The Cosmopolitans (18 page)

Katya raised her head. “Look at me. Do I look like I need help
keeping guys away?”

Yana looked, blinked, began reading again. “‘When the
hombres
de Kellogg
finally made good on their threat to burn down Yadira’s
house, she constructed a makeshift shelter in the woods. Now,
women of the village use the shelter as a refuge, and, from time to
time, a beauty salon.’ See?”

Katya thought: If you follow me to the airport, I’ll get myself
killed right there. She’d make a joke about a bomb.

Milla

As usual, Milla looked at herself in the mirror on the ceiling
of the Strausses’ elevator. Her face, yellow and angular in the dim
light, peered back from inside a black hood. Malcolm had chosen
her coat — he had said it made her look Russian, in a good way. She
failed again to look as though she lived where she lived.

Opening the door, she heard Jean laughing, as Jean laughed
only at Malcolm’s jokes. “Oh, oh, oh,” Jean said, from the ottoman,
and stopped when she saw Milla.

“Honey, you’re home,” Malcolm said, starting Jean up again. If
Jean hadn’t been there, Milla would have swooped down for a kiss.

“It’s early, isn’t it?” Jean said.

“No, I usually finish at, like, 5:30, 5:45.” Milla began sweating
inside her hood.

Jean opened her mouth wide. “I’m shocked.”

“Oh,” Milla said, in what she hoped what was a polite, interested
tone. She put her bag on the floor and started unbuttoning her coat.

“When I started out, I worked until ten, eleven, midnight. You
do what you have to when you’re supporting a family.”

“I do —” Milla began. Malcolm held his palm sideways, like
a Frisbee, and moved it down. That meant she should ease off, she
already sounded angry, and didn’t she know how that stressed him
out?

Milla yanked off her hood. “I actually brought some work
home.”

“Oh, well,” Jean said. “Malcolm, do you want a vitamin?”

“What do I need a vitamin for?” Malcolm frowned and flexed
his arm.

“This is a very special vitamin. Your uncle Jeffy swears by it.
And he’s a homo.”

“So I think I’ll go work,” Milla said. She went into their
bedroom and lay on their doll’s bed and wrote a letter to Baba Byata.
“
Malcolm’s parents feed me very well. Last night, I had dumplings,
a kind of Chinese pielmenyi, and a lot of carrots
.” Baba Byata was a
big believer in carrots. What else could she write? “
I told Malcolm’s
parents you said they were very culturniye people, and they were
really flattered
.” Milla had done nothing of the kind. (“
Culturniye
,
what?” she’d imagined Jean saying.)

She looked at herself in the green mirror that hung by the bed.
“We can’t, I’m a married woman now,” she mouthed to a disappointed
imaginary Julie.

She called Yana, who kept giggling, as someone else laughed in
the background.

From outside, she heard Jean greeting Bobby: “Why aren’t you
wearing your other scarf?” and then both of them asking Malcolm to
play the piano for them, and Malcolm agreeing, “I have to get back
to composing in a few minutes, though.” Somehow, Malcolm was
able to recreate Barbra Streisand’s rendition of the Shema Yisroel,
trills and all. He also, following a lengthy explanation, played them
a song he’d written. Tonight, for once, he was not meeting up with
friends, and his parents were so happy, so grateful, that they forgot
to tell Milla when dinner had arrived. She recognized the smell of
burnt broccoli — Chinese again — combed her hair, sat next to
Malcolm and was quiet as his parents talked about the divorce of
a famous author of thrillers featuring the Israeli Mossad (Milla had
never read him? Really?), currently being mishandled by a different
firm. Malcolm’s hand played piano on her leg, as it usually did when
he felt like fooling around.

After dinner, he said, “I’m sleepy, are you sleepy, Milly?”

“It’s only ten o’clock,” Bobby said. “You told me you’d look at
the napkin samples.”

“Bobby, you know what he means,” Jean said. She winked at
Milla and Malcolm, which froze them where they stood, hands
linked, for a few seconds after Jean had walked away.

In their bedroom, Malcolm said, “So.”

“So.” They sat side by side on the bed.

Malcolm put his arm around her shoulders. “I hope you’re not,
like racked with disappointment, that my parents only asked for my
opinion on the napkins. I’m totally going to represent both of us
when I choose between the little flowers and the medium flowers.”

“I know you’ll be bringing in the rabbi on this one, too.”

“And his minyan, in a minivan.” Malcolm flopped back on the
bed. “I feel like my head’s stuffed with all their minutiae. All the
songs I worked on today, they’re erased.” He flipped open the Stella
Adler Studio catalog he’d gotten a few days earlier. “I should just
do voiceovers.”

Milla lay down next to him. “Did you get a chance to look at
that apartment in Queens?”

The apartment was too far out, but Malcolm had met a guy named
Jelani, who loved all the same music as Malcolm. They’d grabbed
lunch and decided: the two of them would start a multiracial rap-
rock-funk band. Jelani was a quarter black, Malcolm was Jewish,
and they’d find a Latino guy to play drums and, with any kind of
luck, some kind of Asian for bass guitar. The last part was a joke. But
the point they were trying to make was serious. The name appeared
to Malcolm and Jelani halfway through Indian buffet: Multicult. It
mocked their grand ambitions of musical unity, at the same time as
it broadcasted those ambitions to the world, balls out. He’d been so
inspired, he’d written a new song:

All the coral mermaids broke off in my hands,

And the ocean issued its final demands,

And Landra’s gone searching for no-man’s land.

“Wait, Landra?” Milla said.

Instead of answering, Malcolm pulled her on top of him and
said romantic things any decent wife would have loved to hear. Her
breasts, her hair, her shoulders, her thighs, were all deemed more
than satisfactory. He had her stand so they could look at themselves
in the mirror, whispered, “We’ll have to get a bigger one.”

Roman

Roman knew some Russian girls, and their thing was to go into
Caldor and switch a price tag or two, buy a Sex Dollz tee shirt for
seven instead of fifteen dollars. To him, though, there was something
anti-Russian in that kind of half-theft.

He was in the book section, where hardly anyone ever went,
tucking a GED manual into the back of his jeans, when he spotted
Katya Molochnik with her mother.

“
Nu, vot,
” Mrs. Molochnik held up an orange volume. “Go,
You Girl: Eating Healthy, Getting in Shape, and Rocking the World.
Okey-dokey?”

Katya shrugged and said something Roman couldn’t make out.
She looked better than she had at the wedding — she was pretty
again, in a blurry, bleary way, which was also how she seemed to
look out at the book, her mother, the world she was supposed to
rock.

He wanted to go over, would have, if not for the books and
DVDs concealed on his person.
Had she ever been to the Ivy, in
Darien
? he would have asked.
A really hot club, you feel like you’re
in New York
. His aunt Alla had told him that Mrs. Molochnik was
getting Katya off drugs.

Katya shuffled her feet, looking down. “I was never…”
something else Roman couldn’t make out.

Mrs. Molochnik said something about eggs with tomatoes.

“Maybe just sleep,” Katya said.

“
Nu, Katyenok, ‘the sun will shine also on our lawn
.’” Mrs.
Molochnik put her arm around her. Katya shrugged it off.

All at once, Roman was so angry he couldn’t breathe. This girl
had what his mother had never had: a whole family to let her live in
their house, to worry about what she ate, all that and a bag of chips,
and she shrugged it off. All his mother had was him, but she didn’t,
really, not until he could bring her to the U.S. and set her up right,
and when would that be, idiot? He only had two hundred dollars
saved so far. He was supposed to have a house for her by now, a car.
At least he knew: that was how a child should treat a parent. Not
shrug her off.

He tried to breathe. Chillax. She’s cute, it’s not her fault.

He crouched down farther, pretended to look at the college
admissions guides. A guide for insiders, for homosexuals, for top
students, for girls, for Latinas, for jocks: all these students were
equidistant from him. None of them had his hustle, because none
of them needed it. Katya and her mother came to a compromise —
Stalina would buy the book, and Katya would try to eat at least one
egg. Their voices faded. Roman straightened up and went to the
men’s clothing section, hoping for a few packs of boxer shorts to
resell to the guys on his crew.

Osip

Stalina had many ideas about how to make Katya better. All of
them came to her in dreams, and she poked Osip awake and told
him, so that at least one of them would remember. “
Osya — castor
oil
,” “
Osya — a class in something practical
, “
Osya
—
White Sun
of the Desert, best comedy of any country, no?
” A week after Katya
had moved in, Osip bought a notebook. “
Osya —
sweaty yoga
” —
he’d scribble it down and fall back asleep, notebook on chest.