Thirst (9 page)

He was surprised at himself: by the force of his words, by their rudeness, by their desperation. He had somehow given himself away. And the desperation was real and totally inexplicable. His face flushed, and he turned into the wall of his cubicle so that no one else in his office would see him.

She said, “I can’t.”

Her words fell through the earpiece like two pennies into a puddle.

“There’s something I want to talk to you about.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t.”

“Please,” he said, his voice faltering.

There was such a long silence that he thought they had been disconnected, but he was afraid to hang up and call back. Then he heard a tentative murmur of assent. That evening at dinner, he proposed; well, he wasn’t quite sure what he was proposing, the intervening hours had confused and upset him. He talked in an abstract, metaphorical, almost metaphysical way, he began to stammer, tears rose in his eyes, and then Anna
freely wept. She spoke for him, saying that they should live together on a trial basis, with the intention of eventually getting married. Yes, sure, Harrah said, yes, congratulating her as if she had just solved a difficult mathematics problem.

They agreed that her place in the Village was nicer than his on Columbus Avenue. After dinner, they went to her apartment. Both felt amorous, but Harrah gently maneuvered her away from her bed, the place they always made love. She giggled. At his insistence, they made love in the shower, the water blasting his face. Afterwards, she wanted to sleep, but Harrah, saying he was invigorated, suggested they walk to an all-night bagel bakery in downtown Brooklyn.

Anna said he was as romantic now as he had ever been. They returned across the bridge holding hands. The sun was bubbling up through some low-lying clouds in Queens, a new summer morning. Harrah could not recall the last sunrise he had seen.

“I just remembered. I had a dream the other night,” she said. “I was running through the streets with something hot in my hands. Then I saw you but I didn’t recognize you. It was terrible.”

“It was only a dream,” he assured her.

“Move in today,” she said.

“How?”

“What do you have? Clothes, a few CDs, right? We could make coffee at your place and pack up some things into a taxi. The heavy stuff can come later. You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting for this. I had nearly given up hope.”

She hugged him and he kissed her. He had made the happiest decision of his life.

They hailed a taxi and Harrah gave the driver his Columbus Avenue address. The two lovers held hands as the taxi rattled along the empty city streets. Harrah nearly dozed off, but he stopped himself, or believed he had. He shook his body and looked over at Anna, who smiled at him, her eyes bright. Harrah examined every instant of the few minutes they had been in the cab, and each of these instants appeared intact and either the consequence or the precursor of the instants immediately adjacent to them. He hadn’t fallen asleep—or perhaps he had, because the cab slowed to a halt at a towering, doorman-attended building on East 86th Street, a building he could hardly recall now, though it was his East Side residence.

Anna showed no sign that she hadn’t been there before. In fact, it was Anna, once they entered the elevator, who pushed the button for his floor. With a confidence buoyed by love, Harrah looked forward at last to getting some sleep.

A
lan returned with his family from a summer in Bulgaria, and his best friends, Drago and Nadleman, said, “You didn’t get it wet.”

They had worked out a code before he left. Alan had worried that the secret police would read his mail; Drago and Nadleman figured they would be obliged to show his postcards to their parents. The code was this: “I went swimming.”

“No.”

“No,” Drago repeated, mocking outrage. They had speculated that foreign girls, Communist ones especially, might be less hung up, existing in some kind of parallel, promiscuous universe.

“If you saw those Bulgarian women . . .”

“No beauties, huh.” Looking over his shoulder, Drago had twisted his face in a smirk that seemed almost painful.

That was the plural for the Bulgarian word for dog, but neither Drago nor Nadleman asked him to translate. The word just hung there, near the inside roof of the car. Stabbing at the accelerator, Nadleman lunged onto Old Country Road, Drago alongside him and Alan in the backseat. Nadleman had won his license two months earlier and had already put three thousand miles on his
mother’s car. Drago was going for his road test in a week. Alan had missed driver’s ed over the summer, of course, and didn’t have even a learner’s permit. It was a humid afternoon just a few days before school opened.

“The girls have metal caps on their teeth. Gold usually. It’d be like kissing a robot.”

Alan immediately regretted his words. The Bulgarians had shown his family enormous warmth. And some of the girls, in fact, had been very nice. At the university in Veliko Turnovo, the capital of medieval Bulgaria, his father had taught American literature to a gaggle of graduate students who believed that they were bewildered by his speech only because they had been taught
English,
while he spoke that notoriously and unreliably slanged dialect, American. Despite his youth, Alan had been invited to all the student parties.

The city was built on the sides of two hills overlooking the Yantra River, which coiled around a promontory occupied by a commanding Communist-built monument—four bronze horsemen and a hundred-foot black marble sword thrust into the sky. When not in the student cafeteria or at their parties, or sitting in on his father’s classes, Alan had jogged down Veliko Turnovo’s terraced cobblestoned streets, the sword almost always in sight through the clotheslines or at the crest of some steps. He squeezed past women in housedresses as they carried laundry through the city’s zigzag alleyways. He watched the peasant merchants at the outdoor market playing chess between customers. He shot baskets with wiry local youths, good passers but
short,
who had never heard of Kareem. Alan resisted his mother’s blandishments,
the museums and old Orthodox churches were left un-visited, but merely the idea of
being
in Bulgaria had fully possessed his consciousness that summer. Not a moment went by in which he could not congratulate, entertain, or console himself with the thought that he was in, of all places, Bulgaria.

“Hey, I have souvenirs for both of you.” He pushed two packages over onto the front seat.

“A record,” Nadleman guessed, glancing down.

“That’s yours. It’s by the group, Peace in Our Time. The music’s not very good—like the early Bee Gees left on a radiator—but my father’s students loved it.”

Drago opened his parcel. It contained a gaudy poster illustration of rectangular young men and bright-eyed young women waving red flags and the Bulgarian tricolor. A large portrait of a fiercely sober man with a gallant black mustache hovered above them.

“That’s Todor Zhivkov, the party secretary. Underneath it reads, ‘Socialism Today Is Yesterday’s Communist Tomorrow,’ or something like that. I got it off a wall at the school.”

As Drago mumbled his thanks, Alan realized that the poster had been a bad choice. It was too big and not interesting enough to hang. Drago would probably shove it into the back of his closet.

“You guys had a good summer without me? Say you didn’t.”

“It was, like, a tragedy,” Drago said. “Like they shot Lennon again.”

“You were planning to see Time Machine at the coliseum,” Alan said, pleased with himself for remembering.

“Yeah,” Drago said. “We planned it, we saw ’em, it’s history. Thirty buckaroos.”

“Was it worth it?”

Drago made a sound of affirmation without opening his mouth.

Alan was about to ask them if they went anywhere—in the spring they had talked about going camping upstate—but then thought better of it. He himself had gone nearly to the ends of the earth.

“I met a guy who had a Time Machine album,” he said. “They’re rare. You could get a hundred dollars for one on the black market. And Springsteen, forget it.”

Drago slapped a tape into the deck, launching an electric guitar in midnote. The sound ping-ponged around the inside of the car before the rest of the music caught up with it. Alan wondered how many times he had been down this stretch of Old Country Road. Old
Country
Road, he repeated to himself, as if for the first time. Some stranger who had never been to Long Island—say, a Bulgarian—might have expected gently unwinding macadam broken at the shoulders by long grass and wildflowers. He would have found the bright plastic smear of shopping centers and gas stations ironically amusing. To Alan it was, or should have been, the most natural place in the world. He had lived here all his life.

His mother had wanted him to keep a journal in Bulgaria, but Alan had refused. He said he couldn’t spare the time. He had seen himself holed up in their dormitory apartment with that ridiculously flowered cloth-bound book she had purchased for him, while outside
the room Bulgaria would be happening without him. Furthermore—but he did not tell her this, because he feared these additional reasons might collapse under the weight of argument—recording his experiences would attenuate them. It would destroy his spontaneity, make him self-conscious. And a journal would replace these images and ideas that were pouring into his brain like sunshine through a skylight with whatever language he clumsily chose to describe them, so that years later he would no longer possess the memory, but merely the inexact words.

Unfortunately, now he didn’t even have the words. He tried to speak to Drago and Nadleman. The initial sounds of a few sentences—what he had hoped to offer as a series of sharp observations, a brief address, a lecture, a travelogue, a treatise—lay strangled in his throat.

Drago pointed to the right. “A new Friendly’s. That wasn’t there when you left, was it?”

“No, what did it replace?”

“Good question,” Nadleman said and then very mildly chuckled, “Heh, heh.” He did it the same way his father did. But then, why shouldn’t he?

“Damn,” Drago said. “The Beverage Barn?”

“No, here’s Beverage Barn coming up.”

Alan tried to recall just one of the thousands of times he had been on this stretch of road. He picked at his memory, poking it like something he couldn’t see under the car seat.

“Federman’s,” he announced at last.

It had been a men’s clothing store: the Friendly’s, surrounded by a larger parking lot, now took up much
less room. Alan had never shopped at Federman’s, had never wondered who did. It had been impossible to see inside the store from the road, probably because it kept its lights too dim. And—he just recalled—the sign outside had been missing an apostrophe, had never even had one, as if it had been federmans that were for sale. The new Friendly’s ice cream parlor, a prefabricated colonial-style building exactly like the one in Syosset, now looked like it had been there forever, or at least since the American Revolution.

“Oh, yeah,” Drago said. “Federman’s.”

“I have to tell you,” Alan blurted. “Bulgaria was really, but
really
weird.”

After a little while, Nadleman said, “Weird, huh?”

Alan was silent for another moment to allow for a rush of recollection: Bulgarians shook their head side to side when they said yes, up and down when they disagreed. For thank you, they often said
merci.
There was only one make of car. When you bought an ice cream cone the vendor proved that he had given you thirty-eight grams by weighing the scoop on an enameled scale begrimed with sour milk. Georgi Dimitrov, the founder of the Bulgarian Communist state, was entombed in a glass case in a Sofia mausoleum. On Vasil Levski Boulevard in Veliko Turnovo, Alan had met two Western engineers, a Nebraskan and a Belgian, who were supervising the construction of a nearby brewery. Employing the shorthand adopted by workers for multinational companies everywhere, they called the city “Viko.” Alan and his family took it up as well.

“It’s a very closed society,” he said.

When Alan had first arrived in Bulgaria, after more than a year of anticipation, he could hardly believe he was there—not so much because of the place’s foreign-ness, but because he had lost faith that the day would ever come. But while he was there, it was hard to believe that America still existed, that his family’s home was still standing, that Drago and Nadleman were actually living, breathing, doing something at that instant. And now he had returned home, the trip was over. Well, that too was incredible. He had never expected to journey this far in time. He marveled at the passing of every moment: the fact that he was here, in Nadleman’s mother’s car, and that this too in another moment would be no more than a memory, a kind of dream as insubstantial as his previous anticipation.

But what was most bizarre about this moment was how real it was, how suddenly alert he was to it. They were driving on the Long Island Expressway now, another segment of Nadleman’s lazy late-summer orbit around the planet. The greenness of the grass alongside the road filled Alan’s vision, the sans serif lettering of the exit signs softened and modernized the world, he became keenly aware that the intimately familiar place-names they formed—Wantagh, Mineola, Syosset—weren’t, after all, English. Drago switched off the tape deck and put on a ball game. Alan couldn’t concentrate on the play-by-play. Taking them literally, he was unable to comprehend the announcer’s words: “runners on the corners,” “the lefthander kicks and deals.” The smell of the car’s upholstery was pleasantly sour. One of the ashtrays was open, revealing a beige wedge of chewing
gum on which was imprinted the contours of the last two teeth that had squeezed it, recognizably molars. A patch of slightly discolored skin, the size of a walnut and the shape of an unknown foreign country, gleamed on the back of Nadleman’s neck. It had always been there.