“Look, I’m not blind! I know it all. Why do you think I don’t go to Vegas? I know exactly what’s going on, but it’s just bullshit,” he said. “I’m inured to bullshit. You should’ve heard how the men in my penal battalion talked. Steve is a monk compared to them.”
“Your men talked about me?”
“Steve doesn’t talk to me about you!”
“Not to you, but to others! Go ask Walter what Steve says about me. Recently Walter’s been so embarrassed, he won’t look at me anymore, not even to say hello.”
She saw Alexander taken aback by that. Finally. Something got in. He frowned. “That’s it, you’re not coming to the construction sites anymore,” he said.
Tatiana looked at him, opened her palms to him. When all she saw was his closed face, she crossed her arms on her chest. “That seems a normal way to live? Hiding your wife from the people you work with, as if you’re still with the soldiers who buy or take women when they pass through foreign towns? This is your solution? Live like we’re in a penal battalion? Live like we’re in the Gulag?”
“Stop your overreacting. Stevie’s all right. And he is my friend.”
“Like Dimitri was your friend? Like Ouspensky was your friend?”
“No! Are you really comparing Stevie with Dimitri?”
“Even here, this is not how people are, Shura. They weren’t like this at Ellis, at NYU. They’re not like this at my hospital, they’re not like this at the market, at the gas stations. Sure, some try to get friendly. But there is something else going on here. Can’t you see—Bill Balkman hires only these kinds of people. You don’t see something wrong with that?”
“No!”
“Everything is raunchy and grody. Nothing is sacred. Nothing. You don’t think it rubs off on you? Weren’t you the one who told me you breathe oxen, you live oxen?”
“Stop using my own words against me. This isn’t it.”
“Is that what you’re doing? Recreating the Red Army for yourself on your little construction sites?”
“Tania!” exclaimed Alexander. “You better stop right now. I’m not going to get into what you’re trying to recreate in your little emergency room, so don’t start a fight that you can’t finish and can’t win.” He raised his hand before she said another word. “Look, I don’t want to quit my job,” he said, “and I’m not going to. Bill treats me very well. I have seven houses I’m building, he gives me a three percent bonus for each one. Who else is going to do that for me?”
“He charges twice as much for his builder’s commission as G.G. Cain does, which is why all your houses are so expensive and many are built like cardboard boxes. That seems normal to you, a low-quality custom home and a thirty percent commission? Bill should give you twenty-five percent of his damn commission, not three, seeing he couldn’t finish one house on time if it weren’t for you.”
“Oh, now you’re a regular Milton Friedman, too?”
“Who?”
“Balkman is talking of making me partner soon. If I go somewhere else, I’d have to start at the bottom and make no money again. That’s your idea of a happy Alexander? Here, I do well, Bill trusts me, and no one bothers me.”
“They bother me.”
“Don’t come there!” Alexander broke off. Lowering his voice, breathing hard, he said, “I’m done—done—talking about this. Anything else?”
“There is.”
“If you don’t get to it in exactly one fucking second—”
“Oh.” Tatiana clasped her hands together. “I see. Well, in that case, let me get to it in exactly one second. Steve is all right, you say. He’s your friend. Fine. So when your unassailable buddy Steve tells Amanda who tells me—at Cindy’s wedding—that at the Westward Ho, you”— She grasped the sides of the rail—“that you took one of the girls into one of the rooms—”
Alexander stood up abruptly. Tatiana stopped speaking. He didn’t blink, but something happened to his face—it fell and hardened at the same time. Something crumbled and cemented. He said nothing, just continued to stare at her.
“Shura...”
“Tania, I need a second.”
“You need a second? I’ve managed to live carrying those words inside me since last week.”
“You know how you did it. You did it because you know they’re not true.” He lit another cigarette. His fingers were stiff.
“It’s your word against his, husband,” Tatiana whispered. “That’s all I got. Your word against his. And you just spent fifteen minutes telling me that his word is good. You’re working with a man who says these things so that your wife hears, so that your wife believes they could be true. You’re good friends with someone who wants your wife to think those words are true.”
“Leave me alone.” He backed away from her. “I need to—just leave me alone.”
He spent the rest of the evening outside, in his shed and swimming. Tatiana put Anthony to bed, made bread, looked at a coffee table book of the Grand Canyon. She made him tea and brought it out to him with a fresh sweet bun with blackberry jam, but didn’t speak. There was nothing to say. She had told him—the days of ignorance, of innocence, as always, were so short-lived, which is why she cherished and relished them.
Tatiana couldn’t fall asleep in their bed without him. She fell asleep on the couch and woke up, naked and under the covers, feeling his hands on her, Alexander leaning over her, whispering comfort—and then it was five thirty in the morning, and she had to go to work. He got up with her, made coffee while she got herself ready, and brought her a cup in the bedroom. They touched lightly. They kissed lightly. As she was leaving, he said, sitting on the bed, “What am I supposed to do now?”
“You leave them behind, darling,” she said. “All of them. You are not going to change them. Leave them behind and never look back.”
Alexander worked that Friday and Saturday, and on Sunday they went to a Catholic Mass and took a long drive with Anthony up to Sedona to walk amid the Red Rock hills. They had lunch at their favorite Mexican restaurant, they talked about the Grand Canyon, they bought a Spanish vase. At night when they came home and put Ant to sleep, they swam in their pool and made love in the heated whirlpool tub. In bed, Alexander told her there was no way he could be without work for their anniversary, and Tatiana turned away and didn’t say anything, and Monday came and she went to the hospital and he went to work, just as if nothing had changed.
But Alexander found himself like Tatiana—unable to look Steve in the eye. All communication between them ceased except for the professional kind. What’s the status of the Schreiner house? What’s the status of the Kilmer house? What’s the status of...
He didn’t know what to do. Their tenth anniversary weekend was in four days! He bought Tatiana a very expensive ring, though he had just spent all of his bonus account and some of their savings on the extravagant pool. He couldn’t be without work. He decided that he would figure out a way to part company with Stevie while still continuing to work for his father. He also decided not to share his plan with Tania. For some odd reason, he didn’t think she’d agree.
The day before they left for the Grand Canyon, Alexander met Dudley.
Walter, the framer, had told Alexander a little about Dudley, the itinerant worker Stevie had hired a few weeks ago. He was a johnny-come-lately, Walter said, a jack of all trades. Walter said he was a wastrel, that something was not right with him. “Rumor is he’s on the run.” The framer lowered his voice. “Rumor is he’s wanted for murder in Montana.”
Really, Alexander said. For murder in Montana. “Yeah. But Stevie says that on the plus side, he works cheap, does everything, doesn’t complain.” Walter laughed.
Dudley was a tall man, as tall as Alexander. He was wearing cowboy boots and a cowboy hat, which he took off for a mock bow, and underneath it he had messy light ash hair pulled back in a stringy ponytail. His scraggly beard covered most of his face. He was chewing tobacco and then obnoxiously spitting it on the ground too close to eve
ryone’s feet.
Steve said, “You two should have a lot to talk about. Dudley served in Europe, too, on the Eastern front, right, Dud?”
He was unkempt, which was a peculiar thing for a soldier, as Alexander knew, but soldiers came in all kinds and some could not be retrained. Dudley’s handshake was strong and he didn’t look away. He said, “Fuckin’a. Two hundred and eightieth division. We crossed the Oder in April ’45.” He spat.
“Alexander was there, on the Oder. He was south in Poland, though, POW camp there, Catowice, isn’t that right, Alex?”
“Catowice? How the hell did you get so far out east?” Dudley asked.
“I don’t ask questions when I’m in German hands,” said Alexander. “I’ve got to get going. I’ll see you.”
“Hey, you want to come out for a drink with us tonight?” Steve asked.
“Can’t. We’re going away tomorrow.”
Dudley said with an insinuating smile, “You and the little lady?”
Alexander’s hands fisted up involuntarily. That was just a little too much insolence thrown down as a gauntlet in front of him in the middle of a sunny working afternoon. “What’s the smirk for, Dudley?” said Alexander in a voice that was so quiet, he could barely hear it himself.
“It’s ten years for you, isn’t it, Alex?” Steve interjected.
“Ten, huh?” said Dudley. “You know if this was a prison sentence, you’d be out by now.” He and Steve laughed. Then Dudley said, “How’d you get spliced in ’42, stuck in Catowice and all?”
“I wasn’t in Catowice in ’42,” Alexander said. “But two eightieth, that was an infantry unit, wasn’t it?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You were what, a corporal?”
“Sergeant first grade.”
“Sergeant. I see.”
“Alexander here was a captain,” Steve said.
Alexander smiled coldly. “Still am a captain, even as we speak,” he said. “Officer Reserve Corps, combat support services in Yuma.” Dudley didn’t smile even coldly. With the ranking order thus clearly established, now Alexander could unclench. “See you Tuesday. Steve, Dudley.” He started to walk away.
“You two have fun now,” said Dudley.
Alexander stopped walking and slowly turned around. Steve elbowed Dudley.
Alexander knew that in one moment everything he had worked for could be gone. In one moment, Tatiana and Alexander wouldn’t be going anywhere for their anniversary because Alexander would be talking to the police. It was only for her that he gritted his teeth and took control of himself but still couldn’t let it go completely.
“Dudley,” he said, stepping back to the two men, “I never met you before two minutes ago, but I’m going to give you a friendly word of advice. Don’t have that tone in your voice when you talk about my wife. In fact, better for you not to speak of her at all. Understood?”
Dudley laughed, chewing his tobacco with an open mouth. “Hey, man, I said nothing, why is your cage rattled?”
“As long as we’re clear, my cage is not rattled.”
But the cage was clattering.
The Germans in the Grand Canyon
Early Friday morning, they left Anthony with Francesca and drove two hundred and forty miles to the Grand Canyon, where they trekked in the blinding heat six winding hours down the Bright Angel Trail, down the Redwall and the Tonto, to the Archean granite, to the boiling Colorado. They set up their tent and stayed the weekend on the desert shores of another thousand-mile river, this one carving its way through two-billion-year-old igneous rock. Their three days was an oasis in the middle of their life. Alexander himself tried very hard to forget what was outside their tent.
They weren’t allowed to build a fire, but they swam and ate Tatiana’s bread, and Spam out of cans, and drank vodka straight from the bottle and had chocolate out of tinfoil. He gave her a white gold one-carat diamond ring, and she gave him a U.S. Army military watch, because his Red Army one had broken, and new leather boots before they had left home, because his had gotten worn. They played railroad tracks, railroad tracks (Russian-style and American-style), strip poker and even dominos. He lay in her lap and she told him jokes. (“A very sick man comes down from his deathbed, smelling something delicious in the kitchen, where he finds that his wife has baked him a batch of his favorite cookies. Gratefully he reaches for one, and she slaps his hand away and says, ‘They’re not for you! They’re for the funeral.’”) She read to him—as if in a Shakespearean soliloquy—the entire manual for a prototype of a color television, and in a much more Gracie Allen tone an article from Ladies Home Journal: “Are You a Match Made in Heaven, Crabby Cancer Girl and Chatty Gemini Guy?” (“They got us all wrong, Shura, didn’t they? It’s so the other way around.”); she explained to him what an algorithm was (a precise set of logical rules for solving a problem), asked him if he wanted to know what a divide-and-conquer algorithm was and when he groaned and said, God no, she bent and kissed him as if she were raising the dead.
She asked him to tell her one non-bedroom thing about her he loved, and he pretended he couldn’t think of one. He asked her to tell him one bedroom thing about him she loved and she pretended she couldn’t think of one.
Touché indeed.
He liked the way she laughed, he said, like choral music.
She liked the way he moved, she purred, like poetry, in song and sonnetry—in major scales and intervals and sympathetic strings, in undiminished chords and canons and compound meter rhythms, in passion rhyme, in tango time, in great ionic verse, in pyrrhics and dispondees when he was not so lyrical, in anapests and dactyls when he was.
Alexander, ever the poet and a scientist, immediately tested the law of gravitational physics: The force of attraction between two bodies being directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. And then lying in pitch black, at the end of radioactive choriambic love, Tatiana in her first soprano murmured, “I really don’t know what you think the classical sciences will teach you.”
He laughed and said, “That you are the funniest girl a man could marry.”
Very nearly asleep, they were lying quietly bare against each other.
“Shura,” she whispered, “please don’t worry. We’ll get pregnant. We haven’t been lucky, that’s all. We’ll get there.” She cleared her throat. “Though... don’t you wonder sometimes if maybe we’re meant to have just our one Antman?”
“He’s enough boy for anyone,” said Alexander. “But why do you want him to remain an only child? I was an only child.”
“Yes, and you’re enough boy for anyone.” She squeezed him.
“No, no, I’m tapped. Closed for the evening. Please come again tomorrow.”
Choral laughter. “I do nothing to stop us from having a baby, darling. I know my husband thinks I occasionally have divine powers, but he is not right in this case.”
And all Alexander said by way of drowsy reply was “Occasionally?”
She fell silent.
“Remember Luga?” he whispered. “Before I ever kissed you, remember lying naked in my arms?”
Tatiana started to cry.
“Did you ever imagine then, on the verge of our Armageddon, that we would be eleven years down the pike, across the million mystic miles, lying here in the Grand Canyon where the winter never comes, and you’re still naked in my arms, and I’m still rubbing my lips across your hair?”
“No.” She was kissing his bare clavicles. “The Germans aren’t across the river, Shura.”
“That’s true. Many things are forever behind us.” Alexander closed his eyes in the blackness.
“Yes. There’s plenty around us, too,” she said. “We must be strong.” She shimmered and whispered. “When I left you for dead, I thought nothing would ever touch me again. But you’re with me now. Nothing can touch us, my husband.”
For three days they remained in the eternal space where there was nothing else
in the world but them.
And then they came home.
The rock Alexander bought her was a one-carat VVS diamond set in four smaller diamonds in beveled white gold. It was a remarkable ring, and she showed it off to everyone in the hospital until Carolyn said, “Do you have any idea how much he must have spent on that?”
The military watch and the new boots Tatiana had bought him cost her fifty-one dollars. She thought she was a bit reckless and had spent too much. When she got the ring appraised during lunch, she found out it was valued at twenty-two hundred dollars. She burst into tears right at the jeweler’s.
Back home she begged Alexander to take it back. “We’re saving for a house,” Tatiana said. “We lived through Leningrad. You may be leaving your job. We can’t spend twenty-two hundred dollars on a ring!”
“It’s a diamond for you, for our tenth wedding anniversary. And I’m not leaving my job.”
“I don’t need diamonds, Shura, you know that. But you have to leave Balkman.”
“We’re not talking about this! I don’t understand—did I actually marry a woman who thinks the ice her husband bought for her is too big? It’s a gift, Tatiana. I will remind you again, eleven years later, that in this country, when you get a gift, you open it and say thank you. Take the fucking thing back if you want, but don’t speak about it again to me.”
“Don’t be upset with me. Don’t take your stress out on me!”
“Too late.”
The oasis was gone, the life was back.
Dudley of Montana
On Wednesday, the day after they returned, Alexander was nailing down the subflooring in the Schreiner house. The boards were warped and had come loose. His mouth was full of nails, and the hammer was in his hands. He needed to get new floor guys. This subflooring was so subpar. It would usually warp right before the final inspection. Where did Balkman get these crews from?
Steve came to see the progress of the house with Dudley by his side. “How was your time off?” he asked. “Where did you go?”
Alexander glanced back, his mouth full of nails.
Dudley was scrutinizing his bare arms. It was over a hundred degrees and Alexander was wearing only a sleeveless football tank; all the people he worked with had long seen and gotten used to his scars and his tattoos. Alexander spit the nails out of his mouth, right next to Dudley’s feet. He stood up, his hand gripping the hammer. “Grand Canyon,” he said. He certainly wasn’t going to tell them he spent three days in a tent with her. Silently he raised his eyes to Dudley, who raised his eyes to Alexander.