Celebrity Chekhov (13 page)

“I was unhappy. At home, in the restaurant, in the bar, I thought of her; I tried to understand the mystery of a beautiful young woman's marrying someone so uninteresting; to understand the mystery of this uninteresting, good man, who believed in his right to be happy; and I kept trying to understand why she had met him first and not me, and why such a terrible mistake in our lives need have happened.

“Sometimes in town when we ran into one another, I saw from her eyes that she was expecting me, and she would confess to me herself that she had had a peculiar feeling all that day and had guessed that I would come. We talked a long time, and were silent, yet we did not confess our love to each other, but timidly and jealously concealed it. We were afraid of everything that might reveal our secret to ourselves. I loved her tenderly, deeply, but I reflected and kept asking myself what our love could lead to if we had not the strength to fight against it.

“It seemed to be incredible that my gentle, sad love could all at once coarsely break up the even tenor of her life, of the household in which I was so loved and trusted. Would it be honorable? She would go away with me, but where? Where could I take her? It would have been a different matter if I had had a beautiful, interesting life—if, for instance, I had been struggling for the emancipation of my country, or had been a celebrated man of science, or a painter; but as it was, it would mean taking her from one everyday humdrum life to another as humdrum or perhaps more so. As I say, I was a sedentary man, not at all the figure people saw on screens in films like
Miami Vice
and
Law Abiding Citizen.
And how long would our happiness last? What would happen to her in case I was ill, in case I died, or if we simply grew cold to one another?

“And she apparently reasoned in the same way. She thought of her husband, her friends, and of her father, who loved the husband like a son. If she abandoned herself to her feelings, she would have to lie, or else to tell the truth, and in her position either would have been equally terrible and inconvenient. She was tormented by the question of whether her love would bring me happiness—would she not complicate my life, which, as it was, was hard enough and full of all sorts of trouble? She fancied she was not industrious nor energetic enough to begin a new life, and she often talked to her husband of the importance of my marrying a girl of intelligence and merit who would be a help to me.

“Meanwhile the years were passing. Beyoncé already had two children. When I arrived at their house, the staff smiled cordially, the children shouted that Uncle Jamie had come, and hung on my neck; every one was overjoyed. They did not understand what was passing in my soul, and thought that I, too, was happy. Every one looked on me as a noble being. And grown-ups and children alike felt that a noble being was walking about their rooms, and that gave a peculiar charm to their manner toward me, as though in my presence their life, too, was purer and more beautiful.

“Beyoncé and I used to go to the movies together, always walking there; we used to sit side by side, our arms touching. I would take the popcorn from her without a word, and feel at that minute that she was near me, that she was mine, that we could not live without each other; but by some strange misunderstanding, when we came out of the theatre we always said good-bye and parted as though we were strangers. Goodness knows what people were saying about us in town already, but there was not a word of truth in it all.

“In the latter years, Beyoncé took to going away for frequent visits to her mother or to her sister; she began to suffer from low spirits, she began to recognize that her life was spoiled and unsatisfied, and at times she did not care to see her husband nor her children.

“We were silent and still, and in the presence of outsiders she displayed a strange irritation in regard to me; whatever I talked about, she disagreed with me, and if I had an argument, she sided with my opponent. If I dropped anything, she would say coldly:

“ ‘Nice work.'

“If I forgot to get her a soda in the movie theatre, she would say afterward:

“ ‘I knew you'd forget.'

“Luckily or unluckily, there is nothing in our lives that does not end sooner or later. The time of parting came, as Jay-Z decided, as he had before, that he was not simply a businessman, and that he needed to return to his career as a performer. They had to sell their furniture, their cars, everything. When they left, everyone was sad, and I realized that I had to say good-bye not only to their home. It was arranged that at the end of August we should see Beyoncé off, and that a little later Jay-Z and the children would join her.

“We were a great crowd to see Beyoncé off at the station. When she had said good-bye to her husband and her children and there was only a minute left before the train was to leave, I ran into her compartment to put a basket, which she had almost forgotten, on the rack, and I had to say good-bye. When our eyes met in the compartment, our spiritual fortitude deserted us both; I took her in my arms, she pressed her face to my breast, and tears flowed from her eyes. Kissing her face, her shoulders, her hands wet with tears—oh, how unhappy we were!—I confessed my love for her, and with a burning pain in my heart I realized how unnecessary, how petty, and how deceptive all that had hindered us from loving was. I understood that when you love you must either, in your reasonings about that love, start from what is highest, from what is more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their accepted meaning, or you must not reason at all.

“I kissed her for the last time, pressed her hand, and left forever. The train had already started. I went into the next compartment—it was empty—and until I reached the next station I sat there crying. Then I walked home.”

While Jamie Foxx was telling his story, the rain left off and the sun came out. “Excuse me,” Jamie Foxx said. “I have to go take care of something over at the miniature golf course.” The other men went out on the balcony, from which there was a beautiful view of the pool, which was shining now in the sunshine like a mirror. They admired it, and at the same time they were sorry that this man, who had told them this story with such genuine feeling, should be rushing round and round these hotel grounds like a squirrel instead of devoting himself to science or something else that would have made his life more worthy; and they thought what a sorrowful face Jamie Foxx must have had when he said good-bye to her in the train and kissed her face and shoulders. A few of the men had met her in the city, and Katt Williams knew her and thought her beautiful.

Acknowledgments

In this book, I have attempted to reanimate Anton Chekhov's great stories by pulling them gently and sometimes vigorously into the present, in part by substituting for his nineteenth-century Russian characters more contemporary figures. In acknowledging those who have helped me, inspired me, or sat patiently while I went on impatiently, I would like to reverse the process, and convert their modern names back to Russian. To Galina, and Danil, and Jasha, and Lavrik, and Borbala, and Leonid, and Arkady, and Iurosh, and Ludmila, and Igor, and Modliboga, and Kalisfena, and Gavril, and Pchuneia, and Nikolena, and Vyacheslav, and Lazzek. O
.

About the Author

Ben Greenman is an editor at
The New Yorker.
His acclaimed works of fiction include
What He's Poised to Do
,
Please Step Back
,
Superbad
,
Superworse
, and
A Circle Is a Balloon and Compass Both
. His fiction, essays, and journalism have appeared in the
New York Times
, the
Washington Post
,
The Paris Review
,
Zoetrope: All-Story
,
McSweeney's
,
Opium Magazine
, and elsewhere. Greenman lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

The Thin Man

Mel Gibson, an actor in southern California, was driving home from a midnight mass with his girlfriend, Oksana Grigorieva, bringing back a half-full bottle of wine and a cake. The sun had long since set, and the blackness of the sky was punctured by stars. It was Easter, and it was quiet. Mel Gibson rolled down the window. He heard the sound of birds outside, an uncommon sound, and uncommonly peaceful.

Mel Gibson drove on and thought that there was no better or happier day than the day he had just experienced. A year before, he had been married to another woman entirely, and Oksana Grigorieva had been in the arms of another man. Now, the two of them were united by love, and all seemed bright, joyous, and happy. He thought about his acting, and her singing, and thought that it was all going well, that the life they shared was all his heart desired—there was enough of everything and all of it good; he looked at his girlfriend, and she seemed to him lovely, kind, and gentle. He was delighted by the blackness of the sky, and the brilliance of the stars, and the purr of his expensive automobile, and the tweet of the birds. Most of all he was delighted by the cake, which was round and sweet, like the face of his girlfriend, and like the love that was between them. And when on the way home, they stopped into a seafood restaurant so that he could have a drink, he felt happier still. After they drank, they went walking, and Mel Gibson stopped in another bar for another drink, and then they went walking again.

“You know what they say. ‘A great day,'” he said. His voice was high and pinched: from excitement, he told himself. “It is great,” he said.

“Wait a moment, Oksana, and look at the stars. They dance in the night sky. They are rejoicing too!”

“They are not alive,” said Oksana Grigorieva.

“Don't contradict me!” exclaimed Mel Gibson. He heard his voice at high pitch again—now the excitement was mixed with a bit of anger—and breathed deeply to calm himself. “Diane Keaton once told me that there are people on all the planets, and on the sun, moon, and stars. She was not sure it was true, but she heard the news from Jack Nicholson, who . . .” He trailed off. “What is that over there, slumped behind that bus stop?”

Mel Gibson pointed. Oksana Grigorieva followed the direction of his finger, where she saw a gaunt, bearded man wearing what seemed to be a long white robe. He was leaning up against a large planter and running one hand along the underside of one of his pale, thin feet.

“It's Jesus!” Mel Gibson shouted to him. “Jesus Christ! He has risen!”

“Truly He is risen,” answered the gaunt man, without raising his head.

Mel Gibson approached the man. “What are you doing?”

“I fell ill. I could not go further.”

“What is wrong?”

“I have pain in every limb and a shortness of breath.”

“That is terrible,” Mel Gibson said. “It is a holiday, and you are here, weakened and in despair. You should go to a hotel or a hospital. What's the use of sitting here?”

The gaunt man raised his head, and with big, exhausted eyes, scanned Mel Gibson and Oksana Grigorieva.

“Did you go to church?” he asked.

“Yes.” Mel Gibson looked at Oksana Grigorieva. “In fact, we are coming from there. She's Russian. Eastern Orthodox.”

“Really?” the gaunt man said. “I am Russian as well. But I was not so lucky to be in a beautiful mass. The holiday found me on the sidewalk.

It was not God's will for me to reach a place of rest. I would go somewhere safe, but I don't have the strength. Good man, would you give a wayfarer some Easter cake to break his fast?”

“Easter cake?” Mel Gibson repeated, “As a matter of fact, I do have some cake. We got it for after the mass. Stay here. I'll be right back.”

Mel Gibson opened the back seat of his car and took out the cake, after which he fumbled quickly in his pockets and glared at Oksana Grigorieva. “A little help?” he said. “Will you get a goddamned knife? I don't want to just grab a hunk of cake.”

“No knife,” Oksana Grigorieva said, shrugging.

Mel Gibson cleared his throat. He could feel a surge within him—excitement again, or possibly anger. He was about to speak to Oksana Grigorieva when he heard the thin man's voice. “I might have something,” he said, groaning and rolling over on his side. “I have a bag here. Let me look.”

Oksana Grigorieva clucked her tongue and took one sharp step toward Mel Gibson. “No, no,” she said. “I won't let you slice up the Easter cake this way. Let's get back to the house and break the fast there.”

She took another step and grabbed the cake out of Mel Gibson's hands.

“This isn't a meatloaf of a sheet of brownies,” she said. “It's a holy Easter cake. And it's a sin to cut it the wrong way, at the wrong time.”

“A sin?” Mel Gibson said. “Well, it's also a sin to be a f . . . ” He trailed off. The thin man was right there before him, stretched out on the ground, and Mel Gibson was chastened. “Let's go,” he said tersely, after which he spoke under his breath to the thin man: “The lady forbids the cake. She forbids it. Goodbye, then, and good luck on your journey!”

Mel Gibson got back in the car, turned the ignition, and the engine roared to life. Oksana Grigorieva was still grumbling that cutting the Easter cake before reaching home was a sin. When they had gone two blocks, Mel Gibson pulled over and craned his neck backward. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Can you believe that? How can that happen? What a goddamned sin. What a shame. We didn't give him any Easter cake, Oksana, and we should have. What kind of person . . .” He trailed off again. Stars still shone in the dark setting of the sky, and birdsong came through the windows, but Mel Gibson barely noticed. He remained silent all the way home, thinking and keeping his eyes fixed on the dashboard of his expensive automobile. For some unknown reason he felt overcome by depression, and not a trace of the holiday gladness was left in his heart. When he had arrived home and said, “Christ is risen” to his house staff, he grew cheerful again, but when he had sat down to break the fast and had taken a bite from his piece of Easter cake, he sighed heavily and looked over at Oksana Grigorieva. “It wasn't right,” he said. “Not right at all. Don't you see that?”

“I see a little girl who is supposed to be my husband,” said Oksana Grigorieva, frowning. “You're going to cry like a baby because you couldn't give away your precious cake? Now that it is cut and lying on the table, go: give it to him. Do you suppose I care?”

Mel Gibson tried to speak calmly, but a hotness leapt into his tone.

“Shut up,” he said. “We should have given the man some. He was on the street, without a home, not well in any way.”

Mel Gibson drank half a glass of wine, and neither ate nor drank anything more. He had no appetite, the wine seemed to choke him, and he felt depressed again. After breaking their fast, he and Oksana Grigorieva lay down to sleep. When Oksana Grigorieva woke two hours later, Mel Gibson was standing by the window, looking into the yard.

“What the hell?” she said.

“I can't sleep,” he said. “It just makes me mad. We were unkind, you and I.”

“One-track mind,” she said. “If even that.”

“Don't you interrupt me,” Mel Gibson said. “I'm warning you. We don't know a thing about the man. He could have been a prophet, and we treated him as though he were a pig. A sick man like that is a test of the health of our spirit. We ought to have brought him here and fed him, and we did not even give him a morsel of bread.”

“I explained it to you. It's like you never listen. I wasn't about to ruin the Easter cake. You would have cut it by the bus stop and made a mockery of all that is holy?”

Without saying anything to Oksana Grigorieva, Mel Gibson went into the kitchen, wrapped a piece of cake up in a napkin, together with half a dozen eggs, and went to the room where the maid and cook, who were husband and wife, slept.

“Louis, wake up,” he said to the cook. “Take the Mercedes, or the Volkswagen, and go back up to Grand Avenue. Around Fifth Street you'll see a sick man by a bus stop. Give him this. Maybe he's still there.”

After waiting for Louis for about forty-five minutes, Mel Gibson could bear it no longer, so he went out and hopped into the BMW. On San Pedro, he ran into Louis. “Did you see the man?” Mel Gibson said.

“No,” Louis said. “Can't find him anywhere.”

“God damn it,” Mel Gibson said. He got out of his car, took the bundle from Louis, and walked the rest of the way. A few doorways down from where he had left the man, he saw some other beggars. “Have you seen a sick man?” he said. “Thin and pale, in a white robe?”

“There was an old woman collecting cans,” said one elderly beggar.

“There was a crazy guy who said he was riding a horse. But no one else.”

Mel Gibson got home just before dawn.

“I can't get that man out of my head,” he said to Oksana Grigorieva.

“He gives me no peace. I keep thinking: what if God meant to try us, and sent some saint or angel in the form of a beggar?”

“Holy living crap,” cried Oksana. “Can you talk about anything else?”

“You are not kind,” said Mel Gibson, looking into his girlfriend's face. “There are kind women, and there are bi...” He stopped himself.

Once again he remembered the thin man, stretched out by the bus stop, imploring him for a slice of Easter cake, and once again it restrained him.

“I may be unkind,” cried Oksana Grigorieva, “but I am not going to give away the holy Easter cake to every drunken man on the street.”

“He wasn't drunk!”

“He was drunk!”

At this, Mel Gibson lost his temper entirely. He got up from the table, clenched his fists at his sides, and began to reproach Oksana Grigorieva. “F*** off,” he said. “F***ing idiot! F***ing fool! I don't love you any longer.”

Oksana Grigorieva answered in kind, which only made Mel Gibson angrier. “I hope that you f***ing die!” he shouted at her. “I am going to lock you in this f***ing house and then burn the f***ing place down, but not before you blow me!” Mel Gibson went outside and walked around in the yard for a half-hour or so, picturing his wife's face, which now seemed spiteful and ugly. And as though to torment him the thin man haunted his brain, and Mel Gibson seemed to see now his sick eyes, now his long pale feet.

“F*** her,” he muttered. “We were unkind to the man.”

He was overcome by an insufferable depression such as he had never felt before. He kicked a tree as hard as he could, and then another tree. Then, he went back inside and drank. Oksana Grigorieva was in the bedroom, and when she emerged he greeted her with another round of invective, shoring at her that she looked ridiculous with her “f***ing fake tits” and that she deserved to “have a bunch of f***ing beggars run a train” on her. A punch was thrown. Mel Gibson brandished a weapon. On the morning of Easter Monday, he drank some more to sober himself, and got drunk again.

And with that his downfall began.

His career dried up; the cars disappeared one by one from the garage; Mel Gibson was more and more often drunk; debts mounted; he felt an aversion to Oksana Grigorieva. Mel Gibson put down all his misfortunes to the fact that he had an unkind woman, and above all, that God was angry with him on account of the thin man.

Oksana Grigorieva saw their ruin, but who was to blame for it she did not understand.