Extraordinary Renditions (18 page)

The elevator was broken again, or was still broken, so they hiked up the stairs to the third floor, which would have been the sixth floor in any other nation in the world, considering they needed to climb up six flights of stairs to get there. Their laughter and footsteps resounded through the inner courtyard, which was surrounded on all sides by landings that led to the apartments. Climbing the stairs never proved any easier drunk. Nanette had grown accustomed to dragging her camera bag to the top of everything from cathedral steeples to the rooftops of the prefab commie-condo high-rises of Békásmegyer, but each step required more and more effort of Melanie. She envied Nanette’s athletic frame, but not enough to accompany her to the gym every night or for the occasional run around the island. Practicing her violin sometimes six hours a day, plus full rehearsals with the opera orchestra a few afternoons each week, took up way too much of her time for that. Every spring she swore to lose fifteen pounds, but obsession with her artistic growth, or her perceived lack of artistic growth, had so far prevented her from flattening her stomach. She felt distinctly fat all the time, especially in comparison to her sexy roommate.

Nanette possessed a rare, elemental beauty, the kind that made both men and women do surprisingly stupid things for her attention. Consciously or not, she flirted with almost everyone she met. Melanie saw it happen dozens and dozens of times at Eve and Adam’s and all over the city. But Nanette was also violently possessive of Melanie. She had made threats in the past about hurting herself if Mel were to move out.

The scent of stale smoke greeted them in the kitchen, where dishes and glassware, empty wine bottles, and countless photographs covered every flat surface. Melanie’s faces looked up at her in disappointment from the clutter. A doorway led to a short hallway and their bedroom,
guest room, a spacious living room, bathroom, and water closet. Sometimes Melanie felt uneasy about being sandwiched in the middle of a monolithic apartment building, surrounded on all sides by a thousand people and their pets, but at least their building had the advantage of offering many other targets to any would-be burglar. All the same, they had added an extra bar-lock to the door to protect her violin, jewelry, and her massive CD collection.

Constant exposure to classical music constituted a big part of Melanie’s job, of her art, and the fact that Nanette didn’t fully appreciate that was a big reason why they had been fighting so much lately. The current, unsteady truce stipulated that Nan only listened to hip-hop when Melanie wasn’t home. Nanette lacked the sophistication to appreciate the European art music—née “classical”—tradition, though she knew better than to complain about the extraordinary renditions of Bach recorded by the likes of Gertler and Heifetz and Serly. Melanie had long since given up trying to get Nan to appreciate serious music.

Something about the polluted fishbowl of expatriate life helped Melanie form lifelong friendships with people like Nanette, whom she very likely would never have associated with back in Boston. She still loved Nanette in a way, sure, but she also understood that her love was a matter of attraction among opposites. It was a love based on dissonance rather than harmony, with little more than passing, polite interest in each others’ artistic careers. Melanie hadn’t even bothered to invite her to the big Independence Day concert. No point, really.

In just a matter of hours, she would perform in the world premiere of an opera titled
The Golden Lotus,
by the world-renowned but way-overrated composer Lajos Harkályi. It would be broadcast live on national television and recorded for commercial distribution. If it turned out anything like Harkályi’s other albums, it was guaranteed to sell millions. Not that
she
would see any of that money.

Nanette rinsed out two korsós, stolen from one bar or another, and poured both of them glasses of flat mineral water and totally unnecessary Unicum nightcaps from the freezer. They ate stale pogácsas; in the morning it would be Melanie’s turn to run out for fresh bread.

There was nothing on TV at that time of night except soft-core porn, so she put on a Bartók album instead and forwarded it to the burlesque
Kicsit ázottan.
It was a private joke.

Nanette came in and promptly fell asleep on the couch without brushing her teeth. Her cellphone rang from the bedroom; at this hour it was either a jilted former lover or an editor asking her to go shoot a crime scene. Melanie didn’t wake her. Instead, she finished her Unicum and then drank Nanette’s too. When the Bartók ended she listened to Kodály’s
Székely fonó
until she started to pass out as well. Rather than rousing Nan and dragging her to bed, Melanie let her stay where she was. She neglected to kiss her good-night.

Tomorrow was a big day. It was already tomorrow.

Melanie lingered over a slice of thickly buttered toast and too-weak Meinl coffee until Nanette finally emerged, fully formed for the day, from the bathroom. Her third cigarette of the morning hung from the corner of her pouty lips. Hartmann’s
Concerto funèbre
trickled from the living room stereo, barely audible in deference to Melanie’s headache. “I’m getting my hair cut,” she announced, fully aware that Nanette wouldn’t believe her.

And she didn’t. In Nanette’s defense, however, Melanie had made many similar threats in the past. For months she had been talking about getting it lopped off, but always backed out at the last minute. This time she really meant it, though. Apart from the occasional decapitation of split ends, which she did herself, she had not had a real haircut since tenth grade, though recently she fantasized about stringing a violin bow
with it. She wanted a new look. Plus, it was a complete hassle—an hour to untangle and dry it every day.

Nanette stuck her head into the kitchen and gave Melanie that glare of hers, an aggressive combination of disbelief and unwillingness to brook any dissent whatsoever. She was like that sometimes.

The night they met, the previous summer, a fight had broken out during a birthday party held on a boat docked on the Buda side of Margit Island. Melanie had noticed Nanette around town at Eve and Adam’s and the usual expat hangouts—it was difficult not to—but they had never spoken. At that party, they found themselves at the same table, right next to the dance floor, and they hit it off over innumerable korsós of free beer. Nanette spent most of the evening dancing with an American soldier. A small group of them, on landlocked shore leave, showed up quite uninvited. They grew rowdier as the night progressed, shouting and slam dancing and trying to feel girls up while dancing with them. Nanette played along. She rubbed herself against one of them; they slow danced together for hours to the endless techno beat, and she returned to the table every so often to take a big drink from the beer glass that, unbeknownst to her, Melanie kept refilling from the keg. At some point, late in the evening, Nanette slumped into the chair next to Melanie and picked up a plastic instant camera that had been abandoned on the table. “I fucking hate these things,” she said. “It’s not yours is it?”

“Mine? No.”

“Good. Smile!” She pointed it at Melanie and pressed the shutter. Then she held it out away from herself and took a crooked self-portrait. “Let me get one of me and you,” she said and sat on Melanie’s lap for another shot. “See that guy over there?” she slurred, pointing at a bow-tied Hungarian waiter who was being hassled and pushed around by the soldiers. “I’m gonna go take a picture of his cock. I’ll be right back.”

Nanette staggered across the dance floor, pushed her way into the circle of soldiers, and took the waiter by the arm. They watched in amazement as she led him compliantly into the women’s room. Five minutes later, they emerged again and Nanette waved the camera at Melanie to show her that she’d gotten the photo she wanted. Nanette
always
got the photo she wanted, so Melanie learned that night. Frequently at someone else’s expense. She sauntered back to the soldier she had been flirting with all night and kissed him on the mouth. He recoiled from Nan’s face and then shoved her violently to the ground. The waiter tried to help her up, but the soldier smashed a half-empty beer glass against the side of his head. Someone screamed. Nan sat on the floor laughing and laughing, with the waiter crumbled next to her. An expat friend of Nan’s took a swing at the soldier, which set off a free-for-all. Bottles flew through the air, tables got overturned, chairs splintered. Techno pulsated around the combatants. Someone dragged the unconscious waiter by his legs to Melanie’s table, leaving a thin trail of blood across the dance floor. She watched in fascination, then grabbed her purse and joined the stampede up the gangplank into the summer night while the fight raged on.

Melanie sat on the curb outside to regroup. A cab pulled to a stop and Nanette stuck her head out the window. “Jump in!” she said, and Melanie did. “Well, that was fun, but I am
parched.
Let’s go get a drink.” She clutched the stolen plastic camera to her chest like a trophy. “I can’t wait to get these developed.”

The next day, when the photos came back, the last one on the roll showed the korsó at the moment of impact, before the waiter could react. Nanette had it enlarged, as she did the photo she took that night—the very first photo she ever took—of Melanie. The first ten pictures on the roll were of the birthday girl, whom neither of them knew very well, blowing out her candles before the party started.

It wasn’t until months later, after Melanie moved in, at first to Nanette’s spare bedroom, that she learned what had started the brawl. Just for laughs, Nanette had gone into the bathroom to take a photo of the waiter’s penis, but once in the stall she decided to blow him. When she got back to the dance floor, she kissed the American soldier who, she said, had been harassing her all evening, and slowly spit the waiter’s semen into his mouth.

That was Nan: willing to fellate a stranger just to get revenge for a perceived slight, no matter the consequences. Melanie adored her recklessness, at least at first.

“I mean it this time,” she said. “Do you know a good stylist or not?”

“One that’d be open today?” Nan asked.

Melanie had already forgot about the holiday. She was also trying to forget about the concert. Her head hurt.

Nanette scrounged around for a clean cup and poured some coffee. Melanie had never seen her eat breakfast.

“You better think about it first,” she said. She slurped her coffee. “I’d kill for hair like yours.” Slurp. Nan cut and dyed her own hair, cropping it into short, stylishly uneven tufts. She sat at the table and flipped through the stack of envelopes, each one containing several rolls’ worth of negatives. Slurp. She removed a few strips and absently cut through them with a pair of fancy medical shears. Much of her more artistic work—as opposed to the journalistic stuff she did for the local magazines—incorporated double exposures she created by cutting negatives apart and stacking them on top of each other while soaking them with light in the darkroom. She sipped her coffee some more and freed miniature portraits of Melanie from their backgrounds. She took a lot of pictures of Melanie. Too many, maybe.

“I
have
thought about it,” Melanie said. “I need a new look.”

“You’ll regret it, that’s all.” Snip snip snip.

Melanie would deal with that remorse if and when it came, but right then she hated everything,
everything,
about her appearance and needed a change, especially because she was going to be on MTV—Magyar Televízíó—in just a few hours.

In addition to teaching the occasional private lesson here at home, Melanie had regular work far in the back of the string section of the Budapest Opera Orchestra. Of Hungary’s many full-sized symphony orchestras, the opera was the oldest, though no longer the most respected. Its prime passed long before Melanie arrived in Hungary. Over the past two years, she watched the budget shrink and with it the players’ enthusiasm, including her own. Three solid weeks of
Tosca
to a near-empty house will take its toll on even the most dedicated musicians. And another prominent conductor in the city, a man whose artistic work she admired to no end, routinely raided all the best players in town for his own, better ensemble. She was one of only a few foreigners on the official payroll, and the only American. Her conductor found or invented every possible excuse for promoting less-talented musicians simply because they were Hungarian. But if nothing else, the job provided a paycheck, and no amount of practice time at home could simulate the sensation of surrounding oneself on all sides by usually competent musicians working toward a common end. And there was the occasional, sublime concert experience. On a great night it felt like sitting inside the belly of a fire-breathing beast.

For all the talk about fairness and blind auditions, she had no doubt that the best chairs in the Budapest Opera Orchestra went to the Hungarian musicians who happened to look great on stage. The same principle applied to every orchestra in Central Europe. There was no such thing as an ugly or fat concertmaster. That, sadly, was the nature of the music business. The entire system oozed with sexism and moral degradation. Sitting down in the pit of the opera house, she was hidden
from the audience anyway. It normally wouldn’t matter if she cut off her hair or dyed it as blue as the typical audience member’s, but this concert was being held in a church over in Buda. There would be no pit, no hole to hide in. She would be up on stage and on live TV. She had to look good. She had to throw up.

Her cell phone beeped, signaling the top of the hour. The concert was at three, which meant she needed to be at Batthyány Square by two. Hour at the salon. That was ten thirty, eleven. Hour to warm up, play some scales. Change. Find a taxi. Two o’clock. Timing wouldn’t be an issue. She
will
get her cut this time too.

“Whatever. But if you’re serious, which I doubt, I want some ‘before’ shots first.”

Melanie had a digital camera, which she kept hidden in the guestroom closet in a shoebox that also contained several Milka candy bars. She wanted to excavate it and get some snapshots to e-mail home to Mom and Dad, but she knew that Nanette would only give her grief about it. Her roommate never articulated the specific religious doctrine that opposed the operation of a digital camera, but it had something to do with the fact that it didn’t use real light. Or the prints didn’t. Something like that.