Javier screamed and began banging his head on the wall. María yelled at the child, at Vladimir, at Alicia.
Vladimir walked out of the house. This was truly somebody else's life. He pitied the poor man whose life this was.
When he received his visa to enter the UK, María threw another tantrum. She stole his plane ticket and sliced three pairs of his pants with a pair of scissors as he packed. His mother sewed his pants while his wife oscillated between tears and rage, cursing loudly enough for the entire neighborhood to hear. Meanwhile, on the patio, his father picked his teeth, calling Vladimir a lazy imperialist, a collaborator, a spy.
They had hounded him out of that country! How was it possible that they were all still surprised that he'd stayed away?
Diane left Vladimir on a Sunday at noon to see Raise the Red Lantern (Zhang Yimou, 1991), a harrowing evocation of feudal China, where a nineteen-year-old university student (the incandescent Gong Li) is forced to marry a powerful lord who already has three wives. The jockeying for position among the wives is fierce as, each twilight, the women attend a ceremony in which the lord announces with whom he will spend the night, and red lanterns are raised in front of that woman's quarters. There is much scheming, antagonism and treachery among the wives and the servants to obtain the favors of the Master, who is glimpsed only at a distance, often through silk curtains. Even though “Fourth Mistress” is too smart to buy into this poisonous system, when she begins to play the game, it soon turns deadly.
The new series at Bedford Street, “Pageantry and Cruelty,” featured films of the last fifteen years from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. These were, for Diane, what the old Hollywood musicals had been for many: pure spectacle and escape. She had a magnificent lineup—a pity she couldn't interest Vladimir in anything.
The international incident was planned for that afternoon at five. Olga arrived a few minutes early; she was tall, lively and curious, clearly amused by the assignment. Diane was looking forward to getting to know her; she would clearly have to organize something herself, as Vladimir was not the most inclusive social secretary. It took many attempts to get through to Cuba. When they finally had María on the line, Olga introduced herself, and then made a master-of-ceremonies gesture to Diane.
“Hello, María, it's Diane Kurasik,” she said, and Olga translated. “I wanted to talk to you about … your life. I wondered what you have planned.”
“My life?” Olga held the phone away from her ear; María was apparently laughing.
Vladimir leaned against the windowsill with a stony expression.
“ ‘Excuse me, but who are you to ask about my life, my plans?’ María asks,” Olga said.
“Vladimir and I are seeing each other. He tells me that the situation is hopeless, that you haven't seen him in twelve years, that you'll never give him a divorce and all you have is spite.”
Olga translated with a diplomatic face. “ ‘That's right,’ she says, and asks, ‘You want to marry Vladimir?’ ”
“Vladimir's marital status doesn't really affect Vladimir and me,” Diane answered, wondering if that was really true or only true legally. “If I needed to get married, I would have gotten married a long time ago.”
Vladimir was looking out at the empty schoolyard. He interrupted Olga to correct a translation.
“So I was just wondering,” Diane continued. “When will you be happy?”
“ ‘Happy? What kind of an idiot is she?’ María asks.”
“I'm just trying to understand you.”
“She says she'll be happy when Vladimir returns,” Olga said.
“Vladimir has a business and a life in New York. He's on track to become an American citizen,” Diane said slowly. She waited for Olga to finish translating before adding, “Vladimir is not going back to Cuba. Not now, not ever.”
Vladimir continued to look out the window.
“So María,” Diane said, “you need to find another way to be happy.”
There was silence. Olga said, “She says, ‘You think I give him a divorce, and make your life easy?’ ”
“I am irrelevant here,” Diane said, thinking that this was the truest thing she'd said out loud in a while. “Maybe it will work out with me and Vladimir, maybe not. To be honest with you, it doesn't look so hopeful.”
Olga translated, not looking at her or Vladimir.
“So stop thinking about Vladimir,” Diane continued. “You need to think about yourself. What will make you happy?”
No response.
“Okay, that's all I wanted to say.” She stood up to look out the window.
Vladimir took the phone and spoke quietly. He hung up.
“I thought that went very well!” Olga said.
Vladimir thanked Olga and retrieved her coat from the closet. Olga wound a scarf around her neck and walked out into the corridor. “Next time, bring this lady to dinner. Bebo and the girls are dying to meet you, Diane!”
Diane thanked her and said that she would call her soon. The elevator arrived, and the man she was living with and still couldn't call “boyfriend” closed the door and went directly to his computer. She heard the unmistakable sounds of a chess game beginning. A low-grade depression seeped into the room. She'd hoped that breaking the impasse in Havana would lead to progress in New York. But it seemed they had nothing to tell each other.
Diane walked uptown in the frigid darkness, too cold and numb to take the time to inspect the wind-tossed boughs of the trees for the presence of leaves. She returned to the theater to see Farewell My Concubine (Chen Kaige, 1993), a ravishing film so tough it was like being dragged across a gravel parking lot by your hair.
On the way to meet Vladimir for lunch, Chris saw a man who had decorated a car with vitriolic statements: ABEL NESKIN: THIEF, LIAR, SCOURGE OF THE CITY was written in a shaky hand on cardboard; evidence photos curled under Saran Wrap. ARREST ABEL NESKIN, MAN OF FALSE PROMISES AND BAD FAITH! The offended party perched on a stool outside his station wagon, wearing more signs on his coat. Most people saw the shopping cart and the cat on a leash and looked away. Chris didn't want to get involved, but he couldn't walk by this man without acknowledging him. It was rude.
“Good morning,” Chris said and nodded. That was the way he was raised.
“A POX ON ABEL NESKIN!”
“Thank you, you too,” Chris said, and entered the restaurant, nearly colliding with a professionally dressed woman on a cellphone using variations of the word “fuck” as a noun, a verb and a filler for other words she didn't seem to have access to.
Atlanta would be better.
Vladimir was sitting at the bar, reading a newspaper, oblivious. His curls, as usual, stuck out in all directions, genius style. They went to a table in the back.
“How's Diane?” Chris asked, making small talk.
Vladimir exhaled and shifted in his seat. “I think Diane and I are—how do they say in the tabloids? Not longer a subject?”
“No longer an item?”
“Yes.”
“Oh no! I'm very sorry. I thought you made a great item.”
“I haven't talked to her about it yet. But I wanted you to know, because I don't want there to be any misunderstandings on it.”
Chris laughed. “You think you should talk to her about it?”
“Of course.” An impatient look passed across his face. “But it's awkward. She still hasn't found an apartment. I want to light a fire on Paul's ass. Anyway. It's not a topic of conversation.”
“No, of course not.”
He looked like he still had more to say.
“I tell you only because we all work together.” Vladimir looked as if he might be tempted to say more, but thought the better of it.
“Well, if you ever want to talk about it, you know I'm here.”
Vladimir gave an impatient smirk.
The waiter took their order.
Chris laced his fingers and took a deep breath. “I asked you to lunch because I wanted to talk to you about something
.” It felt like he was about to break up with someone. “It's something that will affect the partnership, but ultimately I think it will benefit the partnership.”
Vladimir looked up. Better to just come out with it.
“I bought a house in Atlanta.”
“That's nice. You WHAT?”
Chris laughed. “I bought a house in Atlanta.”
Vladimir let out a low chuckle.
“I bought it as a kind of a weekend house, but I hope, ultimately, to settle there.”
Vladimir began buttering bread rapidly. “Does Paul know?”
“You know, you and Paul are very much alike.”
Vladimir looked disgusted. “Please. Paul is behind you in this?”
“Paul thinks I'm insane.”
“Paul is right. But never mind, you want to be there. You want to make a transition from here to there. You want to end the partnership.”
“No. I don't. Look: I'll be here three or four days a week. Everything we do together we can still do together. And the things we do separately, we'd be doing them separately in any event. We can communicate over the phone and by e-mail. The only difference is that I would be down there some of the time.”
“You want to get some work going there.”
“Yes. There's better work to be had down there. And you'd be part of that, too.”
“But ultimately, you want a second office there, and you would spend most of your time there. That's what you're talking about, right?”
“Ultimately yes.”
“Paul knows about this?”
“Forget about Paul! Paul is irrelevant to our work.”
Vladimir popped an enormous piece of bread into his mouth. “I see.”
“Vladimir, you are my all-time favorite colleague. I don't want to end the partnership. But I can't live in this city full-time. It's eating away at my insides.”
Vladimir nodded and chewed morosely.
“If you saw the house, the neighborhood, the type of work available to little guys like us, I think you'd understand.”
He nodded. “Maybe I should move there, too. Nothing is keeping me here.”
“Now, that's the spirit!”
“Do they have indoor plumbing?”
On a stormy Friday in late April, Diane saw a furnished studio with kitchenette in the Commodore Club, a former single-room-occupancy hotel northwest of the theater district that had been spiffed up into “luxury rentals.” Moving out was taking a step backward, but until Vladimir wanted to talk to her more than he wanted to play chess against Castro, Diane had no choice. When she told him, he nodded. He seemed relieved, but he didn't take the opportunity to define their situation in any way. This was all right: she could use some time to herself, a place to be without feeling like she was in the way, or had to be grateful just for being allowed to perch there.
“This makes sense, considering,” Paul said the following day, when she signed a month-to-month lease on her way to see more options for the long term.
Considering what? He seemed to be scanning her face for emotional clues. When they hit the sidewalk on Tenth Avenue, he said, “Diane, we don't need to schlep around today. Why don't you take a break, put your feet up?”
What did he know that she didn't?
Her furnished room with kitchenette on the third floor had a view of a brick wall and was bathed in a red glow from the neon sign of a take-out kebab shop next door. She dialed Chris's number and hung up before the phone began to ring. She had no idea what she would ask, or how. Periodically, an ambulance careened in or out of the emergency room of St. Clare's on the next block, with sirens and lights. She wished she had a plaintive saxophone score to accompany her in this sickly green, rainy-day room, instead of the chatter and cigarette smoke of a support group congregating in the alley downstairs beneath her window.
If Vladimir had wanted his place to himself, or time to himself, that would have been fine. If he'd wanted to get rid of her, that would have been … not fine, necessarily, but worthy of discussion. He never mentioned it. She had no idea where she stood with him; it was irritating that she would now have to badger him to find out. It could be worse: Ernst Lubitsch learned he'd been fired as Chief of Production at Paramount from the masseur at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
She sat on the king-sized bed, flipping through five hundred channels on TV as her fatigue and disappointment mingled with the sounds of the city flooding the room. She ate too much greasy takeout food. She didn't sleep very well.
Meanwhile, at the cinema, construction had started. She saw or spoke to Vladimir at least once a day. He was absorbed in the details, calling when he needed information or decisions, saying goodbye in a friendly but uncommitted fashion. He was on good behavior now, not displaying anger or temper at anyone. At one point, he asked her opinion on a fabric, and performed something between a squeeze and a shake to her right hand. And then he was gone.
Truffaut once said that in matters of love, women were professionals while men were amateurs. “Women live their love stories in a double sense: they experience them and reflect on them at the same time. Men do not reflect upon what they're feeling … until it's too late.” Clearly, Vladimir had not given the matter of Diane much reflection.
Bobby Wald arrived the first day of construction to announce that he had quit his job, was suing his boss, planned to open his own shop and was available for work in the meantime. His work was meticulous: she had seen photos. She walked him back to introduce him to the chronically understaffed Joe Franco; they both thanked her.
On a reduced schedule designed to accommodate the construction, Diane was currently running “With You / Without You,” a series of movies about or starring couples that couldn't stay together or apart. That night, she was showing Too Many Girls (George Abbott, 1940), the RKO picture on which two unknown contract players, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, met and fell in love. “Too many girls” was, indeed, destined to be one of the problems with Lucy and Desi's marriage. In spite of his flagrant and constant infidelities, Lucy reconciled with Desi the night before their divorce decree became final. Their first divorce.
Lucy and Desi were an interesting example of a couple better together professionally than personally. For years, Lucy desperately wanted to work with Desi so that he wouldn't take his nightclub act on the road. Keeping him at home meant she might get pregnant as well as stop him from carousing. In fact, the more they worked together, the further apart they grew. And though he did get her pregnant, he never did spend much time at home. “Why does she get so upset?” he once said to a friend. “They're only hookers.”
During the day, Diane was on edge from the demolition; at night, she walked through the hyped-up, overemphatic entertainment district to her private eye's lair and turned on the TV. Even if you have a lot in common with someone, it doesn't always work. During her brief marriage to older man-about-town William Powell, party-girl Carole Lombard suffered toxic poisoning, malaria, pneumonia, influenza, pleurisy and chronic anemia. She famously said that George Raft was the sexiest man in Hollywood, but she remodeled herself as one of the guys in order to go fishing and play poker with her second husband, Clark Gable, “the King of Hollywood” at the time. Still: Gable was uncultured, limited and legendarily cheap with waitresses and cab drivers. Lombard had the shock of her life when she saw his false teeth grinning up at her from the nightstand on their honeymoon night. She died in a plane crash two years later, at the height of her fame and his. Who knows what might have happened?
Vladimir seemed to have no trouble staying apart. Wounded pride was a waste of time; after all, she hadn't been 100 percent head-over-heels for him, either. If it wasn't right, did it matter whose decision it had been to part? Not that they had actually “broken up.” But a man who sees you every day and doesn't make a plan with you for any night is a man who has no plans. She wouldn't give in to resentment or sarcasm. She would just change the dynamic between them.
Now, how would she do that?
“I'm thinking about going back,” Carlos wrote. “I wanted your opinion.”
“No!” Vladimir shouted, and wrote back, “Absolutely not!!!”
“My mother has colon cancer,” Carlos wrote.
“I'm very sorry to hear that. Send your fiancée.”
“Remember Simona? She went back and got out. Three times.”
“Simona is a woman! She's no threat to them. You're a man, you're a teacher, you signed every petition. You're on every list. Don't do it!”
Carlos logged off abruptly.
“Hey, Vladimir,” Magnus called out. “How's Diane?”
“Hey, Magnus,” he responded, picking up his keys. “You like your job?”
Chris gave him a series of looks—anguish, anger, impatience— and Vladimir left the office with a feeling of extreme unease. A biting April wind blasted east from the Hudson, scattering trash into his path and soot into his eyes. Why could he see the tragedy awaiting Carlos while Carlos could not? The clocks had been set ahead, and although it was cold, he decided he would walk home in the late-afternoon sunshine. He needed a break. As he walked, he compiled a list of unusual escapes from the island of Dr. No:
The Cuban woman who shipped herself from the Bahamas to Miami in a DHL box. How she got to the Bahamas was not revealed.
The 1951 Chevrolet truck that a group had reengineered to drive across the Florida Straits in 2003. The twelve people aboard were caught a few miles off the coast of Miami and deported. The truck was sunk.
The various hijackings of the Havana Bay ferryboat, including the original successful attempt in 1994, when many passengers apparently cheered upon hearing they were hostages on their way to Miami. After that incident, the authorities had gotten wise.
A bride and groom who hopped on the ferry at the last minute, carrying a cake and a case of beer. As they pushed off from the dock, the groom took a gun out of the cake and announced the hijack. When the ferryman said he had only enough gas to get to the other side of the bay, as per the new, tighter security, the bride walked in with the case of beer; each bottle was filled with gas. The hostages cheered. This attempt was also a success.
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