Somehow they both got used to this—to the TV gradually becoming an active contributor to all their conversations, and even, not infrequently, a counselor and a referee, and they stopped bursting out laughing when, for example, during an argument in which Milena, irritated not as much by her husband’s misplaced jealousy as by the fact that she was not allowed to relax even at home, raised her voice to state (flattered nonetheless) that she needed that Italian man her husband felt she was flirting with at the reception that evening like a fish needed a bicycle, she could barely drag herself to bed at the end of the day already, an elegant respectable gentleman came into view on TV (which they now had turned on almost all the time) to declare, “My dear man, these days most Italian men are homosexuals, so this isn’t going to give you much mileage,” after which the argument fizzled out and they started kissing (noticing that people on TV were doing the same, only already lying down). Most of the remarks that came from the TV showed it to be significantly more cynical than either one of them: it would chat casually, as if about something self-evident, about things that neither one of them would admit to another other than in a fit of self-reproach, and this was highly salutary, they both thought, because once you’ve heard something like that from the screen, you no longer had to be ashamed and pretend otherwise. Milena, for example, would never have noticed on her own, or even if she did, then not anytime soon, that her husband, even when he listened and nodded patiently, was beginning to tire of her constant complaining about the studio head, who wasn’t exactly finding fault with Milena’s work, because there was nothing for him to fault her with, but remained probably the only person who had never openly shown any kind of enthusiasm or at least approval of Milena, whereby he greatly undermined Milena’s straight-A-student’s confidence, hobbled her, you could say, until she began to suspect that this demonstrative, as she believed it was, disrespect indicated a behind-the-scenes intrigue against her, a backstabbing plot to take her show away from her, while Poppet, on the contrary, held to the belief that the studio head simply had the hots for her and had chosen this way of keeping her in constant suspense, and so they kept on this subject, working it over and over like a bone, and would perhaps have kept worrying it like that until Poppet lost his patience if one night the TV did not lose its patience instead. No sooner had Milena started in on another diatribe at the door—“He gave me a ride home, and what do you think, not a word about yesterday’s broadcast, not a single word, I can’t keep working like this!”—than she heard, “So unzip his pants and give him a blow job” from a cold and terrifically vulgar floozy on TV, delivered in two languages, French and Ukrainian, at once. Stunned almost to tears, Milena shut up on the subject of her studio head, and, to tell the truth, stopped caring as much about him. The TV seemed to intercept their thoughts even as they were thinking them, to compress and edit them, sometimes even before they themselves had a chance to finish them or discover their own motivations. “Shall we hit the sack?” Milena’s husband would say as he put his arms around her and slid his hands down her back to her buttocks. Milena would resist half-heartedly, saying something like, “My script for tomorrow isn’t ready yet.” “E-ekh, my dear!” the TV would intrude casually, in the guise of a seasoned old broad from a Russian backwater. “How are you going to hold on to your husband if you don’t give him any?”—What if she’s right, Milena would think, alarmed (and offended a bit, by things being put so coarsely, and for Poppet’s sake, too, is the man to be treated like some kind of rabbit, heaven help us, like that’s the only thing that matters to him?), but then again, who knows with men, you can live with one forever and never know for sure, and so she finished that thought already on her back, legs bent at the knees, while he thrust into her hard and without any apparent rhythm, so she wasn’t getting anywhere, until she opened her eyes at last and gasped: riveted to her with the lower, moving half of his body, her husband held his upper half up in order to see the TV screen over the bed frame, bursts of color running over his face like at a nightclub, his eyes fixed on the image there with an odd, glassy look, sweat sparkling purple on his upper lip. What, what is it? Milena wanted to exclaim, pressed down by the weight of his body, which suddenly seemed to have tripled, crushed by the devastating sense of this humiliation, like under a steamroller, all the more devastating because so unexpected—Who was he with? Whereupon he moaned, and came down, limp, burying his face in her, now undeniably in her. Stunned, with mixed feelings of having been herself robbed clean, but also pity and reproach for her husband, Milena drew her trembling hand along his back, as if trying by feel alone to put back in place the reality of her life, which just a moment before had vanished, disappeared into nowhere. “Who were you with?” she asked quietly, to avoid asking, What were they showing? because that would have been a direct complaint, almost a quarrel, whereas she wanted an explanation, a reconciliation, and an apology. But he didn’t understand the question: He raised his joyfully damp mug in astonishment at her, glowing in full color, “What do you mean, who? With you, Milena, who else would I be with?”
Milena tried to forget this incident, squeeze it out of her memory, thinking that maybe she had really imagined it, like the studio head’s intrigues—didn’t she then flip over onto her stomach and watch, together with her husband, a fun police procedural, with lots of female corpses, and when he trundled off to the kitchen to get something to nibble on, as he always did after sex, and then came back and asked her something, she mumbled in response without listening, and twice even waved him off when he persisted, with, “I’m trying to watch this,” so at the end of the day, she could not, were she to be called to court, have sworn with one hundred percent certainty what had taken place in bed and what had taken place on TV. To be honest, this sort of thing happened to them rather often, because the TV not only interfered in their lives but lived its own life, too, and an incomparably more vivid one at that, more festive, uniformly bright and saturated, on all its fifteen channels at once, while the two of them each had maybe three or four (work, parents, friends) and only one shared one, and all of these, of course, had much less action on them, and broadcast in poor quality, with breaks, dark abysses, floating streaks of unnecessary moods surfacing from who knows where, and ghosts. Unlike them, the TV always had everything under control and was in an invariably chipper mood: each of its stories, however terrifying and bloody, always got a logical resolution; it never quit anything midway in the cowardly hope that things would somehow take care of themselves, and never, ever, left behind any loose ends—relationships that were not completely cleared up, defeats unavenged, ambitions unrealized, corpses unburied, or any of the other baggage you take on in a lifetime. It managed to put absolutely everything in order, to place all the right emphasis, and to insert voice-overs and subtitles wherever necessary, everything just so, and so it is no wonder, then, that when Milena’s husband had sold some wealthy magazine all the negatives he had shot in one lot and then the bastards had started retailing his photos with no thought of paying him royalties, and he, like a pouting little boy, was telling Milena, for the umpteenth time, how he once again saw a photo of his in this publication and on that billboard, he’d have to repeat his report almost as many times before Milena managed to tear her glazed-over eyes from the screen (on which a very nice American newspaperman just decided to sue his crooked boss), becoming aware, at last, that her husband and the TV were not on the same page, so to speak, and having to ask, “I’m sorry, dear, what?” The dialogue that continued between them would have sounded something like this:
Husband: I’m saying they swindled me, that’s what!
Milena: So why don’t you take them to court?
Husband: What court, are you kidding? On what grounds? They paid me a bonus on top of the contract—threw me a bone, and now are free to rake in as much as they want. (Milena steals a glance at the TV.) With the taxes we pay, if I were paid by contract alone, we’d have been looking in the trash for cans to recycle long ago!
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nbsp; TV (in English and Ukrainian): There are no hopeless situations, man. We’ll get the union together, put this story into newspapers—we’ll teach the bastards to respect the law!
Husband (confused): What union? What newspapers? What law?
Milena (shrugs her shoulders and turns back to the screen).
And that, once again, is why it’s no wonder that neither one of them noticed—and by the time Milena noticed, it was too late—what Milena’s mother was the first—and, it turned out, the last—to intuit, except that, as was her custom, she interpreted her intuition the way she wished, and what she, who could not wrap her mind around the fact that three in a home is, whoever they are, a complete set, wished for, naturally, was a grandbaby. And so, one morning following Milena’s show’s broadcast, she called and asked, with a girlish excitement in her voice, “Milena, dear, I was watching you the whole time yesterday—are you by any chance pregnant?”
“No,” Milena said in surprise. “What made you think that?”
“Well, you looked like you put on a little weight. You were sitting there so nice and smooth all over, and your expression was sort of distant.”
Alarmed, Milena weighed herself on the bathroom scale (a ritual she performed every morning) for the second time in one day and even wondered whether the scale was broken, because her weight was of course the same as the day before, and the day before that, and the year before, and the year before that, and if she really had put on some weight, wouldn’t Poppet have been the first to tell her? Just in case, Milena decided to wait for Poppet (he was gone until noon in his printing lab, and she left for the studio at lunch, so they usually missed each other, until late at night), and in the meantime rushed to review the tape of the show—with an elegant financial economist, a highly winsome lady, with a peppery dark Spanish complexion, who talked about how since her divorce she was banging (she clung to this word insistently) exclusively men younger than herself and what a positive effect this was having on her overall well-being, only this time, Milena irritably fast-forwarded her all-conquering financial economist as soon as she appeared in the frame, hungrily hunting for herself alone, especially in close-up: could that idiot operator have screwed something up? (Milena knew that in three-quarter profile her face seemed wider and rounded in a homely way, and, naturally, she never forgot this in front of the camera.) But everything seemed to be the same. And yet it wasn’t. Even if she was neither puffy nor, god forbid, smooth, the on-screen Milena was nevertheless in some ungraspable way different, as if made of thicker bone, and the parts of her that were emphasized by her casual pose—her arm on the back of the chair, her hip turned up from the way she had crossed her legs, and her skirt pulled taut over it—were all as one distinguished by a heavy, grotesque, Toulouse-Lautrec-like monumentality that the delicate Milena had never, ever had, and the overall effect was somehow overfamiliar and preening, maybe even sexy in its own way, but only to a taste that was very plebeian indeed. Things were even worse as far as her face was concerned because it conspiratorially changed expressions in unison with what the irrepressible economist hadn’t even finished or even started to say. From a professional point of view this was absolutely amazing insofar as it sent the viewer’s imagination flying in the desired direction (for which the off-screen Milena, worried and ashamed, could not, in good faith, resist congratulating her on-screen self), but at the same time, there were moments when the on-screen face showed a downright indecent amount of pleasure, spreading out in a sated half smile, the eyes ready at any second, it seemed, to get bleary (which only Milena’s mother, obsessed with her own wish for a grandchild, could have taken for the distant “wandering” gaze of a pregnant woman), and the whole woman really seemed to expand, so full she was of herself, so pleased she was with the way the conversation was going, or, perish the thought, so fully she shared in the economist’s carnal delight in the muscular torso of her young bodyguard-chauffeur-masseur. Something dark and impure was looming in all this, a thick sludge that poisoned the charge that Milena would usually get when she watched herself on-screen: this time, her voice rocked back and forth, swinging like hips, her laugh was aroused, coarse, everything tingling with naughtiness—what happened to her voice? Where did this vulgarity come from that saturated it, dammed up like a stale breath? “What a slut!” cried the off-screen Milena harshly, as if slapping her hand on the table, and felt suddenly sobered, as if doused with water, by the sound of her own recaptured voice, and to this very same sound the on-screen Milena slowly turned to her that insolent mug of hers, shamelessly beautiful, blazing drunkenly from the studio lights, with its kiss-swollen slit of crimson lips, and winked at her arrogantly, triumphantly, all but flashing a grin: Of course, and what did you think?
Breathing quickly and for some reason holding on to her pulse with one hand, the off-screen Milena pressed “Stop” and then “Rewind” with the other hand. This time the on-screen Milena, turning her full face toward her, stuck out her tongue at her, which looked, between those dark glistening lips of hers, downright repulsive—it was pale, as if naked, and twitched at the end. The off-screen one hit the pause button to catch the wretched woman with her tongue hanging out: let her sit like that for a while. But she missed: the frame went by, and the on-screen Milena, suddenly brought to a halt, froze gaping in surprise like a tarty doll feigning offended modesty. She even pouted her little lips for tsk-tsk, as if she were on the verge of saying: Bad Poppet, you’ve hurt your sweet Milena! “Mock me, will you?” hissed the off-screen Milena, stung to the quick and feeling herself cover with a slimy cold sweat, like scales. “You just wait a minute, I’ll show you!” She drummed on the remote’s buttons, almost to the rhythm of her own accelerated heartbeat, forcing the on-screen Milena first to revive and expire by turns, then to contort and grimace in rapid spasms of a possessed marionette, and finally to move in slow motion like a sleepwalker, barely able to raise her hand as if under the pressure of a hundred atmospheres, but none of it was of any use—the other Milena did not reveal herself in any other way and turned into a very ordinary screen representation, tormented for no good reason, so god knows how much time passed before the off-screen Milena, who was just about to quit her schizophrenic clicking (and thus concede to the bitch that she had dreamed it all in her bedroom in front of the screen), heard the telephone ring, which reached her from far away, as if through a mass of water, and picked up the receiver—herself now in slow motion, hand fighting the pressure of a hundred atmospheres.
“Hullo,” said an unfamiliar man’s voice, clearing his throat, pushing onto her from the depths of the receiver like a storm cloud. “Hullo, is Milena there?”
Now she felt cold inside too: this was like the nightmares about the bear she’d had as a child, from which she always woke with a scream: the bear was coming at her, giant and dark, and his shadow covered her.
“Speaking.” She tried to defend herself with her voice, switching instinctively to a silvery secretarial timbre, and whoever was on the other end paused, as if to think (as if to make sure his aim was perfect), and answered with affected recalcitrance:
“Listen, baby, I’ve got an idea for you. I’m tired of looking at you just on TV. So, call that girlfriend of yours, from yesterday, and let’s make a date, I’ll pick you up. Don’t get hung up about the money, I won’t haggle.”
“What? How dare you? Who are you?” rattled the off-screen Milena in outrage, as she watched, with even greater outrage, the on-screen one sit up and fidget in her chair, eyes gleaming, her whole body vibrating impatiently with excited giggling—so she yelled, now utterly desperate, at the spot between the on-screen Milena’s eyes, like an idiot: “I’ll call the police!”
A nasty, knowing laugh came out of the receiver.
“No, you won’t, you stupid hen. Think on it, I’ll call back. I know where you live. And talk to your girlfriend. Don’t worry, you’ll like it!”
“Go away!” the off-screen Milena shrieked, her voice a squeak now, but the re
ceiver had been hung up anyway (whereupon she heard from who knows where the first few bars of Beethoven’s Für Elise played at an incredibly cynical, mocking dance rhythm: pa-pa, pa-pa, pam, pa-ra-pa-pam! They bubbled up like words from a drunk man, then someone very seriously muttered “Sorry,” and the dial tone dripped noisily like water from a leaky tap). The receiver lay down quietly on its rest, and the off-screen Milena, just as quietly, in a voice that was white with rage, said to the on-screen one, “I will kill you,” obviously with no idea of what she was saying.
Because what could she do to the other one? Even in the unconscious fever of the first hours—when the single urge was to rush somewhere, explain, prove, say, Look closely, that’s not me at all (make a statement on air! Even as absurd an idea as that had crossed her mind, believe it or not)—Milena stayed lucid enough to be coolly aware, somewhere deep down, that the other she, itching as she was to tear her off herself like mangy skin, was still far from alien to her, and not just in physical resemblance. In her own way, the other (second) woman was quite striking, much more confident than the first, original Milena, more relaxed (that’s for sure!), and, on the whole, perfectly suited to her purpose—there was no fault to be found with her from the professional perspective. Nevertheless, pent up inside Milena was a painfully vague, all but grunting with the effort to be articulated, recollection that back when she was just launching her show, she had imaged a different screen self—a warmer, more radiant one, one that fit into the vision of women’s heart-to-hearts that go on in the kitchen nearly until dawn on the once-grasped and never again released crystalline singing note of souls growing closer together: Sister, sister, your heartache grows weaker, you are not alone in this world, your children are sleeping in the next room, and life goes on, let us be wise, let us be patient, these minutes are precious as music, as love, because you love her in these moments so deeply your heart could stop, you reel at the scorching pinnacle of her suffering, and here is tenderness, and pain, and pride in our brave and silent women’s endurance, and a beauty unspeakable that brings you to tears, which glows for a while in both women (until the crowd on the bus rubs it off). That’s what Milena, who had known no small number of such evenings, strove to achieve for her guests and herself. In one of her first scripts, which someone later cut without a trace, she called it helping-the-Ukrainian-woman-find-herself-in-our-complicated-times. And look what had come of it.
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