The Ladies' Lending Library (13 page)

Down at the shore it’s so quiet he can hear each wave as it licks, then kicks back against the sand. The dark—it’s the thing he loves most about this place: you can actually see the dark. In the city there are always too many lights, or the hum from power-lines overhead; everyone, everything’s on the move, rushing and racketing about, but here—. He takes a trim silver case from his shirt pocket and pulls out a cigar; holding it under his nose like a pretend moustache, he breathes the scent in so deeply he might be calling up the coconuts and sugar cane from the island where the tobacco grows. For some reason Marta had been going on and on in the car about last year’s Cuban missile crisis. How the Americans had lost their nerve; how they should have stood up to the Russians and that ex-Ukrainian party boss who is no more Ukrainian than the shoe he thumped on the table at the U.N. In spite of himself, Max had let her get to him; he’d actually turned round for a second, asking her whether she’d have preferred Khrushchev—or Kennedy—to have pushed the button. “Button—ha!” she’d exclaimed, using the Ukrainian word,
gudzyk,
making it sound like something out of a children’s game. And then, to top it off, she’d screeched, “Keep your eyes on the road, do you want to kill us both?”

Max allows himself the first rich puff of his cigar; expels a
fragrant plume of smoke into the air, a plume that gathers, then wavers, slowly pushing itself apart. It’s the only sign of anything that’s stirring here, beside the barely beating waves and the stars overhead, the stars that move so slowly they might as well be nails hammered into a board. The same stars the president in Washington could be staring at this very moment, the rich-boy president with his rugged good looks and his cool millions, his beautiful wife and perfect children: a girl, a boy. A man no older, and perhaps no smarter, all in all, than Max Metelsky, but with his finger on the life-or-death of the very planet.

He’s glad, suddenly, that his children are in bed, safe and sleeping peacefully. If the bomb were to hit (he always thinks of it as one single, silver missile, some gigantic bullet) they would never know. But this is morbid, outrageous—this kind of thinking is worthy of Marta. He draws intently on his cigar. Three hours of Marta in the car, and then Sonia, shouting loud and clear as always with that stiff silence of hers, and what the
hell
did he do wrong, just what was she punishing him for
this
time? For not leaving Marta to asphyxiate herself—the word soothes and supports him, a word Sonia wouldn’t know, never mind use
—asphyxiate
herself in that oven of a house they should have got rid of long ago?

But then where would Marta have gone; would Sonia prefer Marta to be living with them—would she prefer to have Marta to put up with, instead of a dog? It’s not as though Sonia didn’t have family of her own to hang around his neck. Of course it was a terrible shame, her mother dying so suddenly, but she should be able to cope with that by now—it’s been four months already. Look at Peter, he isn’t exactly wailing and beating his breast. This show she puts on—not that she’s pretending to grieve, but it’s the performance that gets him: crying all the time, or else silent; wearing sunglasses
to hide her wept-out eyes. It’s bad for the children to see their mother affected this way. His mother had never cried once, he had never seen her weep, and God knows, the life she’d had—or Marta, for that matter.
She
had a tongue all right, but he’d rather that than Sonia’s dagger-silence and red-jelly eyes.

“Hail Caesar, back from the wars!”

Stealing up on him, as usual: how is it he never hears Peter coming? He’s wearing shorts and a stained, rumpled shirt and carrying a pair of sneakers in his hands.

“So. Peter.”

“Come on, Max, you can do better. Why not ‘Hail, fellow, well met’ or
morituri te salutant?
And come to think of it, a cigar would go down a treat right now.”

They say you can choose your friends but not your family, but what is Peter to Max? Neither one nor the other. His wife’s brother, no-account, devil-may-care—what was it in the commercial?—
debonair,
that was the word for Peter. Rogue, idler, jack of all trades, master mimic—he’d been taking off Rex Harrison just now, and to the life. In spite of himself, Max holds out the cigar case as if he had a hundred more Havanas back at the cottage. Sonia hates the smell of them, they give her headaches, she is famous for her headaches; but look at Peter, his life shot all to hell, yet smiling like he hasn’t got a care in the world. Peter, who never gives a thought to the power-monger-men in Moscow, Cuba, Washington.

They sit side by side on a boulder by the shore, as if they were the closest, the easiest of friends: two men gliding into middle age, whose hair is starting to thin. Peter’s is carelessly tinged with grey, as if he’d been painting a ceiling and had forgotten, as usual, to put on a protective cap. But Peter is lean, still has an athlete’s body.
He played what at university? Soccer, baseball, various amatory sports—he got in on a serviceman’s scholarship, but let his grades drop like a pair of pants round his ankles. Had Peter ever had so much as a scrap of ambition—was there anything he’d ever meant to become before good looks, and easy charm, and native laziness got in the way? A teacher, a doctor, a plumber, for God’s sake? No, nothing so exalted, so practical, but an actor—an actor!

Max throws his cigar as far as he can towards the lake, waiting for the hiss of fire on water. He’s remembering the ass Peter made of himself acting up last weekend, at the Plotskys’ party. Remembering, too, some shred of gossip—and Max is, most often, immune to gossip, so he can’t be sure he isn’t making it up—about Peter having fallen for someone in his youth, fallen hopelessly, as you’d expect a man like Peter to do: no sense of proportion or judgment. A miracle, that he’d ended up with Zirka Senchenko, and through Zirka, her millionaire brother. Better luck than he deserved, although God knows that woman would drive you to worse than drink. He coughs to cover his thoughts—as if Peter had
that
trick in his bag, mind reading, of all things.

“Christ, the traffic’s awful—I swear it gets worse each time I come up—and I thought leaving after supper there’d be no one on the roads.”

“It was okay when I drove up,” Peter says, flicking ash into the remains of a fortress the kids have been building, a moat lined with small, white pebbles. “But I started out at two o’clock. I decided to take the afternoon off, things are always slow on a Friday.”

“Funny, it’s the busiest time of the week for me.” Max can’t keep a flick of disapproval from his voice, and Peter can’t help catching it, wearing it like a rose in his buttonhole.

“Man’s got to live a little before that big old spitfire pilot in
the sky trains his guns on him. Haven’t you ever cut a workday short, Max?”

“No.”

“Not even when you were courting my sweet sister?”

“If I were the type to play hooky from the office, there’s no way your sweet sister would have let me look at her, never mind court her.” Max hasn’t meant to say this much, he’d meant to ignore the question, or change the subject. Peter’s capable of taking his answer as a sign that he wants to talk, not about the things men usually talk about, the way they talk—stock market, sports, politics—but things better left private, things you don’t even want to think about, never mind confess to someone like Peter Metelsky.

“Things aren’t going so well between the two of you these days, Max?”

“I don’t discuss my private affairs. Besides, you’re one to talk.”

“I thought as much. Sonia’s funny like that, always has been. Goes off the deep end. About our mother, I mean, all this grieving—”

“Sonia’s a wonderful woman.”

“Of course she is, Max, of course she is. So are they all—wonderful women.”

He’s waiting for Max to ask him something about Zirka, about the desert of their marriage. Max knows that if he gives even the slightest sign—a shrug, a grunt—Peter will tell him everything. As if Max wanted to hear, as if he doesn’t have enough on his hands with Sonia, Marta, Laura—a houseful of women at war. Peter at least has sons. If only, Max thinks, the next one could be a boy, everything would be all right again. There is still time for a boy. It wouldn’t weigh on her so much, then, her mother’s death, and she’d stop worrying so much about Alix, thinking it’s her fault the child won’t speak, is so cold, so closed off to them all. Saying she
hadn’t wanted her, and the child knows it, is punishing her. Crazy talk: the child is going to be fine, she’s a late bloomer, that’s all; it’s only if they keep worrying, carrying on about her that there’ll be a problem. Hasn’t the doctor said so? Always having to hug some guilt to her chest, is Sonia: some thorn or spike of glass. He has never known a woman with so small a gift for happiness.

And yet she was beautiful, is still so beautiful he can be stunned, winded, just by looking at her. Seeing her when she thought she was alone, or the rare times when she couldn’t give a damn how she looked, how decently she was dressed. Like on the afternoon she stormed into his office, crying out—her father had been rushed to hospital, he had to come with her now, right now, this very moment. He’d almost forgotten about the client sitting there, had almost gone to her and taken her in his arms to comfort her, tell her all would be well, he was with her, he’d make sure that nothing bad would happen. But by the time he made his excuses to his client and spoke to his secretary to cancel the remaining appointments, Sonia had already left. And she refused to greet him when he showed up at the hospital, ten minutes after she’d arrived. Fifteen minutes at the most, he’d swear to it.

“Better be getting back,” Peter says, throwing his cigar butt, like Max’s, into the water. It falls instead onto the soaked sand at the very rim of the lake. Peter shrugs, jams his hands in his pockets. But he makes no move to rise. “They’ll be wondering where we are,” he says at last. “They’ll be thinking us drowned at the very least. We should be so lucky.”

Max isn’t taking any bait. Though he knows what Peter is saying—knows what he, Max, would like to be able to ask, if not of Peter then of someone who’d value the question, even if he had no answer. Not a priest, not a teacher or doctor, not even the
huge blue eye painted on the cathedral dome, but just someone he doesn’t know and will never meet again. Some perfect stranger who happens to walk by and see him, sitting here by the water:

Is this what my life, and hers, have come to—just this, and no more? If those men in high places, with their oh-so-powerful fingers, decide to push that button, will it all have been for nothing. And my daughters asleep in their beds—if they’re spared to grow up—will there be nothing more for them than this? A man like Peter, a man like me? A man whose life will add up, at the end of each week, to five days slogging at the office, two days at the cottage fixing a few of the hundred things that have gone wrong or need replacing, six hours’ driving here and back, when the traffic is bad?

Peter stretches out his arms and yawns so lazily, so voluptuously that it has to be an act. “Two whole days I’ve got free, forty-eight fine and blessed hours, and I’m not going to spend even one of them fixing a single thing, no matter how many fits Zirka throws.”

“Lucky you. Enjoy yourself.”

“You taking any time off this summer?”

“I have to make up for the time I took off when your mother died.”

It sounds like a reproach. It is. Sonia collapsed, and Peter was no goddam help—you’d think a brother would be able to support a sister, talk to her, make her see sense the way a husband couldn’t. Useless, Peter: utterly useless.

“Good night, then, Max.” Peter is starting to walk away, not in the direction of his cottage but farther up the shore.

“Good night. And Peter—”

Max waits for a moment, until he assures himself that Peter has stopped walking, has turned to face him.

“Don’t act the fool in front of everyone again. Once a summer’s more than enough.”

If Peter’s angered by Max’s warning, he doesn’t show it. “‘Good night, sweet Prince,’” he calls out. “‘Flights of angels,’ and all that.” He resumes his stroll down the beach, in the direction of the highest bluff, the one the kids have named Gibraltar.

Max, climbing heavily up the steps to the cottage, doesn’t answer. The porch light’s out, the window looks like a socket without an eye. He knows she’ll be asleep, or pretending.

He’s lying with his back to her, snoring, the sheets and covers rolled around him, turning him into a thick white spool of thread. For a while Sonia stays in bed beside him, knowing she won’t sleep but that it’s far too complicated to get up, and that while he sleeps so soundly, she is safe. Once again she goes through the list of things that have to be done in the next two days: get Max to buy the lumber to fix the porch steps; stand over him to make sure he actually does the carpentry; handle Marta’s interference, her snorts of criticism. Then, when he’s finished the steps, when he’s in a thoroughly bad mood, about to head back to the city along with all the thousands of other husbands in their lonely cars, hand him the letter to give to Olya, whom he has never really cared for, and who lives far enough away from them for it to be an imposition. Hand Olya the letter and reassurances about Darka, lies about what a willing help Darka’s been.

And last of all, Peter. Talk to Peter, though how can she begin to say anything to him about so painful a subject? If Sasha thinks he’ll listen to her because he’s her brother—but what business is it of Sasha’s, anyway? Why doesn’t she talk to Nadia instead; butter wouldn’t melt in that one’s mouth:
I’d rather read Shakespeare.
Peter’s never taken advice, that’s why he’s always in one kind of a mess or another. She told him all those years ago it would be a mistake, marrying Zirka: he had only smiled at her in that careless way he had, smiled and never really trusted her again. Thinking of Peter makes Sonia’s legs and arms cramp up; her heart performs its somersaults the way it always does when she forces herself to be still, to lie back and relax. Surely it must be getting on to morning?