“Problems with Hungarians, naturally.”
“Naturally.”
“I tell her to ask Ray to put in for a transfer, but she pretends it’s beyond her means.”
“How about you?” he asked.
“Am I anti-Hungarian, too?”
“How are you doing here?”
Sophie leaned closer, as if she hadn’t heard. It wasn’t a question she posed to herself often, so she had to take a moment. They’d lived for six months in Budapest, where Emmett was a deputy consul. Last year, their home had been Cairo—Hosni Mubarak’s Cairo. Two years before that, it had been Paris. In some ways, the cities blended in her memory—each was a blur of social functions and brief friendships and obscure rituals to be learned and then forgotten, each accompanied by its own menagerie of problems. Paris had been fun, but Cairo had not.
In Cairo, Emmett had been irritable and on edge—a backfiring car would make him stumble—and he would return from the office itching for a fight. Sophie—maybe in reaction, maybe not—had built a new life for herself, constructed of lies.
The good news was that Cairo had turned out to be a phase, for once they arrived in Hungary the air cleared. Emmett reverted to the man she had decided to spend her life with twenty years ago, and she let go of the puerile intoxication of deceit, her secrets still safely kept. In Budapest, they were adults again.
Emmett was waiting for an answer. She shrugged. “How can I not be happy? A lady of leisure. I’m living the dream.”
He nodded, as if it were the answer he’d expected—as if he’d known she would lie. Because the irony was that, of the three cities they had called home, Cairo was the only one she would have returned to in a second, if given the chance. There, she had found something liberating in the streets, the noise and traffic jams and odors. She had learned how to move with a little more grace, to find joy in decorating the apartment with star clusters and flowers of the blue Egyptian water lily; she took delight in the particular melody of Arabic, the predictability of daily prayers, and the investigation of strange, new foods. She also discovered an unexpected pleasure in the act of betrayal itself.
But was it really a lie? Was she unhappy in Budapest?
No. She was forty-two years old, which was old enough to know good fortune when it looked her in the eye. With the help of L’Oréal, she’d held on to her looks, and a bout of high blood pressure a few years ago had been tempered by a remarkable French diet. They were not poor; they traveled extensively. While there were moments when she regretted the path her life had taken—at Harvard, she had aspired to academia or policy planning, and one winter day in Paris a French doctor had explained after her second miscarriage that children would not be part of her future—she always stepped back to scold herself. She might be sometimes bored, but adulthood, when well maintained, was supposed to be dull. Regretting a life of leisure was childishness.
Yet at nights she still lay awake in the gloom of their bedroom, wondering if anyone would notice if she hopped a plane back to Egypt and just disappeared, before remembering that her Cairo, the one she loved, no longer existed.
She and Emmett had been in Hungary five months when, in January, Egyptian activists had called for protests against poverty, unemployment, and corruption, and by the end of the month, on January 25, they’d had a “day of rage” that grew until the whole city had become one enormous demonstration with its epicenter in Tahrir Square, where Sophie would once go to drink tea.
On February 11, less than a month before their dinner at Chez Daniel, Hosni Mubarak had stepped down after thirty years in power. He wasn’t alone. A month before that, Tunisia’s autocrat had fled, and as Sophie and Emmett waited for their wine a full-scale civil war was spreading through Libya, westward from Benghazi toward Tripoli. The pundits were calling it the Arab Spring. She had health, wealth, and a measure of beauty, as well as interesting times to live in.
“Any fresh news from Libya?” she asked.
He leaned back, hands opening, for this was their perpetual subject. Emmett had spent an enormous amount of time watching CNN and shouting at the screen for the Libyan revolutionaries to advance on Tripoli, as if he were watching a football game, as if he were a much younger man who hadn’t already witnessed civil war. “Well, we’re expecting word soon from the Libyan Transitional Council—they’ll be declaring themselves Libya’s official representative. We’ve had a few days of EU sanctions against Gadhafi, but it’ll be a while before they have any effect. The rebels are doing well—they’re holding onto Zawiyah, just west of the capital.” He shrugged. “The question is, when are we going to get off our asses and drop a few bombs on Tripoli?”
“Soon,” she said hopefully. He had brought her over to the opinion that with a few bombs Muammar Gadhafi and his legions would fold within days, and that there would be no need for foreign troops to step in and, as Emmett put it, soil their revolution. “Is that it?” she asked.
“All we’ve heard.”
“I mean you. How was your day?”
The wine arrived, and the waiter poured a little into Emmett’s glass for approval. Sophie ordered fresh tagliatelle with porcini mushrooms, while Emmett asked for a steak, well done. Once the waiter was gone, she said, “Well?”
“Well, what?”
“Your day.”
“Right,” he said, as if he’d forgotten. “Not as exciting as yours. Work-wise, at least.”
“And otherwise?”
“I got a call from Cairo.”
It was a significant statement—at least, Emmett had meant it to be—but Sophie felt lost. “Someone we know?”
“Stan Bertolli.”
She heard herself inhale through her nose and wondered if he had heard it, too. “How’s Stan?”
“Not well, apparently.”
“What’s wrong?”
Emmett took his glass by the stem and regarded the wine carefully. “He tells me he’s in love.”
“Good for him.”
“Apparently not. Apparently, the woman he’s in love with is married.”
“You’re right,” she said, forcing her voice to flatline. The air seemed to go out of the room. Was this really happening? She’d imagined it before, of course, but never in a French restaurant. She said, “That’s not good.”
He took a breath, sipped his wine, then set it on the table. The whole time, his eyes remained fixed on the deep red inside the glass. Finally, quietly, he said, “Were you ever going to tell me?”
This, too, was not how she’d imagined it. She floundered for an answer, and her first thought was a lie: Of course I was. Before transforming the thought into speech, though, she realized that she wouldn’t have told him, not ever.
She considered going on the defensive and reminding him of how he had been in Cairo, how he had treated her as if she had been a perpetual obstacle. How he had pushed her away until, looking for something, anything, to complement her feelings of liberation she finally gave in to Stan’s approaches. Only partly true, but it might have been enough to satisfy him.
She said, “Of course I was going to tell you.”
“When?”
“When I got up the courage. When enough time had passed.”
“So we’re talking about years.”
“Probably.”
Chewing the inside of his cheek, Emmett looked past her at other tables, perhaps worried that they all knew he was a cuckold, and the corners of his eyes crinkled in thought.
What was there to think about? He’d had all day, but he still hadn’t decided, for this wasn’t only about an affair—it was about Emmett Kohl, and what kind of man he wanted to be. She knew him all too well.
One kind of man would kick her out of his life, would rage and throw his glass at her. But that wasn’t him. He would have had his “little shit” moment as soon as he hung up the telephone; his day of rage was over. He needed something that could show off his anger without forcing him to break character or descend into cliché—it was a tricky assignment.