The Sky Is Falling (33 page)

We walked up to Fourth Avenue in silence. I plodded the aisles of the drugstore with her, but I wouldn't help her look. When she went up to the cashier, I slipped outside and waited until, minutes later, she burst out with a paper bag under her arm. “Thank you, Jane!” she gasped.

“You don't like him, do you?”

She kissed me in the same place as before.

“Do you?” I asked.

Trutch house talked in its sleep. Every creak sounded like Sonia coming up the stairs or Pascal going down. I kept getting up, going for a drink of water, going to the bathroom. Dread. Why had I helped her buy the condoms? Why? I read for a little while, waiting for Sonia's light. It never came on, yet my room seemed so bright. When I got up and looked out the window, the moon was nearly full, ringed by blazing moondogs. Below, a paler light flickered in the garage.

A sweet tang masked the other garage odours, which may have been why Pete didn't seem particularly surprised to have a visitor in the middle of the night. “Zed,” he said, wriggling an arm out of the sleeping bag and flourishing it in welcome. “Pull up a milk crate.”

It was the only place to sit. I made myself small on it and asked him how he was.

“Pete's okay. He's hunky-dory. How about you?”

“I can't sleep. I was reading and saw your light.”

“What were you reading?”

“‘Three Years.' It's about this guy, Alexei Laptev. The woman he loves doesn't love him back. So he's always having these conversations with friends. About the possibility of life without love. About passion being a psychosis. About love not existing at all, being just a physical attraction.”

I saw that Pete was shaking his head, letting it roll this way and that on the foamie, and that his stubble was starting to thicken into a beard. “What?” I asked.

“With everything that's going on in the world, Zed? You read
stories
?” He might have said
nursery rhymes
.

“It's Chekhov.”

His look said,
So?

“You read my paper. I love his stories. I love the people in them. How they strive. They have these hopes for the future, but the future seems—like it will never come. They're guilty and idealistic and jaded—all at the same time. And always there's this mood. I'm not explaining it very well. It's just that he writes the way I feel.”

The candle, fixed onto a paint can, licked at the night. We both watched it. Then a line came to me and I recited it. “
My
heart felt heavy within me and I kept thinking how wonderful it
would be if I could only rip it out of my breast somehow.
”

“
That's
how you feel?” he asked.

“Yes. Don't you?”

“Pete's feelings are irrelevant,” he said.

“That's the problem with you,” I said, exasperated. “You act like we're all creatures. It's not going to make you less of an anarchist, admitting you actually love somebody.” Then, to my horror, I did cry, covering my face with my hands, wishing it all felt irrelevant to me. Pete did nothing to comfort me, but after I had dried my face on my sleeve, he offered to sleep with me.

“Pete wanted to at Christmas, but you didn't seem into it.”

“No,” I said.

He arched his back in the bag, a stretch or a shrug. He thrashed around. “Zed, come here,” he said and when I froze on the crate, he laughed. “Fear not. Pete won't jump you.”

So I came and sat beside him, wary until he turned his back to me. “Scratch?”

Between his shoulder blades, up and down his spine with its pretty, decorative knobs. “Harder,” he said and I scratched it harder.

The unbearable itch that had taken over his life.

The weather turned the next day. Having grown smug with spring, we were shocked to wake to a moleskin sky, to wind. Worse, rain was predicted for Sunday when no one could remember a rainy Walk for Peace. For what it would do to the papier mâché alone, it signified disaster, though for us personally only discomfort, our fake blood thinning, the chains slippery and more difficult to handle. Nevertheless, we couldn't help seeing an omen in the forecast.

I had thought my anxiety would evaporate as soon as I finished my exam, indeed, before I finished it, as soon as I read the questions. Instead, I discovered that the exam had been a distraction and now the real worrying began. We were going to cross the border. Some of us were going to be arrested. Not me, I was support, but what if something went wrong?

Isis had promised fun and what she brought over were five identical booklets from the library, five copies of
The Cherry
Orchard
, and a jug of oily-looking plonk. She gathered us on the porch where we sat along the wide wooden ledge and on the flowered chesterfield, feeling its metal skeleton through the emaciated cushions. I avoided Sonia's eye.

Since there were sixteen characters and only seven of us, excluding Pete, Isis assigned some of us multiple roles. She herself took on all the minor characters as well as the two female leads, Ania and Liuba, mother and daughter. “Pete was supposed to be Trofimov.”
Piotr
Trofimov, the idealistic student. “He
is
Trofimov,” she said, meaning more than that they had the same name. She looked at the three males and decided Pascal would be Pete's understudy in addition to playing Yasha, the preening valet. “This is for you, Jane,” she said, pulling a cucumber from her bag. “You're Charlotta. Because you're so funny.”

“I'm funny?” I said and everyone laughed.

Isis read the first stage directions: “
The windows of the room
are shut, but through them the trees can be seen in blossom.
” More laughter over Timo's Yepihodov proposing to Carla's Dooni-asha, as well as Yepihodov dropping or bumping into things, which Timo didn't just read but stood to clown out. Then I had my first line as Charlotta, the German governess. “
My dog
actually eats nuts.
”

They laughed again.

I had read the play once before, almost a year earlier, but remembered only the basic outline of the story—the orchard is going to auction in order to pay Liuba Ranyevskaia's debts. I remembered Gayev's speech to the bookshelf and when Pishchik swallows all of Liuba's pills, and that everyone was in love, Trofimov and Ania, too, though Trofimov pretends to be above love. But I had forgotten about the dead child at the heart of the play, Liuba's drowned son, the reason she fled Russia for Paris five years before.

By Act Two, we recognized the genius in the roles Isis had assigned us. Dieter, who was at first thrilled to play Lopakhin and be yearned for by Sonia's Varia, began complaining. “He's the biggest capitalist in the play!”

“But he's also the only one talking sanely.”

“Look at me,” Timo said to console him. “I'm a couple of tools.”

“Still,” Dieter sniffed. “Why couldn't
I
be Trofimov?”

It was true that Pascal didn't do the character justice. When he stammered through his monologues, we imagined Pete. When he said, “
One day all the things that are beyond our grasp at
present are going to fall within our reach, only to achieve this we've
got to work with all our might, to help the people who are seeking
after truth
,” when he said, “
Don't you see human beings gazing at
you from every cherry tree in your orchard, from every leaf and every
tree trunk, don't you hear voices?
” we heard Pete's.

Isis read Liuba and Ania in two different voices, sometimes as a dialogue with herself. “
I keep expecting
,” she said in a strained voice, “
something dreadful to happen
. . .”

As Charlotta I had to perform conjuring tricks. I had to say out loud the words I often thought to myself, though less poetically. “
I am so lonely, always so lonely, no one belongs to me, and . . .
and who I am, what I exist for, nobody knows
. . .” I had to take the cucumber out of my pocket and bite into it while everybody whooped.

We passed around the jug of wine and it had the intended effect. Pascal, as Trofimov, rose to his feet near the end of the play and, swaying like a tree (he had been glugging the stuff), declared he was a free man. “
Humanity is advancing toward the
highest truth—
”

Sonia tried to shush him. “You don't have to shout.”

“
—the greatest happiness that is possible to achieve on earth—
”

Dieter kicked off a Birkenstock and came at Pascal as though to shove it in his mouth.

Pascal: “
—and I am in the van!
”

At the mention of the vanguard, Pete, seemingly on cue, darted out from the side of the house and ran across the neighbour's lawn straight for the red-hatted gnome. “No, Pete!” Sonia cried, which made us all turn and most of us laugh harder. Because when he seized it and pulled, it wouldn't release. It was cemented in this time. “Go, go, go!” Pascal chanted. Pete pulled and pulled and his hair, lank from lack of washing, began to flap around his head with the fury of each tug. Unshaven, clothes filthy, he looked completely crazy. Finally the gnome capitulated, breaking off at the ankles, and Pete stumbled backward and almost fell. “Look,” Sonia groaned when he had absconded with it. Two pointed shoes, left behind in the flower bed, yellow and hollow, as though the gnome's feet had merely slipped out of them.

Isis clapped her hands and demanded we finish the play. Lopakhin buys the orchard, engages Yepihodov to run it, then fails once more to propose to Varia. She leaves to take up a position as housekeeper on a nearby estate. Gayev gets a job in a bank, Liuba and Ania go back to Paris, taking Yasha. Pishchik's financial problems are solved by the discovery of clay on his estate. And the old servant Freers, whose deafness adds so much comedy to the play, is left behind in the confusion. But was it a comedy or a tragedy? Though many of the lines were funny, the situation was sad, unbearably sad. “They were so deluded,” said Carla. “Over and over again Lop—what's his name? Old Loppy tried to help them, but they wouldn't listen. They just sank deeper.”

Dieter: “That's how it is with the bourgeoisie.”

“It's more than a critique of the bourgeoisie,” I said. “The whole world is our orchard. How are we going to save it?”

“We're going to Seattle tomorrow,” Isis said.

And then we all went for a walk. Timo whispered to me going down the steps, “
My dog actually eats nuts!
” and I replied, “
Fancy
that!
”

We reached one of the flowery streets where the wind had filled the gutters with drifts of petals. Cars, the tops of newspaper boxes—everything coated in pink snow. Pascal scooped up a handful and threw it in Sonia's face. She retaliated, then all of us joined in, chasing each other between parked cars, hurling fistfuls. The wind gusted and the petals swirled and lifted like so many pink, materializing spirits.

“
Did you know—
” Carla said as we ducked together behind a car to avoid the next flowery assault, “
—my dog actually eats nuts?
”

A car forced us back onto the sidewalk and we abandoned the game. Sonia came up to me then. She was embarrassed too, I realized. “The ending gave me the willies, Jane.”

She meant the play, that sound
coming as if out of the sky, like
the sound of a string snapping, slowly and sadly dying away
. Because we, too, were always waiting for a sound, which one it would be, we didn't know—air raid siren, a lone plane, the imagined whine of an ICBM.

“Ah!”

“What?”

“You woke me up!”

This was when I woke up.

“Where were you?”

“In the garage. What?”

“Nothing.”

“I'm here now.”

“Your feet are cold.”

“Warm them.”

They fell silent, or at least too quiet for me to hear. I moved to the edge of the futon and peered down on Sonia's dresser, where I could just make out the white teapot in the dark. Crawling partially off the mattress, I laid my head on the metal grate. Now I could hear a fainter sound. A moist one.

Then: “What?”

“You weren't very nice to your mother.”

A sigh.

“In the play,” she said.

Pascal laughed and the kissing resumed, louder and wetter, before breaking off. He breathed his words, “I-think-you're-so-pretty.”

I pictured her in all her prettiness, lying with me instead, me kissing her cherry mouth, the little pillows of her lips, so sweet. She parted them slightly and I felt her tongue brush against mine. It was so unexpected, I drew back in surprise.

Other sounds. Rustling. I kissed her sweet foot a thousand times.

“Did you like that?”

She told me: “Yes.”

He took back his inhalation. More kissing; small grunts now and sighs. I couldn't picture it. They were shadows in the dark.
Thank you
, whispered. “Thank you for picking me.”