Invitation to a Bonfire

by Adrienne Celt

“Alright,” I said.

  “Three thirty.” He buttoned his shirt cuffs. “Don’t make me wait. I’ll be miserable every moment till then.” In a second, he was gone.

  The next day I would walk into his house and be met by the portraits of Vera on the wall. I would know then; alone in the hallway outside Lev’s office, I did not. But still something drew me to the scribbles on Lev’s note—not just his, but the mysterious others. Askew, askew. I traced the word with the tip of my thumb.

  A few girls came into the hall and brushed by me, slipping something into a nearby mail slot. Then they turned to face me—but interested, for once. Bristled, but not overly aggressive. I was a different kind of creature there, stinking of my own body, flushed to the teeth. And we faced each other as animals in the dark, neither predator nor prey.

  Some sort of kin. Wicked, sated beasts.

  An Oral History of Vera Orlov, née Volkov

  Recorded by the Maple Hill Police Department

  WILL ELLIOTT, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, DONNE SCHOOL

  “Yes, his wife’s another funny wicket. Not a problem, exactly, just not quite what any of us expected. When Orlov got hired, Sophie and I hoped the two of them would make a bridge pair, or keep us company at faculty dinners, at least—you see, Sophie’s always looking for another lady to conspire with. We’d heard the wife was an émigrée, like her husband, and that she helped with his work—gossip had it she did everything, actually, from grading term papers to licking stamps, but we didn’t believe that. Sophie’s a heavy lifter too, and she’s been snubbed for it. Not everyone can hold their own in sophisticated situations.

  “Anyway, we thought, how can she resist Soph? She’s really well read, my wife is, see. Trollope, Brecht, Pound. Even a little Cervantes in the original! Took Spanish in boarding school, and of course we’ve traveled to Madrid. We figured they’d be thick as thieves. But Mrs. Orlov—I never have gotten comfortable calling her by her first name; she always twitches when you do it—she doesn’t exactly engage. First time we met them for cocktails at George’s house, Sophie mentioned that Mrs. Orlov might want to join her book club. I think they were reading Willa Cather or Pearl Buck, one of those bestseller types, and Sophie was all in a tizzy about it. Mrs. Orlov stood there for a while and listened to her describe the club—which is, admittedly, a bit more pugnacious than suits my own tastes—twirling the cocktail onion in her martini around and around and around. And then, when Sophie finished and said, ‘So, can we expect you on Friday?’ Mrs. Orlov just said, ‘No,’ and she left. Not left the conversation, left the party. Set her martini down on the table without taking a drink and walked out the door. George told us later that she’d taken ill, but there wasn’t any indication of it that I saw. He’s a real diplomat, George is. Oh well. A pity for Soph.

  “I’ve taken an interest in watching Mrs. Orlov since then, when we run across one another in social situations. And it’s always the same. Absolutely magnetic when she wants to be, and not just because she’s a beauty. I’ve seen entire rooms turn to listen to what she has to say, especially if it’s in support of her husband. Can’t fault her there, certainly. Holds his arm, steers him around the room, aims him like a gun, you know! Just has no interest in chatting. More of a looker out of windows. Likes to read the labels on wine bottles. And with a husband like Orlov, she can afford to be that way. No one on the faculty was going to touch him, after that book of his made such a splash.”

  GEORGE ROUND, DONNE SCHOOL PROVOST

  “A lovely woman, and unique. Sharp as a tack. Cold as a Frigidaire. Every ounce admirable. Are we done here?”

  BRIDEY LEE MAY, WAITRESS, THE MAPLE HILL CAFÉ DE PRINTEMPS

  “Oh, that lady? Yeah, she comes in sometimes in the afternoons. Not sure why you’d go all the way to a restaurant just for coffee and a cookie, but whatever, she leaves tips. Picky, sure, but I can handle picky. What else do you want to know? She always wears, uh, I don’t know, nice clothes, with these little details you can’t help but notice, like a piece of ivy embroidered on the seam of her jacket, or her buttons are shaped like dried flowers. Things like that. She has a kind of mean expression a lot of the time, but really, compared to some of the jerks who come in here she’s sunshine and roses. I think she scares a lot of the older men at the counter, which suits me fine. I always liked her. [Notes indicate that Bridey shrugs and goes back to wiping down tables, but then calls the officers back over.] Hey, I just remembered something. This one time? That lady came in for coffee like normal, only this time she brought in a stack of mail, you know? Letters and things. And at first I thought, ok, she’s just stopped at the post office and now she’s getting ready to pay bills or write back to whoever. But she takes some of the letters and starts blacking out half the words. That’s weird, right? So I got a little closer, because I was curious, and it looked like all the letters she was blacking out had two people writing them—like, vacation postcards, you know? Where you write hi and your mom writes hi and your brother writes hi? Like that. And she was crossing out everything that one of them wrote. I came over with a coffee pot to offer a warm-up and asked her what she was doing. And she said, ‘Privacy,’ which, come to think of it, doesn’t really answer my question. But anyway.

  “When she was done she folded most of the letters back up, and then she asked for a match, and she burned two of them into an ashtray. Not the blacked-out ones, a different set, I think. I must’ve looked surprised, because she made sure to tell me they were her own letters that she’d written to her husband, as if that made it alright. I said I don’t care what they are, you still can’t do that here, and she just looked at me and smiled. And then left a real whopper of a tip, so I didn’t complain.”

  Zoya

  33.

  Time is a funny thing, dear reader. For instance, you have been tracking great swaths of it on my behalf. Decades gone, in a flash. Little me, in my crib or cradle clutching a bunny, then suddenly sprouting long limbs and leaping over oceans and mountains and calendar years. Not a layman’s task, as such, going forward and back, forward and back. Stopping stock-still on occasion to think through a remark or linger on the lover (Lev)’s face. The second time I met him, he took a piece of my hair and twirled it round his finger, so tight it hurt my scalp. I sometimes stay in that moment for days at a time. The intake of breath, how I moved slightly away to pull the strands even tighter.

  Not much (true) time has passed since I began writing, though. (And even less, I suppose, has elapsed for you. You can sink my days of work into a half hour’s leisure reading, the years of my life, thus, double-sunk.) I’m still in this cabin, alone, with far too many hours each day to think about what’s happened, memories escaping along with the whorls of milk in every cup of tea. I got a splinter from one of the cabinets near the stove while rummaging around and looking for an adequate biscuit, and it took ages to pick it out with a needle, but when it was done I wished I had another, just to occupy my mind. The emptiness here is really starting to irk me, you see. I thought I’d made friends with a cat who came skulking for supper two days in a row, but it’s been three now with no scant tabby. Loyalties are not so easily bought here. Perhaps if I had cream.

  Perhaps if I could cleanse myself of the whole past, and start anew. Walk outside and find a river to dunk myself in. Kerplunk and done. Water so cold it boils over the rocks. Fish reaching out with teeth translucent to pick off my skin and leave white bones. There’s something hideously erotic about the skeleton, is what I’ve come to think. How it lacks gender, identity, individual distinction. The dead bones of a beloved are not the beloved. I’m starting to lose my grip.

  Let me just rewind, rewind. Let nothing barrel towards its inevitable conclusion. Let me pretend that nothing has ever happened, nothing but Lev’s fingers on my scalp. Reader, do you have that power? Unlikely, impossible. But I do sometimes wish.

  34.

  The first time I stepped into Lev’s home I was so busy fiddling with my clothes that I almost
missed the momentousness of the occasion. Stupid, I know, but I just wanted for once to look trim and neat, and my shirt kept riding up at the waistline, tempted by the heavy static in my fall skirt. Now I know better than to think he’d care, or to think the clothes would last long on my body, but I was hoping to make a good impression. He always seemed so cool, compared to me. Lev was already there when I arrived—at three thirty, an in-between kind of hour—and when I got up the nerve to knock he opened the door with the casual air of a man who’s done something a thousand times. Relaxed, almost businesslike. I stumbled when the heel of my shoe caught the doorstop, but he graciously failed to notice.

  “Yes, come in, my dear.” He hurried me across the threshold and into the living room, where I was happy to feel his hand slide a bit lower down my back than was strictly polite. Then it went lower still and I—I’m embarrassed to say I giggled. I was still getting used to the idea that pleasure could, and would, repeat, that there might be a rhythm to it that I could step into and stay inside, rocking back and forth, back and forth, into eternity. The sound of my laugh was like a hiccup. “You need a drink,” Lev said, with a smile, and I was grateful.

  While he was in the kitchen fixing us cocktails, I walked around the room admiring the furniture, the art, the geometry of the décor. It’s funny now to think how much I read Lev into every flourish, from the arrangement of the books to the color of the rugs. He probably didn’t choose a single thing. Any echo of him had been placed there by another hand, and some part of me must’ve known it, because I carefully avoided looking at any photographs. I wasn’t yet ready to gaze into his wife’s face, and superstitiously enough, I didn’t want her gazing into mine.

  (Did I really think she could? I always wonder what Vera knows, and how. Does she make plans and carry them out, like anyone, or does she actually see the future? Are she and Lev lovers, worldly man and worldly wife, or are they actually stitched together at the base of the soul, as each of them would have me believe? Though Lev, of course, says the same thing about me. His lovemaking bears troublingly telltale marks no matter who it’s aimed to please, and I wonder if this is as true of his body as it is of his mind, his heart, his affectionate phrases. If his fingers find the same clever crevices, if my gasps sound like hers, or like another’s. Like every other’s. I sometimes wish I could test this question out on another body, re-creating his passage up and down my spine, between my thighs, to see if I can get the same results.)

  Lev came back in with two small glasses in his hands, which we sipped from and then promptly abandoned in our hurry to get upstairs, where the time—evaporated.

  Afterwards, we sat in our underwear and talked for an hour or more. I felt the intimacy of that: not touching, just looking. Calm and exposed. Like I was a baby and my mother had just been bathing me, was now patting me down with a towel. The light came through the window in flashes when the trees bent in the wind, and it reminded me of a time in Lipetsk when the birds had been doing wonderful things above the fields, their sense of gravity bothered by the rising thermals and their bodies casting small snatches of shadow along the ground. I must’ve been six or seven then, but I could call it to mind clear as day, and I told Lev about it, a memory I’d never shared with another soul. How the birds swooped and rose, never stuttering in their path. How even when you ran at them—as I, a child, often did—they frightened with choreography, streaming up in two directions like a disintegrating vee.

  “I’d have liked to see that,” he said. “If only I’d ever in my life been allowed to choose where and when to go anywhere.”

  I laughed, and was surprised when he didn’t laugh with me. “Really?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine him feeling deprived. But he was serious, and I found myself in the strange position of having to explain that my life had not been easy either, that I had suffered. Look at that girl with her smart little jacket, my mother had said, pointing to the landlord’s daughter in Lipetsk. Someday, if you follow her example, people will think you’re just as elegant and fine. Was this what she meant?

  “Listen,” I protested, “it wasn’t some field trip. It was—we had no choice.” But Lev said it all still sounded pretty. He always saw a charming, Tolstoyan simplicity in the peasant world, an innocent bliss which the Soviets had cruelly destroyed. My father would’ve lost his mind to hear his struggles co-opted this way by a member of the aristocracy. But I didn’t try very hard to dissuade him. You see, I benefited from Lev’s illusion: if the peasant world was charming, that made me charming, too. And what did it mean to me, anymore, the truth of that life? It was gone.

  “You know,” he said a little while later, after we had gotten up and fumbled some more around the room. “I thought that when we arrived in New York, everything would be different for me. It was such a naïve idea, I’m almost embarrassed to admit it.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. And he shrugged. Lifting a casual, bare shoulder and then using it to scratch his ear.

  “There was this party,” he started, pausing once more, maddeningly, to light a fresh cigarette. And then told me all about it, how he and his wife had been invited to a benefit for some publishing giant, and she hadn’t wanted to go because the man had ties to a house that brought out Marxist literature sometimes—general-interest stuff, he assured me, purely educational. They had declined the invitation, but it bothered Lev. Losing the opportunity to mingle, missing out on connections with the members of the literary press who would undoubtedly be present. He thought he’d forget about it, as he usually forgot about their disagreements—“She’s always right, you see,” he said, with no small amount of irony in his voice—but the night of the party it was still on his mind, and he decided to slip out without her. What she didn’t know about, he reasoned, couldn’t hurt her.

  So he told his wife he’d be meeting a friend for drinks, and dressed himself in a suit that was as close as he could get to black tie without raising suspicion, and then walked a few blocks before hailing a taxi to the hotel where the event was being held. He was, he told me, proud of himself for taking a stand, however secret. Had a glass of champagne at the hotel bar before taking the elevator up, to celebrate his good mood. “I must’ve turned my back for a few minutes,” he said. “Just a few, you know. Maybe I talked to the bartender for a little while, lost track of time.” When he’d paid for his drink he went upstairs and threw his coat at the first man he saw who appeared to be a butler. The host of the party walked over immediately, and said he was delighted they’d changed their minds. Lev laughed as he replayed the conversation: “ ‘Hmm?’ I asked the man, and he told me, ‘Well, your wife is right over there, she said you’d be up in a minute from the bar.’ And there she was, in the corner, making some old country-club type lean in too close to hear what she was saying. She caught my eye and that was that—she knew me better than I knew myself. There was no escaping.”

  I expected him to frown or something at the end of the story, but he looked, if anything, impressed.

  35.

  At some point I went downstairs to fetch our drinks from the coffee table where we’d abandoned them, padding through the empty rooms in bare feet. This time, I walked right up to the photographs on the wall, curious to see who this woman was that had so disarmed Lev for so many years, who could find him at a party in the biggest city in the world, sensing him as if by radar across the boroughs. I think back to this moment, now, with a rising anticipation. Was my heart in my throat? Was my skin abuzz? Did I know that something was about to change? And, well. I most certainly did not.

  36.

  I remember, also, that morning in the library with Caroline, Cindy, and Adeline years before. How convinced I was that they were afraid of me in a supernatural sense, that they really looked at me and perceived something spectral, malign. Smoke rising off me, maybe. I have to stop myself, often enough, from thinking of Vera in that same way. When I spotted her picture on Lev’s wall, I was certain that she could see me, her portraits sending messages bac
k to the source. Wedding dress white as cream. Helmet of hair shining beneath her stark wedding veil, eyes glittering with private wisdom. Not evil, necessarily, just powerful as a boogeyman. Vera, Vera, on the wall. It didn’t occur to me that she found him at that New York party simply because she read his mood, or that they had friends in common whom she might have called for information. Even now it’s hard for me to believe she’d need to bother with something so mundane as that.

  Did she feel my presence that afternoon when I walked into her house? When I strolled through the rooms in a man’s shirt, her man’s, with the cuffs rolled up. My hair loose around my shoulders. I wonder if she got, at least, some sense of the surprised recognition that made me reach out to touch the picture’s lips and see if it was really there. Perhaps she heard the disbelief in my voice as I whispered her name—her original name, her father’s name, not the one she took from her husband. “Volkova,” I said under my breath, remembering the girl who walked out of our scout group and never came back. After so many years, here she was again at last, that strange creature lost in the wilderness of time. My opposite in every sense: dark where I was light. Wild where I was tame. At least, where I had been tame.

  Volkova. The wolf.

  37.

  Fall hardened into winter, and Lev went out of town on occasion, sometimes with Vera, sometimes not. When they were together, my mind was a flurry of imagined scenarios: her leaning over to sniff his jacket and smelling me, the echo of our past encounters. Lev kissing Vera’s ear, so that she sighed into him, her hair falling across one eye. Vera convincing him to leave the city, the state, the country—which was of course ridiculous, since she was the reason they’d come to Maple Hill at all, her insistence that Lev needed stability and quiet after a lifetime of wandering and war. I wore my old green coat, which I still took religiously to the dry cleaners at the start of each season and scoured with a lint brush every night when I got home. It remained bright and lovely, if a bit young for me now, and several years less fashionable than it had been. I cooked for myself, and once or twice for Lev as well. Steak au poivre, green salads with lemon in the dressing, pasta with fresh greenhouse tomatoes and so much garlic it made me embarrassed of my breath. The day after I made that dish I woke up sweating garlic in my bed, the entire room stinking with it. My tongue furred, my hair emanating a flavor aura.