If the River Was Whiskey (21 page)

A moment earlier, when Naina had stepped from her car, a chain reaction had begun, and now the car doors were flung open one by one and the others began to emerge. They were old, all of them, as far as he could see. A few middle-aged, maybe. Some in robes, some not. The men were ghosts in baggy trunks, bowlegged, splay-footed, and bald, with fallen bellies
and dead gray hair fringing their nipples. He thought of Buster Keaton, in his antiquated swimsuit and straw boater. The women were heavier, their excrescences forced like sausage stuffing into the black spandex casings of their one-piece suits. Their feet were bloated and red, their thighs mottled with disuse, their upper arms heavy, bulbous, the color of suet. They called out to one another gaily, like schoolgirls at a picnic, in accents thick with another time and place.

“Jesus, Naina,” he whispered, turning to her, “this is crazy. It’s like something out of Fellini. Look at them.”

Naina gave him a soft tight-lipped smile—a tolerant smile, understated, serene, a smile that stirred his groin and made him go weak with something like hunger—and then her mother’s car schussed into the lot. The whole group turned as one to watch as the ancient, rust-eaten Pontiac heaved over the ruts toward them. He could see the grin on Mama Vyshensky’s broad, faintly mustachioed face as she fought the wheel and rode the bumps. He froze for an instant, certain her final, veering skid would send her careening into the side of his Camaro, but the big splotched bumper jerked to a halt six feet short of him. “Naina!” she cried, lumbering from the car to embrace her daughter as if she hadn’t seen her in twenty years. “And Marty,” turning to envelop him in a quick bear hug. “Nice weather, no?”

The breath streamed from her nostrils. She was a big woman with dimples and irrepressible eyes, a dead ringer for Nina Khrushchev. Her feet—as swollen and red as any of the others’—were squeezed into a pair of cheap plastic thongs and she wore a tentlike swimsuit in a shade of yellow that made the Camaro look dull. “Sonia!” she shouted, turning away and flagging her hand. “Marfa!” A gabble of Ukrainian, and then the group began to gather.

Marty felt the wind on his exposed hand and he took a final drag on his cigarette, flicked the butt away, and plunged his hand deep in his pocket. This was really something. Crazy. He
felt like a visitor to another planet. One old bird was rubbing snow into the hair of his bare chest, another skidding down the slope on his backside. “A toast!” someone shouted, and they all gathered round a bottle of Stolichnaya, thimble-sized glasses materializing in their hands. And when one old man with reddened ears asked him where his swim trunks were, Marty said it wasn’t cold enough for him, not by half.

They drank. One round, then another, and then they shouted something he didn’t catch and flung the glasses over their shoulders. Two ponderous old women began fighting playfully over a towel while Naina’s mother shouted encouragement and the others laughed like wizened children. And Naina? Naina stood out among them like a virgin queen, the youngest by thirty years. At least. That’s what it was, he suddenly realized—an ancient rite, sacrifice of the virgin. But they were a little late in this case, he thought, and felt his groin stir again. He squeezed her hand, gazed off into the curtain of falling snow, and saw the mountains fade and reappear in the distance.

Then he heard the first splash and turned to see a flushed bald head bobbing in the water and the old man with reddened ears suspended in the air, knees clutched tightly to his chest. There was a second splash—a real wallop—and then another, and then they were all in, frolicking like seals. Naina was one of the last to go, tucking her chin, planting her feet, her thighs flexing as she floated out into the tumult of the storm and cut the flat black surface in perfect grace and harmony.

The whole thing left him cold.

They’d been going together a month when she first took him to meet her mother. It was mid-October, chilly, a persistent rain beating the leaves from the trees. He didn’t want to meet her mother. He wanted to stay in bed and touch every part of her. He was twenty-three and he’d had enough of mothers.

“Don’t expect anything fancy,” Naina said, sitting close as he drove. “It’s the house I grew up in. Mama’s no housekeeper.”

He glanced at her, her face as open as a doll’s, high forehead, thick eyebrows, eyes pale as ice, and that hair. That’s what caught him the first time he saw her. That and her voice, as hushed and placid as the voice talking inside his head. “How long do we have to stay?” he said.

The house was in Cold Spring, two stories, white with green trim, in need of paint. It was an old house, raked back from the steep hill that dropped through town to the foot of the river. Naina’s mother was waiting for them at the door. “This is Marty,” she pronounced, as if he could have been anyone else, and to his horror, she embraced him. “In,” she said, “in,” sweeping them before her and slamming the door with a boom. “Such nasty day.”

Inside, it was close and hot, the air heavy with the odor of cooking. He was no gourmet, and he couldn’t identify the aroma, but it brought him back to high school and the fat-armed women who stood guard over the big simmering pots in the cafeteria. It wasn’t a good sign.

“Sit,” said Naina’s mother, gesturing toward a swaybacked sofa draped with an afghan and three overfed cats. “Shoo,” she said, addressing the cats, and he sat. He looked round him. There were doilies everywhere, lamps with stained shades, mounds of newspapers and magazines. On the wall above the radiator, the framed portrait of a blue-eyed Christ.

Naina sat beside him while her mother trundled back and forth, rearranging the furniture, fussing with things, and all the while watching him out of the corner of her eye. He was sleeping with her daughter, and she knew it. “A peppermint,” she said, whirling round on him with a box the size of a photo album, “maybe you want? Beer maybe? A nice glass of buttermilk?”

He didn’t want anything. “No thanks,” he managed, the voice stuck in his throat. Naina took a peppermint.

Finally the old woman settled into the sofa beside him—beside him, when there were six other chairs in the room—and he felt himself sinking into the cushions as into a morass. Something
was boiling over in the kitchen: he could smell it, hear it hissing. Sitting, she towered over him. “You like my Naina?” she asked.

The question stunned him. She’d tossed him a medicine ball and he was too weak to toss it back. Like? Did he like her Naina? He lingered over her for hours at a time, hours that became days, and he did things to her in the dark and with the lights on too. Did he like her? He wanted to jump through the roof.

“You call me Mama,” she said, patting his hand. “None of this Mrs. business.” She was peering into his eyes like an ophthalmologist. “So. You like her?” she repeated.

Miserable, squirming, glancing at Naina—that smile, tight-lipped and serene, her eyes dancing—and then back at her mother, he couldn’t seem to find anything to focus on but his shoes. “Yeah,” he whispered.

“Um,” the old woman grunted, narrowing her eyes as if she were deciding something. Then she rose heavily to her feet, and as he looked up in surprise and mortification, she spread her arms above him in a grand gesture. “All this,” she said, “one day is yours.”

“So what do you mean, like love and marriage and all that crap?”

Marty was staring down into his Harvey Wallbanger. It was November. Naina was at art class and he was sitting in the bar of the Bum Steer, talking about her. With Terry. Terry was just back from San Francisco and he was wearing a cowboy hat and an earring. “No,” Marty protested, “I mean she’s hot, that’s all. And she’s a great person. You’re going to like her. Really. She’s—”

“What’s her mother look like?”

Mama Vyshensky rose up before his eyes, her face dark with a five o’clock shadow, her legs like pylons, the square of her shoulders and the drift of her collapsed bosom. “What do you mean?”

Terry was drinking a mug of beer with a shot of tomato juice
on the side. He took a swallow of beer, then upended the tomato juice in the mug. The stain spread like blood. “I mean, they all wind up looking like their mother. And they all want something from you.” Terry stirred the tomato beer with his forefinger and then sucked it thoughtfully. “Before you know it you got six slobbering kids, a little pink house, and you’re married to her mother.”

The thought of it made him sick. “Not me,” he said. “No way.”

Terry tilted the hat back on his head and fiddled briefly with the earring. “You living together yet?”

Marty felt his face flush. He lifted his drink and put it down again. “We talked about it,” he said finally, “like why pay rent in two places, you know? She’s living in an apartment in Yorktown and I’m still in the bungalow. But I don’t know.”

Terry was grinning at him. He leaned over and gave him a cuff on the shoulder. “You’re gone, man,” he said. “It’s all over. Birdies singing in the trees.”

Marty shrugged. He was fighting back a grin. He wanted to talk about her—he was full of her—but he was toeing a fine line here. He and Terry were both men of the world, and men of the world didn’t moon over their women. “There’s one rule,” he said, “they’ve got to love you first. And most. Right?”

“Amen,” Terry said.

They were quiet a moment, mulling over this nugget of wisdom. Marty drained his glass and ordered another. “What the hell,” Terry said, “give me another one too.”

The drinks came. They sipped meditatively. “Shit,” Terry said, “you know what? I saw your mother. At La Guardia. It was weird. I mean I’m coming in after six months out there and I get off the plane and there’s your mother.”

“Who was she with?”

“I don’t know. Some skinny old white-haired dude with a string tie and a suit. She said hello to me and I shook the guy’s hand. They were going to Bermuda, I think she said.”

Marty said nothing. He sipped at his drink. “She’s a bitch,” he said finally.

“Yeah,” Terry said, reprising the ceremony of the beer and the tomato juice, “whatever. But listen,” turning to him now, his face lit beneath the brim of his ten-gallon hat, “let me tell you about San Francisco—I mean that’s where it’s really happening.”

In January, a month after he’d watched her part the frigid waters of the Hudson, the subject of living arrangements came up again. She’d cooked for him, a tomato-and-noodle dish she called spaghetti but that was pure Kiev in flavor, texture, and appearance—which is not to say it was bad, just that it wasn’t spaghetti as he knew it. He had three helpings, then he built a fire and they lay on the sofa together. “You know, this is crazy,” she said in her softest voice, the one with the slight catch to it.

It had been a long day—he was in his first year of teaching, Special Ed, and the kids had been wild. They’d sawed the oak handles off the tools in shop class and chucked stones at the schoolbus during lunch break. He was drowsy. “Hm?” was all the response he could manage.

Her voice purred in his ear. “Spending all my time here; I mean, half my clothes here and half at my place. It’s crazy.”

He said nothing, but his eyes were open.

She was silent too. A log shifted in the fireplace. “It’s just such a waste, is all,” she said finally. “The rent alone, not to mention gas and wear and tear on my car…”

He got up to poke the fire, his back to her. “Terry’s going back to the West Coast this summer. He wants me to go along. For a vacation. I mean, I’ve never seen it.”

“So what does that mean?” she said.

He poked the fire.

“You know I can’t go,” she said after a moment. “I’ve got courses to take at New Paltz. You know that, right?”

He felt guilty. He looked guilty. He shrugged.

Later, he made Irish coffee, heavy on sugar, cream, and whiskey. She was curled up in the corner of the sofa, her legs bare, feet tucked under her. She was spending the night.

The wind had come up and sleet began to rattle the windows. He brought the coffee to her, sat beside her and took her hand. It was then that the picture of her perched at the edge of the snowy dock came back to him. “Tell me again,” he said, “about the water, how it felt.”

“Hm?”

“You know, with the Polar Bear Club?”

He watched her slow smile, watched the snowy afternoon seep back into her eyes. “Oh, that—I’ve been doing it since I was three. It’s nothing. I don’t even think about it.” She looked past him, staring into the flames. “You won’t believe this, but it’s not that cold—almost the opposite.”

“You’re right,” he said. “I won’t.”

“No, really,” she insisted, looking him full in the face now. She paused, shrugged, took a sip of her coffee. “It depends on your frame of mind, I guess.”

At the end of June, just before he left for San Francisco, they took a trip together. He’d heard about a fishing camp in northern Quebec, a place called Chibougamau, where pike and walleye attacked you in the boat. There were Eskimos there, or near there, anyway. And the last four hours of driving was on dirt roads.

She had no affection for pike or walleye either, but this was their vacation, their last chance to be together for a while. She smiled her quiet smile and packed her bag. They spent one night in Montreal and then drove the rest of the way the following day. When they got there—low hills, a scattering of crude cabins, and a river as raw and hard as metal—Marty was so excited his hands trembled on the wheel. “I want to fish,” he said to the guide who greeted them.

The guide was in his forties, hard-looking, with a scar that
ran in a white ridge from his ear to his Adam’s apple. He was dressed in rubber knee boots, jeans, and a lumberjack shirt. “Hi” and “thank you” was about all the English he could manage. He gestured toward the near cabin.

“Ours?” Marty said, pointing first to Naina and then himself.

The guide nodded.

Marty looked up at the sun; it squatted on the horizon, bloated and misshapen.

“Listen, Naina,” he said, “honey, would you mind if…I mean, I’m dying to wet my line and since we’re paying for today and all—”

“Sure,” she said. “I’ll unpack. Have fun.” She grinned at the guide. The guide grinned back.