by Peter Orner
And she’d said, “Why shouldn’t I have a drink?”
After a couple of glasses of wine and some dancing, he’d escorted her up to her room at the Fairmont.
“You move so well,” he said.
“Well, I used to be a professional. A chorus girl, actually. Now I’m a frump. I teach ballet to snots.”
“Frump! I had you pegged as a dancer.”
“You didn’t have me pegged as anything.”
His eyes roved her body and she’d pulled him inside the room.
And now, even now, a hotel room in San Francisco in the morning light. Those weightless days. A man, an insignificant man he would have seemed to more significant men who do nothing but judge their significance in relation to other men. He’d told her he worked in an architect’s office but that he wasn’t an architect, only a draftsman. It wasn’t lack of brains or talent, he just preferred to draw. Buildings themselves meant nothing to him, only the renderings mattered. He lived with his mother. Years later he sent her a drawing, a portrait of her, in the shape of a cathedral. Bernice’s face was at the top of the steeple. He was kind about her nose. The contours of her figure were sleek and aerodynamic. The twin columns out front were legs, her legs, the ways her legs used to look, and they wore golden ballet shoes. She hadn’t known what to make of it. She stuffed it in the bottom of a drawer. But these days, the drawing, too, has come bubbling back. She thinks about digging it out but fears finding other things she doesn’t want to be reminded of. If it even survived the last move, that drawing is in some box in the basement. Someone might find it one day, one of the grandkids maybe, and not know what to make of it either.
They were still in bed when the bellhop knocked on the door with the message. It was after three in the afternoon.
Two men, two days, one bed. I’m a walking scandal! A private joke she told herself for years. Bernice sits down by the window in this quiet house and looks out at Seymour’s tomatoes and cabbages. In spite of her lack of encouragement, they continue to grow like gangbusters. A man named Anthony, his bony shoulders, his nimble probing fingers. And before, each time, he’d asked permission, “May I?” How long dead himself?
You may.
And she thinks of the furniture in that room at the Fairmont, how ugly and solid and useful it was, the most prominent piece, by far, being a massive green high-backed chair. It was some kind of joke in terribly expensive leather, an absurd throne built for a giant. Anthony was appalled and fascinated by it. Seymour too had thought it hilarious. He posed on it wearing only skivvies and his peaked officer’s hat. But Seymour laughing about the chair was of course different and by then she was through with it, the chair, the room, San Francisco.
“The children,” she’d said, louder than she intended, as if the children were anywhere near. A grown man back from war, bouncing up and down on that colossal chair, his hands mincing like an excited puppy. “Seymour,” shouting now, “the children!”
ROMAN MORNING
A large flat, in the neighborhood of Via Trieste, many closed doors, room after room. We’re solidly bourgeoisie, Rocco said as he unlocked the gate. If there was a convention, we followed it. My father was a doctor before—Rocco stopped. Well, you’ll see. And it was true. The first thing you noticed walking in the front door was layers of writing scrawled across the walls, in pen: small, purposeful writing, phone numbers, names of old friends, names of products. (In the bathroom, vertically alongside the mirror, Nivea, Nivea, Nivea.) But mostly they seemed to be jumbled sentences. Faulkner wrote on his walls, I said. Faulkner wasn’t out of his mind, Rocco said. At least not completely. My father wanted to be a great researcher, he dreamed of making groundbreaking discoveries. The last thing he wanted was to see patients, with their ailments, their complaints, their smells. But that’s what he did. And he never received the university appointment he always wanted; he was only a family doctor. After work he’d close himself up in his study for hours. His specialty, he said, was childhood diseases, the mumps in particular. But it was never entirely clear to us what exactly he was trying to find. He must have thought we wouldn’t have understood. A few years ago I visited my parents after my son was born, the first grandchild, and my father shuffled over to me in those paper slippers he always wore around the house, holding a fat book. Have a look, he said. It was Who’s Who. My father wanted me to know he’d been listed in Who’s Who. Everybody’s listed in Who’s Who. You pay a little money, they give you a little entry. My lonely father. The only one who ever believed in him was my mother and this only seemed to frustrate him. It was her job to believe in him. What he craved was the recognition of other people. And even my mother, over the years, began to doubt him. A half century of him shutting himself in his study with his medical texts in English. In the morning, he saw patients at his office. He was a fine doctor, an excellent doctor, but there are many excellent doctors. My father wanted to stand out, to be known, and this whole place is built on this unfulfilled ambition. Always, he had to be different. Every one of his friends married Italian girls, so my father found himself a German wife. And although she spoke excellent Italian, she rarely left the house. As a child I remember her being here—always—but there was some part of her, the corner of her eye, let’s say, that was somewhere else. When she finally had to put him in a home, the first thing she did was move back to Bavaria. She said she wanted to be closer to her parents’ graves. Now when she visits my father, she stays in a hotel. I am supposed to be selling the place. I have to have it painted, obviously.
I think of waking up in that quiet flat, Rocco still asleep, and wandering around all those rooms laden with heavy furniture. Doors opening up into still more rooms, those walls and the chains of words, a mind trying to hold on to something, anything. But it all keeps falling. My train won’t leave for another couple of hours.
EISENDRATH
The same scene as in Act I. Eight o’clock in the evening. Behind the scenes in the street there is the faintly audible sound of a concertina. There is no light.
Eisendrath finds himself early on in Act II of The Three Sisters. He’s on the stage of the New Players Community Theatre in Covington, Kentucky. It’s opening night, the high-school gym. How he got here isn’t important right now. Neither is the fact that Eisendrath hasn’t acted since an eighth-grade production of Little Mary Sunshine, and even then he was only one of a chorus of five singing forest rangers. The last time he was in Kentucky was five years ago, before his life imploded. His lines, what in the fuck are his lines?
Masha Prozorova Kulygina, who is facing him, now says something incomprehensible after a long and seemingly meaningful pause.
MASHA: What noise there is in the stove right now. Not long before Father’s death there was a howling in the chimney just like that. The very same!
Eisendrath is, at least he is supposed to be, the irredoubtable Aleksandr Ignatyevich Vershinin, forty-three, formerly the Lovesick Major, a man with two children and a wife who frequently, even once during the play itself, tries to poison herself just to spite him. A gallant who breezily says, Two or three hundred years from now, the world will be inexpressibly beautiful and all this suffering will have been worth it. In Act III, a place we will not reach tonight, Masha confesses to her sisters that she loves Vershinin for his voice, his speeches, his theorizing, his misfortunes, but even now, in Act II, Eisendrath can see this love in her eyes. The woman playing Masha is not a great actress, but she’s trying, and she’s not unsubtle, and she’s even a little beautiful in exactly the way the three sisters are beautiful: weary, resigned, fatigued by expectation. If only they could make it back to Moscow. Everything will be different in Moscow. By day Masha is Susan Stempler and she works eighty-hour weeks in Customer Service at Bank One across the river in Cincinnati. She has yearned to act since she was a kid, and here she is—and here is Vershinin, a glib character if there ever was one, and he has suddenly and irrevocably forgotten all his lines, and apparently who the hell he is, even.
Eisendrath tries looking at the scars in the wood of the stage, at the audience, which is nothing but a black muddle. He can feel the hot breath of all the people wafting on his cheeks. He stares back at her, at this Masha who is taller than he in flat shoes, who is miserably married to the jolly ignoramus Kulygin, the schoolmaster. This will be the longest moment of his life, not because time stops, but because it continues to stomp forward and onward like the triple-named soldiers of Vershinin’s own platoon, who pound through the back rooms of this play. Eisendrath’s fear is so palpable at this point it could almost be mistaken for drama. A man in one of the back rows begins to cough ravenously, and his boomings echo as if the entire gym is at the bottom of some canyon, and still Masha locks her exhausted, sorrowful eyes on Eisendrath, eyes that of course are also Susan Stempler’s, begging him to say something, anything, anything at all, just move your lips. We’re about to move from glitch to fiasco. How fast we sink. Eisendrath looks down at his uniform as if there’s a clue in the olive jacket the volunteer costume designer (also playing the crone Anfisa) picked up at the army surplus. Vershinin has a few medals pinned to his chest, not many. This is to show that in spite of his many years of loyal military service, he’s never been much for valor. The Lovesick Major’s head is too much in the clouds. Eisendrath looks around at the set, at the drawing room, at the old but solid, not yet ratty furniture. Weird. It’s all vaguely familiar. And though there’s no chance whatsoever that his lines are lodged somewhere in his brain—Eisendrath is not even certain he’s ever even read this play—he almost feels like settling down, right here in this little gymnasium. Sweat and tears course down Susan Stempler’s cheeks, and her eyes, desperate now—this, the one thing I’ve ever wanted. Can’t you speak at all?
Panic rises in the wings and then a voice, shouting disguised as a whisper:
WINGS: Are you superstitious?
VERSHININ: Are you superstitious?
MASHA: Yes, I am superstitious.
WINGS: That’s strange. (Pause.) You’re a splendid, wonderful woman, splendid, wonderful. It’s dark in here and I can see your eyes shining.
VERSHININ: That’s strange—
(Masha shoves her hand in Eisendrath’s face, and so he kisses it, Susan’s hand. It tastes of sweat and Jergen’s.)
VERSHININ: You’re a splendid, winderful woman. It’s dark and I can hear your eyes shining.
(Masha walks over to the other side of the stage, plops in a chair, crosses her feet.)
MASHA: It’s lighter over here.
Eisendrath tries to move closer to the light, but he can’t, his feet won’t budge, and perhaps thirty seconds pass, maybe even a minute, and he does not hear the wings begging, nearly shrieking now—
WINGS: I love you, I love you…
VERSHININ:
MASHA: When you talk to me like this, for some reason I laugh, though I am frightened. Please don’t say it again… Say it again. Go ahead, I don’t care.
(Masha covers her eyes with her hands.)
WINGS: I love your eyes, I love the way you move…
VERSHININ:
MASHA: Say it! I don’t care! Say it!
VERSHININ:
A play is a fixed planet, and Eisendrath has fallen off by now. But even this doesn’t matter anymore. Love? How would he know it if he saw it? He’d stroke Susan Stempler’s now drenched face if he could reach her, if he could ever reach her.
WOMAN IN A DUBROVNIK CAFÉ
Do you remember her? It was sunny. Her hair was pulled back and sunglasses rode the top of her head like another pair of darkened eyes. She had white cream on her face. She talked about her father, her mother, her tabby cats, her white-bearded cats, her Siamese. She said she was afraid in London now.
“I’m not a bigot, but when it gets to the point, you don’t see a white face for blocks—” She stopped abruptly and reached for your hand. “Such exquisite hands. Do you play piano? My father played beautifully. He was English. Mother was a Serb. Father met her while looking for oil near Novi Sad. He left her when I was ten. Mother didn’t kill herself right away. She let a reasonable amount of time pass. We lived in Shrewsbury then. I went with father to the funeral. He said Good-bye, Netty to the casket and then shoveled dirt and rocks on it. She has a large headstone. Mother’s family were very cosmopolitan Jews. They read the paper on Saturdays, drove. Hard to believe now when you read what barbarians the Serbs are. Tony Blair’s dumber than toast. And your Clinton’s truly disgusting. My cousin Anna a barbarian! If you could see her in the little dresses she used to make. I just came from Novi Sad. They’re walking around like they’re already dead, waiting for more bombs to drop. Yes, there are still some Jews left in Yugoslavia. Would you like a chocolate? My father didn’t hate my mother, he just, well, tired of her, and that’s a crime really, because it’s laziness. A man who played Bach like that whispering good-bye under his breath at her grave like she was going somewhere on a train. Would you like more coffee? The waiter knows I’m Serb—that’s why he ignores us. He can hear it in my accent. I really should speak English here. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for so much. Isn’t it funny to be so sorry for things? You two are quite nice. Normally, I loathe Americans. You know, my brother moved to someplace called Rockville in Washington, D.C., and I tell him over e-mail that I’ll visit him over my dead body, and let me tell you, he won’t come mutter over my grave, because I’ve left instructions—cremation within twenty-four hours of my demise. My lawyer has the papers. They’re fully executed. I’ll be taking up no more space here after I’m gone. Things are crowded enough as it is. I say, when it’s over, let the flames announce it. Bring me to the fire—don’t you fresh faces agree? No trace.”
REVEREND HRNCIRIK RECEIVES AN AIRMAIL PACKAGE
Brno, Czechoslovakia, 1963
A slant of rain against the one small window. As there was rain those three days she was here and he had imagined her clothes strewn across this little office. Why lie? There were moments when his lust made it difficult to breathe. The thing he wanted most was her mouth. He thinks of how it scowled at him. Yet her eyes claimed the opposite. There was kindness in them, a kind of dampened kindness. As though her eyes were battling with her mouth over which face to show him. What is more advantageous, ferocity or gentleness? He remembers wondering whether this struggle stretched into other regions. Imagined her torso white, its lower half a gorgeous hellfire of blue and orange.
She worked with an international charitable organization of some sort. The UNESCO office in Prague had arranged for her visit to Brno to facilitate “cross-cultural exchange,” which was a permissible, if dubious, exercise in the eyes of the authorities. She was an American living in Geneva. He’d learned English in London during the war. Over the course of two days, they had had long talks in this office, talks she thought were illicit, and in a way they were. Any candid conversation with someone from the West carried some risks, but this was years before the Soviet invasion and Barbara Hoffman’s questions were so quaint—Reverend, is it true they’ve outlawed your God?—that they couldn’t possibly have attracted the attention of anyone but the most bored of informants. Barbara Hoffman was thrilled danger lurked and so chattered on, at times looking furtively from under her shaggy eyebrows at the window ledge, as though she expected, any moment, the ghost of Stalin’s giant head to rise above the sill.
He interrupted. “My God? I beg your pardon, Mrs. Hoffman. What about yours?”
“Is He still here? I thought he was long gone. I no longer believe. I suppose I used to, must have outgrown it. Two days ago, I met with a couple of decrepit rabbis in Prague and felt nothing. Isn’t that sad? All those years of being something and I come back here to what—the old country?—and I can’t muster any kinship. They just looked like poor, tattered souls, not family.”
“There are so few Jews left, of course.”
“All the more reason I should have been moved, no?”
“What moves us is a complicated question.”
&
nbsp; “I’m not making you uncomfortable, Reverend, am I?”
He’d waved her away with a doorlike swing of his small, hairless hand. A short, gregarious woman in white heels. She sat across this very desk and watched herself through his eyes. She saw a bold woman willing to reach across the great chasm to provide aid and comfort to a poor Lutheran pastor in poor, oppressed Czechoslovakia. So he told her stories, some of them even true, detailing the hardships of running a church in such times. The limitations on what services he could offer, the constantly changing and arbitrary laws, the threat of spies, the disastrous plumbing in the rectory. To get a decent plumber to come to a church you have to know someone in the Politburo! And she’d listened to his boastful anecdotes about the whispering, nudging, and yes, I’ve had to do a bit of bribing here and there. He’d spread his arms wide, not exactly knowing why, but trying in his way to say, I embrace not only the misery of myself and my people but of mankind! “Of course,” he’d said quietly, “I’m insignificant.”
A good woman, perhaps not yet fifty, trolling around for something good to do in this world, and she’d landed, of all places, in this office. She was going to ship him a new mimeograph machine, paper, books, office supplies. Even a boxload of Bibles in Czech. At one point in the last hour of the second day, there was a lull in their conversation. Barbara Hoffman didn’t like lulls. But this particular moment she didn’t fill it; instead, she waited. Then she blurted out so harshly it was as though she’d stomped on his foot: