The Cosmopolitans (21 page)

“I must study,” Pratik said. The screen door slammed against
the outside wall.

By the time Osip finished his third beer, he’d realized that this
little
pisher
probably just had a little
pisher
crush on his Yana. Who
could fault him that? At Pratik’s age, Osip had already had four
women, whereas this boy had the aspect of one of those Komsomolsk
kids saving himself for a new kind of marriage, the focus of which
would be large-machine repair or hydroponics.

Bobby

Bobby Strauss was, as his wife liked to say, a man of simple
tastes. Here he sat before the simplest and tastiest taste of all — a
Burger Connoisseur hamburger, no ketchup, no nothing — a truly
good burger did not need any condiments, he’d explained to Malcolm
before they ordered — and suddenly the series of actions required to
eat it seemed too complex. He needed NASA’s Command Central,
he needed a wire in his ear, like Bush, he needed, well, he needed
Jean. Someone besides himself should have heard this most recent
of Malcolm’s surprises.

Malcolm had immediately resumed chewing away at his
cheeseburger, with pickles, mustard, ketchup, lettuce, two kinds of
cheese, mouth half open, like a child.

It fell to Bobby to say, “That’s wonderful,” and then, “She is
going to…see it through, isn’t she?”

Malcolm paused in his eating. He couldn’t have forgotten what
they were talking about, could he? “Yeah, of course.”

“Good,” Bobby said.

“I wrote a song to it already.”

“A song, well —” Bobby relaxed enough to tear off a bit of
lettuce from his salad. They were back in a familiar place. “Is it
going on your demo?”

“I’m not sure. I just wrote it a few nights ago, after Milla showed
me the test.”

“Oh, the test? Did she take more than one? Did she see a
doctor?” Jean was speaking through him; finally, he’d accessed her
frequency.

“Just a test.”

“So you don’t really —”

“She’s pregnant, don’t worry about that.” The waitress was
filling up their glasses during this proclamation, not that it made
Malcolm lower his voice. Neither Malcolm nor his mother cared,
really, who heard them. Bobby wondered again what it was like to
feel so right about what you said.

He cleared his throat. “So, you’re putting that song on your
demo?”

“No, I told you just a second ago.”

“Do you remember the words?” The lettuce was fresh, thank
God for that.

“Let me think.” Unhurriedly, Malcolm took another bite of his
cheeseburger. “Something like, ‘You are my sun, I am your moon,
when all are gone, I’ll still be true.”

Bobby nodded, as if thinking deeply. “It has a certain…” Why
had he asked? It was very difficult to respond to Malcolm’s music;
Malcolm distrusted compliments, and debated criticisms. Perhaps
simple observation would be best. “It’s simple,” Bobby said.

“I was trying to be simple.” Malcolm scratched his jaw.

Bobby had a sudden thought. “When you say ‘sun,’ — is it a
boy?”

Malcolm spun a fry in ketchup. “No. We don’t know. Milla
doesn’t need to get the test, because she’s so young.”

Feeling strangely competitive, Bobby said, “Your mother was
young, too, when she had you. Twenty-five.” He had been thirty-
five, and even at that age, which had felt so ancient at the time, he
hadn’t been sure he could do it. From the minute Jean had told him,
Bobby had felt like a piano had fallen on his head, just as pianos
fell on the heads of people in the funnies in his childhood, and the
piano had wedged there, and now he had to carry it to work, back,
everywhere, every day, and not let on. And now he had to say, “Of
course, I was thirty-five.”

“I know.”

“You feel up to it? You feel ready? Do you have anything saved
up?”

“No, but you know, babies really aren’t so expensive.”

“Oh, no?” Finally, Bobby felt as if he could eat. He took a bite
of his burger and it was still good, even though it had cooled. It had
passed another test.

Malcolm said, “Yeah, like, we’re not going to, you know, send
it to private nursery school or get it a
nanny
.”

“So one of you will stay home?” He was saying exactly what
Jean would have said, and this would help mitigate her anger over
not having been told first.

“I planned it all out already. Like, Milla will take the baby when
I’m rehearsing and doing shows, and I’ll take it when she’s at work,
and you guys can take it when we go out. You know what it’s like?
It’s like, when he grows up —” Bobby noticed but did not comment
on the “he” — “I’ll get him an instrument, if he wants to play, but
I’m not going to, like, get Jim from the music store to come to his
camp and play two different kinds of keyboards so he can pick the
one he likes, in front of all his friends, you know?”

“You adore that keyboard.” Jean’s words, but not helpful ones.
Stick to facts. “You still have that keyboard. You still use it.” After
years of meditation and medication, he got angry so rarely that it
took him a moment to realize. The keyboard, he’d always thought,
had been a wonderful present. Rather than choose one himself,
Bobby had shown respect for his son’s musicianship by having him
choose, right on his birthday, which took place at camp, because
why wait? It was a music camp, after all, and Malcolm should have
the best equipment possible, had been Bobby’s thinking. And now
he felt Jean’s voice coming through him most strongly. “So you felt
embarrassed, is that it? Poor little rich boy?”

“No, it was fine. It was an okay —” the fact that Malcolm
was leaning back, the fact that Malcolm was smiling, the fact that
Malcolm was about to teach him something, the fact that Malcolm
still hadn’t learned —

Bobby said, “Because why not send Jim away, then? Because
why not give it back?”

“Dad —” Malcolm gestured with a half-eaten fry.

“Because it must have been weighing on you, all these years.
The chosen unwanted keyboard.”

“It was fine —”

“You can’t do that with a baby.” There. He was done. He looked
up to see what Malcolm would do next — storm out? Appease?
Fight? Flight?

Malcolm was, at least in this sense, his father’s son. “No, I like
the keyboard, I like it.”

Milla

Jean and Bobby had gotten tickets to see
Fiddler on the Roof
with some friends, and then both they and the friends had gotten
incredibly busy. Would Malcolm and Milla like to take advantage?
Wouldn’t Milla’s parents want to come along?

At the theater, Milla sat at the edge of their little group, in case
she needed to run to bathroom. The girls who played the sisters were
beautiful, so she couldn’t look very closely. (She was going to be
a mother, after all.) She spent the musical thinking about a recent
accounting scandal. Would she, Milla, have had the courage to send
a memo comparing a company policy to group masturbation, could
she have been an accountant-heroine? She worried about it through
three marriages and a pogrom, knowing the answer all along: no.
Malcolm would have to be the model of bravery for their child.

On their way to a steakhouse her father had chosen, her mother
didn’t say anything about peasants eating cows, which was the first
sign that something was wrong.

“So,” Stalina said, as they came in, ignoring Osip’s attempt to
help her out of her coat, “this Fiddler is big education for me.”

“Oh, yeah?” Malcolm said, looking for a place to throw out his
gum.

“Oh, yeah.” In her mother’s accent, the phrase sounded entirely
different; also, louder. “For example, I know now why American
ladies say when we arrive, ‘Look, is shower,’ ‘Look, is toilet.’ Why
are they telling me with such big smiles? Are they engineers who
built the toilet? No, they think this is first toilet we ever see. They
think we came out of shtetl fighting over if horse was mule. We were
intelligentsia
. We argued over religion and political life, not like
here, here people say, ‘Never talk about politics or religion.’”

“That’s true,” Malcolm said, leaning in to match Stalina’s
posture. He was taking a class in community journalism.

Milla tried to get her mother to move closer to the bar, so that
people could more easily pass by them, but Stalina didn’t notice
the people or Milla’s hand on her sleeve. “They think we are only
talking
spletnya
, who marries who. We had bigger fish. Who is in
jail? Who is losing her job? Who is expelled from party, who is
making protest, who is printing
samizdat
? You know how we decide
to immigrate?”

“Yeah, I mean, I think so,” Milla said.

“Guinness?” Malcolm asked the bartender, who raised his
eyebrows in some kind of commiseration.

“To show that we are free people, and not afraid of the worst
punishment. And then they take us to supermarket and expect that
we will have fainting over food. Five different kinds of apples.” Her
voice reached a higher pitch. “I will now give blow job to Jimmy
Carter.”

Malcolm looked at Milla. And what’s that for? she wanted to
say. Your mom says worse things, just without an accent. She rubbed
her mother’s padded shoulder.

“
Shto bilo, to bilo
, what was, was, but we can still eat, right,
Stalinatchka?” her father said. “Maybe you feel better if you eat.”
He tried to catch the attention of the woman who assigned tables,
by waving at her back. Milla wondered whether she should go try to
talk the woman, but didn’t want to leave her mother.