Vodka (57 page)

Alice was at the bar when the first fight began. Two very drunk Russians were suddenly punching each other. She hadn’t even seen it start, there was no preamble of raised voices, dire warnings, pushes in the chest and handbags at five paces. They just got stuck in.

Two more fights broke out, and then another two, like cells multiplying. Alice clambered onto the bar so as not to get knocked over. Her stomach lurched momentarily as she half lost her balance on a beer slick. One of the original combatants finally managed to knock the other to the floor and was kicking him in the head when security arrived, hauled him off and proceeded to beat the crap out of him—partly for their own pleasure and partly to encourage the others to pack it in. The crowd by the bar started shouting at Alice to dance.

“No way.” She flipped them the finger.

“It might stop us seeing up your skirt,” someone yelled.

“I’m not your type,” she shot back. “I’m not inflatable.”

There was nowhere for her to get down, so she started to shuffle from side to side, careful to keep her footing—she was drunk enough as it was, she wouldn’t need much excuse to fall over—and they were clapping rhythmically, wolf-whistling and cheering, so she started to do some sexy moves for them, gyrating her hips and running her hands down the sides of her thighs. Now she was loving this as much as they were—it felt good to have all these randy men egging her on, to know that she could have taken her pick, crooked her finger at them and watched them step on their cocks as they tried to get up there fast enough.

Someone propositioned her. She waved her hand in
his face, showing him her wedding ring, and in that instant all her hypocrisies came pouring into her head, through the noise and heat and vodka, and she had to leave, she had to get out,
now.
She motioned to the crowd to clear a space for her, and they helped her down, hands groping her en route, but she just wanted out as quick as possible, she didn’t even want to spend split seconds slapping the wandering paws away.

The stairs were as crowded as the bar had been. Alice barged her way down the flights and was almost at ground level when she saw what was going on. Girls were sliding down the banisters, all the way from the top, stark naked with their legs either side of the rail, and at the bottom men lined up with their tongues laid flat or their erections held down against the wood.

One girl lost her grip at the top and fell down the outside of the staircase, sixteen feet or more to the ground, and when she landed it sounded like a small explosion. Even allowing for how drunk she was and therefore how limp and relaxed she’d have been when she hit the ground, she must have at the very least broken a limb, lying naked and spread-eagle with all her dignity gone. Not a single person moved to help her. The men were too busy yelling for another girl to come sliding down, and hurry the fuck up about it too.

“The wetter they are, the quicker they come down,” Alice heard someone say.

She tried to fight her way through the mêlée to the injured girl, but there were too many people in the way, solid phalanxes of leering perverts. She heard American voices among them—dweebs raised in the suburbs, the kind of men who at home would have been afraid to jump subway turnstiles, now blind drunk, blowing
chunks and thinking they were tough guys. There was a word for people like them, she thought bitterly: dorkadent.

Alice walked back through empty, frozen streets; but she was warmed from inside, a great molten core of vodka. Her thoughts seemed to flow down endless rivers of distilled spirit. Vodka was her friend. No one else really understood her, Alice felt, not even Lev. But vodka did, vodka made everything better. Everything better, she thought, everything better—until it made everything worse.

She was hiding, always hiding: behind the vodka at night, behind her professional persona by day. And sometimes, very occasionally, she peered into the gap between the two and spied what was left of her real self, trying to fight its way through, confused and frightened and lonely, pleading for help and trying desperately to be free.

When she was with Lewis, she felt guilty; when she was with Lev, she felt needy. The more this guilt distanced her from Lewis, the needier she became with Lev; the needier she became with Lev, the guiltier she felt about Lewis; the guiltier she felt about Lewis, the more she distanced herself from him, and so it went on. She drank to drown the confusion, drank to drown the shame and the slow erosion of integrity that accompanied duplicity. She felt dishonorable and evil, and her life was spiraling downward, lubricated by vodka and made bearable by anesthesia.

It didn’t matter how fast or slowly Alice walked. Confusion stayed with her. A telephone pole stretched longingly toward the stars, its wires joining with others—power lines, overhead bus cables—in a thick
canopy above her, endless connections to all points urban that linked buildings divided by eclectic architectural patchworks and their own place in history.

Here were bulbous church domes and vast turn-of-the-century imperial government buildings colored in pink and green or huge slabs of pale yellow and light blue; here were functional structures based on machines and a total absence of idle elements, granite and severe half-ruins from the cruel dreams and superwills of the century’s most successful tyrants; here triumphant classicism reflecting postwar pride in cultural values and heritage; here softer and kinder socialist apartment buildings from the eras of Khrushchev and Brezhnev; and here the darkened glitter of new offices in chrome and glass.

Like the buildings around her, Alice felt she was now one thing and now suddenly another, a whole in spite of rather than because of the differing, clashing parts within. She’d lost her bearings. She didn’t know anything about herself anymore, not really. Sometimes she couldn’t tell what she despised and what she admired. She felt as though everything was being doubled in her soul, just as objects appear twinned to weary eyes. Some schizophrenics are unable to recognize themselves in a mirror—would that happen to her? What would she see? Her own face, twisted and distorted? Two of her, identical twins? Someone else entirely? Or simply nothing?

Friday, February 21, 1992

A
lice’s hangovers came in degrees of awfulness, roughly divisible into three categories. First, the mild hangover, when her head throbbed like a fairground generator and her parched mouth felt as if someone had lit a small bonfire in it. These symptoms were amenable to, though not entirely cured by, a mixture of aspirin, water, cola and vitamin C.

Then there was the moderate-to-severe hangover, in which general malaise was accompanied by paranoia (exactly what
had
she done last night?) and the feeling that Lilliputian secret policemen had spent the hours since her last drink pummeling her head and body—especially her kidneys—with small but lethally efficient rubber truncheons.

Finally, there was the humdinger hangover, when she’d wake with a ghastly start at five in the morning, overwhelmed by panic, dread and the certain knowledge that the rest of the day, and possibly the following night too, was going to be lost to remorse, pain, self-pitying tears, chronic anxiety and insomnia. Unless she had another drink, of course—the only remedy that worked, at least temporarily, until the deferred hangover caught up with her all over again.

Alice’s hangover this morning was at level two. She padded to the bathroom on legs that felt like suet and looked at herself in the mirror. Tiny blood vessels had burst along her nose and cheeks; her hands trembled
when she held them in front of her. She dry-heaved over the basin, and saw her reflection in the curved metal of the faucets. Her face was stretched and distorted; now long and flat, now bending around on itself, now back together with a snap.

The phone was ringing. It was early in the morning, no one called at this time without good reason. Alice hurried into the living room, her head lurching in protest at the motion.

“Hello?” Her voice sounded as though she was swallowing a mouthful of molasses.

“It’s me,” Lev said, and her heart gave a quickstep of joy. Hearing his voice was always a thrill, as if he were not quite real, someone she could only love as much as she did if he were a figment of her imagination. “You can’t have seen
Pravda
this morning?” he added.

“Why not?”

“Because otherwise you’d have called me.”

Pravda
had it all, every last detail, or so it seemed: a copy of Presidential Decree 182, testaments from sources within distillery and government alike, details of the scams Alice had uncovered, the attempt to sack Lev and the subsequent walkout, and of course Lev’s affair with Alice. The story ran across the first seven pages, and the reporters had done as thorough and efficient a job as they had on the child killings, to which this new story of course made reference.

Alice was summoned to the Kremlin. Borzov himself wanted to see her.

Lev and Arkin were there too. It was too early even for Borzov to have started drinking, though not too early to have stopped him working up a fury. “What the fuck is all this?” He flicked the back of his hand against
a copy of
Pravda.
“What the hell are you two doing, sleeping with each other? Are you mad?”

No, Alice thought, just in love. But she didn’t think it would be particularly helpful to say so.

“Fools, fools, fools, all around,” Borzov said. “If Anatoly Nikolayevich had the choice, he’d sack the lot of you and start again from scratch. But it’s too late, the auction’s ten days away, we haven’t got time. On the other hand, ten days isn’t long, we can hold out till then. So here’s what we have to do.”

This was what Arkin had meant, Alice saw, when he’d talked about Borzov being on an upswing. This was a crisis, a real threat to his power; this was where he came alive. He pointed at Arkin. “Kolya, you’re in charge of the government response. Deny everything. Say it’s all nonsense cooked up by the enemies of reform. Tell
Pravda
—and every other paper and TV station—that the next time they repeat such lies, we’ll shut them down.” Alice opened her mouth to protest, and shut it again almost immediately. She knew what they’d say, that this was Russia, this was how things were done here. “Flat denials. Act like it’s an effort for you even to lower yourself to the level of answering such crap.”

Borzov turned to Lev. “Red October: the president doesn’t want a peep out of them, not a fucking peep. Tell them you’re doing everything for their own good, blame it on zealous reformers. The president knows what kind of hold you have over your workers—use that now, keep them sweet.

“And you, Mrs. Liddell … You must deal with the West. They hope the new Russia will be their grateful handmaiden. Right now it’s a wild and willful hooligan, but tell them it won’t be like that forever and it shouldn’t
undermine their support for reform. What’s important is that things get done, not how they’re done—you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, all that. Talk to Washington, London, Paris and all the number-crunchers in Frankfurt and Geneva. They’re the ones you must answer to.”

“You seem to have forgotten my husband,” she said.

It was all Alice could do to put one foot in front of the other. The knots in her stomach seemed to be tying her limbs to the spot. It took five attempts before she finally succeeded in inserting her key into the lock, and she almost fell over herself as she stepped through the door.
The Marriage of Figaro
was playing on the stereo—an indication of Lewis’s state of mind; he hated Mozart. Time to face the music, Alice thought, and tried to force a smile.

She went into the living room. Lewis looked at her without speaking, and his silence, so laden with accusation, hurt and betrayal, unnerved her more than any amount of shouting and screaming would have. Alice burst into tears: great heaving sobs, the way a child cries.

Merciless in his stillness, Lewis didn’t move a muscle. He waited for Alice to catch her breath and dry her eyes. He’d have waited there all day, it seemed to her.

“It’s true, then,” he said.

She jerked her head, an approximation of a nod.

“Yes. It’s true.”

“Do you love him?”

“Yes.”

“And me?”

“Oh, Lewis.” He waited her out again. She took a deep breath, knowing that no matter how much the truth might hurt, the lying hurt more.

“Do you love me?” he repeated.

“No. I don’t.” She looked away as she said this, not wanting to see his face. “I’ve tried to love you. But I can’t deceive myself anymore, Lewis. I love
him
.”

It was, Alice thought, as though she’d been skating on the surface her whole life. Hairline cracks in the ice give you glimpses of what it’s really like beneath, but afraid of the danger, you steer away. Then suddenly one of those cracks opens up anyway and drags you down—and that’s life, cold and dirty and exhilarating and a straight fight for survival. And the more you fight the more alive you feel.

Lewis was shaking his head, more in bewilderment than anything else. It had never occurred to him that he might love someone else, and therefore it had never occurred to him that Alice might; that was the way his mind worked. “No,” he said, more to himself than her. “No. You must love me—look at you, you wouldn’t be crying like that otherwise.”