Troika (8 page)

J
ulian’s new home sat at the end of a tree-lined cul-de-sac about a half hour west of New York City. It was a sturdy Tudor built in the 1920s, with a manicured lawn that had clean, clipped edges and a row of rosebushes bearing the signs of fastidious attention: ample and precise spacing, healthy blossoms, the stalks pruned with forty-five-degree cuts, leaves free of spots and mildew, a base clear of weeds.

When Julian first arrived in the suburbs of northern New Jersey, he was enrolled in a local public school that was poorly equipped to ease the boy’s difficult transition. So when he appeared for the first day of the academic year dressed in new clothes that were too formal for this casual—some would say sloppy—school, he was met by two brothers who bore not even the slightest resemblance to each other. The older of the two—by ten months—was wide in the shoulders, with cropped hair, a pug nose and protruding ears. The younger boy had a slight build, with dangling curls, droopy eyes and a nose that
was so long and so impossibly thin that, when viewed from the side, it resembled the beak of a puffin and, when viewed from the front, appeared as if there were no nose at all—just two pinpricks for nostrils. Yet despite their physical differences, the brothers were identical in their provincialism and xenophobia.

Within minutes of the opening assembly, they seized upon Julian’s newness, his separation from the herd, and they mocked his clothing and his strange accent. Julian tried to avoid the brothers—slipping behind a door, sticking close to a teacher—but despite his best efforts, he was not able to escape their pursuit. They followed Julian down the halls, flicking at his ears, yelling
commie
,
commie!
Please, Julian begged in his accented English, terrified and desperate to avoid conflict; please, he cried, one of the few new words he had learned in the weeks since his arrival. But the brothers were unrelenting, and Julian soon found himself cornered, with a gathering crowd of bloodlusters cheering wildly.

As the brothers closed in, Julian thought about his father’s courage and his mother’s deathbed instruction. Intent on extending his brave lineage, Julian sized up the boys. He decided first to attack the larger and presumably more menacing of the two, and then turn his attention to the thin one with the droopy eyes and the peculiar nose. Commie, they yelled. Anything but, Julian thought, proud of the lessons in commerce he had learned from Frankmann.

The boys drew closer. And then, just as Julian prepared to throw the first punch, he took his eye off the smaller of the two boys. And in that moment, the less menacing one—in appearance only—leaped forward, like a bullfrog vaulting off a log, and nailed Julian with a clean shot to the jaw that knocked him to the ground. The other brother then delivered four quick kicks to Julian’s gut and ribs before a teacher, noticing the raucous crowd, ran over and intervened.

“Your first day?” Irina cried from a seat in the kitchen that was stocked with appliances Julian had never seen in Siberia: a dishwasher, a microwave oven, a refrigerator with an ice dispenser in the door, a shiny copper and brass espresso machine. “A fight on your very first day of school, Julian! How could you do such a thing? And a suspension on top of it.” She looked forlornly over to her husband. “Our girls never got into trouble. Did they, Oleg?”

Embarrassed by both the suspension and the outcome of the fight, Julian dropped his head. With his right hand, he held his aching ribs. Oleg had been in dozens of fights as a young boy, and he understood a schoolboy’s shame. He held his hand up to his wife. “Calm down, Irina, please,” he said as he sipped cappuccino—his favorite—from a porcelain cup. “They called you a commie?” he asked Julian.

“Yes, sir.”

“And they mocked those handsome clothes Irina bought you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you come back from your first day with your brand-new shirt torn up?”

Julian rubbed his eyes. “Yes, sir,” he said, frightened of what punishment awaited him.

Oleg placed the cappuccino on the kitchen table, crossed his hands over his chest and smiled. “So, let me get this straight, boy. You can kill a man with your own hands but you can’t hold off a couple of little punks from Jersey?”

Julian blushed at the reference to Krepuchkin—a man and an event that Julian wished to strike from his memory. “Frankmann told you that? He told you I did that?”

“Frankmann told us everything, boy. That’s why my wife was so happy to have you.” Julian looked over to Irina, who was fingering a strand of beads. Oleg stood in front of the espresso machine and
steamed more milk. “It’s always the little ones who have the trigger fingers,” he said, pouring the hot milk into his cup.

“Excuse me, sir?” Julian asked, distracted by the beauty of the glistening machine: its levers, its tubes, a shiny eagle on top, the locomotive hissing sounds.

“The little ones, boy. Always hit the little ones first. And remember, anything goes. The throat, the eyes, the ears.” Oleg paused and looked at the boy, recalling his own difficult childhood in a Saint Petersburg ghetto and the horrors he endured. “And the groin,” he said to the boy, “don’t forget the groin.”

Julian looked down to his own waist. “The groin?” he asked.

“Of course, Julian, anything goes. They don’t follow Olympic boxing rules in the schoolyard.”

Oleg returned to the machine and steamed even more milk. He pulled a cup from the cabinet and dropped in several spoonfuls of cocoa. After giving the milk one more prolonged blast of steam that created a fluffy froth on top, he poured the milk over the cocoa and placed the cup on the table before Julian. The boy looked at the hot cocoa, leaned over the cloud of steam, inhaled the sweetness—but did not touch the cup.

“Go ahead, boy,” Oleg directed. “If you were expecting a punishment, that’s not going to happen around here. We’re not your parents, more like grandparents. And grandparents aren’t in the punishment business, you know.” Comforted, Julian reached for the cup, held it with both hands, felt its warmth. “And besides, Frankmann said that you’re a child who needs his space, that you’re not the type of boy who responds well to authority. That with you it’s just the opposite. And the last thing I want,” he said, chuckling with admiration for the boy’s gallantry, “is my skull split wide open.”

Julian blushed again. Noticing the boy’s discomfort, Irina cast a
disapproving glance at Oleg and pulled Julian’s chair close. “I tell you, boy, it’s a blessing that you’re here,” she said. “A gift from God.”

Rather than consoling him, Irina’s expression of kindness evoked in Julian deep shame; for Julian, being valued invariably preceded great loss. He drank the hot cocoa and looked around the kitchen, careful to avoid the woman’s gaze. “Don’t worry,” she said, “you will get used to this new world. It was a big adjustment for me and Oleg, but now life is easy for us.” She picked up the beads and rubbed them with her thumb and forefinger. “The biggest barrier,” Irina continued in Russian, “will be your English. So tomorrow you will start with a tutor, a professor from the university in Petersburg who now lives in New York. We were on faculty together in Russia, he’s a member of the intelligentsia like me, and a master in Russian, English, French, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, all the greats. He will come here twice a week to teach you. It will take time and much effort, but in three, four years’ time, your English will be better than the philistines’ around here.” Irina noticed a speck of blood in the corner of Julian’s mouth. After placing the beads back down on the table, she licked the pad of her thumb and wiped the blood away.

That night, Julian lay in his bed, sobbing, replaying in his mind every moment of the lost fight. He longed for Petrov and Volokh, and he mentally revised the confrontation by inserting his friends into the scene. There they were, in the school with him, by his side, ready to fight. Julian imagined Petrov blocking the punch of the thin boy with the odd nose. He pictured Volokh delivering a straight right to the jaw of the older brother with the crew cut. He fantasized about pummeling the brothers into submission, being celebrated by the encircling crowd, hugging his friends from the orphanage. Julian came out of his fantasy and wondered what Petrov and Volokh
were doing at that very moment, if they had enough food, if they too had been adopted—or if another boy had joined them in the drafty room with the bulging mattress. Julian wondered if he had been replaced.

Julian returned to an image of the fight, to the altered, nourishing version in which he emerged victorious. His father now joined him in this fantasy, and he thus imagined himself returning home at the end of the school day and boasting about the bullies he had defeated. His father beamed, praising his only child’s courage, his victory in battle. This imagined validation soothed Julian, brought an end to his tears.

And then Julian thought of his mother—whose participation in this fantasy was essential. Julian imagined her entering the flat in the boardinghouse with dinner for the two of them: cured meat, potatoes and a slice of berry pie. He saw his wounds, his bruised lip, how his mother licked the pad of her thumb and wiped away a speck of blood from the corner of his mouth.

“Tell me,” she said to Julian in his imagination—or was it now a dream? “Tell me again how these monsters threatened you, how you were outnumbered, how you prevailed. Tell me, dear Julian, how you refused to submit.”

T
he first time Julian and Sophie ever spoke—years before they became lovers, years before they married—was in a writing class, senior year in high school. Julian was a handsome young man, not conventional or perfectly symmetrical, but beautiful in an atypical way, what with his crooked nose and a pale scar across the right cheekbone, the chipped incisor. There was the tar-black hair and the dark eyes. And then there was his physicality, the twitching litheness in his body, a restlessness deep within. Julian was not large, but strong and sinewy, smooth in his movement—feline, powerful, agitated.

There were some tough guys in the school, but none wanted any part of Julian—for with Julian there was the tacit threat of disproportionate response, a disregard for civilized combat. It was as if, in response to a light slap, Julian might tear off a boy’s ear or gouge out his eyes. The only fight Julian ever lost, his very first fight, was in
sixth grade. A month after that defeat, he approached the two brothers who had beaten him; he took out the little one first with a knee to the groin, then he punched the big one in the throat, smashed his face into a locker. After that, Julian’s reputation was sealed.

Despite his physical appeal, despite the giggles of the girls behind the locker doors and the notes passed to his unwilling hands, Julian seemed oddly disinterested in the local girls. During his senior year, a rumor spread that Julian preferred older girls,
women
, in college or out of school, and that he preferred them from the city. At different times, he was said to be dating a freshman from NYU; an actress with tattoos and a Mohawk who lived in the East Village; even a single mom, a waitress, who had a railroad apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. Some of the boys speculated that Julian’s reluctance to date girls from school was really a cover for a hidden homosexuality, but none had the courage to confront him with this accusation. Not that he would have minded. In fact, he would have found it entertaining. He was self-contained, autonomous,
sui generis
.

Sophie and Julian sat next to each other in the writing class taught by Margaret Bristol, a middle-aged woman who at first glance appeared dowdy and sheltered. But for those with sharp powers of observation, there were signs that suggested otherwise, signs that suggested Bristol nurtured a fading inner wildness and that, in her youth, her insides and her outsides were aligned. And it was only when she aged and got puffy, when her hair thinned and became brittle, that her physical appearance diverged from her inner life.

Sophie was intrigued by Bristol, and she searched for clues to the teacher’s past. There was the sloppy tattoo of a serpent on her right ankle that had been rendered hazy and vague from years of sun and migrating skin cells. There was the tiny dot on her left nostril—an indented freckle that Sophie imagined might be the remnant of a
nose ring. When Bristol readied herself at the end of each day, she put on round retro sunglasses with blue lenses.

There was not what one would consider a sexual chemistry between Bristol and Julian, nothing to suggest a teacher’s improper romantic interest in a student and that student’s misguided reciprocity. But what existed between them was a silent understanding that they would be lovers if only Bristol were forty years younger (but not if Julian were forty years older). Bristol, as beautiful and as enigmatic in her youth as Julian was now, knew from personal experience that there were layers of pain beneath his sangfroid. She understood Julian innately, for she too once kept people at a safe distance through similar conventions: aloofness, physical beauty, an internal algorithm that allowed her to quickly distinguish friend from foe and, for the unfortunate one identified as foe, the threat of a brutal and disproportionate response.

Bristol’s assignments were designed not only to improve the writing skills of her students, but to provoke self-examination, to coax from her students the mysterious secrets and conflicts that formed their characters—further enhancing their craft in the process. Often, students participated in this exploration with little understanding of their own involvement; they wrote, only to realize after the fact that something unintended and therapeutic had occurred.

But Julian was keenly aware of Bristol’s intentions—and because he saw in her something daring and protective, not unlike his mother, a deep trust developed within him. So when Bristol asked the students to write about a
thing
, to describe an object in careful detail, Julian bravely chose a tiger’s paw (wide as a dinner plate, claws curled like the tip of a witch’s boot, leathery pads painted with strips of wet grass); when asked to describe a smell, Julian chose the odor of encroaching death (bitter, acrid, as if milk had curdled and spoiled, but also sweet, like a pot of sunflower honey in the Siberian sun).

The most challenging assignment coincided with the nearing end of the school year, when Bristol asked her students to describe a
fundamental disconnect
—where one’s unwavering convictions were at odds with reality, where what one sees and believes and what others see and believe diverge to such a degree that they are irreconcilable. One student described her color-blindness, how she could not distinguish between navy blue and black, and the fashion failures that ensued.

One boy wrote about being raised in a devout Presbyterian home, only to discover that his mother was born Jewish and that, either by design or lack of interest, she didn’t convert as planned upon her marriage. The boy described his surprise when he learned that under Judaic law he was indeed Jewish, that he was—at least in someone’s eyes—something different from what he thought.

At first
,
you
’
re shocked
,
questioning who you are
.
But then you realize it
’
s just other people making up the rules
,
the classifications
.
The mother
’
s side
,
the father
’
s side
?
What if the Jews say it
’
s a maternal lineage and some other religion say it
’
s paternal
,
then what happens
?
Or what if they both say it
’
s maternal
?
Or both paternal
?
Can you be both
?
Can you be neither
?
And once you realize that it
’
s someone you never met trying to tell you what you are and how you should view yourself
,
present yourself to the world
,
then what does it really matter
?
That
’
s when you realize how absurd it is
.
That
’
s when you realize that the disconnect isn
’
t being something different than what you thought you were
;
the disconnect is even thinking that you were something in the first place
.

Bristol stood before the class and fanned herself with a piece of paper. “Here’s one that I’d like to read,” she said, moistening her
lips. “It’s something Julian wrote.” And as the students awaited the rare chance to learn something about their guarded classmate, Julian braced himself.

I am ashamed
—
ashamed to admit that I am so unattractive that I have never kissed a girl
.
That
’
s not true
.
I did once
,
when I was eight
,
before the girls knew what ugly was
.
That was a bright
-
life moment
.
But soon the fist of hierarchy squeezed tight and rammed me to the underworld
.

My great loves have been unilateral and unknown to all but me
.
That is why I write
,
to create voices
,
back and forth
,
with Her
,
where only a muffled soliloquy once existed
—
a maddening
,
tortured
,
silent scream
.

Sometimes I dream about a blind girl
,
but fear that her sighted friend
—
the one she
’
s known since third grade
—
would tell her she
’
d made a terrible mistake
.
He
’
s hideous
,
she might whisper
,
just hideous
.
Or maybe the friend would have mercy on me
.
Do you think she would
?
Have mercy
?

I once asked a man
,
my father
,
if mercy exists
.
Yes
,
he said
,
mercy abounds
.
And he gave me a tap on the top of my head
,
a loving yet hollow tap that foretold both the tragedy of a child and the powerlessness of a father
,
the awful soul
-
sickening impotence of Our Father
.
Yes
,
He repeated
,
mercy abounds
.

But I
’
m not so sure
.
I was born in Mercy General
,
says it right here
,
right on this piece of paper
.
But that
’
s as close as I get
.

When Bristol finished reading, a restless silence ensued, followed by secretive whispers, the rustling of paper, soles brushing the floor. And once the students had digested Julian’s words, had repeated a
memorable phrase or two in their minds, their reaction was vocal, animated—and divided mostly along gender lines. The girls giggled, were drawn in by Julian’s sensitivity, an inner pain that for them was identifiable and that humanized him, made him more accessible to them. They appreciated the absurdity of this
disconnect
, how a man so beautiful could feel so unworthy—and they thus desired him even more. The boys, confused and even threatened, offended by what they perceived to be either an admission of weakness or a mocking, dishonest taunt, snickered and rolled their eyes.

His mind already on to other matters, it seemed, Julian merely shrugged his shoulders and doodled in his notebook. He appeared unconcerned with the attention thrust upon him, remaining distant and introverted. It was this distance that defined Julian, and it was as if his detachment fueled the mystery surrounding him, brought him increased and undesired attention.

Weeks after Bristol read Julian’s piece aloud, rumors circulated through the school: that Julian was an orphan, that his mother was a prostitute, that he was sexually abused in the orphanage, that he had savagely murdered a gentle, elderly man. Sophie heard the rumors and wondered who had started them, if they were true or false; she wondered what impact they would have on Julian. She was astonished that someone could have betrayed him in such a manner. It must have been a woman, Sophie thought, someone in whom he had confided and who, her heart wounded, had violated his trust. Sophie wondered if the rumors would diminish him, destroy him. Or would they embolden him? Would they intensify his strength, the fear that he evoked in men? Would the rumors make him even more mysterious, more complex, more attractive to women?

From a safe distance, Sophie watched Julian. She observed her classmates’ whispers and curious glances. She studied Julian’s reaction or, rather, his
in
action. He remained chivalrous and polite with
the girls: opening doors, guiding chairs, offering an umbrella in the rain. To the boys, he remained detached, neither polite nor rude, but enforcing a conscious separation with the implied threat of violence. Still, there were foolish souls who taunted Julian—anonymously, of course. Once, he sat down at his desk and found a copy of
Oliver Twist
. He lifted the book. He saw that
Oliver
had been crossed out with a marker, and
Julian
written in block letters above it. He flipped through a few pages of the book and grimaced, noting with simmering rage the intended reference.

Bristol assigned writing partners for a poetry project, and Julian found himself sitting next to Sophie. And although they had shared classes for years, Julian observed Sophie closely for the first time. He noticed her awkwardness, an unsteadiness in hand and in gaze for which she had become known. But Julian looked beyond the easily apparent, past her precocious height, past her poor posture, her blemished skin and eclectic style. When Julian looked into the mature distance, when he looked past the misleading present, he saw in Sophie the inevitability of spectacular beauty.

“What should we write about?” she asked, tapping a pencil on the desk in crisp couplets.

Julian leaned back in his seat to get a better look at Sophie. He noticed her ragged fingernails, her torn cuticles, a tiny flap of bloody skin on her left thumb. Sophie looked at Julian and, following his eyes, sensing that he had noticed her gnawed hands, dropped the pencil to the desk. Self-conscious, she made two tight fists—knuckles up and her thumbs inserted, so the markers of her distress were hidden.

Julian touched his fingertips to Sophie’s forearm. “You okay?” he asked.

The sensation of Julian’s skin on her own caused Sophie to blush. “I think so,” she said.

“You seem upset.” Julian nodded at Sophie’s hands, prompting her to tighten her fists.

“It’s just that, it’s just I heard the rumors, and I . . .”

Julian thought about the girl who had betrayed him—her face so earnest, her tickling toes, the exuded trust that had prompted his imprudent disclosure. “It’s nothing,” he said. “In the end, it’s really nothing at all.”

Sophie shifted in her seat. “It’s not nothing,” she responded. “It’s
something
. Fact is, the same thing happened to me. My uncle did it to me when I was little.” Sophie released her fists. She placed her palms flat on the desk and spread her fingers.

Julian’s jaw tightened. He looked around the room, then back to Sophie. He considered revealing to her the falsity of this particular rumor, how it was one of several about him that was untrue, but he feared that a denial at this moment would magnify Sophie’s shame and sense of isolation. “Your
uncle
?” he asked.