The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [227]
“Boring,” muttered Gábor. “Beneath the dignity of the game. You suck.”
“Fuck you, fucker,” riposted the English teacher.
John (whose rum-and-cola had since arrived, placed for no good reason in front of Mark by a similarly sullen but altogether different waitress): “Fifteen years from now people will talk about all the amazing American artists and thinkers who lived in Prague in the 1990s. That’s where real life is going on right now, not here.” He reached across the table to gather his drink but knocked Gábor’s liqueur onto Scott’s lap. Scott jumped, accepted Emily’s speedy offer of a napkin, and applied fizzing, high-sodium Carpathian water to the brown herbal goop spreading over the crotch of his running shorts.
“Blot, don’t rub,” advised Emily with real concern.
ROUND THREE
“I HAVE TO ADMIT,” GÁBOR SAID SLOWLY WHEN SCOTT WAS SEATED AGAIN, “I was briefly jealous just there when Emily took such an interest in you, Scott.” Charles raised his eyes to her, then looked away, letting his breath stream out in a flutter of the lips before adding, “And the matter of blotting your shorts,” as if the smutty coda to his comment might disguise its embarrassing inner truth.
John stopped breathing, stunned at the sudden barriers to the life plan he had been formulating for the last half an hour. Forced to admit that there was personal history at the table of which he was unaware, he finally consoled himself with the likelihood (75 percent) that Charles had been lying. On the other hand, he recalled that while explaining the rules, Charles had cited “one of the game’s most beautiful aspects: Players sometimes don’t know themselves precisely how much truth they’re telling.”
“You’re a bad person, aren’t you, Charlie?” Emily wagged a finger.
Charles looked away, hoping to disguise something he had revealed, or to reveal something he only wanted to appear to disguise, and so he tricked another waitress into coming to the table, and before she was able to realize the trap, she found herself taking orders for replacement drinks and food. “Poor woman,” he said as she wound her sour way back into the café. “She’ll never survive the new economy. This whole country needs its ass kicked.”
“You can’t take two turns, Charles.”
“No, I know. That was just my opinion.”
Mark was nodding. “I guarantee there was never sullen service in this café when it was founded. You’re up, Em.” “Oh, jeez. Do we have to go on with this? This isn’t the way normal people should spend their time. Okay, okay, gimme a sec. . . . I think I could live in Hungary forever. I don’t ever want to move back to the States.”
John smiled at the idea of this most American of girls slowing and settling into a Central European permanence, raising her Hungarian children to be the first trusting and cheerful nonsmokers in the nation’s history.
Scott’s third-round offering: “English is harder than Hungarian.”
And John’s: “Scott is our parents’ favorite.”
One could always feel the same sense of malaise creep over games of Sincerity near round four, a peculiar discomfort just out of range of consciousness, a wave of sleepiness or spaciness. Nongame conversation would proliferate, but also grow testy, as players were commonly exerting a great deal of energy trying to remember what they had already said and what of that had been ostensibly true. That evening in May, it looked as if only Charles Gábor and, perhaps, Emily had not lost their sparkle. As it edged toward six o’clock, everyone but Scott, an avid nutritionist, had consumed too much sugar, caffeine, or alcohol. Scott was leaning back in his wrought-iron chair to stare at the softening sky filtered through overhanging branches. John was feeling that dull disappointment and heaviness in the legs of stepping up onto an immobile escalator. Mark had gotten drunk off Unicum, the rough herbal liqueur beloved of the Hungarian nation, and, as he tended to grow maudlin under the influence, was massaging a tendril of red hair and gazing at the dusty airline office with a wistful