Russian Tattoo (10 page)

Sixteen

I
realize I don't want to go back to Texas. It is a dangerous thought, and I try to stow it away in the back of my mind, like Boris's letter. I don't want to sleep on a mattress on the floor; I don't want to stare out of the window at the pitiful patches of grass, all brown and dead. My GRE results just came back, and Robert told me on the phone that my verbal score was below 600. It was a meaningless number to me, but when I pressed him on the interpretation, he added it was one of the lowest scores he'd ever seen. “I've never taken a multiple-choice test before,” I said to him, but he didn't answer and simply sighed on the other end of the line, a staticky puff of resignation.

Maybe I should be honest with myself. Maybe it isn't just Texas or multiple-choice failures that make me not want to go back to Robert. Maybe it has something to do with Andy, who now stays for drinks every evening he comes to Millie's to see patients. Andy, who aims his smile where I sit as if the stories he spins were custom-­made just for me. Andy, who is the first person not giving me a sidelong glance as if peering at a curiosity.

We sit in Millie's kitchen and talk, pretending that the air hasn't thickened between us, that nothing I see in his eyes makes my heart constrict and stutter. We sit and talk about unimportant things, those harmless things that any two people who met recently might find in common. Andy tells me about New York's energy and the city's arteries clogged with traffic, talking about his city the same way I think about Leningrad, the way you would feel about a person you love. In response, I gush about the pale complexion of Leningrad's summer nights and the salty breath of the Baltic wind. He smiles; I sigh. Sitting in the kitchen makes our urban enthusiasm ring with intimacy that makes me feel guilty, and in an attempt to banish the guilt I try to listen more intently, as if a conversation about cities could mask the real reason we search each other out in Millie's house.

He asks me if I want to go for a ride. Going for a ride sounds so freeing, so American that I can almost hear the wind rushing in my ears. I nod vigorously, too eagerly perhaps, glad that Millie isn't there. I get into his car, the small space we happily share for an hour as we drive to a place with a strange name, Weehawken. We walk out into the grainy light of late afternoon and lean on the parapet overlooking the Hudson River, dwarfed by the stone authority of the Manhattan skyline.

The glow from the New Jersey side, receding with every minute we stand there paralyzed by being next to each other, makes the windows of the skyscrapers sparkle with gold in the rays of the setting sun. The city of the Yellow Devil, as our Bolshevik writer Maxim Gorky called it, is shining its dangerous invitation straight into my eyes.

“We could be in New York in fifteen minutes,” says Andy. “The tunnel is right over there, right under the Hudson.” He points to the gray, rippled water, although I have trouble imagining a tunnel full of cars carved through all that rock under the immenseness of the river. I think of the breathless thrill of walking in those canyons of streets with Andy, of laughing together about Maxim Gorky, who spent many years of his life on the Italian island of Capri, writing about the lower depths that were so readily available on his native soil.

All this effervescence feels dangerously familiar, taking me back to the Crimea and Boris, to the mobbed Simferopol Airport, where instead of elbowing for a ticket to go back home to Leningrad, in one delirious instant I joined Boris, hopping on the first plane headed for Kiev.

“So do you want to go to New York?” Andy asks, and my blood quickens because his sleeve inadvertently brushes against mine.

The other day Andy didn't go back home and the two of us ended up talking through the night in the attic room under the rafters. Millie had brought a half liter of Stolichnaya out of the freezer after both she and Andy were done with their patients. All three of us sat in the kitchen—not sipping, like the Russian expert on my Aeroflot flight to Washington, DC, but downing shots, as you're supposed to, as real Russians do. Andy somehow knew the proper way to drink vodka, although my own drinking expertise didn't extend past boiling Bulgarian red wine in a pot with sugar and apple slices to get rid of the acidic taste. Then Millie said she'd had enough but the two of us should go on. Go on, she said, smiling and waving us out of the kitchen and into the attic room, as if giving us her blessing, as if letting us know that up there we would be alone.

In the attic, we drank and talked, until the small window became lit from the outside and we no longer needed electric light. I had no idea how much there was to say to someone who had never been to Russia. I told him about my mother's uncle Volya, arrested in 1937, the busiest year of the Gulag camps, for telling a joke. I told him that my mother was a surgeon at a front-line hospital during World War II, scooping lice out of soldiers' wounds with a teacup and sewing up the flaps of torn tissue, until my sister was born, in 1942. I told him about my sister's acting career, about my envying the way she used to sit in front of a three-way theater mirror, ready to transform herself into someone else, someone who knew nothing about Young Pioneers or collectives or the latest five-year plan. I told him that learning English was my way of searching for magic, deciphering the mysteries of foreign words and foreign grammar, listening to a voice on a British record—so unknown, so entrancing, so rarely heard.

When the bottle was finished, we were in the corner of the couch, intoxicated and kissing, the guilt wiped out by Millie's vodka. We both felt delirious and frightened, knowing that this was only the beginning of something big and glorious and difficult. Then morning pried into the house with its insistent light, which lit up the ruins of our night spent in a space we were not supposed to share, and made us sensible and sober. I walked downstairs to my room and Andy got into his car and headed north. We both went back to our respective lives, the god of temporary transcendence dissipating in the harsh morning sunlight. I had told Andy in those few hours so much more than I had told Robert in four months. Maybe I couldn't stop talking simply because Andy was there, listening.

I pull out a box of Russian mascara brought from Leningrad, pour a few drops of water onto the little block of coal inside, and rub it with a tiny plastic brush into what back home used to double for shoe polish and what is supposed to make me glamorous. I desperately want to look desirable and attractive, for one person exclusively, so I streak the plastic brush through my eyelashes three days a week, when Andy arrives to see his patients. I don't simply like Andy: the English word
like
is too shallow to contain the intricacies of the Russian
lyubovat'sya
. This is what's happening—I
lyubyuyus'
with Andy—I look at him with love. And that looking with love infuses me with power and grants me permission, for the first time, not to be an awkward, salad-dressing-dense foreigner. It grants me a hope that I have exhausted my share of failure and may not need to go running back to Russia. This thought is invigorating, and I grin into the mirror when I remember the vinegary Russian professor on the plane.

Looking at Andy with love feels strangely both exhilarating and sane, like drinking champagne without getting drunk. It counteracts the leaden seriousness of leaving everything I knew in Russia and fills me with an unaccustomed lightness because what I see reflected in Andy's eyes is a different me, the me I would like to be. Someone exotic and smart. Someone beautiful and non-Western and a little mysterious, the clumps of shoe polish mascara notwithstanding. I stare into the mirror for any sign of mystery or beauty, but what looks back at me is not as captivating as what I see in Andy's gaze. The person peering back is ordinary when unvalidated by his eyes.

You look good, says Millie. You seem to be in good spirits lately.

I don't know what she notices about Andy and me; I don't know if she notices anything. I don't know if I want her to know. But then I think of the way she waved us up to the attic with more than half a bottle of vodka that night, before she went to bed, almost giving me permission to forget about her son in Texas. Maybe she knows that Robert regrets this marriage and would like it to be over.

When I don't work at Beefsteak Charlie's, Andy and I take a drive to a nearly empty diner that is open late; there we sit in a booth and talk. We drink coffee and eat eggs over easy, a new expression Andy has taught me. It is a freeing feeling, completely un-Russian, to sit at a restaurant at an off-meal hour, to be able to eat breakfast at night. Andy has explained all the items on the menu, telling little stories that make me laugh, so now I can order my own meal, knowing what it will turn out to be. He has also taught me about cars, diners, and fast food, and I have taught him about a Russian movie we all grew up with called
The Irony of Fate
, the charm of which had eluded Robert. I tell Andy the plot, delightful and old-fashioned: on a New Year's Eve three Moscow men go to a sauna. They get so drunk they can't figure out which one of them is going on a trip that night. Of course, the wrong man is packed onto a plane for Leningrad, where he sobers up enough to think that he is home in Moscow. He takes the metro to Builders Street and opens what he thinks is his apartment with a standard Soviet key—650 kilometers away from his real home. The young woman who lives there is dating the wrong man, and the rest is sweet and predictable. We've seen this film on TV for the past four years every New Year's Eve, without fail.

“
The Irony of Fate
?” Andy says. “What a terrific title, so Russian. We should try to find the tape here. I'd love to see it.”

“And those songs the main characters sing to an acoustic guitar,” I groan, leaning toward him, gushing about the lines every Russian knows by heart. “You should hear those songs! My favorite is ‘To Have or Not to Have.' ” I know it is futile to sing in a foreign language and then translate the verse, but I can't help myself. “If you don't have a house, it won't burn down,” I sing in a low voice, although there is no one else in the diner at this hour. “If you don't have a dog, your neighbor won't poison it.” The lyrics rhyme and, emboldened by familiar lines, I sing louder. “If you don't have a wife, she won't leave you for another man. And if you aren't living, you aren't going to die.” This is the first time I dare sing at all because my sister, who went through musical and voice training at her drama school, had always told me I had no ear and couldn't carry a tune. But here, in this empty diner, sitting across from Andy, I am not afraid to sound silly or make a mistake. I am happily light-headed, so the song comes out soft and pitch-perfect, just as I remember it in the film.

When I finish the last line, I realize that we are leaning toward each other across the table, and it takes only a second to see that Andy is looking at me the same way I look at him, with love.

What I wonder—as we gaze at each other across the table—is why I launched into the story of
The Irony of Fate
at all. Why, for half an hour, did I gab and prattle and try to hum the songs?