The ferry back to Budapest was full of reveling women in their fifties. Elbows linked, they danced, stomped, sang, and coughed. In the bar, they banged bottles against the counter. The few men in their party were slumped at the tables, heads buried in their arms. Only two were sitting upright, addressing a salami of durable appearance with a pocketknife.
There were no free seats. No matter where we stood, we were blocking the access from the bar to the women’s bathroom. Owen, Dawn, and I climbed up a ladder and found ourselves on an empty upper deck. We sat on some piles of rope. Owen fell asleep. I hugged my knees and watched the scenery slip by behind the white-painted metal cables.
The sun had disappeared behind a flat gray sky. The trees that scrolled past were a vivid, almost plastic green.
“Southern Comfort,” Dawn was saying. “Do you think they’ll be offended?”
“I don’t see why,” I said, wondering what Southern Comfort was.
“Peter told us to bring gifts, right? And he said Hungarians like to drink. I wanted to bring something representative of where I come from. My mom got mad when I told her. She said I might as well bring them a shotgun.”
“I wish we had some Southern Comfort right now,” I said.
“Me, too.” She propped her feet on a crate of life jackets. “What did you bring your host family?”
“Chocolate.”
“Chocolate.” She sighed.
“I’m afraid I’ll accidentally eat it all before I get there,” I said, following the rule that you had to pretend to have this problem where you couldn’t resist chocolate.
“What if I accidentally drink the bottle of Southern Comfort before I get there?”
The sky was a creamy gray, but if you looked at it without blinking it started to sparkle and prick your eyes. Dawn fell uncharacteristically silent. She was asleep.
An elegant house of modern design glided by, almost close enough to touch. I wondered who lived there, and whether they had a daughter.
I took Dracula out of my bag. In the first paragraph, the hero, a real estate lawyer, arrived in Budapest. Crossing a splendid Western bridge over the Danube, he found himself “among the traditions of Turkish rule.” The lawyer had to get to Transylvania to help Dracula buy some property in London. Dracula, who had taught himself English from books, asked the lawyer to correct his pronunciation. “But, Count, you know and speak English thoroughly!” protested the lawyer.
The real estate lawyer started having a lot of problems. There was an incubus, a succubus, wolves. Dracula was intercepting his mail. I saw right away where he had gone wrong: he hadn’t made enough friends. Of course he had problems in his village.
We glided into Budapest at twilight, the city poured over with a viscous glowing blue, lights already blazing on the splendid Western bridges. Upside-down electronic billboards were reflected in the river, advertising Tuborg beer and Minolta cameras.
We spent the rest of the evening at an outdoor performance of Donizetti’s The Elixir of Love. The singers looked imploringly at the audience as if we could somehow help them. An elixir of love—what an idea. You loved that one, the one who didn’t love you, so what good was an elixir that turned her into someone else? I kept looking around the bleachers at the audience, middle-aged people in practical clothes. Every single one of them cared about love, but how much? A lot, or only a little bit? The opera went on for a long time. Eventually the two youngest people onstage got married, so we could all go home.
? ? ?
The next day, Sunday, we were supposed to go to Mass at a famous cathedral, and then to the baths at a famous hotel, where you didn’t wear any clothes and someone scrubbed you with some wonderful something. Dawn’s clock radio went off at seven-thirty. Burying my head under the enormous pillow, I condemned all organized religions, especially Islam and Catholicism. If it wasn’t for the Islamic obsession with baths, then there might not be a public bath tradition in Budapest, it might have just expired with the Romans, and maybe the Ottomans wouldn’t even have invaded Europe, and Ivan wouldn’t have had to read those books as a kid. If not for Catholicism, there would be no morning Mass, and Ivan would never have written me such convoluted messages about freedom and hell and innocence and seduction. By this point I was really mad. There was no way I was going to go listen to those guys talk in Latin.
The clock radio was playing Louis Armstrong again—“Blueberry Hill,” this time. The moment Dawn woke up, she was full of questions about what she should wear and whether she should shave her legs, having previously shaved them the day before yesterday. Then she tried to shave in the sink and cut her leg. Then there was a worse problem: she had gotten her period. Dawn sat on the edge of the bed with her head in her hands. “Do you think I can wear a tampon in the baths?”
I had no idea what kind of evidence would support or contradict the conclusion that you could wear a tampon in the baths. “Yes,” I said.
“You do?” She sat up. “I’ll just wear a bathing suit, right? Do you think other people will wear bathing suits?”
I said I did. She cheered up. It was so easy to cheer her up.
Dawn carried her passport, plane tickets, and traveler’s checks strapped to her body in a zippered wallet. Her cash rode around in a smaller patented pouch clipped onto her bra. It was called a Bra Stash. When she saw that I was planning to leave my passport and checks in the room, Dawn insisted that I lock them in the wooden wardrobe together with our other valuables: my Walkman, the Southern Comfort, and her clock radio. I didn’t see how the wardrobe was any harder to break into than the room.
“I’m looking forward to getting to the village,” Dawn said, “just for security reasons. I mean, in a little village I can leave all my things in my suitcase—and if I come back in the evening and notice that something is missing, I’ll know who took it.” I imagined Dawn going from door to door in the village like Miss Marple, solving the mystery of who stole her clock radio.
? ? ?
“I think I’ll have to take a rain check,” I told Peter in the lobby.
“A rain check?” He looked amused.
“Well, maybe not a rain check exactly . . .”
“What is this rain check?” asked Andrea.
“A rain check means you promise to do something another time,” said Peter. “Let’s say you have a ticket to an outdoor opera, and it rains. They might give you a rain check, which would be a ticket good for another performance. So it’s a metaphor. If you and I have arranged to go to a movie and I take a rain check, it means I can’t make it today but I promise to go another time.”
“I see,” said Andrea, sounding a little sad that they didn’t get to go to the movie.
“So I’m not going to go to Mass,” I said.
“But it’s not really a rain check,” Peter said.
“That’s true. I misused the expression ‘rain check.’ But I feel more confident now about the right usage. I can teach it to the village children.”
“Excellent,” said Peter. “That’s what I like to hear.”