by Shamim Sarif
She slides into the red vinyl seats, and Alexander is half-inside too but stops to hand the doorman a tip. His wallet is flipped open – a rich, brown leather casing, which is beginning to show the grainy softness of age. He pulls out a bill and hands it to the man, but Estelle’s attention is on a photograph that is exposed inside the open wallet. She sees it for only a second, perhaps two, and it is old and black and white, and perhaps even very slightly out of focus. But the woman in the picture is arresting – she is also young and quite beautiful. Estelle can tell that much despite the fact that the woman is squinting into the camera because the sun is in her eyes. There is something about the photograph, something seductive, something she has no time to think about or define at that moment – but it strikes her as one of those images that contain a whole attitude and atmosphere and that would make anyone stop and take a second look if they could. As Alexander enters the cab, his thumb brushes lightly and very quickly over the picture, and his glance falls on Estelle; then the wallet is closed, and the woman is gone.
He gives the driver his address, and Estelle clears her throat, but hesitates to ask the question on her lips. He looks at her, expectant, a clear gaze with those clear brown eyes, and she can tell nothing at all from them. With a polite smile, she sits back in her seat and looks ahead as the cab moves off.
His house is an old, red-brick building, dating from the days when high ceilings and grand rooms were common. From the days when a growing city could afford to be expansive.
“It’s nice to see a place like this that’s unconverted.”
He nods. “Lots of stairs. Keeps my old bones moving.”
“We don’t live all that far from each other. We’re in a brownstone, it’s a lovely building, but we have an apartment. Small, but worth it, to be in the centre of town.”
He understands this – he has always lived right in the middle of cities; even in Moscow he had that privilege. Most people who wanted slightly larger apartments – or any apartment of their own – were forced to move to Khrushchev’s new buildings, hastily thrown up, thin-walled and grey, on the outskirts of the city. And many people were happy with that; those blocks gave them space they had never had before. Unless you did well for the Party, or worked in the government itself, rooms at the hub of Moscow were tiny and overfilled.
He holds open his front door for Estelle and she steps into a wood-panelled hallway that instantly brings to her mind an English country house. Instead of portraits of ancestors on the walls, there is a selection of art, some abstract, some figurative, all relatively modern. She half-expects a butler to appear, but the only other sign of life is the understated hum of a vacuum cleaner upstairs. While Alexander hangs their coats and scarves, she looks at the artwork. There are a couple of paintings that she feels immediately pulled into. Strangely, they are abstracts, the kind of non-representative pieces that she usually cannot find any empathy with. But these evoke a certain emotion within her, a feeling of lost love or deep sorrow, and she is unsettled by this, and examines the paintings well, trying to ascertain how the patches of textured colours could create such a sensation. She is about to say something to Alexander when he returns, but cannot find the words to articulate what she is thinking, without sounding pretentious or confused.
“Are you sure about this? I hate to trouble you,” she says. “We could just go get a sandwich somewhere.”
“Absolutely sure. Cooking is a kind of therapy for me. It will be a simple meal.”
Estelle follows him into the living room, a large, light space, with leather armchairs and sofas and a wall full of books and a grand piano. A drawing room from a novel, she thinks. In one corner stands a Christmas tree, a real one, that gives off a fresh smell of pine needles and sap. Windows stretch from the ceiling to the floor, showing a small garden beyond. She looks out at this garden while he fetches a bottle of wine from the kitchen next door. The plants and trees have a feeling of fullness even now, in the late autumn, and she can tell that the slightly overgrown, lush, romantic quality of the garden is carefully nurtured. He returns with the bottle and opens it smoothly and with close attention, and Estelle gives him a glance of query before going over to the piano. She studies the photographs that are ranged over it, and picks up one.
“She’s very attractive.”
“Lauren, my niece,” he says. “She’s an artist. A painter. Those are some of her pieces in the hall.”
Estelle turns, her interest caught. “Really? I thought they were amazing. But I don’t know why. I’m so ignorant about great art, and how it’s made and yet…”
“Yes?”
“And yet, if there’s anything I would have liked to have been, it’s a writer.”
And there it is, she has said it out loud, the thing that she keeps so quietly within herself.
He takes a sniff of the wine and concentrates. When he offers Estelle a glass, she takes it, swirls the liquid around as he has done, and inhales deeply. The scent is soft and smoky, a deeply comforting smell, of dried fruit and spice and warm tobacco, and it is a world away from the everyday wine that she is used to.
“Why didn’t you?” he asks. “Become a writer?”
She winces, then takes a quick sip. “Don’t make it sound so simple.”
“Why not?”
She makes no immediate answer. When she does speak, quietly, she feels him leaning in to catch her words.
“Because if it is that simple, I’ve wasted too much time.”
It is a clear, open statement and she is almost embarrassed by it.
“Do you write now?” he asks.
She is dismissive, back in control. “A little. Here and there. Not enough, I guess.”
Her eyes escape back to the piano, and it is then that she sees her. The woman she noticed earlier, in the wallet photograph. Estelle picks up the frame.
“This one?” she asks.
“Katya. My late wife,” he says. Late. As though she has missed a dinner engagement and might be arriving at any moment. His eyes glance outside, involuntarily, away from the picture and from Estelle’s enquiring face; the sky is beginning to cloud over and is giving out a dull, heavy light that reminds him of the past, suddenly. That colourless, oppressive air had been such a memorable feature of the days following Katya’s death that even now, he cannot bear to feel it too closely about him. He walks to the door, his tone brisk.
“Could I ask you to accompany me to the kitchen?” he says with an exaggerated bow. “And is there anything you don’t eat?”
“Sauerkraut,” Estelle says promptly. “If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s cabbage. Especially when it’s all pickled and disguised and wishing it was something else.”
“There goes my centrepiece dish,” he says.
The kitchen is large, as she had expected it would be for someone in his line of work, and it immediately gives her a slight sense of inadequacy. Painted wooden cupboards give it a homely air, arranged around a vast, gleaming steel stove that takes up much of one wall. Above the stove hangs a wood and steel rack from which shining pots, pans and colanders are suspended. On steel hooks over the stove there are large cooking spoons and a number of other items; tiny frying pans and sieves, mashers and graters – many of which have uses that she cannot even guess at. Here, she notices, there is none of the casual disarray and untidiness that always seems to creep into her own home, no matter how she tries to keep things in their proper place. There is abundance here, but also a feeling of order. With quick movements, he ties on a half-apron.
“I’ve been longing to be in this kitchen all morning. Thank you for giving me the opportunity.”
“You’re more than welcome. I wish I had your enthusiasm for kitchens, but I don’t. Which is why I always promised myself I’d marry a man who could cook.”
The opportunity he has been looking for. Some part of him has hesitated to ask her outright whether she is married.
“So your husband can cook?” he asks.
“No,” she replies with a laugh. “He can’t.”
He weighs the tomatoes in his hand – they give a little to his touch, the deep red skin showing the slightest beginnings of a wrinkle of over-ripeness. Satisfied, he pours boiling water over them, waiting a moment for the skins to split, before he peels and chops. They are tossed into the pan where smashed garlic and fine-chopped onions are already frying, filling the kitchen with an aroma that makes her feel hungry at once. She watches the chunky freshness of the tomatoes collapsing in the pan, melting into the translucent onions.
“What can I do?” Estelle asks.
“You could grate the parmesan.”
He hands her a large block of cheese, rough-edged and pungent. She smells it.
“My god, that’s wonderful. And I thought it came from the cow ready grated…”
“Shame on you,” he says. “Here.” He shaves off a piece with a knife and offers it to her. “Taste this.”
Carefully, she takes the cheese and places it in her mouth.
“It’s wonderful,” she tells him.
He hands her the wine glass. “Now take a sip of that over it.”
She is inordinately conscious of his hand touching hers as he passes the glass over. The cheese is rich and full, with layers of flavour that are completely unlike anything she has tried before. He turns away, as if to give her time and space to enjoy the tasting, and washes basil leaves at the sink. The wine runs smoothly over the lingering taste in her mouth, deepening and rounding it. She resists closing her eyes to concentrate her other senses, and instead, watches him tear the basil into the sauce. He pauses and holds a handful of the leaves under her nose. She smells them and smiles, an acknowledgement of the vibrancy of the herbal scent. She watches as he works, leaning over the pan, and takes another sip of wine, grateful for a moment unobserved to absorb the discoveries she feels she has been making all morning.
They begin the meal with steamed asparagus, dipped into melted butter. They eat with their fingers, cradling the stems, coaxing them into the sauce.
“I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who loves food as much as you do, Alexander.”
“It’s just fresh, simple ingredients,” he says. “I got used to stale food in Russia, at least some of the time, but here there is no excuse. And I was lucky. My first job here in America was in my brother-inlaw’s grocery store. I was surrounded by food all day.”
“So you really did start with nothing?”
Less than nothing, he thinks. No money and no prospects was the least of it. A heart as dead as a blighted tree was much harder to overcome.
“Yes,” he answers.
She looks at him, a pin-sharp gaze, but he will not speak the sorrow in his eyes.
“I remember it so well, even now,” he says. “Coming from Russia, I had never seen so much food. So much fresh food. So many wonderful breads and cakes, and fruit and meat all in one place. Of course, compared to the delis and supermarkets we have now, it was nothing, but then… I thought we sold everything. Flour and sugar came out of big drums, into paper bags which were weighed.”
“I remember,” smiles Estelle.
“After a while, I began baking in the shop. Cakes, pies, tarts. We sold them piece by piece.”
Slowly, they had added more dishes – brown-crusted meat pies, lentil-rich soups. Shop and office workers began to come in and buy their lunches there, and Alexander would watch them from the kitchen in the back, noting a shop girl’s smile as she caught the scent of her soup, or an old man biting gratefully into a pie, unable to wait until he left the shop.
“From there it was a natural progression to catering and canapés,” he says, with a slightly ironic smile. He sprinkles the grated cheese into the hot pasta and carries it to the table.
“Who were your clients?” Estelle asks.
“Mostly well-to-do women. Lots of families in Beacon Hill.”
“That’s where I used to live.”
“Really?”
She shakes away his interest. “A long, long time ago.”
He watches her. Even though she has stopped speaking, he cannot help himself. There is something about her. He searches her face – the high cheekbones are clear, but their defined edges have become a little softened with age. Her eyes are an unlikely shade of bright blue, with an animation behind them that makes them crackle, like neon. He had noticed this the first time they met. He had spent a few minutes settling her in his own office to wait for her daughter, who had remained in his boardroom where they were slowly negotiating the terms of her purchase of his company. He had liked Estelle at once; though their conversation that day did not move much beyond pleasantries, there was a quickness, an ironic undertone to some of her replies which had suggested a vibrant personality, and which found a complement, a ready means of expression in her startling eyes. Melissa’s eyes are grey, perhaps after her father. He searches Estelle’s face for something of her daughter’s cool, veiled look but he can find nothing of it there.
“What is it?”
“I was just trying to figure out if Melissa looks like you.”
Estelle shakes her head. “Not much. She has my nose, maybe, but the rest of her is her father.”
The pasta, like everything else she has tasted so far, is a revelation. The firm bite of the penne beneath the sweet spiciness of the tomato sauce. Then the balance of the fresh basil and smooth, rich parmesan. She leans back in her chair, feeling slightly indecorous, overwhelmed as she is by a surfeit of pleasure. She takes another, fragrant bite as Alexander asks her if she ever had a career.
“Not until my mid-twenties. I didn’t need to work, I suppose. My father was well-to-do, and it just wasn’t the thing in those days. One just waited to get married.”
“And you did?”
“Not immediately, no.” She runs a crust of fresh bread over the sauce that remains on her plate. “All those young Harvard boys that would come visiting.” She makes a face at the memory.
“So you began working?”
“Yes, to my father’s great consternation. I just couldn’t stand sitting around any more, drinking tea, and preparing for dinner parties. So, I got a job, though goodness knows how. I couldn’t type, couldn’t take dictation…. Couldn’t do any of the things young women needed for work back then, though I learned pretty quickly. I worked at Boston University. As an assistant to various professors. Mostly in the English Department.”
“Why the English Department?” he asks quickly, and she hesitates.
“I always loved books, I guess. The smell of them, the feel of the pages, the idea that whole worlds that I’d never seen or felt before were sandwiched between their covers. Every now and then I’d be typing up a paper or an article, and I’d read something completely unexpected about a book I knew. Or thought I knew. I did a lot of rereading of classic novels based on those papers.”
“When did you stop?”
“After I got married. My husband was the last professor I assisted. In the end, he travelled a lot, and wanted me with him.”
“Would you have preferred to continue working?”
“Oh no.” She laughs, and feels a slight warmth in her cheeks, which she hopes is not visible. “Not then. I was so in love with him. I couldn’t bear the thought of us being apart. Anyway, I still helped with his research, and typing for a while…. And then, I had Melissa, and it stopped. Once she grew up, I went back to doing a little reading and typing for him, which I still do. It’s been a pretty ordinary life.”
“Not really. You could have gotten married out of college, to a suitably well-to-do young man. But you went to work, which as you say, wasn’t the thing to do, and then ended up marrying a professor. I assume marrying for passion rather than comfort. Sounds like you didn’t play by the rules at all.”
Estelle flushes. She is partly embarrassed that he is interested enough to analyse her existence in this way, and partly pleased. She has never considered her choices in the maverick light that he has cas
t on them.
“Tell me about your writing?”
“Oh, that,” she says, and he senses a shyness in her for the first time. “I’m just an aspiring novelist, I guess. In search of a really interesting character.”
“I thought writers are always searching for a good plot. Or theme.”
“Oh no,” she replies, with certainty this time. “The themes are almost always the same, don’t you think? Love, passion, death, betrayal.”
She feels a slight pause, which for one moment makes her wonder if she has said something wrong – but then he looks up and smiles his assent.
Back in the living room, sinking deep into soft leather armchairs, with a second glass of wine beside each of them, Estelle considers how to approach the subject of his life in Russia. He has fired gentle questions at her all through lunch, but something about his look or his bearing has made her hesitant to do the same. At last she gestures to the photograph on the piano.
“Your wife was very beautiful,” she says.
“Do you think so?”
“Don’t you? Such life in those eyes.”
“I have never seen anyone or anything to match her in all my life.”
He turns, conveniently, she thinks, to the dessert plate, an apricot tart, left over from the day before, warmed through.
“She looks very happy there. In the photo,” she comments.
Had she been happy? He thinks, perhaps, some of the time. But with Katya, happiness had never been a deep seated state of being. Rather it had been a fleeting sensation, a series of brief respites from the world as it existed for her.
“She had quite a difficult life,” he says blandly. If his guest, the aspiring novelist, is in search of an interesting character, he feels no immediate obligation to provide it. He cuts two generous pieces of the tart.
“I suppose I should be declining politely and thinking of my figure,” Estelle says. “But at this stage, what’s the point?” She thanks him and sits down again, the plate balanced on her knee.