What puzzled him was her reaction to this closeness. He had expected her to object to having him as a housemate, and to be even angrier and more remote than before. But she was not. She was formal, perhaps, but no longer offhand in her treatment of him. She regarded him judiciously as he spoke to her. And when it became apparent that Mrs. Borislav regularly checked his room and went through the entire house to see if he had stolen anything, Jelena told him this would be unforgivable if the woman were sane. Anya Borislav, Jelena confided, is not a little crazy. I don’t know how Borislav endures her.
One Monday morning, Jelena said, I’m going to the beach. Would you like to come with me? And so there he was applying sunblock to her thin back, while the gulls wheeled about and the little birds with stick legs went running along in the wet sand, just out of reach of the incoming tide. Jelena’s bathing suit hardly deserved the name, some bits of cloth and a strap or two. Ramon did not own a suit. He’d removed his shirt and rolled up his trousers. There were very few bathers this workday morning, but the beach was embellished with the refuse of the weekend past—hunks of charred firewood, beer bottles, McDonald’s wrappers, plastic bags, balls of aluminum foil, wet newspapers, and the occasional used condom. But they had found a reasonably clean spot where Ramon had only to dispose of a few pieces of broken glass and so here they were in the sun with the hushing waves rolling in and the gulls crying and Jelena’s vertebrae easily countable as she bent forward and he rubbed the sunblock over her back.
Afterward, they sat side by side on their towels and watched the waves.
Ramon, would you like to hit me?
No. Of course not. Jelena, what a strange thing to say. Why?
I have been rude to you when you have done something only for my sake. I would deserve it.
No, I understand your mind, Jelena. Nothing is settled for you. You are new in another country. You are loosely attached. My mother, just before she died, told me that she had never really got used to the States, though she’d lived most of her life here. Of course, everyone is different, but it takes time to make yourself American.
Well, if not you then someone will have to hit me. Maybe Alexander. He knows to do it.
Who hits you? Alexander? Is that your boyfriend?
Yes. In a way of speaking. But it is best if you hit me, Ramon.
She turned to him, removed her sunglasses, and he saw that she was crying. Forgive me, she said, I am the worst of people. I don’t know anymore what I am doing.
Ramon’s heart beat faster. Is Alexander coming here?
He says. But he speaks through Borislav. I am of no importance. Oh, I am so wretched, she said. And she got up and walked to the surf and stood there as, even in his misgiving, he recorded her lovely figure, the long legs, the small, firm haunches, the huddled shoulders as she stood at the water’s edge hugging herself.
—
LEON SAID, RAMON, you should talk to me first. You have made a mistake.
You know those people?
Of course. It is my business to know. When they came into his restaurant Borislav’s stature should have risen in your estimation to the level of the totally untrustworthy.
I am in love with Jelena.
It can be felt as love when you want to fuck someone and can’t.
We are man and wife. In my love for Jelena, I will fuck her.
You would have been better off still walking her to the door and leaving. Now you are in there with all of them and you are vulnerable.
What can they do?
They will speed things up. And you could be out on your ass with no job and a court appearance. And I am a busy man, Ramon. I don’t need this thing of my brother for our lawyers to divert themselves and the P.D. to smirk at.
I will not touch her.
They don’t need you to. You’re in the house, the husband, you’re right there—what is it your movie people say—on location? You’re on location, Ramon! It is a federal law—they made it to punish domestic violence against women. She gets hit and she gets the divorce right now, and the whole thing is done not in two years but in two weeks. And here is this Alexander flying in on her green card to be married.
She would have to bring charges against me. Jelena would not do that.
Oh, please, Ramon. What am I dealing with here? So they give her a couple of black eyes, a broken nose—you think she would like more of the same if she refused to bring charges?
None of this will happen, Leon. So, as I understand it, it’s not for Jelena, the daughter of Borislav’s late uncle, to make a better life for herself in America?
We’re still looking into that. It may be no more than what it seems. There are other ways to have got him in, long before this. So if they’ve taken these pains, and it is not what it seems, we have something to learn. He hasn’t been a faithful boyfriend, we know that. Listen, Ramon, in the meantime just get out of there. Leave your clothes like you’re coming back. They’ll wait. They need you around to make the strongest case. You’ve got your cash. Let them look for you if they want to set you up.
—
THEY TOOK THEIR LUNCH to have on the beach. But it began to rain—a misty rain with the combers rolling in, and everything was gray, the sky, the seawater, and there was no line at the horizon.
They sat on the boardwalk with their bags of sandwiches and drinks on the bench between them. Jelena had pulled up the hood of her sweater. He could not see her face.
I love you, Jelena.
I know. You are reliable, Ramon. As a husband should be.
You’re making fun.
No. I have come to respect you. I find myself thinking about you without meaning to. You are very odd.
I made a decision to love you when Borislav showed me your picture and sent me to marry you.
A decision.
Yes, this was an arranged marriage, and they are the best, when the decision is to love someone you don’t know. Those have always been the most sacred, the marriages arranged before there is love and by other people.
The old way, from long ago, yes, and there is a good reason that it was given up.
Well, I know that my mother and father’s marriage was arranged by their parents. The two young people sat there in embarrassment while their families negotiated. They had not met before. My mother told me that. And she and my father were together for forty years. And when he died she wept, how she wept. Neither my brother nor I could console her.
Well, Ramon, that may be, but you and I have not sat in embarrassment while our parents negotiated. So where were the parents? It is a written green-card marriage, yours and mine.
But it is still a sacred bond. Whether the marriage is arranged by one’s parents or by a drunken idiot, with the bride kissing the wrong man, and all for the wrong reasons—it is the same. Whether through one’s family or out of a desire to go to another country, it is the same mysterious thing going on underneath, doing its work in the manner of fate. And once it is done there can have been no other thing.
That is very philosophical, Ramon. Your brother told me you are a graduate from college.
And there is the sea in front of us, Jelena, that you have come over, to be in this country. And so that’s the way it is.
Ramon carefully slipped her hood back and touched her cheek and she turned to face him. He leaned forward and kissed her lips.
Here is what we will do now, Jelena. We will find a taxicab and leave. Just the way we are. We will buy what we need in the city. I have money.
Ramon—
It is no longer safe for you here. Or for me. Come. Anyway, it is too cold here in the rain. Take the sandwiches. Aren’t you hungry? I am. We will eat on the way.
—
WHEN LEON CAME IN that evening, he found Ramon and Jelena standing at the window looking at the lights of the city. They were holding hands.
Leon coughed to get their attention. They were flustered, as if they’d been caught doing something forbidden.
Leon shook
his head and smiled. Is this the lovely Jelena? So it is! Snatched from under their foreign eyes. Ah, my brother, he said, I should have known. I should have known.
Leon went behind the bar and brought out a bottle of champagne. Come, we’ll drink to it. He set out the glasses and popped the cork. Let the war begin, he said.
What I’ve noticed: how fast they put up these buildings. Cart away the rubble, square off the excavation, lay in the steel, and up she goes. Concrete floor slabs and, at night, work lamps hanging like stars. After a flag tops things off as if they were all sailing somewhere, they load in the elevator, do the wiring, the plumbing, they tack on the granite facing and set in the windows through which you see they’ve walled in the apartments, and before you know it there’s a canopy to the curb, a doorman, and upstairs just across the street from my window, a fully furnished bedroom and a naked girl dancing.
Another thing: how people in the street are pulled along by little dogs on the leash. Usually a little short-legged dog keeping the leash taut so you know who’s in charge. He sniffs out the place to do what he does, does it, and then he’s ready to go on, leaving his two-legged body servant to pick it up. They are royalty, these dogs, they stop to nose one another, they wag their coiffed tails, they’re on their outing, with their shiny coats and curled ears and glittering eyes and the leash a band of leather, taut as a spinal cord, as if this is one creature, oddly shaped, with four short legs and a brain in front, and two tall legs and no brain in back.
And when it rains in this city? It might be just a few drops, but out floop the umbrellas. People holding these things that are like hats on pikes. It is funny, the simple cartoon logic of it. But when it really rains, wind and rain together, the umbrellas blow out, and that’s even funnier, people lifted off their feet.
You can bet they don’t avail themselves of umbrellas on the meadows of Mongolia.
—
TO AVOID THE BENT old ladies and their carts of groceries and their walkers and canes and black women helpers taking up three-quarters of the sidewalk, I run in the street. I mean cars are less of a problem. In typical traffic they are standing still as I run past the horns blowing their dissonant mass protest, and so I wear my earmuffs and I’m fine.
But I run, really, because I don’t know what else to do. I have not believed in where I am for a long time. I mean why, outside of every movie theater I run past, are people standing on line waiting to get in? What or who has persuaded them? And the movie theaters themselves with their filmed stories that I am supposed to worry over? Sitting in the dark and worrying over actors acting out stories? And the need to buy popcorn before you do this? To buy popcorn in movie theaters like you light votive candles in cathedrals? The obligation to eat popcorn that you don’t eat at any other time while watching moving pictures that you have to worry over is a peculiar, anthropological custom for which I have no reasonable explanation.
I don’t belong here. I am outside this realm. If I were inside this realm, I wouldn’t feel this way. I wouldn’t remark on these things. Why do girls see an apartment in a new building as the occasion to dance naked? And the people on leashes holding umbrellas over their heads. And the cars that can’t move, bleating their mass dissonance as if they were Mongolian sheep?
And how can I help thinking everybody I see on the sidewalk is as friendless and alone as I am, that we are total anonymities, talking importantly on our cell phones as we walk along like actors in movies that everyone has to worry over.
—
OF COURSE ON A CLOSER LOOK we can be told apart. I am a trim, sinewy fellow, I am that way from running. I run. I don’t know what else to do by way of filling my lungs with carcinogenic particulate. I could climb up the stairs of the apartment building across the street and knock on the door of the naked girl dancing, but I don’t. I run over to the park and then run with the other runners around the reservoir.
This fellow with the T-shirt that says THE PROGRAM IS RUNNING! sometimes comes up and lopes along beside me. I never know when he’ll appear. Sometimes there are two or three of them with that logo on their T-shirts like they can’t just run, it has to be a cool team thing so that everyone else can feel left out. You run pretty good, the fellow says with an ungrammatical smirk, and with no effort at all he glides past me and bounds away. At such times I feel that my feet are not hitting the ground, but pedaling air.
And then the female runners who run in pairs with their shoulders back and their chins up: they don’t have names printed on them, they are like long-legged birds stepping along in their tights and with their sweaters tied by the sleeves at their waists and rippling like little flags over their backsides.
—
YOU MAY ASK TO whom I think I’m talking. Suppose, for instance, you are one of those thin, undocumented Chinese men on balloon-tire bicycles delivering takeout. You would find me just as I find everything else, which is to say not quite right. I mean I am not yet characteristically impassively sad. I do not ride along on balloon tires delivering Chinese food to apartments where naked girls dance and little dogs with curly coats and glittering eyes will eat the leftovers. So even I, in my incomprehensible talking, can be seen as one more aspect of this weird realm.
In Mongolia the air is clean and cold and you see the stars at night, you actually see them. The shepherds look almost Chinese, with their herds of sheep and goats and with camels and yaks for their regal transportation. No cell phones here. You do not see shepherds walking along with cell phones at their ears past doormen giving them the once-over. They are strong men with sturdy builds and they know the kingdom of earth with its yaks and camels and goats and wild horses is their dominion. They accept the responsibility. They would not run just for the sake of running. If they had a reservoir they would not run around it, they would drop on their knees to see the night sky of stars in the water unless it froze opaque at night like everything does on the steppe. In which case they would see the moonlight inside the ice.
—
YOU MAY ASK HOW I pass the time when I’m not running. Alone, is my answer—as alone as when I am running. My only company is the grammarian who lives with me in my brain. If you ask me with whom am I talking, I am talking always to him or her. So I say to whom. So I don’t say lay down, I say lie down. I say would have and will not have. I don’t say you and me aren’t getting anywhere, I say you and I aren’t getting anywhere. I say you and I aren’t getting anywhere is an idiom. I say you and I aren’t getting anywhere may also be something of a metaphor, but is not a synecdoche or a metonym. When I run, too, I am not getting anywhere since I have no destination other than returning to my window across the street from the naked girl dancing. She and I are not getting anywhere either.
—
OTHER THAN TO THE grammarian I am never sure to whom I will be talking. I speed-dial my cell phone. I get you. You may ask to whom do I think I’m talking. I say I’m talking to you. And who may that be, you say. And then I recognize who it is, it is my mother.
You have all the time in the world, she says.
Until what?
Until something happens, Mother says.
What can happen?
If we knew, she says, and breaks the connection. I speed-dial her again and get the same assurance that I have all the time in the world on her answering machine. Now can you appreciate why I run? (To whomever I think I’m talking?)
—
I AM ALWAYS GLAD to have weather, though it is difficult to run past the construction sites with the cranes in the street, and past the cars with their horns of mass dissonance and their windshield wipers clacking and their headlights lighting up the rain. I am competing for the lanes between the cars with the Chinese take-out men on their balloon-tire bikes. I try the sidewalk, but the old ladies with walkers and shopping carts and their angry black women helpers are everywhere with their umbrellas threatening to poke out my eyes. And the little dogs wearing booties now, jumping around and trying to bite off the booties that keep
their paws dry and so twisting up their leashes as to make the old ladies trip and fall and runners like me leap over them as if we are in an obstacle race.
I am wet and cold with rainwater dripping down my neck, but only when I reach the park can I see the rainfall in its entirety. I circle the reservoir with the sky black above me and the rain, in large walloping drops, popping like popcorn in the dark water. The Programmers splash past, not speaking today, and up ahead those long-legged women leave momentary footprints in the water as they lope along with their limp black sweaters contoured now to their newly indicated behinds.
When I leave the park the streets are streaming, and in the black morning lit by the headlights of the cars not moving, plastic bags of garbage roll over in the water and people are hurrying to work with their umbrellas blown out in the wind like suddenly sprouted trees.
Only the children are unconcerned as they slog to school in their yellow slickers with their violin cases strapped to their backs.
—
A SHAFT OF SUNLIGHT lights up the street from a crack in the black sky. The clouds blow off, the air is all at once warm and humid, and in a matter of minutes I’m trotting along in a brilliant blue morning. Water drips from the apartment house canopies, gurgling rivulets run along the curbstone. I feel as if I’ve risen from one element into another.
On my block, across from my building, some paper trash has spilled out of a torn plastic bag—business letters, bills, flyers. I pick up a handwritten letter on blue vellum, feeling that it was meant for me. My doorman tends to a wet dog on the leash and the dog shakes himself as I pass through my lobby. The ink of my letter runs like tears as I read, while rising to my floor, the grief of an abandoned lover. She can’t understand why he has left her, she needs to see him, come back, she says, come to me, for she still loves him, she always will, and it is all so sad, so sad, so sad, and I don’t know who threw the letter away, he after reading it or she after writing it, but I want to speed-dial whomever it is I talk to and express my gratitude, because when I get upstairs, across the street the shade is drawn on the window of the naked dancing girl and all I have ever wanted is specificity.