by Chris Cander
After a few months, though, he began campaigning for her to enroll at UCLA. “You’re too smart not to,” he told her. “You like cars, so study mechanical engineering. We could spend more time together.” She shrugged and said she was happy being a mechanic, that she liked it and was good at it, her uncle having trained her well. Soon frustrated by her continued lack of interest, Bobby said hurtful, pointed things like “Don’t you think your parents would’ve wanted you to go to college?” Eventually, he told her he didn’t want to be with someone who wasn’t going to do something more significant with her life than changing oil, and that was that. Her first real heartbreak after the original.
She met Frank at a bar a few weeks after her twenty-second birthday. Jack had been diagnosed with late-stage throat cancer, and she needed to escape Ila’s desperate hand-wringing. She’d always been more likely to cry on Clara’s shoulder than to offer the comfort of her own. Frank was a bartender and fly fisherman with tattoos that began at his wrists, disappeared into his rolled-up shirtsleeves, and emerged again at his collar. Clara, approaching him drunkenly that first night, asked where she should go to get inked, something like a socket wrench and a heart in her uncle’s honor. Frank told her she’d regret a tattoo, swapped her whiskey for hot tea, and defended her from jeering patrons while she slept it off, head down on folded arms at the bar. She woke up when the lights came on, and once he’d finished cleaning up, Frank took her home and put her to bed on his couch.
Ila died of cardiac arrest early in their relationship; then Jack was transitioned into a nursing home. Clara had to sell Jack’s shop, along with the house that had been her home since she was twelve, in order to pay all the bills, and Frank made room for her in his small apartment. She needed a job, and he introduced her to his friend Peter Kappas, who gave her one in his parents’ garage. When her uncle died, Frank helped out with the funeral arrangements, stood with his arm around her as the preacher delivered the eulogy, let her cry in the bedroom undisturbed. He was a sweet and decent guy, so much more laid-back than Bobby, so much less demanding, and she thought maybe he was the kind who wouldn’t break her heart—until he brought a girl named Willow home and told Clara how hot it would make him if he could watch them get together.
She didn’t have many friends, so she asked Peter and his brothers to help her move into a new apartment. Afterward, Peter asked her to dinner, and she said she’d go, but only as a friend. She tipped her head far back, looked him in the eyes, and told him, “I like you. Let’s don’t fuck it up.”
She had a handful of casual dates, though never with anyone she wanted to see again. She had a policy against socializing with customers, and since she didn’t like to hang out in bars or coffee shops, meeting new people was hard. When she wasn’t working, she spent most of her time either alone or with Peter.
Then she met Ryan, who was pushing his cart down the grocery aisles with cool aplomb, smiling at shoppers and workers alike. With a high, domed forehead, a hooked nose, and a slight paunch, he wasn’t especially handsome, yet Clara noticed that people were turning to watch him. He nodded at Clara as he passed by, and she understood: that brief and beatific glance felt like a blessing. When he walked away with his back to her, she became aware of the simultaneous sensations of loneliness and longing. He stopped at a display to accept a sample of agua fresca, and she wheeled her cart next to his. The employee handed her a small paper cup, and Ryan turned to her and said, “Cheers” in what she soon learned was a South African accent.
They loitered next to the juice bar, their carts touching. He was a freelance pilot who flew King Airs for an air-ambulance service, delivering harvested organs to recipients or flying patients to hospitals for transplants. He loved being able to help the children especially, he said. While he talked, she noticed and developed an immediate affection for the crookedness of his teeth, the deep blue-brown of his eyes. When she told him she was a mechanic, she worried that he might lose what seemed to be a mutual interest, but he slapped his thigh and said, “That’s so cool!” Then, uncharacteristically forward, she asked if he would take her flying.
She moved into his two-bedroom rental house five months later. Now, almost two years after that, she was moving back out again.
* * *
—
She dropped the stack of boxes by the front door and looked around the twilit room. The overhead lights were too bright for her task, too normal, so she cracked open a beer and let her eyes adjust. There on the table, as promised, was a lease agreement and a shiny gold key. Next to it was a note that said simply, I wish you the best.—Ryan. P.S. Don’t forget to leave your key. She crumpled it up and tossed it in the trash.
There wasn’t much to pack, just her clothes and books and CDs, a few things from the kitchen. The hibachi she’d given him for a birthday present and he’d never set up. A couple of lamps. Her uncle’s favorite tools and the one family photo album her aunt had put together. She could fit most of her stuff into the Corolla; after starting over as an orphan fourteen years before, she’d never gotten into the habit of collecting things. But she would need help, and a truck, for the futon couch that would become a bed again, a small table and chairs, her bike, the piano.
She opened a second beer and wandered into the spare bedroom. Her old Blüthner upright was against the wall, unplayed and mostly ignored, as it had been since she’d moved in. In the beginning, Ryan didn’t complain about the space it took up, didn’t urge her to try lessons again. He accepted it as one does any relic of a lover’s history—generously at first and then, when the inevitable discords arose, with increasing degrees of irritation until, finally, it came to symbolize the worst failures between them.
“Why don’t you just get rid of that thing?” he’d snapped in the middle of a recent fight. His thirty-fifth birthday was a few months away, and he wanted to turn the room into a nursery. “You don’t even know how to play it,” he added, with unforgivable disgust in his voice.
“Fly to hell,” she told him. He marched into their bedroom and slammed the door so hard that she could feel it in her teeth. That was two weeks ago.
Now she sat down on the bench, took another swig. She mashed a pedal with her bare foot and listened to the faint sound of nothing, of dampers lifting from strings without sustaining any notes. It was like pressing the accelerator and wanting to take off—but where?—in a car that wouldn’t run.
THE TROLLEYBUS SQUEALED to a stop, the triangle ropes swinging in lazy arcs above the passengers’ heads. “Извините,” Katya said, rushing, and brushed by the stockinged knees of old women, the bored gazes of tired men. Due at the Theater for Young People in fifteen minutes, she would almost certainly be late.
She walked as fast as she could, occasionally breaking into brief sprints until her feet pinched inside the leather heels she’d borrowed from her roommate. She fanned away her perspiration with the thin portfolio of sheet music—at least the weather hadn’t turned too hot yet—and hurried past the statue of the diplomat Griboyedov, the neat rectangle of grass down the center of Pionerskaya Square, the mothers pushing prams along the tree-lined walkway, the young stilyagi pretending to be fancy Americans in their narrow pants and bright shirts, smoking cigarettes and laughing too loud at one another’s jokes.
“Katya!” called her friend from the Leningrad Conservatory, Boris Abramovich, as he jogged up and took her hand. “I thought you’d changed your mind, I was so worried.”
“No, of course not. It was the trolley’s fault. Late again.”
“Soviet timetables aren’t so precise after all,” Boris said, practically pulling her along, his dancer’s stride longer than hers by half.
“Don’t talk like that, Borya. The walls have ears.”
He gestured gracefully toward the cloudy sky. “In the middle of the promenade! You shouldn’t be so serious all the time, you know. Loosen up a little bit.” He slowed down and
tried to undo the top button on her blouse, but she slapped his hand—mildly, though, as if shooing away a housefly. He laughed. “Besides, now Gerald Ford will save us with разрядка.”
She liked Boris, but he was too fanciful. He was studying choreography at the conservatory, where she was three years into her specialist degree in the art of instrumental performance. Piano students were sometimes invited to accompany the ballet dancers during practices and performances, and even to compose scores for their choreography. This was how they’d met, and while she admired his dancing and his intellect and enjoyed his company, his enthusiasm for seemingly everything exhausted her. He tended to break into dance if provoked by a sunny day or traffic around Theater Square, by news good or bad. Once, when they were waiting for the subway, he’d performed pirouettes down the entire length of the Sadovaya station.
The previous winter he’d invited her to go with him to a party at the apartment of another student whose parents were away. She was reluctant to go—having heard stories about those student parties, how wild and loud they got—but he convinced her that she spent too much time alone, practicing. “You’ll turn into a mushroom,” he said. At the party, there were black-market jazz records and raucous laughter, cheap cigarettes and even cheaper vodka, dancing and kissing among strangers, a steady parade of couples taking turns to gain a few minutes of privacy in the closet. After losing the one drinking game Boris had dragged her into, she found her coat in the pile by the door and snuck out into the relative quiet of the night, so relieved to be alone that she didn’t bother to worry whether any of the citizens walking along the Fontanka River were KGB.
“Did you invite anyone to the performance?” Boris asked as they approached the rear of the building and peered around the corner at the small crowd gathered in front of the low steps. He’d arranged for a grand piano to be moved from inside the theater to the concrete deck that would also serve as his stage. The show was Boris’s idea. A professor had asked him to reinterpret a classical ballet, and he’d chosen The Little Humpbacked Horse, which was based on the familiar old fairy tale about a foolish boy named Ivan and the magical horse who helped him win the love of the beautiful Tsar Maiden. Traditionally, the ballet was staged with large casts, grand-scale scenes, and sentimental music that followed Ivan on his adventures underwater and to the edge of the world. But Boris had wanted something dramatically different—one dancer, one instrument, outside in the open air—and had also wanted Katya to compose the score.
“No. This is your performance,” she told him now. “I’m only helping.”
He glanced at her, pretending to be hurt. “What, you don’t want to show me off to your friends?”
She rolled her eyes at him.
“I’m just teasing you!” he said. “But you should’ve extended an invitation. Your music is magnificent. The whole orchestra translated into a single instrument. You made it better than I could ever have imagined, Katya.”
She blushed and turned slightly away. “It’s only one scene.”
“Yes, but it’s the best one.” He winked at her and unzipped his trousers. “It’s time. Let’s go.”
He nudged her forward, and she walked carefully to the piano. There was no applause, because nobody knew what to expect when she sat down. Then she played a chord and Boris swept out onto the stage wearing flesh-colored tights, slippers, and a pointed felt hat, carrying a large orange feather and a stick horse. There were a few laughs, mostly from the children. He took a bow, nodded to Katya, and they began.
Alone on the improvised stage, Boris became Ivan, ordered to a mountain to find the mythical firebirds and the imagined Tsarevna. As he folded and unfolded, winding and twisting, dancing solo among the building’s columns but conveying all the necessary roles, bringing the drama to life, Katya felt the stage begin to recede. The audience, swelling with passersby, was pushed away from the concrete steps and into the distance. Beyond them, the trolleybuses and cars stopped on their tracks, the murky river paused its flow into the Baltic Sea. Leningrad and maybe the entire USSR grew still; there were no sounds except for the music. It was better on her Blüthner, she thought, but it still felt like magic.
Katya was lifted off the piano bench, her shoes no longer pinching, off the paving stones. Only her fingers on the keys tethered her to the physical world as she floated on the notes into the overcast sky. Now the clouds were parting, the gray smog burning away, the urban smell of sadness and decay gone. Katya closed her eyes. Had she ever seen such colors as those that swirled around her when she soared with the firebirds up to the top of the Tsarevna’s mountain? Bursting flowers everywhere, a sparkling sky. Then there was the princess, swishing her skirt and fan out on the bright balcony above the world, on the edge of newfound love. And here the fool was, discovering her, convincing her to return with him to the capital. It nearly blinded her, it was so beautiful.
She only ever felt like this when she played.
The dance went on for seven minutes, over in a flash. Katya’s soul was still lingering above the stage, covered in music, when Boris put his hand on her back, urging her to stand and bow. She moved as though awoken from a deep sleep. The audience clapped for nearly a minute, calling Браво! Браво! before dispersing. Then Boris danced offstage to see his instructor and some friends, and Katya was left alone, clutching the open piano for support as she tried to fit again into her inadequate body, the day once more turning stagnant around her.
Eventually coming to, she noticed a young man standing on the steps, watching her. He took long drags on his cigarette, narrowing his eyes each time, then angled his square head away to exhale through one side of his mouth, as though to avoid blowing smoke directly at her. She had no idea who he was, but this apparent consideration impressed her.
He didn’t alter his gaze for the long seconds it took him to take a final puff, flick his cigarette down, grind it with his heel, and walk toward her with heavy, methodical steps. He was average height and sturdy beneath his collared shirt, which strained only a little at the buttons above his belt. Yet he moved as though gravity worked harder on him than on other people. It made him seem serious—mule-like, even. He stopped directly in front of her and put his hands in his pockets.
“I found this piece to be motivically cohesive,” he said with a jut of his chin. “It was good. I liked it. There were aspects of the main theme within the structure, yes?” His voice was deeper than she’d have guessed, a low-pitched key that made her think of the old oktavist tradition from the tsar’s court.
She blinked at him. He didn’t look like a musicologist or a musician, but what did she know? “Yes,” she said, and it came out small and hoarse. She cleared her throat. “Thank you.”
“Welcome,” he said. He lit another cigarette and offered it to her.
She shook her head no. She’d tried smoking once; it had bothered her to hold her fingers like that. But she didn’t want the refusal of his cigarette to end their conversation. “Are you at the conservatory?”
“No,” he said, again turning his head to exhale just as a gust of warm air caught the smoke and blew it in her face anyway. “I am going to be an engineer. Still, I understand musical structure. Sometimes I read Schenker.”
She, too, had read the theories of Heinrich Schenker, though only because she’d been required to. Whoever this young man was, she thought, he must be very intelligent. Up close, his eyes were the color of the canal, dirty gray and swirling. She saw herself reflected in them the way a dark sun floats on the surface of the water.
“Maybe you would like to have some tea with me,” he told her. “I have some Estrada records…”
She was twenty years old. A virgin, and not necessarily by choice. In high school she had been almost serious with a boy who lived in her apartment building in Zagorsk, but she had ended it when he complained about her abandoning him for the conservatory, to her father’s rel
ief and her mother’s disappointment. You need to think of your future, Katen’ka. You should have a husband, a family! And what about me? I have only you. It would be nice for you to make me a grandmother!
Boris had kissed her once when he was drunk, and she might have gone to bed with him had he not passed out against her shoulder. A similar opportunity had not yet arisen naturally, and she was too shy to proposition him. Since she’d arrived in Leningrad, two years before, no other boys had shown any interest in her.
“I don’t know you,” she said gently.
“I am Mikhail Zeldin.” He didn’t move to shake her hand, only continued to look at her appraisingly. Then he shrugged and gave a slight grin. “Now you know me.”
She giggled. She found his confidence appealing. She liked how he looked at her, as if he knew she was sometimes lonely, like he might be lonely sometimes, too, even though he didn’t seem the type to admit such a thing. “Okay,” she said.
He turned and started down the steps as though he’d forgotten he had just invited her to have tea. She hurried to catch up, aware again of the tightness of her shoes, and then he slowed his pace so she could walk beside him. As they went along, mostly in silence, Katya registered an unfamiliar tension that pulsated between them in spite of—or perhaps because of—the fact that they hardly spoke.
He led her to his third-floor apartment in a dingy yellow building near the square, and explained that he shared the two rooms with three other students from the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute, where he was studying civil engineering. “Road building is my specialty,” he said. “Very important work.” He didn’t apologize for the heap of clothes on the floor next to the sofa, or the dirty cups that lined the windowsill, or the full ashtrays, or the faintly sour odor. Instead, after they removed their shoes, he motioned for her to sit and then went to the small kitchenette to put a kettle on to boil.