The UnAmericans: Stories

by Antopol, Molly

  Behind the counter, an attendant was waiting on an older couple, silver-haired and so alike in their navy sweaters that Alexi couldn’t tell whether they were siblings or had simply been married for so long they’d begun to resemble one another. He took a moment to survey the wine. An entire shelf of Bordeaux blends, and there, nestled between two Barbeitos, the pièce de résistance, the crowning glory, the 1936 Georges de Latour Private Reserve. He was filled with a rush of memory: Stella and Jack had introduced him to it back when Alexi was a hack, a novice with an unsophisticated palate, not knowing the difference, even, between a Viognier and a Riesling. Of all his friends, those two had always been ahead of the curve on everything, and Alexi had a flash of their trip together, picnicking on grounds as lovely as these, then driving a couple cases back to L.A. in time for an NAACP benefit they were throwing at their place in Hancock Park. Alexi saw himself standing by their pool with a glass in his hand, surrounded by people, all of whom wanted to be near him. He couldn’t remember the story he’d been telling but remembered people laughing and himself laughing along with them, certain that night it would be impossible to embarrass himself no matter how drunk he got—so different from his first industry parties, when he was starting out and never even completely sure whether his invite had been a mistake, every conversation a cause for second-guessing, so afraid he’d say one wrong thing and immediately be outed as a false ally, a false European, a false Alexi.

  But there, at Stella and Jack’s, he’d felt his life commencing. There people laughed at his jokes, even if they weren’t funny, though somehow, when he was feeling that good, when he was riding that high, they almost always were. Every story he told seemed to have an arc, a punch line, an effortless, self-deprecating beauty—and he suddenly remembered the tale he’d been telling that night by the pool, about his grandmother’s run-in with the NKVD outside her apartment, a story he’d only heard secondhand from his parents, as he’d left Moscow as a baby, but into which Alexi had found, easily enough, a way to insert himself as a character, the young grandson in the doorway with his Babchi, listening to the old woman shout those officers into silence for lurking outside, then inviting them in for coffee and dessert.

  “And for you?” the attendant said then. He was tanned, with dark hair combed drastically to one side and pale blue eyes that seemed to boast about the rest of his face.

  “A bottle of the Private Reserve.” Alexi calculated, after the motel room and the filling station snacks and the raspberries, bread and cheese, that he had a little less than seven dollars left, and he was willing to drop it all on that bottle. He turned to Benny. “I don’t care what it costs. Nothing in the world,” he said, “is better than a glass of this with that Camembert.”

  “Agreed,” the attendant said. “Absolutely. That will be ten dollars.”

  Alexi swallowed. The wallet in his hand, his black leather Ferragamo wallet, suddenly felt flimsy, meaningless, another stupid prop in his ridiculous sham of a life. This was, he thought, a thousand times worse than the previous night at the Pinecone, simply because his son was seeing it. He had a sudden, massive fear that this was what every subsequent day would be, a slightly variant, though eerily similar, round of humiliation.

  He surveyed the tasting room. His first thought was that he had no idea Stella and Jack were that wealthy, carrying that wine out by the caseload. His second thought was that no one, not a single person, recognized him—and they never would. The attendant didn’t know he was waiting on a man who couldn’t afford that bottle, who could hardly afford the free samples. He smiled patiently at Alexi. He grinned down at the boy. Benny was looking back and forth at Alexi and the attendant, and then he reached into his pocket and pulled out the five-dollar bill his mother had given him. He laid it on the counter. Alexi stared at the bill. He wondered if there was anything more excruciating for a child than watching his father shamed. “Put that away,” he whispered, and when Benny didn’t, when he just stood there, Alexi snatched it off the counter. He shoved it into Benny’s pocket and led him toward the door. He could feel the attendant staring. Only this time, unlike the night before, he couldn’t come up with a single excuse for why he was bolting back to the parking lot.

  He got into the driver’s side and covered his face with his hands. Benny slid in next to him and Alexi knew, suddenly, that he was going to cry. The first time he ever had in front of his son—the first time, since he was a boy, that he had in front of anyone. Benny tentatively put a hand on his arm.

  “That’s a good wine,” Alexi said, wiping his eyes.

  “I know,” the boy said.

  “I promise you, we’ll share a bottle one day.”

  “It’s okay,” Benny said. “I don’t even like wine.”

  “Of course you don’t,” Alexi said. “You’re nine years old.”

  “Actually,” the boy said, “I’m ten. I had a birthday in April.”

  “My son is ten.” He stared out at the windshield, tiny dead bugs splattered on the glass. Beyond that was grass and water and more grass, everything beautiful and still as a photograph.

  “The thing is,” Alexi said, “you asked me a question last night and I didn’t give you a straight answer.”

  “That’s alright,” Benny said quietly. He picked at a mosquito bite on his arm, flinging the scab in the air. “Maybe I shouldn’t have asked.”

  “No,” Alexi said. “I want to be the kind of dad you can say anything to. That’s something I thought a lot about this year. It’s just hard for me to talk about.”

  “Yeah?” Benny said, looking excited.

  “Not in the way you think,” Alexi said. “I didn’t get in any fistfights, no one knifed me in the leg. If anything, life inside was quiet. Most people had done their craziness out in the world and were pretty beaten down by the time they came in.”

  He shifted in his seat. “But something happened to me in there. I had a lot of time on my hands and so I finally started paying attention to the news.” The world, it turned out, was falling apart. Every day, he told Benny, new things came up about Russia. They’d all get together, Alexi and his buddy Karl and a few others, over dinner or cards or sometimes during shifts in the garage, and discuss it all. They weren’t so naïve they believed the Soviet Union would be perfect, but in those meetings at Stella and Jack’s they had talked about how it stood for a better way of life. And yet suddenly Alexi was hearing about the treason trials, how even the supposedly staunchest communists in Russia were turning out to be traitors. It was the most depressing feeling, sitting in the prison yard with all these believers, discussing plans to fix the world while it was burning up around them. Sitting around with all these people who, unlike Alexi, had genuinely devoted themselves to the Soviet model. All these people who had destroyed their careers and their families for an ideology that may, in the end, not have worked at all. “That may have been making life worse for all the common people in Russia everybody was always talking about,” he said. “Just like my parents had told me all along.”

  Alexi’s tears were coming so quickly that every time he wiped his eyes a new batch was waiting. He had no idea if any of this made sense to the boy. If Benny was old enough to understand even a fraction of it, if all any of it meant to him was that his father hadn’t been around. That he’d missed science fairs and parent-teacher conferences and—Alexi wasn’t even sure what he’d missed.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You must think your dad’s gone crazy.”

  “No,” Benny said. “I get it. At least I think I do.” And then Alexi saw something in his son’s face, an expression of pure, unbridled adoration, and he thought about how much he would have killed for a moment like this with his own father. It was all so unfair, he thought. Fatherhood was like one giant free pass. The crying, the rambling, the admissions of weakness: all of it seemed to be making his son admire him more, and when Katherine broke down and did the same thing—the exact same thing—it made Benny want to run from her. He hated himsel
f right then. Benny was the only person he had left, and Alexi didn’t trust himself not to set this relationship on fire along with all the others. He thought about his friend’s pool house awaiting him in L.A., where he’d begin to grovel for work he didn’t even want, now that he could no longer return to the studio, now that all his contacts were still in jail, or hiding out in Mexico, or God knows where.

  Alexi had convinced himself all that mattered was that he be near his family. But now even the smallest decisions felt enormous, insurmountable, potentially destructive—and for the first time, it occurred to him that this weekend could be causing Benny even more damage than the past year when he had no father around at all.

  He put his keys in the ignition. Alexi suddenly wanted to drive very fast, as far away from himself as possible. “Let’s go,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “Back to San Francisco.” He’d punished his son so much already. Benny shouldn’t be forced to contend, on top of everything else, with the full reality of the disgraced man his father had become. It would devastate him. “I’ll drop you with your mother and Aunt Ellen.”

  “But,” Benny whispered, “what did I do wrong?”

  “Nothing. It’s just time to go.”

  “But I don’t understand,” his son said, and when Alexi didn’t say anything, when he felt, quite possibly, that he had exhausted every word in the English language and there was nothing left to say, Benny mumbled, “Okay. I just need to use the bathroom.”

  He watched his son disappear into the tasting room. Sammy Kaye floated out from the speakers, and a Cadillac pulled up to the lot and a man got out, followed by an attractive black-haired woman: people Alexi might have known in a life that was feeling so far away it was as if it had never been his to begin with. He could see horses meandering in the distance, and, walking freely through the gardens, a peacock. My God, he thought, where was he?

  Alexi was itching to go, out of this vineyard, this town, this . . . he could go anywhere, he thought. Anywhere and nowhere. He looked around the property. Benny was taking an awfully long time. Alexi got out of the car and walked up the path where he saw, through the door, his son coming out of the bathroom from the back of the tasting room. Soon, Alexi thought, Benny would be grown, with a wife and a home and maybe a son of his own. And yet all of that seemed so far in the future, watching Benny walk toward him, still so in the process of becoming a boy, let alone a man. There his son was, wiping his hands on his pants, running a finger up his zipper to make sure it was closed. There he was, walking up to the tasting counter, so high it reached his shoulders. The attendant was busy talking to the black-haired couple, and when he turned to the register to ring them up, there his son was, ducking behind the counter. There Benny was, swiping a bottle of the Private Reserve right off the shelf. There he was, slipping it under his shirt, walking past the bar without even a sideways look—a better actor, Alexi thought, than he himself. His pulse kicked. He had no idea what to do. He stepped forward to stop him, to turn him around and make him give it back, to teach his son a lesson while he was still young enough to listen. But Benny was already walking through the doors and into the bright sunny day, pulling the bottle from his shirt and thrusting it at his father: terrified, astonished, ready for his love.

  Retrospective

  Friends quoted in the obituaries talked about Eva Kaplan in her heyday, back in the sixties and seventies. They talked about the parties she and her husband used to throw in their Jerusalem home, inspired by the secret apartment exhibits Eva had attended in Moscow. A few Russian artists were often in attendance, and friends recalled them standing in front of their paintings, surrounded by philanthropists and U.N. officials and Knesset members, while Eva swept through the crowd in a silky pantsuit, a cocktail in hand, wearing what appeared to be all of her gold at once. The exhibits went on in the living room, but displayed throughout her home was the permanent collection amassed over a lifetime: the Picassos and Légers bought for a pittance back in the thirties, when she was still a young and ambitious art student in Paris; the Kotins and Gottliebs she’d begun collecting in the fifties during her years in New York; and, of course, the works that had made her as famous in her circle as the painters themselves: the hundreds of pieces she’d smuggled out of Russia, right up to the fall of the Curtain.

  The art, her friends admitted, wasn’t always that great. Of course the whole point, one friend said, was that it was supposed to be edgy and political, but there was no getting around how unappetizing it was to stare at a canvas of Nikita Khrushchev in a compromising position each morning over breakfast. Other pieces had been virtually destroyed by the time Eva exhibited them. It was hard to know if the poor quality had to do with the fact that the artists often worked with anything they could scavenge off the streets, mud and trash and auto paint, or if it was the shoddy way Eva had packed them, so that by the time the smuggled art made it through customs at Ben Gurion and was unveiled on her wall, the canvases, which sometimes weren’t canvases at all but paper bags or burlap sacks, were so faded and torn it was hard to see what the artist’s original intent had been. Still, friends insisted it wasn’t simply the work one bought but the stories that went along with it. Eva had sneaked out several of Litnikov’s now-famous labor camp paintings and, more than anyone, had promoted Mikhail Borovsky’s work throughout the U.S. and Israel. Borovsky had been one of Russia’s best-known painters under communism and internationally prized even after his death a few years ago, possibly the only member of the Artists Union the unofficial artists had respected back then, the only one, they’d said, able to think craftily within the constraining box of Socialist Realism—the only one, as Eva had said, who didn’t think membership meant he had to paint “another bridge, or smiling worker, or ridiculous cow.”

  All over the world, obituaries puzzled over how Eva had managed to perform one of the largest and most dangerous art-smuggling operations of the twentieth century. The only person with a bigger collection was an American economist in Maryland, a friend of Eva’s, whose quest to bring as many unofficial Russian works to the western world had inspired her, she’d said in numerous interviews, to do the same for Soviet Jewish art. A curator in Stockholm, quoted in her Ha’aretz obituary, believed Eva may have surreptitiously rolled the thinnest sketches into rugs she’d purchased before going through airport inspection in Moscow, while the director of the National Gallery in London thought she may have hidden beneath the canvases of state-sanctioned art—those bridges, those workers, those cows—the unofficial works. But as Eva’s will traveled across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic to her family in Boston, the biggest question for her daughter Wendy was what her mother had bequeathed to her. Wendy had spent the past two weeks in Israel, dealing with the funeral and the shiva and sitting through one too many luncheons honoring her mother at the Israel Museum, where Eva had been a board member for nearly fifty years. And while the trip had only confirmed for Wendy what she’d feared most of her life—that these art people knew her mother better than she did herself—Wendy’s father had already been dead two years, she was the only family Eva had left and she felt, in her heart, that the woman would have wanted to make her daughter’s life as financially easy as possible. The paintings in Eva’s house alone, Wendy told her own family as she tossed aside the rest of her mail and opened the executor’s letter, had to be worth almost twenty million. But there, typed out clearly and succinctly, Eva’s last wishes were stated: she was selling her private collection at discount to the Israel Museum and donating the proceeds, every last shekel, to charity.

  Wendy sank into a chair and put her face in her hands. It was so like her mother, she whispered, to map things out to the minutiae. All the money, Eva had decided, would go toward creating the Eva Kaplan Family Foundation, which her daughter Wendy, son-in-law Larry and two grandchildren, Mira and Hannah, would administer. The foundation would fund art education programs at youth villages and immigrant absorption centers from Kiryat Shmoneh to
Eilat, places Eva had been supporting for years. She’d use the rest of the money—of which there was millions—to build a new wing at the Israel Museum that would house the Eva Kaplan Mentorship Program, dedicated to granting fellowships to promising young curators from around the world, who would come to Jerusalem to work in the same space, and follow in the footsteps, of Eva herself.

  And what could the Kaplans of Boston say?

  “It’s really . . . amazing,” Wendy’s husband Larry said slowly, as though rummaging through his head for the appropriate word.

  “And sort of tragic,” their son-in-law Peter offered. “That she’ll never see any of this.”

  “But is it maybe,” their daughter Hannah said, “just a little bit tacky, putting her name on everything?”

  “What it is,” Wendy said, finally looking up, “is so unbelievably her.” They were all at the dining table now, which no one had sat at in years—everyone always ate in the kitchen, even with company—but which had felt so fitting to spread the legal documents across, as if they were in a boardroom in some glittery high-rise and not a Victorian fixer-upper on Cedar Street.

  “Always flying out to Europe, or lunching with some refugee scholar,” Wendy said. “Always—always—letting everyone know just how generous she was,” she said, walking into the kitchen to answer the phone. Standing in the doorway, twisting the cord around her elbow, Wendy resembled her late father, with her short, disheveled hair and sleepy green eyes, as if perpetually startled from a nap. Then she hung up, walked back into the dining room and said, “That was the Israel Museum. They’re planning another event next month in her honor.”

  Her eyes filled up, that fast. “We’re all invited,” she whispered. “The entire foundation.”