Actually, suspicious symptoms had appeared earlier, too, in her news-department days. Insofar as her news was broadcast on channel thirty-something, Poppet (Sugar, Pumpkin), with his own two hands, mounted a specially acquired antenna (forty-five dollars, without the installation) outside their window, so that in the evenings he could watch his sweet Milena, because the building’s common antenna got only the first three channels. Since then, the TV delivered lots of various “pictures,” as Milena’s photojournalist husband (who identified himself, more pretentiously, as a “photographic artist” on his business cards) called them, and he was now in the habit of spending his evenings in the bedroom with the door closed, as if he were in a darkroom—only the light there was not red but, if you looked at it from the street, a ghoulish blue—picking over the buttons on his remote and hopping from channel to channel like a bank manager calling up subordinates on the intercom, and when Milena would poke her head into the half light of the bedroom to ask what to make for supper, he would grin at her with his teeth colored by the glow of the TV screen. After this they would often start making love—Milena would turn off the TV at the critical moment. Then her husband would go to the bathroom, and Milena would lie there faceup and listen in wonder as the fullness of her life moved slowly past her, thick and caramel-like.
And so one time when she came in from the cold, and straight from the hallway into the bedroom, before she had even caught sight of her husband’s illuminated teeth, Milena heard a man’s baritone greeting her from the TV screen with a booming Good evening, love—turned out, an atrociously dubbed Brazilian soap opera happened to be on, and she and her husband had a good laugh at the surprise. Not long after, something similar happened to Milena’s mother when she came for a Sunday visit. The two women’s aimless, spastic jostling around the kitchen with their pots in an absurdist arrhythmic dance and their equally aimless jumpy conversation, all loose ends and interrupted sentences, cut off, dropped, and never picked up again, would tire Milena’s husband rather quickly, and he would escape to the bedroom, where he lay low in front of the TV until the visit was over. Well, this time, his kindhearted mother-in-law, who was looking for him in order to enlighten him (she’d just thought of it) as to the proper way of sharpening kitchen knives (by running them against a step in the stairwell), headed for the bedroom herself, and, just as soon as she had pushed open the door, the darkened room, illuminated by aquarium-like floating flashes of color from the TV screen, screamed at her in a hysterical falsetto: Get out of here! Get out, do you hear me! Milena’s mother forgot about her knives on the spot (she remembered them later, on her way home, and called from the streetcar stop, just when her daughter and son-in-law had turned off the TV, because the vegetable, as its gardener had claimed, had grown quite big enough). And possibly the very next day, when Milena, worried because her period was late, pressed a button on the remote in the bedroom to take her mind off things, an unbearably brash little cartoon frog croaked out to her from the screen, Don’t cry, little girl, let me sing you a so-o-ong instead, and a cheery little tune poured out, and an hour later Milena’s flow started. It was then that she had her first inkling that something had gone terribly wrong: something, or someone, had taken possession of the TV set.
She didn’t know yet who it was exactly, and later, too, she only thought she had found out, because, as I’ve said, this was all happening back in the news-department days, before Milena launched her own show, which did so extraordinarily well in the ratings so quickly. If anyone has forgotten, let me remind you: Milena talked to jilted women. There were old ones among them and young ones, pretty and ugly, smart and not very (Milena did not allow the utterly stupid ones into the studio): a peroxide blonde interpreter—fat legs, a short skirt, a plastic doll’s light-colored eyes—talked about how many men were fighting over her just then, while a PhD in chemistry, with a nose that could be called Akhmatovian if she’d known how to wear it, insisted aggressively that at that particular time she was completely happy, and only once did she tear up as she was taking a handkerchief out of her purse, fall silent, sniff, and stuff it back in again (Milena did not cut the shot, not least out of a vague hope of moving the chemist’s ex-husband to pity, in the event he was watching the broadcast). Milena’s first guests came from among her girlfriends’ friends—their classmates, hairdressers, beauticians, moms whose kids went to the same day care, and other various and sundry women who indulged in mutual confidences, as women do, on random pretexts. Later, when the show was better known, the guests came en masse themselves, just for the asking, and Milena simply marveled—sincerely at first, and then mechanically, by habit, mostly in conversations—at the insatiable lust for publicity human suffering carries within itself, and aren’t we all so afraid of death precisely because that is the one thing you can’t share with anyone? She took pride in the fact that she was helping all those women to recut and resew (well, at least to rebaste) their own suffering into a style they could wear, sometimes even quite smartly: she learned this from one of her first shows, which had subsequently brought in a whole cartload of letters. An awfully nice little woman, dark haired with barely a dusting of grey, mother of two teenage boys and boyish looking herself, her hair almost in a crew cut and her shirt probably borrowed from her older son, a librarian—in other words, broke, but sharp as a tack—expounded, smoothing out something invisible in her lap the whole time, on how she would be raising her boys from then on so that they wouldn’t turn out like their father, with deadpan delivery that made the camera operators convulse with laughter behind their cameras, because the boys’ father came out a phenomenal asshole, if he couldn’t appreciate a clever little woman like that. Granted, everything didn’t always turn out so well, sometimes quite the opposite, and in ways you’d never even think of. Milena couldn’t sleep for two nights and took Valocordin and valerian drops with water when she found out that an ambulance had to be called for one of her guests because the day after the broadcast the stupid woman had gone and opened all the gas valves in her apartment. Everyone went into a tizzy that time, and the director had even rushed off to consult someone about getting a certificate from a psychiatrist just in case, because you could tell the woman was neurotic right off the bat, and her upper lip twitched on the right side, the camera brings out things like that like a microscope, there’s no denying them, so it was Milena’s fault for choosing her as a guest, that much was clear, but thank god, the whole thing had worked itself out, the damn woman pulled through, and Why in the name of fuck, the producer spat out in puffs of cigarette smoke, would you get yourself on TV if you can’t look in the mirror without your meds? Stupid women! Milena breathed a secret sigh of relief at this gracious verdict and not being blamed after all, then immediately felt ashamed of her relief, and felt ashamed all day until her shame melted away. Milena did have her scruples, no matter what anyone said, and who would know better than I? So there.
That’s what Milena’s show was like, and she put it on, I’ll say it again, with scruples. What I mean is she remembered well what she’d been taught at the university: that a journalist must show not herself but her subject, and if they wished to revel, if they wanted to all that badly, it would also not be in her misery but in her subjects’. And she really did have a genuine interest in all those women and in peering over the fence into the abyss: to imagine what would happen if she ended up in their position herself, if her Poppet took off one day and left her for good—an unnaturally stupid thing for her to conceive of, let alone imagine, like picturing a day when your legs all of a sudden separated from the rest of you and marched off down the street and left you sitting on the sidewalk on your rear end—but still, what then, what would she be like then, how would she feel? To try something like that on for size was titillating, terrifying, it made her dizzy (like when you were a child and listened, cowering under your bedclothes, to stories about highway robbers, or like your violent erotic fantasies when you imagine being raped by a whole platoon). Milena’s
pupils would dilate hypnotically on the screen, which, physiologists assure us, is the key to attractiveness, and her luminous voice would deliver incantations that ranged from the soothing empathy of a sister of mercy (Tell us, please, tell our viewers and especially our female viewers) to the angry low-pitched solidarity of a fellow amazon (And you put up with this for how many years?), although sometimes she needed to resort to her seductive voice, intimately cajoling when a guest would suddenly close up and wouldn’t say another word, no more secrets, and go ahead, Milena, figure out how to crack that nut. Why, sometimes Milena would even let out one of her keen, low-pitched giggles of encouragement, short and lusty, as if to say, Oh yes, my dear, I’ve been there myself, and then what? That was usually how the most delectable bedroom bits were gotten out of the guests, prompting the flood of letters and calls to the show to rise to life-threatening levels. Milena didn’t really like herself when she resorted to tricks like that, but the unpleasant aftertaste was more than compensated for by the megavoltage spotlight of professional triumph—Look what I can do! with the beads of joyful sweat between her shoulder blades and the half-admiring, half-envious way her colleagues looked at her—Better not mess with you, baby!—and that swelling sense of her own power, the biggest high of it all, like the gymnast’s from his absolute power over his own body. Whenever she watched the show with her husband at home, Milena, her gleaming eyes fixed on the screen, would unseeingly squeeze his hand, hard, at the most dramatic moments—There it is, right there, watch this!—and would giggle, anxious with arousal, at every felicitous word that dropped from the screen, and he’d chortle, too, pleased, and proud of her success. Their professional ambitions did not overlap, and he had never photographed Milena, except well before they were married, in their courting days, and even then more as a pretext, because the static Milena was a mere shadow of herself: her voice, her face, the glint of living quicksilver in her—that, and not the still portrait, was her element, and Poppet preferred to take pleasure in her live, although he did find her photos pleasing, and generally considered Milena a beauty, which was, of course, an exaggeration, even though there were others besides him who thought so, especially when Milena got her own show and nothing seemed to foreshadow any trouble.
Now they were planning to buy a satellite dish and install it on the balcony. This would come to about $300, but it was worth it, because, although Milena conscientiously watched almost all her colleagues’ shows, the output on Ukrainian TV, of course, could not satisfy her, and the Russian product was hardly better, three-quarters of it lifted straight from American scripts, while Milena was a patriot and always said that Ukraine must find and follow its own path. In fact it would be worth buying a second television, because her husband preferred to look at visuals, and, obviously, there are more of those in movies, whose story lines he would recap to Milena in two or three quick sentences (who’s who, who’s with whom against whom) that summed up the story up to the point at which she’d come home and snuggled at his side. His eyes glued to the screen, he would pull the blanket over her, tuck her in, gather her up to himself, tickle her cheek with his lips, and mutter, “This one here, the blond guy, he was abducted by aliens, but now he’s come back.” “Why did he come back?” Milena would ask absentmindedly as she pressed against him, staring now in the same direction, and so, after a little more fidgeting, they would fall silent and, lying side by side, eyes on the screen, and the third person in the room and their home was that Panasonic, so that as time went on the idea of buying another TV began to seem awkward and a bit bizarre to Milena, because wouldn’t it be just like splitting up their bed or apartment? “After all, smart people can always find a compromise, can’t they, Sugar?” Milena would say, which meant Sugar would watch what she wanted to watch with her, and the rest of the time he would be free to amuse himself as he pleased, to which the smart Sugar would respond with a cheerful Yes, ma’am! like the good soldier he was and just as cheerfully and resonantly smooch his sweet smart Milena, and thus compromise would triumph. But late at night Milena herself didn’t mind watching something entertaining and thus distancing herself from the many faces and many installments of women’s misfortune with which she now lived out almost all of her waking hours.
Altogether, that misfortune was quite strange indeed: made up, dolled up, flirty—some of the women were so committed to appear pert and happy on camera they presented with a forced, fake familiarity that was downright embarrassing, so when that happened, Milena would call out a categorical cut to the camera operators and spend five or ten minutes talking the overly emotional lady down to a more or less normal state. And yet, and this is what is interesting, every one of them was genuinely suffering, sincerely and unaffectedly, and Milena had even thought at first that slighted women came to her show mainly in the secret hope of bringing back their ex or at least taking their revenge, because some women did ask Milena whether it was all right to address him directly, and then would deliver into the millions of postdinner apartments their moving “Sasha, if you can see me now, I want you to know that I’ve forgiven you for everything, and I hope you are happy” whereupon Milena herself would get a lump in her throat: at that moment she could actually physically feel the choral, gurgling sob of the female half of the nation spreading out in the reality beyond the broadcast frequency—crescendo, crescendo—and a dark wave of public anger rising and swelling at this Sasha, millions of lips whispering, Asshole, millions of noses sniffling, the entire country caught, for a fraction of a second, in the shared orgasm of empathy—and all of it her, Milena’s, doing, because it was she, Milena, who edited out the rest of the speech when her guest herself had not managed to stop with this exquisite opening, and proceeded, zigging and zagging like a car on a slippery road, irresistibly drawn into the ditch: “Of course, you hurt me, and very badly, I still can’t see how you could have been such a jerk, and after everything I’ve done for you,” tossing out long-rehearsed words faster and faster, seething, rattling, all but foaming at the mouth with her bottled-up fury, predatory flames in her eyes, and the hair on her head ready to spring straight up like on a witch taking flight. Milena’s power was in presenting those women the way she saw them herself (they were better than that, so much better!), and when hers was unanimously voted “show of the month” and she said, now herself being interviewed (and focused with her every nerve on not, god forbid, having it sound condescending!), that to her guest she was a friend, a counselor, and a gynecologist all at once, it was, clearly, the absolute truth and no one would contradict it, but still Milena had the vague feeling it was not the whole truth: something still remained unexpressed, an exceedingly important, perhaps essential ingredient, like yeast in dough, was still left out. And so, something similar was probably happening to them too: even as the women came driven into the studio by the single, all-devouring intention of calling out one more thing in their ex-better halves’ wake, somewhere deep in every one of them stirred the dark amorphous shape of a much more incomprehensible urge: to fly toward the light of the screen itself, like moths that used to fly, on humid and still July nights, toward the blue luminescence of the old black-and-white Slavutych TV on the summer cottage’s porch so that up close you could clearly hear the dry crackling of faulty electrical wires or tiny sizzling wings. Did they (the women, not the moths—although who can say with confidence what a moth is thinking?) perhaps dream that by crossing over into that space beyond the screen, they would get back the soul that a man had taken from them, and not just get it back, but get it back completely renewed, enormously enriched, bathed clean in the glow of fame and raised up to unreachable heights above the lives they had lived until now, melded forever with the fantastic colorful shimmering of all the pictures in the TV at once, so that the Santa Barbara, the Dallas, the Denver dynasty, and the snow-white villas on the shores of tropical seas would all become their own, something that had happened to them, since they had been there, on the other side of the screen, too, and their everyday existen
ce would acquire a special, perhaps even divine significance? Milena knew only too well from her own experience this magic of the screen: the spellbinding effect of your own face—in that first instant so alien you don’t recognize it—in the frame, multiplied by itself a hundredfold in all its barely perceptible movements, how it envelops you, chained to your viewer’s spot, in a ticklish warmth, like a bubble bath, and you soften, rise, and expand, feeding on the energy that streams from the screen, become so much larger than your common self that for a moment you can believe in your own omnipotence. “An energy boost,” Milena’s husband would say. “Just go read about lepton fields.” (He would сlip articles from popular science magazines and put them in a special folder.) “Why do you think that back at the turn of the century the Inuit would break ethnographers’ cameras and run away from them as if they were evil spirits?”
“A photo is different,” Milena would fling back, her face still flushed, eyes gleaming, because she sensed that if this comparison were taken to its logical conclusion, she would end up among the ethnographers and her studio guests among the Inuit, which she would not like the least little bit, and her husband would silently and agreeably switch to a different channel, one with reruns (all the more so, since on Milena’s they were already running the last commercial), and the TV would aim at them the typical squinty look of a Soviet-movie secret police officer, and say, with that kind of officer’s paternal warmth, “I’m looking at you, and I can tell you are really good kids!”
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