“So where’s this salon?” she asked, buttoning her shirt.
“Just up at the körút. What’s that hotel right before Nyugati — the Hungotel?”
“With the good cukrászda? That’s the Budapest Suites.”
“Right. They have a salon. Very expensive.”
“Not like I get my hair cut every day.”
“True enough, baby. They’re probably closed today, but if Judit’s there you can just walk in. Tell her you’re a friend of mine. I did some headshots for them that that fucking bitch still hasn’t paid me for.”
She will need to sneak over there right away. “What time you want to meet up later?”
“I have to shoot the prime minister today at the National Museum, or else you know I’d be at your concert.”
Melanie couldn’t remember inviting her. “You can catch it when it moves to the opera house,” she said. “One of the singers in particular is amazing.”
“And the conductor’s supposed to be there?”
“The composer, yeah. Lajos Harkályi. I hope the conductor shows up too, though.”
“Fuck you.”
“I can meet you downstairs at five? Six?”
“Six sounds right. After the speeches there’ll be parades and shit. I’ll beep you if anything changes.”
Melanie watched Nanette repack the rest of her equipment. Then they bundled up and left together, circling the landing to the top of the stairs. They didn’t even bother to try the elevator. Stepping outside felt like walking into a city-sized meat locker. Smelled just as bad too.
“Looks like snow.”
“It’s too cold to snow,” Nanette said, “but at least all the dog shit has frozen.”
They walked up to the körút and took the tram one stop to Nyugati. The platform where they got off sat on an island in the middle of the four-lane road, between the glass-and-iron face of the station on one side and the shiny exterior of a huge communist-era department store on the other. A flight of stairs led to the underpass built beneath the körút and the train station. It reverberated with music and, already, drunken laughter and singing. Everyone wore red, white, and green ribbons. Their favorite of the many colorful local bums, the Fisher King, shuffled among the various street musicians collecting coins from passersby, his Burger King crown and filthy beard likewise decorated for the holiday. Nanette kissed Melanie good-bye and took the escalator farther down into the stinking bowels of the city, where she could jump on the blue line. Mel backtracked to the Budapest Suites. It was a relief to be on her own for a few hours. Away from Nan. The sidewalk seethed with revelers swinging plastic jugs of homemade wine and celebrating Hungary’s almost-was independence.
3.
The Budapest Suites stood out even amid the endless series of gorgeous art nouveau buildings that lined the körút. Each possessed a unique charm and state of disrepair. Melanie’s muscles grew tense as she approached the salon, which turned out to be open despite the holiday. Great news. Now fewer and fewer businesses closed for the national holidays; everything was open today.
A separate entrance for the salon steered people away from the lobby of the hotel, which appeared busy. From cold or worry, Melanie’s hands shook as she pushed through the revolving door. She forgot, however briefly, about her burning stage fright. She wanted to remember to pick up some pastries from the good cukrászda upstairs on her way out.
The building’s heat, cranked all the way up, enveloped her. Sweat licked coolly at the back of her neck and trickled down inside her shirt and cashmere sweater. An acute feeling of exposure lingered on her body from the photo session and she felt embarrassed, revealed in some way to the entire salon. The place buzzed with life and gossip and an annoying, standard-issue techno beat she believed undeserving of the term “music.”
A half dozen people in the reception area smoked English cigarettes and dropped the ashes into their own and others’ glasses of sparkling wine. Whatever excitement she felt about her pending new look faded in a spritz of fruit-scented hairspray. Everyone else looked like models, but she was chubby and gross. As an expat, she had grown accustomed to the locals’ sneers and snide looks — not everyone appreciated the presence of such a large and affluent foreign population. In the eyes of those present, she was no doubt contributing to the stereotype of the ugly American. The disdain was palpable.
“Do you speak English?” she asked the woman behind the desk. The receptionist’s low-cut T-shirt revealed enough of her huge breasts for Melanie to admire the tanning-bed-induced, baked-potato texture of her skin.
“Yes,” she said, exhaling loudly.
“Are you Judit?”
The receptionist’s lipstick parted like a pouty vermilion sea. “Judit, uhn, is very busy. Do you have an appointment?”
“I’m a guest of the hotel,” she lied, “and a friend of Nanette Oread.”
The woman rolled her eyes and exhaled again. “Just wait. You can sit.”
She stood and disappeared into the next room. As the frosted-glass door opened, Melanie saw a series of women having their hair washed by a band of white-robed attendants hovering over a row of sinks. The intricate motion of the various stylists, hair washers, and the occasional customer appeared choreographed, like a secret dance of the Hungarian nouveau riche. Women young and old prepared for holiday parties and gallery openings across the city. Some of them might be at her concert a little later. The nausea contemplated an encore. The most compelling people present were those with no apparent role in the unfolding drama, those who gathered only to watch and to be seen watching. She waited for what had to be fifteen full minutes before the receptionist came back. “Judit can help you today, but you must wait.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know — thirty minutes. Maybe more.” She looked like she was made out of crinkly brown construction paper.
“Fine,” Melanie told her, unwilling to be frightened off. She sat and tried to make herself comfortable.
Her Hungarian wasn’t perfect, far from it, but it wasn’t bad for someone who had never taken lessons. She understood just enough to follow the conversations around her. The ladies-in-waiting were agog over some Hollywood actor’s visit to Budapest to shoot a film, and about a famous transvestite’s appearance in that very salon just yesterday. One woman, accompanied by her daughter and her daughter’s Puli, looked like the recipient of at least one face-lift that didn’t take.
A glamorous woman of indeterminate age approached and said, “Kávé vagy pezsgő?” and upon receiving an answer fetched a hot mug of surprisingly good coffee. Vienna’s famous coffee houses were just three hours away, yet it was still next to impossible to find a decent cup in Budapest. A little hair of the dog would have done her some good, but Melanie never drank alcohol before a concert. She sipped slowly and self-consciously, holding the saucer in her lap the way her mother had taught her. The usual magazines stood in perfumed stacks on the table, along with several unread, erect-postured hardcover books and current issues of the three local newspapers written in English. She flipped through one while listening in on the conversations around her. The caption “Nanette Oread” appeared beneath every photo. The cover story detailed the different Independence Day festivities throughout the city, and she was surprised to find a long feature on Lajos Harkályi on the front page of the Arts section. Much of it was lifted almost verbatim from the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, but it was also more or less common knowledge. Born in Hungary, Harkályi had been sent to a concentration camp as a child, which was where he started to compose music. After the war, with the personal help of Eugene Ormandy, he ended up at the Curtis Institute, where he devoted himself to composing music full-time. He labored for years in obscurity until a small indie label agreed to release his Symphony No. 4 (“Musik Macht Frei”), which according to the Pulitzer Prize announcement, “fulfilled all of the obligations of the masterpiece while simultaneously looking back in terror and forward with hope of redemption.” The album had sold four million copies and his subsequent recordings did nearly as well. Whatever. Sure, his story was tragic, but no one talked about the actual music.