The Cosmopolitans (37 page)

No one was home, the key was in the mezuzah: signs that he
was doing what was right.

Upstairs, he took off his socks, stood in the bath, opened the
faucet. Then he remembered the Molochniks’ vodka and got out,
splashing the tiles with his bare feet. He dried the floor with a bit of
toilet paper: she’d never be able to say he never cleaned up.

He hefted the bottle upstairs and emptied the last of Chino’s K
crystals into it. Chino would understand. Roman had never liked the
taste of vodka, but had been able to conceal this fact, and now would
carry it to his grave.

He folded his Masta Killa tee shirt. Maybe Izzy would want it
when he grew up. He put his underwear in the trash (and here he
heard himself speaking, as if to an audience, voice reverberating, “
A
man should not leave his dirty underwear behind.
”)

He found Louisiana at the bottom of the geographical shower
curtain and touched his finger to the green finger of land that poked
from it. If only he could help. He wished them all well. What a thing:
to lie down in water. Water made a bed for you, water received you
when no one else would. The drain tried to take all the water but
there was too much.

He held the vodka above his head and poured it into his mouth,
gangster style. After a while, his mother’s body floated towards
him, bloated, scarred. Roman covered himself and shifted his legs
to make room.

Osip

In the car going home from the supermarket, Osip and Katya
listened to people asking for water on the radio. It felt strange to be
driving in a car filled with food.

The telephone rang. “
Yanushka,
” Osip said. “
Nu, how are
you?
”

But Yana wanted to speak in English, her language of argument,
about New Orleans. “This is your Bush,” she said as he steered one-
handed.

“Bush didn’t build —” he had to switch to Russian — “
the
levees, that’s engineers.
”

“Tell me one difference between the Bush administration and
the Pakistani army.” The Pakistani army? Osip ran a red light, cars
honked, Yana said, “Are you in your car? Drive to D.C. and protest.”
She finally said goodbye; she had other people she had to call.

“You should have just hung up,” Katya said. He wondered about
her: how easily, once she’d decided a person was not worthwhile,
she carried out that decision. Even in her leaving Roman, which had
been, without question, the right choice, Osip had been surprised by
her lack of hesitation, how she’d mailed back the CDs Roman sent
without bothering to listen even once.

They parked and Katya started for the house, carrying six
bags of groceries. “Hey,” he said, squeezing her arm, “who has the
muscles?” She would go into the house and unload like a robot, take
exactly ten minutes for lunch, and return to caulking the downstairs
bathroom. Periodically, she would walk through the kitchen, and he
would feel her eyes as he tried to relax with the paper, and then they
would caulk together through the afternoon.

It was dark inside, so Stalina had not yet returned from Lord
& Taylor, which had been her second home since Katya began her
improvements. It sounded like she’d left the radio on — soft static.
He flipped the light switch, but it only flickered, and above it, the
ceiling sagged, dripped steadily from many small points, the way he
had thought a rain cloud worked when he was little. “Katya —” he
turned to tell her to get out of the house, but she was already running
upstairs.

He dropped his bags and followed, feet sinking into the swamp
of the carpet. Water pulsed from the bottom of the bathroom door.
“Locked,” Katya said.

Osip pushed her behind him, shouldered the door once, twice —
metal crashed against tile, the shower curtain collapsed — a scream.
Katya? She jumped past, clutched the shower curtain; no, something
inside the curtain.

“Sorry,” a voice said, from beneath Alaska. Osip waded a step
closer. It was Roman, yellow as a supermarket chicken, in churning
pink water.

***

“It looks okay,” Stalina said a few hours later, uncertainly
fingering the handle of her white paper shopping bag. She began to
pick her way across the lawn. The neighbors were looking. Luckily,
she didn’t seem to notice. She’d left the car door open.

Osip tried to think of something authoritative and reassuring to
say, called after her, “Little to no exterior damage.”

“Half an hour,” a fireman said at the door.

Damp, trampled envelopes were scattered like leaves in the
front hallway. The mailman had come to their house as if it were
any other, as if they would continue to order cable and pajamas —
one of the letters had Russian curlicued handwriting, and a return
address from
Novoe Russkaya Slovo
— someone else remembered
his parents, perhaps correctly this time — but Stalina was muttering
in the kitchen, and he stuffed the mail in his pockets and ran to her.

She was shaking a dripping lamb leg over the sink. “We have
to cook this up right now, just get me a —” He threw it in the trash,
steered her towards the stairs. “Always rushing me,
dyurgoet menya,
my mother’s rugs —”
She stopped at the door of their bedroom. Osip
had carried Roman in there, put him on the bed as they waited for
the ambulance.

“
Come
.” He pulled her into Yana’s room, which was almost all
right, and sat her on the edge of the bed.

He filled a suitcase with Stalina’s clothing, putting the most
cheerful colors on top — a sweater with a peacock, orange stretch
pants — and went back downstairs to get her figurines. Only the
leaping couple above the fireplace had broken beneath the weight of
a chunk of ceiling plaster. When he came to tell her the good news,
Stalina was kneeling on the floor of their room, going through the
bedside table. She sprang up with two dark spots on her pantyhosed
knees, threw open their dresser drawers and pulled out the remaining
sweaters, nightgowns, socks, bras, piling them on the carpet, heedless
of the damp. When she’d emptied all the drawers, she began pulling
them from the bureau, upturning and shaking them. “
Rot and die,
then,”
she finally said.

“Are you talking to me?” Osip tried to make a joke out of it. She
let him bundle her out the door.

Roman

Katya knocked on the open door of his hospital room.

They were lucky: his roommate, a spry old man with a
spider bite, slept inside his curtains. Now Roman could tell her
everything he’d been thinking. But his mind caught on her, just
her, her straight brows, her scratched hands. She’d been working
without gloves again.

She said, “You don’t look too great. But, you should see our
house.” A tiny smile: a joke. He laughed. It hurt.

He tried to sit up. “It was my bad, it was all my bad. Forgive,
please —”

“Hey —”

Tears shot from his eyes. “I’m the
sterva yobanaya
, not you.”

She rubbed her arms. He wished he had a jacket to give her.
“Do you feel bad at all?” she said.

“Hell to yes, I feel bad, I —”

“About the house.” She turned away, breathing hard. “That
was supposed to be my parents’ last house. Did you have even
one thought about the drywall? The shelving? My mom’s swan
curtains, we made fun of them, but they were custom —”

Roman shook his head. “To keep it real: no. But now —”

“We’ll have to break out the ceiling.”

“I will fix —”

“You. Are you HVAC certified? As if. There’s mold, which
we can’t afford, because the insurance doesn’t feel like paying,
because, according to the insurance guy, you’re still in our family.
Aren’t we so lucky? I feel like such a retard for screaming when
we saw you. After a second, it was totally obvious you weren’t
dead.”

No one could ever want to kill himself after hearing that
scream.

“
Kotletka, listen —
”

“No, you listen. You listen.” He sat up in the posture of a
perfect student. She slammed the door.

Lev

Leaf Day Morning. Osip’s car turned into the manor’s parking
lot, skirting a glaring puddle. Osip came out and walked to the front.
Osip came back. Osip and Katya came out, came back. Osip, Stalina,
Milla, Izzy, Katya and Yana came out and disappeared under the lip
of the roof. Osip’s head emerged at the top of the ladder.

Of course they found me, he said. Did I imagine that my
neighbors, and even Katya, once, hadn’t seen me sneaking up here?
If we left now, he said, we would still reach the rabbi in time for the
ceremony. Didn’t I want to honor our parents? Didn’t I understand?
Had I made myself into a complete defective? It was very hot.
His head became reflective and he shielded himself with his hand.
His mate and progeny came, one by one, or by two, and gathered
themselves to him.

“
He won’t come
,” Osya said.

“
Then let’s go
,
Izzinka’s getting dusty,
” Stalina said.

“
You won’t come, the least you can do is give your speech now
,”
he said. “
Do our parents mean anything to you at all? Aren’t you
proud of them?
”