by Alon Preiss
Now the beach was fenced off; inside, no more Communist bosses, only gangsters and their molls, fat men in tight-tiny briefs, young women in expensive thong bikinis. The year-round residents of Sochi would shake their heads and their fists, and curse. So little had really changed, anyway. The new criminals had the same name as the old ones, in fact. In Irina’s early youth, everyone called the party bosses mafia. Suddenly in the late 1980s, all of that changed. To the Russians, mafia was slang for raspad, or chaos. Whatever destroyed the country at the moment, that was mafia.
Her lover claimed to know a big film producer and swore that Irina, with her subversive beauty, would be a natural for the movies. That sounded like a good plan to her, but the young man’s main occupation was “import-export,” and he died a year later with a bullet in his brain, almost on schedule, shot by a passing car and witnessed, so they said, by no one. His red blood flowed on the dark green grass of the dacha he had bought from a Communist official for American dollars. She received the news with a dull aloofness. He had become cruel in recent weeks, but now she would need a new mob patron to get her into the movies. And anyway, maybe she could find someone this time closer to the apex of the local cinema hierarchy.
Her new lover, Timur, seemed to fit the bill, a fifty-year-old man who smoked Cuban cigars and ran five miles a day. He was limber and lean and looked only forty, thanks to the hair dye that arrived in shipments from Switzerland. He met her at a reyv in the center of Moscow, a big party at the Cosmos Pavilion. Timur claimed to have put this party together, and he also happily claimed that his organization was receiving 60% of the profits. He spotted her across the room, wearing a short black dress, her hair looped around the top of her head, then falling across her shoulders in curls. She’d seen it in an American edition of Vogue, but she had to hold her head absolutely straight or the whole thing would fall apart – this rigidity gave her the look of youthful royalty, or a young Audrey Hepburn. Timur was relatively handsome, soft-spoken and charming in his double-breasted suits from New York, and she swore that she adored him and really believed it, too. He promised that she would be a star and pledged a hundred thousand to her first feature. On hearing of this pledge, made by this rather unsavory mobster, respected writers began sending Irina film treatments, cinematic novels, full screenplays, some in Russian, some in English.
Within a few weeks, Irina began negotiations with a number of independent producers, and finally decided to star in a romantic thriller pushed by a Russian director named Anatoli Rostislavsky, a man who’d won a few awards for his Soviet films. Rostislavky’s involvement brought in funds from a few more investors, some solidly mafia, some borderline legitimate. Her career had been nothing but a small and sad daydream before she killed those men in that building, but now everything was really on track, it seemed.
The proud Timur introduced Irina to his inner circle at lavish dinner parties thrown in the best new apartments in Moscow, where he would solicit funds for her film project, while Irina tried to be charming and beautiful and to stifle her urge to disagree, the almost uncontrollable instinct to challenge these criminals who now ruled her country.
One day, four months after she had first shared his bed, and more than a year after that terrible night about which Irina could not make herself think, Timur asked her to get away from the movie business and accompany him on a little pleasure trip to “the Riviera of Thailand,” a town known as Pattaya where, for some reason, Russian mobsters had begun to flock. As usual, Irina did as she was told without another thought.
Did Daniel still think about Susan? He would swear to Natalie, rather frequently as the years passed, that he did not. Indeed, after the slow drift of a few decades Daniel would discover that he could actually recall very little of those brief months – at the age of 57 he would pause for a moment from his perusal of an opponent’s interrogatories to muse that he would gladly trade a year of his salary for a diary of his time with Susan. What had they done on November 3? What had she told him on December 1 that had made him laugh? What movies had they enjoyed together, had they ever taken a walk together in the park, what did her voice sound like? Until his retirement, he would be able to remember every element of his Edward Bear oral argument with a strange mixture of triumph and shame, but of the life he had lived with Susan, the memory was little more than a quick, tentative touch filled with tenderness, then moments later gone forever. Oddly, the majority of even his few recollections would be erroneous, and so, throughout his life, he would remember Susan as perfectly compatible with him in every way, right from the very start. What I would do for just one photograph of myself with Susan, together as we once were! he would bathetically exclaim one night in a dream to the specter of Henry, his long-dead friend.
Still, at the age of 62 he would tell Natalie that nothing was gone for good. The wormholes, he would say, thinking of Susan. With a wormhole, one could return to any place or time to re-live past joys or correct past errors. His wife would smile and pat his hand and tell him that she thought he didn’t really understand wormholes. Daniel would shrug and smile and admit that, he supposed, she was right. The past was gone for good, and his life with Susan, a life he fantasized about weekly – traveling the world with the young Susan, learning everything there was to learn about her, growing old with her, all as Fate had surely intended – that life was lost to him forever.
On an icy Wednesday, Susan sat in a midnight screening at the Thalia (a movie from Poland, badly translated, and the heroine died at the end); at 2 am, she wandered up and down Broadway for another hour. She finally felt ready to sleep; she returned at 3:10 am and climbed the six flights to her apartment.
Her keys rattled in the lock; something in her apartment, some noise she hadn’t noticed before, suddenly stopped. Footsteps, bare feet, tapped softly. She wasn’t afraid. The door opened of its own accord.
“Sue.” Joe.
He held a coffee mug in one hand; a bottle of vodka stood open on the hallway table. He seemed both wired on caffeine and dulled by alcohol; the caffeine had kept him awake through the hours of waiting, while the alcohol had given him the courage to stay.
“No one calls me Sue,” she said. “I don’t like it when people call me ‘Sue.’ ”
“I’m glad to see you,” he said lamely. Joe was too tall and usually awkwardly cheery, but tonight the bags under his eyes made him seem darkly handsome, adult.
“What a coincidence to run into me here, right?” she said as she pushed by him.
He followed her. “I needed to talk to you.”
“Why?”
“You don’t answer your phone or return my calls.”
She spun around. “That’s not an answer. You don’t need a thing just because you don’t have it.”
He smiled, pathetically sincere. “Rachel said to keep trying.”
“Tell Rachel to screw herself.”
“She’s your best friend.”
“She’s also a pain in the neck.”
“I listen to her.”
“That’s your first mistake. And how did you get in here?”
“You gave me your key.”
“You stole my key,” she said.
“You saw me take it.”
“And I didn’t smash you over the head with a beer bottle. So I suppose maybe I let you steal it.”
He smiled again. “That’s like giving, right?”
Susan smiled back mildly. She touched him on the cheek. “I must have been out of my mind. Joe, aren’t you ashamed? Doesn’t this insult your sense of self, being such a puppy dog?”
“I just want us to talk.”
“We’ve already talked.”
“You talked, Sue,” he replied. “You talked and I listened.” The mix of liquor and coffee on his breath was somehow endearing; he’d been drinking and drugging himself all night, and just for her.
“All right,” she said. “Take a seat.”
Her apartment was large, and during the day it was flooded with s
unlight. Sitting in the living room, in her living room, knowing that it was hers, somehow gave her the courage and the power to face Joe, or anything, at three o’clock in the morning.
His argument was old and sad. He relied on emotions he knew she once had, however fleeting they may have been. Here we are again, he said, and then he said, remember this, remember that, remember Wednesday, remember Sunday? Remember the living room, remember the kitchen? How can you throw away all of that? He had seen her smile, he had seen her smile widely and laugh and look at him with those eyes, he had seen her give him that look, that adoring look, with her big blue eyes, and now he thought that he – they – deserved another chance.
“I do adore you,” she said softly. “I do, honestly, with all my heart.”
He nodded.
“And I meant every one of those looks.”
But, she added, she had woken up in the middle of the night nine days after he had first shared her bed and had been struck by a sense of futility. By the morning her misgivings hadn’t abated. She had given herself two days to think about it, to imagine that she had already cut him loose, to see whether tears came to her at the thought of him, whether she felt herself overcome by an unbearable longing. No regrets. It wasn’t fair, she knew it really wasn’t fair, but it was honest. She would always remember him; he had given her nine sort of nice days and had told her a joke about Camus that she would never forget.
“Maybe,” he said, “you – I mean, this apartment must be pretty expensive. I’m tired of living in Queens. I could sack out in the other room for a while and help you with the rent. You’ll see me every day for a few minutes when you get home. After some time passes, maybe you’ll change your mind. If not, it’s cool. I’ll understand.”
She laughed.
“I’m not a shameless capitalist, which you should know by now. Look, I don’t pay for this apartment, OK?” She sighed. “And I’m just not into it.”
She could have told him that after her mother had died, nine months ago, her father had settled into a state of increasing alienation, that the 60-year-old man now spent his waning days commuting between the house on Long Island where he and his wife had raised a family and their retirement home on the beach in Florida, that this constant commuting had begun to seem more and more irrational, and that the rest of the family had begun to ignore him. Whether this was the reason for her early adulthood crisis, she did not know, but she could have told him for certain that she felt herself growing away from the world, and that she had no real explanation for the wall of ice through which she viewed her existence, that she had once been such a happy girl that nothing had seemed more important than to go out into the world, make her family proud, marry a nice young man and raise a child, but that now the road ahead looked empty and barren, and that life suddenly seemed far too long. She could have told Joe that the only person who could save her was Daniel, that she’d been calling him from time to time just to listen to his voice on the answering machine, and how could Joe have ever hoped to compete with such devotion? She could have told him all of this. But she didn’t. And it was probably the right decision.
“Goodnight, pal,” she said.
Joe stood at the door. “If you see me on the street, say hello, all right? Don’t ever look the other way. Even if you’re with your new boyfriend.”
“We’ve been friends for a long time,” she said. “We’re still friends.” Fair enough: it was the right thing to say. She insisted that she was ashamed of nothing.
She listened as his footsteps in the stairwell faded away into the night.
Susan’s friend Rachel had a little secret, a strange and beautiful romance. She called the man “Pierre,” though she did not know if that were really his name. He had sprung fully formed from the depths of Rachel’s other little secret, her twin sister Carrie, whom Rachel never mentioned to most of her friends. Carrie, who looked exactly like Rachel, except better, somehow, charmingly buoyant where Rachel was merely weightless, engaging where Rachel was off-putting.
Here is the story of how Rachel met Pierre:
Two years ago, their mother, an immigrant from Holland who lived by herself in a brownstone on East 72nd Street, received a strange phone call from overseas, from a man who asked for Carrie in an accent that she didn’t recognize. She explained that her daughter wasn’t home. “I will be in New York on Tuesday,” he said. “Tell her please to meet me in front of the Plaza Hotel at eleven in the evening.” The mother said all right, then she hung up the phone. All at once, she remembered that her daughter Carrie was in Africa, on a safari. She called Rachel, explained the situation. She didn’t have the man’s telephone number. She didn’t know the man’s name. He would be standing in front of the Plaza Hotel at 11 in the evening on Tuesday, and she didn’t know what he looked like.
If Rachel went, the man would recognize her as Carrie’s sister. Rachel could explain that Carrie was not in town, and apologize for their mother’s carelessness. Rachel didn’t want to go, but finally agreed.
Rachel stood in front of the hotel, watching her breath freeze in the icy blackness. A few cabs came and went, skidding on the streets.
Suddenly, a man ran up to her. He had come from the hotel, and he wore a tuxedo. He shouted “Caron!”, swept her into his arms, and before Rachel could get a good look at his face, he was embracing her. His face, his lips were so warm, and Rachel didn’t pull away – and she knew that since she had not pulled away, she could not admit who she really was. Why didn’t you pull away when I embraced you? he would ask, embarrassed, and she would have no answer, because she did not know. And so now she had to pretend. But she wouldn’t let him kiss her again.
He was in New York for only one evening, he said; now nervously, she explained that she couldn’t stay long. She was staying with her mother, and had to be back soon or the old woman would worry. This was so that she could avoid having sex with her sister’s lover, which was important to her, although she didn’t know why. They went to the bar in the Plaza Hotel, and he told her about the past three years, the three years since they had met “in Zaragoza” – a faraway sounding name with a nice little ring to it – since they had met in Zaragoza and then traveled together to Rawalpindi, both places she thought her sister had never really been, but this was Rachel’s fantasy, and Carrie could just stay out of it. He told her an intricate story about a man named Kaarlo and a woman named Franja that involved all sorts of things that Carrie would have known about and ended on a punch-line (“...and Franja asked: Have you met the Countess?”) which meant nothing to Rachel, but which, based on the glint in the man’s eyes, she imagined must have been amusing. He told her all about the difficulties in his work – he seemed to be writing some sort of philosophical tome, as well as working for the restoration of the monarchy in some socialist country somewhere in the world – and the natural disasters that had damaged his homes in the Cantabrian Mountains and by the Aegean Sea. He asked her, “What has happened in your life, Caron?” and Rachel said, “Right now I’m on a safari in Africa,” and he laughed with delight. And soon she found herself in a hotel room, listening to a man call her Caron – which was not even her sister’s name, exactly – and having a romantic, dimly lit affair with her sister’s European, long-ago lover. The next morning she awoke, found a gracious goodbye note from the man, with a phone number to call if she was ever again in his home country. The letter was signed “P.” She decided that the man’s name was “Pierre,” since that was a foreign name that began with the letter P.
A month went by, and she called him, thinking that she would confess, show him that she was the one he really loved, not Carrie, but the number was not in service. Pierre probably omitted the country code that Carrie would have known. I probably would just hung up anyway, Rachel silently conceded. A year later she asked her sister if she had ever been to Zaragoza or Rawalpindi, and her sister said, “No, where’s that?” without missing a beat. Did she know anyone with homes on the Aegean Sea or in the Can
tabrian Mountains? and Carrie said no, why? Was Rachel planning a vacation somewhere? Finally, Rachel asked whether Carrie knew a man named Kaarlo and a woman named Franja.
“Did they call?” Carrie said.
“No,” said Rachel. “Do you know them?”
“No,” said Carrie.
“Then why did you ask if they called?”
“Because I wondered why you asked if I knew anyone by that name. I thought perhaps someone by that name had called, and that maybe that was the reason why you’d asked me if I knew anyone by that name.”
“Well, do you? Do you know anyone by that name?”
“I told you, no.”
“Then why did you think they would call?”
“I didn’t think they would call. I asked if they had called.”
Later, Rachel would wonder if Carrie ever saw Pierre again, and whether she ever found out her secret.
That icy Wednesday night, as Joe heard Susan’s door click shut behind him, Rachel lay awake in bed in her ground floor studio apartment. The curtains were slightly open, and steam floated up past her window through cracks in the sidewalk.
She got up from bed and put on a robe, pulled open the curtains and sat in the dark in her little rocking chair, watching people pass on the street: drunks carrying paper bags, lawyers and businessmen staggering home. And one of them reminded her of Henry, about whom she had thought very little during the last half year.