The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [224]
He left the U.S. a week later, not informing his family in Los Angeles, punctuating nearly two years during which contact with his parents and his brother was already infrequent. He surfaced, breathing easily, in Budapest. There he put his college degree to use as Assistant Head of Programs at the Institute for the Study of Foreign Tongues, a privately held chain of schools—first Prague, then Budapest, Warsaw, Sofia, plans afoot for Bucharest, Moscow, Tirana—hawking that most valuable commodity: English.
It is not only at that school or at this table that Scott’s ash-blond hair, nearly Scandinavian features, svelte muscularity (tank top), and patently Californian health stand out. In any corner of Budapest he looks positively exotic, an obvious foreigner even before he confidently mispronounces one of his few words of Hungarian, or, in slow, pedagogic English, pesters underpaid waiters in state-owned restaurants that haven’t changed their pork-predominant menu offerings since the birth of Stalin to make him something vegetarian. Not so different after all, Scott has joked, from his L.A. childhood spent among three foreigners claiming to be his parents and younger brother. (Though Scott neglects to mention that he was then the tremendously—cartoonishly—obese blond Jew in a family of more traditional models: short, slim, curly-haired, olive-skinned.)
After four months in Hungary, Scott blundered into his predictable but somehow always surprising moment of sentimental weakness. Late one night, bothered that his mother might suffer even more regret than he would wish for her, he sent to California a postcard with a picture of Castle Hill in Buda and the text Am here for a while teaching. Hope you are all okay. S. He regretted it as soon as the card schussed into the little red mailbox, but he consoled himself that he had given no address, and surely even they would be able to read between the lines. His carefully constructed world was still safe.
Except that two months later, to Scott’s right sits today’s fifth competitor, his newly arrived and disproportionately loathed younger brother, John.
III
ROUND ONE
“WELL, LET’S SEE WHAT’S WHAT THEN,” SAID THE INVENTOR AND UNDISPUTED master of Sincerity. John Price watched Charles stretch his arms around the back of his chair, lace his fingers together, and lean back slightly to permit the lowering sun to touch his face. A symbolic opening of the game, John noted, as if Gábor were holding himself up to the light, an illustration of candor. And yet, it was an intentionally symbolic action. Indeed, John thought he could see that Charles liked the idea of his competitors/friends noticing the symbolism but then being smart enough to reject it as not only a mere symbol but also an inaccurate one, a silent trick, since he surely did not believe that turning his face to the sun demonstrated any actual candor. And, John thought further, perhaps this was a small compliment as well, since Charles trusted that you were clever enough not to take the gesture at face value but to know that the act of intentionally symbolically revealing himself was meant to show that he was not revealing himself. Alternately, Charles might have been stretching.
Charles changed directions, leaned into the cluttered table, placed an elbow on its marble. He looked sideways at Mark and his brown eyes relaxed into a misty warmth. “To be perfectly honest, Mark,” Charles said, “I sometimes envy your passion for your research.” His gaze rested on Payton a few seconds longer, the desire to say more wrestling with the regret of having said so much. A wistful