A Partial History of Lost Causes: A Novel: A Novel

by Jennifer Dubois

  Along the Neva, I watched an older woman push her mentally disabled daughter in a wheelchair. The daughter was wearing eyeliner, and I thought of the care that had gone into making that a reality—the mother licking the pencil, bending her thumb against her daughter’s eyelashes.

  If I’d defined my father’s failure in such stark terms—his unwillingness to part with the last feeble snatches of his existence, his greedy and small clinging to what little was left—if those were the terms by which I defined failure, I knew I had a hazier vision of what I meant by success. In part, I was trying to avoid causing my mother the exact brand of anguish that my father had caused us—the particular pain of wishing rabidly for the death of a person you once desperately loved. Though if I was honest with myself, I knew that I was doing something not dissimilar, not demonstrably better, by running away. Did I really think they’d forgotten me? Was my self-esteem actually so low? It was not. Jonathan would get over it one day—he’d find new love, he’d find new memories, those memories would pile on top of the memories of me, pushing me ever further to the bottom of his consciousness, time would elapse, great swaths of time, such time!, and the time he’d spent with me would become ever briefer, comparably, until one day it might feel incidental, anecdotal. But I knew that day had not yet come, and in the meantime, I’d done nothing less than traumatize him. And my mother. I did not think so little of her that I felt my departure was, fundamentally, any kind of favor. I didn’t believe that she’d be able to relax now, soak up the Arizona heat and the love of an inane man, enjoy life. I hoped there’d be some of that, but I could not pretend that all the great difficulties were truly over. To do so would be to invoke depths of grotesque faux self-martyrdom that not even I possessed. No, there was no way to romanticize it: this trip was essentially a temper tantrum. But then maybe insanity invites insanity; illogic invites illogic. There was simply no good answer. There was no right way to go, only countless wrong ways, each as unique as a snowflake.

  I did not know what the humane thing was, but I knew I was not doing it.

  I turned away from the Neva and started walking toward the bridge. The air was unbendingly cold, the city entombed in a darkness that was beginning to feel permanent.

  I learned something once, I think, from my father’s illness. Mostly, I did not learn; mostly, I resented and resisted and made it elaborately clear how little fun I was having personally, to anyone who was paying attention, which nobody was. But once, maybe, my jaw aching with the tedium of it, in one of those awful, mostly unremembered years, there was a small revelation of a kind. Once, maybe, I looked into his stricken, blanking face and I knew something that I couldn’t stop knowing.

  Behind me, the Neva was growing dim. The horizon was relinquishing its last monofilament of light.

  Personality is continuity. Personality is the myth of continuity. And the person is lost when nothing can be old to him, when nothing can be familiar, when all parallels, all symbols, all analogs, are gone; when the world is perpetually stunning; when we are newborns again, at last.

  13

  ALEKSANDR

  St. Petersburg, 1986–2006

  The eighties melted into the nineties, and Aleksandr lost weight again. His currency among women strengthened, and there was something of a nationalistic uprising in his personal life. All of a sudden they were everywhere—thin-browed, thin-faced, pale, and long-limbed, pressing their warm asses against his thighs all through those long winters. They found his jokes hilarious, and his prominent nose distinguished, and his chess talk fascinating. When he started going on CNN, when he started being invited to speak at the elite American universities, it was an inundation: he nearly began to resent them for their beauty, for their unapologetic availability. He took to sleeping with women whose last names he did not know; then he took to sleeping with women whose first names he did not know. He didn’t ask, and he tried not to remember if they told him. Sex became tedious for a while; sometimes he longed for a woman to reject him just for a surprise.

  He thought of how Elizabeta had left him back when he was deserving of love and it would not have been wasted on him. And now he was ruined for it, he knew, and did not warrant it.

  In the other Leningrad—the one Aleksandr no longer lived in—the lines for toilet paper stretched around corners. On television, that smiling, simian American president kept making his demands. When the satellite countries broke away—with relative ease, as if the Soviet Union were a rotted thing that was more than ready to abandon its auxiliary elements—he sat up straight and allowed himself thirty seconds of optimism. He was an early supporter of Gorbachev; he waited in the cold until his ears were red, and he cried when he cast his vote for Yeltsin. The Museum of the History of Atheism and Religion turned back into Kazan Cathedral. The Communist Party was banned; the ruble became a convertible currency; confiscatory privatization overtook state-run concerns; inflation shot to 20 percent. The shelves at the markets filled back up, but no one could buy. Once prices tripled, people began to turn out their dogs, which roamed the streets like beggars, mangy and chagrined. The population was decreasing by six hundred thousand people a year. Shock therapy was hard on the common people, certainly, but it was the birth pangs of capitalism, the plinth upon which the towering new Russia would be built. And in the free-market economy, Aleksandr wrote a book on business and chess that made five million dollars. He intended to sink gratefully into the luxuriant wealth of the brand-new post-Communist oligarchy—hot tub, women, the kind of travel that comes with steaming face towels when you cross the international dateline.

  He went to clubs. He never danced, he only watched. He encountered blondes. He encountered brunettes. He encountered Central Asians who turned out to have no pubic hair whatsoever. And one night when he was out late, five years after he’d become world champion, maybe, he encountered a redhead who was smiling a secret smile to herself.

  “Hello,” he said. “What do you know that I don’t know?”

  She shrugged, and at the time he believed that this meant there was something. Later, he knew that he should have taken her at face value.

  “You’re the chess champion.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you already knew that.”

  He ducked his head. “I suppose.”

  She was drinking champagne. He wondered if she was celebrating something. She cocked her head to one side; her red hair was ineffably gorgeous in the light. No, he decided, she was not celebrating anything. She didn’t need to.

  “And who are you?”

  “Nina,” she said, extending a hand. Her wrist was impossibly delicate and feminine, tremendously well-made. She looked like a human to whom some attention had been given, whereas Aleksandr often remarked that God had made him (Aleksandr) in the dark, one hand tied behind His back, possibly drunk. Aleksandr didn’t really believe in God, of course, but he liked the joke, and told it often. He thought of telling it now but looked at the wrist again and decided against it.

  She smiled at him then. “It was bold the way you made them resume play during the World Championships.”

  “Bold?”

  It had been a long time—too long—since someone had thought he was brave. No: maybe nobody ever had. Elizabeta might have once, for the paper, but that was ages ago, in another lifetime. Was this assessment from Nina undeserved? Maybe. The risk he’d taken with the FIDE had been more calculating, more clinically self-interested; after all, he wasn’t standing up to them because they were morally bankrupt—he was standing up to them because they’d wanted to screw him over, and he’d lost too much already to let them screw him over at that late date. So she admired him for an impulse that was as petty and shallow and reflexive as slapping someone’s hand away when he’s digging in your pocket.

  “Yes,” she said. She clasped his hand. “It was courageous. Not everyone would have done such a thing.”

  “Well,” said Aleksandr. He felt the thrum of social tables turning; he knew that he coul
d take his time answering and that she would wait for him. “It was self-interested, you know.”

  She laughed a little. He could smell the champagne she was drinking, vaguely vinegary; cheap, he thought. He wanted to buy her something better. “Rationally self-interested,” she said. Later, he’d look back and realize how, at the beginning, Nina would often say a catchphrase or a snippet of some academic or intellectual jargon, sometimes out of context and often obliquely; this kind of talk seemed to suggest deep understanding, vast knowledge. It soon proved that she’d internalized a certain number of terms that, when deployed alongside a knowing expression, could make men believe she had a brain, if they were already inclined to hope so.

  “Yes,” he said. “Rationally self-interested. Don’t tell my handlers.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it. That Rusayev. Tell me. Is he really as ugly up close as he looks on television?”

  They laughed. He told her anecdotes, partially embellished, about Rusayev’s hygiene and habits and quirks and demands. He performed an extended impression of Rusayev’s tendency to learn forward and taunt you with the mad hope that he might be ready to make his move, then lean back again, then forward, then back, until you were beset with nervous exhaustion. He also tended to leave his finger on his piece for a comically long time, rolling his wrist, leaving one hand, then two fingers, then one finger, retreating more slowly than the Americans from Vietnam, he said, and Nina laughed. It was a lovely laugh—bell-like and clear. It wasn’t necessarily a laugh that seemed to reflect actual amusement, but that didn’t matter to Aleksandr just then.

  At some point in the evening, he started looking at her harder. He realized she was someone whom he would need to remember meeting, and so he tried to make a mental note of what she was wearing, and how she looked, and what she’d first said to him. If this went somewhere, he’d want to remember those things.

  At the end of the evening, he walked her to her door and gazed at her fondly but did not, for the moment, kiss her. He could have, he knew, he could have done anything he wanted; he did not fear rejection. But he wanted to be able to tell her later about how he’d wanted to kiss her and had been too shy. He wanted that to be part of the story they would tell each other.

  The next night he did kiss her, and he took her home. And after that, they were a couple.

  He took her to private clubs with private leashed-off balconies, with gleaming vats of vodka and fresh juices already waiting for them. He took her dancing. Her took her to the ballet. She wasn’t an intellectual, but neither was she a philistine—she loved visual art, she loved singing. She didn’t know art history or music history, but it didn’t keep her from responding to art and music; she wasn’t a theorist, and how refreshing that was. For her, he suffered through opera—twice—and it was worth it, almost, to see Nina rapt: the beautiful blankness on her stricken face.

  She became interested in biorhythms, in energy fields. She liked to watch Kashpirovsky’s mass-healing séances on TV. She did not care for politics. She found public displays embarrassing. They watched the coup together on television, agog, but she did not want to go outside once it was all over and Yeltsin had saved the country. He tried dragging her down to Moscow for the Yuri Shevchuk concert, when 120,000 people swayed in Palace Square, but she rolled her eyes. She’d sooner cry in public, she said, than get sentimental about a pop singer in public. And that ended the conversation, since Aleksandr had never—not once—seen Nina cry, though he’d suspected her of secretive offstage crying once or twice over the months.

  It didn’t matter. It did not matter. Here was a woman who could love him for what he was, not what he had tried—ineptly!—and failed—miserably!—at being. If this woman wanted competence, he had that to spare. If she wanted ruthlessness, he was learning. Better to be loved—or whatever—for our own actual sorry selves and not for some distorted version of who we might have been. It was that discrepancy that led to disappointment, among other things.

  And then there was this: he was thirty-two. It didn’t have to be Nina in particular, but for decency’s sake, it had to be someone. He was still decent when it came to family: he’d rescued his mother and two of his sisters from their backward hovel in Okha (the third had married a semi-toothless sturgeon fisherman and had refused to come).

  Nina and Aleksandr might have been mismatched, but their dual mismatch provided a kind of symmetry: she was so much more beautiful than he, he was so much more talented and accomplished than she, and was this not the trade-off made by most powerful men? It was a tenuous understanding, an uneasy policy of mutually assured destruction—either of them could wound the other with all the ways in which he or she was not what was wanted once. If he’d wanted to hurt her, he could have pointed out that there were countless gorgeous women in the world, and there was only one chess champion (currently: him). He could have pointed out that beauty was fleeting. But she could have pointed out that everything was fleeting—chess competency was only slightly more enduring than beauty; both, it turned out, were games that favored the young. Anyway, what was power on the chessboard vs. power in the bedroom? Chess was a metaphor for war, but sex wasn’t a metaphor for anything. So whose power was more real in the end?

  They fell into a routine in which she was playfully critical of him, and he was eye-glazingly tolerant of her, and this seemed to flatten the unevenness of their relationship’s landscape. Aleksandr might be a chess champion, but he was also just a man and was thus deserving of the ambient scorn of beautiful, exacting women. He did not disagree; in fact, he felt he deserved more scorn than even Nina would be able to provide him, though for reasons he never discussed with her.

  He bought them a gorgeous apartment overlooking Nevsky Prospekt (expensive). He bought them a high-maintenance little dog with a lazy eye (also expensive). After an appropriate interval, Nina and Aleksandr were married.

  A decade passed in slow motion, then faster and faster. When Aleksandr looked back, it returned in snatches, on repeat, hiccupping and distorted sometimes, like a scratched record. There were some good times, of this he was sure—some nice nights with Nina, especially at the beginning, though in memory it became difficult to ascertain how many of the nights were actually nice. Was it one night or two or a half dozen or a dozen? Or was it typical, was it usual, for them to slow-dance in front of that enormous picture window, with St. Petersburg cracked open before them, backlit by the moon, shining with all the grandeur of ancient Rome? What you imagine is what you remember, and what you remember is what you’re left with. So why not decide to imagine it a little differently? It is possible that it wasn’t all a horrendous mistake from the outset. It is possible that they were happier than he sometimes suspected.

  But when he tried to remember the good, most of what emerged was the mundane: there’s Nina in 1993, combing her hair in front of the mirror; there she is again in 1997, maybe, her hair slightly longer, her frown slightly deeper. He remembered her evolving sleepwear, the cyclical courses of her shoes—seasonal, astronomical, in their regularity. He remembered the things they acquired: the sound system that seemed to seethe in the dark, with an array of dials and knobs and buttons that looked to Aleksandr like the operational apparatus of a spaceship; the computers that began as looming presences, half the size of Aleksandr, and slowly shrank down to sleek nefarious objects, bafflingly unobtrusive. He remembered also the parade of Nina’s friends, wearing bright colors, talking conspiratorially. They came for lunch, they came for dinner, they came—eternally—for drinks. They were a rotating cast: he could never get their names straight and was always mixing one up with the other, and always being scolded, and always making a point to remember, and always, always, immediately forgetting again. The women often mocked one another for failings that Aleksandr couldn’t see or understand—anyone who missed the evening was considered fair game. No matter how thoroughly a particular woman had been eviscerated by the others in her absence, the next time she appeared, she would be greeted with the sam
e breathless concern, the same false smiles, the same astonished arching of eyebrows at the same grim litanies of the outrageousness of children, the callousness of men. Then there was the same hearty agreement, the same clinking of glasses.

  Aleksandr remembered also the halfhearted attempts at a baby. Over the years, Nina was on and then ambivalently off three different kinds of chemical birth control; in 1994 she went off again—this time earnestly, meaningfully—and they waited. Nothing happened. They waited longer. Still nothing happened. Aleksandr remembered the growing realization that it was taking longer than it should, then much longer than it should, and then the further realization—never articulated but shared, he was sure—that they were not as disappointed as they probably should have been. He watched Nina purse her lips at another negative test—the eleventh or twelfth—and he knew that she was nonplussed, slightly, but not distraught. The two of them with a baby: what the hell would they do with it? Nina was good at taking care of things—the stereo system, for example, and her ever growing collection of fussy silken clothing—but things were still and quiet and could be fairly easily kept clean. A pregnancy, a birth, a wailing baby with an always open maw—the whole thing sounded as embarrassing as it would be exhausting. After a year or two, the birth control pills reappeared in the cabinet, and Aleksandr never complained.

  They did not fight. They never fought. They went days without speaking sometimes, but even that wasn’t really a fight—he’d sometimes just forget to talk to her. Their sex life began to die quietly, uncomplainingly, with all the meek gravity of a religious martyr: first sex became conventional, then infrequent, then brittle and harassed and, he thought resentfully, resentful. And then it became a fluke, a comet glimpsed blearily through a thicket of stars—it happened sometimes when she’d been drinking, or he’d been cajoling, or they’d been laughing (rarely, rarely). Sometimes he’d engage in self-conscious rituals designed to bring them back to whatever they’d once been, but that was when he most realized that he wasn’t sure what that was. Still, he tried: he’d put awful early-nineties love songs on the stereo system, the kind that they’d heard in their nights out on the town, back in the early days. It was meant to be ironic, but like all irony, it was also slightly sentimental—and since Nina was possessed of neither irony nor sentimentality, she pursed her lips and stared at Aleksandr and failed to smile.