In the Red (7 page)

This would happen for two, sometimes three nights in a row. She'd puzzle over herself, wondering if she was getting sick, and then in the morning her breasts would be hot, sore, heavy. Some small punishing monster roiled in the pit of her belly. It paced its tender chamber and tore down the wallpaper. When it was furious enough, it flung furnishings out the door: blood.

It was only that, blood. This whole woman thing again. How could she forget this every month?

But when she was with Andrei she never forgot her femaleness. He trapped her in this vulnerable state where she could be penetrated. Even now, she cannot forget. It comes upon her at unexpected moments, a yearning so sharp it slices through the core of her, her body's insistence that it was made soft to make him hard. A disturbance, a sudden volcanic eruption into a quiet ocean—here she is all red molten rock, all black plumes of ash, all hissing heat boiling away the tentative equilibrium of life that had just begun to bloom again. Here she is polluting herself.

T
here was something about the other girl's body but Irina could not tell what. It was as if Elena contained some kernel of knowledge that offered glimpses of itself while refusing to give a full reveal. As clear as a mirror image, and somehow as untouchable. Irina watched her do slow, leisurely laps in Andrei's small blue swimming pool, wondering how she could move through the water without her tiny string bikini exploding off her. Irina was also wearing a bikini, a sturdier one with ruching in flattering places, splashed with a pattern of large flowers. It was reminiscent of something a pinup might wear. Had Irina put on red lipstick, curled her hair, and sat in a coy pose, she might have been a painted woman winking down from the nose of a World War II bomber.

Elena's bathing suit was plain red. It was unclear whether there would have been room to fit a pattern on the bitty triangles of cloth that barely made her outfit legal to wear publicly. She looked more like something out of modern Hollywood than Irina did. Irina admired the lithe lines of her body as she rose from the pool and came to lie down on a chaise longue without patting herself dry. Everything was pert and trim. Her hip bones jutted out slightly from her flat stomach. Her rib cage, her clavicle—so many bones exposed. They made Irina feel heavy.

“What?” Elena asked.

“You are very pretty,” Irina explained.

Elena looked down at herself as if to check on what Irina had just said. “You are prettier,” she answered. “I look like a child. You look like a real woman.”

“You could be a model,” Irina said.

Elena shook her head as if she had already tried that tack. “Not tall enough,” she said. She indicated a pair of fuller breasts on top of her own. “I want your breasts,” she said.

“Yours are adorable,” Irina answered. “They'll never sag. Mine would fall out of that little top you're wearing!”

“Can I take it off here? I want to tan.”

Irina didn't see why not. There was no one else out here with them. The landscaped apartment complex was so quiet under the dazzling sun that it felt empty of people. Besides, if it was against the rules to strip down, who would come set them straight? The police? The homeowners' association? Elena reached around her back and pulled the string to undo the knot. She slipped off the halter without untying it and let it drop to the ground without looking at it. Beads of water glinted on her skin. Her rosy nipples drew Irina's gaze.

“You too,” Elena said, motioning at Irina's top. “You do not want lines in your tan, no?”

Irina was about to say no. She had always been the kind of girl who hugged her breasts to herself while changing in the locker room so that others would not see. Clearly, Elena would have been one of those girls who walked to the showers buck naked, talking loudly with her friends, proud of her pride itself. Or not—what did Irina know of her, anyway? What did Irina even know of herself? In a matter of months, she had turned from an innocuous model student to a willing accessory in God knows what. She had been a gifted American teenager, and now she was what? A gun moll? It wasn't precisely rebellion that had pushed her here. It was a kind of curiosity, maybe the same spirit of query that made an addict try one harder drug after the other. There was no good place to go down this path. But down was the most fascinating direction.

Irina's heart beat fast as her top plopped wetly on the concrete next to Elena's. For a couple of quiet minutes, the two girls roasted silently in the sun.

“You fluster!” Elena said with a giggle. “I can feel you fluster at your nakedness. You are such an American.”

“What if a man saw us out of his window?”

“Then he should pay us.” Elena laughed. “Men pay to see young naked girls, don't you know?”

Irina breathed deeply, making a conscious effort to relax.

“You should not be ashamed,” Elena said. “They are very nice.”

Irina was unsure how to respond to that. Her customary response to compliments was a simple thank-you, but this seemed wrong under the circumstances. The second default response was to give another compliment in exchange for the first. Somehow this felt less inappropriate.

“I like your haircut,” Irina said.

“Ah. Yes. I had long hair, like yours. Longer than yours. Down to my ass, like a princess in a fairy tale. I had the hair when I sent Vasilii my photo. Then one day I was tired of all the weight. Had it all cut off. My mother cried. I showed her I got money for it, but she cried anyway. Said it was so beautiful. She did not want any part of the money. I would have felt bad but I was so light, so light without it. No big heavy weight down my back. No catching it places, or sitting on it. Instead of the hair there was just air. Just freedom. When they sent me to Vasilii, I was told maybe it had been a mistake, to cut off the hair. Maybe he had chosen me for it. They sent me anyway. The first thing Vasilii said when I got off the plane was, ‘You cut off your hair.' I said, ‘Is that bad?' He said, ‘No. But you need new clothes.'”

“You have lots now.”

“Yes. What he meant was I needed more clothes. More clothes on my back. More covered up. He said I smelled of cigarettes, and a woman should not smoke.”

“But Vasilii smokes!”

“Vasilii is not a woman. Sometimes when he is not home, I steal one of his. But I try not to. I do not want to smell of it. But it is hard. I am hungry all the time. But I try not to eat. If I become fat he might send me back. He said he did not care about the hair, but he does not like his women fat.”

It was strange, to hear of Vasilii and women. He'd seemed so unconcerned with them before the night he'd explained the appeal of young girls to his business associates.

“You don't miss your hair at all? Sometimes I think of cutting mine, but I'm afraid I'd miss it.”

“I do not miss the weight. But it's true, the hair, it gives you something to do. Maybe I would not have cut it if I knew how much time I would have here, how little I would have to do!”

Elena laughed then, and shook her short curls. “Come here,” she said. “Sit. Let me braid you.”

Irina sat at the foot of the chaise longue, Elena close behind. She closed her eyes when she felt Elena's slender fingers stroke her scalp.

“Your hair,” Elena said. “Warm from the sun.”

“Because it's black.”

“Naked women braiding each other. This is like the banya.”

“The banya?”

“The public bath, in Moscow.”

Irina pictured steam, many naked bodies. Not young and pert like the two of them, but of all sizes and ages. Scars, rolls of fat, moles, jiggling, gales of laughter. The forgetting of men. What did a fat old woman look like naked, really? Irina did not know. Those were not the kinds of nudes that were shown in magazines and at the movies. Elena had seen women in the flesh, many of them. In unflattering light. Unretouched. Not posed to sell something. Irina wanted to ask if they were very ugly, if they were scary to look at. If looking into her own young body's unsightly future made her shudder. But no. Maybe, Irina thought as she opened her eyes to look up at the cloudless blue sky, maybe there was a strange kind of comfort in it.

N
ot too far from the big casinos, there was a bar owned by a man Andrei did business with on his many trips to the desert city. In the bar's basement were three rooms: a small one with a table and chairs, for meetings; a larger one with shelves, for storage; a larger one still with a stage and seating, for a show. The show that was put on there was not advertised anywhere. Still, on performance nights it drew a decent-size audience composed of men who bought tickets with their drinks at the bar. When Irina and Elena arrived at eleven thirty, it was still early enough for downstairs to be empty. They could sit on any of the plush red velvet seats with cup holders that the bar's owner had purchased for a steal from a shut-down movie theater.

“Get all the drinks you want,” the owner said to the two girls.

“How long will you be?” Irina asked Andrei.

“Until Vasilii comes back,” he called as he disappeared into the back with Dragos.

“The show starts at midnight,” the owner said as he closed the door behind the three of them. “Enjoy, girls.”

The inflection in his voice made Irina order a plain cola from the bar. She wanted to stay lucid for whatever was coming in case she had to think quickly. Elena had a fruity mixed drink, an icy alcoholic slurry layered in shades of pink and red with both a cherry and a little paper umbrella on top. The stage was shielded by a curtain that matched the velvet on the seats. The room was bathed in quiet music and dim, aquarium lighting.

“What kind of show?” Elena asked Irina.

“Dancing girls, I'm guessing.”

“Well, I know
that
much, but what
kind
of dancing girls?”

At a quarter to midnight, the two television screens bracketing the stage flickered to life and started playing a cartoon. The cartoon looked old. Snow White was wearing a dress with a yellow skirt reminiscent of the one worn by her Disney self, but this was clearly a different version. In this version, she lay on her back on a table with her skirt hiked up while the seven dwarves, being dispensed to her on a conveyor belt, mounted her for a few hasty thrusts and then rolled off. There was something ancient and primitive about the whole repeated display, like a relief of a fertility rite chiseled onto a tomb wall. Snow White's wicked stepmother watched the whole scene in her magic mirror while pleasuring herself with a lit candle. Whenever her body engulfed the tiny flame, she breathed fire out of her gaping mouth.

“Well, this is weird,” Irina whispered into Elena's ear.

“Probably German,” Elena said with a smirk.

By the time the cartoon was over, a couple of lone men had come in and sat behind the two girls. When Elena went to get more drinks, Irina could feel the men's eyes on the back of her neck. She made the mistake of turning around. One of them raised his wineglass to her and smiled. It seemed a long time before Elena returned with another sweet boozy confection for herself and a plain glass of seltzer for Irina.

At midnight, the light grew dimmer, the music grew louder, and the curtain parted. A woman in a sparkly Arabian Nights getup shimmied onto the stage. In slow, smooth movements, she divested herself of her entire outfit, even her bejeweled thong. Though the woman was naked save for the gold lamé stilettos that made the muscles on her calves stand out like tense ropes, Irina felt a vague sense of relief wash over her. This wasn't so bad. It was even a bit campy, like cross-dressing. The dancer's false eyelashes, her completely hairless body, her costume made her hardly more real than the strange German cartoons. When the music stopped, she picked up her clothes, giving the audience a wink and a wave when the curtain closed on her. The television screens displayed more cartoons in the interlude before the next act.

Bubblegum pop by a teenage starlet blared over the speakers when the curtain rose on two blondes in schoolgirl outfits with tartan miniskirts, white shirts tied above their bellies. These schoolgirls wore black patent leather stilettos and black shadow on their heavy-lidded eyes. They circled each other as they removed their costumes, starting with the tiny backpacks that jostled against their taut rumps. Their pigtails swayed with their gyrations. Once they were completely naked, they kissed. Irina looked around. There were more men in the audience now, including a rowdy cluster that had come in together and was occupying the entire back row.

Then the two dancers sprung glittery, baby-blue dildos from their tiny backpacks and began shoving them inside each other. A high, lone whistle came from the back of the room. Elsewhere a man laughed. Irina took a careful sip from her chalky-tasting seltzer. When the song ended, the performers exited the stage with all their gathered props, shiny dildos bobbing jauntily in their clutches. The cartoons started up again. Elena giggled. Irina felt her warm, sweet breath against her neck when she whispered in her ear, “What would happen if we kissed like the two girls in the show right now?”

“They are already watching us,” Irina replied, the edginess in her voice making Elena look around. The two of them stuck out in the audience so that even the men who were thoroughly absorbed by the show snuck glances at them when the cartoons came back on. The place had filled up. The two girls were surrounded by alert male bodies. The air was warmer and the music louder. Irina breathed easier when only one woman came out for the next act. She danced deftly using a chair. Her flexibility was impressive. Then something unexpected happened: a man appeared onstage. He paced leisurely around the dancer, offhandedly flinging dollar bills at her at regular intervals. Each time she was showered with money, the dancer removed an item of her clothing. When she was naked, the man stopped. Everyone was paying attention. The whole place was electric with anticipation.

“Will they really fuck?” Elena asked Irina with a sly look. Irina wondered at that moment if there was more inside Elena than alcohol. She was about to ask whether Vasilii or Dragos had given her a pill when the man onstage exploded out of his tear-away clothes. He took the dancer by the hair, roughly bent her over the chair, and shoved his professional-size erection into her waxed slit. He thrust in time to the throbbing music. Irina was fascinated by their unchanged facial expressions. This impersonal piston action didn't seem possible to her—how was this sex?

The performers continued their blank mating in various acrobatic positions designed to give the audience the best views of the entry. Irina could not take her eyes from the woman's face. Her lips were parted, but her eyes remained as distant as those of a factory worker performing a rote task. How could she have something that size pounded into her and not make a sound? Maybe that was why the music was so loud—to cover up any sounds. Irina thought maybe she saw the woman wince.

“That girl,” Elena said.

“What?” Irina could barely hear her over the blasting music.

“That girl,” Elena shouted over the thrumming bass. “That girl up there is Russian like me.”

“How do you know that?”

“Her face. She has a Russian face.”

How far had the dancer traveled in her lifetime? Was this possibly the least degrading job she had ever held?

The song seemed to go on exceedingly long. Possibly, it was being played on a loop. Finally, it ended, and when it did, the man and the woman simply disengaged and waved good-bye to the restless audience as the curtain disappeared them from view. After that there were other pairs in various costumes. Irina would not be able to remember later how many or what they were wearing or what the wafer-thin premise of their storylines were. The displays of dominance by the men became more aggressive as the night wore on. One man spit into the woman before he penetrated her. One man whipped a woman before taking her by the neck. Elena did not seem in the least alarmed, so Irina decided she should not be alarmed either.

It was past two in the morning when Irina noticed a tattoo of a leaping dolphin on the lower abdomen of the absurdly endowed man onstage. What a strange thing. A dolphin was a hopeful symbol you expected to see inked on the ankle of a sweet-faced college girl—or, if she was daring, on her lower back, peeking out above the waistband of her low-rise jeans. But right above the drugged cock of a pornographic actor? Irina looked up at his face. He must have felt her eyes on his, for he looked right back at her while giving his mate an offhand smack on the ass. It was horrifying, but Irina would not look down. She would not look down. The song was winding to its noisy crescendo. Had he just winked at her? She could not be certain. What was certain was that he pulled out of the orange-skinned bleached blonde he was sodomizing, pulled her head roughly to him, and came in her mouth. At the sight of the semen dripping down the woman's chin, the entire pack of men surrounding the two girls was palpably galvanized. A large hand squeezed Irina's thigh. She stood up abruptly, shaking off the unseen grab, and shouted in Elena's ear, “We're getting out of here. Now.”

It was at this moment that Vasilii entered the basement, scanning the darkness for the door to the little meeting room. Irina had never been so happy to see him. She pulled his limp wife to her feet in order to bring her to him, stumbling over men's knees and feet to reach the one man in the room she was hoping would offer safety.

“How was the show?” Andrei asked Irina on the limousine ride back to the hotel. It was a casual question that could not have been asked with a casual intent.

“There were cartoons,” she said carefully. “All perversions of fairy tales.”

“Yes, that's right,” Andrei said. “Dragos thought those were very funny.”

Dragos laughed and said, “Those monster cocks are going to give our poor girls nightmares.”

Irina wasn't sure whether he meant the cartoon or flesh-and-blood ones. Andrei had known what the show was, yet still he had left the two girls to watch it alone. Why had Andrei wanted her to see such a thing?

“They never took their shoes off!” Elena observed with a strange, awry glee, before leaning into her husband's shoulder and closing her eyes.

“Those girls,” Andrei said pleasantly, “they're poor girls thrown away by their families. But they're lucky enough to be pretty, so an agency picks them up and tells them there's work for them. A job in America is a plum job for girls like that.”

The place had been a showroom, of course. The performers were displaying their skills onstage to later sell them privately to willing men in the audience. Irina thought of their slender ankles wobbling in their high, high heels as they milled around the audience after their turn onstage, waiting for offers. Her womb cramped up suddenly and viciously.

“Those girls are lucky orphans,” Andrei said, turning his head to look out the window at the passing lights of the desert city.

That was what he meant. Irina was these girls and they were her. He was offering her alternate selves. It was a sick kind of gift.

Irina cupped the pain in her belly with her hand. There was something she ought to say to Andrei, to all three of the men, but she could not tell what. She looked at Elena. Elena was draped limply across Vasilii's lap, asleep. Or at least pretending to be asleep. It would have been a clever move, pretending to be asleep at a moment like this. The sort of willful checking out of a bad situation an agency girl would learn. Closing the eyes and leaving the body behind for whatever was in store for it, while the mind was elsewhere, not having to know things it would rather not know. Elena was from an agency too, like the dancers.

Irina was Elena and she was her. They were all lucky, lucky orphans.