Without a Hero

by T. C. Boyle

  “No, but”—backing off now, distraught, his den, his den—“but we need the basics, at least. Furniture. A TV. My, my textbooks. My scopes.”

  The light through the unshaded windows is harsh, unforgiving. Every corner is left naked to scrutiny, every board, every nail. “All taken care of, Mr. Laxner, no problem.” Susan Certaine stands there in the glare of the window, hands on her hips. “Each couple is allowed to reclaim one item per day from the warehouse—anything you like—for a period of sixty days. Depending on how you exercise your options, that could be as many as sixty items. Most couples request a bed first, and to accommodate them, we consider a bed one item—mattress, box spring, headboard and all.”

  Julian is stunned. “Sixty items? You’re joking.”

  “I never joke, Mr. Laxner. Never.”

  “And what about the rest—the furniture, the stereo, our clothes?”

  “Read your contract, Mr. Laxner.”

  He can feel himself slipping. “I don’t want to read the contract, damn it. I asked you a question.”

  “Page two hundred and seventy-eight, paragraph two. I quote: ‘After expiration of the sixty-day grace period, all items to be sold at auction, the proceeds going to Certaine Enterprises, Inc., for charitable distribution, charities to be chosen at the sole discretion of the above-named corporation.’” Her eyes are on him, severe, hateful, bright with triumph. This is what it’s all about, this—cutting people down to size, squashing them. “You’d be surprised how many couples never recall a thing, not a single item.”

  “No,” Julian says, stalking across the room, “no, I won’t stand for it. I won’t. I’ll sue.”

  She shrugs. “I won’t even bother to remind you to listen to yourself. You’re like the brat on the playground—you don’t like the way the game goes, you take your bat and ball and go home, right? Go ahead, sue. You’ll find it won’t be so easy. You signed the contract, Mr. Laxner. Both of you.”

  There’s a movement in the open doorway. Shadow and light. Marsha. Marsha and Dr. Hauskopf, frozen there on the doorstep, watching. “Julian,” Marsha cries, and then she’s in his arms, clinging to him as if he were the last thing in the world, the only thing left her.

  Dr. Doris and Susan Certaine exchange a look. “Be happy,” Susan Certaine says after a moment. “Think of that couple in Ethiopia.” And then they’re gone.

  Julian doesn’t know how long he stands there, in the middle of that barren room in the silence of that big empty house, holding Marsha, holding his wife, but when he shuts his eyes he sees only the sterile deeps of space, the remotest regions beyond even the reach of light. And he knows this: it is cold out there, inhospitable, alien. There’s nothing there, nothing contained in nothing. Nothing-at all.

  WITHOUT A HERO

  IN THE END, through luck and perseverance and an unwavering commitment to the spirit of glasnost, she did finally manage to get what she wanted. It was amazing. With two weeks to go on her six-month visa, she fell head-over-heels in love, got swept up in a whirlwind romance and found herself married—and to an American, no less. His name was Yusef Ozizmir, he was a naturalized citizen from a small town outside of Ankara, and he was production manager for a prosthetics firm based in Culver City. She called me late one night to give me the news and gloat a bit over her honeymoon in Las Vegas and her new apartment in Manhattan Beach that featured three bedrooms, vast closets and a sweet clean smell of the sea. Her voice was just as I’d remembered it: tiny, heavily accented and with the throaty arrhythmic scratch of sensuality that had awakened me in every fiber when I first heard it—the way she said “wodka” still aroused me even after all that had happened.

  “I’m happy for you, Irina,” I said.

  “Oh,” she gasped in her tiny voice that was made tinier by the uncertain connection, “that is very kind of you; I am very grateful. Yusef has made me very happy too, yes? He has given me a ring of twenty-four karats gold and a Lincoln automobile.”

  There was a pause. I glanced across my apartment at the sagging bookshelves, the TV tuned to a dim romantic comedy from the black-and-white era, the darkened window beyond. Her voice became tinier still, contracting till it was barely audible, a hesitant little squeak of passion. “You know…I miss you, Casey,” she breathed. “I will always miss you too much.”

  “Listen, Irina, I have to go…” I was trying to think of an excuse—the kitchen was on fire, my mother had been stricken with ptomaine and rushed to the hospital, my knives needed sharpening—but she cut me off.

  “Yes, Casey, I know. You have to go. You must go. Always you go.”

  “Listen,” I began, and then I caught myself. “See you,” I said.

  For a moment there was nothing. I listened to the cracks and pops of static. Finally her voice came back at me, the smallest voice in the world. “Yes,” she said. “See you.”

  When I first saw her—when I laid eyes on her for the first time, that is—it was by prearrangement. She was in the baggage-claim area of the Tom Bradley International Terminal at LAX, and I was there to pick her up. I was late—a failing of mine, I admit it—and anxious on several counts: about meeting her, missing her, about sleeping arrangements and dinner and a hundred other things, ranging from my total deficiency in Russian to my passing acquaintance with the greats of Russian literature and the fear that she would offer to buy my jeans with a fistful of rubles. I was jogging through the corridors, dodging bleary-eyed Sikhs, hearty Brits and circumspect salesmen from Japan and Korea, the big names—Solzhenitsyn, Chekhov, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy—running through my head like an incantation, when I spotted her.

  There was no mistaking her. I had Rob Peterman’s description to go by—twenty-eight, blond, with a figure right out of the Bolshoi and a face that could kill—but I didn’t need it. She was the center of a vortex of activity, a cigarette in one hand, a plastic cup of vodka in the other, her things scattered about her in cyclonic disarray—newspapers, luggage, makeup, paper towels and tissues, a sweater, several purses, half-a-dozen stuffed animals and a Dodgers cap occupying the two rows of seats behind her. She was engaged in an animated discussion of perestroika, Lithuanian independence, the threat of nuclear war and the relative merits of the Jaguar XJS as opposed to the Mercedes 560 SEC with three well-lubricated businessmen in rumpled suits. The cigarette—“A Gauloise, of course; what else is there?”—described an arc in the air, the hopelessly out-of-date go-go boots did a mazurka on the carpet, the fringe of the baby-blue patent-leather jacket trembled and shook. I didn’t know what to do. I was sweating from my dash through the airport and I must have had that crazed, trapped-in-a-burning-barn look in my eyes.

  “And do you know what I give you for that Mercedes?” she demanded of the shortest and most rumpled of the businessmen. “Eh?”

  No response. All three men just stared at her, their mouths slightly agape, as if she’d just touched down from the far reaches of space.

  “Nichevo.” A little laugh escaped her. “This is what means ‘nothing’ in Russia. Nichevo.”

  I edged into her line of sight and made an extenuating gesture, describing a little circle of apology and lament with my hands and shirtsleeve arms. “Irina?” I asked.

  She looked at me then, stopped dead in the middle of her next phrase and focused her milky blue—and ever so slightly exophthalmic—eyes on me. And then she smiled, allowing me my first take of her slim, sharp-toothed grin, and I felt a rush of warmth as the blood shot through me—a Russian smile, I thought, my first Russian smile. “Casey,” she said, and there was no interrogatory lift to it, no doubt. “Casey.” And then she turned away from her three interlocutors, dismissing them as if they’d never existed, and fell into my arms.

  There was no shame in wanting things, and Irina wanted plenty. “Where I come from,” she would say in her tiny halting breathy voice, “we do not have.”

  She revealed this to me for the first time in the car on the way back from the airport. Her eyes were shining, the Dodgers c
ap (a gift from one of the businessmen) rode the crown of her head like a victory wreath, and she gaily sang out the names and citations of the cars we passed on the freeway: “Corvette! Z-car! BMW 750!” I tried to keep my eyes on the road, but couldn’t help stealing a glance at her from time to time.

  Rob Peterman had been generous in his description, I could see that now. In the rush of excitement at the airport I saw only the exotic Irina, Rob Peterman’s ideal made flesh, but as I began to study her I saw that she was no beauty—interesting, certainly, and pretty to a degree, but a far cry from the hyperborean goddess I’d been led to expect. But isn’t that the way it always is?

  “Is that not I. Magnin?” she cried as we pulled off the freeway. And then she turned to me and gave me that smile again, purring, cooing. “Oh, Casey, this is so—how do I say it?—so very much exciting to me.”

  There was the bulge of her eyes, too much forehead, the drawn mouth and sharp little teeth, but she fit her jeans as if they’d been tailored for her, and there was her hair, and her smile too. To a man three months divorced, as I then was, she looked good—better than good: I forgot the ideal and tumbled into the actual. “I’ll take you there tomorrow,” I said, “and you can run wild through the store.” She was beaming at me, worshiping me with her eyes. “Tonight,” I said, letting my voice trail off a bit so as not to betray my eagerness, “tonight I thought we’d just have a quiet dinner—I mean, that is, if you’re not too tired—”

  Two weeks earlier Rob Peterman had called me from Georgetown, where he was one of the principal buttresses of the International Relations Department at the university. He’d just come back from a six-week lecture tour of Russia and he had some good news for me—better, even: he’d brought back a little gift for me.

  I’d known Rob since college. We were fraternity brothers, and we’d had some wild times. We’d kept in touch ever since. “Gift?”

  “Let me put it to you this way, Case,” he said. “There are a lot of university students in Moscow, thousands upon thousands of them, and a high percentage of them are young women from the provinces who’ll do anything to stay in the big city. Or to travel, for that matter.”

  He had my attention, I had to admit it.

  “You’d be surprised how many of them tend to gather round the Intourist bars and hotels, and how polished and intelligent they are, not to mention beautiful—you know, the Ukrainian princess, the Georgian fleshpot, the exotic long-limbed Slav…”

  “Yes? And so?”

  “Her name’s Irina, Case,” he said, “and shell be in L.A. next week, TWA flight number eight nine five, arriving from Paris, where she connects from Moscow. Irina Sudeikina. I, uh, met her while I was over there, and she needs attachments.” He lowered his voice. “If Sarah found out about her she’d take me to the vet and have me fixed, know what I mean?”

  “What does she look like?”

  “Who, Irina?” And then he gave me his generous description, which ran to twelve paragraphs and fanned the flames of my anticipation until I was a fireball of need, greed, hope and lust.

  “Okay,” I said finally, “okay, I hear you. What flight did you say she was on?”

  And so there we were, in the car, driving up Pico to my apartment, my question about dinner, with all its loaded implications, hanging in the air between us. I’d pulled out the sofa bed in the back bedroom, stuck a pole lamp in the corner, tidied up a bit. She hadn’t said anything about a hotel, and I hadn’t asked. I glanced at the road ahead, and then back at her. “You’re tired, aren’t you?” I said.

  “Do you not live in Beverly Hills, Casey?” she asked.

  “Century City,” I said. “It borders on Beverly Hills.”

  “In a mansion?”

  “An apartment. It’s nice. Plenty of room.”

  She shifted the Dodgers cap so that the brim fell over the crown of her sunstruck hair. “Oh, I have slept on the aeroplane,” she said, turning her smile up a notch. “I am not tired. I am not tired at all.”

  As it turned out, Irina was to be my houseguest for the next two months. She settled into the back room like a Bedouin settling into a desert outpost, and within a week her things were everywhere, ubiquitous, from the stuffed panda perched atop the TV to the sweat socks beneath the kitchen table and the Harlequin romances sprouting up from the carpet like toadstools. She took a free, communistic approach to my things as well, thinking nothing of scattering my classic Coltrane albums across the couch or breezing down to the Beverly Center on my eight-hundred-dollar Bianchi all-terrain bike, without reference to lock or chain (where it was promptly stolen), not to mention using the telephone as if it had been provided by the state for the convenience of apartment dwellers and their guests. Slovenly, indolent, nearly inert, she was the end product of three generations of the workers’ paradise, that vast dark crumbling empire in which ambition and initiative counted for nothing. Do I sound bitter? I am bitter. But I didn’t know all this back then, and if I had known, I wouldn’t have cared. All I knew was Irina’s smile and her hair and the proximity of her flesh; all I knew was that she was in the bedroom, unpacking and dressing for dinner.

  I took her to a sushi place on Wilshire, thinking to impress her with my savoir-faire and internationalism, but she surprised me not only in being an adept at ebi, unagi and katsuo, but by ordering in flawless Japanese to boot. She was wearing a low-cut minidress made of some shiny brittle material, she’d drawn her hair back severely and knotted it up over her head in a big puffy bun, and she’d put some effort into her makeup. The sushi chef was all over her, chattering away in Japanese, fashioning whimsical creations of radish and carrot for her, rolling out his rare stock of fugu, the Japanese blow-fish. I’d been a regular at the restaurant for two years at least, and he’d never looked at me twice. “Uh, Irina,” I said, as the chef slouched reluctantly off to make a scallop roll for the couple beside me, “where did you learn your Japanese? I mean, I’m impressed.”

  She paused, a sliver of Norwegian salmon tucked neatly between her lips, patted her mouth and gasped, “Oh, this is nothing. I have spent six months in Japan in 1986.”

  I was surprised. “They—the government, I mean, the Russian government—they let you travel then?”

  She gave me a wink. “I am at that time a student of languages at Moscow State University, Casey…am I not then to learn these languages by visiting the countries in which they are spoken?” She turned back to her plate, plucked a morsel from some creation the chef had set before us. “Besides,” she said, speaking to the plate in her tiny voice, “there is a man I know in Moscow and he is able to arrange things—even difficult things.”

  I had a hundred questions for her—about life behind the iron curtain, about Japan, about her girlhood and college and the mysterious benefactor in Moscow—but I focused instead on my sake and a slippery bit of maguro that kept eluding my chopsticks, and thought only of getting in the car and driving home with her.

  I was a little tense on the way back—the first-date jitters, the sort of thing every male goes through from adolescence to the grave: will she or won’t she?—and I couldn’t think of much to say. It didn’t really matter. Irina was oblivious, lit with sake and three big pint-and-a-half bottles of Asahi, waving her cigarette, crossing and uncrossing her legs and rolling the exotic Anglo-Saxon and Latinate phrases over her tongue with real relish. How nice it was here in America, she thought, how sympathetic, and what a nice car I had, but wouldn’t I prefer a sportier model? I made a lot of money, didn’t I?—she could tell because I was so generous—and wasn’t it nice to have Japanese food, something you could find in one place only in Moscow, and then only if you were an apparatchik?

  At home we had an after-dinner drink in the living room—Grand Marnier, twenty-six dollars the fifth; she filled the snifter to the top—while Coltrane serenaded us with “All or Nothing at All.” We talked about little things, inconsequential things, and she became progressively more animated as the level fell in her glass. An
d then, without a word of explanation—hello, goodbye, good night and thank you for dinner, nothing—she stood, refilled her glass and disappeared into the bedroom.

  I was devastated. So this is it, I thought bitterly, this is my passionate Russian experience—a hundred and twenty bucks for sushi, half a bottle of Grand Marnier and a rush-hour schlep to the airport and back. I sat there, a little sick in the stomach, and listened to the sad expiring click of the turntable as the record ended and the machine shut itself down.

  With all she’d had to drink, with the time change and the long flight from Moscow, I figured she’d probably hit the bed in a cold faint, but I was wrong. Just as I was about to give it up, heave myself out of the chair and tumble into my own comfortless bed, she appeared in the doorway. “Casey,” she murmured, her voice rich and low, and in the muted light I could see that she was wearing something silky and diaphanous—a teddy, a Russian teddy. “Casey,” she crooned, “I cannot seem to sleep.”

  It was about a week later that she first asked me if I knew Akhmatova. I did know her, but not personally. She was dimmer to me even than Pushkin or Lermontov, a fading memory out of a drowsy classroom.

  “We studied her in college,” I said lamely. “After she died—in the sixties, right? It was a survey course in Russian literature. In translation, I mean.”

  Irina was sitting cross-legged on the couch in a litter of newspapers and magazines. She was wearing only a T-shirt and a pair of panties, and I’d just watched in fascination as she applied a glistening coat of neon-pink polish to her toenails. She looked up at me a moment and narrowed her pale-blue eyes. Then she closed them and began to recite:

  “FROM THE YEAR NINETEEN-FORTY

  AS FROM A HIGH TOWER I LEAN,

  ONCE MORE BIDDING GOODBYE

  TO WHAT I LONG AGO FORSOOK,

  AS THOUGH I HAVE CROSSED MYSELF