T. C. Boyle Stories

by T. C. Boyle

  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 The cigarette—“A Gauloise, of course; what else is there?”—described an arc in the air, the hopelessly out-of-date go-go boots did a mazurka on the carpet, the fringe of the baby-blue patent-leather jacket trembled and shook.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 cap (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 she’ll 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 sun-struck hair. “Oh, I have slept on the airplane,” 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 whims
ical creations of radish and carrot for her, rolling out his rare stock of fugu, the Japanese blowfish. 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. And 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

  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 ther
e 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.”