Rick squints at me like only I can save them all, as he takes a long sip of wine. “Please, Oksana, tell us about your goddamn job. I heard you love it,” he says at last.
“It’s the first job I’ve ever loved,” I say.
This is no lie. I was lucky enough to get a gig teaching English at a private high school in the Oakland Hills two years ago. My only complaint is that I have even less time to work on my novel than I did when I worked at my dumb start-up writing job. I do wake up at five every morning to get an hour of work in, but I don’t mention this, or the fact that I have been covertly researching MFA programs, though I don’t know if I have the courage to apply. Instead, I tell a story about how amazed I was when I was teaching Oedipus to my freshmen and realized the dramatic irony was lost on them, that they did not already know that his wife and mother were one and the same.
“They shrieked like hell,” I say. “You should have seen them. I had to draw a family tree and everything.”
“I guess high school is where they learn all that stuff,” Beverly notes.
“Exactly,” I say. “And I’m the one who teaches it to them. I feel so unqualified.”
“Who’s qualified?” Roman says.
They laugh and I wonder if what Roman tells me is true, that they don’t suspect he and I were having an affair before he divorced Julia. They have been alarmingly nice to me. So nice, in fact, that I have the sense that they are almost grateful Roman’s with me instead of their daughter now; she remarried a fellow doctor and already has a kid and is pregnant with another.
Whereas I, at thirty, have been campaigning for kids since we got married, though Roman wants us to get on our feet first, which could take years—he’s finishing his dissertation and there’s no end in sight. My parents had me in their early twenties and I am already geriatric to have a child, by Soviet standards, though Roman likes to remind me that we live in Oakland, not Kiev. But having a gay brother doesn’t help my fears of letting my poor dead father’s genes flame out, though I try not to let that keep me up at night too often and to focus on being proud of my brother, who has just started his freshman year at Brown, for being who he is. Though I must admit that when I agreed to meet Beverly, I had the sick thought that seeing a dying person with me would encourage Roman to get going in the baby department, since life counters death, on to the next generation, we need to procreate to forget our impending doom, et cetera.
“I love my students,” I continue. “But they’re so sensitive. They wear me out with their anxiety and questions. I can’t wait for summer so I can get back to work on my novel.” I realize it’s only October—it’s not the best sign that I’m already thinking about summer.
“Good luck getting anything done over the summer, though,” Beverly says. “When I was teaching, anytime summer rolled around, I always said I was going to paint, but I was so zonked I could barely work. You know what I did instead? Laundry. Cleaned the floors.”
“Come on, Bev. You’ve still found time, and your work is incredible,” Roman says, and I try to picture him jumping to defend my work like this but can’t.
“Writing’s not just a hobby for me,” I say. I see from Roman’s face that I have majorly fucked up. I have completely forgotten myself. “Oh my God,” I say. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean—I’m sorry, just, ever since I started this job, I keep thinking I’m teaching all these books to these eager kids who are eating them up, and I’m like, why am I teaching literature instead of writing it? Am I going to be doing this forever? You know? Fuck, I’m so sorry.”
There is no iciness to Beverly’s smile when she puts a hand on my arm. “Don’t be sorry, darling. I don’t think of my painting as a hobby either.”
“Of course not.”
“To think, you could have been the one to write Oedipus!” Roman says, and Beverly and Rick laugh nervously. Now we are the ones who have made them uncomfortable.
“That’s not what I meant,” I mutter, though I have no ground to stand on.
“Oksana’s very serious about her writing,” Roman notes, and he gives me a gaze that encompasses all of this—his resentment of me for pounding away at my keyboard every morning on something I care about while he struggles to analyze anti-Semitism in Dostoevsky and Gogol; his fear that he’s never going to be a real professor and that he has wasted his thirties on his dissertation; and his belief that I care more about my silly novel about my dear boisterous grandmother’s childhood during World War II than anything else, including him.
“You’ve got a tough woman on your hands,” says Rick, not without approval. “What should I open next, another chardonnay or a chenin blanc?”
“I’ll take the California wine over the French, you old snob,” Roman says, but this barely gets a smile from Rick.
“Wonderful plan,” Beverly says, nodding at me genially. I nod back, trying to communicate how deeply sorry I am.
I eat another kale chip and say, “Delicious. So much better than real chips.”
“Thank you,” she says. She is still gorgeous and not sick-seeming, and it’s hard to imagine that she is going to die before the rest of us. She disappears to help her husband with the wine. Roman looks away from me. He is just as compact and wavy-haired and handsome as ever, even more handsome when he hates me, when his jaw is firm and I need to win him back.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean—”
“A woman is dying in front of your eyes, and what do you think about? Your writing. Your dreams. You have time for your dreams, Oksana. You know who doesn’t have time?”
“How many guesses do I get?”
This earns a smile. “Thank you for coming,” he says, squeezing my hand. “I know you’d rather be writing.”
“It’s my pleasure.”
“Shut up.”
“I will,” I say. “It’ll go better if I do.”
“They like you, Sana. I can tell. They argued in front of you. It’s a promising sign.”
“Very promising,” I say. I watch a hummingbird drinking from its feeder. “This is a real fucking pleasure cruise, isn’t it?” I say.
“I am having the time of my life.”
“It kind of reminds me of that honeymoon we never took to Hawaii.”
“I could do this kind of thing all day, every day,” Roman says. “If only I knew more people who were on the brink of dying.”
“I’ll ask around,” I say.
Then Beverly is back without Rick and with a desperate gleam in her eyes. She pulls her chair close to Roman’s and clutches his hands.
“Listen,” she says. “I meant what I said about the Hi Dive. I want to scatter my goddamn ashes in the water out there, and Rick and Julia will need your support. I need you to be strong for them, Roman.”
“Of course I’ll do it,” he says, his voice heavy, and I feel sorry for him, for both of them. Beverly is probably a little bit in love with him, but this doesn’t make me feel weird, and in fact, I can’t blame her. Every year, he settles into himself more, the wrinkles around his eyes and the gray in his temples making him look sexier, more distinguished. Does he have affairs? It would serve me right, after all, but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t. I get up and back away from them, because I’m not supposed to be there—not for this conversation, or at the house, or maybe not even with Roman. But my foot cracks a twig, and they stare at me like they have just remembered I exist.
“Sorry, sweetie,” Beverly says. “You’re invited too, of course.”
I thank her and even consider laughing, because her invitation is so absurd, but luckily Rick returns.
“More wine?” he says, and we all gratefully accept.
As Roman tells an anecdote about a student who has a crush on him, his blue eyes twinkling with mischief, his hands moving wildly as he describes his tactics for discouraging the poor lovesick girl,
I try to wrap my head around the fact that he will die one day. The two days a week he commutes to Davis, I hold my breath until he texts me that he’s safe; whenever he flies to a conference, I am mad with anxiety until he lands; and every morning I watch his chest rise and fall to make sure he didn’t go in his sleep. One day he will die, but I hope to go first; I don’t know what I’ll do if he dies before I do. There’s yet another reason to pop out a few kids. Carrying on our genetic material, a buffer against loneliness, a desperate crack at immortality.
* * *
—
Another bottle of wine later, Beverly takes me inside, which is the last place I want to go; I had been relieved when they’d led us straight to the yard when we arrived. I had hoped to avoid exactly what I see right then, which are the walls plastered with photos of Julia and her brother in their younger years. Her brother is messy-haired and handsome like Rick; Julia has short sandy hair and a plump figure and possesses none of her mother’s beauty, but she looks like a nice person in all the pictures I have ever seen of her. I had stopped obsessing over the twelve years she’d spent with my husband long ago, and now she looks about as threatening as a second cousin.
But Beverly doesn’t linger on these pictures of her progeny—she wants to show me her paintings. As I follow her up the stairs, I say, “I’m really sorry.”
She pauses and gives me a look I can’t read. “Why, what for?”
“For what I said about writing not just being my hobby.”
She shakes her head. “It’s okay, sweetie.”
“It’s not. I—I’m just really overwhelmed with this job and I didn’t mean to take it out on you, especially since—”
“Since I’m dying?” she says with a laugh.
“I didn’t mean—”
“You are wise to be sensitive about your work,” she says, and I follow her up one more flight, to the attic, and she opens up the room, which is filled with sunlight and crowded with terrifying portraits. They really are incredible, though I am no expert. The strokes are thick and not at all realistic, but wild, making everybody look tortured and holy. The only painter I have known is my long-dead aunt Alla, but these blow her work out of the water; Beverly is a real artist. I identify a younger Rick, Julia and her brother as teenagers, and even the poor dog Roman surrendered to Julia when he left her.
“Before Julia and Jack, I painted all the time. Now it really is a hobby.”
“This is amazing,” I say.
“You think so? I think so,” she says. “Don’t get me wrong, I love my family, and Julia has been nothing but a joy, but my son has nearly killed me, and Rick has had his moments too. I spent forty years taking fucking care of everyone, driving to the fucking prison every week, and I’ve reached the end of the dock—and, hell, I love my family more than life itself, and I don’t mean to be cocky, but in my darkest moments I wonder what it would have been like if I had spent the last forty years alone in a fucking room, making art. Without a single person depending on me. I could have been really good. See, that’s the kind of nutty thing you can say when you’re going to die.”
“That doesn’t sound nutty.”
She shakes me off, slightly embarrassed, and wipes her face. She says, “I want you to have this.” She hands me a portrait of Roman. I hate it. It is from well before we met, most likely from his college years, when he had just begun to date Julia. He’s sitting somewhere green, probably the backyard, in fact, and this painting isn’t wild and tortured like the rest but realistic, and he looks scrawny and insubstantial, just another college boy smoking too much weed, not the man I was ready to die for when we locked eyes at our PhD orientation, by the end of which I realized that I didn’t want the PhD, that it was him I wanted. This boy is a stranger, but I take him in my hands.
“Thank you,” I say. I keep looking at it, only because it seems better than looking at her.
She tosses her head back and laughs. “For a second there earlier, I thought you were saying sorry for fucking around with Roman while he was married to my daughter.”
She is stony, free of her girlish giddiness. Washed out by the bright light, she could be a corpse. It’s a relief I have never believed in God—I’ve never thought you could plunge into the afterlife and await a fate corresponding to your earthly actions. I have tried to love people, but I am selfish at heart, whether it means falling so madly in love with someone that I didn’t care if he was married, or ignoring that someone years later to write a fucking book, yet another stab at immortality. If you weighed all the good and bad I have done, I don’t know which side I would fall on, and I would take oblivion over a gamble between heaven and hell any day. Whatever the case may be, though, there is no sense in lying to the woman.
“I’m sorry for that too,” I say. I look at the portrait of my husband as a near stranger again. “I really love him,” I add pointlessly.
“So do I,” she says, sighing. I wait for her to tell me her daughter is better off without him, that she knew they’d fallen out of love years before I came on the scene, that she knows Roman held on because of her and Rick more than anything else, that I did the poor woman a favor. But she just looks out the window, to see Roman and Rick laughing by the pool. “I hardly ever had time to swim in that thing. All it’s good for is collecting leaves,” she says. I follow her back to our men, more confused than ever. I think of my students and Oedipus and wonder if there is something so obvious about all this that I just can’t fucking see.
The sun drifts below the horizon by the time Roman deems himself sober enough to drive and we say goodbye to Rick and Beverly with the portrait and a bottle of chenin blanc in tow. As they wave to us from the driveway, it’s hard to believe my husband has driven here once a month for years, though I have never seen the place until now, or that we may never see the two of them together like this again.
As we veer down the hill, the lights begin to flicker on in the tasteful pastel houses with the tasteful water-saving lawns and the tasteful well-meaning people in them, marking the fact that we are all another day closer to the grave. I study Roman’s face, trying to gauge if he’s the kind of upset where he’ll lock himself in our tiny office and read Raymond Chandler with our cat on his lap or if he’d rather watch Bar Rescue while holding my hand and pounding Rick’s wine. I know I belong in a ring of hell for selfish people, because even then I hope he’s the first kind of upset so I can squirrel away a few hours on my novel before bedtime.
We manage to snag a parking spot not too far from our apartment but we don’t get out of the car right away. Roman puts his head on the steering wheel, and when he lifts it his eyes are wet. He turns to me and says, “You’re right. I’ve been such an idiot. What, I want to put off kids because I need to finish my fucking dissertation? Make more money? Live in a bigger apartment? God, none of that means a thing. Let’s do this, Oksana. I’m game if you are. Let’s start a fucking family.” He gestures at the empty street and adds, “I mean, what else is there?”
It takes me a moment to realize that his question is not rhetorical. I turn to him in the sudden darkness and tell him I don’t know.
As Mama and my brother and I wait for our driver outside the airport, I try to imagine where my grandmother’s atheist Soviet soul has gone. I am slightly delirious from the twelve-hour flight to Kiev, most of which I spent staring at the seat in front of me, willing myself not to puke and waiting for Baba to pop up and declare, “Surprise! I’m not dead in the least, you fools!” I decide she is in the swaying poplar trees by the highway, scowling down on us.
“Oksana,” I say aloud in my best Baba voice, “you come all the way to your ancestral home and don’t even think to comb your hair? And Misha—foolish boy, why are you dressed like a vagabond? Tanya, why do you wear no makeup at all; don’t you know the features tend to melt down the face with age? You are not a product of the first freshness, my dear.”
> “The more you go on, the less funny you are,” Mama says. She looks cold and beautiful, streaks of white dancing through her dark hair.
“Do you guys think the Maidan is still fucked up?” my brother asks, ignoring us. He is a junior at Brown, a Slavic studies and anthropology double major who does not believe there have been nearly enough revolutions. The Maidan is a huge plaza in the center of the city that was ravaged by bloodshed, fire, and smoke after protesters fighting to keep Ukraine close to the European Union instead of Russia set up camp there. But all the chaos ended four years ago, so I don’t know what my brother expects to find.
“Dearest God I don’t believe in,” Mama says, shaking her head at us. “What have I done in a past life I don’t believe in to raise such children? A comedian and a revolutionary! Groucho Marx and Karl Marx, I don’t know which is worse. Where did I go wrong? Tell me, did I not give them enough to eat, put clothes on their back, offer the occasional encouragement….”
Mama is unmoored and husbandless too, having left my stepdad at home, while my almost-professor husband is interviewing in Tallahassee. My stepdad promised never to set foot in Kiev after he left, and though I have come to accept his and Mama’s quiet love, his absence is a relief. He and my brother are constantly feuding, and it would only complicate things.
When the van pulls around, Mama tells my brother to help the driver load our luggage.
Misha rolls his eyes. “Long live the patriarchy,” he says, pumping a fist in the air. “You’re both capable of carrying your own luggage, but you think only a man can do it. What can I do that you can’t? I’ve worked out, like, twice in my life.”
I smack the back of his bushy idiot head. “Save it for your professors.”
“Your mother is tired and your sister is expecting,” says Mama. My pregnancy has made her nervous, conjuring her own pregnancy struggles, and she hardly lets me lift a finger.
My brother regards me as if he had forgotten this until now. “Right,” he says, and he finishes loading the bags, though the driver does most of the work.
Oksana, Behave! Page 19