Troika (16 page)

O
n the terrace outside our apartment, there is a solarium with hundred-year-old glass, original lead mullions and an oxidized copper crest that runs along the peak. The doors are open, the side vents nudged ajar, and the autumn air washes past us, soft and with a hint of that back-to-school wistfulness that will likely plague me for the rest of my life, long after my final matriculation. The late afternoon light is rich and pearly and, despite the difference in season and location, it reminds me of the East End in July, when we hit the pole, when the sun near the beach stands tall and confident, infuses the warm seawater and browns the shoulders—and it looks to some like the air is filled with dust particles or pollen, but what it’s always looked like to me is millions of tiny crystals that shimmer and rotate like the sparkles on a movie star’s gown.

Julian and I sit at the table in the solarium, I in my wheelchair. It has been two weeks since my bowels betrayed me in bed. Our love
for each other is as strong as ever, but our sex life has become so complicated by my predicament, so infrequent, so calculated and prone to disastrous outcome, that we have both withdrawn to unreachable places when it comes to physical intimacy. Sure, there are kisses and hugs, stroked hands and cuddling in bed—but that’s the extent of it. We’ve been through these periods of distance before. They might last a few weeks or months. We always recover and give it another shot, but something about this distance seems different, as if we have reached some inflexion point in our relationship where there is no choice but for us to move forward at different trajectories, different speeds. It’s as if we have finally given up the fantasy of having a normal relationship.

We look west out over the park—the museum to the right, Sheep Meadow in the distance, the two-spired monsters on Central Park West that mock us with their blinking red eyes. Julian strokes my hand, which is something that he has done habitually from the very first day we spoke, when we sat by each other in class; when I told him about my uncle, when he comforted me and first offered me a glimpse of his majestic brutality.

From a straw in a plastic cup, I sip cool blush wine—one of my few remaining pleasures. Julian has mint tea in a tall, perspiring glass. To the west, a small plane, a prop, glides up the Hudson River. For a fraction of a second, as if in a lucky photograph taken with an old Brownie, the plane is frozen, framed between the Choragic towers of the San Remo. Then it continues north, crosses the George Washington Bridge, dips its shoulder and swoons low and smooth over the Palisades.

“How are you?” I ask.

Julian stirs his tea with the tip of his index finger. “Fine, I guess. You?”

“All things considered, I’m well.”

Julian picks up on my clue and turns to me. “All things considered?”

I take a sip of wine from the straw and swallow. I take in a colossal breath, feeling the expansion of my diaphragm. I hold the breath as long as possible and then exhale. I enjoy the relief of this release. “I’ve been thinking,” I say. “You know, it’s been six years.” I tap the wheels by my side.

“Doesn’t seem that long.”

“Speak for yourself.” I smile and give a little tug on Julian’s pinky.

“I’m not even sure I was speaking for myself.”

“Then who were you . . .” I pause and, with a bit of pretension to which I sometimes resort when anxious, I correct myself. “
For whom
were you speaking?”

“I don’t know. How about the god of denial?”

“Yes, dear, yes! The god of denial, he’s my God too.”

Julian squints at me with mock skepticism. “I thought you were Lutheran.”

“Wrong again,” I say.

“That’s the beauty of a marriage,” Julian jokes. “Always learning things about your spouse you never knew before. Peeling layer after layer.”

“Like an onion.”

“Or the matryoshka dolls.”

“Matryoshka?” I ask.

“The Russian dolls. Wooden, with smaller ones inside.”

“Oh, yes.”

“We had one at the orphanage. Missing a couple of pieces, but we kept it right there on the shelf. Very colorful and sweet. Petrov brought it with him when he arrived.”

“Petrov . . .”

“Petrov . . .” Julian repeats.

We again gaze west over Central Park. There’s a patch of red just to the south of the museum, a sugar maple in full bloom. “I’ve been thinking,” I say, not fully prepared to continue. I struggle to place my wine cup on the table. I’ve got the bottom pressed on the edge of the table, but I’m feeling particularly weak today and just cannot get it over the edge. I turn to Julian. He reaches for the cup and places it on the table. Then he holds my hand, my fingers clasped tightly together, flipper-like.

“Look over there,” he says, pointing to a huge cluster of balloons—dozens maybe—elevating to our left, just north of the zoo.

“You think that’s a celebration or a catastrophe?”

“The balloons getting away?”

“Yes,” I say. “Happy or sad?”

Julian thinks. “I’d like to think they’re up there on purpose, that the birthday boy released them at the end of the party. So I’m going with celebration. You?”

“Me, too. Celebration.” I lie, imagining a child pointing at the sky, wailing, screaming. Come back, come back.

“So . . . what have you been thinking?” Julian asks.

I reach for the plastic cup and lift the straw to my lips; I feel like a child. I take a sip of wine, a big sip. I’m feeling a delightful buzz from the alcohol. “Well, what I’ve been thinking is that maybe it’s time we start living like the French?”

Julian turns to me. “The French? Yes, yes, a place in Paris. Is that what you’re thinking? Or in the south? I’d love that. Get away from New York for a while.”

I shake my head. “I’m not talking location. I’m talking state of mind.”

“State of mind?”

“Mistress,” I say.

“Sorry?”

“I’ve gotten pragmatic over the last few years, Julian. Paralysis will force your hand like that.” I look down at my legs, my feet curved inward, my weakened hands. “There’s just limits to what a person can do, you know. You start giving up on stuff, start giving up on things that . . . There’s some things that, no matter what, we just can’t make happen.”

Julian reaches for my cup and again places it on the table. “What do you mean?”

“What I mean is that I can’t fuck you the way I want, the way
you
want.”

Julian pauses before responding. “It’s different now, and that’s okay,” he says, and I know he wants to mean it. “Sickness and health and all that. It’s life.”

“It’s not life, actually. It’s the
opposite
of life. Shitting while fucking is not life. That’s death and degradation. That’s just us limping toward obsolescence while we obey some convention that never contemplated anything like this.” Frustrated, as if I am about to escape, I disengage the brake on the wheelchair. “Sickness and health and all that? Nonsense, fucking nonsense.”

“It’s not nonsense,” he assures me.

“You’re telling me that in all these years you haven’t slept with one single girl other than me?”

Julian does not answer. Instead, he positions his feet on the seat of an empty chair. “What do you want?” he asks.

I have rehearsed this next part of the conversation
ad nauseam
, and I thus deliver it without hesitation. “What do I want? What I want is for you to have a mistress. What I want is for you to stay with me, to love me, to care for me. What I want is to stay married to you, to love you, to fuck you the best I can, infrequent and
shitty
as it might be. What I want is to see you happy, to see you fuck like crazy . . . not to actually see it, of course . . . but to know that you are having your needs met by someone who rings your bell. But what I do
not
want is for you to fall in love with someone else, that would be too much for me to bear. Just for you to find someone who fucks you good, that’s all. Like I used to.”

I believe everything I just said, but not without great reservation. Julian looks at me. His face is oddly serene, and I cannot tell if his expression suggests disbelief or relief. We sit in silence as another plane shoots north up the river, but this time it’s a jet that rapidly makes its way over the bridge and out of our view. “Well, then,” he says, “the truth is, this French thing has already started.”

I reflexively grab the wheels of my chair and re-engage the brake. “I figured,” I respond, surprised by a titillating, prurient interest that Julian’s revelation elicits in me—and at the same time working to suppress a piercing ache of jealousy that I’d assured myself would not arise. “Tell me about her.”

Like a prickly little boy who’s just been told to do his errands, Julian kicks his feet off the chair. “You want me to tell you about her?”

“Yes, but first I want you to fill my kiddie cup with some more blush.”

Julian lifts the bottle out of the ice bucket and fills my cup. He places it in my hand. I pull on the straw, take down half the cup. I’m loopy and ready for Julian’s lurid confession.

“Where do you want me to start?”

“Hmmm. I’m not sure it matters. Name? When you met her? When you slept with her the first time? What she looks like? Hot, I assume. Age? I’m guessing she’s barely out of high school.”

“You’ve got all the answers, don’t you?”

“I always do, so let’s hear it.”

“Well, I met her down in Florida when I was there for work. Must have been, I don’t know, maybe six months ago.”

“And where did you meet her?”

“Just around, nowhere special.”

“Ju-li-an.” I draw out his name in an admonishing way.

“In a strip bar.”

“Ooh, how tawdry.” I feel a vaguely erotic sensation in the band above my waist.

“I was bored and was just driving through Fort Lauderdale one day, saw this place on the side of the road and figured what the hell? Just go in for a lap dance, get my mind off work for a half hour and that’s it. So I go in, and it’s a trashy place, not like the one you and I went to in Vegas years ago. Remember that place? With the tropical fish tanks and all those Greek columns?”

“I do remember. That was a fun night. And the ridiculous blonde who wanted to come back to the room with us? Good call on our part to decline the offer.”

“I think that was
your
call, not mine,” he reminds me.

“Good point. Anyway, continue.”

“So I walk in and I’m looking around for a cute girl to give me a dance. Next thing I know, this Latin girl comes out from behind a curtain, sees me and walks right over to me.” Julian pauses to dry off his wet glass. “Most of the girls in these places are pretty aggressive, but this one, Perla’s her name, Perlita, she’s a bit shy and sort of proper. Normally, the first thing they do is ask you to buy them a drink, and next thing you know you’re paying twenty bucks for a beer. But Perla offers to buy
me
a drink, which is pretty damn clever, and I started thinking that this girl’s got some business smarts to be pulling a stunt like that. So, we sat and talked for a few minutes. Turns out she was raised in Cuba, came over with her parents when
she was young. Her dad died, she loved him like crazy, and she lives with her mother down in Miami.” The intimacy, the familiarity of the phrase
she loved him like crazy
makes me cringe.

“What’s she like, physically?” I ask.

“You want it straight?”

“As an arrow.”

Julian squirms in his seat and prepares for the next level of disclosure. “She’s beautiful, young. Twenty-three. Dark skin, a nice body.”

“Her tits?”

“Excuse me?”

“How are her tits? Are they fake?”

“No, natural.”

“Cup size?” I ask, bordering now on extreme drunkenness.

“Sophie, are you serious?”

“Very.”

“You know how bad I am with that stuff.”

“Compared to me, then . . .” I cup my hands under my breasts.

Julian looks at my chest, sizes me up. “About the same, maybe a little bigger. But not much.”

“So a B cup?”

“I guess.”

“Did you fuck her that first night?”

Julian makes a jerky motion with his hand, an upward motion toward his mouth—a sign, I think, that he is startled by my directness. “That’s crude, Sophie. Please.”

“Julian!”

“Not the first night, no. That night I just got a lap dance in a private room.”

“And you liked her?”

“I don’t know if I
liked
her, but I found myself very attracted to her. She’s smart, street-smart. And there’s something sweet about her, almost wholesome.”

“Wholesome and smart?” There’s some skepticism and mockery in my voice.

“Something like that.”

“So you started to see her every time you went down there for work?”

“I’d stop by, go in the back and get a dance. And then one day, I just invited her back to my room and . . .”

“And?”

“And I’d rather not continue,” he says weakly, aware that his wishes carry little weight at this time.

“Please continue.”

“We had sex.”

“How was it?” I ask, and I really do want to know.

Julian squirms again and kicks his feet back up on the chair. “Fun, I guess. It felt innocent. There’s no drama with this girl. She expects very little, which I guess is sort of sad.”

I smile because Julian’s arrogance has again gotten the best of him. “That doesn’t sound sad to me at all. In fact, it sounds exceedingly healthy. Realistic.” I want to ask Julian if Perla is a hooker, if he pays her for sex—but I know how sensitive this particular topic is for him, so I do not ask. In light of his mother’s painful life, I would be astonished if Julian ever paid for sex. Although he’s paying for lap dances, so I’m not sure where the dividing line is. “Do you enjoy her?” I ask. “Your time with her?”

“Sophie . . .”

“Do you?”

“It’s just sex.”

“It sounds like it’s a tiny bit more than just sex,” I snap, cursing myself for my broken state, my inability to satisfy Julian.

“Maybe.”

I take another drag on the straw and suck the remaining wine out of the bottom of the cup. I slurp from the bottom like a kid and make a grotesque sucking sound. I’m drunk—the first time I’ve been truly drunk in years. It feels as though my wheelchair is moving, which it most certainly is not. I’m feeling loose and uninhibited, giddy. I used to love this feeling; I used to love fucking Julian when I felt like this.