Russian Tattoo (11 page)

Andy and I are both sitting quietly now, without speaking, without moving, because the outline of that screen romance rings familiar to both of us. The happenings on Leningrad television are just as strange and meteoric as they seem to be, unfolding in real time on this side of the Atlantic in New Jersey.

“What was that line again,” says Andy. “ ‘If you don't have a wife she won't leave you for another man'?”

We sit quietly over our empty plates, contemplating the irony of our own fate, afraid to think that the movie's happy ending is too sweet and unbelievable for us, too impractical for a real life.

Seventeen

I
t all feels dizzying, as if I just got off a ride for kids, one of those attractions at an amusement park where the five of us—Millie; Donald; his wife, Bea; Andy; and I—went the previous Sunday. Andy sat next to me in a little seat, like the sidecar of a motorcycle, and held my hand. We haven't yet gone beyond secretly holding hands, embracing, and kissing, as if we were two teenagers, just like the crowds around us. “What should I do?” I yelled into the wind as the torrent of air swept our faces and churned our adrenaline. It felt like such a romantic thing to do—shouting into the wind and asking stupid questions that no one could hear.

“So what are you two going to do now?” asked Donald, Millie's former son-in-law, when we were back on steady ground. He was tall and bearded, a Viking as I imagined one, smiling his Nordic smile, his arm around Bea. He meant what ride were we going to go on next, but to me what he said sounded profound and existential, a question that clearly had no answer.

Yesterday it snowed, big, heavy clumps slowly melting on rhododendron leaves—the kind of wet snow that falls on Leningrad in May—and it became obvious I needed a warm jacket. My mother was right, after all, when she told me to pack warm things. Warm things—a key to any Russian's survival—as essential as soup for proper nutrition or fresh air for healthy lungs. As she was pontificating on the value of hats and scarves while pinning wet laundry on a rope stretched across the room, I cut her off and declared with absolute certainty that there was no winter in Texas.

“Would you mind driving Lena to a store tomorrow?” Millie asked Andy as we were tearing up salad leaves and tossing them into a bowl. I couldn't believe my fortune—Millie making it so simple—and I stiffened inside, begging the god of winter to bestow on Andy a free afternoon.

“Of course,” he said and smiled at me as if he heard me hold my breath, as if he wanted to tell me that he was as excited about going to a store with me as I was about going there with him. He was standing in a panel of sun slanting through the window, as perfect as Prince Bolkonsky from
War and Peace
, his hair the color of chestnuts Millie had bought for the holidays. We both knew she had just granted us a legitimate chance to be together, and I turned away, pretending I was looking for a cucumber peeler to hide a silly smile I couldn't control.

The glass doors of the department store welcomed us into its huge, anonymous space perfect for our shopping rendezvous. We could walk on its granite floors past racks of clothes, talking about nonsense and holding hands. We could pretend we were together, a couple enjoying their afternoon, so used to walking side by side that they don't even notice when their shoulders touch.

“How about a down jacket?” Andy said. “You'd look good in down.”

“Yes,” I said and beamed. “I'd love it.” I felt thrilled about wearing down, whatever down was, if Andy thought I'd look good in it.

He thumbed through a rack as I stood there and watched him, grateful that I didn't have to choose one jacket out of the sea of coats that floated in all directions, like waves.

“Do you like this one?” he said, holding up a beige quilted jacket with soft blue lining. It was feathery and warm, and Andy zipped it up on me and tied the sash across my waist. Even through all the padding of down his hands felt tender, or maybe I simply imagined how tender his hands would feel. I straightened my spine and pulled my shoulders back in front of the mirror as my sister had instructed me a woman should stand, like an actor onstage.

“You don't even know how pretty you are,” Andy said. He was looking at me as I was looking at him reflected in the mirror looking at me. “I don't think you have a clue.”

I didn't, but I told myself I had to believe him. In the mirror stood a confident-looking woman in an elegant down jacket, a drop of vulnerability in her happy eyes, growing taller and poised under an admiring gaze. I wanted to believe him, and I wished for both things to be true: I was pretty and Andy loved me.

In the middle of December, Millie announces that Robert is coming back to Princeton as soon as his semester in Austin is over. “He's arriving next week,” she says and peers at me from behind her glasses. “He should know what's going on.”

I don't know myself what's going on, and whatever is going on is happening too fast. Way too fast. But maybe I do know. Maybe it is like playing the old Russian game of pretending, except the one doing the lying is not the Soviet government but me. I am pretending that nothing is happening; Millie knows I am lying; I know she knows I am lying; but I keep lying anyway and she pretends to believe me.

I stare at the yellow cone of light from the nightstand lamp, thinking of what I am going to say to Robert when he gets here. I can say that Texas is much too foreign for someone who has just escaped the tight embrace of the collective. I can say that the KGB has ordered every Soviet citizen married to a foreigner to get an immediate divorce. Or I can tell the truth and say that I met a man who has given my life texture and color and who makes me feel that I don't have to depend on the kindness of Milto's Pizzeria, or Beefsteak Charlie's, or even Texas Instruments.

When I get down to the facts, it all sounds pretty pathetic: should I choose someone I've known for four weeks over someone I've known for four months? It sounds worthy of a sitcom I've been watching on television lately, where young actors with impeccable hair in twenty minutes of listless dialogue untangle situations much more complex than mine. And would the person I've known for four weeks even want me to leave my husband for him? It sounds so real—leave my husband—but that's what Robert is, even if our marriage was never a marriage, even if Robert resents it. Maybe if I take a clear look at Andy, a look unclouded by this rosy fog, I'll immediately see how little I know about him, probably as little as I knew about Robert when I agreed to marry him.

And suddenly the most unsettling thought springs at me with the ferocity of the giant bear from the horror film I saw: I am exactly like my mother. It took her two weeks to marry her first husband, a hospital patient with shrapnel in his rear end during the Finnish War of 1939, a marriage that lasted only a few months before they were both drafted to the front and lost contact with each other. It took her one week to marry her second husband during the war in 1942, not enough time to find out that he had tuberculosis, along with a common-law wife and a ten-year-old daughter in a northern town close to the Urals; not nearly long enough to figure out that he was a bingeing alcoholic. I know this because just before I left I found a blue notebook in a drawer of my mother's desk, its pages covered with her perfect square handwriting, detailing her life before she moved to Leningrad. She must have written it for posterity, and that meant for me. So I read it. And now I almost wish I hadn't.

Andy comes to Beefsteak Charlie's and sits at one of my tables. “So your name is Elena and you're gonna spoil me?” he says, grinning, looking at my button.

“I'm a terrible waitress,” I say. “I've already warned you.”

“You did,” he says and orders baby back ribs and a Diet Coke. “And dressing on the side,” he adds and we both laugh.

I bring his order, and, since it's a weekday and the place is slow, I sit down at his table. “Robert is coming in three days,” I say. “From Texas.”

“I know,” says Andy, although I have no idea how he can know this. Maybe Millie told him. I also wonder where this knowledge leaves us and, more important, if there is an “us” at all. What do I know about Andy, really? He is thirty-two, seven years older than I am. He was married but is now separated and lives alone. He has a younger brother, Frankie, who lives in upstate New York. He is the most irresistible man I've ever met, including Boris from Kiev, who was completely irresistible.

“Why don't you pack up and move out?” says Andy.

“Move out?” I ask. “Move out to where?” In my life, I've moved out once, from my mother's apartment in Leningrad to America. No one in Russia simply moves out because they want to move out, and it is impossible to explain this to anyone who didn't have to wear a red Pioneer scarf when she was nine.

“Move to my place in North Bergen,” says Andy. “I have a one-bedroom apartment. But there are actually two rooms,” he says, because I already told him that assigning a function to a room is nothing but a Western luxury.

I want to ask Andy in what capacity I would be moving to his place, but I don't because that was what my mother asked her third husband, my father, who was her ulcer patient in the hospital in the provincial town of Ivanovo shortly after the war. My father got a job as the director of Leningrad Technical School and he asked my mother if she would move to Leningrad with him. “In what capacity?” she asked sternly, making sure to preserve the propriety and order she so cherished, letting him know that he couldn't take advantage of the situation.

I don't even want to imagine what my mother would think of all this turmoil. She hasn't had time to get used to the thought of my not sleeping under a bridge with Robert, so how am I going to inform her that I am on the verge of changing both, the partner and the bridge?

“You can sleep on the couch if you like,” says Andy and smiles, but his eyes are so liquid that it's impossible to take him seriously. I think of yesterday, when on the way back from our diner trip we stopped and bought a pear at a little fancy fruit shop in Princeton. It was yellow and almost translucent, and Andy took the first bite and offered the fruit to me, still in his hand. As I sank my teeth into the golden ripeness, the juice, sticky and sweet, ran down his fingers and I was about to lick them—an impulse that rose straight from my gut—when I saw the salesperson, an older man with a gray mustache, looking away, as if he knew our relationship was illicit, as if his turning away was a reminder that what we both wanted was off-limits.

I should probably tell Andy I've already done this once before: I packed my life into a suitcase and went to live with a man who, in some old-fashioned circles, might be called a stranger. And what did it lead to? Nothing good, obviously, or I wouldn't be staring this choice in the face again.

“Excuse me,” says someone above my head, and I see Samantha the bartender standing over our table. “Can I have a word?”

“You can't sit down with a customer,” she whispers into my ear. “If the manager sees this, she'll fire you.”

I jump up, picking up my tray, and quickly look around to establish who else has had a chance to witness this latest failure. But then I glance at Andy, and his eyes let me know he doesn't think it is a failure. He is looking at me with pride, as if I'd won a national linguistics competition by impeccably parsing a page-long sentence.

“Please tell me if I could get you anything else,” I say after a few moments of silence—a standard, irrelevant sentence I've learned with other standard phrases—although it doesn't matter what I say to him now. His pride and his trust, which I see suspended and focused in his eyes, have entered me directly, without words, making me realize that Andy has already understood everything about me I want him to know.