by Jane Smiley
Charlie laughed.
Monique made herself a little more comfortable on the end of his bed, leaning back against the footboard and crossing her legs. She was, indeed, a beautiful woman, but now that she had confessed her age, he could see it. He said, “So—are you married?”
“That, too, is an interesting question.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was married in Russia, but my husband disappeared, and then I left, and my husband does not seem to have reappeared. He has not contacted my family.” She shrugged.
“Don’t you care?”
“It has been almost ten years since I saw him. He could well be dead by this time, because he was easily offended—he did not like people telling him what to do. Once everyone in Russia had guns and weapons, the life of someone who was easily offended became very dangerous.”
Charlie, who had never been to Russia, didn’t know quite what to say about this, so he tried the only thing he could think of. “If you are thirty-three, then you would have been raised a Communist.”
Monique gave him a bemused look, then said, “Well, were you raised a capitalist?”
“Of course.”
“What does that mean? To be a capitalist, you must have some capital.”
“No,” said Charlie, with a pleased and rather self-satisfied feeling at what he was about to say, “to be a capitalist, you have to have an idea. Well, a good idea.”
“And you had some good ideas when you were a child?”
“I have a good idea now.”
“May I ask what it is?”
“Well, in a nutshell, and this is what the best investment-advisers tell you all the time, invest in what you know. I realize that I am just one of a very large group of men who are getting older, and the age cohort behind me is even more vast, and so I am on the cutting edge of an important social phenomenon. Let me show you.”
Charlie threw off his covers and walked over to the lowboy, where he opened his case and looked at it fondly. He carried it over to Monique and set it on the bed. He said, “You may not be interested in my health, but plenty of folks are, or should be, because what works for me will work for them.”
“You take all of these pills?”
“I do. This, for example, is saw palmetto, which I take for prostate health and repair. This here is Viagra, which is a wonder drug. Here’s the aspirin. Did you know that the bark of the willow tree has been used all over the world for all sorts of therapies since—”
Monique was counting. “You have sixteen. No, seventeen types of pills here.”
“Yes, I do. It’s a complicated regimen, and sometimes I get a little mixed up, but it’s doable, and I feel great, better than I have in years. Look at this.” He pulled a photo out of a pocket in the lid of the case. He said, “This is what I looked like ten years ago.” The photo was of him; he had had Karen take it, and he had been a little surprised that the drugstore was willing to develop it, but not a peep out of them. It was full-front, top to bottom. He said, “It’s not just the paunch and the sagging pecs and the loss of muscle mass in the shoulders, or even the jowls. Look at my jowls. They were a lot worse then. You can go to the gym and fix those things, or even—”
“You are showing me a picture of yourself naked.”
“Yes.” He looked at it again. He had looked at it so many times over the years that in a way he had forgotten that it was at all immodest. “But it’s purely informational. See how bad my skin tone was? Loose and pasty and dehydrated. That was ten years ago! I was a fairly young man, but I felt like I was a hundred years old. I was working for Pepsi then, and between you and me—”
She took the photograph out of his hand and slid it back into its sleeve in the lid of his case, then she closed the lid. She said, “Have you taken all your pills today?”
“Well, yes, but I was saying—”
“Then let’s talk about something else.”
“But we were talking about something else. The regimen of pills I have in here can change the lives of millions of men, and, through them, the lives of their whole families. That’s my idea. I have a friend who is an expert in Chinese medicine, and through no fault of his own is stuck in a little shop in Chinatown in New York City. I haven’t even told you about the most miraculous—”
All of a sudden, Monique knocked the chest off the bed, and it landed upside down on the carpet.
“Hey!” exclaimed Charlie, thinking he should have known something like this could happen. And then, when he bent down to pick it up and turn it over, she started spanking him with the flat of her hand on his bare ass, which was what reminded him that his ass was bare. Whack, whack. He didn’t get away until the middle of the third whack, which went astray and clipped him on the leg. He jumped up, case safely in hand, and turned to confront her. She was grinning. He said, “What the hell are you doing?”
“I’m sorry.” But she didn’t look sorry.
Charlie set the case down carefully, hoping that he would remember in the morning to sort through the pills, many of which looked similar, but, thank God, not exactly the same. That was another part of his idea—make all the pills look different, color-coded or something, so that old guys—
Her grin faded to something harder. She said, “You have fondled my posterior and shown me a picture of yourself naked and walked around in front of me without any shorts on. It was my feeling that a little discipline would help you learn to mind your manners.”
Now Charlie felt his first real burst of anger. He shouted, “What’s the matter with you, lady? You showed up in my room at, what is it, eleven-thirty at night, and I am supposed to be welcoming you with a cup of tea and a cookie? Get the fuck out!”
But he was standing there in his nightshirt (a T-shirt, actually, not long enough to cover himself), and he was between the bed and the door, and he was trying not to get any closer to her, so he sensed that his voice lacked a certain measure of authority. For that reason, perhaps, she continued to sit on the bed. He ran his hand over the right cheek of his ass. It stung. Right then, he decided maybe she was crazy. Maybe that talk about vitamin D, though it sounded good, was really some sort of delusion, and this was a Jekyll-and-Hyde sort of transformation. By day she was a perfectly respectable girl working for, admittedly, a set of strange people, but by night she roamed the mansion—
She said, “You didn’t think that was even a little fun? Would you like to spank me? I like it myself. Have you ever done it?”
“Get spanked? Or spank?”
“Either one.”
“Well, I used to spank my kids. I’ve never gotten spanked before, at least not since I was maybe four years old.”
“Did you enjoy spanking your kids?”
“I don’t know. I never thought about it. They needed to be spanked, and they got spanked, and that was the end of it.”
She stood up and began to unzip her jeans.
“You know,” said Charlie, “I don’t think…” His anger had given way to just a dot of fear, just a grain of unease. When she had unzipped her jeans, she slid them down maybe six or eight inches, and he saw that she was wearing no underwear, and that, furthermore, she had shaved her pubes in one of those new styles, just a strip, maybe three inches long and, it looked like, dyed. At any rate, it was red. She pushed her ass out of her jeans and turned around, showing it to him. It was a nicely shaped ass. Of course, he had noticed that at the dinner table. He said, “I guess you’ve decided to take my gesture at the dinner table as an invitation.”
Her voice was a little muffled, but it sounded like she said, “I have been mulling that over. I am of two minds about that.”
She shifted her weight from one leg to the other, and her ass changed shape. Of course it was tempting. He hadn’t actually had anything to do with women since the separation. The few women who made up to him were divorcées or widows more or less his own age, and they didn’t appeal to him. And he seemed to be not especially attractive to the women he was inter
ested in. It had not escaped his notice, for example, that Zoe more or less avoided him, though he would have said that he himself was more attractive than Paul. Of course, Paul had no money, but it was clear he had some sort of other capital, however bogus that might be. It sort of got his goat, to tell the truth. Thinking of this, he said, “Did you notice the guy with the beard?”
“Of course.”
“What did you think of him?”
“Excuse me?” Her voice was even more muffled.
“Do you find him attractive? On a scale of, say, one to ten, where would you—”
She stood up and turned around and pulled up her jeans. To tell the truth, that was something of a relief to him. She said, “I saw him making yoga postures in the herb garden before dinner. He is very supple and strong. That is appealing in its way.”
“But when he gets down to his shorts, you can see there’s a lot of sun damage from exercising—”
She sat on the bed again. She held up her finger to him and said, “But, you see, that is what I was saying earlier. He has allowed the sun to naturally envelop him with what you might call a carapace. Yes, he is leathery, but he is evidently very healthy and vital, and what you call sun damage is really a protective layer. It is not so appealing to some, perhaps, but I see the fact that he has done this as a sign of intelligence and experience. I would say that he is appealing in a certain way. He has something to offer. Expertise is sexy.”
“Most Americans would just say he is one weird guy. And did you see how Isabel has taken up with the little agent? That surprised me. She must outweigh him by—”
“From the point of view of someone like myself, who has come from Russia and lived in France, most Americans are narrow-minded, ignorant, and provincial.”
Charlie was offended at once. He felt his face go red, and he saw that she noticed it. She said, “So now are you ready to spank me? I have insulted your country; Americans hate that sort of thing. Here, I will compound the insult. Once I was at the opera in Saint Petersburg, and there were some Americans sitting near me, a whole group. They were well-dressed adults, and evidently important, because they were sitting in good seats, but they could not sit still in their chairs. They were shifting and talking and squeaking and interfering with the performance. Eventually, several of them dozed off, and then, at the interval, most of them left. It was like watching children. All around them, the Russians were sitting quietly and enjoying the performance.”
Charlie didn’t quite know how to respond to this, so he said, “Don’t Russians hate being insulted?”
Monique threw back her head and laughed. “It is not possible to insult Russians more than Russians insult themselves. For Russians, it is a point of pride to believe that Russians are hopeless. It is like—Have you ever read any books about the Stalinist era? Let’s see, there was one by Evgenia Ginsburg. In it, she talks about how, when she was in a retraining camp in Sibir, the soldiers there would drink the antifreeze of their trucks when they had no vodka or other alcohol. And they would live and keep working. This is a point of pride for Russians, that they get so desperate that they would drink antifreeze that would kill anyone else, but that they are so tough that they would live through it. My husband was like that. Once, he was so drunk that he did not see a truck coming toward him, and it hit him and rolled over him, and broke his ankle, but he got up and staggered home anyway, and he only discovered that his ankle was broken the next morning. He was as proud of being stupid as he was of being undaunted. I came to not care for him very much in the end.”
“What was his name?”
“His name was Viktor Vassileyevich Storokin. We were from a town inland of Sochi. Have you heard of Sochi?”
“No.”
“I am not surprised. But Sochi is a very famous city. It is on the Black Sea, and in Russia, but it has palm trees and tea plantations. It is very tropical and very beautiful. It is the Menton and the Honolulu of Russia. Have you heard of Odessa?”
Charlie thought he had.
“It is rather near to Odessa, though Odessa is now in Ukraine. Sochi is not in Ukraine, but in Russia.”
“Is that the sort of place Max would be making his movie?”
“What movie is that?”
“Your boss wants him to make a movie of an old Russian book called Taras Bulba.”
“Oh. By Gogol. Yes. I have not read that book, but Gogol was Ukrainian from the steppe. He is famous for writing about lots of things, and for offending the Tsar. He wrote a play, and the Tsar got up and left in the first act of the first performance, and so Gogol escaped to Europe that very night, because he was afraid the secret police were going to come get him and throw him in prison. He also wrote a famous book called Dead Souls, about a man who buys the property that used to remain in the serfs even after they had died. But at the end of his life, after he had finished it, Gogol thought better of that book, and tried to burn it in his stove. I have read a little of that book, but I don’t remember anything except the lonely idea of going around to the impoverished estates in a horse-drawn carriage. I prefer a Russian novel called Fathers and Sons. Have you read that?”
Charlie shook his head. He said, “I’m not much of a reader. I like the Discovery Channel, though.”
“Dead Souls is a very difficult book, but Fathers and Sons is about a family. The troubled ones die off, and the family lives on, and there is a baby at the end. It is not very exciting, but it is pleasant, which is a rare quality in Russian books.”
Charlie yawned.
Monique looked at her watch. She said, “It isn’t yet midnight,” as if she was surprised that Charlie was tired. He said, “That seems late to me.”
“I, by contrast, am wide awake.”
“Maybe you should find your friends Marya or Joe.”
“Joe is gay. He’s with Raphael. Marya and I spend enough time together. We are friends, but I need a larger group than we have here, and it is too inconvenient to go all the way down to town when I have to be back here early in the morning. And, of course, there is no television or Internet access. When I saw your group, I thought I might find some entertainment among you.” She shrugged, as if to say that anyone can be wrong sometimes. “It would be nice to talk to this girl Zoe Cunningham. She is very pretty. I can’t quite believe that she is with your group. It seems like a comedown for her after the people she has been with in the movies.”
“We’re her family. Max is her former husband. Isabel is her daughter, and Delphine is her mother. I’m Max’s friend, and Elena is Max’s new girlfriend. Simon is Elena’s son.”
“He is most attractive.”
“That’s what he thinks.”
Monique laughed. She said, “Actually, Marya and I flipped a coin, and she got Simon. I got you.”
“I thought you were just walking down the hallway—”
“The gallery.”
“—and you came in here on impulse.”
“Did I say that?”
“Yes.”
“It was more of a game than that.”
“Now you’re telling the truth, right?”
“Maybe. But what does it matter?”
“I think it’s always better to tell the truth. That’s how I raised my kids.”
“You spanked them until they told the truth?”
“Sometimes I did, I have to say. One of my boys, Jared, he seemed to lie a lot. My wife, Karen, said that it was because he was the second child, and he could see that there were plenty of things that his older brother was doing that we parents had no idea of, so that idea that the older one had, that he would be caught if he did something wrong, the younger one didn’t have. He could see the disparities between what was going on and what we knew all too well.”
“How many children do you have?”
“Five. They’re all married now. I have twelve grandchildren at this point. I bet there’s another one on the way, but my wife hasn’t told me about it yet. We’re separated. We’re working on the divo
rce.”
“And so what purpose did it serve for you to leave your home and go off on your own?”
“I get to do what I want. I have to admit that sometimes I don’t enjoy what I’m doing and it seems kind of aimless and stupid, but it is what I want to do, and that’s better than doing what she wanted to do.”
“What was that?”
By now Charlie was sitting on the bed again. He lifted his legs and turned, so that he was leaning against the headboard. His legs looked odd, skinny and sort of droopy, so he flipped the bedspread over them, but the bedspread was so luxurious that now he had in his mind the image of his weird old legs underneath this princely piece of goods. He cleared his throat. “Oh. Are you really interested?”
“Interested enough for now.”
That didn’t seem like the best beginning to his tale, but it didn’t look, from her relaxed gaze up at the ceiling, like she was leaving, so he told it anyway. He said, “I don’t guess you’ve heard of the Catholic Charismatic Movement? That was something that started in the eighties. I don’t know much about it, because neither my wife nor I was Catholic. My family was Congregationalist, and her family was Episcopalian. Her name was Cooperman, but the Episcopal church was the ‘best’ church in her town, so they went there. My wedding took place at a country club where my wife’s family belonged. She was half German and half English, all Republican. There were a couple of Jewish relatives, but they just avoided the ham. That was the only way you could tell that any of them were Jews. In those days, we didn’t think as much about religion as we do now. Anyway, we had the kids and my career and the house, and she joined various book groups and bridge clubs in addition to our country club, and I think, for a while there in the seventies, she joined a consciousness-raising group, because she got me to buy this white elephant of a big wooden hot tub, I don’t even remember how you heated the thing except that it was a pain in the ass, and then she heard about some people in California dying in their hot tub because it was too hot and they were drinking wine and somehow the overheating of their bodies caused them to pass out and die. Literally, that’s the main thing I remember from the consciousness-raising period, because I was working at Pepsi fifty hours a week most of the time, and traveling a lot, too, but she met another woman in this group, named Margaret. Margaret had long hair, down to her waist, and she wore it like that for years, just hanging down to her waist, and one time she actually said to me, ‘My hair is my glory,’ and, I mean, she had nice enough hair, but I ask you. So I guess I could say that I never really got Margaret, but my wife was crazy about her, and they did a lot of things together. Margaret’s husband was a proctologist, and he was always working, too, so we hardly ever got together as couples, which seemed to suit everyone just fine. That was all through the eighties. Margaret kept her hair long and, as she said, ‘her ideals intact.’ She hated Reagan, which in my book was a compliment to him, and the main thing I remember about the eighties was that my kids were teenagers, and once in a while Margaret and I got into screaming political arguments. Anyway, it got to be sort of a joke, like the two relatives at every Thanksgiving dinner who fight about whether FDR was the Joe Stalin of American history.