A Question of Return

by Robert Carr

  “One day you’ll understand,” he repeated.

  “I’ll understand you left your wife while she was pregnant with your child? Art, some things cannot be understood.” He kept quiet and she went on. “All right, what? What will I understand? Help me to understand now.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You can’t? Why? You don’t trust me? You say you love me, yet you don’t trust me.”

  “It affects other people.”

  “It affects me too.”

  It was only after they ordered coffee that he gathered the courage to ask her what was happening.

  “Nothing, Art. Nothing is happening.”

  “You changed your mind. You were all set to taste my cooking, and then, just like that …”

  “I need to trust people, Art. I can’t live with secrets. I don’t want to do it anymore. You sound like my husband—it’s complicated, one day I’ll understand. ‘Beyond my control’ should be in there somewhere too as an excuse. That’s what Nicholas kept telling me. Keeps telling me. I don’t want complications anymore.”

  “You can trust me.”

  “But you don’t trust me, not even with an explanation. What you did was terrible.”

  “I would tell you if I could. Please, trust me.”

  “Trust you? You didn’t tell me you had a child in Moscow, a child you’ve never seen. I had to read about it in the Paris Review, Art. How can I trust you?”

  She kept staring at him, but there was nothing else he could say.

  “We need to talk, Art.”

  He burst out laughing. The couple at the next table glared at him. “Aren’t we?” he asked after he recovered.

  “A serious talk.”

  It was comic material. He’d write a poem about this dinner, he’d call it A Serious Talk. “There isn’t much merriment around this table, Audrey,” he said. “About?”

  “About me. About what I want, or feel, right now. And, in a way, about you and me.”

  “This does not sound good at all.”

  She sighed. “Art, I like you. You are a poet, an extraordinary man. People in the know say you are a genius, and I’m sure they are right.” She smiled. “Even Lezzard speaks highly of you. You are also nice. Very nice. Funny too, although not naturally inclined toward levity. I feel good when I’m with you. There is even an aura of mystery about you, but perhaps that’s true of anybody who runs away from Communist Russia. But at this time …”

  “Oh boy.”

  “At this time, I have other commitments.”

  He was tempted to say that he wasn’t asking for a commitment. A flimsy relationship, insubstantial, he’d settle for that.

  “Other commitments?”

  “I’m married, Art. My husband says he loves me and wants me back. I won’t be here much longer, in Toronto. Your life, at least for a few more years, is here—your teaching, your students, your father’s journal. My life is in London, with or without Nicholas. I love London. My father is there too. He’s not well, and he’s alone. I don’t think I did, but if I gave you the wrong impression, sent the wrong signals, I’m sorry.”

  “You mean, you’d rather have complications with your husband than with me.”

  “I’d rather have none at all.”

  He stared at his hands, not knowing where else to look. They were on the table, palms down, fingers slightly spread, as if his body needed additional support.

  She touched one of his hands. “I like you, Art. Don’t misunderstand me. In fact, I … No, it’s better this way.”

  He desperately wanted to believe that this was all a misunderstanding. Even though he’d half-expected it, the truth was hard to hear. It constricted his breathing and he gulped for air.

  “The stars are not aligned?” he asked.

  She nodded, although, he was sure, she heard the sarcasm in his voice.

  “What the hell does that mean? Oh, don’t answer that. It’s my wife, isn’t it? I mean, my former wife. Leaving her in Moscow …”

  “I wasn’t making it up, Art. I’d miss London, and my father would miss me … But, yes, I can’t get over the fact that you left your wife when she was pregnant with your son.”

  Why was she touching his hand? “I need another drink,” he said. “Do you mind?”

  “Of course not,” Audrey said. “Don’t be silly. I’ll join you. Let’s have some brandy.”

  What else was there to say? They ordered the drinks. The silence was heavy. He thought of Twain’s seedy stagecoach passenger—the one with the crushed cork leg—gasping for brandy. Except that his pain was real.

  “You’re smiling,” Audrey said, relieved to break the silence.

  “I’m having my annual do with my students next Saturday,” Laukhin said. “A combined dinner, my students and Colson Emslie’s students, at the Emslies. It’s always been there, a tradition since I joined the department. I provide the drinks, and Kate cooks. Russian fare, of course, for these occasions. Come with me. Dinner for my indentured, the ones slaving away on my father’s notebooks. Kate calls it ‘Colson’s and Art’s annual feeding of the serfs.’”

  She seemed to be searching for a way to decline the invitation, and was saved momentarily by the arrival of the waiter bearing brandy snifters.

  “I’m afraid I can’t,” she said. “I’m going to London on Friday night.”

  “Again?”

  She nodded.

  “How does Lezzard put up with you when you’re always away?”

  “Josiane is just about recovered. She’s already coming for a few hours three days a week. Lezzard doesn’t need two permanent staff, so it’s time for me to leave. I’m going back to check on an opportunity. Martha’s pushing me to open my own gallery.”

  She lowered her nose into the snifter, breathed in and began coughing. It took her a while to recover. The awkwardness returned. They drank quickly, with the silence hanging about them oppressively, like news of death, the death of their relationship, of their affair. What affair? It was over before it started.

  She touched his hand again. “Remember Strong Symmetries, that small ink and watercolour Lezzard had in the small room? He took it home to make room for the large Chemakoff oil.”

  He remembered it, the mannequin birds. Bird mannequins? What a sad way to end the evening—to end the whole thing—with both of them desperately searching for things to talk about.

  “It’s not in the books either,” Audrey went on. “I checked.”

  Laukhin nodded.

  “I thought you’d be more interested,” she said.

  “Maybe he owns it.”

  “Wait. Then I checked the books for 1981. I looked for the early Chemakoff oil he tried to sell the Osterhoudts in the fall of 1981 in the deal that fell through when he asked for cash. Well, there was no entry for it in that whole year. I checked several years. The only Chemakoff oils listed in the books, not many, were new ones, painted after he left the Soviet Union.”

  He couldn’t care less.

  “I did something else,” Audrey went on. “I asked Lezzard about the small ink and watercolour, where it was. He wondered why I was interested—did I have a customer in mind? I said, yes, myself. I might want to purchase it—a memento of my Toronto interlude. Was it still available? He said, it was, but only for cash. Cash again, Art.”

  He was only half-listening to Audrey’s story.

  “I asked him why he needed cash. He didn’t like the question. He said that it was not his drawing, that it belonged to a dealer in France he’d known for a long time who wanted to lower his taxes. He had bought it with cash from Chemakoff many years before, and he wanted to keep it that way. As simple as that—beyond Lezzard’s control.”

  He’d go home, drink, and write about a beautiful woman chattering away while her suitor’s heart was sinking. The whole evening was deserving of a poem—the careless way she kept touching his hands, a gesture clashing with her indifference. Part two of A Serious Talk.

  They left and walked f
or a while in silence.

  “Mr. Gratch returned this morning,” Audrey said.

  She waited for his reaction, but he had nothing to say. He should leave, just say goodbye and leave. It would be a relief for both of them.

  “It was busy,” Audrey went on, “as Saturdays usually are, and Lezzard and I were closing on a sale with a client couple. They wanted smaller payments spread over a longer period. Lezzard is very good at this, knows how far he can push, and it was only a matter of time before we had an agreement. Then I noticed him staring past the couple and becoming red in the face. I turned and saw Mr. Gratch leaning on the wall near the door. Lezzard told me to take over and went—well, flew—to him. I had never seen Lezzard walk so fast. We, of course, were startled, and stared at the two of them as their voices quickly got louder. They spoke Russian, clearly having an argument. I tried to get the couple back to the interrupted deal, and eventually did, but all three of us kept throwing looks at the drama near the door. It ended with Lezzard opening the door and showing Mr. Gratch the way out. He kind of pushed him out, actually. It was comical, two short elderly men shouting at and shoving each other. Lezzard was upset and still red when he returned. The buying couple looked at each other, and the man made a joke of it. ‘Late with your monthly dues, Mr. Lezzard?’ Probably without thinking, Lezzard answered, ‘Yes, funny, but it’s money he was after.’ He realized what he just said and rectified it somewhat with, ‘Charity. They all think I’m rich,’ and then, responding to our disapproving looks, added, ‘Russian Jehovah’s Witnesses, imagine that.’ As soon as the couple left, he went into the small room and, after closing the door, made a long phone call. Just as he did the previous time he had an argument with Mr. Gratch.”

  “Will you come to my place?” he asked. “Let’s end it all with a splash.”

  She stopped to look at him, either startled by, or considering his out of the blue proposition. “It wouldn’t be a good idea,” she said after a while.

  “This is it, then?”

  “I’ll call you.”

  “Something tells me you won’t.”

  “I’ll call you.”

  He was grateful for her lie, for the few inches of air between the ceiling and the water level, the few inches into which he’d thrust his nose and open mouth.

  In front of her mother’s apartment she did something unexpected—she kissed him. It was an open-mouthed kiss, not rushed at all. He could still taste and smell the brandy, and felt her breasts against his chest, and the back of her neck under his uncertain fingers. She moved away slowly and said, “Let’s not get carried away. Not tonight, anyway …”

  He didn’t get it, didn’t get it at all. It was as if she was attached to a bungee cord, and every time she got close to him, the elastic force pulled her back, out of his reach.

  It had turned cooler and windy. He walked to the Yonge subway. Once underground, he wished he’d taken a cab. The platform was dirty, the walls dull from years of grime. It must have been one of the requirements laid on the builder—make the stations unbearably gloomy. Coming from Moscow, it was one thing he couldn’t get used to. It made him think it was the Toronto subway, not the Moscow metro, that was built by convicts. The train was almost empty. Now and then it screeched, much like his heart. On a seat across from him a young woman with a Blue Jays baseball cap was nodding off, oblivious to Laukhin’s misery. At the near end of the car, a bookish looking man, thin, with a long grey beard and an umbrella from an earlier decade, was writing feverishly in a notebook and shaking his head. His lips were moving as he wrote, but, if he was talking out loud, his words were drowned out by the noise of the moving car. A great poem, Laukhin thought, or last instructions for tomorrow’s brunch.

  She had brought up the subject of Tanya, couldn’t get over it—those were her words. Leaving his pregnant wife in Moscow was, in Audrey’s eyes, a callous act which defined him. And so it would be in anybody’s eyes. It was a barrier, an invisible fence that set alarm bells ringing every time she tried to walk through it.

  * * *

  Tanya had rung him that Sunday morning and said she needed to see him. It was, she added, rather urgent.

  Laukhin said, “Come home. We’ll have lunch together, like in the old days.”

  “There’s none of your women skulking about? Joan Geraldine?”

  He laughed. “You know very well Joan Geraldine went back to England long ago. She’s married and bringing up twins now, and has little time for anything else. Come, Tanichka. The refrigerator is full. Old Fenya cooks for an army. You know that, she can’t change. Bring Vadim along.”

  “Vadim is away for a few days.”

  Come home—that had slipped out, although the Lavrushinsky Lane address remained her home on paper, since she had not officially moved out. And she still kept many of her things in the small bedroom. She had a key to the apartment, and he believed she dropped in to pick up a thing or two of hers when she was certain he was not in. She still worked at the hospital in Serpukhov and would take the train back to Moscow on weekends. For the last three years, she spent any free day she had with Vadim in a cramped room in a communal apartment. It must have been hard on Tanya, after more than ten years on Lavrushinksy Lane, but Vadim had told her he was going out of his mind thinking she was still living in the same apartment as her estranged husband. “And you are too, with your wife and child,” Tanya reminded him. At least that was what Tanya told Laukhin later, while she stored a few of her things in a suitcase. But Vadim was an insistent man, and in some way old-fashioned, and they moved in together in a small room vacated by a friend of his who had been transferred to Kiev.

  Tanya arrived out of breath. “The elevator is being fixed,” she explained. “That’s what the sign said, but no one was working on it.”

  They ate in the kitchen. He didn’t have to do nuch, just heat up the stuffed peppers prepared by old Fenya on Friday. She cooked the same amount she used to when his sister lived at home with him and his parents.

  Tanya declined a glass, but Laukhin poured himself some vodka. He felt a wave of tenderness and regret. She looked good, Tanichka, although—her old battle—she had put on a few pounds. She seemed preoccupied, and wasn’t even indignant when he proposed a trip to the bedroom.

  He reached for the saltshaker. Old Fenya had stopped using seasonings altogether. “Well?” he said.

  “I’m pregnant.”

  She had been pregnant once before, soon after they were married, but felt too young to be a mother, and he hadn’t cared one way or another. She’d had an abortion, and, somehow, afterward, never got pregnant again.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  He felt sad all of a sudden. “That’s wonderful, Tanyusha.”

  “It was a bit of a surprise. I’m not that young anymore. Vadim took it well, considering.”

  He knew what she meant. Considering that Vadim already had a fifteen year old son, that both Vadim and herself were still married to other people (although Vadim was in the process of divorcing), that she and Vadim lived in one small room with a shared bathroom and kitchen. He got up, walked to the sink where he turned on the tap, then, moving his chair closer to hers, sat back down. He brought his face close to hers and whispered, “Are you happy about it?”

  She was surprised by his precautions, but whispered back, “I think so.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you’re not entirely sure.”

  She sighed. “Tyoma, we can’t go on living in that room, Vadim and I, and soon the baby.”

  He nodded.

  “You have to help me,” she went on. “You have to help us.”

  He waited for her to go on.

  “What I mean, Tyoma … Let’s exchange this apartment for two smaller ones. One for you, and one for Vadim and me, and the child.”

  “I don’t think the Litfund will let me.” He poured himself another vodka and took a mouthful, his face still cl
ose to hers. “My hold on this apartment is tenuous. I expect to be thrown out at anytime.”

  “You’ve been saying that for years.”

  “Let’s go for a walk.”

  “Now?”

  “It has stopped raining.”

  “Will you help us?”

  “I can’t think while I’m static. I need to move.”

  “Give us some money, then. We’ll put a down payment on a cooperative apartment. You can do this with the money your father left you. We’ll pay it back, of course. In time.”

  His father had left him millions, true. He also had left him his notebooks. His father’s swollen face, eyes barely open, came back to him, as did the words he whispered whose meaning only he, Tyoma, understood. “Fuck Oleg, Tyomka, fuck Oleg Vinograd. For me, Tyomka, for me.” Sixteen years, and all he’d done was get the notebooks out of the country with Joan Geraldine’s help, or rather, with the help of one of her friends at the British Embassy. He had not done anything else in sixteen years.

  They finished in silence and he washed the dishes.

  She wore fairly high heels—it was one fashion she had always liked—and yet she climbed down almost noiselessly, her hips swaying. The large entrance hall was dark. A woman he had never seen before was wiping the marble floor with a wet rag.

  There were several buses in front of the gallery, and a large crowd. They walked the other way and turned left on Tolmachovsky Lane. The pavement was still wet and there was a chill in the air.

  “When did you find out?”

  “Yesterday morning.”

  “Who else knows?” he asked.

  “Why are you asking?”

  “Well?”

  “Vadim knows, of course. I called him yesterday.”

  “Nobody else?”

  “What does it matter? I told my mother.”

  “Ah … That’s not good.”

  A group of noisy children running by forced her a step or two in front of him. His wife—she was still his wife, officially—moved with the same grace as when they first met, despite the added pounds and years. She had never been a light woman, but it was the way she moved that had first attracted him to her. He took her arm and said, “Let’s walk toward the river, like in the old days.” They turned left on Bolshaya Ordinka. “Has Vadim told anybody?” he asked.