Unlovely (15 page)

"Okay," he said. It sounded
like, "Ho-
kay
." Very charming, indeed.
"What do you need to say to me?"

"I would like you to come back to
my room with me."

Arkady
was taken
aback. What did she mean? He must have misheard. He blinked rapidly as if it
were his vision that were foggy and not his brain. "Really? Why?"

Claudia swallowed hard and leaned toward
him, hoping the scent of her cologne would waft seductively in his direction.
"I think you know why." She struggled to maintain a steady gaze, full
of sensual promise, although every impulse in her told her to look away. This
was no time to lose confidence.
Audaces
fortuna
juvat
,
after all.

After a moment's reflection to discern
whether there were some huge cultural convention he was missing,
Arkady
did know why. It seemed this girl wanted to have sex
with him. Strange. He laughed, thinking it must be a joke, but he swallowed the
laughter when she didn't join in.

"You are serious?"

"I am."

There was an awkward pause of several
seconds as Claudia stared at him in her unblinking way. She could hear her
heart pounding in her ears.
Arkady
looked down at his
folded hands as he considered what she was proposing and, if it was what he
thought it was, to escape this awkward situation tactfully. She was weird, but
she was a human being. She didn't deserve to be humiliated.

"Excuse me, but I want to be sure
that I am understanding correctly: do you suggest that we have relations?
Please forgive me if I'm wrong."

Claudia squirmed. She didn't like having
it put out there so baldly. Nonetheless, there it was. Too late to turn back
now.

"Yes, that's what I'm
suggesting."

Arkady
smiled quickly.
His mouth twitched nervously before he responded, "We have not spent any
time together outside of the classroom."

"I know. And I'm aware that this
might seem unusual, but I'll tell you anything you need to know about me."
A thought struck her, "Oh, are you concerned about diseases? I'm a virgin,
so you've got nothing to worry about."

"No. No, of course you don't have
diseases. That's not what I was thinking about."

Arkady
abruptly sat
back in his chair. He remained silent, biting his lower lip, nodding almost
imperceptibly and still avoiding Claudia's eyes.

Claudia waited nervously. She hadn't
allowed herself to imagine failure, but suddenly it seemed a real possibility.
She had no idea how to persuade
Arkady
; she had hoped
she could simply make a proposition and he would accept. Claudia was aware she
wasn't the most conventionally beautiful woman on campus, but she wasn't
hideous. Plus,
Arkady
knew she was a responsible,
intelligent person from their interaction in class. That must count for
something.

It was aggravating to sit there and wait
in silence while this man deliberated. Claudia was not going to beg or plead;
she'd abandoned enough of her dignity already. She'd practically served herself
up to him on a platter. Claudia thought she would explode from the tension.

"So,
Arkady
.
What do you think? Just say it."

Arkady
opened his
mouth to answer and then closed it again, thinking as quickly as he could and
translating in his mind before daring to speak.

"Well, of course I am very
flattered. But I have a girlfriend at home who would not like this thing you're
suggesting."

Was he looking for an out, or was he
trying to make sure that Claudia wasn't expecting a relationship? Claudia
decided to go with the latter. "No, she wouldn't. But of course, she
wouldn't find out unless you told her."

"But I would know what I'd
done."

"Yes, you would know you had sex
one time with a woman in a foreign country whom you will never see again."
There – that should reassure him. No strings.

Arkady
sighed.
"Yes, that's true, but Claudia, what makes you want to have relations with
me, anyway? We are not even friends."

Claudia was about to protest when
another graduate student appeared in the doorway, a paper cup in his hand.

"Hey, I've been looking for
you," the stranger said
boozily
, gesturing
toward the Russian and ignoring Claudia completely.
Arkady's
face betrayed his relief as he stood up to greet the newcomer, then briefly
turned back.

"Excuse me just a moment, please. I
must speak to Mark. We attend a seminar together."

Arkady
leaped from his
chair and practically raced to the door. Claudia sat watching the two men
converse, pinching the palm of her left hand to relieve her nerves. This was
not turning out the way she'd hoped it would at all.

Arkady
was speaking in
rapid Russian to his friend, a short, square-built fellow. Claudia could
understand nothing of it, but by the surprised look she saw on Mark's face, she
guessed that
Arkady
wasn't too much the gentleman to
share the discussion that had been interrupted.

Mark jabbered something in Russian, and
Arkady
laughed.
Arkady
asked Mark
something, and Mark said, "
Da
!"  Claudia understood that
quite well.

Arkady
led Mark into
the room.

"Claudia Milford, please meet Mark
Adams. He is a graduate assistant here at the university. He will be coming
back with me to Moscow for a semester in the spring."

Mark took a seat and nodded a greeting
to Claudia, who regarded him suspiciously through narrowed eyes.

"Mark is a good fellow. I hope you
will like him. He understands American women better than I do."
Arkady
paused, his face a mask of discomfort. Mark, for his
part, grinned sheepishly.

"Stop. I think I know where you're
going with this. You're passing me off. You're passing me off to this
guy," Claudia hissed. "Do you think I'm some slut? I chose you,
Arkady
, for very specific reasons, not just to get
laid!" Claudia was appalled at the way this was going.

"No, no!"
Arkady
raised his hands in protest, his mind scrambling to speak in English. When he
panicked, it was so much easier to think in Russian. Oh, this was terrible! How
did he end up in this situation? "I am not passing you off. I am offering
Mark to you. I do not know why you chose me for this special thing, but I am
saying that I cannot do it, but Mark can."

"I don't know Mark."

"You don't know me."

Claudia was quiet for two beats while
she considered the veracity of that statement.

"You can get to know me," Mark
interjected helpfully.

"I don't want to get to know
someone. I want to have sex with someone," Claudia snapped at him, again
cringing inwardly at the coarseness of the discussion. It was true, but it
sounded really, really bad.

Mark smiled. "You see, we have
something in common. I want to have sex with someone, too."

Claudia tilted her head to the side,
studying Mark and organizing her thoughts. She would have preferred
Arkady
, but clearly that wasn't going to happen. This was
pretty much like getting a recommendation from a first choice candidate for a
replacement. She began to waver from her initial repugnance. Did she really
want to start the search from the beginning again?

"Forgive me for being blunt,"
Claudia said, "But why don't you just have sex with a girlfriend or
something?"

"I don't want a girlfriend. I'm
leaving in a few weeks. I want to have sex, and it seems you're offering
–" he stopped when he saw her expression, knowing he'd overstepped.
"I didn't mean that the way it sounded. I mean, it seems you and I share
some of the same goals --"

That just sounded stupid, but at this
point, Claudia was weary of the transaction and couldn't have cared less. She
wanted it over with. And when they'd done it, he would leave, and that would be
the end of it.

"Okay," she said.

"Wow, all right," Mark
responded, surprised. He looked at
Arkady
for a
moment and smiled. It looked lascivious and triumphant, and
Arkady
gave him a wink. Claudia panicked, realizing that this had evolved from a deal
between two people into a group project.

"Hey, listen,
Arkady
.
Are you planning to go out there and tell everybody about all of this? I'm
asking that you don't. Seriously. Please don't. Please keep this among
us."

Truth be told,
Arkady
had already been thinking of how he would regale his colleagues with the story,
but seeing Claudia's desperate expression, he changed his mind. He was a
gentleman after all. He could hold on to the tale until he returned to Moscow.
He wondered idly if his friends there would believe it.

"No, it will only be among us. I
promise."

"You too," she said to Mark.
"Promise to keep this private."

"Naturally," he shrugged.
"So how does this work, then? Do we go out to dinner first?"

"Sure, I guess," she began,
but then immediately reconsidered. "You know what? I'd really rather not.
Don't you think the conversation would be even worse than the one we're having
now?"

Good grief, she was blunt.
"Probably," he agreed. "Okay, so I just come over to your place,
then?"

Claudia feared she'd made a gaffe. Would
it make her seem cheap if she didn't let him take her out to dinner? Dinner
before sex was a social nicety. Had she just committed a
faux pas
?

"You know, on second thought, I
guess if you want to, you could bring coffee or something."

He chuckled. "Coffee? Really?"

"Yeah. What? You don't like
coffee?"

"Okay," he said. Pre-coital
coffee. Weird.

"Give me a pen," Claudia said.
Mark produced one and Claudia wrote her phone number and address on a flyer for
the poetry event that someone had dropped on the floor.
Arkady
edged discreetly to the door.

"Well, goodbye,"
Arkady
said as he slipped away, happy to have made an
escape and just as happy to be returning to his champagne. Claudia and Mark
ignored him.

"I live in Fife. You can go up to
the third floor common area, call this number and I'll come out to get you.
Unescorted men who aren't residents aren't supposed to be on the hall."

"When should I come by?"

"How about tomorrow at ten?"

Mark slipped the paper into his jeans
pocket and got up to go.

"Okay. Ten it is. See you later,
Claudia."

"Bye."

Claudia watched him walk away. He was
shorter and heavier than she'd wanted, but he wasn't fat. He seemed
intelligent. He was going to study in Moscow, and you don't get to do that if
you're not bright enough to take advantage of the opportunity. She wondered if
perhaps it was a little cheap or slutty, the way it all came about. Yes, it
surely was, she concluded, but it was better than the way a lot of girls hooked
up, drunk and mindlessly groping some guy in a frat house. By comparison, this
was downright civilized.

"The point of this exercise is to teach you to
work together," Rich yelled to the residents as they tied blindfolds over their
eyes. Moments earlier they had been told to pick a partner, and then one of
each team went to the west end of the field, one to the east end. They lined up
facing each other, at a distance of about fifty yards.

It was a warm, sun-dappled day. Although
there had been light rain in the morning, the deep grass in the field was dry
and tickled the ankles. Before fastening her blindfold, Claudia had noticed
many patches of white clover. She hoped it wouldn't attract bees. It would be
just her bad luck to get too near to a bee while she was blindfolded and get
stung.

Thoughts of insect stings turned into
thoughts of Gretchen Hanson. Poor Gretchen, taken out by a bug all those years
ago. She never lived at all, really. Claudia felt a moment's pity, then it passed.
She'd had it coming. Anyway, wherever Gretchen was now, she was probably
rejoicing that Claudia had ended up in the loony bin.

"At least I'm alive," she
muttered to Gretchen's soul, hoping she could hear it.

Rich was still explaining, "So the
goal is to find your partner as you walk blindfolded toward one another across
this field. You'll identify your partner by following the sound of the animal
you decided on. So, for example, Maggie and Josie will each moo, and listen for
the other's moo, until they find each other. No calling names – that's cheating
– got it?"