Visiting Professor (16 page)

Rain insisted I translate. “My dad was definitely not a primitive person,” she icily informed Axinya.

It went on that way for an epic half hour or so. Giving a workmanlike imitation of a housewife, Rain cleared away the dirty
dishes, stacked them on top of the mountain of dirty dishes already piled next to the sink, served decaf and doughnuts. Axinya
asked if there was a toilet in the apartment and disappeared into it when I flicked on the light. When I returned to the kitchen,
Rain looked at me in what I thought was a peculiar way.

“She has to be the lady friend you told me about, right? The one you saw on Monday afternoons and Thursday evenings? The one
who straightened your room beforehand and ironed the sex out of her glad rags afterhand? So do you want to make it with her?”

“Yo?”

“Here’s the deal: you want to fuck her, go with the flow, it’s cool with me. Like I could watch, right? Or I could participate.
Or I could pull a disappearing act. Whichever.”

“You want to par-ti-ci-pate?”

“Join in. Take part. Co-lab-o-rate.” One of her eyes twitched suggestively. “Hey, check it out. Rock ‘n’ roll.”

I took a deep breath, I squared my drooping shoulders, I threaded my fingers through my tangled hair. “I do not want to fuck
her,” I announced with what I took to be grim dignity. “I do not want you to participate or disappear.”

“So there’s no reason to get pissed.”

“I am not pissed,” I insisted, but I was lying through my badly repaired, tarnished teeth. I was pissed at Rain for not feeling
responsible for the death of her father. I was pissed at Axinya for turning up in Backwater. I was pissed that Rain was being
so cool about it. I was pissed that she could think I would want her to collaborate with me collaborating
with Axinya. (I had heard about such things, I had even fantasized about such things, but I considered them to be manifestations
of the decadence of the West.) Most of all, I was pissed at myself for being frightened because the earlobes I had done cipher
work for back in Russia had noticed my departure and wanted me back.

Down the hallway, the toilet flushed. Axinya took her sweet time returning. Rain and I exchanged looks. I shrugged. Rain shrugged
back. When she reached up to put the decaf back on the shelf, her T-shirt drifted away from her body, exposing for a fraction
of a second the soft undercurve of a breast and the Siberian night moth lost in a sea of freckles.

As we say in Russian, I rinsed my eye. Also my heart.

Axinya wandered into the kitchen. She had a diabolical expression on her face. “I saw the Swedish safety razor I gave you
for your name day in the medicine chest next to her sanitary napkins,” she informed me frostily in Russian.

“Hey, I don’t mind your talking to each other in a secret language,” Rain said snappily.

“There is only one bathroom,” I explained to Axinya in Russian. “In the one bathroom there is only one medicine chest.”

“There is only one bedroom,” Axinya shot back. “In the one bedroom there is only one bed.”

“There is a couch in the room with my computer which opens into a bed.”

“It is currently closed. If you ever bothered to open it you would see it has no sheets.”

“I was wondering what took you so long,” I said under my breath.

“Act as if I’m not here,” Rain muttered. “I’m cool.”

Axinya fumbled in her handbag for an embroidered handkerchief, delicately blew her nose into the part of it that was not embroidered.
“When is your contract here up?” she asked. “What can I do to convince you to return with me to Russia?”

Suddenly, I do not know why, I wanted to hurt her. “What is in it for you if I go back?”

Tears welled in Axinya’s eyes, causing her mascara to run. “How can you ask me such a thing?” She tucked a
stray tuft of silver hair back into place. “You are in it for me.”

Observing Axinya’s tears brim, observing one of them trickle down her cheek, I made a mental note to talk to Charlie Atwater.
He had already taken a look at the surface tension of teardrops, but there was another chaos-related angle to explore. Given
the weight, configuration and surface tension of a teardrop, given the coefficient of friction of skin, given the topography
of the cheek down which the tear would flow, I wondered if it would be possible to predict the trajectory of the teardrop
on any given run.

I wondered how I could be so detached about Axinya’s distress.

What was it with me when I should have been feeling emotion, I wound up thinking chaos?

Did I have enough chaos in me to make a world? Or too much chaos in me to live in the world I make?

Rock or roll, right?

Walking wounded, right?

My head was spinning from all these questions with painful answers.

Axinya must have noticed how distracted I was. “There was a time when the sight of me in tears moved you to tears,” she said,
turning her back on Rain to hide her emotions, dabbing at her eyes with a corner of the handkerchief. “When my mother died
it was me who had to comfort you, it didn’t matter that you had never met her. America has put its mark on you, Lemuel Melorovich.
Even your English sounds strange—not like English, really.”

Yawning noisily, Rain scraped back her chair and padded over to the sink and started washing her underwear in a basin, splashing
water everywhere. “Your Russian lady friend is beginning to rub me the wrong way,” she announced over the sound of the running
faucet. “I don’t think I’d collaborate even if you begged me.”

“What does she say?”

“You are the second live Russian she has ever met,” I explained tiredly. “Her basin runneth over.”

Axinya slowly turned her head and sized up Rain the way only a woman can inspect another woman. “Her ass is too small,” she
said in Russian, “her mouth is too large, her earlobes have a peculiar shape, she does not come
equipped with hips or breasts. Seen from certain angles, she looks like a boy. What’s in it for you, sleeping with her?”

I thought, She is in it for me. But the urge to hurt Axinya had passed and I did not say it out loud.

Axinya folded her arms across her chest, or more accurately, rested her arms on her chest. “I’ll bet she has a G-spot,” she
declared in a sudden flash of inspiration.

“If I did a major merge with someone whose breasts drooped as much as hers,” Rain commented from the sink, her lips drawn
into a tight smile, “I’d pass the Cadillac.”

“She talks a great deal,” Axinya commented nastily. “Does she say more than listening to can explain?”

“It is her kitchen. It is her eggs. It is also her frying pan.”

“Does she really own a Cadillac?” Axinya, impressed despite herself, asked in Russian.

“She is not feeling well,” I explained to Axinya. “ ‘Pass the Cadillac’ is Lilliputian for ‘throw up.’ “

“That’s the second time you have mentioned Lilliputian,” Axinya noted irritably. “What is it, a local upstate New York dialect?”

God knows how I would have explained Lilliputian if we had not been distracted by the siren. Its pitch changed as it turned
into the alleyway, a result, as any schoolchild knows, of the Doppler effect on sound waves. Axinya, who happened to be standing
next to the kitchen window, stared at the flashing light on top of the police car as it skidded to a stop in front of the
wooden staircase. I remember Raymond Chandler using the expression “The blood drained from her face,” but I had never seen
the phenomenon with my own eyes until then. Suddenly as gray as sidewalk, Axinya put a hand on the windowsill to keep from
crumpling to the floor. “It’s the militia,” she gasped in Russian. “They have come to arrest me as a Russian spy.”

I went over to the window as the car door slammed and recognized Norman, the deputy sheriff who knows where Jerusalem is.
He looked up and waved. I raised a paw and saluted him through the window. He started up the stairs.

“Not to worry,” I told Axinya. “It is only Norman.”

Rain went through the living room to open the front door and returned with Norman in tow. He came striding into the kitchen.
The metal taps on the soles of his shoes
clicking on the linoleum sent an electric current up my spine. Dropping two file folders onto the kitchen table, he noticed
Axinya cringing in the corner and nodded amiably in her direction.

“Explain him, for God’s sake, that I am a journalist, not a spy,” she hissed at me in Russian. She turned toward Norman and
bared her teeth in a tense smile. “So good day to you, Police Officer.”

“She is an old friend from St. Petersburg,” I informed Norman, “here to interview me about the nuclear-dump affair.”

Norman touched the broad brim of his sheriff’s hat with his fingertips. “Any friend of Lem’s.”

“What does it mean, ‘Any friend of Lem’s’?” Axinya demanded in Russian.

“Americans have this habit of saying you half a sentence and letting you figure out the other half for yourself,” I explained
her. “That is why the political situation in the country is so confused. What I think he is saying you is, Any friend of Lemuel’s
is a friend of his.”

My explanation only added to Axinya’s bewilderment. “How could I be a friend of his when I only just now met him?”

Still wearing his hat, Norman adjusted his holster and testicles and straddled a folding chair as if it was a saddle. Rain
placed a cup of lukewarm coffee on the table in front of him. Rocking back and balancing the chair on its hind legs, Norman
announced, “The sheriff sent me over.” He started to say something else, but his eyes went blank as he forgot what it was.
To cover the lapse, he tilted the chair forward and spooned sugar into his cup until the coffee spilled over the rim into
the saucer. He looked up at us looking at him. A light came into his eyes as he remembered what he wanted to say.

“It ain’t been announced on the radio yet, but there’s gone and been two more serial murders—one upcounty, a seventy-seven-year-old
Caucasian male working as a night watchman at a shoe factory, the other in Wellsville two hours later. The second victim was
a forty-four-year-old Japanese male working at an all-night gas station. Both the victims was shot in the ear with a garlic-coated
dumdum bullet fired at point-blank range from the same .38 caliber
pistol. First time we’ve had us two murders so close apart in time and place.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Rain gasped from the sink. “The goddamn random killer has struck again.”

“Do you think I should contact the Soviet embassy?” Axinya anxiously asked in Russian from the window.

“There is no Soviet embassy anymore,” I muttered in Russian.

“Like they are speaking a foreign language,” Rain explained to Norman.

“Uh-huh,” Norman said. He turned toward me. “Sheriff’d like to know where you’re at. The gypsy in Schenectady who reads entrails,
the blind Romanian lady in Long Branch who reads tarot cards, they’ve both thrown in the sponge. You and the defrocked Catholic
priest who dangles a ring over a map are the only two still looking for the perpetrator.” Norman flashed a boyish grin. “Asides
the police.”

I made a mental note of “throw in the sponge,” the meaning was clear from the context, and started to leaf through the two
file folders Norman had brought over. “When you see the sheriff,” I told him, “say him I am getting warmer.”

Norman took a gulp of lukewarm coffee, decided to add more sugar, as if sweetness could compensate for coldness, then took
another gulp.

“You’re getting warmer,” he repeated.

“Warmer to knowing whether the killings are random or not.”

“Uh-huh.”

After Norman left I borrowed Rain’s Harley, kicked the motor over and ran Axinya back to the motel across the Backwater town
line.

“Welcome to the cockroach motel,” I told her as we pulled up in front of her cabin. “You check in, you do not check out.”

“You’ve changed,” Axinya said. “You used to act dirty, but you never talked dirty.” She leaned forward and fitted her lips
against mine. In Russia this had passed for kissing. “Come home,” she whispered breathlessly. “Here you are a fish out of
water.”

I disengaged her arms as gently as I could and backed
toward the Harley. “I will swim when and where I will swim.”

“What keeps you here?” she wanted to know. Her voice had the plaintive quality the Russian language tends to take on when
you ask questions to which you know the answers.

Two cabins down a porch light snapped on and the Oriental man I had run into at the E-Z Mart stuck his head out a door. “If
you absolutely must quarrel,” he called in his clipped British accent, “might I be so bold as to suggest you save it for the
A.M. when you will both be fresher.”

I kicked the Harley until it jumped under me and gunned the motor. Axinya must have repeated her question, I could see her
lips mouthing the words “What keeps you here?” With the Harley roaring in my ears, I mouthed words back at her. In Russia,
I tried to tell her, I used to stand around waiting for good news. Then I stood around waiting for news. Then I stood around
waiting for death. Over the years my ankles had swelled. My heart, too.

The last memory I have of Axinya, as I drove off on the Harley, was the perplexed expression on her face, which led me to
suspect that my message had been garbled in transmission.

Hey, lip reading is not easy. Heart reading neither.

When he gets
back to the apartment, Lemuel finds the projector covered with mauve silk turned on and Rain sitting stark naked in a yoga
position on the only bed in the only bedroom. He takes a long look at her hips, her breasts, decides they look perfectly female
to him. Rain has switched off one of the two bed lamps and set the other on the floor, a signal she is expecting sexual activity.

“Like what’s your position on yogurt?” she asks.

“In Russia, everyone thinks people who eat yogurt live longer.”

Rain seems relieved. “I once read in this women’s magazine where you don’t get something called a yeast infection if you douche
with yogurt, so from time to time that’s what I go and do.”