A Replacement Life (29 page)

The city that had felt mellow and forgiving as they walked from Bar Kabul
to Straight Shooters on their first night together now felt hyper and choleric. The thermometer affixed to the doorjamb of Arianna’s apartment building said one hundred. However, the heat had emptied the streets, lending them the feel of a holiday weekend, which always created for Slava the illusion that the city was briefly his. “Where to?” he said, swatting at his forehead demonstratively.

They walked in the direction of the Museum of Natural History. When the Bocks of Brentwood began to visit New York with little Arianna, this was always the first stop; the Eagle liked eagles. (Sandra Bock, uncharmed by wildlife, waited in the café.) The museum plaza was empty save for gaggles of pigeons—these would survive the final desolation. Inside, in the sacerdotal dark, the light reserved for antelopes stunned in midleap, camp children mixed with Japanese and German tour groups, individual families gliding between them with the freedom of the unaffiliated. Arianna had dressed in sandals, a low-cut sailor shirt with short sleeves, and black shorts with gold buttons that ended right below the rim of her ass. Men contrived, in the gloom, to inspect this exciting genus, but even more so the women, reminding Slava of Uncle Pasha’s insistence that it counted the most when the women looked. Slava thought about Pasha with weary amusement.

Arianna, trained by city sidewalks, cut a lane through the crowds, occasionally reaching back to make sure Slava was there. He followed like a kindergartner. She stopped now and then to say something about the ibex, the lynx, the coyotes that howled in the Los Angeles hills. All the animals looked the same to Slava: horns, hooves, enlarged watchful eyes. He listened with a rancid feeling. To him, she was synonymous with the city, but all this was also known to her. He loved this about her; she brought surprise to his life. But everywhere they went, she narrated. What if he had spent his boyhood trooping through the Museum of Natural History instead of deciphering letters and dictionary-tripping at his wood-paneled desk? Would he know as much as she did? Or was it something about her?

Stopped at a display, he wrapped his arms around her from behind, her collarbone familiar against his forearm. She stopped speaking and leaned into his chest. She had straightened her hair; he inhaled its burnt, smoky dryness. He lifted the tips with his fingers and kissed her neck. “I want to go,” he heard himself say.

“You want to go home?” she said.

“I would like to show you a place now.” He said it before he was certain of the destination, but the feeling was sure.

She nodded eagerly. “But let’s stay like this for one more minute.”

Outside, the wet air attacked immediately, and he stuck out a hand for a taxi. She noted the luxury—they always took the subway. He colored, embarrassed. My credit-card statements don’t go to the Eagle, he wanted to say, but held his tongue. Did observant Arianna also notice that they had spent every night of the previous month at her apartment? No, this imbalance went unremarked. But he
preferred
her apartment. He was hopelessly tangled. He held the door as she climbed into the cab.

“Where are you taking me?” she said.

“Following the moment,” he said, staring at the cabbie’s brown neck. He made himself take her hand.

They rode silently. The Upper West Side turned into Midtown, then
Chelsea, the West Village, Battery Park—self-conscious, he splurged for the tunnel—and into Brooklyn.

“Where are we going?” she laughed.

“You don’t love being in the dark?” he said as unstiffly as he could, though it came out stiff all the same. Now they had to keep holding hands to pretend they weren’t angry at each other. Slava stared out his window. The street slowly revealed itself as familiar—he knew it only relative to the subway, so he recognized it with delay. He had been mugged here. Grandfather and Grandmother lived nearby then, before they found the better subsidized apartment in Midwood. The mugger had been Slav—not a Jew, but still, one of theirs. He had violet splotches of sleeplessness under his eyes and a long knife under his T-shirt—comically long, with a gilt handle, like a circus saber. Graciously, he explained: His family had just spent their savings on bail, and he needed cash for a lawyer.

Slava was with Igor Kraz, the boy who would become the proctologist. He had taught Slava how to karate-kick properly, and how to masturbate into a pillow, so there was use to having him around. He was studded with diamonds. Slava had nothing more than a silver bracelet and necklace, even these like insects he wanted to brush off. The jewelry had nothing to do with them; they were broadcasting their families’ progress in America. Grandfather was upset with Slava for agreeing to nothing richer than silver. “But we can do better,” he said again and again. “Why does he wear gold and you only silver? What, we don’t have?”

When the mugger asked for their jewelry, they handed it over. The young proctologist had forgotten all his karate kicks. And when the thief asked for their addresses, to keep them from squealing, they told him the truth. He must have realized the angelfaces he had collared that day, because then he told the boys to be at the same corner an hour later with a thousand dollars. When they phoned their parents, the first thing they said was they needed a thousand dollars.

They were their parents’ and grandparents’ children. They did what they were told, parents or muggers, as they had been taught. Compliance with instructions—just say what the rules were—was as molecularly satisfying as a cool plum on a hot day. When he was little, the satisfaction of it reached to the part of Slava that burned when the tea he was drinking was too hot. So how had he turned out a forger? Had his grandfather’s fraudulence found its way into him despite the Gelmans’ best efforts to raise an obedient person? You can’t stop the blood, it goes where it wants? Maybe the Gelmans, older and wiser, understood this and had been trying to keep him close in order to shelter him from it. This part of him—his proper and corrupt soul—appeared only when he squirmed out of their reach. He wished badly to ask Arianna, because he knew she would offer something that he hadn’t considered, that would make him think about it differently. But he couldn’t. He groaned, and she squeezed his hand.

The taxi stopped on Brighton Sixth. She opened her wallet, but he covered her hand and paid. Whipped by wind from the water, the air was less thick here, the sun exhausted by the
punishment it had been meting out all afternoon. They stood looking down Brighton Beach Avenue, Arianna waiting for a signal from Slava. He glared at the doomed souls wandering past them, their legs varicose and bent, the jowls swimming in fat, bellies hung over the legs like overripe fruit. (Had Otto made his way down here, to see firsthand what he was dealing with in his folders, or did he prefer to keep his distance?) Yes, they weren’t easy to be near. The mesh bags stuffed with discount tomatoes, the lumbering bodies heedless of traffic lights, the threadbare emporia that had to traffic in furs
and
DVDs
and
manicures to squeeze from the stone of this life the blood of a dollar. And these were the honest ones. After fifty years of Soviet chatteldom, they had come here to get fucked in the ass for a little bit longer before packing off to a spot at Lincoln Cemetery, even this impossible to acquire without money being passed under the table. They never even voted.

“You’re always asking,” Slava said. “Here it is. Here they are.”

“Show it to me,” she said.

They walked without plan, happenings from long ago reminding themselves to Slava. In this store, his grandfather had purchased a mink for Slava’s mother without paying a dollar. The owner of the store, a man whose existence depended on wringing every penny out of the mink in Grandfather’s hands, had ended up pleading with him to take it for free, though Slava didn’t recall the exact reason or, more likely, was too young to comprehend the machinations, though he was old enough to understand that minks weren’t free and watched his grandfather from below with wonder. That was Grandfather. Arianna reiterated her desire to meet him. People always wanted to meet Grandfather when you told them about him, Slava said. They lit up.

Here were Uzbeks, here Tajiks, here Georgians, here Moldovans. Here you could get a manicure
and
pedicure for ten dollars. (This truly elevated Arianna’s eyebrows.) They were staring at the row of identically frost-haired women working the chairs of the beauty salon when Slava froze. Without thinking, he had brought Arianna to a neighborhood where half a dozen homes had enjoyed from him forged letters. What an amateur. His little heart had been wounded—he wanted to show her something that he, not she, knew, and he’d just yielded to the impulse. Grandfather had passed down his fraudulent soul? Slava was a pinkie on Grandfather’s hand, no more.

“What is it?” Arianna said.

“So I just wanted to show you,” he said quickly. “We can go.” He cursed himself a second time; he was retreating as artlessly as he had approached.

“What?” she said. “We just got here. I want to go drink hot tea, Uzbek-style. Take me, please.”

As they walked to the boardwalk, he tried to map the homes that required a wide berth and half listened as Arianna babbled on about their surroundings. Where he saw desperation and scraping, she saw another act in New York’s great ethnic circus. As they walked past the Key Food, he thought he spotted old Anna Kots waddling out with a grocery cart, but it was a double. At the
chaikhana
, he strongly recommended a table in the
back, away from the windows. It was cooler by the windows, Arianna said—they had been flung open, the sea spangling with a heat-crazed blue light past the wide beach. “I thought you wanted to be hot, like the Uzbeks,” he said, and she obeyed.

“What
is
it?” she said when they were seated.

“Nothing, nothing,” he said.

“Is it strange for you to be here?”

He was saved by the arrival of a waitress in an Uzbek rug cap. An earpiece wire coiled out of her ear. “Are you in the FBI?” he joked to her in Russian. She laughed—this was how the servers communicated with the kitchen. Arianna waited for a translation, but none came. She was asked, however, to choose the tea. Realizing that Slava was accompanied by an American, the waitress became formal. When she returned, she set down the tray and held up each item: “This is green tea, please—
kuk-choi
. This is spoons, please.” She held up two rug caps: yes or no? Slava said no, Arianna said yes. The waitress permitted herself a smile and said in English: “I leave, you decide.”

“Why does your grandfather know how Uzbeks drink tea?” Arianna said when the waitress departed.

“That was where he was evacuated during the war,” Slava said cautiously.

“They’re talking about expanding eligibility,” she said. “It’s in the paper. He might qualify in the end.”

“We’re hoping,” Slava said twice as cautiously.

“I can’t imagine what it’s like there.”

“He was conscription age; he would piss himself in the street so recruiters would think he was retarded.”

“You always talk about him.”

“You asked about him.”

“I meant you never talk about your parents. And I only talk about my parents.”

“I even have my grandfather’s last name instead of my father’s,” Slava said. “They made the decisions, I guess. I would like to meet the Eagle.”

“Sandra has her charms, too.”

“I mean that I like the way you feel about him more.”

She looked toward the water. “Do you know that in seven years in New York, I haven’t seen the ocean.”

“How does it compare to the other one?”

“Whenever I read
The Stranger
, when he kills the Arab on the beach, this is how I imagine it. The water so blue that it’s black. And the sun so bright that everything feels bleached.”

“You’ve read it more than once?”

“I reread books all the time. Especially if they made you read it in high school. Then it’s like a
measuring stick. This is what I thought about it at seventeen, this is what I think about it now. I used to love
One Hundred Years of Solitude
—if you leave out all the chauvinist crap. But I couldn’t get through it last year. The woman eats dirt, the colonel’s blood flows from the war back to the house where he was born . . . so melodramatic. It’s me right now, not the book; I’ll try again in a couple of years. I think good books should be translated once per generation. I have a
Stranger
from 1948 and 1982, but from England, and a 1988 American. They’re all different.” She sipped her tea, holding the
piala
from below with both palms. “García Márquez was brought up by his grandparents. That’s the way I think of you.”

He laughed. “You’re rambling. Are you nervous?”

She smiled. “Maybe.”

He extended a hand toward her. She placed a palm inside it. It was warm from the bottom of the tea bowl.

“Was Grandfather telling the truth?” Slava said. “Are you less warm because you are as hot as the weather?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Let’s go outside and check.”

Miraculously, the ocean was stingingly crisp despite having been under assault from the sun for two months. It would stay swimmable until October, this guest welcome to linger. Arianna squealed as the water hit her toes. The rocketing spray climbed up her legs. He had forgotten all about the neighborhood’s minefield of betrayal. Momentarily, he felt exempted from responsibility.

“It smells like fish,” she said.

“No, fish smells like it,” he said. They laughed. She kicked the surf in his direction. He filled his mouth with seawater and wouldn’t stop chasing her until he had squirted it down her back.

They fell asleep on the sand, his rolled-up T-shirt for his pillow and his chest for hers. He smelled the brine on her face as he dozed off. His last thought before dozing off was: He was his best with her and his worst.

The sun had slunk off by the time he awoke. Arianna still slept, so he didn’t dare move. The departing yolk of the sun streaked a final tantrum of pinks, violets, and golds, a better sunset than the hot, sweaty day deserved. He remembered reading in one of his newspapers that postcard sunsets were actually caused by excess smog. Just as human ash could give you gorgeous five-pound tomatoes. Just as Yevgeny Gelman, Israel Abramson, and Lazar Rudinsky, a hundred years later, would give you Arianna Bock. Everything in between was a loss, a write-off.