In the Red (3 page)

S
ometimes when he was burrowed all the way inside her he would suddenly pull out almost entirely, just to hear her gasp and watch her face seize with helpless distress, her eyes filling with tears. More like a child being abandoned than a woman being fucked. Was it because she was so young? But she wasn't the first he'd had that young, and none of the others were like this. He'd hover there while she looked up at him with her mouth slightly open, her breath held and her back arched, her whole body perfectly still, waiting for him to decide. He'd plunge in again to the hilt and she'd sob as she parted for him. Sometimes a tear would run down the side of her face, sometimes not. When he whispered in her ear, “I'm here. I'm here,” the expression in her gleaming eyes filled his thrumming heart with happiness and terror.

W
hen Irina called her parents the morning before the wedding  she had to look up the weather at her university so she would have something to talk to them about. Only a month into her studies, she was already cutting several days of classes to travel to sleazy places with sleazy men. She should have felt shame, but she felt only surprise at finding herself here. So it made a kind of sense that after all this time not bringing a single girl around, Vasilii would marry the first one he let his associates lay eyes on.

“Marriage is an honorable estate,” the officiant recited. “It is not to be entered into lightly or unadvisedly, but discreetly and soberly. Into this relationship these two persons come now to be joined. I therefore charge both of you that if you know any reason why you should not be joined in marriage, you make it known at this time.”

The officiant looked at the bride and groom and then glanced over at Irina, Dragos, and Andrei in case they had something to say. So far, they'd had not a word for the willowy blonde Vasilii had brought to the business meeting in Las Vegas, an unexpected addition to the large, plush hotel suite they were staying in. Before his associates or Irina could talk to her or even take a good look at her, Vasilii called a limousine to drive them up the strip to the Little White Wedding Chapel, where he would bind his young bride to him.

The officiant was dressed in a gray suit that didn't call attention to itself, while Vasilii was dressed in a much more expensive and better-fitting version of the same thing. The girl did not wear white, and her distracted look made Irina wonder if she quite understood the proceedings. She had on a cherry-blossom shade of pink that brought out the creamy pallor of her skin. The dress had a full skirt with a tulle overlay that reached below the knees, as if she had modeled her outfit on the way American movies represented high school dances in the halcyon 1950s. A wrap of the same tulle as the skirt overlay was slipping off her frail shoulders. She'd somehow found a pair of high-heeled, round-toed shoes in the same shade—possibly dyed to match. She wore no jewelry save for a pair of large diamond studs that must have been false, given the homeliness of the clothes. Unless Vasilii had given them to her. Then they were real.

She looked indecently young next to her groom. Was she the same age as Irina? Could she possibly be younger?

“Vasilii Grigoriev, will you take Elena Lukowskaia to be your wedded wife, to live together in the bonds of marriage? Will you love her, comfort her, honor and keep her, so long as you both shall live?”

“I will,” Vasilii answered, his gaze on the upturned face of his wide-eyed bride.

“Elena Lukowskaia, will you take Vasilii Grigoriev to be your wedded husband, to live together in the bonds of marriage? Will you love him, comfort him, honor and keep him, so long as you both shall live?”

Vasilii leaned into Elena's ear and whispered something. For a moment she beheld him with an expression that looked as if she were bracing herself to leap into a pool of water she suspected was very cold. But she was not one to stand on the edge for very long. “I will,” she said.

At either corner of the podium, behind the officiant, were two white wicker stands piled high with pink flowers. The flowers were cloth, and a touch dusty. The officiant's voice droned, “Vasilii, repeat after me: ‘I, Vasilii…'”

Vasilii repeated. He held the girl's hand. Looking at them, Irina saw that they both had long fingers, delicate wrists—male and female versions of the same hands.

“‘…take thee, Elena, to be my wedded wife…'”

Elena's fine, dark blonde hair was cut just below her ears, where it curled under. The broadness of her cheekbones left no doubt that she was a Slav.

“‘…to have and to hold from this day forward…'”

“Elena, Irina,” Andrei whispered into Irina's ear. “Her name is almost like yours.”

Irina turned to look at him. She could not read the distant, dreamy look on his face.

“‘…for better or worse, for richer or poorer…'”

Did he mean she'd be next? That
he
would marry
her?

“‘…in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish…'”

Certainly not.

The officiant turned to the girl. “Elena, please repeat after me…” The girl repeated, slowly and carefully, promising to take Vasilii as her wedded husband. Her accent was very thick. Did she understand the words, or was she repeating them phonetically?

“She is just your age,” Andrei felt compelled to tell Irina.

Vasilii slipped a plain yellow gold circlet around Elena's finger. When he uttered the words “With this ring I thee wed, and with all my love I thee endow,” Irina felt a hot wave wash over her. She was quite certain all of them were doomed, like horses with broken legs, about to be shot.

The officiant did not even seem to be fully conscious when he recited, “Inasmuch as you have thus consented together in marriage, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the laws of the state of Nevada, I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss the bride.”

Vasilii took Elena by the waist and drew her to him, and Irina realized then that she had never seen Vasilii take possession of anyone or anything like that, with the happy impatience of one finally putting his hands on an object long awaited. Even when he drank his vodka, he did so slowly and with a kind of apathy, as if he were indifferent to the taste in his mouth. But this girl, she had his attention. She let him tip her back; she opened her mouth for his kiss. A kiss that might have been their first, for all Irina knew. Where did he get this girl?

Afterward, Elena's hand went up to her mouth as a florid blush overtook her face, as if she meant to cover lipstick she knew he had smudged.

In the parking lot, Vasilii showed Elena the marriage license, in the Latin script she quite possibly could not read. As they looked over the page, their two blond heads were close together, nearly touching, her hair's shade as warm as honey and his lightening into white. Irina could not hear what he said to her, but she could see him pause, his finger poised over the page, when he could not think of a word straightaway. He was translating for his bride. Would he explain every word, or might he skip some? The intimacy of their Russian stung Irina with jealousy. She'd never be able to address Andrei in his native tongue like that. Not that he wanted her to. When she'd asked him to teach her, he'd waved her off, saying, “You don't want to speak the shit language of my shit country anyway. You do not need it.” She assumed it was because he did not want her to understand his business with Dragos.

But maybe there was some other reason. Maybe it was in the way he said that the shit country was
his
. Not hers, though she had been born there.

That evening, the men stayed in the suite to do business with some guests, sending Irina and Elena out onto the strip to entertain themselves. The sky was growing dimmer, but there was no drop in the staggering heat. In this heat, a breeze did not alleviate the air's weight but only made it worse. How could a desert evening feel so smothering? Maybe it was the excess of bodies holding down the heat over the asphalt, the blast of the freeway-like traffic. The rows of glinting cars ticking with impatience at every traffic light made crossing the street a menacing proposition. It made Irina want to hold Elena's hand, as if she were a defenseless child. Was this nightmarish cacophony of light and sound the first Elena was seeing of America? Irina had never been assaulted by anything like it.

Rolling walkways conveyed clusters of sweaty tourists from the bustling sidewalk into giant hotel-casino complexes, each themed after a caricature of some time and place. Renaissance Italy. Ancient Egypt. Paris. New York. The circus. The strip's microcosm throbbed in the night. If money corrupted the world, then this was the world that corrupted money. Irina pointed out a cluster of stylized skyscrapers to Elena and attempted an observation in slow, careful English: “This one is supposed to look like New York. See the tiny Empire State Building? It has a whole amusement park in there. With a roller coaster.”

Elena gave Irina a drowning look. Irina made a sine curve in the air with her finger. “A roller coaster,” she said. “A ride for fun. Do you want to go in and ride it?”

Elena shook her head. “I do not like high up,” she said.

“How about we go in this one?” Irina asked, pointing to an enormous fairy-tale castle with turrets topped with colors as bright as children's blocks. Elena nodded and they wended their way in. The wall of climate control that hit them upon entering made Irina gasp. Elena shivered. She was wearing a lot less than she had at the wedding: after the ceremony she'd changed into a frilly red tube top and a flouncy skirt that barely covered her entire rump.

“How do you feel when people look at you?” Irina asked, gesturing up and down the girl's scant outfit. Irina's uncertainty that she was being understood gave her a strange type of freedom to say whatever was on her mind. Elena did not take offense at the question; she merely shrugged.

The slot machines rang merrily. There were suits of armor propped up in the corners, and staff in skimpy costumes meant to suggest medieval clothes moving through the aisles with underwater slowness. The whole place had the feel of being submerged. Hermetic climate, no visible exits, aquarium lighting. The department stores Irina frequented back home were much like this, and they had the same basic purpose. This was the same thing on a grander scale, a monumental mall. Surely, then, it was only the scale that was sinister, that suffused the place with faint alarm. The two girls walked absently through the maze.

Suddenly they were standing before a large, spotlessly clean bas-relief of perfect ancient Egyptians in vibrant color. They must have been conveyed from one casino to the next through some suspended passageway they had no memory of crossing. Now the waiters were wearing white loin wraps and lamé accoutrements, their eyes jarringly stark in their kohl outlines, complete with little fish tails at the temples. “Want to gamble?” Irina asked.

The Russian looked at her with intense focus. “What means ‘gamble'?”

Irina took a quarter out of her wallet, parked the two of them in front of one humming slot machine among the din of them, put the quarter in, and pulled the lever. The three displays whirred and clicked into place one by one. Two pairs of cherries and some kind of peach-like fruit. The machine vibrated and then emitted a fierce series of tinny dings in a rollicking melody of joy. It dispensed two quarters into the receiving tray.

“Ha!” Elena said.

“We won!” Irina smiled as Elena scooped one of the quarters from the tray and immediately fed it back into the machine, yanking the lever with great gusto. A bunch of grapes. A jackpot logo. A pair of cherries.

They waited for the machine to sing at them, but it remained silent. Undeterred, Elena put in the second quarter. Again, nothing. She looked at Irina expectantly. Irina was rooting around in her bag for another quarter when a voice shouted, “Hey!”

They looked up. The man striding toward them was not wearing lamé or a pharaonic headdress with a snake on it. He had on a black suit and an earpiece. “Hey you! How old are you?”

The two girls did not even look at each other before they started to run. They lost the man quickly; he probably didn't care enough to really give them chase. It took them long minutes of panting panic to find their twisting way back onto the street. The sky had gotten completely black in the time they'd been inside.

“Why did he ask how old?” Elena said, tugging down her skirt, which had ridden up while she was running.

“In America, you have to be twenty-one to play these games.”

“Oh,” she said. “But these games, they look like they are for children.”

Irina laughed. “Yes, children who feed these games entire mortgage payments one quarter at a time.”

“What is
‘mortgage'?
”

Irina walked with Elena, trying to explain to her the concept of a homeowner's debt to a bank. Elena could not understand because Irina kept piling her explanation with words Elena had never heard before. Irina gave up. This concept was not important anyway. The two of them were too young to talk about adult debts, about sinking into the red to find a place in the world. But then again, they were certainly too young to be married, and Elena was as of that afternoon. They were too young for all of it, too young even to feed money to dumb machines.

I
rina once asked Andrei what was the strangest thing about America when he got here? He said the choice. He noticed the language; the climate; the unknown plants; the inexplicable rituals and behavior of the natives; the way they shook hands with only two fast pumps and then let go immediately; their oversized straight white teeth; the way they spoke louder than necessary; the way the men sat with their legs crossed at the ankles to take up the most room possible, as if their generously sized genitals needed room to breathe; the way advertising could not be escaped; the way money was everywhere; the insincere friendliness; the forgetfulness; the way everything was so quickly and easily forgotten—he said he could get used to all those things. But it was choice that drew him, that was strangest of all.

When he first arrived, he developed a fascination with supermarkets, the miraculous excess of well-organized foods. The way people shuffled bleary-eyed through the aisles tipping brightly colored packaged goods into their carts without any seeming awareness that this was unusual, this was unprecedented in human history, this was almost obscene. The foods for children interested him—what was a blue raspberry? How could a chocolate spread be “part of a nutritious breakfast”? Why did the cheese come in soft flat orange squares in cellophane, unrecognizable and scentless? Scentless—that was strange too, everything so clean. You could not smell the meat, the fish, sometimes not even the fruit. How could you have an entire table covered in peaches not one arm's length away from you and not be able to smell a thing? The glossy skin of the flawless apples made him lay his finger on them to check that they were not fake, not made of wax.

“They are wax,” Irina tried to explain when he told her about the apples. “I mean, they are coated with a patina of wax. To make them look that way.”

He told her he almost fainted once in the cereal aisle. An entire wall of cardboard boxes screaming at him. Flakes or pellets. Shaped like tiny doughnuts or tiny waffles. Chocolate, neon fruit, peanut butter, marshmallows. Endorsed by athletes, cartoon toucans, ethnically diverse children. Chex, Frosted Flakes, Cheerios, Rice Krispies, Froot Loops, Life, Life,
Life!
He started to breathe fast. How many different kinds of crunchy sweetened grain could one civilization need? How was it possible to pick one out of such a lineup? Was this glut not a harbinger of retribution, disaster? He put his hand on his chest to slow his heart. He looked into the crazed eyes of a cartoon squirrel. He needed some air. He walked briskly outside.

“What I had forgotten,” he said with ironic amusement, “was that in August in Las Vegas there is no air. The oven heat punched my chest and I gasped. Like a woman who had just been grabbed by an unseen hand in the dark, I gasped and I reached for something to steady myself. A signpost. Scorching hot in the desert sun. At that moment I could have sworn I heard a little hiss like a drop of oil in the fire. I pulled my hand away and started to laugh. I doubled over and laughed and all the housewives who were loading their cars blasting air conditioners; they must have thought I was barking mad. Irina, I
was
barking mad.”

He was smiling as if this was all very funny, but there was still something in his eyes that made her want to hold him. His vulnerability distressed her a thousand times more than her own.

“But I got their nice white teeth, see? No more peasant teeth for me,” Andrei said nearly in a whisper. She hadn't known until then that he had caps. She'd never thought of questioning someone's teeth before. She was about to say something when he asked her how old she was when Ceauşescu was shot.

Irina tried to think of the answer to this unexpected question. But it wasn't a number he wanted from her.

He was from the country she had been born in but couldn't remember. She had been born in the place he had run away from, and raised in the place he had run to. Both places he hated and loved. Was the thing he reached for inside her the same thing she reached for inside him?

Andrei answered his own question. “Oh, you must have been only a little slip of a thing. Probably you did not yet speak. Or if you spoke, what you spoke was not English. There is a video of it, you know. But it made me feel, what do you call it? It made me feel shortchanged. You hold out your hand waiting for more, and more does not come. We were cheated. We did not get to watch the bullets go in. We did not get to see them bleeding out. I would have liked to see.”

What could she do then except kiss him? It was always the best thing to do when she had no answer. When there was no answer, the only thing to do was revert to skin.