“It’s only eleven.”
“Seems plenty late, don’t you think?”
She wasn’t looking at him. “All right, go,” she said. “I’ll be home a little later.”
“You’re not coming?”
“I am... later.”
His hand on her bolero sleeve squeezed harder.
“It’s fine. You go.” Tatiana pulled herself away. “This way you’ll still have time to make your bar rounds.” Her mouth was tight. And then she looked up at him. “When you need to stay and talk to me, you run out for a drink with your boys who go to meet the girls. If you had any decency you would stay with your wife for thirty more minutes at her Christmas party.” The starched crinoline crackling, she turned to walk away, making a little dismissing motion with her hand. “But you go to it, little barfly, fly away. Shoo.”
Alexander stared hard at her!—her loose blonde hair swirling in a wild wind inside his heart.
He left.
Trouble waited for her at home, Tatiana knew.
The porch light was on. Alexander was sitting out back. Well, at least they would have this one dressed. Tatiana was helpless during the naked arguments in the bedroom. She always lost the fight and had to plead for understanding, agree to anything, acquiesce to anything, to everything. It wasn’t even acquiescing, it was just complete submission. Like yesterday. She was never right in the bedroom, which was why he liked to fight in it so much.
The house was unlocked—because the man of the house was home. She came in, dropped her purse on the shelf, and went to check on Anthony. He was sleeping deeply.
After taking off her cashmere ivory coat and red heels, Tatiana made herself a cup of tea but couldn’t go out back. She went on the front deck instead and sipped her tea, shivering in her Christmas dress.
Alexander was on the rear deck with his back to the house, and Tatiana was on the front deck with her back to the house.
Finally, her tea long finished, she walked through, opened the back door and stepped out. Only a small yellow light shone over the door. Alexander was smoking, drinking a beer, and didn’t turn her way. She debated going to sit at the table in the corner across from him. He didn’t like her close when he was upset. But she knew he needed her close when he was upset, and so she sat by him on the rocking bench, not touching him, but close enough to smell the leather of his WWII bomber jacket and the cigarettes and beer on his breath. He looked so handsome tonight when he came to the party, his short black hair in a clean sheen, face freshly shaven, dark suit pressed, white shirt crisp. And now he was in his black long johns that he knew she loved and his bomber jacket that he knew she loved, his long limbs spread out on the bench, his body so wide, and so grim tonight.
“It’s cold out, no?” Tatiana said. “The desert in the winter is not always hospitable.”
“Yes, it’s ice everywhere.”
“No, it isn’t, Alexander.” So he wasn’t wasting time. “Come on, what’s been the matter with you?”
“Nothing’s been the matter with me.”
“How in the world do you know Cubert’s wife?”
“She and her husband came to look at some spec homes last month. But what does she have to do with anything? Tania, women have been dressing up, coming close, flirting, asking me for a light, for a house, for a job for years. They were on the boat in Coconut Grove, they are here in Scottsdale. Who cares?”
“Shura, where are we going wrong?” Tatiana whispered. “You and I are not allowed to go wrong anywhere—what are we doing that’s not right?”
“I’m going to tell you what,” Alexander replied, finally turning to face her. “Because obviously I have not been making myself clear the last eight years. What’s not right in our house,” he said, “is you putting your work, your hospital, the things you do, the other things you do before me and our marriage.”
“Alexander, I don’t put anything before you,” she said. “I put up with everything—”
“Put up with me? Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Wait, wait, I misspoke,” she said, her hands fanning out, trying to steady him. “I meant I never cease to be what I’ve always been for you. And as you know,” she said, with slight color coming to her cheeks, “I never deny you.”
“Tania, you’re not home for sixty to sixty-five hours in your week!” said Alexander. “You deny me those hours, don’t you? The hours you are home you are no fucking good to anybody. Have you seen yourself lately? You’re worse than ever.”
“No good to anybody, are you joking?” she exclaimed, and suddenly her hands went down as she became less interested in steadying him, needing to steady herself instead. “What’s not done for you? Is your house not clean? Are your shirts not pressed? Is your dinner not on the table? Is your bread not fresh? Do you ever have to move to pick up your own plate, to pour your own coffee, make your own bed? For God’s sake, Alexander,” Tatiana said, “I’m your maid and your milk-maid.” She paused to let the army words sink in. “What is it that I don’t do for you?”
Alexander said nothing.
All Tatiana heard in the silent chasm was his internal screaming.
“Oh, what’s happening?” she whispered, and her hands went up to him again. “Shura, angel, come on, look at all we have ...I know you’re sad about... but look at the rest of our beautiful life. Look at our perfect Ant. We have him. And so many bad things are behind us.”
“Obviously not all bad things,” said Alexander. His elbows were on his knees as he lit another cigarette.
“No, they are, they are.”
He pulled away from her reaching hands. “Lazarevo is behind us, too, Tania,” he said. “Lazarevo, Deer Isle, Coconut Grove, Napa, Bethel Island. They’re all behind us. You know what’s not behind us? Leningrad.” He blew out smoke from his mouth. “That’s not behind us.”
Tatiana, despite her great effort at self-control, started to shake. Addressing only what she could of his comment, she said, her teeth clattering, her face in her chest, “Yes, but every day when I drive home, I think of running out of Kirov, turning my face to you. Every night when I come in your arms, it’s a bit of Lazarevo for me—every day in Arizona.”
And what did her loving husband say to that? “Oh, give me a fucking break,” he said. “Frankly the amount of time I spend on you, I could make a chair come.”
Gasping, she jumped up. She whirled to go.
“That’s right, go,” he said, taking a drag on his cigarette. “Can’t even finish it, can you?”
“Finish what?” Her voice was raised. “You say things like that, and you want me to finish? Fine, I’ll finish.” She felt herself getting hot in the neck. “You spend time on me? Yesterday you spent time on me? Yes, you’re right, because that was effective and satisfying.”
“Yes,” said Alexander, smoking, staring at her with his brazen eyes. “It was both.”
Tatiana had to back away and grasp the deck railing behind her. “It’s late,” she said quietly, her eyes to the ground. And this is so pointless. “It’s very late, and I’m exhausted. I have to work tomorrow. I can’t be without sleep and then be on my feet for twelve hours. Why don’t you hang in there until the weekend and then we can talk some more about this.”
Alexander made a mirthless sound. “Oh, you’re good. To show me how much you want to solve our problems, you’re telling me to wait till the weekend?”
“And what problems would you like to solve tonight?” Tatiana asked tiredly.
“This very fucking thing in your voice,” he said. “You’re with me right now and look, you’re already thinking of tomorrow, of flying to your work; you’re already glazed over. I’ve become the annoying thing you do while you can’t wait to get to the thing you really want to do. I’m now Kirov instead of Alexander. You say you remember Kirov? When you slogged twelve dogged hours to have five flurry minutes with me—and not the other way around?”
“God, is it possible for you just once,” exclaimed Tatiana, “to
keep yourself from saying every nasty thing you can think of?”
“I’m not saying every nasty thing I can think of.”
She twisted away to give him the back of her head, to face the desert.
She heard him light another cigarette. They didn’t speak for a few minutes. Then Alexander spoke. “Who are you putting on a red dress for, Tatiana?” he asked quietly, inhaling his nicotine. “I know it can’t be for me.”
That made her spin back to him. He was sitting casually, a foot crossed over a knee, an arm stretched out across the back of the bench, smoking, but his eyes on her were black and anything but casual. Tatiana walked across the deck, her hands in supplication. She wasn’t angry at him anymore and she wasn’t afraid. She didn’t care what he did. Moving his foot off his knee, she kneeled between his open legs, her swing skirt ballooning out in a red parachute on the deck. “Husband,” she whispered, “what are you talking about?” Looking up into his ominous face, she slid her hands up his quads until they rested on him.
Alexander continued to smoke, his other arm draped over the bench. He didn’t touch her himself, but he let her touch him. “What’s happened to my wife?” he asked. “Where are her hands to bless me?”
“Here they are, darling,” she whispered, caressing him. “Here they are.”
“Who are you wearing red for, Tatiana?”
“You, Shura... only you—what are you worrying yourself over?”
“Where’s that burka to cover you completely?” He took a breath. “Are you dressing up for Dr. Bradley?”
“No!”
“Do you think I’m blind?” Nothing was casual or relaxed anymore about his tense body. The arm came off the bench. “That I have no idea what good old Dr. Ha-ha-so-fucking-funny Bradley is thinking when he touches your back? When he kisses your hand, pretending it’s just a joke, you think I don’t know what he’s thinking? When he stands close to you, looks into your nice red lips as you talk, when his eyes shimmer at the mention of your name? He’s gone soft in the head, you think I don’t know? I was the one with the hat in my hands, standing for hours waiting for you to get out of Kirov. What,” said Alexander, “you’ve moved on from me? You want to bring Bradley to his knees now?” He paused. “You don’t have to wear red for that.” Here it came. His face darkened and he grabbed her caressing arm and pushed her so hard away that she fell on the deck. “Well, go to it, little one,” said Alexander. “Because, personally, I’m broken from being on my knees so long.”
“Oh, Shura,” Tatiana whispered, creeping back to him. “I beg you, please stop. Please. You’re getting yourself crazy over nothing.” She came between his legs again, pulling up on him, clinging to his leather jacket, to his neck, looking up into his face, into his eyes, pulling him down to herself, to her soft and quivering mouth. They kissed, her hands surrendering up to him, his cigarette thrown down. His hands gripping her face, he was bent to her, kissing her helplessly as she was on her knees in front of him in her red bolero dress.
“Go—go twirl your hair in his face, Tania,” whispered Alexander into her mouth. “Like you once did for me. Maybe he’s unblemished. Not me. I’m fucking scarred from the inside out.”
“Yes!” Tatiana cried in a temper, pulling away from his hands. “Mostly on your damned heart!” Pushing him in the chest, she jumped up. She was panting. “I know what it is,” she said. “This is absurd of you, and deliberately cruel. This is our life here, our real life, with real things going on. I know this isn’t Kirov or Lazarevo. What ever is.” Her voice cracked. “What ever is. I know you want it back, but it’s gone, Alexander! It’s gone and we will never have it again, no matter how much you want it.”
Alexander stood from the bench. “You think it’s Lazarevo I want from you?” he said in a stunned voice.
“Yes,” Tatiana said loudly, taking half a step back. “You want that young girl back. Look at her, how beautiful she was, how young, and how much she loved me!”
“No!” Tatiana saw he was struggling to restrain himself from taking one step to her. “I don’t need your 18-year-old self to love me. I can get that any second of any day.” He was breathing hard to keep in control. “I don’t even have to close my eyes.” He broke off to take another breath.
Oh Shura.
“I’d settle not for Lazarevo but for Napa,” he said. “I’d settle for our first months here in Scottsdale. I’d settle for a week in Coconut Grove, for one hour on Bethel Island. I’d settle for anything other than what I’m getting from you lately,” he said, “which is a whole lot of fucking nothing.”
“Oh God, I honestly don’t know what you’re accusing me of,” she whispered, unable to look at him, lowering her stricken head. Tatiana’s hands were clenched at her chest. Alexander’s hands were clenched at his sides. He was on one side of the wooden deck railing, she on the other, the potted yellow prickly pears between them, their hands knotted, their mouths twisted.
Black silence passed crashingly between them.
“You’re glad we don’t have a baby,” Alexander finally said. “Because you don’t ever want to leave your work.”
“I’m not glad we don’t have a baby!” she said, her voice breaking. “But you’re right, I don’t want to leave my work. Leave work and do what? Stare at the walls all day?” She squeezed her hands together, trying to keep herself from emitting a cry. “Shura, we’ve been through this and through this. When I get . . .” She couldn’t continue.
“That’s right, do please stop yourself,” he said, shaking his head. “Words are so fucking cheap. But don’t you find it ironic,” he went on in a voice that was anything but ironic, “that we made Anthony in Leningrad? In complete desperation, when the bombs were whistling by, when we were both at death’s open door, the besieged and starving Leningrad begat our only child. You’d think that here, in the land of plenty—” He broke off, his gaze fixed on the planks of the deck, and stepped further away from her. “You don’t want to hear it. You’ve never wanted to hear it, but I’m telling you once again,” Alexander said, “it’s because you’ve put that place between us in our bed—you with your trembling fingers and visions of death—and you’ve put it between us and our hope of ever having another baby—yes! Don’t shake your head at me!”
“What you’re saying is not true!” Tatiana cried, fighting the impulse to put her hands over her ears.
“Oh, it’s true and you know it! You’ve got nothing left for a baby, nothing! Everything you have goes to that fucking hospital.”
“Please stop, please,” she whispered. “I’m begging you...”
Alexander stopped. When he spoke again, every breath out of him was exhaled with alkaloid poison anguish. “I won’t make peace with it,” he said. “I know you want me to, but I can’t and I won’t. I know you think we’ve been dealt a fine hand here, but very soon Ant will be grown and gone—and then what?”
“Shura, please!”
“Don’t you see,” said Alexander, “that unless an infant comes to this house, we are forever in the ice in Lake Ladoga with your dead sister and sunk under the winter tree with your brother? We are against the wall with my mother and father with blindfolds over our faces, and I’m digging coal in Kolyma. The baby,” he whispered wrenchingly, “is the American thing. The baby is the new house and the new life. The baby is the power that sustains the stars. Don’t you see that?”
Her head shuddering in sorrow, Tatiana’s hands were clasped in a suffocating prayer—at her throat.
Everything she had she gave to him. Everything—except the one thing he desperately wanted. Except the one thing he desperately needed.
“Our house is divided against itself,” said Alexander.
She shook her head. “Please don’t say that,” she whispered. “God, please.”
Waving his hand to flag the finish, Alexander collected his beer can, his ash tray. “There’s no use talking any more about it,” he said, walking past Tatiana to the house. “We’ve talked it now to deat
h.”
These were the snapshots of their brief and unspeakably silent love that night: Tatiana with her legs draped over the bedroom chair, her white crinoline and red flowing skirt spread around and near and over Alexander’s lowered black black head. And this: Alexander standing, not touching, and Tatiana kneeling on the floor in front of him. And this: Tatiana on her hands and knees in her red bolero dress, Alexander behind her. And finally the afterglow: he’s gone back outside and is sitting on the deck, smoking, and she is alone in the armchair, in her red bolero dress. The ticks of time, the fractions of an hour, four bars of a rhyme. There was no whispering, no sighing, no crying out, not a single oh Shura. The only muted sounds coming out of her throat were as if she had been suffocating.
And the next morning Tatiana got up and flew to work in the red Ford Thunderbird rag-top Alexander bought her so she would love him.
Faith Noël
Tatiana and Bradley were sitting across from each other having lunch that afternoon, a Thursday. Tatiana kept the conversation flowing, shop talk, other nurses, and patients, Red Cross blood drive, which she organized every year for the city of Phoenix. “Did you hear about the woman who refused a Cesarian section for her twins?” Tatiana asked.
“This isn’t one of your little jokes, is it?” He grinned.
“No, no joke,” she said seriously, now wishing it were. “One of the babies was stillborn.”
Bradley stopped smiling and nodded. “I know. The other one is okay, though. He’s already been adopted. But sometimes this happens with twins.”
“Yes,” said Tatiana. “I was one of those too-small, non-Cesarian twins. But that was in a Soviet peasant village. This is going on in your maternity clinic, David. The woman refused the op because she said the doctor looked shifty.”
“I’m not responsible for the choices Cesarian mothers make in my clinic.”
“Mmm,” she said. “You mean non-Cesarian mothers. Are you responsible for Dr. Culkin?”
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