Hedy took his arm, drawing him farther into the living room. She smiled playfully. “It’s nice, isn’t it? Our little European colony on the Pacific. Almost like home.”
“Is it?” Sasha wondered, catching the regret in her voice.
“Otto’s over there,” Hedy said, motioning to his gleaming bald head. She steered them toward the open balcony doors, where Otto raised two champagne glasses for them. Whispering while she walked, she told Sasha that Leon, Elsa’s husband, could be quite witty, his books sold extraordinarily well, even in America, and he thought very highly of himself. Sometimes too highly. And he was sexually ravenous.
“You know from experience?”
She gave him a little shrug. “Of course not. But I know about the little black notebook in which he records every ejaculation, the duration of it, what he ate beforehand, and how much he produced.”
“What?”
“Elsa told me about it once. She doesn’t mind his little book, but she gets furious when he breaks the rules and allows a woman to spend the night. Once, after he did this, she served them breakfast in bed, just to make a point. Strawberries and champagne. Leon found the whole episode hilarious.”
“I bet,” Sasha said.
“Hello, my Vögelchen,” Otto said, handing Hedy a glass of champagne.
She draped a languid arm over his shoulders and sighed, motioning to Sasha. “He refuses to do more than three takes.”
“I’ll do more takes if you want to kill every ounce of spontaneity.”
Hedy rolled her eyes. “You see what I mean?”
Sasha smiled, leaning against the stone balustrade, taking in the dry yellowish bluffs and palm trees, wondering what kind of life they lived out here, so far from town. Nestled within the swirl of animated conversation, he felt oddly familiar with its foreign cadence and timbre, soothed by the sound of languages he didn’t understand. From the living room, someone started playing a few chords on the piano before breaking into a melody that cut to the quick: Sasha balanced on his father’s shoulders, the passing tree leaves brushing his outstretched hand, his father whistling this tune, the pressure of his large hands clutching Sasha’s small legs to keep him fastened there, Sasha laughing, fearful and giddy. The forest grew denser, his father kept singing, the sky lightened above them.
He turned to Hedy, his heart in his throat. “What is that song?”
She didn’t hear him at first, laughing at something Otto had said, her porcelain skin flushed from the champagne. “Sorry?”
“The song,” Sasha pressed. “Where’s it from?”
“Oh, it’s an old one . . . We sang it all the time as kids. Ein Männlein steht im Walde ganz still und stumm. A little man stands in the forest, completely still and quiet.” She smiled at him, her eyes radiant with the past, and then whoever was playing started a Bach piece, the notes light and scampering.
Putting a hand on his shoulder, she said, “Sasha, are you all right?”
He must have looked undone by the song, by the sudden memory that plunged him back into those early years that his mother would never talk about. He replied, “Just tired from the week.”
Elsa came out onto the patio and announced dinner, motioning for everyone to follow her into the dining room, which was on the far end of the house.
Sasha followed Hedy and Otto, their laughter reverberating in the vaulted hallway that connected the living room to the dining room. He paused for a moment, hands in his pockets, vaguely aware of the elegant staircase that led up to the second story, still unmoored by the sensation of wobbling on top of shoulders, the exhilaration of feeling closer to the trees, to the sky, to his father.
Passing under the whitewashed archway, he happened to look up and see a defined ankle, followed by the curve of a calf. He caught his breath when her dark eyes, rimmed with kohl, bored into him with startled delight.
She stopped in the middle of the stairs, her mouth slightly open, and then, in a moment of confusion, she ran back up.
All the air drained from his lungs, as if someone had punched him in the stomach. He exhaled, pivoting on his heel. Then a slightly older well-dressed man stormed down the stairs. Sasha recognized him too, from the club, but he didn’t notice Sasha, consumed by what had occurred upstairs, muttering to himself in French before he disappeared into the dining room.
She returned, standing at the top of the stairs, gripping a metallic clutch. When she saw him, she broke into a faint smile before walking down at a measured pace.
He felt that same suspension of time and space, as if she were a magic trick, and there was no dinner party occurring in the next room, no applause, no wineglasses clinking or chairs scraping against the floor. They stood in a velvet cave, rife with anticipation of his hands cupping her bare shoulders, his mouth on her neck, her perfume flooding his senses.
“We haven’t officially met.” She held out a satin-gloved hand. “Vera Volosenkova.” She raised an eyebrow. “And you are?”
“Aleksander Rabinovitch.” He reached for his full name, when normally he would have just said Sasha, but next to the way she held herself, shoulders thrust back, her gaze intent and expectant, “Sasha” didn’t sound good enough.
She smiled, and his heart lifted.
“Russian?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“You have no accent. Is my accent very bad?”
“You have a wonderful accent.”
She smiled again, and he felt as if his chest would burst. Then she touched his arm, lowering her voice. “I don’t want to go in there.”
He inhaled, breathing in every trace of her: jasmine and twilight, dewy grass after the sun has disappeared behind the trees. Luminous and sheer. He craved to feel the curve of her waist running under his hands, her protruding collarbone pressing beneath him, her breath sweeping over his skin.
He took her hand. “Then let’s get out of here.”
Her eyes widened and she seemed about to laugh. “Really?”
The back of his neck tingled. “Really,” he said. “Come with me.”
* * *
• • •
They sped toward Malibu, blond bluffs abutting the highway, the ocean a flat blue line, her hair whipping in the wind.
“You know, I saw you before.”
“New Year’s Eve.”
He shook his head. “Ocean Park Pier. The day of Pearl Harbor.”
She turned toward him, her cheek pressed against the brown leather headrest, and searched his face. “You became a soldier.”
He caught her eye before refocusing on the road. “Yeah.”
“And now you’re home,” she said, her voice as warm as the sun.
Chapter 28
VERA
February 1945, Malibu, California
They pulled up to Las Flores Inn, a glass stucco box perched over the water with a sign out front that promised sea lions at play. Walking into the dimly lit restaurant, she stared out at the windswept beach and indigo sky through the windows that wrapped around the room and said, “Perfect.”
She didn’t know why she was here, or what he was thinking right now, about her, about this situation, but an unexpected recklessness had urged her to drive off with him, erasing all those questions for the time being. And within that erasure, a sense of freedom rushed into her, something she hadn’t felt in a long time. Something she craved, to step outside of herself, as if stepping out of an expensive dress and leaving it in a puddle on the floor.
They slid into a booth next to the window, and he ordered them clam chowder and saltines, sand dabs and shrimp cocktail.
When the vodka tonics came, Sasha raised his glass, the ice clinking against it. “To the future.”
Her eyes glistened with uncertainty. “To the future.”
The waves rose, a shimmering wall of green, before breaking.
&
nbsp; Bing Crosby’s “White Cliffs of Dover” played on the chrome jukebox lit up in ghoulish neon lime, and she wished for a song that wasn’t so popular, a song that wasn’t about the war. The euphoria of the car ride, the sense that they had escaped something together—she didn’t want to lose that feeling.
He shifted in the booth, finishing off his vodka before ordering two more.
Vera still nursed hers. “When I saw you on New Year’s Eve, I was miserable.”
He reached across the table and took her gloved hand in his. Her eyes locked with his, and she realized she was shaking, biting her lower lip.
“Was that your husband I saw at the party, coming down the stairs?”
She breathed deeply. “I left him two weeks ago. Leon and Elsa have been so kind, letting me stay at Villa Aurora. But today I told Max that the minute this terrible war ends, I’m returning to France. He’s very upset about it.”
“He doesn’t want to go back?”
“It’s more complicated than that.”
“Anyway, I . . .” He paused. “I don’t care if you’re married or moving away, like you say. I only want to be right here with you, in this booth, looking at the ocean.” Their eyes met again, their shared gaze eliding the past and the future, and she wondered what he was running from, sitting here with her, a woman who was also running. Running from that shameful mistake that throbbed through her veins every minute of every day. She could never escape it, but tonight, she decided, offered a reprieve, motoring toward her like a rescue boat, its red light blinking in the dark.
She slid her gold wedding band over her knuckle and then back down again, and noticed the way he took out a lighter, debating if he should smoke, before sliding it under the butter plate. She noticed everything, and it made him nervous, understandably, but that’s what writers do, even when they’re not writing, she thought.
“Don’t you speak any Russian?” she asked, her fingertip still tracing the scalloped place mat.
“Yiddish.”
She smiled.
Sasha threw up his hands. “What’s so bad about Yiddish?”
She stared into her drink. “Nothing.”
He explained that they all spoke it growing up on the Lower East Side.
“And you live here now?”
“Yeah, I make movies.”
She nodded and dipped a shrimp into cocktail sauce before setting it on her plate. “Little golden America,” she murmured.
He asked if she meant goldene medina, the golden land, which was how everyone in the old country referred to America. “A few weeks before we left Riga, we became suddenly richer, more important, even though we hadn’t even boarded the ship yet. My mother always used to laugh because when we got here, we lived in a tenement flat, worse off than we were in Russia.” He paused. “We shared a bed that folded out of the wall. My mother worked for a tailor. Day and night, she was in that little shop.”
“And your father?”
He looked uncomfortable, and she regretted asking. Falling silent for a few minutes, Sasha said, “He died before I was born.”
The waitress cleared their plates, leaving the saltines that Vera now broke apart. Not taking her eyes off the tiny pieces, she said, “My father and I used to mock the poor Jews who flocked to America, as if America was so much better. As if America, with its promise of money, heals every wound.” She shook her head. “And here you are, an example of the American dream, as they say.” She looked up at him. “Well, as it turns out, we should have emigrated too. But we waited too long. And then it was too late.”
* * *
• • •
The waitress approached with the dessert menu, her high chirping voice listing cream pies and tapioca pudding, none of which they wanted. Sasha waved her away, and Vera stared out at the ocean. He pressed her hand between his, and she felt the pressure of her wedding ring between his palms, and wondered if he felt it too, a reminder that she still technically belonged to someone else, the little piece of gold symbolizing a promise that she was now breaking. But Max had broken something deeper, his the greater betrayal, and she recalled the first moment of it with utter clarity: when he stared at her through the detention-camp fence, only worried about his own survival, Lucie erased from his mind. In that moment, the promise between them began to shatter, splintering over days and weeks and years. Splintering into now.
Pushing that thought away, she suddenly got up and slid into his side of the booth, allowing her skin, her breath, her wild heart, her body to take over, to direct her. Her hands rested on the back of his neck, her eyes fluttering closed, and he found her parted lips and closed his eyes too, and she braced for the sensation of falling. He drew her close, his palm spreading over the dip in her lower back, pulling her into this shared desire that obliterated guilt, remorse, the past and the future, vibrating only with now.
She whispered into his neck, “Let’s spend the night together, at least.”
* * *
• • •
In the spectral moonlight, half covered by the sheet, she cradled her head in one arm, the other hand balanced on her hip, holding a cigarette. The motel room was simple and clean, with windows opening to the sea, and oil paintings of the redwoods. They were lucky, the motel clerk said; this was the last room. Otherwise they would have had to try farther up the coast. Smoking in bed, she contemplated how easily they’d decided to stay for the night, as though they were conspiring outlaws, muffling their laughter as the hotel clerk unlocked the door, eyeing them with distaste, probably thinking this was how all lovers acted.
Once the door closed behind them, they couldn’t wait to be unencumbered by clothing, her shallow breath in his ear, the real smell of their bodies beneath her sun-filled perfume and his cigars. The zipper almost broke on the side of her dress, but she didn’t care. She clamped her legs around him and pulled him into her with her thighs, squeezing both his shoulders, but then he yelped out in pain, half collapsing onto her chest, laughing at himself, explaining his shoulder injury from the war, and then she held his head to her chest, whispering, “Sorry, sorry,” while he kept laughing, and then he begged, half joking, “Don’t hurt me,” and she said, laughing quietly, “I’ll try not to,” but, she thought, that was the promising delight of first encounters: this gleaming, clean slate, without any hurt yet, without any history. Unlike the way she and Max could flash around the wounds they’d given each other at a moment’s notice, calling up banks of resentment, and the sadness beneath it, their mutual pain right there beneath the surface, waiting for the tiniest scratch to unleash it.
* * *
• • •
Afterward, he traced the fuzziness of her earlobe while she stroked the dark hairs on his chest, their legs intertwined. Her head on his heart, he traced the long line of her neck, and then followed the curve of her body until he couldn’t reach any farther, stopping at her abdomen, the white raised scar beneath his fingers.
She glanced up at him, her eyes liquid in the moonlight. “She wouldn’t come out any other way.” Shifting positions, she drew the sheet around her. “When they brought her to me, the first thing I said was ‘Welcome to the world. I promise it’s not so bad.’” Vera shook her head. “I lied to her.” When she told Sasha this, that moment felt so close, as if she still held Lucie to her chest in a bundle of muslin, peering down at her closed eyelids, translucent, as delicate as flower petals while she slept, and Vera watched over her, willing the moment to never end, willing that she could always hold her this closely, protecting her from the world.
* * *
• • •
They had left the windows open, and the breeze now lifted up the wooden blinds before they clattered against the window frame, the night air carrying the scent of salt water and dank seaweed. Sasha swallowed and drew Vera closer. “My mother was married for ten years before she had a child. My grandmother said dybbukim whiske
d away her unborn until one day they got tired and gave up. Then I came.”
Vera lay still, listening intently.
“The funny thing was, her husband apparently really wanted a child and complained about not having one all the time, blaming her, and then, after he died, she had a son, and my grandmother always said it was revenge, a punishment for saying all those years of childlessness were my mother’s fault.”
The sharp white of the moon bullied through the blinds, bars of light patterning over the sheets and their bodies. “Your father?” she asked, confused.
“What?”
“When you said ‘her husband,’ did you mean your father?”
“Yes, that’s what I meant,” he said quickly.
“It’s terribly hard to lose a child, or to be unable to have any, especially for mothers,” she replied, sensing that he didn’t want to talk about his father. “But we shouldn’t compare tragedies. For example, the way people talk now: he lost all his family in the camps, as opposed to just one sister, or she lost her husband and her children, as opposed to just one child, or someone’s entire village has been erased off the map, with no one and nothing left, so then they get the prize. They look at me, a selfish woman mourning only one daughter while living in a nice house, far away from the destruction, and I know they think I’m ungrateful, while they cling to that insipid phrase ‘Life is a gift.’”
She turned onto her side to face him.
“Who do you mean by ‘they’?” he asked.
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