Butterfly Skin (14 page)

It’s easy to be unfaithful to your wife. Especially if you know why you do it. If you wake up one morning with the feeling that your life is passing by pointlessly, squeezed between the routine of work and the routine of family. I love my job and I love my family, but I resent being an ordinary correspondent who does an occasional interview for a second-flight online newspaper. In professional terms, I’m a successful failure. Successful – because I do actually earn the kind of money I can bring home without feeling ashamed. A failure – because after a year even I can’t recognize my own articles. Everything would have been different if I’d had the talent to become a columnist like the ones who write for
Gazette
– then my friends would quote my columns to each other when they met. Or if I could have gone to Chechnya.

I don’t regret the choice I made. I chose my family, but even in my family I still feel like a successful failure. My children love me, my wife supports me at difficult moments. In the final analysis, we drag this cart along together – my interviews in Evening.ru and Oxana’s articles in
Harper’s Bazaar
or
Elle
, added together, provide our breakfast, lunch and dinner, which is what five billion of the six billion inhabitants of the Earth toil for. I’m a very successful failure, I love my wife and my children. But I feel cramped in our life, just as the four of us are cramped in the two-room flat left to us by Oxana’s parents.

Sexual acrobatics with women I hardly even know – that was the only war I could set out for. Basements where water slops under your feet, stairways where the glass from broken bottles crunches under the soles of your shoes, abandoned buildings scheduled for demolition, a hoarse cry, a palm covering a mouth – for me these are Gudermes, Mozdok and Grozny, which I never visited. I never made it as a journalist, but at least as a man I don’t feel like a loser. I remember all of them, from the young girl courier with the pierced navel to the forty-year-old American journalist with whom I celebrated Yeltsin’s victory with oral sex in the sumptuous luxury of the Radisson-Slavyanskaya Hotel. All of them from the first-year student Natasha, who seduced me six months after my wedding, to Ksenia, whose ear-splitting shriek I only heard for the first time last week. These memories are my invisible trophies, photographs brought back from places where I didn’t have to feel like a failure.

It’s easy to be unfaithful to your wife. You just have to know the boundary that you must not cross. You just have to remember all the time that these women are doomed to become memories, invisible trophies, and your wife will be with you unto death. It’s very easy to respect your wife, especially if you’ve lived with her for ten years and you have two children. Sexual acrobatics is impossible with a body you know as well as you do your own; it’s like trying to kiss yourself on the heel. Your bodies have been ground to fit each other, they have no need of superfluous movements as they sway in synchronized motion on the waters of Oblivion in the most erotic rhythm a man and a woman can know. This rhythm is called “we shall grow old together,” and it is measured out by the water boiling in the kettle in the morning, the New Year chimes on TV and the rare long, drawn-out sighs in the air of the bedroom at night. Every morning you wake up together and every night you go to sleep together, every day you watch the gray hairs growing through the red tresses, every month you breathe in the smell of unborn children leaving her womb when their time comes. And when Oxana is sleeping beside you, you put your arms round her and as you fall asleep you wonder what invisible trophies her memory holds. Sexual acrobatics is impossible with a body you know as well as you do your own; and so is infidelity.

I LIKE WEEKENDS. I DON’T HAVE TO GET UP AT NINE
o’clock in order to be at work for eleven, I can lie in bed, then take a shower, stand in front of the mirror and watch the drops of water slithering down, the same way my body sags more with every year. I once promised myself that the bathroom in my own apartment would have a mirror right across the wall – I must have seen that in a video, in some dubious erotic tape that was a fifth-level derivative of
Emmanuelle
, some German soft porn or Scandinavian movie about the interminable adventures of five, six or seven buxom Swedish girls in every country in the world. My female friends and I, all decent, high-minded girls from the history faculty of what was then Leningrad University, sometimes used to get together in Katya’s apartment to discuss Nabokov and Brodsky, and then watch porn. Liza once brought genuine hard porn with pricks, full erections and all the works, but I found it distasteful and went hurrying off home, citing an exam that was still two weeks away. Well then, it was on one of those relatively innocent tapes that I saw a bathroom covered in mirrors, I don’t remember what was going on in there, but the idea of it stuck in my head and now here am I, Olga Krushevnitskaya, a thirty-five-year-old woman, IT manager, successful professional, standing naked in front of the mirror, all on my lonesome.

Of course, Oleg and I did once try to screw looking in the mirror. I don’t remember what they showed us when we were young, but in the movie everything must have looked far more sensuous. In reality your feet slip on the bottom of the bath, screwing and looking in the mirror at the same time is very uncomfortable, and in the end the curtain collapsed on our heads, like in another movie so terrifying that I switched the TV off at that point and felt glad that I was all on my lonesome in the apartment, so I didn’t have to feel ashamed in front of anyone or lie about having to study for an exam.

Ksyusha probably likes watching movies about psychos, maybe she even gets aroused by stories of men in masks wielding massive choppers and pursuing squealing girls. The girls in those movies always have huge breasts, like those numerous Swedish girls on Ibiza and the Mediterranean islands. So I don’t have to worry, I’m safe, my breasts are quite ordinary, size B at best, and they’ve started to sag in the last few years.

It would be good if I already had a child: then, when I looked in the mirror in the mornings, I’d understand that my breasts have sagged because a little boy or girl drank milk out of them and pounded me with his or her little fists. Looking at my sagging breasts, I’d think about my child, but as things are I only think about how time is passing and the way my body is drooping like a candle left out in the hot sun. Drooping further every moment even now, as I stand in front of the mirror in the bathroom, all on my lonesome.

Oleg says he likes my body, that it’s a mature woman’s body, a really experienced body. I don’t want to disappoint him, but my body isn’t all that experienced, except in waking up alone in its own bed. My sexual experience has been limited to the men that I have loved. There have been very few of them – probably because I’ve always remained a girl from a cultured Petersburg family, where Mom explained that the most important thing in life is love, and so the word “sex” was never even spoken in our home. It’s an effort for me to fall in love, I fall out of love slowly, and I was always envious of my girlfriends who had holiday affairs, as if they weren’t Petersburg girls from cultured families, but five, six or seven Swedish girls who had moved from Ibiza to Koktebel, Repino or Sestroretsk near Petersburg.

To be quite honest, the ability to make hard work of falling in love is all that remains in me of the girl from the cultured Petersburg family. Girls like that shouldn’t live in their own apartment in Moscow, they shouldn’t drive a Toyota, not even one that’s six years old, and they certainly shouldn’t weave intrigues against their own shareholders. Delicate Petersburg girls from the humanities faculty don’t ask their friends to use their journalistic contacts to check out potential investors with a distinctly criminal past, two partners who have disappeared and three criminal cases pending. Decent girls prefer to read about men like that in books or, at a pinch, watch them in the movies. To be quite honest, even Grisha and Kostya, my present shareholders, are not the most appropriate company for a cultured Petersburg lady, even if both of them do have a college education.

I feel a bit sorry to hand Grisha and Kostya over for this man to gobble up – and not even because he’ll find some way to pay them far less than the business they want to destroy is worth, but simply because I like them. We understand each other, because we’re very much alike. We’re all traitors.

I was supposed to study the nineteenth century, and Grisha and Kostya were supposed to study theoretical physics. We were supposed to live poor but honest lives. I was supposed to deal with words and dates, not numbers, and Grisha and Kostya were supposed to search for black holes or something of the kind, not the loopholes in the law that allowed them to make their first money. We’ve never spoken about this, but I know that we understand each other.

We are traitors, and betrayal is only hard the first time round. It’s hard to quit your job and go away to Moscow. It’s hard to tell yourself: “I can grow this business.” It’s hard to say for the first time: “Mom, I can’t talk now, I’ve got a meeting” – and hang up. After that everything just happens. You buy an apartment in Moscow, you grow this business, you get used to paying your parents’ bills. You have no difficulty in delivering up Grisha and Kostya to a man who will shaft them – and perhaps shaft you too.

It’s only hard the first time round – in business and in love. Hard to take your clothes off in front of a stranger, hard to respond to a kiss for the first time, hard to accept the attentions of men you don’t love at all. It was like that with Oleg. He wooed me for six months, sent me flowers, invited me to restaurants. He was a head of department in a major bank for which the firm I worked in was putting together a website. At first I thought Oleg was too pompous, then I thought he was too pushy, then I told myself he wasn’t from my social circle. Once when we were dining together, I was feeling unwell, I had a sore throat, so I hardly said a word. When they served the dessert, Oleg took a little box out of his pocket. Inside it was a bracelet of dark red stones. He put it on my wrist and kissed my fingers, one by one. At that moment I realized I couldn’t postpone the inevitable any longer. You’re a big girl now, I told myself, how much longer are you going to string the poor man along? Let him have it this evening, he’ll never show up again, and you’ll be quits.

Oleg always took me home, but this time I let him come up to the apartment. At that time I rented a one-room apartment near the Dynamo subway station, and he carried me straight from the hallway to the bed. We started making love and I suddenly felt what was happening wasn’t right. I could hardly breathe, my throat was smarting as if it had been scraped with sandpaper, I was helpless and passive, so Oleg spun me about like a lifeless doll. When he came, I just carried on lying where he’d put me five minutes earlier. He got up, leaned over me and asked: “Is there something wrong?” But I just waved my hand toward the door as if to say – go! He got dressed, walked into the kitchen, drank some water and came back into the room. “Are you sure there’s nothing you need?” he asked, and I shook my head again and waved my hand toward the door. He shrugged, kissed my unresponsive chapped lips and said: “Forgive me, apparently I…” and left without finishing what he was saying. It was only hard the first time round – so hard that in the morning I had a temperature of almost a hundred, and I stayed in bed for an entire week. Oleg came to see me every day, he brought me food, medicine and flowers. There was something old-fashioned about it – and that was how we became lovers.

I moved from near the Dynamo station to the Sokolniki district and then bought an apartment near the University subway, and during those years Oleg and I met once a week, sometimes less often, sometimes more, and had dinner at a restaurant. He told me about his work and sometimes mentioned his wife and children – simply in passing, as something that was taken for granted. It was from him that I first heard about the man I want to hand Kostya and Grisha over to. Oleg said that if I wanted to see this man, he could arrange a meeting.

Yes, we used to meet, dine at a restaurant and then make love. Oleg kissed me goodbye when he left, and I was left all on my lonesome, a girl from a good Petersburg family where they used to say that the most important thing in life is love.

Standing in front of the mirror all on my lonesome, I thought that maybe they didn’t simply say that, maybe they really believed it. I still believe it even now, but I wouldn’t admit that to anyone but Ksyusha.

Ksyusha often laughs at me. She says: you ought to screw more often, then you wouldn’t confuse sex with love. She says that if I’d had five or six men instead of one during this period of more than three years, I could say which one of them I love, but the way things are I just love the one who happens to be at hand, as they say, or rather, the one who has been between my legs. Ksyusha, by the way, doesn’t say “between your legs,” she avoids euphemisms in general, and so, by the way, do many Petersburg girls from good families. I never used to say things like that, and I never say them now, not because I’m embarrassed, but because a long time ago they became simply a work tool for me, a jargon that my business partners use, especially the suppliers. It would be strange to use words like that in ordinary everyday speech – for me it’s as strange as calling the check from the Auchan hypermarket a
payment document
.

But whatever Ksyusha might say, I think that if instead of one man I had five, six or seven – numbered like those lascivious buxom Swedes – I wouldn’t be able to love any of them. I would have several times more sex, but there would be no love left at all. My kind of girl can’t do it like that.

“Ksyusha,” I asked her one day, “have you ever been in love? Genuine girly love, like in the movies?”

“Probably, in fifth grade,” Ksyusha answered, “and perhaps with Nikita, my first BDSM lover. Apart from that, no, never. I told you, you need to screw more.”

It sometimes seems to me that Ksyusha and I are very much alike. I’ve never seen her Lyova, but I imagine him as being like my Vlad; if he was in Moscow, he’d make her wash the dishes after he had visitors. I’m sure that by my age Ksyusha will have her own apartment too, and a good car, perhaps even better than mine. I imagine that this morning she’s standing in front of the mirror in her bathroom too, a bit of a journalist, a bit of an editor, just a little bit of an IT manager, but in any case a successful professional, and thinking about me. Every one of us has a little secret: I have my Oleg, Ksyusha has her strange predilections. But then, what kind of secret is that, she doesn’t try to hide it, although, to be quite honest, I still feel embarrassed. The other day we were sitting at the chessboard tables in the Atrium mall, and I remembered how I used to play chess at school and reached the second grade, and Ksyusha told me she used to go to the dance studio and how glad she was six months earlier when she found a club where she could dance the boogie-woogie. The bar is shaped like a carved wooden arbor and the winter sun shone with unusual brightness through the glass walls. I thought that in ten years’ time Luzhkovian architecture would meld into the urban environment of Moscow, and people a bit younger than Ksyusha wouldn’t be any more annoyed by it than I am by touristy Arbat Street. So we were having a nice chat, and I was telling her about the shoes I’d bought the week before, and suddenly Ksyusha said in a perfectly genteel tone of voice: “And yesterday I bought myself a lovely scourge with lead tips on it. An absolutely classic cat-o’-nine-tails. It was damned expensive too, but you can’t expect the men to get anything, I have to get everything myself.” She said it so loudly that the people at the next table heard and probably realized quite clearly she wasn’t saying she’d bought a wonderful little kitten with nine tails. I immediately felt embarrassed and wanted to leave.