Since she’d arrived in America and got divorced, Ilona Siegal had been set up three times. The first man was not an ordinary man but a Ph.D. from Moscow, the friend who’d arranged the date said. When Ilona opened her door, she’d found the Ph.D. standing on her front steps in a pair of paper-sheer yellow jogging shorts. He was thin, in the famished way of grazing animals and endurance athletes, with folds of skin around his kneecaps and wiry rabbit muscles braiding into his inner thighs. Under his arm he held what, in a moment of brief confusion, Ilona took for a wine bottle. But when he stepped inside she saw that it was only a litre of water he’d brought along for himself. Their plan had been to take a walk around a nearby park and then go out to lunch. But the Ph.D. had already been to the park. It wasn’t anything special, he said. He’d just gone jogging there. He didn’t like to miss his jogs, and since he’d driven an hour and a half out of his way to meet her he’d got in a run first. Ilona poured him a glass of grapefruit juice and listened to him talk about his work at Bell Labs. He reclined in his chair, his knees apart, unaware that one of his testicles was inching out of the inner lining of his shorts. Ilona stared at his face, trying not to look down.
The second man was American, somebody’s co-worker, brought along to a party to meet her. He had graying red hair and his light lashes were coated with dandruff-like flakes. He took Ilona to an outdoor concert at the local community college. Afterward, she waited while he searched the cabinets of his kitchen, finally producing a tray of crackers and a dry triangle of Brie. All she remembered now of the man’s small apartment was the blinding light of his empty refrigerator.
The last man was too young for her and obviously gay. He’d agreed to meet Ilona because he had the impression that she was an illegal who needed to marry to stay in the country. As soon as they sat down at an outdoor table at a café, the man told her that he wouldn’t normally consider such an offer but his mother had fallen ill and he needed to pay for her treatment. Ilona nodded in sympathy and asked the young man to repeat himself more slowly. She understood that her case had been shoved so far into the recesses of her acquaintanceships that the people who now gave out her phone number no longer knew who she was or what she wanted.
It had not always been this way. There had been happier times, when she’d had both a husband and a lover; when she and her husband had thrown parties in their Tbilisi apartment that went late into the night, with longer and longer rounds of toasts and the smell of sweat and sharp cologne overpowering even the odor of cigarettes. Nothing fed Ilona’s spirits more than the company of men. She loved the sound of their hoarse voices, the amateur authority with which they spoke about world affairs and other matters they had absolutely no effect on. But most of all she loved the flattering light of their attention. After the last female guest had said good night, and she had found herself in the thrilling half-susceptible state of being the only woman at the party, was when modesty came most easily to her. It lent coherence to her whole character, so that she could finally be her most humorous and disarming self. But all that had been a world ago and she tried to think about it as little as possible, now that she came home to an apartment that was not hers, and to a man who was neither a spouse nor a lover but who seemed to demand more of her than either possibly could.
“Have you met Thomaz?” Taia said. “He’s outside.”
“The Georgian?” Ilona went to the sink to rinse off her hands. “I hope you didn’t invite him here for me.” Her fingers were grainy with the watermelon she’d been slicing. She ran them under the tap and felt around on the counter for her rings.
“I didn’t invite him at all. He came with the Gureviches.”
“He’s a bit young, no?” Ilona slipped on the bigger of the three rings first, a teardrop diamond in a five-prong setting.
“If you’re comparing him with your roommate,” said Taia, who almost never referred to Earl by name. “Don’t lose those.” She glanced down at the rings. “One day you’ll take one off and it’ll fall down a drain. Some women don’t even wear the jewelry they own. They have copies made.”
“So maybe I should tear off a piece of tinfoil and wrap that around my finger instead?”
“Do what you want,” Taia said.
There was no point, Ilona decided, in reminding Taia that before Felix started making money she’d been so cheap she’d gutted empty tubes of Crest, scraping the toothpaste from the creases. No matter how tough her life got, Ilona thought, she’d never lower herself to something so miserly. At least she made use of the nice things she owned. Unlike Taia, whose kitchen had floor-to-ceiling pantries, brushed stainless-steel everything, and polished granite counters that she touched only when she was throwing a party.
“Did you put new low lights in the ceiling?” Ilona said.
“It was Felix’s idea,” Taia said, tipping her head back. “He thought we’d get more for the house if the kitchen was brighter.”
“You’re selling it?”
“Not right away. It usually takes a year.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“We haven’t really told anyone. Except the Kogans, and the Weinbergs, in case anyone knew of anyone who was looking. It isn’t a secret.”
There were plenty of things that Taia forgot to tell her—but selling a house? Was that just another bit of information exchanged between people with money, like a stock tip?
“Oh, don’t be upset. A year’s a long time. You can still come here whenever you need to get away from that man. Come this weekend. We’re going to Providence for Parents’ Day. You could drop in and water the plants, feed the cat.” Taia laid down her paring knife and stood up. “Let me find you a key.”
“I still have the key from last time,” Ilona said. She couldn’t tell if Taia was offering her a favor or asking for one, just as she couldn’t judge if her friends kept things to themselves to protect her feelings or because they found her irrelevant. She knew they gossiped. A year ago, she used to bring up Earl in conversation all the time—told her friends stories about his two favorite activities, researching his genealogy and organizing his video collection; and mimicked him mercilessly even if he was in the next room, or precisely because he was in the next room and didn’t understand a word of Russian. She was staying with him so she could save up for her own apartment. But lately she’d started to realize that unless she wanted to move north into Putnam County or south into the Bronx, and either way end up an hour’s drive from her job, her sojourn would have to drag on for at least another year.
She stepped outside and into the sun. The clouds were coasting slowly in the sky, forming metallic reflections in the second-story windows. The air was smoky from the grill. On the patio, two men were lamenting the loss of jobs to Bangalore. Ilona walked past the Kogans and the Ulitskys, past the women reclining in white lounge chairs. It was mid-September, but already she felt a kick of cold in the air. She wore a silk blouse, while the others had come in cotton sweaters. She set her cup on the refreshments table and bent down to refill it with seltzer. A few dead leaves had fallen on the grass. They were the weakest leaves, the lemon-lime color of early fall.
When she turned around she found Felix standing behind her. “Where is your friend today?” he said, and surveyed the people scattered around the lawn.
“When I left, he was still sleeping in front of his sixty-inch television.”
“So Earl fell asleep and you snuck out?”
“Do I need Earl’s permission to see my friends?”
“No. But I thought you’d extend the invitation to him.”
“And what makes you think I didn’t?”
“I don’t think he would have missed an opportunity to be seen with you.”
She was too tired to play this game today. Every time Felix tried to make her feel better he only made her feel worse. It was his diplomacy that was the worst of it, his awareness that every comment could be taken as a potential insult. The old contrite song, not for their affair of eleven years ago—which, thankfully, no one had learned about—but for all the other disappointments in her life.
“Earl couldn’t come because he isn’t feeling well. He’s still weak from his bypass.” It was a lie, an obvious one, because five months had passed since Earl’s surgery. But who was going to argue? She picked up a plate. “I’m going to get something to eat.”
“Please do.” Felix stepped back a pace and returned her evasiveness with a delicate smile.
It was her fault for allowing Earl to meet her friends in the first place. She’d brought him along to the Fourth of July party a year ago and introduced him to everyone as her “roommate.” As though this would explain anything. He was seventy, she was forty-five. She may as well have called him her chef or her architect—it would have sounded more plausible. The minute she left him alone, he’d drifted off into an empty hallway. She’d discovered him an hour later in the foyer, talking to Felix about Hiroshima. Laughter from the party floated in from the yard while Earl went on about the Japanese who had jumped into the Motoyasu River only to be scalded alive by boiling water.
She felt her heels sinking into the lawn as she walked. Most of the other guests were wearing loafers or sneakers. A few had gathered around the grill to listen to the Georgian, the man Taia had mentioned. It was hard to tell if he was handsome or not; Ilona had seen him on the way into the party and had noted the light-gray eyes and crooked lower teeth, a combination that stirred an almost queasy sympathy in her. He looked younger than the men around him, possibly as young as thirty-five, yet he appeared to be on the brink of a decline that might be rapid, so that, when he finally did age, he would do so overnight.
“They told me they were guarding a base,” the Georgian said, as the men parted to make room for Ilona. “They said that their friend had been shot in the hand and needed drugs to relieve the pain. I offered antibiotics, but they wanted morphine.” She had no idea which war he was speaking of. It could have been Abkhazia or South Ossetia. She’d left Georgia three years before the republic had split from Russia, and its new problems—which autonomous province wanted independence next—had little impact on her. She’d heard of addicts in Tbilisi raiding hospitals even in peacetime. Perhaps it was the snobbery of distance: nothing would ever change there.
“I wanted to get out,” he went on. “But when I stood up one of them was pointing a rifle in my face.”
“But you had a gun!” one of the men interrupted. “You should have shot him in the mouth!”
“Which mouth?” another said. “There were two of them!”
“I did something more dangerous than that,” the Georgian continued. “I began to curse. I called them every name I could think of, hoping to alert someone who might overhear me. But I was running out of profanities.”
He paused, glancing at Ilona. He looked surprised by the silent attention he had drawn.
“Aren’t you going to tell us if you survived?” Ilona asked.
“Thank you,” he said, nodding. “I did survive.” He had a long jaw with a dimpled chin; it was the only feature that lent any merriment to his face. “I heard a vehicle drive into the hospital yard. The addicts thought it was a carload of soldiers. But it was only a man with an attack of pancreatitis.”
“Pancreatitis? He must have been an alcoholic,” Ilona said.
The Georgian acknowledged her mutely with his brows. He waited for the people around him to disperse into smaller groups. “He was. You work in an alcohol clinic?”
“No, a urologist’s office. But I was a nurse in Tbilisi,” she said.
“And what do you do now?”
“Catheters, rectal exams. Technically, I am only a receptionist, so I also pick up the phone. But that’s the only legal thing I do.”
“Then your work is closer to medicine than mine,” he said. “During the day I lay carpet.”
“And at night?”
“At night I clean supermarkets.”
“Then I wish you luck finding something more suited to your skills.”
The man’s eyes flitted across her face, as if they couldn’t decide which part to examine first. “That may be hard for me to do without a work permit. My visa expires in a month.”
“And after that?”
He shrugged. “We’ll see. I am Thomaz,” he said, offering his hand.
She squeezed it lightly. “Ilona.”
He held on to her fingers. “In my life I have met only two Ilonas, and both of you are very beautiful.”
She felt heat rising in her face. So he is this kind of man, she thought. He was standing close, and she had to look up to speak to him. “You live in the city?” she said.
Thomaz aimed his dimpled chin at a heavyset man with a short, square beard. “Yosif is a cousin of my friend in Chiatura. He and his wife are letting me stay in their apartment in Brooklyn. Their son is at college and I’m taking his bed. It is awkward sometimes. I help buy food. If I have to use the bathroom at night, I tiptoe. But I’m not complaining.” He touched his hand to his heart. “I am grateful. I feel as though I need to lose three limbs and an eye before I can be sorry for myself.”
An illegal who cleaned supermarkets . . . She smiled to herself. This was all they could find for her? And yet she suspected he knew his appeal to women, and that in the worst of times he could still rely on it.
“It is a nice place here,” he continued, looking around the property. Ilona followed his gaze down to the small rectangular pond. A dog was barking in a distant yard. “All this space,” he said, shaking his head. “I am inside all the time now. It has been too long since I’ve seen woods, nature. The spirit starts to forget.”
“This is hardly nature,” she said. “But if you want to see nature you should come back and walk the trails. I could pick you up at the station. The trains run every hour.” Her voice had slipped into the perfect fluency of half-truth. When was the last time she had gone hiking? The sun and the mosquitoes bothered her.
“You live nearby?” he said.
“Not far.”
“In a house like this?”
“An apartment.” He was staring at her fingers. “I share with a roommate,” she added clumsily.
“You are not married, then?”
Ilona gave a bland, cheerful laugh. “Not anymore.”
“Your rings. I didn’t know . . . ”
She straightened her fingers and examined her hand at a distance. “Some might say they are extravagant. But I invest in living.”
“Who knows here?” He laughed. “There is a ring for everything. For university, for fiancé, for boyfriend.”
“Well, some of them were gifts,” she said. “But not contractual ones.”
By the time Ilona got home it was dark. The dog was at her feet as soon as she unlocked the door. “Quiet, Elsa,” she whispered, and knelt down to let the dog lap at her palm. On its short dachshund legs it followed Ilona down the darkened hallway, where she slipped off her shoes and set them on a shoe rack next to Earl’s. Heel to toe, their feet were practically the same size. It seemed perverse that, given all the things in the world they didn’t have in common, shoe size would be something they shared. She walked barefoot across the carpet to where Earl lay dozing on the couch. A plaid throw hugged his hard ridge of stomach. The air was stale with the yeasty scent of bread. Earl had probably spent the afternoon grilling cheese sandwiches, buttering the pan to get a good, deep fry. Ilona leaned over the couch and tugged a creased newspaper out from under Earl’s knees, then picked up his bottle of hypertension pills from the coffee table. A glass of water had left a bloated white stain on the wood. Ilona lifted it and rubbed at the polish, but that made it worse. She carried the pills and the glass into the kitchen, which was separated from the living room only by the switch from carpet to tile. “Like mopping up a child’s ass,” she said to the dog, which waddled in after her.
The room she slept in had once been Earl’s office. He’d cleared it out for her when she moved in, and now tall file cabinets and a gray plastic computer desk occupied one side of the living room. She’d asked him to get rid of them, but he said he needed to have all his old files available in case someone from the insurance office called. Six years the man had been retired.
Ilona rolled up her sleeves and lowered her hands into the sink. Earl was muttering something in his sleep and turning over on his side. A growth of silver stubble had sprouted on his cheeks. He barked a cough and opened his eyes. “What time is it, Luna?” he said, slowly rotating himself into a sitting position. He squinted at the clock on the VCR. “Seven-thirty? That can’t be right.” He found his glasses, adjusted the pads, and pressed them to his nose. He had a thick nose, German and retroussé, the kind glasses easily slid off.
“You told me you were coming home at six. Didn’t we have plans tonight, Luna?”
“Did we?”
“It’s Saturday, Luna. I had to call Delmonico’s twice so they’d hold our table.”
She ignored him and continued rinsing. When had going to Delmonico’s become one of her duties? Now that the maître d’ greeted them as Mr. and Mrs. Brauer, Earl didn’t like to miss a Saturday night. She dumped out a teacup and began to untwine the wet string from the handle.
“It’s a good thing I called,” he said, and raised his heavy body off the couch.
Ilona tossed the tea bag into the trash. “Call or don’t call. They always say they’ll hold our table, Earl. Because there’s nothing to hold. Every time we go to that restaurant, it’s half empty.”
“You don’t like Delmonico’s now?”
“I don’t care, Earl.” She rinsed a plate and crammed it into the drying rack. “Does it matter what restaurant we go to this week? Can I just finish these dishes?”
His lower lip hung open as he searched for a thought.
“Earl.”
“What?” He looked up, a white hair from his brow drooping into his eye.
“We have to trim your eyebrows.”
His eyes scrolled up. He licked his thumb, then smoothed it over each brow. When he finished, he took a few silent steps toward his room. Ilona waited until he had closed the door, then wiped her hands on a hanging apron and went into her room.
She could hear him moving around on the other side of the wall. She knelt down beside the old-fashioned trunk that doubled as her night table. There was barely enough room in the tiny closet for all of her things. On good days, she tried to imagine that the office she lived in was a cabin on a ship and that she was in the middle of a journey across the Atlantic of another century. Kneeling, she removed the densely packed sweaters and beaded scarves one by one until she found a flesh-pink cashmere sweater. It was finely combed and as thin as lambskin; she had thought about saving it for a more interesting occasion. But now she bit through the plastic line of the tag and snapped it off. There would be other items for other occasions. She allowed her new clothes periods of latency that could last weeks or even months. This way, when she finally did take off the tags it was with the satisfaction of unsealing a ripe bottle of brandy. And if some people thought she was extravagant she was only preparing herself for a future that was far more uncertain than theirs. Would Earl ever have knocked on her door if she had looked any different? Would he have asked her to join him for a neighborly cup of coffee the very week she’d decided to move out of her apartment, three doors down? Would he have given her the sewing machine she’d admired? Or a fur coat two weeks later? And while she’d had to decline the fur (it smelled like naphthalene and had obviously belonged to his dead wife), she’d got something better. Very politely, she had told him that she had no room for it now, because she was planning to move out of the neighborhood. It had become too expensive for her to live here—with her credit-card debts, car payments, and the money she’d paid in advance for nursing classes she discovered she had no time to attend. She spoke undramatically, but, like the best actresses, she had an instinct for timing. “But Mrs. Siegal,” Earl had said, “a woman like you should never have to worry about money.” And that was when he’d offered her his old office. She could stay as long as she needed to, as long as it took her to get her finances in order. That had been a year and a half ago.
She could hear Earl padding around the hallway now. She pulled off her shirt and slipped on the sweater. Her eyes looked tired in the mirror. Her hair seemed a shade closer to purple than to the burgundy she’d dyed it two weeks ago. She pulled it up from the nape of her neck and fixed it with a large lacquered pin. Right this way, Mr. Brauer, Mrs. Brauer. That’s how the waiters would greet them at Delmonico’s. Did she really look old enough to pass for his wife? Or were they playing the game, too? Well, it didn’t matter to her what these people believed, whether they thought she was his wife or his girlfriend or his mistress. She was happy to coöperate with whatever public fantasy he had planned. Earl was outside the door, knocking.
“I’ll be a second!” Ilona called.
What was she supposed to tell people—that even if Earl did want to he had his hypertension and his arrhythmia to worry about? Not to mention his prostate surgery four years earlier. For all she knew he was impotent, and it was more of a relief to him than a disappointment if she rebuffed his attentions.
He knocked again.
“Yes!” she said, opening the door.
Earl’s striped shirt was buttoned almost to his chin. He stood in the doorway wearing his slacks and slippers. In his hand was a pair of manicure scissors.
“Let’s do this quickly,” Ilona said.
She let him watch her while she unfolded a sheet of newspaper in the bathroom sink. “Lean over, Aristotle Onassis.” Earl closed his eyes and tipped his face toward the mirror. “Here’s our friend,” she said, finding the errant hair and snipping it. She trimmed the rest, and then with the back of her hand brushed the clippings from his moist face onto the newspaper. When he opened his eyes again, he stood up straight. “Luna, you’re my angel,” he said, meeting her reflected eyes.
Delmonico’s always made Ilona think of a hotel restaurant. The trellis-patterned carpet, the mirrored walls, the sense that its patrons were dining there only because they were too tired to search for something more interesting. But it was expensive, and for this reason Earl always seemed to enjoy it. She watched him hitch up his sleeves and open the leather-bound menu. He took to the business of ordering with an almost proprietary seriousness.
“You can’t fool me,” she said, smiling. “I know you’re looking at the calf’s liver.”
“Nah, I wasn’t, angel.”
“Look at this, the steak comes with bacon. How can we keep coming here after what your doctor said?”
“I’ve been good, Luna.”
“You’ve been good? Is that why the apartment smelled like grilled cheese when I came in?”
“I made those for Lawrence. He came by today with Lucinda.”
“Your son just dropped in?”
“They asked where you were. I said you were visiting your friends. Nothing wrong with that.”
Ilona stared at him. “Is something supposed to be wrong with it?”
“You know, they always have their own ideas.”
Ilona folded her menu and placed it to the side of her plate. “What ideas?”
“They worry, you know. After the surgery. They think I ought to get an aide, just someone to come and check on me once in a while.”
It was possible that he was making it up, she thought, as revenge for her not having taken him to the party.
“They think a professional can take better care of you than me?”
Earl didn’t lift his head. “I told them I was fine.”
“It’s strange the idea didn’t cross their minds when you had pneumonia and I took a week off work.” She sipped her glass of water.
“I told them it was silly. I’m fine. I don’t need anyone.”
She could see that he regretted telling her. He’d started sweating, and she felt sorry for him. Ilona took a deep breath and slid her hand across the tablecloth to pet his. “I’ll always take the best care of you,” she said. They sat like that until the waiter approached. Ilona looked up at the young man and smiled. “I will have the tagliatelle pasta,” she told him.
“And sir?”
“He will have fish,” she answered.
Thomaz was arriving on the six-twenty. She left the clinic at five-forty and drove straight to the train station. By the time she joined the snaking line of cars at the platform, her windshield was speckled with rain. She gazed at the children twisting in the back seat of the car ahead, bouncing and looking out the windows every few minutes for the silver flash of train. Finally, it came, with a high squealing of brakes, and Ilona watched the crowd disappear under the covered stairwell and spill out again on the rain-slicked street. When she saw Thomaz, her stomach tightened. He was standing on the sidewalk, shielding his head with his hand. He wore an orange-and-coffee Windbreaker that was too large for him. Her guess was that he’d picked it out of a charity bin. He spotted her car, and she had no choice but to lift her fingers in a weak wave before she reached over to unlock the passenger door.
He got in and laid his wet backpack on his lap, then pressed his head against the window and looked at the sky, which had dimmed to a bruised purple.
“I’m sorry,” she said, turning on the radio. “I should have checked the weather.”
“Maybe it will stop in an hour,” he said optimistically.
But it didn’t. It continued as they drove down the parkway, the heavy drops pounding the windshield and the radio bridging the silence between them. It continued as Ilona steered the car up Taia and Felix’s narrow driveway, paved now with fallen leaves.
They ran inside the house and took off their shoes and turned on the heat. Ilona told Thomaz to make himself comfortable on the leather couch, while she disappeared into the kitchen and fed the cat its supper from a tin can. When she returned to the living room, he was holding a small parcel wrapped in coarse tissue paper. “A souvenir from Tbilisi,” he said, handing it to her. “It’s only silver, but I thought you might like it.”
It was a bracelet: stones set in twisted wire like flower petals. She molded it around her wrist and leaned in to kiss his cheek. “Thank you,” she said, and went back into the kitchen to make tea. It was half past seven, and Earl was probably waiting for her. She thought of taking the walk she had promised Thomaz once the rain stopped. But it was too dark now, and already she knew that she would not be driving him back to the station tonight.
She heard the TV in the background when Earl picked up.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“I’m watching ‘Schindler’s List.’ ”
“Can you lower the volume?”
The background voices died down. “I got the movie because you wanted to see it.”
“I’m staying at Taia’s tonight. Did you eat dinner?”
“Yeah, I made some canned beans.”
“I left you real food in the refrigerator.”
“I looked. Couldn’t find anything.”
“Earl, I left you chicken. And the steamed vegetables are in the glass container.”
“I ate those yesterday.”
“I made them for both days.”
“You didn’t tell me anything about it.” The TV voices got louder again.
She listened silently for a moment, until she could hear his strained breathing.
“Are you still there?” she asked.
“Where am I going?”
“Did you take your pills?”
“I took them. They never do anything.”
He was just being difficult now. “What is it, Earl?”
He coughed into the phone. “I’ve got chest pressure.”
“Is it in your chest or your upper abdomen?”
“I don’t know. Just . . . general.”
“It’s very different.”
He didn’t answer.
“It could be the beans,” she said. “I promised Taia, but do you want me to come home?”
“No.” It was a halfhearted reply. “Maybe I’ll call Lawrence.”
“Lawrence? If you aren’t sick . . .” She stopped herself. “I’ll come home if you want,” she said again.
“I’ll be fine.”
The teakettle whistled.
“I’ll call you later,” she said, hanging up. She found a dish towel and poured the boiling water into two porcelain cups on a carved metal tray that she’d taken from one of Taia’s display shelves. She carried it into the living room, where Thomaz had stood up. He was running his fingers over the leaded glass of a Deco lamp. “It must be nice to live in a home like this,” he said.
Ilona set down the tray. “I don’t envy anyone.”
It was hard to tell if he was smiling or sneering. His face seemed to say, “Yes, this is also an answer, but not to the question I asked.”
She had imagined she’d take great pleasure in showing off Taia’s house. And she was happy that he seemed impressed, as much by the high sloping ceiling as by the heavy art books in the built-in bookcases, and even the bird’s nest retrieved from the back yard, which spoke to a kind of collecting pleasure that transcended mere attainment. She wanted him to feel the character behind these things. And yet it was not her character, and she had to repress the urge to say that she might have done the room differently, that she would have placed the furniture closer to the windows or painted the walls a brighter color, a color she could wrap herself in. Thomaz circled the couch and lowered himself into the overstuffed armchair.
“I look around here and everything is clean, nice,” he said. “People work, they do well.”
She knelt on the rug by the glass table and dipped a tea bag into her cup. “Not everyone. Some people fold, they lose themselves here.”
Thomaz watched her. “Like your husband?”
“Maybe if he had got an earlier start, but . . .” She shrugged.
“But?”
“To make it here, you have to want to be here.”
“I see. He did not want to come to America?”
“We had a good life in Tbilisi,” she said, watching a ribbon of color spread in her cup. “Good job, good apartment.”
“Then why did you leave?”
“Everybody was leaving, all our friends. I didn’t want to be in the last wagon on the train.”
How else would she explain it, she thought? Could she say that she had followed a man who was not her husband to America? A man whose wife was her closest friend and who had become involved with her only because he was leaving the country soon and thought that she would stay behind? Or that she’d stayed with her husband because she’d been too scared to make the long journey alone? She had been thirty-two then, and without children, not young, perhaps, but young enough for her choices to seem reversible.
“My husband was an administrator at an electronics institute,” she said. “You know what that means: he knew how to tell a joke, how much to slip in someone’s palm. He was a smart dog. He knew when to bark and when to lick. But none of that helped him here. He tried programming, like everyone else. But it only gave him ulcers.”
Her husband’s whole being had recoiled from survival the way a half-asleep person recoils from the light. She had felt responsible for a while, but then war, the upheavals of independence in Georgia, had absolved her. The friends who had stayed began to write letters full of horror stories: demonstrations stopped by troops armed with shovels and clubs, backed by tanks, spraying tear gas and chloropicrin in people’s faces. Then the electronics institute had closed, bankrupt without the contracts that had come from Russia. The Russian families they knew were fleeing and settling in remote towns where the government in Moscow had given them asylum and a bit of land. Even if her husband had wanted to return, there would have been nothing to return to.
“He isn’t doing badly now,” she said to Thomaz. “He went to San Antonio to work at his cousin’s furniture store.”
Thomaz leaned over the table and picked up his teacup. “Your husband’s weakness irritated you?” The question seemed aimed more at himself than at her.
She answered automatically, “No. We were not a good match from the beginning.”
“When a man can’t support his family . . .” He was leaning back in his chair, shaking his head. “In my town, the men are all dying younger. They have heart attacks, strokes. But really it is because they’ve lost their purpose.”
Ilona looked up at him from the floor. “Have you?”
“No, because I am here.” He sipped his tea and set the cup down. “When I returned from Abkhazia, I could find no work. Then a clinic gave me a job. But no one paid us, at least not with money. And now people don’t go to doctors at all.”
“What do they do?”
“They die at home.”
Ilona rested her palm on his fingers. “I’m sorry,” he said. “All these sad stories.” He parted his lips to add something more, then shut them on his thought. She took his hand. The skin of his knuckles was as smooth and tough as a walnut shell. He interlaced his fingers with hers, and before she could feel her sweat or pulse he was lifting her up, as a person would pull someone out of water, until her body was again doing what it knew and sinking deeply into the saddle of his lap.
She allowed him to kiss first her hands and then her face. She kept her eyes closed while Thomaz kissed the line of her jaw and the curve of her neck. When his lips moved down, she pressed her face into his hair and inhaled the smell of the weather he had brought inside with him.
Upstairs, he was only a flicking shadow, the taut muscles of a back and the scratchiness of a cheek. He moved his weight over her with slow concentration, the two of them conscientious to avoid clumsiness, not testing each other, careful not to trample whatever small force they’d generated. Afterward, they lay together in silence. When the air became too warm, she asked Thomaz to open a window.
“Tell me something,” she said when he returned to the crumpled bed. She rolled onto her stomach and ran her fingers over the straight ridges of his forehead and nose, down to the stubbled cleft of his chin.
“You were too young to have been a doctor during Abkhazia.”
“I was twenty-five. I had finished medical school. I did not consider myself young. The soldiers were younger. Nobody taught them anything. They didn’t even know how to part with the dead.” He tugged a sheet over his shoulder, for the room had got cool. “One night, three boys brought in a fourth. I could see as soon as they carried him in that there was nothing left to do for him. They shouted at me to rescue him. One fired a bullet into the ceiling. I forced fluid into his body so his heart would have something to beat. I kept going in front of his friends. I pumped his chest, just for show. It was worse than anything I had done to a living person.” He turned away from her toward the wall. His body was still stiff a few minutes later, and she knew he hadn’t fallen asleep.
“Do you have children?” she asked, finally.
Thomaz rolled onto his back and breathed in the room’s chill air. “I have a son. He will be twelve next month.”
“And your wife . . .”
“He and my wife are with my mother in Chiatura. My parents have a house there. I will probably also stay there when I go back.”
She found the crook of his arm and curled her head into it. “It’s good to have a place to go back to,” she said.
They awoke at noon, to the sun leaking through the blinds. On the way back to the station, she drove him through the well-laid-out neighborhoods of Tarrytown—down the tree-lined streets, through the park, and past the tennis courts that gleamed in the sun. “Maybe next time I can see your home?” he said as she pulled up to the station. She smiled and planted a dry kiss on his lips.
In a diner across the road, she drank a cup of coffee. She considered the menu and put it aside. The coffee was strong enough to quench her hunger, and soon she would return home to cook Earl’s supper. She felt as if her body had taken a long, full breath. She’d forgotten the way sex could sweep the clutter from the mind, and now she wanted to sit and inhabit this emptiness awhile longer.
Elsa was yapping when Ilona opened the door. The air inside was cold, laced with the bitter scent of carbon, the smell of oil that had burned and then cooled.
“Earl?” she called into the living room. She walked into his bedroom and found the bed made. “Earl?” she called again, louder.
She’d left the heavy front door open and now someone was knocking scratchily on the screen door.
“Hello?” Ilona said, stepping halfway into the hall.
“Mr. Brauer?” It was the woman from next door. Her name might have been Martha, but Ilona had never asked.
“Do you need something?” Ilona looked the woman up and down. She was in a sweatshirt and her thighs bulged under black leggings.
“I just wanted to see if Mr. Brauer was back.” The woman cocked her head for a better look inside.
“Back from?”
“I guess you weren’t here this morning, then, when the ambulance came? It was pretty early. Woke me up.” The woman rested her eyes on Ilona’s sweater, her handbag and shoes.
“He isn’t back,” Ilona answered. “Now, please excuse me. I was picking up a few things to take to the hospital for him.”
“Weren’t you just calling him,” the woman asked.
“I was speaking to the dog,” Ilona answered.
The receptionist at Phelps Memorial would tell her only that Earl had been taken to the cardiac ward at 9:30 a.m. Was she an immediate relative?
“No,” Ilona said. “I am his . . .” She threw a glance down the hall and saw Lawrence stepping out of the large steel elevator with his wife, Lucinda. “Just a second,” she said to the girl. She slipped her rings into her palm and dropped them into her purse. “I am his companion,” she said, turning back.
“Companion,” the receptionist repeated to herself and searched her monitor. Ilona stepped away from the desk and threw Lucinda a sympathetic smile that was ignored. When Lawrence looked at her, his face was reproachful, but not, thank God, pained with grief. If they still had energy left for civilized hostility, she thought, Earl was certainly all right.
“How is he?” she said, approaching.
“Fine,” Lawrence said. “He’s fine.” He seemed disappointed not to be able to tell something worse.
The doctors had told them that it was an anxiety attack, but with a patient who’d already had one myocardial infarction they had to take all complaints seriously. They were still doing blood work, Lawrence said. They would finish the serial cardiograms this afternoon.
“In that case, I will stay with him today,” she said.
Lawrence threw a glance at Lucinda. “We don’t think that’s a good idea,” he said. Like his father, he was not tall. His hair curled in a single wave on top of his head. “He will be staying with us at our house for a day or two.”
“He likes his apartment . . .” Ilona stared at both of them, confused. “This is what he wants?”
“It doesn’t matter what he wants,” Lucinda said. “What matters is his health.”
“We like you, Ilona,” Lawrence said. “But wouldn’t it be better for you to be in the company of a more . . . energetic person? My father is weak. He has his illusions. But they can damage him.” He seemed to be memorizing his shoes. “You can stay at the apartment for a little while,” he said.
She did not ask him how long “a little while” meant. Like anyone else, Lawrence would be gracious until the time came to be cruel. Back at the apartment, she set a frying pan on the stove and poured in some oil. Through the window she could see the trees turning dark under the softening evening sky. At her feet, Elsa nibbled a few squares of salami. Ilona cracked two eggs and whisked them, then poured the mixture into the pan and watched it spread on the surface of the oil. If she left, she would take the dog with her. Earl wouldn’t challenge her on that. Her plans struck her with the kind of certainty that overtakes the mind after a day of hunger. She could fly to Alaska, where the men were as plentiful as salmon. Or she could rent a cheap basement apartment in Ossining and invite Thomaz for the weekend. She laughed at the thought of them, in a windowless white-painted brick basement, refusing to feel sorry for themselves because neither of them had lost three limbs or an eye. He believed that his hardships had galvanized him, but she knew that anyone could be fearless as long as there was no other option. In her case, it wouldn’t be so easy. As soon as Earl walked in the door and saw her boxes spread out on the floor, he would ask her where she thought she was going. He’d tell her to drop it all and offer to take her shopping, and if she resisted he’d beg her to stay. How good giving in would feel. Tomorrow, she would begin to pack. She tipped her omelette onto a thin dinner plate, chopped the chives on the cutting board, and sprinkled them over the top. A little garnish always made it taste better. ♦
