Without a Hero

by T. C. Boyle

  AND AM GOING DOWN UNDER DARK

  VAULTS.

  “It is from Akhmatova’s great work, ‘Poem Without A Hero.’ Is it not sad and beautiful?”

  I looked at her toenails shimmering in the light of the morning; I looked at her bare legs, her face, her eyes. We’d been out every night—I’d taken her to Chinatown, Disneyland, the Music Center and Malibu pier—and the glow of it was on me. “Yes,” I said.

  “This is a great work about dying for love, Casey, about a poet who kills himself because his lover will not have him.” She shut her eyes again. “‘For one moment of peace I would give the peace of the tomb.’” She let the moment hang, mesmeric, motes of dust floating in a shaft of light through the window, the bird of paradise gilded with sun, the traffic quiet on the street. And then she was looking at me, soft and shrewd at once. “Tell me, Casey, where does one find such a hero today? Where does one find a man who will die for love?”

  The next day was the day she took my bike to the Beverly Center and we had our first falling-out.

  I’d come home late from work—there was a problem with the new person we’d hired, the usual semiliteracy and incompetence—and the place was a mess. No: actually, “mess” didn’t do it justice. The apartment looked as if a troop of baboons had been locked inside it for a week. Every record I owned was out of its jacket and collecting dust; my books were scattered throughout the living room, spread open flat like crippled things; there were clothes and sheets and pillows wadded about, and every horizontal surface was inundated with a farrago of take-out food and crumpled wrappers: Colonel Sanders, Chow Foo Luck, McDonald’s, Arby’s, Taco Bell. She was on the phone in the back room—long-distance to Russia—and she hadn’t changed out of the T-shirt she’d been wearing the previous morning. She said something in Russian, and then I heard her say, “Yes, and my American boyfriend he is so very wealthy—”

  “Irina?”

  “I must go now. Do svidaniya.”

  I stepped into the bedroom and she flew across the room to fling herself into my arms, already sobbing, sobbing in midair. I was disconcerted. “What’s the matter?” I said, clutching her hopelessly. I had a sudden intimation that she was leaving me, that she was going on to visit Chicago and New Orleans and New York, and I felt a sinkhole of loss open up inside me. “Are you—is everything all right?”

  Her breath was hot on my throat. She began to kiss me there, over and over, till I took hold of her shoulders and forced her to look me in the eye. “Irina, tell me: what is it?”

  “Oh, Casey,” she gasped, and her voice was so diminished I could barely hear her. “I have been so stupid. Even in Russia we must lock up our things, I know, but I have never dreamed that here, where you have so much—”

  And so I discovered that my eight-hundred-dollar bicycle was no more, just as I was to learn that she’d sheared the blades off the Cuisinart attempting to dice a whole pineapple and that half my records had gouges in them and that my new white Ci Siamo jacket was stained with lipstick or cranberry juice or what might have been blood for all I knew.

  I lost my sense of humor, my forbearance, my graciousness, my cool. We had a scene. Accusations flew. I didn’t care about her, she shrieked; things meant more to me than she did. “Things!” I snorted. “And who spends half her time at Robinson’s and Saks and the May Company? Who calls Russia as if God Himself would come down from heaven and pay the bills? Who hasn’t offered to pay a penny of anything, not even once?”

  Her hair hung wild in her face. Strands of it adhered to the sudden moisture that glistened on her cheekbones. “You do not care for me,” she said in her tiniest voice. “I am only for you a momentary pleasure.”

  I had nothing more to say. I stood there fuming as she fussed round the room, drawing on her jeans and boots, shrugging into the baby-blue patent-leather jacket and tamping out a cigarette in an abandoned coffee mug. She gave me a look—a look of contempt, anger, sorrow—and then she snatched up her purse and slammed out the door.

  I didn’t sleep well that night. I kept listening for her key in the lock, kept picturing her shouldering her way through the punks and beggars on the boulevard and wondering if she had friends to go to. She had some money, I knew that, but she hoarded it like a capitalist, and though she knew all the brand names, she bought nothing. I saw the absurd go-go boots, the fringed jacket, the keen sexy spring in her walk that belied her phlegmatic Russian nature, and half-a-dozen times I got up to look for her and then thought better of it. In the morning, when I got up for work, the apartment was desolate.

  I called home sporadically throughout the day, but there was no answer. I was angry, hurt, sick with worry. Finally, around four, she picked up the phone. “It is Irina,” she said, her voice tired and small.

  “It’s me, Casey.”

  No response.

  “Irina? Are you all right?”

  A pause. “I am very well, thank you.”

  I wanted to ask where she’d spent the night, wanted to know and possess her and make demands, but I faltered in the presence of that quavering whispery voice. “Irina, listen, about last night…I just want to say I’m sorry.”

  “That is no problem,” she said. And then, after a pause, “I leave you fifty dollars, Casey, on the table in the kitchen.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I am going now, Casey. I know when I am not wanted.”

  “No, no—I didn’t mean…I mean I was mad, I was angry, that was all. You’re wanted. You are.” I was pleading with her and even as I pleaded I could hear that I’d subconsciously picked up something of her diction, clipping my phrases in a too-formal way, a Russian way. “Listen, just wait there a minute, will you? I’m on my way home from work. I’ll take you wherever you want to go—you want to go to the airport? The bus? Whatever you want.”

  Nothing.

  “Irina?”

  The smallest voice: “I will wait.”

  I took her out to Harry’s that night for Italian food, and she was radiant, beaming, almost giddy—she couldn’t stop grinning at me, and everything I said was the funniest thing she’d ever heard. She cut her veal into neat little strips, chattered at the waiter in a breathy fluid Italian, tossed off one glass of Chianti after another, all the while pecking kisses at me and entwining her fingers with mine as if we were sixteen-year-olds at the mall. I didn’t mind. This was our reconciliation, and the smoke of sensuality hung over the table.

  She leaned toward me over dessert—mille foglie with a cappuccino and Grand Marnier—and gave me the full benefit of her swollen eyes. The lights were low. Her voice was a whisper. I expected her to say, “Do you not want to take me home to bed now?” but she surprised me. With a randy look, she cleared her throat and said, “Casey, I have been wondering”—pause—“do you think I should put my money in CD or mutual fund?”

  I couldn’t have been more stunned if she’d asked me who played third base for the Dodgers. “What?”

  “The Magellan has performed best, has it not?” she whispered, and the talk of money seemed to make her voice sultrier still. “But then the founder is retiring, is this not so?”

  A sudden anger came over me. Was she hustling me, was that it? She had money to invest and yet accepted her room and meals and all the rest from me as if it were her divine right? I stared down into my cappuccino and muttered, “Hell, I don’t know. What are you asking me for?”

  She patted my hand and then said in her fading slip of a voice, “Perhaps this is not the time.” Her mouth made a little moue of contrition. And then, almost immediately, she brightened again. “It is early yet, Casey,” she said, quaffing her Grand Marnier and rising. “Do you not want to take me to the Odessa?”

  The Odessa was a club in the Fairfax district where Russian émigrés of all ages would gather to sit at long cafeteria-style tables and listen to schmaltzy singers and third-rate comedians. They drank water glasses of warm Coke and vodka—the Coke in the left hand, vodka in the right, alternati
ng swigs—and they sang along with and got up from the table and careened round the room to the frenetic Tatar strains of the orchestra. We stayed past closing, danced till we were soaked in sweat and drank enough vodka to fuel a 747. In the course of the evening we toasted Gorbachev, Misha Baryshnikov, the girls of Tbilisi, Leningrad and Murmansk, and drank the health of everyone in the room, individually, at least three times. Irina passed out in the car on the way home, and the night ended after she vomited gloriously in the potted ficus and I helped her to bed as if she were an invalid.

  I felt queasy myself the next morning and called in sick at the office. When I finally got out of bed, around noon, Irina’s door was still closed. I was brewing coffee when she slumped through the kitchen door and fell into a chair. She was wearing a rumpled housecoat and she looked as if she’d been buried and dug up again.

  “Me too,” I said, and I put both hands to my temples.

  She said nothing, but accepted the coffee I poured for her. After a moment she pointed out the window to where one of my neighbors was letting her dog nose about in the shrubs that rimmed our little patch of lawn. “Do you see that dog, Casey?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “It is a very lucky dog.”

  “Lucky?”

  “Yes,” she said, slow and lethargic, drawing it out. “It is a dog that has never tasted wodka.”

  I laughed, but my eyes felt as if they were being sucked into my head and the coffee set my insides churning.

  And then she took me by surprise again. Outside, the dog had disappeared, jerked rudely away at the end of a leash. The coffee machine dripped coffee. Someone gunned an engine two blocks away. “Casey,” she said, utterly composed, utterly serious, and she looked deep into my eyes. “Do you not want to marry me?”

  The second blowup came at the end of the month, when the phone bill arrived. Four hundred twenty-seven dollars and sixty-two cents. I recognized a few calls—my lawyer’s number, Rob Peterman’s, a drunken cri de coeur I’d made to an old flame (now married) in Santa Barbara. But the rest were long-distance overseas—to Moscow, Novgorod, London, Paris, Milan. I was outraged. I was in shock. Why should I be responsible for her bills? I did not want to marry her, as I’d explained to her the morning after the Odessa. I told her I’d just been divorced and was leery of new attachments, which was true. I told her I still had feelings for my wife, which was also true (of course, those feelings were exclusively antipathetic, but I didn’t mention that). Irina had only stared at me, and then she got up from the kitchen table and went into her room, shutting the door firmly behind her.

  But now, now she was out somewhere—no doubt looking at popcorn makers or water-purifying systems at some department store—the house was in a shambles, I hadn’t even loosened my tie yet and the phone bill was sending shock waves through me. I’d just poured a drink when I heard her key in the door; she came in beaming, oblivious, in a rustle of shopping bags and cheap trinkets, and I was all over her. “Don’t you know what this means?” I shouted. “Don’t you know that the telephone isn’t free in this society, that somebody has to pay for it? That I have to pay for it?”

  She gave me a hard cold look. Her eyes narrowed; her chin trembled. “I will pay it,” she said, “if that is how you feel.”

  “How I feel?” I shouted. “How I feel? Everybody pays their way in life, that’s how I feel. That’s the way society works, like it or not. Maybe it’s different in the workers’ paradise, I don’t know, but over here you play by the rules.”

  She had nothing to say to that—she just held me with her contemptuous look, as if I were the one being unreasonable, and in that moment she reminded me of Julie, my ex-wife, as if she were in league with her, as if she were her double, and I felt bitter and disgusted to the core. I dropped the bill on the coffee table and stalked out the door.

  When I got home from work the next day, the phone bill was still there, but there were five pristine one-hundred-dollar bills laid out beside it like a poker hand. Irina was in the kitchen. I didn’t know what to say to her. Suddenly I felt ashamed of myself.

  I drifted into the room and draped my sportcoat over the back of one of the chairs and went to the refrigerator for a glass of orange juice. “Hello, Casey,” she said, glancing up from her magazine. It was one of those women’s magazines, thick as a phone book.

  “Hi,” I said. And then, after an interval during which the level of the orange juice mounted in the glass and I gazed numbly out the window on a blur of green, I turned to her. “Irina,” I murmured, and my voice seemed to be caught in my throat, “I want to say thanks for the phone bill—the money, I mean.”

  She looked up at me and shrugged. “It is nothing,” she said. “I have a job now.”

  “A job?”

  And there was her smile, the sharp little teeth. “Da,” she said. “I have met a man at the Odessa when I go for tea last Thursday? Do you remember I told you? His name is Zhenya and he has offered me a job.”

  “Great,” I said. “Terrific. We should celebrate.” I lifted my glass as if it contained Perrier-Jouët. “What kind of work?”

  She looked down at her magazine and then back up again, holding my eyes. “Escort service.”

  I thought I hadn’t heard her right. “What? What are you saying?”

  “It is an escort service, Casey. Zhenya says the men who come here for important business—in the movies, banking, real estate—they will like me. He says I am very beautiful.”

  I was stunned. I felt as if I’d had the wind knocked out of me. “You can’t be serious?” My voice was pitched high, a yelp. “Irina, this is”—I couldn’t find the words—”this is not right, it’s not legitimate. It’s, it’s prostitution, don’t you know that?”

  She was studying me, her shrewd eyes, the little nugget of her face. She sighed, closed the magazine and rose from her seat. “It is not a problem,” she said finally. “If I do not like them I will not sleep with them.”

  And what about me? I wanted to say. What about Disneyland and Zuma Beach and all the rest of it? Instead I turned on her. “You’re crazy,” I spat. “Nuts. Don’t you know what you’re getting into?”

  Her eyes hadn’t left mine, not for a second. She was a foot away from me. I could smell her perfume—French, four hundred dollars the ounce. She shrugged and then stretched her arms so that her breasts rose tight against her chest. “What am I to do,” she said in her smallest voice, so languid and sad. “I have nothing, and you will not marry me.”

  That was the end for us, and we both knew it.

  I took her out to dinner that night, but it was a requiem, an interment. She stared off into vacancy. Neither of us had much to say. When we got home I saw her face illuminated for an instant as she bent to switch on the lamp, and I felt something stir in me, but I killed it. We went to our separate rooms and to our separate beds.

  In the morning, I sat over a cup of lukewarm coffee and watched her pack. She looked sweet and sad, and she moved as if she were fighting an invisible current, her hair streaming, imaginary fish hanging in the rafters. I didn’t know if the escort-service business was a bluff or not, didn’t know how naive—or how calculating—she was, but I felt that a burden had been lifted from my shoulders. Now that it was over, I began to see her in a different light, a softer light, and a sliver of guilt began to stab at me. “Look, Irina,” I said as she struggled to force her suitcase shut, “I’m sorry. I really am.”

  She threw her hair back with a jerk of her chin, shrugged into the baby-blue patent-leather jacket.

  “Irina, look at me—”

  She wouldn’t look. She leaned over to snap the latches on her suitcase.

  “This is no poem, Irina,” I said. “This is life.”

  She swung round so suddenly I flinched. “I am the one, Casey,” she said, and her eyes leapt at me. “I am the one who can die for love.”

  All the bitterness came back to me in that instant, all the hurt and guilt. Zhenya, Japan, the mysterio
us benefactor in Moscow, Rob Peterman and how many others? This was free enterprise, this was trade and barter and buying and selling—and where was the love in that? Worse yet: where was the love in me?

  I was hard, a rock, granite. “Then die for it,” I said.

  The phrase hung between us like a curtain. A car moved up the street. I could hear the steady drip-drip-drip of the kitchen tap. And then she bowed her head, as if accepting a blow, and bent for her suitcases. I was paralyzed. I was dead. I watched her struggle with her things, watched her fight the door, and then, as the sudden light gave way to darkness, I watched the door swing shut.

  RESPECT

  WHEN SANTO R. STEPPED into my little office in Partinico last fall, I barely recognized him. He’d been a corpulent boy, one of the few in this dry-as-bones country, and a very heavyset young man. I remembered his parents—peasants, and poor as church mice—and how I’d treated him for the usual childhood ailments—rubella, chicken pox, mumps—and how even then the gentlest pressure of my fingers would leave marks on the distended flesh of his upper arms and legs. But if he’d been heavy then, now, at the age of twenty-nine, he was like a pregnant mule, so big around the middle he hardly fit through the door. He was breathing hard, half-choked on the dust of the streets, and he was wet through to the skin with sweat. “Doctor,” he wheezed, sinking a thumb into the morass of his left pectoral, just above the heart, “it hurts here.” An insuck of breath, a dab at the brow, a wince. I watched his bloated pale hand sink to cradle the great tub of his abdomen. “And here,” he whispered.

  Behind him, through the open door, the waiting room full of shopkeepers, widows and hypochondriacs looked on in awe as I motioned Crocifissa, my nurse, to pull the door closed and leave us. My patients might have been impressed—here was a man of respect, who in the company of his two endomorphic bodyguards had waddled up the stairs and through the waiting room without waiting for anyone or anything—but for my part, I was only alarmed at the state he was in. The physician and his patient, after all, have a bond that goes far deeper than the world of getting and keeping, of violence and honor and all the mess that goes with them—and from the patient’s point of view, self-importance can take you only so far when you come face to face with the man who inserts the rectal thermometer.