The UnAmericans: Stories

by Antopol, Molly

  The apartment Karl had set him up with was on a hill at the crest of Buena Vista Park, tidy and bright with a Murphy bed in the living room. On the kitchen table was a note from Karl’s friend’s friend, wishing them a great weekend and offering whatever was left in the icebox. Alexi was touched that someone he’d never met would be so kind.

  Benny walked to the window and Alexi followed him. It offered yet another unobstructed view of the skyline, as if the entire city had been built to brag about the same postcard image. Alexi looked out at the treetops, the low-slung buildings and the water beyond, the light so sharp he wondered whether his eyes were still adjusting after his time indoors or if it was, simply, a truly beautiful day. Even the undershirts fluttering from the clothesline seemed particularly white, the trash bins on the sidewalk a glorious green—and though he had no idea where Ellen’s apartment fit within this scene, the fact that she and Katherine were out there somewhere, that they too could be going for steaks tonight and pancakes in the morning but doing everything in their power to avoid running into Alexi, suddenly made him feel queasy and warm, and he backed away from the window, turned to his son and said, “Forget San Francisco. Let’s blow it off and head to Napa. That’s how I want to spend my first weekend out—to relax somewhere, just the two of us. Who knows, maybe we’ll make it up to Oregon.”

  “Really?” the kid said, sounding more excited than he had all day, and Alexi, suddenly excited himself, said, “Really.” This was what it meant to be out in the world again. To change plans on a whim, to speed down that narrow one-way street with his son beside him, leaving the city behind as he steered onto the bridge, the windows down, the possibilities flying everywhere.

  SOMEWHERE IN Napa, Alexi realized he had no idea where he was. Part of the problem, he knew, was that he’d been there only once, three years ago, and he hadn’t been driving. He had been drunk in the back with Julia Wexler, the film’s head writer and cause for so much of the trouble in Alexi’s marriage to begin with, while the husband-and-wife producer team drove them from winery to winery. Stella and Jack had been going to Napa for the past fifteen years, even before it was Napa, when it was just a handful of vintner families scattered across the valley, trying to make a living post-Prohibition, and that entire weekend had felt meandering and glorious, discovery after discovery.

  Now he was lost, and it was dark, and the towering oak trees and skinny dirt roads that had once felt so inviting seemed menacing and sinister. For almost an hour he couldn’t find a single place to stop. Benny was staring out the window, his cheek against the glass, and Alexi passed orchards and cattle farms and rickety wood houses, feeling more and more hopeless, until finally, in the distance, he saw an inn and pulled over.

  “Stay here,” he told his son, and jogged inside. It was no-frills but perfectly adequate, with overstuffed leather chairs and dark green walls, like a hunting lodge without the guns or taxidermied animals. Through the glass doors Alexi saw picnic tables, and his mood immediately lifted as he envisioned a decent night’s sleep after a year on that stiff, dirty cot and a lovely breakfast on the patio in the morning, coffee and juice, eggs and fresh muffins. The pretty redhead behind the desk was reading a thick paperback she set down then and said, “Welcome to the Pinecone. Just you?”

  “One room, two beds,” Alexi said. “For me and my son.”

  The woman smiled at him. Her hair was pulled away from her face and Alexi admired her long, creamy neck, the tiny, almost inconsequential buttons climbing up her blouse. It had been twelve and a half months. There had been a time in his life when it would have felt so easy to lean over the counter and ask this woman when she got off work, then meet her for a drink, or three or four. But her skin, her lips, the sparkly blue stones in her delicate earlobes—all of it gave him a jolt of sadness, just another reminder Katherine wanted nothing to do with him.

  “That’ll be eighteen dollars,” she said, and Alexi cleared his throat. If he paid for this room, he and Benny would be sharing a pack of gum for dinner. He realized he had no idea what things cost in Napa—everything had always been paid for, Stella and Jack opening doors to every inn, winery, restaurant, and all that was ever expected of Alexi was that he glide right in. He was struck by a feeling he hadn’t had in so long, a feeling that had thrown him into a crippling panic when he was in his early twenties and first auditioning: of being an imposter, a single step away from being found out. He raked a hand through his hair and looked at the woman. A trio of brass mirrors hung behind her and he could see himself reflected back, dozens of tiny blinking Alexis.

  “Just give me a minute. Let me get my wallet from the car,” he said, backing out. He let himself into the driver’s side and took a long breath. Benny was bobbing along to some radio song that sounded to Alexi like all backup vocals. “It was crummy inside. We’ll find something better,” he said, and threw the car in reverse.

  He sped down another dark, curvy road. He had no idea where to go. Benny didn’t seem concerned, though—he perked at the task. “There’s one,” he said, pointing to a vacancy sign, and when Alexi drove right past he pointed out another, as if they were simply playing car games on a family road trip. He knew his son was trying to help, but he hated the game—I-Spy Another Inn My Father Can’t Afford—and when Benny pointed out a third, Alexi mumbled, “You don’t think I see them too?”

  Benny looked as if he’d been struck in the face.

  “I’m sorry,” Alexi said quickly. “Oh Benny, I’m sorry.” But his son had already slunk into his seat, and Alexi stared ahead at the road and wondered how the trip was, so soon, panning out this way. Driving with Benny through the night, possibly being forced to, at a certain point, pull over to the side and sleep in this borrowed shitheap. He’d once, not so long ago, won the starring role as Lev Gorelik, hardscrabble peasant turned war hero. The Russian paratrooper from the tiny, impoverished village of N., who, when forgotten behind enemy lines, finds himself trapped in a collapsed building with seven SS soldiers. Before he’d landed the part, Alexi had been stuck singing hair-care ads for the radio, and he couldn’t believe, sitting in the Paramount lot in his Red Army fatigues, that for much of his adult life he’d actually gotten up in the morning to sing jingles like Wildroot Cream, a little goes a long, long way without wanting to kill himself. The Unknown Soldier had been a serious and character-driven project, following Lev’s fateful encounter with the Germans—a moving film, the publicists promised, with “drama to touch the heart of every woman, adventure to stir the blood of every man.” It had been, in all possible ways, the part of a lifetime, and everyone—the casting director, the producers, Julia Wexler—had believed that he, Alexi Liebman, a working-class Russian himself, was perfect for the role.

  Of course, not one of those people knew that, while Alexi may have been born in Russia, he had lived in Queens since he was two. That he hadn’t grown up wealthy by any measure but had been perfectly comfortable; that in fact his parents had dedicated their lives in the States solely to maintaining this level of comfort, his father spending his days off from the bottle factory in their driveway, waxing his beloved Model A, his mother stashing away every Sears catalog that came in the mail and combing through them slowly and obsessively in the evenings, her personal pornography. That communism was the exact reason they’d escaped when they could, saying it had only made their lives more miserable, and that, beyond sharing news about relatives still there, they never mentioned Moscow at all. That as a boy, Alexi, in a desperate attempt to seem like more of an American, had dropped the i at the end of his name, and that, by the time he got a high school scholarship to Collegiate and had a whole new group of friends in Manhattan, he was already known by everyone, including his parents, as Alex. That when he was eighteen and both his parents died of heart failure the doctor was certain had been brought on by the stress of their early lives, he found himself barely thinking at all about Russia, a place he had not a single memory of. That it was only when he moved to Los Angeles and w
asn’t even getting callbacks for hair-care ads that it occurred to him his heritage could make him stand out in a good way, could actually give him leverage, when trying to break into an industry run by his own people. And so right away he went back to calling himself Alexi, even paying extra to have all new headshots printed with the name change, fifteen extra dollars just to have that i back where it belonged.

  Everywhere he went people thought he was foreign. Somehow, being the child of immigrants gave him the look of an immigrant himself: his thick hair, gray since his twenties, made him seem world-weary and somber; his dark, droopy eyes gave him an air of mystery and exhaustion, as if he’d witnessed terrible, unmentionable things, even after a blissful night’s sleep and a weekend bodysurfing in Malibu. Even his slight, skinny frame, the one thing he’d never liked about his looks, only added, according to Variety, to his “rakish appeal.” And it wasn’t just Variety that believed in him. In the early reviews, Backstage had called him “an old soul, by turns mesmerizing and terrifying to watch.” The L.A. Mirror had called him “a virtuoso capable of embodying both the horrors of war and the optimism of the future.”

  And he had believed it. Everyone had. Since the day he’d been cast as Lev, Alexi had been aware that he was getting away with something—though, he reasoned, he’d never explicitly lied about anything. He just never told the complete truth. He may have, when asked about his American accent, mentioned the pronunciation workbooks stacked on his family’s kitchen table, as if he, and not just his parents, had pored over them nightly. He may have once, a little drunk at a party, pretended to forget the English words for the pigs in a blanket being passed around. He may have, that night and possibly a few others, begun sentences with, In my country . . . He may have, when asked by the film’s very openly communist director one night over steaks at Musso’s what he thought about Truman, parroted back what he’d overheard at the writers’ table, that he was narrow-minded and ruthless, his doctrine a farce and an affront to civil liberties. He may have, at Stella and Jack’s invitation, attended a number of meetings in their Hancock Park living room, where there may have been some pretty detailed discussions about following their Soviet comrades down whatever path they took. He may have, on one of those evenings, filled out one of the Party membership forms being passed around, simply because everyone else was. He may have lied to Katherine about his whereabouts, inventing a rummy game with the guys. He may have, after those living room meetings, followed Stella and Jack and Julia and all the others to the Polo Lounge for drinks, where there may have been talk about making another, even more politically charged film than The Unknown Soldier, a film so important, so heartbreaking, so stirring, the director said, that he’d eat his own shoe if it weren’t an immediate classic. Alexi may have gotten an erection at the possibility of starring in said film. He may have downed his vodka martini and announced, to every bigwig in the room, that if they weren’t considering anyone else, if they hadn’t already made a casting decision, that it would be both an honor and a gift to marry his political and artistic passions in such a project, to entwine them so entirely, and they may have, every person in that room, eaten it all up completely.

  Not that he’d admit to any of this, even under oath. Especially under oath. Alexi Liebman may have been a lot of things, but one thing he’d never be was a snitch. Anyway, none of that information, he knew, would have made a difference in court. He’d still gone to meetings, starred in a flagrantly political film, been a card-carrying Party member, even if he often was late paying his dues. Right after the cast and crew had been subpoenaed, Stella and Jack had mobilized everyone—there must have been twenty people—in their living room. They brought in the best lawyers they could find, sympathizers themselves, who all said, over and over, that if everyone banded together in court and invoked the Fifth Amendment, they’d not only protect the group but challenge the House Un-American Activities Committee’s right to ask such unconstitutional questions in the first place. Anyway, the lawyers said, they were certain of victory. Look how easily Howard Hughes had shouted down the congressional committee. The list went on. If everyone stuck together, the lawyers said, if they all meticulously coordinated their statements—and Alexi remembered how glaring Julia Wexler’s absence had been that evening, though they hadn’t yet learned that she’d named names, then scrambled to find work script-doctoring another film—they’d get through this relatively unscathed.

  Alexi had believed them. He hadn’t known, that night at the meeting, that the group’s own refusal to give up names would get them cited for contempt of Congress, and that, when their final appeal was denied by the Supreme Court five months later, they’d all be sent to jail. No one—not Stella or Jack or the lawyers—really thought that was a possibility. Their group was one of the first brought in to testify, and at the time not even the lawyers were taking the Committee’s threats seriously. The best thing Alexi could do, they told him, both for his career and for his family, was to plead the Fifth; when the inquiry was finished—and they were all convinced it would blow over quickly—he’d want to be seen as loyal and trustworthy to his higher-ups so he could get back to work. Alexi had no choice but to listen. His career, once on the brink of massive success, was suddenly in danger of being orbited into obscurity, blacklisted before the world had a chance to know he existed. And so he did what he did to stay in the good graces of the only people who’d ever hired him. He approached the witness chair that day in Washington and handed the Committee a short statement the group had scripted: that in America there was a secret ballot, and he didn’t believe the government had any more right to inquire into his political affiliations than an election official had to walk into a voting booth and examine a ballot marked by the voter.

  But as the chairman glanced at the statement, so quickly it was impossible he’d gleaned anything from it at all, Alexi had looked out at the packed caucus room, every seat filled, every newsreel camera and microphone aimed at him, and had been filled with a rush of disappointment. Because while he’d prepared himself for the spectacle—everyone knew what a PR gold mine this was for the Committee—he hadn’t been prepared for how bright the camera lights would be. He hadn’t been prepared for the way his entire body perked every time one of those bulbs flashed right at him, a thirsty, neglected plant back under the sun. And while he’d been prepared for the Committee chair’s question—Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?—he hadn’t been prepared for how deadening it would feel to give such a lackluster response during what, Alexi was realizing right then, may very well have been his final performance.

  And yet he had known that, in the end, he would answer exactly as the lawyers had advised. So he’d looked right into the cameras and said, “Your question, Mr. Chairman, is both improper and illegal.” It was precisely the response he was supposed to give, vague and evasive—and, Alexi feared, completely unmemorable. He delivered it exactly as he was supposed to, in a clipped, unemotional tone—everything he’d learned not to do in acting class—and, maybe worst of all, the whole thing was over so quickly. The moment his words were out he was excused, all the cameras swiveling away from him and down the aisle to follow the next witness approaching the chair.

  DOWN THE road now, on the other side of an overpass, Alexi saw blinking lights spelling out mo el. He pulled into the lot, grabbed their suitcases and led Benny to the lobby. It really wasn’t so bad. Moths flitted around a single bulb and the sofa was threadbare, but back issues of Time were fanned out attractively on the coffee table. There was an older woman behind the desk doing a crossword, and the radio was broadcasting a baseball game. Alexi paid his eight dollars and got the key and he and Benny walked back outside, around the rear of the lot and up the concrete steps to their third-floor room. It was carpeted and relatively clean. There were two single beds with a desert landscape framed between them, and he and his son put down their luggage and looked at each other.

  “You want to play cards?” Alexi s
aid.

  “I’m not sure we know the same games.”

  “You want to read, then?”

  “I didn’t bring a book,” Benny said. “Do you want to read?”

  Alexi shook his head. “Are you hungry?”

  “Not really. Maybe a little.”

  “Oh my God,” Alexi said. “It’s ten o’clock. I forgot about dinner.”

  “It’s okay. We can eat tomorrow.”

  “No,” Alexi said. “You wait here.”

  He locked the door behind him and ran out to the thoroughfare. He could see his son watching from the window and wondered what he looked like from three stories above. There were car dealerships on either side of him but not a single restaurant, so he sprinted ahead to a filling station. He grabbed the first things he saw and brought them all to the register: two root beers, licorice, Hershey bars.

  His stomach flipped just looking at the food, but when he returned to the motel and spilled the loot on the bed, Benny’s eyes bugged. “I never get root beer.”

  Alexi couldn’t believe this was actually earning him points. “What’s your mom making these days?”

  “Meat loaf, tuna casserole.”

  “So she still has time to cook?”

  “She does it on her day off, then freezes everything for the week.”

  “She’s doing alright, then?”

  “Yeah. Okay. Not great.”

  Alexi could hear Katherine’s voice so clearly—even Benny’s intonation on that last word, as though her thoughts were being transmitted directly through their son. He’d spent the past year thinking about what he’d done, wishing he could fix it, knowing he couldn’t. Knowing, even, that he was capable of making it worse, of rubbing dirt in her wounds, like earlier that day outside the prison when he’d felt so nervous seeing her that Alexi realized now he hadn’t even thanked her for driving Benny up, probably taking time off work to do so. But it was only right then, sitting beside his son, that he understood, even without Katherine in the room, even with the Golden Gate Bridge between them, just how much he’d hurt her. And he knew it wasn’t just his arrest, or the affair with Julia Wexler. It was Katherine knowing that all her conversations, even the most painful, private ones, had been recorded. It was the shitty apartment in Palms. It was the fact, as she told him after his hearing in Washington, sitting together in the bar of the Sheraton Park Hotel, that he’d hidden this whole world from her. “The thing with Julia I can understand,” she’d said. “I hate it and it makes me want to run you both over, but at least it’s something I can wrap my head around. But you swore to me that working with a communist director didn’t mean you were getting caught up in that yourself. You kept a life from me, Alexi.”