“The food was bad, it started raining . . .”
He passed me a two-liter bottle of Sprite—the store hadn’t sold water. For a while we sat there talking about the dog, taking long gulps of lukewarm, highly carbonated Sprite, until Ivan said we should head to the highway exit, where his parents were going to pick us up. Both of them were coming: his father, who knew the road, and his mother, who had had less wine at dinner.
I was surprised to discover how close the highway was—less than ten minutes’ walk. We sat in a bus shelter overlooking a complicated interchange with an overpass, an underpass, and a roundabout. Everything looked brand-new. The letters on the signs and the lane markings on the road sparkled white. The asphalt seemed as smooth and puffy as a freshly baked meringue. There were no cars in sight. A gas station sign glowed in the distance.
Ivan started to think of different things that could have gone wrong with his parents. His mother might have let his father drive the car. Or his father might have fallen asleep in the passenger seat and been unable to navigate.
“I don’t always get along with my father,” he said.
“How come?” I asked.
A brightly lit coach bus sped over the overpass.
“He thinks I’m selfish.”
The Opel came into view, advancing in a hesitant fashion. Ivan walked into the road, one arm raised, and the light from the headlights washed over and around him. Ivan’s mother pulled the car over; Ivan’s father was in the passenger seat. Ivan and I got into the back. The mood in the car was more cheerful than I had expected. Nobody seemed angry or particularly worried.
At first I thought it would be easy to find the canoe since it was so close by, but the car couldn’t go back the way we had come. By the time we had circled around the embankment and come out on the other side, I had lost all sense of orientation.
“You were watching the canoe a long time,” Ivan told me. “Do you remember where it is?”
It did seem very hard that I should have so little to show for all the time I had spent guarding the canoe.
It was Ivan who eventually recognized the landing place, because of a dead tree. Ivan and his father carried the canoe back and tied it onto the roof. “All my friends have missed me,” observed Ivan’s mother, swatting at the mosquitoes.
? ? ?
In the kitchen, Ivan’s mother sliced cold meats, cheese, cucumbers, and tomatoes for sandwiches, and opened a bottle of red wine, which she and Ivan drank. When we had finished the sandwiches, Ivan’s mother said she would show me where I could sleep. It was a little room down some stairs with a daybed, a TV, and a mahogany sideboard with a display of filigree teacups. The room’s regular occupant, B?be, who seemed to be either a housekeeper or a relation, I couldn’t tell which, was away for the weekend.
Left alone, I washed up, changed into the Dr. Seuss shirt, got in bed, and started writing in my notebook. I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time—the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed. But then time passed and unthinkably grew dead again, and it turned out that that fullness had been an aberration and might never come back. I wanted to write about it while I could still feel it and see it around me, while the teacups still seemed to be trembling. Suddenly it occurred to me that maybe the point of writing wasn’t just to record something past but also to prolong the present, like in One Thousand and One Nights, to stretch out the time until the next thing happened and, just as I had that thought, I saw a dark shape behind the frosted glass and heard a knock on the door.
“Come in.”
“I almost expected for you not to be here,” Ivan said. “I never feel like I can count on you to be somewhere.” He was glaring at the sideboard.
“I feel like that, too,” I said. “Cool teacups.”
“B?be brought them from England. She arranged them like this. She decorated the whole room herself, that’s why it looks this way.” The cups’ gilded handles all faced right. Ivan turned one to face left. He said B?be would think ghosts had done it—the ghosts of Jesus Christ and Winston Churchill. Finally he looked at me. “What are you writing?”
“Nothing.” I put the notebook in my backpack. “Oh, do you want an agricultural journal about winter cereal?”
“Not really. Can I sit down?” I nodded. He hesitated between the bed and the chair, then sat on the chair. “I thought you weren’t going to call me,” he said. “This Rózsa must be really horrible.”
I said I had wanted to call earlier but things had been complicated. I said that Rózsa wasn’t so bad—just intense. Ivan asked in what way she was intense. I told him about the living room with the four clocks, and how she wanted me to ask her questions about herself, and make honest confessions.
“That could be fun,” Ivan said.
“I’m really bad at it.”
“You and I are both bad. But we could practice. We might get better.”
“Practice how?”
“We could ask each other questions, like a game, with rules. They would have to be real questions, and then the other person would have to really answer. Do you want to try?”
“Right now?”
“I can go first. I can ask the first question.” He was looking at the floor. I was always surprised by his profile, by how delicate it was.
“Okay,” I said.
He looked up. “Why did you call me today?”
“I—” I cleared my throat. “I wanted to leave on a better note.” Where had that sentence come from? Almost every word was wrong. Everything after “I wanted” was wrong.
“On a better ‘note’?”
“With a better ending than before.”
“So it isn’t a good note when you just disappear? When you leave me cold?”
I looked at his face to see if he was serious.
“No,” I said. “It’s not.”
Something changed in the atmosphere. “Okay,” he said. “Now it’s your turn.”
But nothing would come, neither the thoughts nor the words.
Ivan said he would go again to give me time. “Why did you write to me? The first time?”
I felt my face light up. “I’ve wondered that so many times. I was just so curious about you. You had such a different energy from anyone else. I wanted to talk to you, but I didn’t know how.”
“I think I understand,” he said. “Anyway, I’m glad you did.”
“I’m glad you wrote back. I wasn’t sure that you would.”
“You thought there was a chance I wouldn’t write back to you? No way. Your message was so refreshing, so different from all the things that people usually say.”
“That’s how I felt about you.”
“That’s good.”
“I know.” Neither of us said anything for a while.
“I think I’m going to get a heart attack from this,” he said eventually. “I think it would help if we were at least drinking wine. But I guess you don’t want to.”
“You can, though.”
“What if I bring the bottle, and maybe you’ll have some, too?”