She was concerned. He had been keeping to himself since the meeting. Had they taken it too far? The guy was really only overenthused, and they made him give over his balls in a plastic cup. Apologize for the inconvenience too. And for what? The throwaway status games of a writing workshop?
Now at the dinner table he was fiddling with the detailing of the menu cover, lost in some kind of tactile sanctuary where craft and grace still mean something. Or somewhere along those lines. That must be what the head of a guy like that sounds like.
But really, Wanderloo was thinking about antelopes and the debt crisis. The Greeks made up the deer-goat as an absurd symbol of tragicomedy because they had never seen an antelope, much less a giraffe. I Wanderloo am that dear goat. I am Varoufakis on the chopping block. I with my middle class package complete before 30, my therapist and private pension fund. I share a mortgage with a girlfriend I love but cannot stand.
And the stupid kid getting me to give him a history lesson when what he really wants is for me to tell him we're all Slavs. And me protecting him when the cool kids had a bullying fit and were ripping nasty cracks into him. He stuck to me like a fly. Now he won't even come talk to me.
"It's engraved," she heard the Hungarian with the top knot undercut tell him, mocking surprise.
"No," the Greek guy replied, "it's an embossing," and he caressed the syllables like they had the same filigree as the wooden bits affixed to the menu cover. Though he was an inchoate child like that she had actually liked him for a summer fling. These pretty smart nice combos are good material for this kind of project, that doesn't give them enough leash for their unstable emotionality to tangle with hers. But he was faithful, along with everything else. Why do they have to pretend they aren't the way they are? Now it would have to be the tall Slovak, who stood next to him at the whiteboard acting like he also had ideas. Who jockeyed with the cool kids and won leadership. No doubt he would jockey her into a private meeting too. Not her first choice. But why not.
They ate slowly and without making a big deal of it. From the far side of the long table, her namesake who was more on the vicious side of the hipster spectrum narrowed her eyes at her prey. He must have forgotten himself looking at her. Now he had to see her turn to her friends and storytell him bungling through the vote, and the tea spilling with all that glee.
Top Knot related later how he ran into him at the hotel corridor, in the middle of the night. "He said he had a dream that he should stay. I told him let's talk about it in the morning and left him there." At any rate, he turned tail and got on the next bus to his girlfriend.
the Budafoki amended 