Under Budapest (4 page)

This kettle had witnessed the first nomination to dean's list (both of them), the first C- (Daniel's for a paper he'd written too quickly and, in retrospect he had to admit, too polemically), the first piece published in the student newspaper (also Daniel's, an editorial, also polemical), the first suggestion from a professor to apply to graduate school (Tibor's, from a history professor). Other momentous events: Tibor's passion for the Japanese Visa student in his cultural geography class. It had lasted for the entire year, unrequited. Daniel's joining the campus communist party and growing his hair long. Then meeting Juliette and cutting it all off and considering a career in law. Tibor's confession that he had also been in love with Juliette. Both of them deciding together that being a socialist was more ethical than being a lawyer and then realizing that was the dumbest conclusion they had ever reached when Tibor, stoked on Solzhenitsyn and his first-ever reading of Foucault, reminded Daniel that any system has its disciplinary apparatus whether panopticon prison or gulag. Fight the power; want nothing.

Tibor loved the layers of grease on chrome. It was history in the making, tangible and unclean. Hardened volcanic streams of orange and brown also covered the gas stove—on its once-pristine white enamel surface, years of sausages and bacon and fried egg and canned beans. There was a satisfying feeling, in the house, of unperturbed masculinity, of the accumulated effort of boys becoming men.

Tibor's mouth tasted ugly and he smelled of cigarettes and sweaty sleep and beery farts under flat polyester quilts but this, too, was a Friday morning joy, the stink and muzz of hang­over. They ate on the futon couch that Tibor had slept on, holding plates mounded with eggs and toast close to their chins. Famished. They fed their bellies. They slaked their thirst with huge gulps of sweet hot tea from mugs purloined from family cabinets, evidence of the roommates' pre-independence histories. Daniel's firmly declaimed
OPSEU: Your union
while Tibor sipped from someone's chipped homemade pottery.

“Aaah.” Daniel leaned back, hoisted his feet onto the milk crate that served as a coffee table as he lit a cigarette. “Good breakfast.”

Tibor leaned back beside him. “Great breakfast.”

In the kitchen, two of Daniel's roommates talked in morning monosyllables. Tibor heard cornflakes hitting a bowl. How is it you always recognize it's cornflakes? The sound of it, dry and husky. The cornflake sound.

“I got into Harvard.”

Daniel said it between drags, still holding his inhale so the sentence came out tight. Foreshortened. He exhaled, and the smoke plumed about his head.

Tibor's chest tightened. He didn't even know Daniel had applied to Harvard. Harvard. Who the fuck applied to Harvard?

“I didn't want to say it out loud. I mean, it's Harvard, you know.”

Tibor slapped Daniel on the shoulder—somewhat clumsily because they sat too closely together on the couch to manage a sincere, manly clap on the back but well intentioned. “Well, way to go, man. Harvard.”

Daniel's face, as Tibor sneaked a sideways glance at it, seemed to shine. He was trying to hold back the shine, but he couldn't. That face shone with the most arrogant son-of-a-bitch shine on the planet. It shone with worldliness, with the love of the world itself. The world
loved
Daniel and he knew it. He'd always known it and now he had proof. Sun-shining-out-of-his-ass proof
.
Fucker.

“Well, I should get going.” Tibor bent to find his socks somewhere under the coffee table. “Gotta get to the library. I'm so behind in Soviet politics.”

He fumbled his socks on. They smelled of his feet.

“Really good news about Harvard,” he said, standing. “Really. Amazing news.” And he patted his shirt pocket for his cigarettes, his pants pockets for his wallet. “Sorry to run like this. We'll celebrate next Thursday?”

“Sorry, Rolly. Can't next Thursday. I'm cramming.” Daniel always called him by his last name, Roland, Rolly for short. It used to make Tibor feel like he was part of a club. Now he hated the familiarity, the presumption. How had he never noticed the advantage it gave Daniel—the right of the namer to name.

“Right. Of course. Harvard man must cram.” Tibor heard his voice and didn't like the sound of it. Better to just leave. Envy was a fist-sized bolus of undigested egg, lodged just above his sternum.

“See you later then,” he said, smiling widely at Daniel, who still sat on the sleep-rumpled futon, basking in his own glory.

In the grey linoleum hallway just the other side of the door, Tibor shoved his feet into cold shoes, grabbed the satchel he'd dropped there on the floor the night before, and fled.

The once-stylish Palmerston Boulevard, where Daniel lived, was just regaining its elegance in the early 1990s, but the eras were still rubbing shoulders: working-class immigrants who'd bought in the early 1970s and made vegetable gardens of their backyards, single men in tiny rooms with hotplates and bar fridges, students in similar tiny rooms, or shared apartments with hardwood floors newly exposed. Rents weren't cheap in this neighbourhood. In summer evenings, up and down College, gorgeous young women with nonchalant hair laughed and swallowed red wine in great gulps and ate mussels with bread or sharply seasoned pizza, and young unshaven men with more wit than Tibor made them laugh and shared their wine and debated O.J.'s guilt, or Clinton's charisma, or art funding in Canada.

When he first visited Daniel on Palmerston (when Daniel first made him tea with the brand-new kettle), Tibor felt he'd finally entered the heaving, bubbling pool where life itself was formed. This, right here, was the organic mess from which ideas, history itself, would emerge. You could feel the surge of it. You could walk along College and feel the sidewalk cracking, the old storefronts heaving, the streets blowing with futurity. And if you were here, you were part of it. Simple as that. Living cheek by jowl with the great and the potentially great, you could be poor, be artists, be scientists and writers and intellectuals, and you could whip this world. This was what it meant to be off College. It was not Tibor's world. Tibor lived in a basement north of Dupont, a land barren of pretty girls and Italian coffees, and as he walked north, he knew that mattered.

Tibor had applied to Toronto, McGill, and Queen's. He'd yet to receive an answer from any of them. He was reasonably certain that Toronto would accept him into its master's program, but he was hoping for a federal scholarship, enough money that he could move to a new place, maybe a smaller place, more compact, where he could thrive and grow into the proportion he felt was rightly his. But an American school? He should have expected it from Daniel. And to keep it a secret too.

Tibor propelled himself northward, legs and arms pumping past the apartment balconies where he'd rather be, furious with his own passivity, furious with the fucking Tibor Rolandness of him that he hadn't had the temerity to imagine Harvard for himself.

. . .

Three weeks pass before Rafaela calls. June. For the first week, he checked his answering machine regularly and his heart jumped when the phone rang. But then nothing, and he figured that she'd gotten home and given her head a shake, realized that she was married and what had she been thinking. She seemed a practical kind of woman, one not likely to succumb to fantasy.

So when she calls and says, “Hello, this is Rafaela,” she is answered, at first, by the blank silence of surprise.

“Rafaela,” he says finally. “How are you?”

“I'm good, thanks, and you?”

“Well, I can't complain.” Did he really say that? He cringes, knocks a fist to his forehead.

“Great, great. I'm just calling to…” And here she, too, stumbles, uncertain of the tone and language required to set up a meeting where obviously the purpose is sex but where, just as obviously, the purpose couldn't be overtly stated. “Are you free this Thursday afternoon?”

Tibor does a quick mental run through his schedule. Empty, basically. Why pretend? “Thursday? Thursday's fine. Where would you, ah…”

“How about…There's a Second Cup on King, near Jarvis. Say twelve-thirty?”

“King and Jarvis,” he repeats, writing it down on the back of an envelope as though he might forget it otherwise. “I'll see you there.”

King Street is nowhere close to his home, or his work, thank goodness. Also far from the University of Toronto student ghetto. Not much chance he'd bump into anyone he knew, students or faculty. King and Jarvis, where the business and bank towers peter out, and where, just a thin block away, furniture stores and condos are shouldering aside homeless shelters, pawnshops, and prostitutes. The Second Cup—bland and in between, the perfect setting for an illicit rendezvous. An
affair
.

Sometime not far into his cappuccino, he stutters to a stop. How absurd to be sitting—no, to be sunk—in a brown leather armchair with his knees uncomfortably high under posters of lavishly frothed milk, trading observations about Toronto in the summer—too humid, bad air quality, but there's nothing like the pleasure of a beer on a street-side patio—and doesn't it all look so
utilitarian
after Montreal's pretty streets. It is so absurd that it almost entirely obliterates any sexual desire. The steam of latte, the brainless chatter of glossy-haired girls, the fucking endless grind and whirr of machines: it's enough to flatten the most illicit of passions. And Rafaela. She is, after all, a quite ordinary woman with crow's feet at her eyes and chapped lips. He watches her suck her frappuccino through a straw, eyes focused on the street outside, and he tries to hold on to the freckles and the wet red suit and the pink begonias, but they are fading fast.

He's about to make up an excuse about a forgotten appoint­ment or a diseased testicle when she fastens her blue eyes on him and says, “If you think you feel stupid, imagine what it's like for me.”

There are things that he could say, but thankfully he does not say them. Without another word, they stand and leave their quasi-coffees on the table. They walk out and across the street into St. James Park under a blue sky pulled impossibly tight. They stroll out and ahead of their self-awareness. They
stroll
—slowly, closely. The heat feels good with that city humidity pushing down, flowers pushing up, and the dark still-cool lake at their backs. Junkies drowse, indolent under trees, and dogwalkers stoop to pick up after their pets while under the cover of the Victorian gazebo a tourist levels his camera. By the time they reach the end of the short park, Tibor is beginning, but just beginning, to remember the colour of Rafaela's nipples.

Thank God the hotel is close. If they had to travel, it wouldn't work. Imagine the two of them in her little Toyota on their way to an illicit hotel rendezvous. What radio station would they listen to? Classic rock? Country? It's too painful to imagine. As it is, the hotel appears at the other end of the park, at the end of their walk, as though they have summoned it.

They don't speak in the elevator. They don't speak when they get to their room on the seventeenth floor looking out to the north of the city. As she had in Montreal, Rafaela goes into the bathroom, leaving the door ajar as she takes her clothes off, turns the shower on. “Tibor. Aren't you coming?”

Metal slide of the shower curtain rings on their rod, grate of thin plastic curtain against his arm and thigh. She stands, eyes closed, head back under the streaming water. Begonias bloom through clouds of steam.

After this encounter, they agree to meet next at Tibor's apart­ment.

Tibor lives on the second floor of a multiply divided Vic­torian mansion on a leafy street south of Dupont. South is better than north of Dupont, and it's still an easy commute to suburban York University, where he teaches.

Upstairs is a graduate student in physics at University of Toronto, in and out at all times of the day. Downstairs is a writer—not the literary but the technical type and she is almost always home. He doesn't really know either of these neighbours, and they don't really know him and probably wouldn't notice who made their way up the shared walkway lined with bushes that needed clipping. But even so, Tibor feels self-conscious. Sex in the middle of the day. The floor creaks and sound travels via radiators and God knows what other conduits. Plus, there's one elderly Portuguese lady, across the street, still dressed in mourning though no doubt her husband has been gone for years, maybe decades. And she's always on her front veranda, not reading, not doing anything, just sitting and watching the street. She would now know this about him. That he is having sex. And so what? For once his self-consciousness doesn't impinge because at the thought of Rafaela Tibor feels, just barely, at the base of his throat, the very edge of happiness, paper thin and hopeful.

. . .

Four years ago, Tibor and Daniel were still friends and somehow they'd both landed back in Toronto. Tibor hadn't left the province, had gone to Queen's for his master's degree, and then returned to the University of Toronto for the Ph.D. He was just finishing his dissertation on nationalism and modernism in post-war Hungary, a study of treaties and boundaries, the politics of geographic and territorial identity. Daniel hadn't completed the Ph.D. in political economy and government at Harvard, but as he explained over a tumbler of Jameson's, he'd never really wanted to be a scholar. He wanted the real world, all its messy, ego-driven scrapping, its material stakes. And Toronto. He'd had enough of America, frankly. He'd brought his fiancée home with him, a woman he'd met in Boston, and they were expecting a child. Life. Tibor would like her, an academic type, just like him. Rafaela. Yes, great name.

In the over-warm bar, all gleaming wood and glass, Daniel talked with the same confidence as always, dismissing anything that clearly didn't count. And Tibor, as always and against his own will, believed him. It wasn't just the timbre of Daniel's voice that pulled him in, nor his casual name-dropping—he'd had drinks with men whose books were described as “seminal”—it was simply and undeniably Daniel's
intelligence
. With Daniel, it was as though everything accelerated: the heat of whisky in the throat, the throb of the crowded room, the flash of the waitress's belly ring, the clamour of dishes from the kitchen, the snow outside that pressed against the glass, the bar humid and dark. Between them, conversation rapid-fire, not tumultuous or aggressive, but seeking, sparking, connecting in new and unpredictable combinations. It made Tibor's heart race, and not figuratively. Pounding excitement. Whether the topic was Argentinian economic policy or
Big Brother,
Daniel formulated. He fulminated. Ideas shot to the surface and scattered, phosphorescent. Talk was crucial. It was
urgent,
and important things hinged on
words
traded just like this, over a varnished table in the steam-pressure of a clamorous bar on a winter night between intellectuals of similar, if not identical, left-leaning political stripe.