Nothing.
“Irina?”
The smallest voice: “I will wait.”
I took her out to Harry’s that night for Italian food, and she was radiant, beaming, almost giddy—she couldn’t stop grinning at me, and everything I said was the funniest thing she’d ever heard. She cut her veal into neat little strips, chattered at the waiter in a breathy fluid Italian, tossed off one glass of Chianti after another, all the while pecking kisses at me and entwining her fingers with mine as if we were sixteen-year-olds at the mall. I didn’t mind. This was our reconciliation, and the smoke of sensuality hung over the table.
She leaned toward me over dessert—millefoglie with a cappuccino and Grand Marnier—and gave me the full benefit of her swollen eyes. The lights were low. Her voice was a whisper. I expected her to say, “Do you not want to take me home to bed now?” but she surprised me. With a randy look, she cleared her throat and said, “Casey, I have been wondering”—pause—“do you think I should put my money in CD or mutual fund?”
I couldn’t have been more stunned if she’d asked me who played third base for the Dodgers. “What?”
“The Magellan has performed best, has it not?” she whispered, and the talk of money seemed to make her voice sultrier still. “But then the founder is retiring, is this not so?”
A sudden anger came over me. Was she hustling me, was that it? She had money to invest and yet accepted her room and meals and all the rest from me as if it were her divine right? I stared down into my cappuccino and muttered, “Hell, I don’t know. What are you asking me for?”
She patted my hand and then said in her fading slip of a voice, “Perhaps this is not the time.” Her mouth made a little moue of contrition. And then, almost immediately, she brightened again. “It is early yet, Casey,” she said, quaffing her Grand Marnier and rising. “Do you not want to take me to the Odessa?”
The Odessa was a club in the Fairfax district where Russian emigres of all ages would gather to sit at long cafeteria-style tables and listen to schmaltzy singers and third-rate comedians. They drank water glasses of warm Coke and vodka—the Coke in the left hand, vodka in the right, alternating swigs—and they sang along with and got up from the table and careened round the room to the frenetic Tatar strains of the orchestra. We stayed past closing, danced till we were soaked in sweat and drank enough vodka to fuel a 747. In the course of the evening we toasted Gorbachev, Misha Baryshnikov, the girls of Tbilisi, Leningrad and Murmansk, and drank the health of everyone in the room, individually, at least three times. Irina passed out in the car on the way home, and the night ended after she vomited gloriously in the potted ficus and I helped her to bed as if she were an invalid.
I felt queasy myself the next morning and called in sick at the office. When I finally got out of bed, around noon, Irina’s door was still closed. I was brewing coffee when she slumped through the kitchen door and fell into a chair. She was wearing a rumpled housecoat and she looked as if she’d been buried and dug up again.
“Me too,” I said, and I put both hands to my temples.
She said nothing, but accepted the coffee I poured for her. After a moment she pointed out the window to where one of my neighbors was letting her dog nose about in the shrubs that rimmed our little patch of lawn. “Do you see that dog, Casey?” she asked.
I nodded.
“It is a very lucky dog.”
“Lucky?”
“Yes,” she said, slow and lethargic, drawing it out. “It is a dog that has never tasted wodka.”
I laughed, but my eyes felt as if they were being sucked into my head and the coffee set my insides churning.
And then she took me by surprise again. Outside, the dog had disappeared, jerked rudely away at the end of a leash. The coffee machine dripped coffee. Someone gunned an engine two blocks away. “Casey,” she said, utterly composed, utterly serious, and she looked deep into my eyes. “Do you not want to marry me?”
The second blowup came at the end of the month, when the phone bill arrived. Four hundred twenty-seven dollars and sixty-two cents. I recognized a few calls—my lawyer’s number, Rob Peterman’s, a drunken cri de coeur I’d made to an old flame (now married) in Santa Barbara. But the rest were long-distance overseas—to Moscow, Novgorod, London, Paris, Milan. I was outraged. I was in shock. Why should I be responsible for her bills? I did not want to marry her, as I’d explained to her the morning after the Odessa. I told her I’d just been divorced and was leery of new attachments, which was true. I told her I still had feelings for my wife, which was also true (of course, those feelings were exclusively antipathetic, but I didn’t mention that). Irina had only stared at me, and then she got up from the kitchen table and went into her room, shutting the door firmly behind her.
But now, now she was out somewhere—no doubt looking at popcorn makers or water-purifying systems at some department store—the house was in a shambles, I hadn’t even loosened my tie yet and the phone bill was sending shock waves through me. I’d just poured a drink when I heard her key in the door; she came in beaming, oblivious, in a rustle of shopping bags and cheap trinkets, and I was all over her. “Don’t you know what this means?” I shouted. “Don’t you know that the telephone isn’t free in this society, that somebody has to pay for it? That I have to pay for it?”
She gave me a hard cold look. Her eyes narrowed; her chin trembled. “I will pay it,” she said, “if that is how you feel.”
“How I feel?” I shouted. “How I feel? Everybody pays their way in life, that’s how I feel. That’s the way society works, like it or not. Maybe it’s different in the workers’ paradise, I don’t know, but over here you play by the rules.”
She had nothing to say to that—she just held me with her contemptuous look, as if I were the one being unreasonable, and in that moment she reminded me of Julie, my ex-wife, as if she were in league with her, as if she were her double, and I felt bitter and disgusted to the core. I dropped the bill on the coffee table and stalked out the door.
When I got home from work the next day, the phone bill was still there, but there were five pristine one-hundred-dollar bills laid out beside it like a poker hand. Irina was in the kitchen. I didn’t know what to say to her. Suddenly I felt ashamed of myself.
I drifted into the room and draped my sportcoat over the back of one of the chairs and went to the refrigerator for a glass of orange juice. “Hello, Casey,” she said, glancing up from her magazine. It was one of those women’s magazines, thick as a phone book.
“Hi,” I said. And then, after an interval during which the level of the orange juice mounted in the glass and I gazed numbly out the window on a blur of green, I turned to her. “Irina,” I murmured, and my voice seemed to be caught in my throat, “I want to say thanks for the phone bill—the money, I mean.”
She looked up at me and shrugged. “It is nothing,” she said. “I have a job now.”
“A job?”
And there was her smile, the sharp little teeth. “Da,” she said. “I have met a man at the Odessa when I go for tea last Thursday? Do you remember I told you? His name is Zhenya and he has offered me a job.”
“Great,” I said. “Terrific. We should celebrate.” I lifted my glass as if it contained Perrier-Jouët. “What kind of work?”
She looked down at her magazine and then back up again, holding my eyes. “Escort service.”
I thought I hadn’t heard her right. “What? What are you saying?”
“It is an escort service, Casey. Zhenya says the men who come here for important business—in the movies, banking, real estate—they will like me. He says I am very beautiful.”
I was stunned. I felt as if I’d had the wind knocked out of me. “You can’t be serious?” My voice was pitched high, a yelp. “Irina, this is”—I couldn’t find the words—“this is not right, it’s not legitimate. It’s, it’s prostitution, don’t you know that?”
She was studying me, her shrewd eyes, the little nugget of her face. She sighe
d, closed the magazine and rose from her seat. “It is not a problem,” she said finally. “If I do not like them I will not sleep with them.”
And what about me? I wanted to say. What about Disneyland and Zuma Beach and all the rest of it? Instead I turned on her. “You’re crazy,” I spat. “Nuts. Don’t you know what you’re getting into?”
Her eyes hadn’t left mine, not for a second. She was a foot away from me. I could smell her perfume—French, four hundred dollars the ounce. She shrugged and then stretched her arms so that her breasts rose tight against her chest. “What am I to do,” she said in her smallest voice, so languid and sad. “I have nothing, and you will not marry me.”
That was the end for us, and we both knew it.
I took her out to dinner that night, but it was a requiem, an interment. She stared off into vacancy. Neither of us had much to say. When we got home I saw her face illuminated for an instant as she bent to switch on the lamp, and I felt something stir in me, but I killed it. We went to our separate rooms and to our separate beds.
In the morning, I sat over a cup of lukewarm coffee and watched her pack. She looked sweet and sad, and she moved as if she were fighting an invisible current, her hair streaming, imaginary fish hanging in the rafters. I didn’t know if the escort-service business was a bluff or not, didn’t know how naive—or how calculating—she was, but I felt that a burden had been lifted from my shoulders. Now that it was over, I began to see her in a different light, a softer light, and a sliver of guilt began to stab at me. “Look, Irina,” I said as she struggled to force her suitcase shut, “I’m sorry. I really am.”
She threw her hair back with a jerk of her chin, shrugged into the baby-blue patent-leather jacket.
“Irina, look at me—”
She wouldn’t look. She leaned over to snap the latches on her suitcase. “This is no poem, Irina,” I said. “This is life.”
She swung round so suddenly I flinched. “I am the one, Casey,” she said, and her eyes leapt at me. “I am the one who can die for love.”
All the bitterness came back to me in that instant, all the hurt and guilt. Zhenya, Japan, the mysterious benefactor in Moscow, Rob Peterman and how many others? This was free enterprise, this was trade and barter and buying and selling—and where was the love in that? Worse yet: where was the love in me?
I was hard, a rock, granite. “Then die for it,” I said.
The phrase hung between us like a curtain. A car moved up the street. I could hear the steady drip-drip-drip of the kitchen tap. And then she bowed her head, as if accepting a blow, and bent for her suitcases. I was paralyzed. I was dead. I watched her struggle with her things, watched her fight the door, and then, as the sudden light gave way to darkness, I watched the door swing shut.
(1990)
HEART OF A CHAMPION
We scan the cornfields and the wheatfields winking gold and goldbrown and yellowbrown in the midday sun, on up the grassy slope to the barn redder than red against the sky bluer than blue, across the smooth stretch of the barnyard with its pecking chickens, and then right on up to the screen door at the back of the house. The door swings open, a black hole in the sun, and Timmy emerges with his corn-silk hair, corn-fed face. He is dressed in crisp overalls, striped T-shirt, stubby blue Keds. There’d have to be a breeze—and we’re not disappointed—his clean fine cup-cut hair waves and settles as he scuffs across the barnyard and out to the edge of the field. The boy stops there to gaze out over the nodding wheat, eyes unsquinted despite the sun, and blue as tinted lenses. Then he brings three fingers to his lips in a neat triangle and whistles long and low, sloping up sharp to cut off at the peak. A moment passes: he whistles again. And then we see it—way out there at the far corner of the field—the ripple, the dashing furrow, the blur of the streaking dog, white chest, flashing feet.
They’re in the woods now. The boy whistling, hands in pockets, kicking along with his short baby-fat strides; the dog beside him wagging the white tip of her tail like an all-clear flag. They pass beneath an arching old black-barked oak. It creaks. And suddenly begins to fling itself down on them: immense, brutal: a panzer strike. The boy’s eyes startle and then there’s a blur, a smart snout clutching his pantleg, the thunderblast of the trunk, the dust and spinning leaves. “Golly, Lassie … I didn’t even see it,” says the boy sitting safe in a mound of moss. The collie looks up at him (the svelte snout, the deep gold logician’s eyes), and laps at his face.
And now they’re down by the river. The water is brown with angry suppurations, spiked with branches, fence posts, tires and logs. It rushes like the sides of boxcars—and chews deep and insidious at the bank under Timmy’s feet. The roar is like a jetport: little wonder he can’t hear the dog’s warning bark. We watch the crack appear, widen to a ditch; then the halves separating (snatch of red earth, writhe of worm), the poise and pitch, and Timmy crashing down with it. Just a flash—but already he’s way downstream, his head like a plastic jug, dashed and bobbed, spinning toward the nasty mouth of the falls. But there’s the dog—fast as a struck match—bursting along the bank all white and gold melded in motion, hair sleeked with the wind of it, legs beating time to the panting score … Yet what can she hope to do?—the current surges on, lengths ahead, sure bet to win the race to the falls. Timmy sweeps closer, sweeps closer, the falls loud now as a hundred timpani, the war drums of the Sioux, Africa gone bloodlust mad! The dog strains, lashing over the wet earth like a whipcrack; strains every last ganglion and dendrite until finally she draws abreast of him. Then she’s in the air, the foaming yellow water. Her paws churning like pistons, whiskers chuffing with the exertion—oh the roar!—and there, she’s got him, her sure jaws clamping down on the shirt collar, her eyes fixed on the slip of rock at the falls’ edge. Our blood races, organs palpitate. The black brink of the falls, the white paws digging at the rock—and then they’re safe. The collie sniffs at Timmy’s inert little form, nudges his side until she manages to roll him over. Then clears his tongue and begins mouth-to-mouth.
Night: the barnyard still, a bulb burning over the screen door. Inside, the family sit at dinner, the table heaped with pork chops, mashed potatoes, applesauce and peas, a pitcher of clean white milk. Home-baked bread. Mom and Dad, their faces sexless, bland, perpetually good-humored and sympathetic, poise stiff-backed, forks in midswoop, while Timmy tells his story: “So then Lassie grabbed me by the collar and golly I musta blanked out cause I don’t remember anything more till I woke up on the rock—”
“Well I’ll be,” says Mom.
“You’re lucky you’ve got such a good dog, son,” says Dad, gazing down at the collie where she lies patiently, snout over paw, tail wapping the floor. She is combed and washed and fluffed, her lashes mascaraed and curled, her chest and paws white as dishsoap. She looks up humbly. But then her ears leap, her neck jerks round—and she’s up at the door, head cocked, alert. A high yipping yowl like a stuttering fire whistle shudders through the room. And then another. The dog whines.
“Darn,” says Dad. “I thought we were rid of those coyotes—next thing they’ll be after the chickens again.”
The moon blanches the yard, leans black shadows on the trees, the barn. Upstairs in the house, Timmy lies sleeping in the pale light, his hair fastidiously mussed, his breathing gentle. The collie lies on the throw rug beside the bed. We see that her eyes are open. Suddenly she rises and slips to the window, silent as a shadow. And looks down the long elegant snout to the barnyard below, where the coyote slinks from shade to shade, a limp pullet dangling from his jaws. He is stunted, scabious, syphilitic, his forepaw trap-twisted, his eyes running. The collie whimpers softly from behind the window. And the coyote stops in mid-trot, frozen in a cold shard of light, ears high on his head. Then drops the chicken at his feet, leers up at the window and begins a soft, crooning, sad-faced song.
The screen door slaps behind Timmy as he bolts from the house, Lassie at his heels. Mom’s head emerges on the rebound. “Timmy!” (He stops as if jerk
ed by a rope, turns to face her.) “You be home before lunch, hear?”
“Sure, Mom,” he says, already spinning off, the dog by his side. We get a close-up of Mom’s face: she is smiling a benevolent boys-will-be-boys smile. Her teeth are perfect.
In the woods Timmy steps on a rattler and the dog bites its head off. “Gosh,” he says. “Good girl, Lassie.” Then he stumbles and slips over an embankment, rolls down the brushy incline and over a sudden precipice, whirling out into the breathtaking blue space like a sky diver. He thumps down on a narrow ledge twenty feet below. And immediately scrambles to his feet, peering timorously down the sheer wall to the heap of bleached bone at its base. Small stones break loose, shoot out like asteroids. Dirt-slides begin. But Lassie yarps reassuringly from above, sprints back to the barn for a winch and cable, hoists the boy to safety.
On their way back for lunch Timmy leads them through a still and leaf-darkened copse. We remark how odd it is that the birds and crickets have left off their cheeping, how puzzling that the background music has begun to rumble so. Suddenly, round a bend in the path before them, the coyote appears. Nose to the ground, intent, unaware of them. But all at once he jerks to a halt, shudders like an epileptic, the hackles rising, tail dipping between his legs. The collie too stops short, just yards away, her chest proud and shaggy and white. The coyote cowers, bunches like a cat, glares at them. Timmy’s face sags with alarm. The coyote lifts his. lip. But then, instead of leaping at her adversary’s throat, the collie prances up and stretches her nose out to him, her eyes soft as a leading lady’s, round as a doe’s. She’s balsamed and perfumed; her full chest tapers a lovely S to her sleek haunches and sculpted legs. He is puny, runted, half her size, his coat like a discarded doormat. She circles him now, sniffing. She whimpers, he growls: throaty and tough, the bad guy. And stands stiff while she licks at his whiskers, noses at his rear, the bald black scrotum. Timmy is horror-struck. Then, the music sweeping off in birdtrills of flute and harpstring, the coyote slips round behind, throat thrown back, black lips tight with anticipation.