Neither of them thought to bring a towel, and the night is nippy. At first, he can’t find his shoes. Then he sees them, and when he leans down to pick them up, he realizes just how much he’s had to drink.
He tucks them under one arm, then grabs his clothes as she gathers hers. In the manner in which you register sound when you’re drunk, he understands that the copter is somewhere else now, much closer than it was only seconds before. It has lift at its disposal, drag and thrust. It can do things people can’t.
Maybe the accident, if there was one, has been satisfactorily dealt with by the police. Or maybe they caught whoever staged a break-in, stole a car, committed assault, rape, or murder. Or maybe miscreants are loose nearby.
“Hurry,” he says.
She giggles, and they make a dash for her back door. They’re halfway across the yard when the spotlight blinds them. He ducks his head, so he doesn’t see her turn her face to the sky. But he hears her over the noise of the blades: “It’s biblical!” she cries. “We’re naked in the garden!”
Her bed is a wrought-iron affair that he expects to creak beneath his weight, but it doesn’t. The mattress feels artificially lush, like those in every Marriott he’s ever stayed at. The covers smell faintly of vanilla, the scent of her shampoo.
She switches off the light and backs up against him. For one unrealistic moment, he thinks maybe she wants to go to sleep. That’s what he would like, to lie here holding her all night, listening to the sound of her breathing. He doubts he will sleep much himself. He never used to when he had too much to drink, and he didn’t the other night in San Francisco.
“Fondle my tits?” she says.
He works his right arm underneath her so he can caress both at once.
“Ah. Pull on my nipples, will ya? Draw ’em out.”
He does as she asked, and in a matter of minutes, or maybe it’s only seconds, she’s shivering. She stops his hands, waits till her tremor subsides, then says, “Lil’ more.” She comes at least three times, the last aftershocks accompanied by a sound that falls somewhere on the spectrum between a laugh and a sob.
“Jesus Christ,” she whispers, “that was so fucking nice.”
She rolls over, her face inches from his. Stealthily, like she’s about to lift his wallet, she reaches between his legs.
The easiest thing would be to blame it on drink. But morning will arrive, and so will another night. “It’s not you, Maria,” he says.
She pulls her hand back and studies it. “Looks like me.” Sniffs it. “Smells like me.” Licks her forefinger. “Tastes like me.” Then she pushes the covers aside and begins working her way down his body, kissing his chest and stomach before taking him in her mouth.
He closes his eyes.
Along with most other Poles he’s ever met, his wife hated the film Sophie’s Choice, considering it a self-indulgent, romanticized American take on her nation’s tragedy. Lying here in this strange bed, he calls upon the dissolve at the end, when Meryl Streep’s face fades into pixels and the strings coax out every canned emotion the male heart can harbor. Only now it’s the face of his wife he sees, the dark hair in soft focus, the large eyes alight.
How would what’s happening look to her? Might she wish him quick gratification, since little else is possible? Would she sympathize with Maria, who’s giving so much more than she’ll receive and, on some level, must know it? Julia used to tell him that if she died first, she hoped he would soon find someone else. He said the same thing. You can toss platitudes into the air like confetti when you’re young and the eventuality seems far away, if not inconceivable. You don’t think that day will come, but then it does. And here it is.
And here he is.
Maria is nothing if not tenacious. She works hard to make it happen, and they are finally both rewarded, his hips arching off the bed. It would be difficult to say which of them labored more.
“Oh, man.” She reaches toward the floor, for a glass of water artfully placed. She takes a swallow, wipes her mouth, then crawls the length of his body, planting kisses on the way up as she did on her way down, until she’s lying on top of him, her damp hair spread out on both sides of his chest. She falls asleep like that, and he lets her lie there for a long time, stroking her thin shoulders before gently shifting her onto her side.
She wakes happier than she’s been in a long time—happier, maybe, than at any time since the first weeks of her marriage, nearly twenty years ago in Arkansas. Richard, of course, has no idea she was ever married. He didn’t ask, and she didn’t volunteer. Her husband was a wonderful man, sixteen years older, owner of a lumber company in Hot Springs. He had countless good traits. He was solicitous, soft-spoken, generous to a fault. He also had one very bad habit that she wasn’t aware of until they’d been married for a month: every week or two, he visited the racetrack at nearby Oaklawn Park. He’d been doing it for years and was in debt up to his neck. She learned that the morning a guy she’d never seen before approached her in the dairy aisle at the grocery store.
She can hear Richard moving around in her kitchen, and she can smell coffee and hear the Mr. Coffee chugging away, hissing and gurgling. It needs to be cleaned. Making a mental note to buy white vinegar, she shrugs into her bathrobe. She can’t locate her house slippers, so she walks in barefoot.
She’s thinking how nice it is to wake up and find someone in the house, somebody who’s taken the time to make coffee so you won’t have to. If he hasn’t already fixed breakfast, maybe they’ll go eat at the French bakery in Fig Garden Village. She’s an early riser and has dropped by there a few times to pick up croissants or fresh rolls. You see a lot of older couples in there, retired people, probably, who have nothing pressing to do and can go out to enjoy breakfast together and sit there all day if they choose.
He’s fully dressed. And he’s having trouble looking at her. He studies the level in the coffee pot as if he’s involved in a lab experiment that will go up in flames after one drop too many.
In an instant, she lowers her expectations. If you told her that five years from now, she’ll be covering crime and immigration for the Washington Post, living in Bethesda, Maryland, happily married to a high school principal and with a daughter whom they adopted from Thailand, not only would she not believe you, she might also slap your face. She has a good mind, right now, to slap his. “What is it?” she says.
He removes the pot from the coffee maker and fills two cups. Then he finally does look at her. He’s not just embarrassed. What she sees in his eyes is mortification—of which, she would grant you, embarrassment is a subsidiary property, at least in her experience.
“Can we sit down?” he asks.
“Sure. We can sit down, we can lie down, we can roll over and play dead. Whatever you choose.”
“This is not what you think, Maria.”
He tries to hand her the coffee. She won’t take it.
“How the hell,” she asks, “do you know what I think?”
“You’re right. I don’t. Would you agree to tell me?”
“Okay. To start with, I hate your fucking wounded nobility. You wear it like a motorcycle helmet. Get over it.”
“I’d love to.”
“Then do.”
“I’d love to. But I’d be doing you a disservice to pretend I have when I haven’t.”
He realizes immediately how poorly he chose his words. Still, he’s unprepared for the speed with which she eliminates the distance, grabs his shirt collar, and twists it. “I am not an automobile,” she says, so close now that he feels a blast of hot breath. “I don’t need service. If anybody got serviced last night, it was you.”
She clenches his collar for a few more seconds, during which she decides the best way to move past where they are right now is for her to go ahead and slap him. She lets go and whacks him on the side of the head, a halfhearted blow that nevertheless stings her palm and leaves his left ear red.
“Now what are you supposed to say?” she asks.
&n
bsp; “‘Thanks, I needed that’?”
“Good boy. I had high hopes for you. You know it, don’t you?”
He carries his coffee over to the kitchen table and sits down. “What can I say, Maria?”
She picks up the cup he filled for her and sits down opposite him. “Whatever it is,” she advises, “you better avoid mechanical imagery.”
So he tells her that when he woke up in Krakow and learned he’d lost his wife and daughter, he understood he was ruined for anybody else. Why it’s so, he doesn’t know. Plenty of people transcend their losses and go on to make second lives, sometimes even third lives. Whereas he returned nearly three years ago and began to go through the motions, slogging from one day to the next without caring too much whether the next one ever came. “When we had lunch a couple months ago at Chicken Liver’s and you stomped on my foot, you said you wanted to wake me up. You did that. And I’m grateful—really, I am—for the chance to remember what being awake feels like. I hope you’ll forgive me for saying this, but I think the best thing for me would be to go back to sleep.”
She’s heard all kinds of exit lines and delivered a fair number herself. He’s the first man she’s ever slapped. And now, in the wake of being dumped by him, he’s become the first one she feels the need to look after. He’s many times worse off than she will ever be. He no longer believes in possibility. A small part of her can’t give up on that belief. It needs to be watered daily, kept alive until conditions improve. They’re bound to.
“About the story we’ve been working on?” he says.
“Yeah?”
“It’s no longer ours. It never really was. It’s all yours.”
“I’ve just accepted a whole lot from you, Richard. But that I don’t understand.”
“I can’t write it.”
“Why?”
“I just can’t. I don’t have what it takes anymore. It’s related to everything else I don’t have.”
“You know I was ordered not to pursue it.”
“Of course I do. That’s why the two of us spent the last couple months doing what you were told not to.”
“So what are you suggesting? That we just let the story die along with those poor people while that fucking sleaze continues to chase his championship?”
“Not at all. Take what’s on that memory stick and lay it on your editor’s desk. Inform him that if he won’t let you write the story, I will write it instead, and that a big part of my story will be how he put the lid on your efforts. What do you think his response will be?”
With greater calm than she feels, she takes a sip of coffee. It will be a couple of months before she wonders if this was a gift of sorts, a present in lieu of other responses she could not inspire. She’ll entertain that line of thought for only moments before rejecting it. That’s not who he is. Those kinds of calculations are beneath him.
She sets down her cup. “That cowardly bastard?” she says. “He’ll be on his knees begging me to write it.”
He pulls into a parking lot at City College to check his phone. There’s a text from Monika, telling him Stefan just had to have emergency gall bladder surgery but that he’ll be okay. A text from Stefan, striking a jocular tone, noting that since the Polish word for “death” is feminine, if he dies, at least it will be at the hands of a woman. In no mood for dark humor, Richard presses the escape key, leaving the rest of it for later. There’s also one from Franek, sent late last night, saying he’s in love with Sandy, that he wants to remain in America and marry her rather than go home, because he doesn’t love his parents and never did.
What a lovely day.
He pulls back into traffic. When Rupert said the person who brought Jacinta’s phone to him was a “she” rather than a “he,” his disbelief had lasted only a few seconds. The picture came into focus, as it does when you’re looking at a pointillist painting and you locate the optimum viewing distance. He knew immediately who “she” was, and when he described her, Rupert confirmed it.
If your son’s welfare is at stake, you do whatever you have to. If he’s hanging around the wrong kinds of people, smoking too much pot, and revealing a proclivity for cybercrime, you send him elsewhere, hoping that a change of scenery will solve the problem. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. Maybe it will lead to other problems, which might be worse. You won’t know until you try.
If your daughter falls off her bike and busts up her beautiful face, you throw her in the car and head for the children’s hospital as fast as you can, hoping that your worst fears will not be realized, that she’ll be treated quickly and expertly, that her scars will heal, that she won’t have to live with a face that looks like a road map. Right then, you can’t imagine anything worse, even though you know that worse things do in fact happen to people. You’re just convinced they won’t ever happen to her.
If you didn’t get to attend college because your folks were first-generation Mexican immigrants and you lived in a shitty house on a dangerous street in East L.A., it stands to reason that you’d like to give your own kids the chance you never got. So you and your wife work your asses off. She pulls extra shifts and eats too much candy, and you pull extra ones too. Like most joes, you don’t turn down work. As the tuition bills come due, you lie awake at night, wondering how you’re going to pull it off. Four kids times a hundred thousand dollars or even more if they’re accepted by private schools that don’t offer a ton of aid. How much overtime can the two of you stand? If you’re never home, they may get into trouble. That’s what unattended kids do.
Then an opportunity falls into your hands. And you’ve got the one piece of knowledge you need to capitalize on it, because your eyes and your ears are your currency and you’ve kept them open. You didn’t kill anybody. No matter what you do or don’t do, you can’t bring them back. You see that phone lying there on the table, so you pick it up and put it in your pocket.
You know, because you keep your eyes and ears open, that there are folks around who can tell you what’s on the phone. They will have their price. It’s a gamble. It might not reveal anything at all. But it’s a risk worth taking. The thing is, your face is known. It occasionally shows up on TV, usually in the background, as one of those guys standing around behind the chief or his designated spokesman. You can’t take the step yourself, though you will take the necessary subsequent steps if anything of use turns up on that phone. In a good marriage, the partners pull together. You both do what you have to for those you love the most.
Richard understands this. He remembers how it was. That’s the truest thing he could say to Cloris Garcia, the woman who once made certain his daughter went right to the front of the line, that she got the best care in the least time.
SAFE SPACE - 2016
When Bogdan wakes after another poor night’s sleep, he looks at the clock. It stands on his bedside table, less than a meter away, but he still can’t quite decipher the glowing green numbers. In the last few years, he’s developed blepharitis. Lately, perhaps because he lies awake at night listening to the sounds coming from the room above his, it seems to be getting worse. This morning, it takes a couple of minutes for his vision to clear. Even after it does, his eyes keep burning.
He swings his legs out of bed, his bare feet recoiling when they touch the floor, which feels like a sheet of ice. He reaches for the radiator, wondering if the boiler is again on the blink, but the surface is hot. It must be really cold out. His sister will be pleased. Having little to fret over, she worries about the cancellations warmer temperatures bring. You can’t ski without snow.
He rises, flips on the overhead light, then pulls off the long underwear that he’s been sleeping in and steps into the small bathroom, where he turns on the shower. He lets the water run for a moment before entering the stall. Until recently, he got up each morning, washed his face, put his clothes on, and went to breakfast, saving the shower for the evening. He only changed his routine after Teresa hired the Ukrainian refugee.
Elena is blonde like
Krysia, but her hair has a few gray streaks, and her face looks tense. It’s impossible to say how old she is. His best guess would be forty-five. Around the pension, she always seems to wear the same clothes: a pair of pleated jeans, a green sweater that needs depilling, black shoes of the type that are usually called “sensible.”
He has seen her wearing something different exactly twice. The first time was about a month ago, on a Saturday night when he was strolling down Krupowki, Zakopane’s steeply sloping main street, which is lined on both sides by shops, restaurants, hotels, and bars. She emerged from one of the latter. It was snowing, and she had on what he assumed was a fake sheepskin but no scarf or cap. The lampposts on Krupowki curl into the shape of a bass clef in honor of the composer Szymanowski, and when she reached out to steady herself against one of them, he thought she’d lost her footing. Then he realized she was drunk. He took a step in her direction, but she shook her head, as if to say, No, I don’t need or welcome your help, so he continued on his way to meet Roman for a beer. He didn’t mention what he’d seen.
The other time was last week when the boiler quit. He was down in the basement with two repairmen all afternoon and most of the evening, and once they finally got it working, they asked him to go into each room and make sure the release of hot water hadn’t caused any leaks. The last room was the one above his. When he knocked, she didn’t answer. So he knocked again. This time he heard familiar footsteps. The door opened a crack, but she left the night latch engaged. “What?” she said.
He could see just a sliver of her face: her right eye, the corner of her mouth, part of her jaw. The effect was jarring, as if the rest of her head had been sheared away.
“I need to check the radiator,” he said.
“It works.”
“I know that. But they’re worried about leaks. I’d just be a minute.”
The door closed again. The latch clicked, and she let him in.
She was wearing a plaid flannel shirt that must have belonged to a very large man: it hung halfway down her otherwise bare thighs, and though she’d rolled up the cuffs, they still covered her wrists and part of each hand. She gestured toward the window. “There,” she said, like he might not know a radiator when he saw one.
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