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.
After dumping the dregs of her coffee into the sink — it was still Nanette’s turn to do the dishes — Melanie helped set up a portable portrait studio in the living room. The only natural light in the place seeped through a set of double doors that led to a small balcony facing the top floor of the building across the street. By leaning over the rail, they could see a small patch of the river and island to the left, and of course the beer sign at Eve and Adam’s. Even with the windows closed, a cold draft forced its way into the room. The sky, still a good month or two from showing any sign of blue, didn’t provide enough light, so Nanette set up two softboxes containing all but one of the special bulbs she had found in Prague at the end of a long day spent dragging an increasingly grumpy Melanie to musty camera shops all over the city. One of them got broken, quite accidentally, during the train ride home.
Nanette went digging on her hands and knees in the hallway storage closet, cursing up a storm. She emerged with an antique wooden tripod and two white umbrellas. She placed five cameras of different manufacture and expense on the floor, then tested the room at great length with a pocket-sized light meter. She didn’t say anything, but her body language complained bitterly about the endless Budapest winter. Nan came from California originally—Southern California, she always clarified, as if it were a different state — and talked about moving back almost as frequently as Melanie talked about getting her hair cut. Did Melanie give her grief about that? No.