In the Red (16 page)

Then his Death, which had become completely shriveled in the chest, leapt out of its prison and seized him. The prince fell lifeless on the ground and instantly crumbled into dust.

E
lena was wearing a one-piece swimsuit, which seemed unusual to Irina. It was navy with white polka dots and a lot of ruching down the sides. Maybe she was trying to imitate Irina's vintage pinup look. Or maybe there was something wrong. She hadn't gotten in the pool yet, when usually she was the first to leap in. She moved in a slow, hunched over way, as if she were in pain.

“Do you have cramps or something?” Irina asked. “I can get you painkillers.”

“Cramps?”

“You know.” Irina motioned to her lower abdomen.

“Yes, lady problems. No thank you. I will just warm myself here in the sun.”

For a few minutes, they reclined with their eyes closed. Then Irina heard Elena's voice say, “I shave my toes now.” It sounded curiously exhausted.

“What?”

“I was watching television the other day. There was a commercial on for a kind of wax for women. The commercial said the wax removed the unsightly hair from such places as your upper lip, bikini line, toes. Toes? I looked down at my feet. And there it was, unsightly hair on the top of the toes I had never before seen. I had been alerted of my deficiency. I could not unsee the little hairs.”

“So now you shave them.”

“Yes.”

“I shave mine because the straps on high-heeled girly sandals will sometimes tug on them and it hurts.”

They thoughtfully looked over each other's denuded toes. “I like your nail polish,” Irina said.

“The color is called Femme Fatale,” Elena answered flatly.

“That's more exciting than mine. Mine is called Cinnamon Spice.”

These were the names a copywriter had given to a bright red and an orangey pink, trying to infuse these colors with sexy allure: a woman of lethal beauty and a spicy tang on the tongue.

“Really, they are just tiny pots of nasty-smelling paints,” Elena said, as if she could hear what Irina was thinking.

“So you're not into pedicures, is what you're saying.”

“Oh, I hate it when people touch my feet. I do it myself.”

Irina pictured Elena crouched over her feet, gingerly painting the nude seashell pink of each of her toenails with a bitty paintbrush while wrinkling her nose at the chemical reek of the lacquer. “Why do you bother with it?” Irina asked.

“We have to, do we not?”

Irina hadn't thought about whether or not the ritual was compulsory. She just got weekly pedicures and manicures because it gave her something to do. But it was true, it must have been, in their position—they had to do it. Being young, pretty, and well-groomed was practically their vocation.

“I went to bed with Dragos,” Irina blurted.

Elena sat up in her chaise longue. “What?”

“Dragos. Dragos fucked me.”

“Ha! Did he drug you?”

“No.”

Elena gazed pointedly at Irina, presumably reflecting on the fact that she had gone to bed with Dragos of her own volition, not under the influence of some kind of chemical. Was the act more or less shameful because she had chosen it? Sometimes Elena was as inscrutable as her husband. A less observant person than Irina might have ascribed their impassivity to their common Russianness, but that wasn't it. The textures of their silences were different. Elena had the sangfroid of someone who had had a lot of things done to her, Vasilii of someone who had done a lot of things to others.

“Interesting,” Elena said. “Well, he has wanted you for a while.”

“You knew this?”

Irina's tone sounded shocked enough to make Elena giggle. “It is hard not to. So, was he any good?”

Irina could not begin to explain to her friend what had happened when she went to bed with Dragos. It was entirely bizarre. The words
good
and
bad
seemed not to apply. Or if one of them did, then the other did too.

“What's
not
good, exactly, when it comes to sex?” Irina asked.

“If you do not know that, you are a fortunate girl.” Elena gave a small, dry laugh. She, like Andrei, must have known what a bad fuck was. Worse, what if she didn't know what it was like when it was good? It was true that it was practically impossible for Irina to imagine Vasilii as a lover. Or stranger still—

“Were you with other men before Vasilii?”

Elena shrugged. “Some.”

“Elena, how old were you for your first one?”

“However old a girl needs to be to be sold.”

Irina went quiet. Did Elena mean that quite literally? Not just in the way a girl might give her body in the hopes of a marriage, but a real sale? Irina was about to ask if this happened through some kind of agency. And if that agency was the same kind that had made her matrimonial match with Vasilii. And if Vasilii somehow owned or operated this agency. And if Andrei was also involved somehow. If Andrei's traffic extended beyond luxury goods. Beyond counterfeit luxury goods. Beyond stolen cars. Beyond illegal drugs.

There was a great big ball in Irina's throat. There was so much crime so close by that she hardly had to reach out to touch it. But then again it was everywhere, even far, far away from the pleasures of Andrei's bed. You couldn't even buy a sack of oranges at the supermarket without exploiting somebody. You couldn't put clothes on your back to cover your nakedness without a pair of underpaid hands to sew them together for you. It was a stupid, losing gamble to try to be a good person in this world. The desert city had taught Irina about the house. The house—the house always wins.

“You know,” Elena said, sighing and resting a limp hand on her sore belly, “maybe I want your painkillers after all. Do you have any good ones?”

T
he four ATMs are outside, around the corner of the building, two per wall. Behind them there is an ATM room accessed by upper and lower keys, where the bankers open up the backs of the machines to load them. To get to this room Irina and Amy have to walk across the bank floor with a big, unmarked bag filled with twenties. If somebody knew what to look for, knew when to tackle the bankers and run, it would be a fast and effective robbery. They move quickly. In the space of a deep inhale and exhale, they make it from the safety of behind the teller windows to the inside of the ATM room, locking the door behind them.

Each machine is named after a letter in the phonetic alphabet: Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta. Alpha is the one with the sticky door; Irina has to give it a good yank to get it open. Then she pulls the metal shaft out of the machine's innards, where the money is packed.

“How many K we need in there?” Amy asks.

“Ten, I think.”

Amy hands Irina the five packets of twenties one at a time. Irina lines them up in the long tray, one behind the other. When she breaks the Federal Reserve paper straps on them with a letter opener and pulls them out from the solid mass of cash, she does it with a peculiar violence that makes Amy ask her if she is okay.

“I can't believe I did this again!” Irina says, exasperated.

“Did what again?”

“Bad date last night.”

“Was he a creep?”

“You could say that.”

Irina pushes the metal shaft loaded with money back into the machine, hard, and then stands there without letting go of the handle. Yes, she's done it again. She had allowed a man to ruin her, as Andrei would have said, in microcosm over the course of one evening. Why did she let them do this to her?

Amy isn't saying anything, isn't moving. She is waiting for Irina to continue, so Irina does:

“I met a new man. It seemed to be going well; I liked his wit. Last night after dinner I went back with him to his place to watch a movie, a tragic war-torn love story. The kind of movie a man takes you to so that you'll cry and then he can comfort you. I was collaborating with his design, I was drinking his wine and we were getting pretty close on the couch, I was leaning on him. Except at the end when the titles were rolling he was the one who was crying. Tears pouring unchecked down his face without a sound. Made me wonder how long I was sitting there in the dark leaning against this weeping man. Made me feel sorry for him.”

Irina shuts the back of Alpha and locks it. She opens Bravo. “This one's almost empty. We're going to need a good twenty K in here.”

“Here, let me load,” Amy says gently, nudging Irina aside. Irina watches her tightly fit the neat packets of cash inside the long open tray, one at a time. When the money is all in, Irina reaches for the letter opener. “So, he was crying,” she says, “and like an idiot I ask him with great care, ‘What's the matter?' And he says, ‘The lead actress looks so much like my ex.' And me, like an idiot, I'm full of drunk girl empathy, so I give him a hug. After a minute of me holding him he says, ‘I'd rather not sleep alone tonight.' This is when it gets awkward.”

The Federal Reserve straps on the cash packets make a satisfying crack as Irina breaks them with the letter opener. She pulls the straps out, leaving the money as one uninterrupted block, and drops them in the trash. “What would you have done?” she asks Amy.

“You mean would I have stayed?”

“Yes. When a crying man asks you to stay, what do you do?”

They are both standing there, while Amy is considering the question, when the silence is broken by a series of little electronic beeps in the machine from someone outside trying to use it.

“Out of fucking order, okay?” Irina shouts at the beeps through the metal guts of the machine, and the noises stop. She heaves a deep sigh. “Well, I stayed. I said, ‘Okay, let's go to sleep, then.' I borrowed one of his T-shirts and got in bed with him. For a while we lay there and I watched car headlights from the street move across his wall. Then he caught me around the waist and pulled me in. When he went for a kiss I turned my face away and his tongue left a big wet streak down my cheek and I thought, This is my fault. Why am I here? Shrinking back from him as much as I could without fighting him, hoping he'd get the picture. He must not have cared too much about the picture because he pulled the T-shirt up and sucked on my tits so hard that it hurt and this is when I would have said no if I'd said it. But if I said no then he might really hurt me. So I let him. I let him and it didn't take long, he went to sleep right after. I was stuck there, in some residential neighborhood somewhere where there weren't buses at that hour and I was still too drunk to go anywhere anyway. So I would wait until the morning. You know what? I shouldn't have but I went to sleep. I went to sleep with this man in his bed and I woke up this morning with his arm around me. Can you believe that shit?”

“Whoa. Usually I'm the one cussing in here,” Amy answers.

Irina slides the cash shaft back into place and closes the door on the back of the machine. “I slept with his arm around me,” she says, her voice quieter this time.

“I'm sorry. It's okay. Sometimes that happens.”

“Sometimes what happens?”

“Sometimes you're just tired.”

Irina nods, her eyes far away. She turns the key to lock up Bravo and pulls it out. Her button-down shirt feels tight around her neck. Her pencil skirt feels tight around her hips. She hates her stupid banker clothes. Once again, she has let a man use her. Worse, she has unveiled her bleeding loneliness in a bank, at work, where she was supposed to be able to get away from herself. But Amy doesn't seem to mind. Amy picks up the bag of twenties and says, in the tender tone of a mother trying to make a hurt child forget a scrape, “Come on. Let's load Charlie.”

Today, Irina stops in front of the empty house again on the way home. She looks it over to see if there are any further signs of degradation, if more of the paint has flaked off. If there are more cobwebs in the corners, if pieces of plaster have started to crumble from the walls. Maybe she didn't look closely enough last time, because as far as she can see nothing has changed. Except that today the door is closed. Whose hand might have shut it? Probably there was no hand. Just a passing breeze. When Irina nudges at the door with one finger, it does not give. She considers it for a few moments, considers turning on her heel and going home. Instead she roots around in her purse and takes out her bank employee identification card. She slides it carefully into the crack of the door. How embarrassing would it be for the card to break, half of her name remaining stuck in the side of the house as evidence of her wrongdoing?

Of course, nobody would care.

She works at the lock more or less randomly, not really expecting anything to happen. Her gesture is a lark; she is pretty certain that her lock picking is futile.

There is a click. The door yields and swings open a mere inch. Irina didn't know she was such an adept criminal. The men in her life must have rubbed off. Thinking of them gives her a moment's hesitation, but only a moment. She steps inside and waits for her eyes to adjust to the gloom.

In the kitchen, the dead refrigerator still gapes open, but the jar of green mayonnaise that was inside is gone. Its absence would be less odd if it looked as though the place had been cleaned since Irina was last here, but if anything, the layer of dust on the cheap Formica seems to be thicker.

She walks into the back of the house, farther than she went last time. There is a sliding door in the bedroom leading out to a deck, which itself has a few steps down into a scraggly backyard. Irina leans on the deck's railing, looking down at the sandy ground covered by a dried tangle of uninvited plants. She pictures herself back there tearing up weeds. Planting bulbs so that the next spring would be pink with flowers. Arranging a little table and chairs so she could sit out there with a glass of wine on breezy evenings and have the smell of blooms brush her face. Would a man live with her in the house? Yes. A man who loved her. But before she can even imagine the contented quiet of their undisturbed lives, at her feet materializes a child. A baby, crawling and gurgling happily. She picks up the baby. It laughs when she tickles its soft pudgy neck.

She does not know if the child is a boy or a girl. At that age, it hardly matters anyway. At that age, a person is only a pair of big eyes that know nothing yet. Only the insistent tugging of a mouth on a mother's breast, drawing sustenance from her body. This nonexistent child makes Irina's heart shrink into its shell like a snail poked with a stick. She recedes back into the bedroom, sliding the glass door shut after her. Through the emptiness of the kitchen, the living room, the entryway—where she will never hang her coat.

Out on the sidewalk, Irina pulls the front door closed after her with enough verve that it slams. She checks that it is locked. She walks away making sure not to look back at the empty house. Elena. How she envies Elena. It's odd to envy someone who is quite possibly dead. Still, Elena somehow had the backbone to ride away from the cataclysm. She'd decided to go and she went. Irina hadn't been woman enough for that. Irina had to be pushed out. She had to be exiled. She had to be cast out with no idea where she was going.

Irina feels cold to her bones. She knows she has to keep moving or her frozen soul will never be found. She doesn't want to open her mind's eye, because the wind howling at her mind's ear and the cold flakes whipping at her mind's cheek tell her that all she will see is white. Snow. Snow. Snow as far as her heart can see.

Today Irina cannot shake the dim gaze of the security camera. It is as if the ceiling itself is looking at her, but there is no mind behind its eye to judge her. If she could sense judgment emanating from the white plaster, from the crown moldings, it might actually put her at ease. Instead the ceiling promises a whole lot of nothing. It will not point at her and roar. It will not cave in and engulf her in debris.

It feels so lonely, not being judged. It must have been why people made God.

Irina's fingers tap automatically on her computer's ten key, and the ceiling says nothing. She counts and counts and counts piles of meaningless money and the ceiling says nothing. It is all the more loathsome because there is nothing to loathe. Who watches the security camera footage anyway? Somewhere there is a luminescent checkerboard of screens playing to an empty room in mute shades of gray.

A man comes to Irina's window to cash a check. He presents identification. He endorses the check in front of her. She inspects his signature against the identification.

“Twenties okay?” she asks.

The man nods. The amount on the check is $238.72. She pulls bills out of her cash drawer and counts for him:

“Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, one hundred.” In a neat fan of five bills.

“Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, two hundred.” In a neat fan of five bills overlaid on the first fan.

“Twenty, thirty, thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight.” In a neat fan of six bills overlaid on the other two.

“And sixty-two cents,” she says, dropping the change directly into his palm. Two quarters, a dime, two pennies. He pockets the change while she closes the fans of money and makes a neat stack of bills to hand over. He does not feel compelled to recount them before shoving them in his wallet.

“Thank you. Have a good day,” Irina recites. The man grunts something like assent and leaves.

When the glass door swings shut after him, Irina looks up at the singular eye in the ceiling and asks it mutely,
Did you see?

No reply is forthcoming, of course. No policeman bursting in to bend her over the counter and roughly cuff her. No thundering voice admonishing her from a hidden speaker. No accountability whatsoever. And yet. And yet here she has purposefully shortchanged a man by a dime, right here. Right here under the eye of the security camera.

She doesn't even check to see if somebody is watching when she picks a dime out of her change till and, without taking her eyes from the ceiling's gaze, puts it slowly, almost theatrically, in her pocket. Her eyes say,
Come get me
.

She wants to be gotten and no one will get her. No one will come collect all her debts. If she wanted, she could walk along the metal wall to the vault and find the palindrome number 21012. She could open the safe-deposit box she has stolen the key for and steal whatever is in the box too; it would make no difference. That it would make no difference is perhaps the reason why she has not done it yet. She would not be able to withstand more indifference from the universe.

On one of the one-dollar bills she has given the man who cashed his check, on the bill of smallest value, Irina has written in a loose, careless scrawl, slanted with speed, without lifting her pen between words so that the entire phrase is one loopy line, its words separated by only a flat line:
youth without age and life without death
.