The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [223]
Next to him sits Emily Oliver, a Nebraskan, though she passed her first, mostly forgotten, five years in Washington, D.C. She too has recently arrived, landing in March to serve as the new special assistant to the United States ambassador, a post she secured on her own merits but also with the assistance of peculiar family connections. Answering the noticeably keen inquiries of the newest arrival at the table, she has just described her job as “neat” but also “a little, you know, menial, not that I’d ever complain,” complaining being a crime her widowed father punished with tickling (until Emily was seven), pithy aphorism (seven through twelve), and thereafter with stark descriptions of real suffering he had witnessed—in Vietnam or in a local thresher accident or in her mother’s last weeks. End of complaints.
Emily looks very American; even Americans say so. (“She smells like corn on the cob,” Charles Gábor will say, shuddering, when discreetly asked later this evening about her availability.) She wears her light brown hair pulled into a ponytail, entirely revealing what Nebraska society politely termed a square jaw but which in fact is much closer to a broad isosceles triangle hanging parallel to the ground, suspended from her ears. Imposing as it is, she has always laughingly resisted the well-meaning roommates and hairstylists who devise methods to “soften” her features or “accentuate her eyes.”
She embodies and publicly extols straightforwardness, a quality her history-battered Hungarian acquaintances find simultaneously charming and a little inexplicable, a flat-earth approach to the world. Embassy elders and their wives cite her listening skills, her aura of certainty and solidity, her similarity to their younger selves, and she cannot argue with any of that, though she wouldn’t mind hearing the last comparison a bit less often. Roommates invariably declare her to be just the sweetest, most trustable woman in the world, not the boring girl you’d expect when you first meet her.
Here at the Gerbeaud this afternoon, as on most days, she wears khakis, white oxford shirt, blue blazer, standard dress for young nondiplomatic employees of the U.S. embassy, but also the unmistakable tribal costume of the world’s interns and first-year assistants. Emily appears to be one of those, too, despite her up-beatitude, one of those about to face the disillusionment of boring jobs with glamorous titles, soon to retreat into the warm embrace of another, more marketable degree and a little more time to think.
To her right sits a young man who recently asserted quarter seriously that he will return to school only “when they institute a master’s degree in living for the moment.” Scott Price’s declaration testifies to a diet of self-help books, brief and impassioned love affairs with Eastern philosophies, and a cyclical practice of wading in and out of various regimes of psychotherapy, accredited and otherwise. Scott’s repeated requests, however, each sharper than the last, that Charles ask the elusive waitress whether the Carpathian mineral water contains any sodium, and his evident frustration at Charles’s unwillingness to comply or even take the question seriously, belie Scott’s recent public claim to “have achieved a new, better relationship with anger.”
Seven months ago Scott swayed very close to a heaving stage-front amplifier in a Seattle nightclub, and he bathed in a long-overdue and honey-sweet epiphany. “Look at Me, I’m Above It All”—an early hit during Seattle’s dominance of American pop—roared over and through him, and though he knew the song’s title was meant ironically, he chose not to take it that way; from that moment, he would be above strife, out of reach of another recently fumbled relationship, yet another unhappy work situation, and, most of