But the woman was faster. Even as the snake was striking, her hand was reaching up to grab it, to hold it firmly by the back of the neck. The snake hissed, its mouth straining toward her, its tail thrashing back and forth, and then went limp. Gently, like a mother stroking a child, the woman traced the rough cross just visible in the scales on its head. The snake calmed. Its body relaxed, its mouth closed, its head bowed toward the dirt. When at last the woman put it down, it crawled docilely into a fold of her skirt and lay still.
Maisie was very pleased with herself when they brought her home, as though her recovery were a magic trick she had performed.
“Yesterday I sick,” she said. “Today I better!” She skipped down the hospital corridor, holding Jane’s hand.
Billy was waiting in the car on the other side of the automatic doors. Jane could see him sitting in the driver’s seat, his form distorted by the double layer of glass, the car window and the thick hospital door. He looked smaller than he was, a fun-house Billy hunched like a mobster over the steering wheel. The sight unsettled her. She paused, and Maisie tugged on her arm to get her moving again.
The March air was cold and smelled of snow. Inside the car there was a sharper smell. Soap? Aftershave? Billy’s hair was wet from the shower, his face closely razored, revealing the hard, clean plane of his jaw. Scrupulous. In the back Maisie ate a graham cracker and kicked the front seat. Billy drove fast down the slushy streets. The silence was icy, aching. Maisie began to hum.
Jane started to talk. “The doctor said that the virus Maisie had, the RSV, it’s something you can only get once,” she said. “Like chicken pox.”
There was a pause. Then Billy replied, “People do sometimes get chicken pox a second time, though, don’t they? Isn’t that what shingles is? Or is it rickets?”
“I think rickets is what sailors get. When they don’t get enough vitamin C. That’s why they used to give them lime juice on whaling ships. But you’re right, of course. About getting chicken pox twice.”
Billy was silent.
“We always believe doctors, don’t we?” Jane went on. “What they say. Just like Masha believed hot olive oil would cure a child’s cough because the midwife told her it would.”
Billy swung the Honda fast onto Monroe Street. The back end fishtailed as the car roared up the hill.
“Can I need another cracker?” Maisie asked.
Jane reached over the seat and handed her one. “Why does it bother you so much when I talk about Masha?” she said to Billy.
Billy said nothing for a minute. Then he said, “Why do you have to talk about her all the time?”
“I don’t talk about her all the time,” Jane said.
Billy stared out the windshield at the wet street.
“She’s my work, Billy. I’m not supposed to talk about my work?”
“Yes, of course!” Billy said. “I just wish you’d talk about other things more. It would help convince me that your head is here, in this world. More than it’s there. That you care about what’s going on with us as much as you care about them.”
“Of course I do!” Jane said. “Don’t be ridiculous!”
“Do you?” Billy said. “Maisie was sick. You seemed kind of—I don’t know. Blasé isn’t exactly the word. Detached. Distanced.”
From the back seat Maisie chirped, “I not sick! I better!”
“I have not been blasé about Maisie being sick!” Jane said. “I was terrified!”
“I not sick,” Maisie repeated. “I said good-bye, tent.” She meant the oxygen tent. “Good-bye, hop-sital!”
“You weren’t here,” Billy said. “I couldn’t reach you. You didn’t return my calls! It was frightening, goddammit!”
“I forgot to charge my phone!” Jane said. “I’m sorry! You didn’t say she was sick in the message you left on Helen’s machine—how was I supposed to know?”
“I better,” Maisie reminded them yet again. “Dat nurse tole me—I’m all good!”
They had reached the house. Billy parked and switched off the car. Jane got out, opened the back door, and unstrapped Maisie from her seat while Masha’s letter sat perfectly still and silent in the vault of the Newberry Library, like a star at the center of a solar system.
…
Sigelman knocked on Jane’s office door. He wore a rumpled shirt under a brown suit jacket and his half-bald head reflected the overhead lights. “Come have lunch with me,” he said. “I’m on my way now.”
Jane opened her mouth to decline, but what was the point? He wanted to have lunch with her; she would have lunch. Nothing in her life was very much fun right now, but this might be.
“Have the mushroom strudel,” Sigelman suggested when they were seated in the narrow upstairs restaurant on State Street. “It’s very good.”
“All right,” Jane said.
“It always makes me think of that scene in The Lime Trees,” Sigelman said. “The one where Sergey and Irina go mushroom hunting in the forest.”
Jane, who had been examining the menu, looked up. “He carries the basket for her, and their hands touch as she lifts the cloth to drop the mushrooms in,” she said.
Sigelman smiled, a real smile instead of his usual wolfish grin, and quoted in Russian: “‘The brush of her small, smooth hand against his large one, hardened by work, made her feel nearly faint. Her cheeks reddened and she could not look at him but lowered her eyes to the forest floor, scattered with pink and white wildflowers. As she struggled to regain her composure, a slow bee buzzed its way into the mouth of a wild geranium, brushing pollen from a neighboring flower against the stamen and collecting nectar on its hungry tongue.’”
“Poor Irina,” Jane said, impressed, despite herself, at his recall. “Poor Sergey, I should think!”
“Sergey’s dead. He doesn’t know the difference. Whereas Irina is left alone, her last hope of marriage gone.”
“They should have been more careful picking the mushrooms,” Sigelman said.
“Yes,” Jane agreed. “They were fatally distracted by lust.”
The waitress brought a bottle of wine and uncorked it. Sigelman waved her away, poured the wine himself, and raised his glass.
“To your career,” he said.
Jane could see the way he must have looked decades before, a dashing young man from behind the Iron Curtain with a way of looking at you that made you feel revealed, as though you were a text he were explicating.
“Thank you,” she said, and they drank.
“So,” Sigelman said. “How was Chicago?”
Jane put her wineglass down. “How did you know about that?”
Sigelman shrugged. “It is a secret?”
“No.”
“Well, then. Was it a good trip?” His pale eyes watched her blandly. Gray pebbles.
Now it was Jane’s turn to shrug. She took another drink of wine. It was dry and cold and faintly acidic, and it tingled as it went down her throat. “All right,” she said. “I’d hoped to spend the whole week, but as it turned out I only got a couple of days.”
“I heard your daughter was in the hospital,” Sigelman said. “What a scare! But she’s all right now?”
Jane looked the tablecloth, concentrating on not starting to cry. “Yes. She’s all right.”
“Such a frightening thing,” he went on, leaning toward her. “Of course you had to come right back! I’m very glad to hear she’s all right.”
“Thank you,” Jane said. Part of her thought he was snowing her, practicing his charm out of boredom, perhaps, or just to keep in practice. What did he care about Maisie? But another part of her felt that the warmth and sympathy were real. See, she wanted to say to some-one—Shombauer perhaps, or Helen. See, he’s not so bad!
The food arrived. The mushroom strudel was delicious, and Sigelman told a story about a nephew whose appendix had burst when he was thirteen. “I went to visit him in the hospital,” Sigelman said. “He was all right by then—convalescing with the TV on and everything.
Absolutely fine! But my sister, she was a wreck. No sleep for a couple of days and worried sick, and her English wasn’t so good, either. The hospital terrified her, she couldn’t understand half of what anyone said.
“So I told her, ‘Go home!’ Joseph was fine. ‘Hannah,’ I said, ‘you need some rest. I’ll stay with him.’ Not that he needed anyone to stay with him, a big boy of thirteen. At that age I was already cutting up meat at the butcher—ha!” He looked at her to see what she thought of the picture of him at thirteen in a bloody butcher’s apron.
Jane smiled and cut another bite of strudel. “Go on,” she said.
“So, I promised I would stay with him. And Hannah went home, and I sat down next to Joseph and I told him I wanted to get him something, something to entertain him. Because he was going to have to stay in the hospital another couple of days for the doctors to keep an eye on him. ‘Joseph,’ I said, ‘what can I bring you? Comic books or a Walkman, maybe?’ This was 1982, more or less, and Walkmans were hot—all the rage, you know. But Joseph hemmed and hawed. He didn’t want a Walkman, but I could tell there was something he did want. Only he wasn’t saying what.
“He was a skinny kid, my nephew, growing like they do at that age, their pants always too short. And he had acne all over his face. And he was shy. Even with me, his uncle! So I tried to encourage him. ‘Joseph,’ I said, ‘go ahead and tell me! You want a camera? A couple of record albums? How expensive can it be?’
“But he just shook his head. ‘Uncle Otto,’ he said, ‘it’s not something expensive.’
“So I said, ‘What, then? Spit it out!’ And he goes red as a beet, and he leans over to me and he whispers: ’Hustler. That’s what I want! Can you get me some Hustler magazines?’”
Now Sigelman began to laugh, a great hoarse guffaw that made people at the tables near them turn and look. “Hustler magazine!” he repeated. “Can you believe it? Playboy, he said—Playboy—that was too dull for him! He’d heard Hustler was so much more exciting.” He laughed with his head thrown back, his wattles jiggling.
Jane had to laugh, too: it was such a Sigelman story. She should have guessed, she thought, what the punch line would be. “So did you get them for him?”
But Sigelman didn’t answer. The story and his laughter had cost him breath, and he began to cough.
“Otto,” Jane said. “Otto, are you all right?” She leaned toward him and he shut his eyes, which were watering now, two rivulets running down the loose skin of his cheeks, and he nodded, making a great effort. Conversation at the tables around them stopped, and the young waitress hovered nearby, unsure if there was something she should do.
At last he managed to bring the coughing under control. He opened his eyes and let out a long, phlegmy breath. “Sorry.” He wiped his face with his napkin. He was sweating. He poured himself another glass of wine and drank it down. “I’m fine. Just this fucking cough I get sometimes!”
“Have you seen a doctor?”
“Sure I have,” he said. “Fucking doctors. Johnny-one-notes. Why should I give up my one pleasure in life, just to hang around here for a few more years?”
Smoking, he meant. Jane finished her wine. “Somehow I think you have other pleasures, too,” she said.
“Well,” Sigelman said with what was either sincerity or mock sincerity—Jane couldn’t tell—“there’s always the work.”
“The work!” Jane repeated, and she went to pour them some more wine to toast it, but the bottle was empty.
Sigelman gestured to the waitress for another bottle. “Are you going to tell me about this trip of yours or not?” he said to Jane. “Surely it wasn’t a total waste of time?”
Jane looked at him, at his gray, jowly face into which a bit of color had begun to return, his rumpled shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the age-spotted scalp with its wisps of white hair. Half a bottle of wine in her, she could no longer remember what she thought she was protecting by not telling him. Besides, she had to tell somebody. The words, unspoken, felt electric in her mouth. “Actually,” she said. “I did find something.”
He leaned just perceptibly forward. “What?” he said.
“A letter,” Jane said. “Wedged in the back of one of Maria Petrovna’s diaries.” She was gratified to see the gray pebbles of his eyes narrow. “It’s from Karkova to her sister Varya. It’s very strange and very interesting. It says she got up in the middle of the night and went down to the river and picked up a snake. She seems not to have returned home for several weeks after that.”
Sigelman put down his wine glass. “Where did she go?”
“I don’t know. She refers to peasants’ huts, but she’s not specific.”
“It sounds like—”
“It sounds like Dama Zmiev. Yes.”
Sigelman said nothing. He sat with his big brow furrowed, frowning. The waitress, who had long ago cleared their plates, now took the salt and pepper off the table, leaving the stained cloth bare except for the check.
“There are lots of references to snakes in her diaries as well,” Jane went on. “Particularly in the later years. I hadn’t noticed how many until recently.”
But Sigelman wasn’t interested in what was in the diaries. “Just the one letter?” he said. “Uncataloged?”
“Just the one. And even that I didn’t get to finish! It was closing time, and I almost got into a tug-of-war with the desk guy. And then Maisie was sick.”
It was almost two o’clock now and the restaurant was empty. Out on the street a bus roared by. Jane reached for her purse.
Sigelman smiled and leaned back comfortably in his chair. The web of red veins in his cheeks grew redder. “So,” he said, “we think we may have uncovered a biographical basis for Dama Zmiev. But we don’t really have enough information.”
Jane, who had been fumbling for her wallet, turned and looked at him. “I think I may have uncovered!” she said. She stared into his baggy gray troll’s eyes.
“Of course,” Sigelman said. “You.”
* * *
That night, after putting Maisie to bed, Jane went downstairs where Billy was watching the Bulls game. She sat beside him on the old brown sofa. “What’s the score?” she asked.
“Bulls up by two.”
“Close game.”
Billy said nothing. The light from the television flickered across his face so she could see only intermittently how tense and unhappy he looked.
“Want a beer?” Jane asked.
Billy glanced over at her, surprised. “Okay,” he said. “Sure.”
Jane got up, went into the kitchen, came back with an opened beer. She handed it to Billy.
“Thanks,” Billy said.
“You’re welcome.”
“You’re not having one?”
“No.” Jane pulled her legs up under her, turned her face to the television.
There was a pause. Jane tried to follow the game. Then Billy said, “Since when are you that kind of wife?”
Jane looked at him again. He looked like someone she used to know a long time ago. “What kind of wife?” she asked.
“The kind who gets up to get her husband a beer.”
“I’m the same kind of wife I’ve always been,” she said. “What kind do you want?”
The game went to commercial. Billy shook his head. “No,” he said. “You’re different.”
“How, exactly?” Jane asked. She was curious.
Billy shrugged stiffly. “I think you used to be happier. Before,” he said.
Before? Jane thought. Before what? Before Maisie was born? Before they were married? Before they moved to Madison and she had a job and he didn’t? Suddenly she was crying. It was all too much for her: Maisie’s illness and Billy’s coldness and Masha’s letter and her own seeming inability to do anything right. She hadn’t even managed to finish reading the letter! Sigelman, she was sure, would never have left the way she had. Tears slid down her face.
Billy, who could never bear to see anyone in pain, put his ar
ms loosely around her. Jane leaned into his chest and wept. “I’m sorry,” she said. She couldn’t stop crying. His chest was solid, and she would have known his smell anywhere. She wrapped her arms around him and held him tight, and he fell back against the cushions, and she lay on top of him and began to kiss him. She kissed his face, his stubbly cheeks, and the hollows beneath his eyes. She kissed his ear and felt him sigh involuntarily as she breathed into it, felt the hardening inside his jeans. She slipped her hands under his shirt. His skin was warm. She pulled his face around and kissed his mouth. His lips opened for her, his teeth grazed her teeth.
“Let’s go upstairs,” Billy whispered.
Jane reached down to find his zipper. His penis pulsed in her fingers and he groaned and reached inside her blouse.
“Jane,” he said urgently. “Let’s go up to bed.”
She knew what he was thinking. Felicia could walk in any time, but Jane didn’t care. She slid her skirt up to her waist and pulled her underwear off, and at last Billy stopped talking.
But afterward, when she lay with her head cradled on his chest, he sat up and gently pushed her off.
“Let’s just lie here a minute,” Jane said.
“Janie. Come on.” Billy found his pants, buttoned his shirt.
Jane sank into the scratchy cushions of the couch and watched him.
He picked up her underpants and tossed them over to her. He glanced at the door. He ran his hands through his hair to smooth it.
“Billy,” Jane said, letting the underpants lie where they had fallen. “I have to go back to Chicago on Saturday.”
He looked at her in utter disbelief. “What?” he said.
“Just for the day. I found something when I was there. A letter. It could be very important.” Jane was getting cold, but it seemed better to tell him while she was still naked. It was as though she wanted to make him see she wasn’t hiding anything.
“What’s important,” Billy said, “is for you to be home for a while! At least until Maisie is a hundred percent better. Until things settle down.”
Lady of the Snakes Page 16