Cindy had gone thick around the middle and looked, Denise thought, far worse than she had to. Her features were lost in foundation, rouge, and lipstick. Her black silk pants were roomy in the hips and tight at the ankles. Brushing cheeks and weathering the tear-gas attack of Cindy’s perfume, Denise was surprised to detect bacterial breath.
Cindy’s husband, Klaus, had yard-wide shoulders, narrow hips, and a butt of fascinating tininess. The Müller-Karltreu living room was furnished with baroque loveseats and Biedermeier chairs in sociability-killing formations. Softcore Bouguereaus or Bouguereau knockoffs hung on the walls, as did Klaus’s Olympic bronze medal, mounted and framed, beneath the largest chandelier.
“What you see here is merely a replica,” Klaus told Denise. “The original medal is in safe storage.”
On a vaguely Jugendstil sideboard was a plate of bread disks, a mangled smoked fish with the consistency of chunk canned tuna, and a not-large piece of Emmentaler.
Klaus took a bottle from a silver bucket and poured Sekt with a flourish. “To our culinary pilgrim,” he said, raising a glass. “Welcome to the holy city of Wien.”
The Sekt was sweet and overcarbonated and remarkably much like Sprite.
“It’s so neat you’re here!” Cindy cried. She snapped her fingers frantically, and a maid hurried in through a side door. “Mirjana, hun,” Cindy said in a more babyish voice, “remember I said use the rye bread, not the white bread?”
“Yis, madam,” the middle-aged Mirjana said.
“So it’s sort of too late now, because I meant this white bread for later, but I really wish you’d take this back and bring us the rye bread instead! And then maybe send someone out for more white bread for later!” Cindy explained to Denise: “She’s so so sweet, but so so silly. Aren’t you, Mirjana? Aren’t you a silly thing?”
“Yis, madam.”
“Well, you know what it’s like, you’re a chef,” Cindy told Denise as Mirjana exited. “It’s probably even worse for you, the stupidity of people.”
“The anogance and stupidity,” Klaus said.
“Tell somebody what to do,” Cindy said, “and they just go do something else, it’s so frustrating! So frustrating!”
“My mother sends her greetings,” Denise said.
“Your mom is so neat. She was always so nice to me. Klaus, you know the tiny, tiny little house my family used to live in (a long time ago, when I was a tiny, tiny little girl), well, Denise’s parents were our neighbors. My mom and her mom are still good friends. I guess your folks are still in their little old house, right?”
Klaus gave a harsh laugh and turned to Denise. “Do you know what I rilly hate about St. Jude?”
“No,” Denise said. “What do you really hate about St. Jude?”
“I rilly hate the phony democracy. The people in St. Jude pretend they’re all alike. It’s all very nice. Nice, nice, nice. But the people are not all alike. Not at all. There are class differences, there are race differences, there are enormous and decisive economic differences, and yet nobody’s honest in this case. Everybody pretends! Have you noticed this?”
“Do you mean,” Denise said, “like the differences between my mom and Cindy’s mom?”
“No, I don’t know your mother.”
“Klaus, actually!” Cindy said. “Actually you did meet her. Three Thanksgivings ago, at the open house. Remember?”
“Well, you see, everybody’s the same,” Klaus explained. “That’s what I’m telling you. How can you distinguish the people when everybody pretends to be the same?”
Mirjana came back with the dismal plate and different bread.
“Here, try some of this fish,” Cindy urged Denise. “Isn’t this champagne wonderful? Really different! Klaus and I used to drink it drier, but then we found this, and we love it.”
“There’s a snob appeal to the dry,” Klaus said. “But those who rilly know their Sekt know this emperor, this Extra- Trocken, is quite naked.”
Denise crossed her legs and said, “My mother tells me you’re a doctor.”
“Yah, sports medicine,” Klaus said.
“All the best skiers come to Klaus!” Cindy said.
“This is how I repay my debt to society,” Klaus said.
Though Cindy begged her to stay, Denise escaped from the Müller-Karltreus before nine and escaped from Vienna the next morning, heading east across the haze-white valley of the middle Danube. Conscious of spending Brian’s money, she worked long days, walking Budapest sector by sector, taking notes at every meal, checking out bakeries and tiny stalls and cavernous restaurants rescued from the brink of terminal neglect. She traveled as far east as Ruthenia, the birthplace of Enid’s father’s parents, now a trans-Carpathian smidgen of the Ukraine. In the landscapes she traversed there was no trace of shtetl. No Jews to speak of in any but the largest cities. Everything as durably, drably Gentile as she’d reconciled herself to being. The food, by and large, was coarse. The Carpathian highlands, everywhere scarred with the stab wounds of coal and pitchblende mining, looked suitable for burying lime-sprinkled bodies in mass graves. Denise saw faces that resembled her own, but they were closed and prematurely weathered, not a word of English in their eyes. She had no roots. This was not her country.
She flew to Paris and met Brian in the lobby of the Hôtel des Deux Îles. In June he’d spoken of bringing his whole family, but he’d come alone. He was wearing American khakis and a very wrinkled white shirt. Denise was so lonely she almost jumped into his arms.
What kind of idiot, she wondered, lets her husband go to Paris with a person like me?
They ate dinner at La Cuillère Curieuse, a Michelin two-star establishment that in Denise’s opinion was trying too hard. She didn’t want raw yellowtail or papaya confit when she came to France. On the other hand, she was plenty sick of goulash.
Brian, deferring to her judgment absolutely, made her choose the wine and order both dinners. Over coffee she asked him why Robin hadn’t come along to Paris.
“It’s the first zucchini harvest at the Garden Project,” he said with uncharacteristic bitterness.
“Travel is a chore for some people,” Denise said.
“It didn’t use to be for Robin,” Brian said. “We used to take great trips, all over the West. And now that we can really afford it, she doesn’t want to go. It’s like she’s on strike against money.”
“It must be a shock, suddenly having so much.”
“Look, I just want to have fun with it,” Brian said. “I don’t want to be a different person. But I’m not going to wear sackcloth, either.”
“Is that what Robin is doing?”
“She hasn’t been happy since the day I sold the company.”
Let’s get an egg timer, Denise thought, and see how long this marriage lasts.
She waited in vain, as they walked the length of the quai after dinner, for Brian to brush her hand with his. He kept looking at her hopefully, as if to be sure she had no objection to his stopping at this store window or veering down that side street. He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure. He described his plans for the Generator as if it were a party that he was almost certain she would enjoy. Clearly convinced, in the same way, that he was doing a Good Thing that she wanted, he backed away from her hygienically when they parted for the night in the lobby of the Deux Îles.