Cynthia shot her a sympathetic glance a time or two during the concert.

  On the other hand, she tried to get what benefit she could from the situation. Both Edwards men were more than happy to translate bits of the performance to her. Turned out that Thoreau had spent one college year abroad in Vienna studying psychology (“Freud’s city, you understand,” he explained), so his German was stellar and, actually, even better than Emerson’s, whose reason for picking up that particular language stemmed from his innate unwillingness to let his elder brother best him in anything. Apparently, decades of sibling rivalry made both brothers better linguists.

  “And better musicians,” Emerson added, when she confronted him on this point.

  Thoreau overhearing, of course, chimed in, “And better drivers,” to which his kid brother sent him a steely glare. Gwen gathered there was a family story involving cars that she hadn’t yet heard.

  “Better public speakers,” Emerson lobbed at him.

  “Better athletes,” Thoreau countered. “And, naturally, better chess players.”

  Emerson snickered and took a deep breath. “Better lovers,” he shot back, raising his voice just enough that a couple of older women in the row behind them gasped.

  “Okay, guys. Enough,” Gwen said firmly. And for the rest of the concert neither of them spoke again. Not to each other, and not even to her.

  When the show was over, Hans-Josef couldn’t contain his jubilation. He kept turning to everyone around him, shaking their hands and exclaiming, “Oh, wunderbar! It was good, ja? To hear songs from Das Glücksmädel and Die Fledermaus ...”

  What could Gwen say to that but “Ja.”

  Aunt Bea overheard her and slapped her knee, laughing silently.

  They slowly filtered out of the hall, Guido already waiting with the bus to return the group members to the hotel for the night. The Edwards boys, however, had promised the three women a meal and had no intention of letting Gwen, Louisa or Cynthia escape the commitment. But the decision of where to go next was just another opportunity for a brotherly battle.

  “Pardon us a moment,” Emerson said grimly as he nudged his brother to one corner of the lobby to discuss their options, leaving Cynthia, Louisa and Gwen to exchange looks and talk amongst themselves for a few minutes. The glow of the performance faded somewhat as the concert hall emptied—at least for Gwen—but Louisa smiled, her gaze distant and wistful.

  “I remember having a night out like this in Budapest once before,” Louisa confided to them. “It was utterly delightful.”

  “With Ian?” Cynthia asked, her tone one of surprise.

  Louisa nodded. “Hard to believe, I know,” she told Cynthia. Then, to Gwen, she added, “My husband. We’d come here once in our second or third year of marriage. It was just for one of his business trips. I spent the days at the hotel or wandering around a bit downtown, but when he was done with his meetings for the night, we’d go out to dinner or to see a show. It was so, so ... pleasant.”

  Gwen smiled warmly at her. Although Louisa’s memories were tinged with bittersweet edges—like a white carnation with pink-rimmed tips—the unevenness of the color pattern only added an unusual dimension to the flower, giving it more character than it might have had otherwise. And she realized with a start that she was, herself, adding memorable moments to her formerly untouched snowy petals of inexperience. When it came to world travel, speckles of pink now permanently decorated the white. Each dot a place she’d now visited.

  How very much she’d seen and done in just this first half of the trip. She would carry these memories with her forever, or until—like Colin—they were lost to the calamities of illness or the blockages of old age. But these were the memories of her life. Had she collected enough of them for someone who’d lived three whole decades already?

  In the momentary silence between Louisa’s comments and Gwen’s thoughts, Thoreau’s distinctive voice snapped the airwaves and reached their ears. “The hell I will,” he said to his brother in a tone so incredulous that Gwen couldn’t begin to guess what Emerson had suggested. The latter replied with words far too hissed and low for them to hear, but she gathered they were not complimentary phrases.

  Guido had the bus engine running just outside of the building. Just before Aunt Bea hopped onto it, she pulled Gwen aside and whispered, “You got your keycard for the hotel room, right?”

  “Yes, of course,” Gwen said.

  “There’s still time to slip it
to me,” her aunt said, her mischievous eyes darting around the lobby to take in the tour members who remained. “You could pretend you lost it. Or left it in the room by accident. Then those handsome boys will insist on letting you stay with them in their room tonight. You wouldn’t want to wake up your dear old auntie too late now, would you? She needs her beauty sleep, you know.”

  Gwen stared at her. Shook her head.

  “Well, c’mon, honey! Quick. Hand it over.”

  “No, Aunt Bea.”

  The older woman rolled her eyes and sighed. “You are so stubborn, child,” she mumbled just before ambling toward the bus. “Can’t say I didn’t try to help you.”

  If this was what passed for help these days, Gwen could only imagine the magnitude of disaster that woman could create when trying to be unhelpful.

  “Good night, Aunt Bea,” she called after her, unable to keep from chuckling slightly in spite of herself. Forget Cynthia or even Emerson. Her aunt was the real piece of work.

  Beatrice just shrugged and started muttering something to Hester as they boarded Guido’s bus and found their seats. There were only a few other tour members that followed them as most everyone else was already prepared to depart. With the very notable exception of their tour guide.

  Hans-Josef was not at all anxious to leave the Vigadó. After having a lively discussion with a couple members of the orchestra, he emerged from the concert hall and strolled toward Gwen and the other two women in the lobby. It was obvious that the happy German melodies were still scampering through his Austrian brain because he walked with a distinct dance in his step, his smile positively luminescent.

  He inhaled, deeply and dreamily, drawing the dry lobby air into his lungs as if it were aromatically scented. “This is a night I do not want to see end,” he said.

  Cynthia, with a gift for taking matters into her own hands, shot an exasperated glance at the Edwards brothers and turned the full force of her grin on Hans-Josef. “Why should you see it end?” she inquired, beaming at him. “I think you should come out with us.” She hitched her thumb at Emerson and Thoreau. “Those two are debating restaurants to take us to and, by the time they decide on one, every place in Budapest will be closed. I just want to go to a bar. To grab some pub food and a nice drink or two and talk about the performance. Doesn’t that sound like a far superior idea?” she entreated. She glanced first at Louisa then at Gwen before returning her attention to Hans-Josef for confirmation that, yes, her idea was indeed the better plan. And while their reasons for agreeing with Cynthia differed, all three of them were unanimously in favor of it.

  “Brilliant!” Cynthia said, only a tad smug. “Do you need to go back to the hotel first with Guido? If so, we can wait for you. If not, perhaps you can help us select a good place to go and we’ll follow your lead.”

  This suggestion was met with a tremendous amount of enthusiasm on their tour guide’s part, but Gwen didn’t know if it was Cynthia’s flirtatiousness, the continuation of an enjoyable evening or the prospect of wrestling the leadership role away from those pesky Englishmen that was the greatest allure.

  “I do not have to ride back with the group,” Hans-Josef insisted. “Let me just inform Guido of our plans.”

  And before the Edwards brothers had any notion at all that their control of the situation had been usurped, they found themselves dragged along by Cynthia to a hopping Budapest bar of Hans-Josef’s choosing and forced to contend with far less complicated menu items than they had planned.

  “My apologies, Gwen,” Thoreau murmured, studying the bar menu. “They do seem to have a rather large selection of bratwurst, however.”

  She laughed. “Don’t worry, I’m not that hungry. What could you and Emerson have possibly been arguing about for so long, though?”

  He studied her for an endless moment. “I suspect you’d rather not know.”

  She blinked at him. “Yes, I would.”

  But he just shook his head and changed the subject, a simple task given their new circumstances.

  With Hans-Josef among them, there were now three pairs and three native countries represented. The group dynamic had been considerably altered with just that one additional person, and the setting was markedly different than anything they’d encountered together as a group. To Gwen, it was all a bit surrealistic. The bar was loud, smoky, dark and unmistakably foreign to her eye, not having been one to go clubbing in big cities when in the States. It was also overly hot due to the crowds, necessitating Cynthia’s almost immediate removal of her flimsy black shawl, an action that created an instantaneous response around the table.

  “It’s dreadfully warm in here. Am I the only one in a cover-up?” she demurred, fanning her face and fluttering her eyelashes prettily as she untied the little bow holding the garment around her.

  While her dress was already plainly low-cut, the shawl had managed to cover not only Cynthia’s bare shoulders but it also fell across both sides of her chest, adding a density to the fabric in that location, which was gone the second she lifted it away. It was clear in an instant that the woman wasn’t wearing a bra—a discovery of some interest to the men at the table. It was also impossible for any of them to ignore the two new guests they had joining them: Cynthia’s very visible nipples.

  Louisa exhaled on a laugh, smiling at her friend’s triumphant expression. Gwen, realizing that this was no unintentional wardrobe malfunction, caught herself before she giggled and, instead, watched as the three guys reacted in dramatically different ways to the same visual stimuli:

  Hans-Josef’s jaw dropped and he actually turned his chair to face her, his eyes riveted to her lips while she spoke to him, but very much focused on her chest when she was speaking to anyone else. The tour guide actively tried to engage her in conversation, even going so far as to let it slip that he was a man interested in committed relationships. Cynthia smiled winningly at him and fiddled with her plunging collar just to torment him a little more.

  Thoreau pointedly avoided looking anywhere below Cynthia’s neck and embarked with Louisa on a spirited discussion of some eighties British TV series called Lovejoy about a scruffy antiques expert who managed to get into these scrapes with a variety of unsavory sorts. Gwen was quickly confused by their detailing of certain episodes—was it a comedy, a drama or a mystery?—and she tuned them out after five minutes.

  Emerson didn’t look at Cynthia at all. He studied Gwen silently and with a tense jaw for several minutes, downed his Pilsner in record time and announced that he was going to the bar for another one. He asked if he could bring her back anything, but she’d already gotten both a drink and a brat and had barely touched either, so of course she said no. He strode off as if being chased by an invisible Vajdahunyad vampire.

  Gwen immediately felt that fifth-wheel feeling again. Amazing how that happened no matter which four other people were involved. She couldn’t deny that she was the person who didn’t quite belong, and this was only heightened by the fact that Hans-Josef was all but drooling over Cynthia, Louisa and Thoreau were laughingly reminiscing their way through several seasons of that weird antiques show and Emerson—the person who should have completed her pair at the table—was across the bar, trying desperately to escape from the situation. She knew enough to know there were reasons beside her presence for this, but that didn’t keep her from feeling left out. And it didn’t keep her from admiring his swift and decisive exit. Perhaps she should do the same.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” she said, rising softly from her chair. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  Hans-Josef nodded pleasantly at her and continued to ogle Cynthia, who was having such an enjoyable time that she waved cheerily at Gwen and ogled Hans-Josef right back.

  Thoreau shot her a sharp look. “Ladies’ room?” he guessed.

  She shook her head. “Outside. I just need some fresh air.”

  “It is smoky in here,” Louisa observed.

  Thoreau motioned to stand. “We could join you, if you’
d like.” He glanced at Louisa for agreement and she nodded.

  Gwen appreciated the gesture. It was nice that they tried to include her. The fact that she didn’t fit in despite their efforts wasn’t their fault. “No, don’t get up. You two look comfortable where you are, and I won’t be gone long.” She smiled at them both. “Thank you, though.”

  Thoreau winked at her. “As you wish. But we’re here if you change your mind.”

  She appreciated that, too, but she had no intention of changing her mind. She’d needed a breather from the group—literally, figuratively—for several hours and had been long looking forward to a moment when she could collect her thoughts.

  The swirl of cigarette smoke followed her out of the bar, but the night air helped to dissipate the worst of it. The sky was a cloudless indigo with even a few very faint star patterns detectable above the slowly extinguishing city lights. She located the Big and Little Dippers, marveling that the constellations she could view from home were, likewise, visible these thousands of miles away in Hungary, however dimly. This familiarity was comforting. It was, perhaps, a smaller planet than it had felt to her as of late.

  She remembered a night not long ago when she and Richard had been strolling past dark and they had gazed into the evening sky, connecting the starry dots to form those distinctive outlines. Pinpointing the sacred position of the North Star. In space and through time, it remained constant. Her mom and dad had seen it as children. Someday, if she ever had kids of her own, they could gaze upon it, too.

  This knowledge was also comforting.

  And Richard. The certainty of him—her familiarity and knowledge of him—this was the most comforting of all. Especially given the strangeness of these past few weeks. The many unsettling events. The collection of new and challenging personalities.

  She had, perhaps, needed a breather from her life back at home but, having been granted the time away, she’d come to appreciate many things about her real life even more. The constancy of it. The calmness. The competence with which she navigated the ins and outs of her day. Not only did she lack fluency of speech here in Europe, but her actions lacked the confident smoothness she craved. She worked so hard to be precise and well prepared at her job and in her life. Here, she was ever hesitant, faltering, inarticulate. She wouldn’t miss these flaws in herself when the tour ended. Not at all.