EQMM, June 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "Sounds like fun,” Philip had said, and in his mind now he emptied out the pocketbook sitting across from him: lipstick and powder, several Kleenex, her wallet, a tampon, her cell phone, her Palm Pilot.

  "Excuse me,” Evgeniy said to each person whose elbow he jostled, “pardon me.” He moved as swiftly as he could through the crowd without disrupting them too terribly, without drawing too much attention—struggling to cast a quick smile or a friendly nod to those he knew, to maintain some equilibrium.

  "Well, it's great that you got the chance to catch up with him,” Philip had gone on. “Good that Buddy's turned up here in town."

  "It really is nice,” Catherine said. “I'd forgotten how much I missed him."

  "How long has it been since you last saw him?"

  Years and years ago, she replied. They had been such good friends when they were in school—had taken several classes together, gone out to the same clubs. But once graduation came, so many people headed their separate ways. Buddy had moved out to the West Coast, to Sacramento—a job he couldn't refuse. Catherine had promised to come out and visit, had really meant to. She hadn't been particularly pleased with her own job then. She'd felt aimless, unambitious ... unhappy, really.

  I will come and see you in Sacramento. I have never been happy; I am miserable now. I have thought of nothing but you all the time; I live only in the thought of you....

  "But I never went out to see him,” she said. “Eventually, each of us got so busy. I got the job at Ligon. We stopped calling each other as often as we had.... You know how easy it is to lose touch."

  Soon, Catherine had prepared to go to sleep—removed her makeup, brushed her teeth, pulled on a pair of his boxers. By the time Philip joined her, she had already settled between the sheets, was nearly asleep. He turned out the light and felt his way into the bed, recognizing in the darkness the scent of the new perfume he'd first noticed several nights before. She leaned over. A kiss. Lips redolent with mint, the taste lingering as she pulled away. They lay for a while in the half-darkness together, in the glow of the streetlight through the window, under the faint outline of the ceiling fan overhead. Philip tried to catch the dim sound of its motor spinning amidst the silence.

  "Did you ever...” he finally asked her, “...you know. I mean, with your friend Buddy?"

  A long pause. His imagination trembled. “You men,” she said after a few seconds, “the way you...” and he heard the hint of a low chuckle. A long sigh followed. “Once or twice,” she said finally. “It was back in college. It was years ago."

  "Excuse me,” Evgeniy said to each person whose elbow he jostled, “pardon me.” He moved as swiftly as he could through the crowd without disrupting them too terribly, without drawing too much attention. Surely what he'd seen wasn't what it seemed. Surely the man following his wife wasn't ... Surely the man from Yalta wouldn't dare to ... Evgeniy had been able to excuse that indiscretion, an isolated mistake, but he could not condone this, not abide such, not here in his own town. No, this was untenable, this was...

  They didn't speak after that, and soon Catherine's breathing settled into a regular pattern. He listened to her for a few minutes, then realized he would be unable to sleep himself. He went downstairs, put on the Ornette Coleman CD, and sat down on the sofa to stare at the air-conditioning vent and the painting over the mantel and the pocketbook on the chair with her Palm Pilot within.

  What was the name of that painting? he asked himself again, and this time it came to him, a conversation years ago, emerging from some tucked-away place in his memory. Twin Passions Twined, she'd called it, remarking to Philip that it was like them, wasn't it? like love should be? She wrapped her arms around him in the memory, they kissed, they ... but no comfort in remembering that embrace tonight. Other thoughts intruded. She'd actually painted it in college, hadn't she? And who had the purple swath represented for her then? What had she written down in her Palm Pilot for tonight—"Dinner w/friends"? “Dinner w/Miriam, Alex, etc."? “Dinner with Buddy"? What was listed for the evening a few nights back when she had claimed she was going to Target and Borders?

  * * * *

  It was at the theater that Evgeniy first saw Gurov with his own eyes, but this was not his first awareness of the other man, despite his many attempts to suppress that knowledge. Looking back over all that had happened, Evgeniy realized that he had likely already lost Anna in Yalta, or even before, and he was ashamed to have arranged a witness to his own humiliation.

  Yalta was his wife's first holiday in the two years since they had been married. She had grown up in Petersburg, and he knew that moving to the provinces had been an adjustment for her. He had sensed that she was sometimes restless with their surroundings, restless with the days that he spent away from her while at council and the evenings he spent building relationships to ensure a successful career. He imagined her staring all day at the gray fence opposite the house, or chasing idly after that pesky little dog she loved so, and he felt responsible for the drabness he had begun to see in her eyes.

  "Why don't you take a trip, my darling?” he had asked her one evening when she complained of not feeling well. “A change of scenery will invigorate your spirits. You could travel to Moscow, maybe, or to Petersburg to see your sister. Or someplace new. To Yalta, perhaps. You might enjoy some time at the coast. You can stay for two weeks or a month or even more.” And though she had been hesitant at first, she had eventually acquiesced. A trip was planned for late summer. She bought some clothes for her journey, a new beret, a new parasol as well. Even the preparations seemed to return some glimmer of light to her soft gray eyes, and Evgeniy felt his own spirits relieved as well. At the end of her stay at the coast, he might come down personally to fetch her. They could spend a few days together. It would be a second honeymoon.

  The week before her trip, he had summoned Zhmuhin, the hotel porter, to his office. Evgeniy found Zhmuhin a despicable person in many ways. The man was gaunt and angular, with a bent nose, and Evgeniy had often sensed something smug and sneering beneath his show of truckling diffidence. Plus, Zhmuhin perennially mispronounced Evgeniy's surname as “Dridirit"—intentionally, Evgeniy believed. But Zhmuhin also possessed the keen eye and discretion necessary for his post. He was precise in his tallying of new arrivals to and departures from the town, encompassing in his recognition of small details. It had even been rumored years before that Zhmuhin was an outside agent for the Okhrana, the imperial police, and though the idea had quickly been dismissed, Evgeniy had often wondered at the possibility and as a result continued to cultivate some familiarity with the other man. As if recognizing this, Zhmuhin sometimes dropped his pretensions around Evgeniy, and too often took advantage of being treated as an equal.

  After the porter had settled into one of the wing chairs opposite the mahogany desk, Evgeniy offered him a glass of cognac, asked him about who had checked in most recently at the hotel, laughed that Zhmuhin was always at the hotel, always so much work, and didn't he ever need a holiday? And when Zhmuhin replied that he arranged to go to Petersburg each May and November, the former in honor of the emperor's birthday and the latter to commemorate the dowager empress, Evgeniy commented that such respect was very noble, wondering beneath his words if the man's trips to the capital might have more to do with some duties for the secret police.

  "But perhaps you would also like to take another type of holiday, and sooner,” continued Evgeniy. “Perhaps somewhere warmer, perhaps to a coastal climate? Perhaps to Yalta?"

  A sly smile emerged at one corner of Zhmuhin's lips. “And why would I choose to go to Yalta?” he asked, tugging at the lapels of his gray porter's uniform. “Is there some specific reason for such a trip?"

  "I have always said that you are a clever man,” replied Evgeniy. “That you are intelligent beyond your position, and such you are.” He gestured as if doffing a hat to the porter, though he wore no hat at the time. “You are correct. It is my wife. I have decided to send her to Yalta for a holiday herself, a
nd I would like for you to go as well."

  Zhmuhin's smile vanished. “That sounds little like a holiday, Mr. Dridirit,” he replied, enunciating the last word. “To carry bags and open doors. I can do these things here. And you yourself have servants for such tasks. Send them along instead.” He started to rise.

  "You misunderstand. Please sit, please,” said Evgeniy, careful to maintain his cheer, lacing his fingers together. “That is not at all what I'm asking. Even here you are too wise for such duties, I have always thought you so. No, I do not wish you to accompany my wife but to attend to her at a distance. You have a watchful nature, everyone knows this. I simply want you to keep such a watch over my wife while she is away."

  Zhmuhin's eyes narrowed. He returned to his seat.

  "What need is there to keep a watch over your wife?” he asked. “When I look at your wife, I see a grown woman who does not need a guardian. Don't you agree, Mr. Dridirit?” That sly smile had returned, and Evgeniy detected some hint of salacity behind the porter's comments. He chose to ignore the man's studied insolence.

  "Before our marriage, my wife was surrounded by her family in Petersburg,” Evgeniy replied instead, “and here she enjoys my guardianship, of course. Certainly she is a grown woman, but I have discovered that she is so young still in many ways, simple in her thoughts and her amusements, a naïf. Often I have called her my baby bird, merely a term of endearment, you see, and yet it is appropriate in so many ways that I had not intended.... “He stared down at the blotter on his desk, at the inkwell and the calligraphy pen, the papers, his political responsibilities—another world in which his wife would surely be lost, and he treasured her all the more for that. “This is her first time away on her own, you see, and perhaps I fret over her well-being too much."

  They had completed their deal after that. Zhmuhin was merely to watch from a distance, not to intercede unless he found Anna Sergeyevna to be in some danger. Evgeniy in turn paid for Zhmuhin's transportation, his lodging and meals, and a remuneration of 100 rubles for the six weeks’ work—more than half again his salary at the hotel for the same period, but the extra would ensure his attention and discretion.

  During the first fortnight that his wife was away, Evgeniy began to receive short letters from her. She wrote of her walks in Verney's pavilion and in the public gardens, of the roughness of the seas in the days and the strange light upon it in the evenings, of how everyone gathered in the harbor for the arrival of the steamer. Evgeniy smiled over her letters, envying such simple pleasures, the easy amusements that he had never been the type to enjoy. He was grateful for a wife who could appreciate them so.

  Then one morning, a messenger delivered a telegram to his office. The message itself was unsigned, but in some manner the block type itself bore a familiar insolence, and despite his incomprehension of the telegram's meaning, the words at once sent the blood rushing to Evgeniy's face.

  "Baby bird has found her wings."

  * * * *

  Two nights later, Philip sat in a rented Buick half a block from his own home, staring at the Land Rover that had just pulled to a stop at the curb, watching his wife escorted by another man across the lawn and into their front door. As he had throughout the evening, he struggled with the word stalker and its connotations. But he hadn't been stalking. He had no intention to do anything. He had merely been surveying. He was simply watching the story unfold.

  He should have been in Charlottesville at this point—the lie he'd told Catherine, the one he'd had to tell her. Research for his story, a quick trip to the Center for Russian Studies at UVA, dinner with a friend from college who lived there, someone he hadn't seen in a couple of years. “So I'll have a place to stay for free,” he had explained, plausibly enough. “And it'll give the two of us a chance to catch up.” He'd used the last phrase deliberately—the same that he'd used when talking to Catherine about Buddy—but she hadn't seemed to notice, and he alone had been left with a sour taste in his mouth.

  So far, he'd put only a dozen miles on the rental, only a few miles between each stop: Buddy's neighborhood first, a series of squat bungalows half a century old, freshly painted, freshly landscaped, oversized SUVs out front. A pot of begonias had already bloomed on Buddy's own stoop; his porch swing slowly swayed nearby. Then to the restaurant, following the Land Rover across town to Glenwood Avenue and to the parking lot at 518—a couple of extra miles crisscrossing the streets near the restaurant, Jones to West, Lane to Boylan, the parking lots adjacent to 42nd Street Oyster Bar, Southend, and Ri Ra, couples leaning toward one another, groups talking and laughing, until he found Catherine's beige Camry on Harrington.

  It was still back there now, he knew, abandoned for the evening, and he wondered once more what had been running through her head as she made that decision—him watching from just down the street as the two of them exited the restaurant together, the rest of the evening determined, she must have known, by whatever happened in that moment. She'd held her head low, looking down at the sidewalk; Buddy had leaned his face down to meet her eyes better, gestured for her to stay there, walked around into the parking lot. Catherine alone in front of the restaurant. Her head held low with regrets? with shame? lost in her thoughts? lost in anticipation? Philip imagined for a moment that she had been drinking, that she was drunk, that Buddy was taking advantage of her condition. Didn't it seem she was struggling to maintain her equilibrium? But no, her balance had been complete, her stance never swayed. He could almost smell the scent of her new perfume behind her ears, along her neck. She had looked up the moment he thought that. In the direction of Philip and the rented car? No, toward the tip of the Land Rover, waiting to turn out of the parking lot.

  And now they had entered the house together, the story unfolding not as Philip would have chosen but, unfortunately, as he expected. He tapped his fingers against the steering wheel, its surface sticky with the sweat of someone else's hands.

  A song ended on the radio and the announcer came on. Bob Rogers. WSHA. “The blues is the blues is the blues,” Rogers said, his tone folksy, soothing. Philip thought of evening deejays in empty studios, alone with their passions. He thought of the people who listened to those deejays and about the shape of such a shared solitude. He had always felt apart from people—shy and self-aware—but Catherine had been patient with him, indulged his eccentricities. And what had he given her in return? What had he failed to give her that had sent her away?

  He picked up the cell phone and dialed their home number.

  "Hello, beautiful,” he said when Catherine answered, careful to keep his tone light, determined not to betray his emotions.

  "Hey,” she said. “Are you almost to Charlottesville?"

  "Almost,” he said, pulling up the car a few feet, watching which lights went on in which rooms. “I'm driving into the city limits now. What have you been up to this evening?"

  "I've been out, just got back in,” she said. “I got a call soon after you left and ended up meeting some people down at 518. But about halfway through the meal, I felt sick to my stomach and ended up just coming home."

  An internal complaint, Philip thought. How ironic. How fitting.

  "Well, I hate that I'm so far away,” he said. He searched for the shadows of movement between the half-closed blinds. “I hate for you to be sick and all alone like that."

  "Yeah, I really do feel awful,” she said. “But I'll be all right. Buddy ended up driving me back here, and Miriam said she'd come over and stay the night if I wanted her to."

  "Buddy's there?"

  "Yeah, he said he'd stay with me for a few minutes to make sure I'm okay.” A light went on in the room where Philip worked. “And he hadn't seen the house yet, so this gives him a chance to see our place.” The light went off again.

  "Do you want me to come back?"

  "You're hours away, hon,” she said, her silhouette appearing at the living room window. “Don't be ridiculous. I'll be fine."

  "Well, do you want me to call you back
in a little while?"

  "I'll be fine,” she repeated, and he watched as she shut the blinds tightly. “Don't worry. It was just something I ate. You're almost there and I know you want to catch up with Mike. I'm just going to turn down the ringer and go to bed in a few minutes, just as soon as Buddy leaves."

  Turn down the ringer. Go to bed. Catch up. Half-truths easier to tell than lies.

  "So.” His mind scrambled in vain for a new strategy. “I guess I'll just talk to you tomorrow, then."

  "All right, hon. I'll give you a call on the cell when I get up, okay?"

  "Okay,” he said. And he saw the light in their bedroom come on. “Well, good night."

  "Hey!” she said then. “Aren't you forgetting something?"

  "What?” he asked.

  "How about ‘I love you'?"

  "I love you too,” he replied, relieved that she had said this in front of Buddy. “I'll talk to you tomorrow. Feel better. Good night."

  But his hopes gradually faded as the minutes stretched on. And it was more than an hour before the other man left the house. When the Land Rover pulled away from the street, Philip followed, dutifully.

  * * * *

  Zhmuhin began to send letters after that, penned in his own awkward hand, bearing information about Anna Sergeyevna's indiscretions: how she had retired with the stranger to the sanctity of her hotel room; how the couple had shared a cab to Oreanda, where they had sat near a church and held hands as they stared at the sea; how they now took their meals together regularly; how they stole kisses in the square.

  Zhmuhin was fastidious in his details: There was cream in the crab soup they shared at lunch on Tuesday; the wine they drank after dinner on Thursday was a Madeira, uncorked just for them. Zhmuhin had walked past them near the church in Oreanda, but had recognized no remorse in the man's eyes; the couple's kiss in the square was fleeting, the one in the garden approximately half a minute in duration. Gone was Zhmuhin's insolence, but his cold precision and simple matter-of-factness were perhaps more brutal, giving Evgeniy's grief little room for relief. Evgeniy wept like some sniveling child. His eyesight became bleary with tears and his face turned so red that he stayed home from the office. He caught the servants exchanging glances when he passed them in the house. What a poor excuse for a man he had become!