Russian Tattoo (12 page)

I am sitting in Millie's kitchen with Donald, telling him about Andy and Robert, asking him what I should do. I realize I have no one to talk to here but Donald, whom I have known for only several weeks. In a weird way, Donald is related to me, being Millie's former son-in-law. Back home, in addition to my mother, who was invariably there with string bags of unsought advice, I had my sister, always ready to share a lesson from her life, which was the enviable life of an actress, thirteen years longer than mine. In the most critical situations, such as Robert's proposal, I turned to my best friend, Nina, whom I met in my first-year university class. We were in Nina's two-room apartment, where she lived with her new husband, her parents, and her brother. She was pregnant, kneeling in the corner of the smaller room next to an armoire, measuring the space for a crib. “Don't be an idiot,” she said. “Do whatever you have to do to get the hell out of here.”

“What do
you
want to do?” asks Donald, turning the question around, as, I should've known, a psychotherapist would.

I want to be with Andy, but I don't want to hurt Robert.

I tell Donald what I am thinking, and he says I should do what I consider best for me. I didn't know it was so simple.

“Come and stay with us, if you like,” says Donald. “Until you figure out your next step.” He looks at me and nods several times, as if to confirm what he just said. “Bea and I would love to have you.”

This is the sweetest, kindest thing anyone has done for me since I arrived here, and I am about to start crying. I think of the sun streaming through my Leningrad kitchen window, pouring gold on the oilcloth with a sunflower print, on our cupboard and our old stove and on all those cabbage and egg
pirozhki
my mother baked for my birthday just before I left
.

“Thank you, former brother-in-law,” I whimper through sniffles and hug Donald. Or rather he hugs me with his huge, Nordic arms.

Eighteen

R
obert is back from Texas, and he doesn't seem at all relieved that I left. He isn't behaving like the Robert I know, the cerebral, logical Robert who shipped me off to his mother in New Jersey. He is suddenly someone different, someone who speaks with the high, angry notes of my sister's stage voice. Looking despondent, he paces around the living room, refusing to believe what I am telling him. He is suddenly very human, and this makes me feel guilty and ungrateful.

“I can't believe this,” he says, throwing up his arms in bewilderment. “I just can't believe it. When did all this happen?”

A long time ago, I want to tell him, but I don't. I stand by the side of the couch, against the wall of Millie's living room, silent, out of his path.

“So let me get this straight: you're here for six weeks, at my mother's house, and you meet someone else? You jump into someone else's arms? Is that what you're telling me? Someone so”—he pauses, searching for a word—“so ordinary.”

Would it have been better if I'd jumped into the arms of someone Robert considers above ordinary? His roommate, Sagar, perhaps, who also solves cosmic problems, or maybe Robert's friend the pianist whose concert we drove to across the endless flatness of Texas?

“You have so much going for you. You're smart. Smarter than Karen,” says Robert, groping for reasons to demonstrate why, if I needed to jump into someone's arms, they shouldn't have been Andy's. He pauses after he says this because it's the first time Karen's name has been spoken since last December, when we were walking toward our Leningrad apartment, Robert explaining the concept of open marriage to me.

My being smarter than Karen doesn't make things better. I know Robert means it as a compliment, but it only reminds me of the Karen ghost I used to see in our Texas bedroom, silently peering at us from the corner. And is it really an achievement to trump your husband's girlfriend in intelligence?

“You're speaking from your loins,” accuses Robert. “Loins,” he repeats, which makes me think of Nabokov's
Lolita
. Light of my life, fire of my loins—lines that were banned in Russia. We are speaking all in English now; Robert has no time or inclination to turn Russian case endings over in his brain. This conversation is all too visceral to be conducted in a foreign language, it occurs to me, which is ironic since I'm speaking in English.

“It's never been a real marriage,” I say. “We didn't know each other. We still don't. You married me to help me escape my mother,” I say, fumbling for a summary that will usher in some closure. “And I'm grateful for what you did for me. I really am.”

“Fuck your gratitude,” snarls Robert. “Don't tell me why I fucking married you. I flew to that country of yours three times. My mother thought I was out of my mind. Karen almost left me. Did you know that? I spent five thousand dollars to bring you here. How much did this other guy spend to get you out of Russia?”

It never occurred to me to calculate how much I might owe Robert, but maybe I should have. It was a mystery to me how much a round-trip ticket from New York to Leningrad could cost, in American dollars. I'd never known anyone who left Russia and then came back. I was even naïve enough to dream—after a glance at a map confirmed that the route to America lay over Europe—about stopping in Paris and visiting the Louvre. Could I change planes in Paris? I asked Robert in a letter. It is on the way to the United States. Maybe I could stay there for a day or two instead of spending six hours in the airport at Shannon. Paris, I wrote, as if I had a right to commit the magic word to paper, a word that shared space with Tolstoy's ball gowns and royal fox hunts with packs of borzoi. A city that was clearly unreachable, suspended in air over real life, like a mirage. Now I am glad Robert said no, or I would have cost him even more.

But aside from my gratitude and my cost, aside from my remorse at watching the new, visibly shaken Robert, there is something else bubbling inside me, something I haven't been able to verbalize until now.

“I knew nothing when I came here,” I say. “I was clueless. I desperately needed someone to explain all this to me. I'd never seen a hamburger before. When I first went to the supermarket I cried because I had no idea what was in front of me. I felt like a three-year-old. People stared at me like I was a drunk crusted in vomit hobbling down the street. And you never helped me. You worked, you read, you practiced music. You never ever helped me.” These words are a surprise as they stream out of my mouth, rising like a vapor from the dark pool on the bottom of my heart. “You were always involved with your teaching, with your violin, with Karen.” I say her name for the first time, wrapping my mouth around the sound of it. “You lost interest in me. You were like a child and I was your new toy, and when you saw that your toy was damaged, when you saw I didn't know how to do the simplest thing here, you rejected me. You sent me back to your mother's house.”

Robert stops pacing and looks at me with disbelief. “I sent you here because you were unhappy in Texas,” he says. “I didn't know what else to do with you.”

“You sent me away. You didn't have time for me. You abandoned me,” I say, purging the toxic words from the murk inside me. Their sounds explode in my mouth and make the words swell with power as I release them. It feels good to unlock them, to validate their meaning as they enter the air between us. “You sent me away because you just can't live with another person.”

“But we talked about this,” says Robert with irritation, only hearing what he wants to, letting the rest stream past his ears. “You agreed, for god's sake.”

“How could I not have agreed? You knew where I lived, behind bars. You've been to Russia, you know what it's like. Do you remember what it's like? Not a place of options. I had to agree. I had no choice.”

For a few moments, Robert stops pacing and stands there, thinking. “Listen, why don't you come back with me to Texas?” he offers. “I can get you a teaching assistantship at the Slavic Department. I can get you into graduate school, I promise. We'll have time to talk. If this is serious, this . . . thing, you'll feel the same way in June,” he says, and I know this insight comes straight from Millie. Millie, who I felt had nudged me toward Andy to help her son and who now, lamenting Robert's anguish, is doing all she can to get us back together.

I can't help but think about Natasha from
War and Peace
. She is sixteen, and her fiancé, whom she meets at that first debutante ball, an older Prince Bolkonsky, asks her to put off their wedding for one year, a requirement erected by his authoritarian father. “Go travel abroad,” says the father, peering at his son with a mocking smile, “and then, if this love, this passion, whatever it is, is so great, then you can get married.” The old man knows life much better than his son, and during that year, needless to say, terrible things happen and Natasha never marries the prince.

I can't imagine falling into a trap straight out of Tolstoy, waiting a year to seek a miraculous cure for a crippled marriage. I can't imagine losing Andy.

“Look. You told me once you wanted to go to Paris.” Robert says this with a clipped, staccato rhythm, a desperation flashing around the edges of his voice. “I'll get tickets in the spring and we'll go. Maybe we just need to get away.”

The word
Paris
enters my mind but doesn't settle there. It is no longer about Paris, or graduate school, or even Karen. I know I must leave this marriage the same way I knew I had to leave my mother and my country. The same way I made the choice almost a year ago and left the ledge of my courtyard sandbox. I understand this, but the knowledge doesn't make me feel less guilty. I wish this Robert were the old, rational Robert, immune to anguish and desperation.

“In August I would've been ecstatic about Paris,” I say. “But not now.”

“Please think about it,” Robert insists. “Think about what I'm saying. Things really aren't that bad. Just consider it, that's all I'm asking.”

I don't say anything, and he makes an exhaling sound, raking his fingers through his hair. “It's really hard to understand you,” he says, anger in his voice. “You wanted to teach. You wanted to go to Paris. I'm offering you everything you wanted.”

Robert turns around, takes off his glasses, and starts wiping them with his shirttail, as if everything at this moment depended on the clarity of his vision. “You are a fraud,” he says, without looking at me. “An impostor, a person I don't even know. Maybe someone I never knew.”

Then he returns to striding back and forth, taking injured, baffled steps, every few moments coming to a wall. Where was this fragile gait before and why didn't I see it? I watch him, flattening myself against a window frame, and guilt curdles my heart. The guilt as dark as my dacha well, as sour as rancid milk.

“I'm sorry,” I say, “but it's time for me to leave,” as Robert makes a roaring noise and drives his fist into the wall.

P
ART 2

Andy

Nineteen

I
am staring into a box with things I brought from Russia, things that became irrelevant the moment I disembarked at Washington Dulles Airport less than a year ago: my wedding dress made from sparkly polyester the color of lilac, a scratchy wool shawl with red roses, a pocketbook I bought on Nevsky Prospekt in a store called Hunting and Fishing. It hung on the wall next to rifles and spinning rods, intended to be a hunting bag to hold small game, and I bought it because it was made from real leather and had a fringe on the flap that looked more fashionable at the time than any of the three types of hideous plastic handbags our department stores had to offer.

I never opened the box during my first five months in this country. The contents seemed alien and dated, clearly out of place in the sterile strangeness of Texas. I first dared take off the cardboard lid after unpacking my Russian suitcase in North Bergen, New Jersey, when Andy asked to see what was inside. His curiosity made me happy, even giddier than I'd been the past few weeks since I moved into his apartment, so the reminders of my Leningrad life didn't look as pitiful as they would have back in Austin. Yet when I unfolded my wedding dress, it drooped over my arm, staticky and wrinkled. The roses on the shawl seemed to have faded. But the leather fringe on the hunting bag still swayed in rugged elegance as I lifted it out of the box and hung it over my shoulder. The mirror on the wall reflected an image I could live with, unlike those reflections in Austin mirrors I generally hated: a bewildered girl dressed in silly clothes. My Leningrad hunting pocketbook oddly fit into the North Bergen interior, matching a sweater Andy had bought for me at a department store called Bamberger's.

I needed clothes to go to work. A couple of weeks earlier, I had found a job in New York, near Times Square, on Forty-Second Street.

“You, on Forty-Second Street?” our next-door neighbor repeated incredulously and laughed a short, uncomfortable laugh.

Five mornings a week I take a bus that stops next to our building and half an hour later arrive at Port Authority, which spews crowds of commuters into the seedy tunnel of Forty-Second Street. Neon girls in first-floor windows point to the eerie darkness behind open doors as I walk past men who stand on the sidewalk and mutter under their breath, trying to entice passersby into the underworld of capitalist ills that
Pravda
has warned us about. I walk past the twenty-five-cent peep shows, past the twinkling promise of live nude girls behind shabby entrances, past the lit XXXs, competing with each other in size, to a sign on the door that reads
scs business and technical institute
. I am a teacher now. I teach English as a second language to immigrants fresh from Soviet Russia, thirty hours a week.

I distribute mimeographed copies of dialogues to my class of twenty-five students, mostly women, mostly from small towns south of Moscow, places I would never have thought of visiting when I lived in Russia, places where Soviet citizens were supposed to be happily building a bright communist future instead of emigrating to the West. They come to class on the
subvey
all the way from Far Rockaway, trying to learn enough English to find employment when they graduate six months later. SCS Business and Technical Institute offers English classes complete with phone labs, promising office jobs to all its graduates.

Phone lab sessions make me nervous. Once a week we all go to a big room with a black phone proudly sitting on every desk as if this were a KGB listening center where we are supposed to play agents. I know I have to train my students to be receptionists, but what right do I have to head this effort if this is the job I failed to get in Texas? “IBM. May I help you?” reads the mimeographed page of my script. “IBM. May I help you” is what my students memorize, what Valya from Pinsk and Klava from Chernovtsy diligently recite into the telephones that look completely real. They do well on this part: they answer the phone without the sheepishness I would bring to the task. They confidently hold the receiver and enunciate the question into the nonexisting line.

It is the rest of the conversation that gets convoluted: What do you say to the callers who foolishly take you up on the offer of helping them? What do you do when you cannot decipher their words distorted by static, when you know you wouldn't be able to make out what they say even if the lines were perfectly clear? It occurs to me that this phone lab is another instance of
vranyo
, where we all pretend that if we ask the May I help you question with the assertiveness required in the manual, the subsequent words from the other end of the line will miraculously flow into our ears, as transparent and accessible as water from the tap.

“Make up scenarios for professional office dialogues,” said the program director, who showed me the lab, and I wrack my brain in a futile search for possible business conversations, trying to imagine what would compel these textbook customers to call an imaginary IBM office manned by ex-Soviets from the end of the
subvey
line.

I am as afraid of the director as I am terrified of answering the phones. Her name is Bonita Binder, and her straight spine and thin frame convey the same inflexibility that is locked in the repeating consonants of her name. She brandishes work sheets and mimeographed exercises as she strides down the halls, the most recent one about the weather.
Hot, humid, freezing, windy
are the adjectives leading the vocabulary list for the students to memorize, followed by the Celsius to Fahrenheit conversion formula, which I commit to memory before distributing the copies. The last page contains a list of idiomatic expressions I've never heard before. “A woman is as changeable as the weather,” read my students, a sentence followed by an instruction to create situations that would illustrate the point. The women in my class giggle and oblige with little misogynistic stories from their fresh Soviet past. Valya from Pinsk, who was an engineer in her Russian life, tells us how her office, eighty percent female, could never fulfill their quarterly plan because her colleagues spent hefty chunks of their workday queuing up for groceries, constantly changing their minds about which line to join. “First she want to stand for bologna,” says Valya, slicing the air with the heel of her palm, “then she decide she need butter. More changeable than weather, that girl.” Valya pauses and looks at my handout with Bonita's idioms. “Though weather in Pinsk was bad,” she concludes.

During her class visits and phone lab demonstrations, Bonita stands erect on her sturdy feet tucked into black flats, refusing to give me a smile of reassurance, remaining as serious and stern as she thinks the SCS Business and Technical Institute ought to be. She would fit well, I think, into the cheerless offices of the Leningrad Young Communist League, where I had to surrender my membership card to be entombed into the safe in case I ever decided to return.

At home I march around the kitchen in my slippers, impersonating the SCS director, driving the May-I-help-you offer into our phone receiver with as much authority as I can muster. Andy laughs and scoops me into his arms, saying that Bonita Binder is nothing but a control freak. I don't know what that means, but his embrace feels tight and warm, giving me hope that the threat of being a receptionist no longer looms over my head, that teaching at SCS is only the first step in the direction of the path to college teaching and my impersonation of Bonita Binder will soon become as irrelevant as the wrinkled lilac wedding dress I pulled out of my Leningrad box.

I get a letter from home, four pages of my mother's worried handwriting, urging me to snap out of this love delusion, think hard, and go back to Robert, my marriage to whom was decreed by the Leningrad Bureau of Civil Acts and stamped into my passport, with my whole family as witnesses. I can see her and Marina whispering late at night, after my sister comes home from her evening performance, the television glowing with the late
News from the Fields
and then going blank when all the programs end at midnight. They are alone in the apartment, so why are they whispering?—yet this is the picture I hold in my mind, the two of them huddled on my mother's bed, muttering and sighing.

I write back—two pages about Andy and our apartment overlooking a park—words that I know will not persuade my mother. I enclose a photograph of Andy and his Datsun. I also put in a picture of me grinning on the couch with a glass of Amaretto, on a tasting spree of all the liqueurs behind the glass in our living room cabinet. I know my mother's logic: if I didn't have enough food, she will reason, I wouldn't be lounging on a divan with a silly smile, happily downing drinks. I write about my first professional job teaching English to Russians—just as I did in Leningrad!—­and about my lunches at Popeyes on Forty-Second Street across from my school. Almost every afternoon, I walk through the inviting smell of hot grease and order chicken legs and wings, all extra-crispy, all fried in deep vats of oil no one in my country has ever seen.

“If you tasted this chicken,” I write, “you'd swallow your tongues,” a Russian idiom my mother likes to use when her
kotlety
turn out especially succulent, another brick of evidence in support of my absent deprivation. “We're going to send out a résumé and look for a college teaching position for me,” I write, translating what Andy said recently. There is no word—or concept—of a résumé in Russian, so I replace it with the word
letter
. “We,” I write—the same pronoun widely used back home—although this American
we
is altogether different. It is a trim, individual
we
with space for two people only, Andy and me, as opposed to the bulky Soviet
we,
big enough for our apartment neighbors, our work collectives, Aunt Polya from our nursery school kitchen and Aunt Lusya with our middle school mop, and other unspecified aunts and uncles who yelled, pontificated, and harangued, all melding into one noisy crowd that passed under our windows on May Day with banners, balloons, and fake carnations swaying on wire stems.

Every few weeks or so our phone rings in the middle of the night. When Andy wakes and fumbles for the receiver, there is silence on the other end, nothing but faint static in the ether. I can imagine Robert crouched over the phone on his Texas mattress, with darkness behind the windows buttressing his resolve, egging him on in his resentment.

The glowing hands of the clock on our bedside table show 2:15. I imagine Robert on the other end of the line, reaching out to me through the blackness, trying to connect, all too late. My mother's saying pops into my head, one of those slivers of wisdom that always rhyme in Russian, that I always failed to learn: “We don't value what we have, then cry when we lose it.”

Or maybe these early morning calls are about something completely different and Robert isn't trying to connect. Maybe he simply wants to shame me for what I've done, to make sure my moral plunge to the lower depths—worthy of Maxim Gorky's sharp proletarian pen—stares me in the face. Or maybe it isn't Robert at all.

Andy's breathing is even and calm again, the breathing of a sleeping man. The clock ticks, nudging its hands toward 3:00. Warm in my new bed, I lie awake in the dark, happy to be next to Andy, awash in my thanklessness and guilt.