by Tom Perrotta
Everyone I meet dispenses a bit of wisdom on how to survive the “difficult” winters—embrace the outdoors, drinking, travel, drinking, sun lamps, drinking, sex, drinking. The hydrologist offers to prepare spicy curries to keep me warm, offers to give me a taste of his very special curry. I decline, tell him I have a delicate constitution. Nils, my department chair, stops by my office. He says, “How are you holding up?” I assure him all is well. He says, “The first year is always the hardest.” He says, “You might want to take a trip to Detroit to see your family.” I thank him for the support.
I am walking around the lab, watching students work, when Magnus calls. I excuse myself and take the call in the hallway, ignoring the students milling about, with their aimless expressions.
My heart beats loudly. I can hardly hear Magnus. I say, “You didn’t need to take so long to call me.”
“Is this a lecture?”
“Would you like it to be?”
“Can I make you dinner?”
I ignore my natural impulse to say no. He invites me back to his trailer, where he prepares steak and green beans and baked potatoes. We drink beer. We talk, or rather, I talk, filling his trailer with all the words I’ve kept to myself since moving to the North Country, longer. I complain about the weather. At some point, he holds his hand open and I slide my hand in his. He traces my knuckles with his thumb. He is plainspoken and honest. His voice is strong and clear. He talks about his job as a logger and his band—he plays guitar. When we finally stop talking he says, “I like you,” and then he stands and pulls me to my feet. I stand on his boots and wrap my arms around him. He is thick and solid. When we kiss, he is gentle, too gentle. I say, “You don’t have to be soft with me,” and he grunts. He clasps my neck with one of his giant hands and kisses me harder, his lips forcing mine open. He brushes his lips across my chin. He sinks his teeth into my neck and I grab his shirt between my fists. I try to remain standing. I say, “My neck is the secret password.” He bites my neck harder and I forget about everything and all the noise in my head quiets.
In the morning, I want to leave quickly even though I can still feel Magnus in my skin. As I sit on the edge of the bed and pull my pants on, he says, “I want to see you again.” I say yes but explain we have to keep things casual, that we can’t become a thing. He traces my naked spine with his fingers and I shiver. He says, “We’re already a thing.” I stand, shaking my head angrily. “That’s not even possible.” He says, “Sometimes, when I’m miles deep in the woods, looking for a new cutting site, it feels like I’m the first man who has ever been there. I look up and the trees are so thick I can hardly see the sky. I get so scared, but the world somehow makes sense there. Being with you feels like that.” I shake my head again, my fingers trembling as I finish getting dressed. I feel nauseated and dizzy. I say, “I’m allergic to cats.” I say, “You shouldn’t talk like that.” I recite his words over and over for the rest of the day, the week, the month.
Several weeks later, I’m at Magnus’s trailer. We’ve seen each other almost every night, at his place, where he cooks and we talk and we have sex. We’re lying naked in his narrow bed. I say, “If this continues much longer, we’re going to have to sleep at my place. I have a real bed and actual rooms.” He smiles and nods. He says, “Whatever you want.” After Magnus falls asleep, I stare up at the low ceiling, then out the small window at the clear winter sky. Just as I’m falling asleep, his alarm goes off. Magnus sits up, rubbing his eyes. Even in the darkness I can see his hair standing on end. He says, “I want to show you something.” We dress, but he tells me I can leave my coat. Instead, he hands me a quilt. Outside, a fresh blanket of snow has fallen. The moon is still high. Everything is perfect and silent and still. The air hurts but feels clean. He cuts a trail to the barn and I follow in his footsteps. As Magnus walks, he stares up into the sky. I tell myself, “I feel nothing.” Inside the barn, I shiver and dance from foot to foot trying to stay warm. He says, “We have to milk the cows.” He nods to a small campstool next to a very large cow. I say, “There is absolutely no way.” Magnus leads me to the stool and forces me onto it. He hunches down behind me, and he pats the cow on her side. He hasn’t shaved yet, so the stubble from his beard tickles me. He kisses my neck softly. He places his hands over mine, and I learn how to milk a cow. Nothing makes sense here.
Hunting season starts. Magnus shows me his rifle, long, polished, powerful. He refers to his rifle as a “she” and a “her.” I tell him my father hunts and Magnus gets excited. He says, “Maybe someday your father and I can hunt together.” I explain that my father hunts pheasant, and by hunt, I mean he rides around with his friends on a four-wheeler but doesn’t really kill much of anything and often gets injured in embarrassing accidents. I say, “You and he hunt differently.” He says, “I still want to meet your father.” “I introduce only serious boyfriends to my family,” I say. Magnus holds my chin between two fingers and looks at me hard. It makes me shiver. This is the first time I’ve seen real anger from him. I wonder how far I can push. He says, “You won’t see me for a few days, but I’m going to kill a buck for you.” Five days later, Magnus shows up at my apartment still wearing his camouflage and Carhartt overalls. His beard is long and unkempt. He smells rank. He is dirty. I recognize only his eyes. Magnus steps inside and pulls me into a muscular hug that makes me feel like he is rearranging my insides. I inhale deeply. I am surprised by the sharp twinge between my thighs. When he kisses me, he is possessive, controlling, salty. He moans into my mouth and turns me around, pinning my arms over my head. He fucks me against the front door. I smile. Afterward, we both sink to the floor. He says, “The buck is in the car.” He says, “I missed you.” I want to say something, the right thing, the kind thing. I slap his thigh. I push. I say, “Please take a shower.”
I visit my parents in Florida for Thanksgiving and my mother asks why I don’t call as often. I explain how work has gotten busy. I explain how snow has fallen every single day for more than a month and how everyone thinks I’m from Detroit. My mother says I look thin. She says I’m too quiet. We don’t talk about the dead child or the father of the dead child. There is “this life” and “that life.” We pretend “that life” never happened. It is a mercy. Magnus calls every morning before he leaves for work and every night before he falls asleep. One afternoon he calls and my mother answers my phone. I hear her laughing as she says, “What an unusual name.” When she hands me my phone, she asks, “Who is this Magnus? Such a nice young man.” I push. I say he’s no one important. I say it a little too loudly. When I put my phone to my ear, I can only hear a dial tone. Magnus doesn’t call for the rest of my trip. We won’t speak until the end of January.
In my lab things make sense but they don’t. I can’t concentrate. I want to call Magnus, but my repeated bad behavior overwhelms me. The weather has grown colder, sharper. The world grows and I shrink. My students work on final projects. I have a paper accepted at a major conference. The semester ends; I return to Florida for the holidays. My mother says I look thin. She says I’m too quiet. When she asks if I want to talk about my child, I shake my head. I say, “Please don’t ever mention her again, not ever.” My mother holds the palm of one hand to my cheek and the palm of the other over my heart. I send Magnus a card and a letter and gift and another letter and another letter. He sends me a text message: I’M STILL ANGRY. I send more letters. He writes back once and I carry his letter with me everywhere. I try to acquire a taste for venison. The new semester starts. I have another paper accepted at a conference, this one in Europe. A new group of students tries to flirt with me while learning about the wonder of concrete. I get a research grant and my department chair offers me a tenure-track faculty position with the department. He tells me to take as much time as I need to consider his offer. He says the department really needs someone like me. He says, “You kill two birds with one stone, Katie.” I contemplate placing his head in the compression-testing machine. I say, “I prefer to be called K
ate.”
The hydrologist corners me in my lab late at night and makes an inappropriate advance that leaves me unsettled. For weeks, I will feel his long, skinny fingers, how they grabbed at things that weren’t his to hold. Even though it’s after midnight, I call Magnus. My voice is shaking. He says, “You hurt my feelings,” and the simple honesty of his words makes me ache. I say, “I’m sorry. I never say what I really feel,” and I cry. He asks, “What’s wrong?” I tell him about the married hydrologist, a dirty man with a bright pink tongue who tried to lick my ear and who called me Black Beauty and who got aggressive when I tried to push him away and how I’m nervous about walking to my car. Magnus says, “I’m on my way.” I wait for him by the main entrance and when I recognize his bulky frame trudging through the snow toward me, everything feels more bearable. Magnus doesn’t say a word. He just holds me. After a long while, he punches the brick wall and says, “I’m going to kill that guy.” I believe him. He walks me to my lab to get my things.
At my apartment, I hold a bag of frozen corn against Magnus’s scraped knuckles. I say, “I shouldn’t have called.” He says, “Yes, you should have.” He says, “You have to be nicer to me.” I straddle his lap and kiss his torn knuckles and pull his hands beneath my shirt.
Magnus starts picking me up from work every night, and if I have to work late, he sits with me, watching me. He tells me about trees and everything a man could ever know from spending his days among them. He often smells like pine and sawdust.
In March, winter lingers. Magnus builds me an igloo and inside, he lights a small fire. He says, “Sometimes, I feel I don’t know a thing about you.” I am sitting between his legs, my back to his chest. Even though we’re wearing layers of clothing, it feels like we’re naked. I say, “You know I’m not very nice.” He kisses my cheek. He says, “That’s not true.” He says, “Tell me something true.” I tell him how I hold on to the idea of Emma even though I shouldn’t, how she’s all I really think about, how she might be trying to walk now or say her first words. He brings my cold fingers to his warm lips. He fills all the hollow spaces.
JENNIFER HAIGH
Paramour
FROM Ploughshares
THE TRIBUTE WAS held downtown, far away from the theater district. Christine crossed the street gingerly, on four-inch heels thin as pencils—Ivan had always loved women in high heels—and checked the address against the invitation in her purse. The building was new and modern, the front window lettered with Cyrillic characters and a boldface translation: UKRAINIAN CULTURAL CENTER. She’d forgotten, nearly, that he was born in that country. To her he’d been a New Yorker, nothing else.
The upstairs gallery was large, the wood floors gleaming. A hundred chairs were arranged in a horseshoe, facing an improvised stage. At the door, a girl handed out programs—shyly, as if embarrassed by her unflattering but perhaps authentically Ukrainian hairstyle, a long braid wrapped around her head.
In the front row—RESERVED FOR BORYSENKO FAMILY AND FRIENDS—a woman sat alone. Christine studied her plump shoulders, her blond hair twisted into a loose chignon. Beth, she thought. The wife’s name was lodged in her memory like a bullet that could not be removed. Ivan’s marriage, its happiness or unhappiness, had once consumed her completely. On his desk, he’d kept a single photograph: the mysterious Beth sitting nude, her back to the camera, a naked infant asleep on her shoulder, a wash of pale hair hanging down her back. Now she wore a batik sundress. Her cleavage was deep and freckled, skin that had spent forty or fifty summers in the sun.
The room filled, hummed, quieted. A half-dozen men took seats on the stage. Finally Ivan came striding down the aisle with a girl on his arm. The crowd burst into applause.
He’d aged, of course. His hair, still longish and wavy, was now more gray than black. He whispered something to the girl—a round-faced brunette, impossibly young, squeezed into a clinging dress.
“Let me guess. You were his favorite student.”
Christine turned, startled by the intimacy. The man had leaned in close to her ear. For a second she’d felt his breath on her neck.
“I’m Martin, by the way.” He was her own age, handsome like a pirate—shaved head, a deeply suntanned face.
“Christine. How did you know I was his student?”
“Ivan is nothing if not consistent.” The man spoke in an unfamiliar accent. “He’s always had an eye for blondes.”
Christine glanced at the front row, where Ivan and the girl sat shoulder to shoulder. “It seems his tastes have changed.”
Martin followed her gaze.
“Darling, that’s Pia,” he said. “Ivan’s daughter.”
Ivan Borysenko had been her teacher, a visiting professor at the small, good upstate college she’d attended on scholarship. He’d come from the city on a one-year appointment to teach playwriting, a subject that hadn’t interested her in the slightest until he appeared.
She’d been a mercurial student, prone to infatuations: philosophy to French lit, Rousseau and Voltaire to Sartre and Genet. She’d studied these subjects with roughly equal aptitude, a generalist excelling at nothing, until Ivan came along.
He pronounced his name distinctly, with a soft roll of the r. Borrysenko. “It’s Ukrainian,” he’d explain, to blank stares. The Soviet Union had not yet crumbled; American students were unaware, still, of the many countries it comprised: the multitude of languages, plosive and sibilant; the lumbering syllables of those impenetrable names.
Christine’s first effort, a surrealistic one-act, had piqued his interest—and Ivan’s interest, she learned, was an irresistible force. She felt caught by him, mounted like a butterfly, held fast for his consideration and delight. Her nineteen-year-old self appeared to fascinate him completely—Christine, who had never fascinated anybody in her life. He selected her play for a student production and taught her to run auditions and rehearsals. They were assumed to be lovers, a misconception she didn’t correct. She was not, strictly speaking, a virgin. With her best friend, a boy named Tommy, she had suffered two attempts—one failed, one nominally successful; both awkward and crushingly sad. In the end, Tommy dropped out of school to be the lover of a wealthy man, surprising no one but Christine, who would love him the rest of his days. That he had loved but not desired her was a truth she confided to no one. She carried the shame like a disfiguring scar.
Ivan’s attentions, in private, were fierce and febrile, but it was his public devotion that thrilled her. As they crossed the campus together, she felt lit up from inside. This handsome older man, brilliant and sophisticated, had chosen Christine Mooney, wanted, and had her: this belief was etched on her classmates’ faces. To Christine, at nineteen, it was more than enough.
The tribute lasted two hours: glowing testimonials by writers and directors, a charismatic Irish actor she’d seen, a lifetime ago, on- stage. They spoke of Ivan’s lasting imprint on the New York theater, the generations of students he’d molded and shaped. His twenty-year marriage to Beth, his rock and muse; his famous devotion to Pia, who was born remarkable and became more extraordinary—it was agreed—with each passing year.
In the front row, Ivan sat between them, an arm around each.
After the final applause, the standing ovation, he was caught in a scrum of well-wishers. “He’ll be stuck here for an hour,” Martin predicted, guiding Christine through the crowd, his hand hovering lightly at her back.
She and Martin shared a cab to Paramour, the Soho restaurant where the after party would be held. “South African,” Martin said, when she asked about his accent. He was a dramaturge at Circle Rep, a job Ivan had helped him secure. Christine nodded and smiled, asked pertinent questions, and barely registered his answers, her mind elsewhere.
Paramour was already crowded, samba music nearly lost in the conversational roar. Christine stood in a corner, waiting for Martin to bring their drinks. Waiters circulated, precariously wielding trays of appetizers. All around her, strangers stood back to back, elbow to elbow—Ne
w Yorkers accustomed to crowds, to chaos. Old friends shrieked greetings; acquaintances made small talk at the top of their lungs. No one seemed to find this unsettling or strange.
She recognized a few faces from the tribute. At the bar, two playwrights shouted past each other. Across the room, Ivan’s daughter told a story to a rapt audience. The evening’s speeches had established that Pia was used to the spotlight. (At four she’d sat for a renowned Polish photographer, a portrait now hanging in the Guggenheim. She’d inspired a series of children’s books written by a friend of Ivan’s, and by her tenth birthday was eligible for an Equity card.) Christine watched her keenly, an ordinary-looking teenage girl, flushed and happy, tugging occasionally at her slinky dress. Her audience—a well-dressed couple, the Irish actor, a woman in a fedora—seemed captivated, their eyes bright and encouraging, as though watching a baby’s first steps. In Christine’s family, such attention was not lavished on children. Her mother would have called Pia a show-off. Christine found her marvelous.
She glanced out at the patio. A gray-haired man in Armani stood smoking, talking into a headset clipped to his ear. He stopped speaking when a pretty boy asked him for a light. The boy was blond and very young. He wore a silky shirt, blue paisley, that lay like paint on his skin.
I could never live anywhere else, Ivan had often said. To Christine, at nineteen, New York had seemed not merely the height of civilization but its actual center, the most vital point on earth. Later—after Tommy’s illness, his slow wasting—the city became a cemetery, a vast and teeming grave. His final month had been spent in a downtown hospice. His wealthy lover had paid for his care, but it was Christine who’d slept in a chair by his bed.