The Sky Is Falling (5 page)

“Unrequited love,” Kopanyev sighed.

“They're even married to people who don't love them back.”

Kopanyev: “Example?”

“‘Three Years,'” I said.

“Remind everyone, please, Jane. Summarize story.”

“Go ahead,” I said to Michael but he only made a face.

“Laptev is in love with Julia, a friend of his sister Nina,” I said. “Nina's dying of breast cancer. Actually, Nina's also a victim of unrequited love because her husband lives in another part of town with his mistress.”

“Men!” expleted the ponytailed girl at the end of the table and everyone laughed, except Mohawked Keith who generally limited himself to expressions of contempt.

“Laptev proposes. At first Julia refuses because she doesn't love him. Then she agrees. Because Laptev's rich and she doesn't see any other opportunities for herself. The story basically relates the first three years of their marriage.”

Michael swept his bang away again. “Their
unhappy
marriage. It's completely
depressing
.”

“Chekhov is funny too.”

“What's funny about that story? Find me one funny thing.”

“I don't have the book with me.”

“Cancer? Ha ha ha.”

“Doesn't their baby die?” someone asked. “That's the same story, right?”

“That story is more sad than funny,” I agreed, “but others are really funny. The people are funny.”

“And we have two cases of unrequited love,” said Kopanyev. “Can anyone think of other stories with this element?”

“‘Lady with a Lapdog.'”

“That's not
unrequited
. That's
doomed
.”

Turgenev's Bazarov and Odintsova were proposed, but Kopanyev asked that we restrict our discussion to Chekhov. The heavy girl who kept poking at her cuticles said, “There's that story. I don't remember titles. Where the creepy husband pisses off the wife who's trying to help the famine victims.”

“‘My Wife.'”

Another professorial nod for me.

“‘His Wife,'” I added.

Blank looks all around.

“Where he finds the telegram from his wife's lover saying he kisses her sweet little foot a thousand times?”

“Ha ha ha!” roared Kopanyev. “So wife can be villain? I thought women could only be victims.”

The three other girls in the class rolled their eyes but wouldn't take the bait, not even Ponytail. “The wife's the villain in ‘The Grasshopper,'” a male pointed out.

“‘The Grasshopper'!” Michael moaned. “I read that last night. Another riot.”

At Kopanyev's request, Michael summarized it: wife runs off with arty friends while doctor husband pays for everything, catches diphtheria, and dies.

“That's actually quite a funny story,” I said.

“But in that story,” the heavy girl said, “the wife didn't hate the husband. She just thought he was boring.”

“She was having an affair.”

“But she still
liked
her husband, so I don't think you can call that”—four fingers with ragged cuticles, two from each hand, went up and scratched the air—“unrequited, per se.”

“‘The Kiss'!” Keith blatted.

“Most definitely.” Kopanyev asked for a summary.

“This army captain? He goes to a ball. Hangs around feeling like a loser. Later he goes into a dark room where this lady's waiting for her boyfriend. She kisses the loser by mistake. This pathetically transforms the guy's life. He spends months fantasizing about the mystery lady, hoping for a chance to go back to the house. Finally the opportunity comes up and he goes and realizes what a complete and utter loser he really, truly is.”

Kopanyev stroked his beard for a full minute. Sometimes he treated his facial hair like a living thing, a cat clinging to his face. It seemed to help him think. “You don't sound very sympathetic, Keith.”

“He's a loser.”

For some time we talked about “The Kiss,” whether being in love with a hypothetical person could even be considered unrequited love, whether Staff-Captain Ryabovitch was indeed worthy of sympathy or merely deluded, and when the majority expressed scorn, Kopanyev declared that we were either preternaturally hard-hearted or had been remarkably successful in love despite our youth. He went on to confess one of his own early trials—he had adored a classmate and was rebuffed—regaling us with humiliating details until he noticed his watch. “You're not serious!” He clapped his hands. “My dear little children. My pupils. My timepiece has been unkind to us, as usual. Thanks to Michael for excellent topic, which we have barely scratched.”

And, sighing, he rose just like a bear being prodded to stand upright.

Chekhov began his career as a writer of comic stories in order to support his family. I was baffled that my classmates couldn't see the humour in his work. That evening, searching for something funny in “Three Years,” I underlined the passage where Julia is travelling back home from Moscow by train with her philandering brother-in-law, Panaurov. “
Pardon the pub simile
,” he says to her, “
but you put me in mind of a freshly salted gherkin
.”

And later, when Laptev's friends, Yartsev and Kostya, walk drunkenly back to the station, unable to see a thing in the dark: “
Hey, you holiday-makers!
” Kostya suddenly shouts out. “
We've
caught a socialist!
”

Sad
(
5
),
sadly
(
4
),
unhappy
(
4
),
miserable
(
1
),
lonely
(
1
),
depressed
(
2
),
depression
(
2
),
disgruntled
(
1
),
boring
(
9
),
bored
(
5
),
dull
(
1
),
monotonous
(
2
),
apathetic
(
1
).

Sonia tapped and looked in. “Supper.”

Downstairs, a pot of soup and a tray of airy, row-provoking biscuits waited on the table. “Sit,” she said, before taking the chair beside me and shouting to the other two. They thundered down. Supper was the only time they ever responded promptly to a call.

Dieter: “I usually sit there.”

Sonia said nothing, while Pete, who was loading biscuits on his plate, exhaled a single word. “Fascist.” Dieter took the chair across from Sonia and knuckled up his glasses. “I'm a creature of habit I guess.”

“You're a creature,” Pete said.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“You are. I'm a creature, you're a creature. Zed's a creature.”

Sonia: “Her name is Jane.”

“She'll let me know if she doesn't like what I call her.”

“Whoa!” said Dieter, taking two biscuits off Pete's plate and returning them to the tray. “We'll divide these up evenly. What do you say?”

While Dieter was busy divvying up the biscuits, Pete ate his entire ration. Then he double-checked the empty pot. “Sonia?”

“What?”

“You'll never eat three. Give me one.”

Dieter: “No.”

“I'm not asking you.”

“Three each.”

“I'm asking Sonia.”

Sonia kept her head low to her bowl, blowing ripples across her spoon.

“Sonia?”

She was by far the best cook. The biscuits were buttery, cloud-light. Dieter wasn't touching his; I assumed he was saving them for last so he could eat them in front of us when ours were gone.

Pete said, “Sonia, why do you always make so little food? It's not the end of the world yet.”

She dropped her spoon. I realized before Pete and Dieter did that she was crying. I was sitting next to her and, dumbfounded, saw the tears rain in her soup.

“I'm still hungry,” Pete bleated, clasping his hands. “Feed me. Feed me.”

She leapt up. “How can you joke about the end of the world? How?” Before he could answer, she snatched a biscuit off the tray and hurled it. It struck Pete square on the forehead, then bounced off, leaving a floury mark. He sat, momentarily stunned, before letting go a long, crazy, primeval whoop, a pterodactyl call. “It's not funny!” she shrieked. “Not at all!” and she stumbled from the table and out of the room with Dieter hurrying after her. “Asshole,” he hissed at Pete.

Pete took advantage of the moment to jam a fourth biscuit in, the one that had ricocheted off him. “Do I go too far, Zed?” he asked when he had finally choked it down. I didn't reply. I didn't think he cared what I thought. When he left, he took another biscuit with him.

I cleared the table and put the dishes in the sink, though cleanup was the cook's job. I could hear Pete talking in a funny voice and Sonia begging him to stop. When he wouldn't let up, I went down the hall to see if she was all right. Her door was open and she was sitting on the bed hugging a stuffed toy, Dieter kneeling on the floor at her feet, Pete on the bed behind her, massaging her tiny shoulders. “Leave me alone,” she was moaning, “go away,” while Pete kept telling her in a duck's voice that everything would be okay.

That night I woke to the leaded glass window on the ceiling. I stared up at it, wondering what time it was. Maybe Sonia was afraid of the dark. Maybe that was why her light was on so often at night.

It was true she never made enough food. I was hungry again.

I felt my way into the dark hall and down the stairs. Moonlight penetrated the living room, rebounding off the white surfaces—the note taped to the lamp,
It's payback time!!!
, and the statue's painted grin—relegating the rest of the room to obscurity. I carried on past the French doors, to the kitchen where I saw the glow and stopped.

A bright orange spiral.

The stove was on. My first thought was that this was why I'd woken. Sometimes it was the front door slamming, or Belinda and Pete's noisy exertions. But Belinda wasn't there tonight so I must have instinctively sensed danger. I'd just taken a step to shut the burner off when I realized someone else was there—Sonia, moving toward the stove at the same time, her face and upper body washed in the thin orange light. Palm down, fingers outstretched, she was reaching for the element, lowering her hand over it. When she got close enough to the coil to make me wince, she drew her hand back and shook it out. She tried again, getting closer the second time.

I crept back upstairs and lay on my futon staring at the pattern on the ceiling, wondering what to do. When Sonia's light finally snapped off, I turned my own on, tore a sheet from my notebook, tore that in half, wrote. I folded the note until it was compact enough to wriggle through the grate. Then I listened for it, the small sound of it landing on the dresser below, the soft tap of my message reaching her.

She seemed so tormented, but if I lost any sleep over Sonia's problems, it was only because her light woke me up. Those first months in the Trutch house I mostly tried to avoid my housemates, staying in my room and getting up earlier than everyone else. But I couldn't escape our communal supper or the awkward dashing to and from the upstairs bathroom that I shared with the men. And in the afternoon, when I came home, someone was inevitably there. Pete would be there, or Hector with his gold tooth and his beret, watching
Looney Tunes
with Pete. Sometimes if Dieter was there, he and Pete would exchange a look when I came in, their unsecret signal to close the subject, which was always politics. But maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was them wondering about me and just what my problem was.

What was my problem? I wondered it myself.

Then one afternoon I came home and found my bedroom door open. I always kept it closed, but it was open now and Pete was there, in my room, his back to me, hair in a ponytail, T-shirt inside out. I saw a tag and seams.

“What are you doing?” The words came out in a quiet rasp.

“Looking for a pen.”

He wasn't looking for a pen. He was lying on his side on the floor, one hand propping himself up as he studied the spines of my books. My private, treasured books. My room received the sun's afternoon attention and he was basking in it, in a bright cloud of dust motes. “There are pens downstairs by the phone,” I said.

“Can you get me one?”

“No.”

“See?” he said. “It's too far to go. You read a lot of novels.”

“Some of them are short stories.”

“It's a waste of time.”

Now I mustered a tone nearly appropriate to what I felt. “Can you get out of my room, please?”

The books were arranged in three pillars. He pulled one out from the middle, causing the whole stack to collapse, opened it and began flipping, pausing to read the underlined bits. “
Art
is just a means of making money, as sure as haemorrhoids exist
.” He looked over his shoulder at me. Utter delight. Complete self-satisfaction. My expression seemed not to register with him. “I rest my case. It's written right here. What
is
this?” He glanced at the cover.