The Cosmopolitans (17 page)

Pratik

A week after the wedding, Pratik heard a brass-knuckled knock
on his bedroom door and opened it to Yana. She said:

Why did you come here?

What are you studying?

Isn’t industrial engineering just another way for the rich to plant
their boots on the necks of the poor?

When were you born?

What do you think of the dowry system?

What do you think of the class system?

Do you think Kat’s going to be all right? Why? What are your
reasons? Stalina just found that detox program on the Internet, you
know, she and my dad. Do you still think it’ll be okay?

Have you had a lot of girlfriends?

Was she really great, then?

Aren’t you going to devote any of your career to creating potable
water?

Aren’t we living in a police state?

Do you think I should take the job in Washington Heights? It
would mean living here one more year, so I don’t know if it’s worth
it. Do you think it’s worth it?

What do you think of Joe Lieberman? Of Air America Radio?
Of Gandhi? Of Rumi?

One night, Yana came not with questions but with explanations:
She had been drinking because it was a friend’s birthday party, a
really good friend’s, Lisa’s, and Lisa was going to teach English
at this school in a fishing village in Mexico. The school was called
the American School, but it wasn’t an American school, really, that
part was bogus, but Lisa was going because she’d grown up there.
That was the kind of the thing Yana had always wanted to do, but
she didn’t know Spanish, and she was happy for Lisa, but she would
miss her, it was hard to find people who were real. So they’d had
vodka, which she didn’t like, but she guessed she’d been trying to
remind herself that she had roots, too, just not among the fishes,
fishers, fishermen. She held up her hand for a high-five. You know
how people said you got beer goggles? Vodka goggles were much
worse, believe her.

Pratik, who had never had alcohol, nodded. He wasn’t sure of
all her slang but he thought he knew the meaning. Yana spun on his
office chair, trying to grab the Columbia mug on his desk with every
turn. He pulled the chair back and held it until it stopped trying to
move. Bending his head to a proper 45 degree angle, like a film
actor, he kissed her.

Milla

Malcolm and Milla honeymooned in California, driving from
town to town filled with girls who looked like cruder versions of
Julie. Milla woke Malcolm up for sex every morning. Sex was an
acquired taste. Julie had made her acquire lesbianism, and Malcolm
would help her un-acquire it. Back in New York, where the women
wore more clothing, it would be even easier.

Her body felt glazed. It was so hot. She bought a woman’s
magazine featuring an article on twenty ways to make his toes curl,
did four ways a day. She called Yana and talked about how much
she’d grown up over the past few weeks, how mature and centered
she felt. Yana told her about Katya. No one had told her at the
wedding, why?

On their last night in California, Malcolm drove them down a
curving road, decelerating and accelerating with each turn. “What if
we just moved here?” he said.

“Here?” She braced herself against the window frame.

He put a hand on her shorts. “You wouldn’t get as many
colds.”

“I didn’t know you liked it so much.”

“It’s so free — my parents aren’t here, your parents aren’t
here.”

She didn’t want to be so far from Yana. “Are there jobs?”

“Listen to my girl: ‘Are there jobs?’ You wouldn’t have to worry
about that. I’d get a job. I’d play piano in some roadhouse, or do
carpentry.”

A few days later, having spoken with his mother for an hour
and twenty minutes, Malcolm explained that if they moved into his
parents’ apartment, they could save up money to eventually buy their
own house, rather than dropping it into a sinkhole of rent. Perhaps
it was his family origins, Malcolm said, but there was something
about land-ownership that called to him. His great-grandparents had
owned buildings all over the city.

Jean and Bobby met them at the airport. Malcolm and Milla’s
room — the former maid’s room — had been painted in Antique
Rose. That didn’t threaten Malcolm’s masculinity, did it? “Do you
love balloon shades? We tried to get a bigger bed, but it just didn’t
fit, so your bed is a little short, is that awful?”

“No, that’s fine,” Milla said. “I usually —” She stopped herself;
it seemed too personal, but she should have known better, because
now Mrs. Strauss was going to get it out of her.

“You usually what?”

Did she have time to make something up? No, it was no good.
“I usually sleep curled up, around Malcolm.”

“Hmm.”

While they’d been away, the Strausses had gotten a new car.
“It’s German, so I feel awful,” Jean said. “Milla, you never told me
whether you love balloon shades.”

Malcolm gazed out the window, listening to headphones. Milla
said, “I think they’re great.”

“You mean you think they’re fine. See, Bobby, we shouldn’t
have gotten them for the kids’ room.”

Bobby glanced back at Milla. She wondered whether the collar
of her polo shirt was still clean. “Taste is a muscle,” he said.

Lev

It seems there may be a war, but it won’t derail us. Neither Osip
nor Yana could smell the smell, but that was because they sat on the
couch and not in my chair. I told them that the war didn’t matter,
because no one would be coming here; only some of us, and not us,
would be going there.

Yana

Pratik was like a first-time chess player: all of his moves were a
surprise to his more experienced opponent, that is, Yana. Sometimes
that worked in his favor, sometimes not. He kissed her elbow, stuck
his finger in her bellybutton. “Wow,” he said, as she held his hands
above his head. Anything she did, he took as a sign of her odalisque-
like prowess.

They met every night at eleven, even if they could still hear
gunshots coming from the television. Yana usually came to Pratik’s
room, but if he got impatient, he would come to hers, coyly peering
around her doorframe as if it were a tree trunk.

“I want to say your name in the Russian manner,” Pratik said.

Yana burrowed into his quilted blanket. She tried to say it with
a Russian accent, but it still came out “Yah — Nah,” which was
also a summary of her ex-boyfriends’ feelings. They had thought
that maybe they could love her, but it turned out…nah. It had been
like that right up to the fat, uxoriously married, Difference Feminist
graduate school professor who’d briefly found her “refreshing.”

“Yah-Nah,” Pratik said. She pulled the blanket up to her nose.

“You don’t like it?” He turned to face her and crossed his legs
in their fuchsia pajama bottoms.

“It just sounds kind of stupid. Milla, Katya, those are so nice, I
don’t know why Stalina messed up mine.”

“Guess what your Bengali name would be.”

“No.” Yana’s feet were cold and she stuck them under his legs.

“You would be Yamha, the dove.”

“Yeah, like I really have a dove personality.”

He raised a bony finger to make some point, but she put her
hand, and then her mouth, laughing, over his.

Katya

Katya lay on the couch, trying to read a St. Petersburg guidebook
she’d found upstairs. The letters breathed in and out, they blurred
themselves, they scuttled into new arrangements. Normal withdrawal,
her mother said, so fake-cheery all the time. She wouldn’t have to
act so fake for much longer.

Russia was the place. How had she not realized it before? In
Russia, Katya would tell people her Brezhnev voice was something
all Americans did sometimes, to make fun of Communism. In
Russia, they had enough problems of their own, no one looked at
you except to mug you, or sell you into prostitution, and Katya was
a candidate for neither, so no one would care.

Yana said from the loveseat, on which she and Pratik were sitting
a careful inch apart, “Do you want to hear something great?”

Katya stared at a photograph of a golden onion dome and wished
herself into its warmth. If Yana wanted to help her, she should get
her a blanket and some tea, and some pills. If Yana even had a
connection, which she probably didn’t.

“This’ll totally put your addiction slash identity issues into
perspective.” Yana spoke with too many syllables stacked on one
another, like dishes clanking together. Yana began reading aloud
from an article about a woman who loved barley. She loved to eat
it, and she loved to farm it. She was very satisfied by it. She wanted
her people to eat a lot more barley, to start barley farms of their own.
It sounded like the barley woman had some addiction slash identity
issues of her own, but Katya gathered, from the way Yana was
pronouncing words like
fuerte
, that she was meant to be impressed.

Katya would sell her mother’s figurines to get a plane ticket. It
wasn’t anything worse than what she’d already done; it was better,
her family could hate her afterwards, and relax. They would regret
they hadn’t just let her be.

“‘Asked about her romantic life, Yadira gives another one of
her hearty belly laughs. Barley, she says, is much less trouble than
a
novio
. Men can wait.’ Isn’t she such a role model?” Yana said,
threading the fingers of her free hand through Pratik’s.