The Cosmopolitans (38 page)

All I could think of was an old children’s song. It had been
Milla’s favorite when they first immigrated.

“
Mama flies a great big plane, that is very good

Mama makes a fruit compote, that is also good!”

His wife held him back from me, “
Osya, you see how old he is
.”
He commanded his family and they disappeared down and away.

Yana

Yana sliced into her steak. They didn’t have steak like this in
Bangladesh. Or, they had it, imported, for five hundred dollars, and
people displayed it in their living rooms when you came over. Unfair,
unfair. That was what Pratik called her. He hadn’t been angry. In fact,
he had been trying to show her she shouldn’t be so angry “all the
time.” Electricity went out and there was nothing to be done about
it. Try to relax, try to walk with all the others in large circles in the
grassy lot
.
And in fact, the times he’d gotten her outside on outage
nights, she had liked the peace, the coconut trees and the cows, how
it was too hot for good clothes and how teenagers, on those nights,
were allowed to flirt.

Her mother was questioning Milla about her new friend Theandra.
“
Do you go out together and meet men? It’s easy for women together
to fall into a pattern of just sitting at home and complaining.
”

Katya ducked her head in a smile — what was so funny? When
she raised it again, though, she had the same clenched expression
she’d worn for most of Yana’s visit. A man — a boy, really, but still
— had tried to kill himself over her. It was awful, it had wrecked
their house, but if Yana had been Katya, she would have felt flattered.
Sick. She took Katya’s cold hand. “You know it wasn’t your fault,
right?” she said in an undertone.

Katya blinked and said, “Why would you even think — I wasn’t
even there,” making Stalina halt mid-interrogation, and turn, and
say, “
Of course not, Katyenok
.
What kind of crazy person would
think that?
” Why wasn’t Stalina asking Yana anything? She was the
one who’d been away. Would it cost too much to call Pratik on the
hotel phone?

Stalina

After dinner with the girls in the hotel restaurant, Stalina released
them back to their room so they could gossip about men. Hadn’t
she always wanted them to be friends? Every time they laughed at
something Stalina didn’t understand, it was a victory of motherhood.
The handkerchief would have asked why the girls hadn’t “
comforted
their destitute matriarch
,” so it was lucky Stalina hadn’t been able
to find it earlier. It would probably follow in a day or two. It couldn’t
have drowned.

Stalina’s room was so quiet, she felt as though her ears were
filled with cotton. She almost couldn’t believe that she had ever had
a house, and in it a collection of figurines, flocks of worries. She
tried to make a list of what was lost. She tried to open a window. The
Swiss bank building glimmered at her through the glass.

She turned on the television. The citizens of New Orleans begged
for buses, trailed her through the channels. Why show these scenes,
if there was nothing she could do? She called the Red Cross number
on the screen and donated, but it wouldn’t be in time. She threw the
polyester blanket off her legs. She turned the television off, then
back on again. Why hadn’t they left before the storm? There was
always a way, legal or illegal, if you really wanted to go —

Some time later, she realized she was lying in a ridiculous
position, curled like a hedgehog, ruining her skirt. At least she had
remembered to be silent. Her girls, in the room next door, couldn’t
have heard.

By the time Osip returned from his meeting with the insurance
agent, she was in her nightgown, brewing tea in the coffeemaker. He
was sweating, his shirt was unbuttoned, the tie with the ducks she’d
bought him spilled from his pocket, he looked like a cabdriver, he
refused tea, he vibrated beside her in the bed until she closed her
Ulitskaya novel and said, “
Nu? He told you something new?
”

“
We’ll have enough
.”

“
Enough for what?
”

He spoke so quickly, it took her a second to recognize the
language as English. “Enough for most happy plan for my
Stalinatchka.”

“Me?” She waved her hand. “I have no problem.
We have
never been materialistic people. What, I’m going to cry over my
curtains? Over the rugs from Azerbaijan, where the people hate
us now? This was not the Point of Immigration. We can live in an
apartment, we —”

He grabbed her by the shoulders. “
Will go to
Boston
.”

She pulled back. “
What’s this nonsense now?
”

“‘
Oh, my mother’s in Boston, taking the wrong vitamins!
Oh, Edward and his big, big lab in Boston!
’” Osip said in a high
voice.

“
But you wouldn’t even let me —
”

Osip rolled on top of her and patted a breast. “He is no match
for my awesome love powers.”

She squeezed a corner of the blanket in her fist. “Your job?
You are now hippie?”

“Yes. I am hippie. I take early retirement. I will golf.” He talked
and talked, periodically rising for bouts of exuberant open-door
urination. Didn’t Stalina know that Milla’s company had a branch
in Boston? Izzy would meet so many children of the intelligentsia.
Katyenok would come, of course; she loved the sea. He spread his
arms across the pillows and smiled.

Leonid

Leonid Chaikin was not in the mood for this errand, and yet,
here he was, activating his security system. He’d spent the day being
trained not to act the way every single guy at his firm acted, all
because some new hire — a secretary, at that — had ratted him
out to HR. HR. What bullshit. He slammed the door. He should
have bought a Mercedes, or even a Hummer; Porsches were too
fragile. Some kids on bikes slowed to look at him and his car. He
straightened, put on his jacket. You had to be a role model, no matter
what was happening in your work slash personal life. He wished
he’d brought a scarf. Damp brown leaves clung to his shoes.

Would there be a permanent mark on his record or not? Would
the firm still send him to Switzerland? All he’d done was try to
get a little something something going with Fiona. He hadn’t even
yelled at her yet, and it was a hostile environment? He sneezed
into his hand, and for a moment had a pleasant memory of lying
in bed, drinking hot milk with honey, his mother reading to him
from Iacocca’s autobiography. You couldn’t call in sick for a sexual
harassment workshop, or you’d have to start all over again. Nor
could you get out of an errand, not when you were Leonid, and your
mother had asked you.

His mother had actually said, “
It’s what Russians do.”
Excuse
Leonid, but hadn’t they emigrated to get away from Russians? Who
but his mother had forbidden them to speak Russian in the house?
Who had forced him through Little League, karate, ballroom dance,
and yoga? She had raised him to be transnational, the General
Electric of men (they needed him for Switzerland), and now, she
didn’t like it?

No one answered the Molochniks’ door, so after a moment, he
opened it. The living room was empty but for two orange folding
chairs, and the floor was covered in some kind of plastic. He heard a
man singing in Russian and followed the voice to the kitchen, where
Katya Molochnik was standing on a ladder, doing something to the
ceiling with a tool he didn’t recognize. He grabbed the front of the
ladder. “You shouldn’t be —”

“Oh no, it’s safe,” she said. Even dirty and shabbily dressed,
needing only a few others to form a huddled mass, she was not bad
looking.

“So my mom sent me to check up on you,” he said.

“I’m okay.” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. Was
she flirting? He could use a consolation fuck. Did girls like her get
pedicures?

“Mind?” He poured himself some water from a plastic jug.
“You’re really supposed to be using a paintbrush for that. Just
saying.” He raised his hands.

“That’s after the plaster layer.”

“If you say so.” He smiled and shook his head. “What’re you
listening to?” It sounded like one of those old guys his parents
sometimes put on.

“Galich.” She sang along with a verse. “
What is a soul? Last
year’s snow.
”

“That’s pretty hard-ass,” he said.

“Well, it’s the devil talking.”

“No, I like it.” He swigged the water and tasted plaster.

“How about you?” She pointed at his headphones, which he’d
forgotten he was wearing.

“Floyd,
The Wall
,” he said, unlooping the headphones from his
ears.

“I like that movie. Or I did in high school, anyway.”

“Yeah?” Throughout today’s workshop, he’d been thinking
about the part where the giant, open flower swallowed the small,
pointy-petaled one. He’d felt like the small, pointy-petaled one. “The
parents are liking Boston, so I hear. How’s the rest of the fam?”