The Faces of Strangers

by Pia Padukone

“I can’t believe my brother had the balls to go to the football pitch by himself without his bodyguard by his side.”

  “Mari, you don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

  “I know that Paavo has been hiding in your shadow since you arrived. Come on, Nico, give me some credit. Not all models are airheads.”

  “I never said you were.”

  “So what, are you packing already?”

  “Looks that way, doesn’t it?”

  “But you have a week here. You’re not leaving for a week.” Mari felt suddenly desperate. She’d known that Nico would eventually be going home, but like the end of her modeling career, or what felt like it, she hadn’t realized it would come so soon. She watched him as he tossed in socks, and laid pants flat against the floor of the bag.

  “Admit it. You’re going to miss me.” Nico raised his eyebrows and threw a sock at Mari. She grabbed it, giggling. What was she doing? She didn’t giggle. She didn’t flirt. She stayed on the periphery; at least, she used to. Now, of course, she was center stage, plastered across buses and billboards wielding a brown bottle of Vana Tallinn in front of her chest like an AK-47 and wearing a tiny little sarong as though Estonia were a tropical island. She was making eye contact from behind last month’s cover of Kuula, one of the very glossies she had purchased to bide her time in hundreds of waiting areas.

  Standing there, watching Nico pack, all the thoughts in her head moved and shifted like puzzle pieces. Nico leaving marked the passage of time; a year and a half had passed since she had committed to modeling, to surrendering her childhood to Viktor and fasting and water and fidgeting. She had given her parents her word, but moreover, she had made a promise to herself. She could not go out of the modeling world being the face of a second-rate liqueur. She was bigger than that. She needed to leave a legacy. She would have to act fast. Mari broke her own reverie.

  “When you’re done, come upstairs,” she said. “I have something for you.”

  Nico smiled. “I knew I’d wear you down. You’re not the ice queen you try to be.”

  “Just remember which one of us freaked out when we first met,” she said, turning on her heels.

  “That’s not fair,” Nico sputtered. “You snuck up on me in the dark, in a place I didn’t know.” But Mari was already gone.

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later, Nico stood outside her closed door. Soft music with vaguely French lyrics emanated from behind it. She opened it before he’d even finished knocking, smiled at him, hooked her two fingers into the collar of his crew neck T-shirt and pulled him inside. Mari hadn’t turned on any lights in her room, allowing the floodlight that Kunnar had installed over the henhouse to cast long cants of broken light against the carpet, broken up into individual rectangles by the vertical Persian blinds. She shut the door softly behind him and leaned against it. Nico stood in the center of the carpet, bathed in the slatted light. He’d flinched at her touch; his face contorted as though he were awaiting torture. He looked stricken, but mostly he looked confused. Mari placed her finger in the hollow where his collarbone dipped. She continued the line down his chest, feeling the goose bumps that dappled upon his skin before her finger even reached there. She heard the breath catch in Nico’s throat as her finger paused at the button of his jeans. He hadn’t been undressed since he was a child, when Stella made all his decisions for him. The sensation was strange, as though he should have been taking over in order to voice his autonomy. But he stood mute, like the metal wand at the airport, watching as Mari’s hands traveled all over him, unbuttoning and sliding cloth from his skin, waiting to see if she would set off an alarm. His entire body was tense and buzzing, as if she had released a hive of bees within it. As soon as she leaned forward and placed her mouth against his, his body went slack like that game of Trust that Coach had made the team play during practice, where you put your arms out, close your eyes and fall back into the arms of the person that you pray is there to catch you.

  * * *

  It felt like hours later that he emerged from a conscious slumber, but Nico knew it was only twenty-two minutes from the large red digital numbers blinking like a witness on Mari’s desk. The clock was placed atop her towering stack of modeling papers, as though to remind them of the dwindling aspect of time, that she couldn’t stay forever young with taut skin stretched over her cheekbones like a fresh canvas, that the sinews in her muscles would one day atrophy and her hips would one day lose their flexibility.

  Nico would have been lying if he said he hadn’t imagined this before. In fact, he had imagined it many times over as he lay in the cold little pullout bed in what felt like the banished part of the house as the rest of the family slept upstairs. He straightened himself up from the bed, propping himself on one elbow. His chest was tacky with sweat, and his temples pulsed with adrenaline. Next to him, Mari was asleep, her body heaving up and down as though in distress. He poked her to make sure she was all right, and she turned away from him toward the wall, pulling the blanket over her shoulders. The house was still; their bodies hummed with the two lights that combined and settled over them: the blue haze from the floodlight and the orange glow of the setting sun. He felt caught within the sheet’s clutches, everything all crunched together like a trap. Nico felt a conflicted tide rise in him, the ebb of wanting to stay by her side. Moving from the bed would be criminal. It wasn’t like leaving her with a full sink of dishes. And yet he felt the flow of wanting to disappear, especially if she was faking it and giving him an out, allowing him to slink out of the room in order to minimize the drama that comes with the aftermath of such an act.

  He edged his head toward her moist shoulder and brushed his lips against it. No response. He pulled himself out of bed in a single motion. She still hadn’t moved. He wanted to tell her so many things, that she was so much better looking without all that makeup, that the whole thing was so much better than he could have ever imagined, that he wondered how long she’d been planning that... Instead, he closed the door with a gentle click. He stood outside her door, naked, pale and shivering.

  The lower part of the house was unaware of what had transpired overhead. But as soon as Nico got to his room, waves of panic overwhelmed him. It was as though he had dreamed the whole thing, or had an out-of-body experience. A swarm of questions hung around his head like pesky gnats. Was that it? Sex? It was over, just like that? Why was there so much buildup? Had he been any good? Was Mari’s response positive? Had they used a condom? Would it happen again? Was she his girlfriend? How should he behave when he saw her again?

  With all the rush of emotions and hormones, he couldn’t help but feel like a walking cliché. Of course the big American jock had traveled to a foreign country and slept with the gorgeous, foreign, exotic girl. Wasn’t that practically written in the stars by some bad made-for-television movie? Perhaps, but at the end of the day, Nico was a cliché who had slept with a model. And as far as bragging rights went, they spoke the loudest.

  His clothes were still in the six piles for each remaining day of the week he had left in Tallinn, but the ones he was wearing were still caught between the claws of the tangled sheets. He picked up the stack for the next day and somehow managed to fold his body into them. He passed his hands over the vodka for his father, the matryoshka dolls for Nora, the crocheted tablecloth for Stella and nestled them all carefully back within the folded clothes, padded by sweatshirts. He had to remember to return the down jacket he’d borrowed from Paavo before he left.

  Paavo. Shit. But he didn’t necessarily have to find out. Nico certainly wouldn’t tell him, and he couldn’t imagine Mari wanting to, either. Nico closed his eyes and breathed in and slowly out. He mumbled his wrestling incantation—Defend Until the End—under his breath and counted to ten. Then he shoved his feet into the sneakers that lay askew on the mat and jogged out the door, slamming it behind him so that even Mari in her repose with he
r labored or feigned breathing would be sure to hear him leave.

  NICO

  New York City

  December 2002

  The changes in Stella’s son were striking, not subtle. His face had clearly changed: more angles, fewer instinctive smiles. Even his writing seemed more blasé, as though he couldn’t be bothered to form a complete sentence. It was strange how dramatic changes seemed when you couldn’t see them happening in front of you, the way you didn’t notice a plant growing when it was in your own living room, but when you came back after a vacation, it had suddenly sprouted six inches. Stella couldn’t pinpoint it, but Nicholas seemed different somehow, including his name.

  “Nicholas,” Stella had called as soon as his face turned the corner from the arrivals ramp and he made his way to the baggage carousels. She’d leaped up and run toward him in a manner she might have scoffed at had she been watching another parent. She couldn’t help it. She wanted to drink in her son, remember what his hair smelled like, what his body felt like in her embrace. But everything was off somehow—even his name.

  “Hi, Mom,” he’d said, slightly breathless after she’d released him from the hug. “Can you call me Nico now?”

  “Oh,” she’d said. She could feel her face flushing as though someone had pointed out that her zipper had been down. “Why?”

  “It’s just what everyone called me over there,” he said. He shrugged and straightened his shoulders, his eyes focused on the conveyor belt.

  “I guess I could try that,” Stella said. She observed her son as though he were behind a glass case, the way his fingers flexed and his jaw tensed.

  “I can’t place what’s different about you,” she said on the drive home. “Was it the fact that you maneuvered your way around a foreign country? Were you popular? I bet everyone wanted to be friends with you. I bet you were a total star, the cool American kid. It was a girl, wasn’t it, some pretty Russian doll? Sorry.” She’d caught herself. “STD.”

  “That’s not technically an STD, Mom,” Nico said. “A doll is what you call a pretty girl, so that’s not wrong.”

  “So, was it?”

  He shook his head and went back to staring out the window. Even though she could reach out and touch him, she sensed a deep schism between the two of them, as though Tallinn had been planted between them and was growing subterranean roots that would eventually strangle them from below. Her son had been swapped in a KGB maneuver; the real Nico had been left behind and a stand-in had been sent in his stead. STD.

  “So what is it?” she asked. Perhaps being straightforward was the best approach.

  “What’s what?” Nico asked, leaning his head against the window and looking up at the sky.

  “What’s different?”

  “Nothing. I don’t know—maybe I’m worldlier or something.”

  “That’s not a word.”

  “I don’t know what you’re looking for, Mom.”

  “I’m not looking for anything.” Stella blanched and looked back at the road. “I guess I just missed you. Look, I took the whole afternoon off. Do you want to head over to City Bakery when we get home? They have this new chocolate-caramel-doughnut-cookie thing that absolutely must be shared.”

  “I thought I’d meet Toby and the guys this afternoon. I haven’t really talked to them since I left. I only have like, a week before Paavo gets here.” Nico hadn’t turned his head from the window the entire time. It was as though he was taking in all the sights whizzing by for the first time.

  “Oh, okay,” Stella said, turning on her left blinker. “Well, I’d like to spend some time with you, too. Hear some stories, just catch up.”

  “Maybe this weekend,” Nico said. “I missed a whole semester of wrestling. I want to catch up, too.” Stella pursed her lips. She’d formed this child, his very flesh and bones within the caverns and contours of her own body. She’d been responsible for creating the curls and synapses of his brain matter, for stacking the sinews of his musculature within her womb. She knew it was silly to feel proprietary toward him after all these years, but when she reminded herself of the pure and simple biology of Nico’s existence, it was difficult to let him go when he’d just arrived. Stella longed to grasp Nico and squeeze him like a sponge in order to learn everything he’d seen, thought and experienced since he’d been gone.

  * * *

  Nico wished he could preserve the encounter with Mari in much the same way. But when he began to realize that the occasion was over and done with, he began to distance himself from the encounter in stages.

  Immediately afterward, standing in the pale twilight of the Sokolovs’ den, the act had felt nefarious. He was culpable for having stained Mari’s sheets with his sweat, for having bitten her top lip until it was pink and swollen, for leaving little crescents in her skin from his fingernails. What’s more, Mari was Paavo’s sister, a sister who may as well have been his own for the four months he’d spent in Tallinn. As skittish and timid as Paavo was, Nico had no idea how he might respond if he ever found out. He found himself lurking around the house almost as anxiously as Paavo himself; slipping in and out of the bathroom like a thief, and trying his ultimate best to be quiet when he was in his own room.

  The next week, as Nico packed up the vodka, the dolls and the tablecloth for his family, he remembered that he’d only gone up to Mari’s room because she’d said she had a gift for him. The guilt dropped off him like a cloak and he felt suddenly duped and naive. Mari had been the seducer, luring Nico up to her dimly lit lair when the entire family was absent from the house. It was Mari who had lined her eyes with kohl so she resembled that cat stalking him on his very first night, a wild feline who would ultimately get what she wanted. It was Mari who had begun touching him, in a way she had never touched him before; in fact, except for when she’d fallen asleep on his shoulder in the car or when she’d changed his vodka socks, he didn’t think that she had ever touched him at all. Over time, he began to feel like the victim; Mari had taken advantage of him. She had initiated every touch, every breath, each flicker of her tongue. She’d known exactly what she was doing from the start. Nico wanted to feel indignant, but he knew exactly what his friends would say if he complained: “So what?”

  So he let himself shift to the next step. He accepted it, embracing the action fully as Barbara would have wanted him to experience everything he was exposed to in Tallinn. He relived it. He recalled all the actions, the touches and the shivers. For those twenty-two minutes, Mari was a star that he had reached out to with his bare hands and caught as it sailed across a crystal clear sky. She sparkled, stretching her taut calves, presenting him with her elegant but accessible breasts and a belly button chasm that Nico hadn’t realized was an irresistible body part until he was lost in it.

  He began to wonder if sex upon returning home would be completely different. There hadn’t been any expectations in that cloistered room in Tallinn. There had been hand placements that had prompted soft coos. There had been awkward tracings over skin, kissing in unerogenous areas, crevices explored with tentative fingers, soft blowing in an ear, which had been subtly turned down by a shake and a turn of the head so the ear was out of reach. There had been guidance, as though the entire act had been planned out from the start. There had been unease at the start, which had quickly translated into hunger, a brave recourse for the seduced, he who had scarcely been expecting such an invitation. High school sex was sex for sex’s sake. It was sex for bragging rights, for the ability to cross over from one side of a deep divide to the other, entirely for the intention of feeling smug. No one was experienced or possessed a skill set that made sex worthwhile, meaningful or even pleasurable. High school sex was a deed that was done so that it could never be undone. But of course, once the act was over between Mari and Nico, it was as though nothing had happened, and the two retreated to their own quarters, much like mating lions that ha
d completed their biological business and now would embark on the matter of pretending the other one didn’t exist.

  The fact was that he hadn’t seen much of Mari in his last few days with the Sokolovs. She had been out of the house before he awoke, and came home late in the night. Vera reported that she was out on calls and auditions; Viktor had redeemed himself and business was really picking up for her. On Nico’s last day, as Leo was about to return him to the airport from which he’d collected him four months before, she sauntered casually into the kitchen.

  “Just wanted to say goodbye,” she said, her hands deep in her pockets. “All the best.” Nico felt a pang in his side. His body was responding physically to her nonchalance. Mari’s hair was tied back in one of her signature knots, but her fringe spread across her forehead like a windshield wiper, clearing her face of emotional clutter. Her dungarees were frayed and pale from washing and her T-shirt rode over the rise of her pelvic bones as she loitered in the doorway.

  “Thanks,” he said. He slid his chair back opportunely, hoping it might encourage her to come and touch him. He would welcome even a chaste exchange now: a hug, even a handshake. But Mari remained loitering by the doorway and finally leaned against it, establishing her station there. “Come visit us in New York sometime. Maybe they’ll send you out there for a job.”

  She smiled. “Maybe. Keep in touch. And good luck with wrestling.”

  He ducked his face behind his mug of steaming tea. There didn’t seem as if there was anything else to say, and simultaneously as if there was everything to say. But none of it could be said with the audience of Paavo, Vera and Leo. With the lengthening of the silence, Mari stepped backward into the hall. And then she was gone.

  Nico wondered if he’d played everything all wrong. That perhaps Mari’s nonchalance and standoffishness had been the foreplay, the dance she had choreographed in order for Nico to step up his game and try to seduce her again. But it was too late. It was time for him to leave Estonia. Resigned, as Paavo and Leo packed the car, Nico had stolen into her empty bedroom and helped himself to one of her head shots and a handful of comp cards. He knew no one, not any of the team or even Toby would believe him unless he brought physical evidence.