Remembrance (41 page)

43

A week later Vasili came out of the hospital, and he appeared to be almost angelic. They led a quiet life, stayed home much of the time, he was kind and thoughtful and loving with Vanessa. It was as though in his last rash act of self-indulgence he had finally seen the light. He explained to Serena that he first tried heroin ten years earlier, as a kind of lark, to see what it was, and within weeks he had got hooked. Andreas had ultimately arrived from Athens, seen the condition he was in, and put him immediately in a clinic to clean up. After that, he had stayed away from it for a year and then someone had offered it to him at a party, and he had fallen off the wagon again. For the next five years he had been on and off it, and then he had stayed totally clean until he met his last wife. Shortly after their marriage he had discovered that she used it—”chipped,” he called it—and she had wanted him to use heroin with her, so she “didn't feel so lonely,” she had told him pouting, and stupidly he had tried it again. Their relationship had apparently been a catastrophe of using dope together, and in the end she had died. That had sobered him again, until now he had tried it again. But this time he was certain that it was the last. Serena, however, found it discouraging to learn that he had been in and out of the hospital to clean up so many times.

“Why didn't you tell me?” She had looked at him sadly, feeling as though she had been cheated.

“How do you tell someone that? ‘I have been a heroin addict.’ Do you know how that sounds?”

“But how do you think I felt when I found out, Vasili?” Her eyes showed him how great was her pain. “How could you think I wouldn't know?” The tears began to flow again then.

“I didn't think I'd get hooked again.”

She closed her eyes and lay back among her pillows.

“Serena, don't … darling, don't worry.”

“How can I not?” She looked at him with anguish. “How do I know you won't start again?” She didn't trust him now. She didn't trust anything about his life.

He held up a hand solemnly. “I swear it.”

For the next five months he was as good as his word. He was absolutely exemplary and he spoiled Serena rotten, doing everything he could to make up to her the pain he had caused her and to assuage her fears about his using again. He was thrilled about the baby, told everyone he knew, talked endlessly to his friends, his clients, his models, everyone knew about the baby, and of course he called his brother Andreas first of all. Andreas had sent them the biggest teddy bear Serena had ever seen, and it already sat in what would later be the baby's bedroom. He sent Vanessa an antique bride doll at the same time.

They were days of tenderness and gentle loving between Vasili and Serena. The boyish charm he had had in the beginning emerged again, and they spent long hours going for walks hand in hand. He took her to Paris twice, they spent Vanessa's Easter holiday in Athens, with Andreas and his wife and children, and then Vasili and Serena stopped in Venice on their way home, and she showed him her grandmother's house and all her favorite places. They had a wonderful time, and she thought that she had never been happier when they came home. The baby wasn't due until the first of August, and in early June Serena settled down to do the baby's room. She had bought beautiful little quilts and some wonderful old children's paintings of storybook characters in watercolors and oils. She herself was going to paint a mural, and Vanessa had been giving up dolls and stuffed animals, anticipating that she'd have a real doll soon. As June drew to an end she was excited about the baby. Serena was eight months pregnant, and it seemed incredible that the time was almost here. Vanessa had been invited to cruise the Greek Islands with Andreas and his family, but she wanted to stay near her mother to see the baby, and she still felt uneasy about going away alone. She didn't want to leave Serena, not even to visit Teddy, who had offered her a vacation in the States with him. “After the baby comes” was her answer to everyone, and Serena laughed when Vasili said the same thing to all invitations.

The pregnancy had been surprisingly easy, and the only thing that worried her now was that the same thing might happen with this baby as had happened with Vanessa, and if she started to give birth at home, she knew that Vasili didn't have Teddy's cool head. He was already a nervous wreck at the prospect, and every time she moved in bed, he leaped up, his black eyes starting, a look of shock on his face. “Is it now? Is it now?”

“No, silly, go back to sleep.” Serena would smile at him, and she lay in bed, thinking of their baby and the years ahead. Everything was peaceful between them and the episode of his heroin use seemed like a distant nightmare now, until one day in the first week of July Vasili didn't come home at night. At first she thought that something awful had happened, like a car accident perhaps, and then as the hours ticked by she began to wonder if it was all happening again. She was racked by terror and anger as she waited up for him until four thirty in the morning, and at five o'clock she heard him come up the front steps. The door slammed soundly behind him, and on bare feet she tiptoed down the front stairs, trembling, with the baby seeming to leap inside her. She was afraid of what she would see, but she had to see it and know if he was using drugs again. All the old terrors had started again, in only one night.

As she stood halfway down the stairs and he stood in the front hallway, his eyes met hers, and he attempted a false bravado, with an enormous movie-star smile.

She could see instantly from the way he looked that he was high on something, and he looked nervous and foolish as he raced toward her, trying to pretend that there was nothing extraordinary about coming in at 5 A.M.

“Hello, darling, how's the baby?” His voice sounded hoarse and she had noticed that during his drug use before Christmas too. He always sounded different when he used heroin, and she couldn't bear to think now that he had done it again. She didn't answer him, she just stared at him, and he ran up the stairs and tried to give her a kiss. But she shrank from him in horror, knowing full well what he had done.

“Where were you?” It was a stupid question and she knew it. The point wasn't where he had been, but what he had done. And without waiting for an answer, she turned on her heel and walked up the stairs as quickly as she could. She felt as though at any minute she might have the baby. She felt so tense and she was having so many contractions from her long night awake that she wasn't sure if she was in labor or just feeling ill.

“Don't be so goddamn square,” he shouted at her as she reached their bedroom, and she turned to him with a look of fury.

“Be quiet or you'll wake Vanessa.” But it wasn't anger she felt so much as terror and despair. Vasili's private demon had entered their life again.

“To hell with Vanessa, she's a little bitch anyway.” But at the very sound of the words Serena lunged toward him. With a rapidly flailing hand she attempted to slap him, but he caught her wrist first and flung her backward against the wall. She stumbled as she fell, and she groaned as she reached the floor, but more than hurt, she was stunned. He stood over her, and when she looked up at him with tears in her eyes, she saw that his eyes had the mad nervous gleam they had had before when he used heroin. It was like reliving the same nightmare and she felt as though she couldn't bear it. She felt a rage rise up within her that was almost beyond control.

“You make me sick!” She rose to her feet, with every inch of her body trembling, and she reached back as though to slap him again, and this time he beat her to it. He caught her across the face with the back of his hand and sent her reeling. She came crashing to the bedroom floor, and it was at this moment that Vanessa came running in. “Go back to your room!” Serena said it quickly, not wanting the child involved, but before Vanessa could leave, Vasili pushed her, and she landed in a heap beside Serena.

“There, two whimpering women. You belong with each other.” He turned away and then spat over his shoulder. “Fools!”

Serena whispered to the child to go back to her room, but Vanessa refused, with a look of panic in her eyes. “He'll hurt you.”

“No, he won't.” She was afraid he would too, but she didn't want Vanessa to see it.

“Yes, he will.” Vanessa began to sob and clutch at her mother.

“Darling, please.” Carefully she stood up and led the child to her room, and it was half an hour before she returned to Vasili. He was sitting in a chair, his head on his chest, a cigarette burnt out in his fingers.

“What?” He picked his head up as though she had just spoken and squinted in her direction. “I heard you.”

“I didn't say a damn thing.” She closed the door softly behind her, hating him with every ounce of her soul. “But I'm about to. I just want to let you know now, you son of a bitch, that when you come to tomorrow morning, I'm going to my lawyer, and then I'm going back to the States.”

“And what will that prove? Who will support your baby?”

“I will.”

There was something evil and vicious about him when he used drugs, and as Serena saw him that way she began to hate him. It was as though it canceled out all the good she had seen in him, all the hopes, all the dreams. All she wanted to do was run away. She began to leave the room then, but even in his seemingly sleepy state he suddenly sprang from his chair and leaped toward her.

He grabbed her arm and pulled her toward the bed and then he pushed her onto it. “Go to bed.”

“I don't want to sleep here.” She was shaking but trying not to show it. And the contractions were so fierce that she could barely stand up straight. And then, in spite of herself, she began to try and pull away from him. “I don't want to be near you.”

“Why not? Do I disgust you?” The evil eyes gleamed at her.

“Let me go. You're hurting my arm.”

“That isn't all I'll hurt if you don't start behaving.”

“What in hell does that mean?” She knew better than to argue with him when he'd been using and yet she couldn't stop. She wanted to shake him. “Do you expect me to take this and stick by you? Well, I won't, damn you. You can go to hell. I'm getting out of here in the morning.”

“Are you?” He took a step toward her again. “Are you?” She trembled uncontrollably as he stood over her, and then, as though the effort had been too much, she lay back on the bed and began sobbing. She cried for over an hour and he didn't come near her, and when her tears were spent, she fell asleep on the bed, and when she awoke, it was eleven o'clock and he was still snoring. She tiptoed out of the room to go and find Vanessa, but Marianne had taken her for a walk, and Serena walked around the house slowly. She knew that she had to leave, that she had to get Vanessa out before things got too far out of hand again, and she had to go for the sake of the baby, yet she felt a strange panic at the thought of going. Maybe he was right. Who would help her? Where would she go? She couldn't expect Teddy to help her with this baby. And there was no one else left. She felt trapped as she sat at the foot of the stairs, and didn't hear him approach her. She only felt the touch of his hand on her shoulder and she leaped off the step with a little scream. As she turned to face him she saw his ravaged face. This time the damage of the drug was apparent after only hours. The time before it had taken weeks to look as bad as he did now. He already looked haggard and ferret-faced and seedy.

“Are you all right?” The wan face wore an expression of terror. She nodded, looking at him with dismay, and was almost unable to keep from crying. He lowered his voice. “Did I hurt you?”

“No.” She spoke very softly. “But you terrified Vanessa.” It was as though she herself no longer existed, as though the only two people who mattered anymore were Vanessa and the unborn baby. For herself, suddenly she didn't care if he killed her. She just didn't want him to harm her children. And it all seemed so exhausting to defend them. She was at a time in her life when she needed someone to take care of her, and instead she was suddenly having to deal with this nightmare with him. “What are you going to do?” She stared at him with beaten eyes. He was no longer the man she knew. Already, in one night, he had vanished.

“I don't know. I can handle it myself this time. I've only used a few times.”

“A few times?” She looked shocked. She hadn't noticed, and she was surprised that he was being so honest. In Athens, the previous spring, when she and Andreas had once discussed it, he said that Vasili was never honest about using drugs once he started. So if he said “a few times,” how many did that mean? She looked at him in despair. “Why now?”

“How do I know?” He sounded irritable and nervous.

“Will you go into the hospital again?” She looked at him imploringly and felt her swollen belly begin to contract again.

“I don't need to this time.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know, dammit.” She was making him very nervous. “Why don't you go upstairs and rest?” She noticed then that he was wearing jeans and his shirt from the night before and shoes without socks.

“Are you going somewhere?”

“I have to pick up some film.”