“It is just a theory,” said Boris. “Why does it please you?”
“I’d hate to see it go to waste.”
“Even if it was bad?”
“Your vinegar, another man’s ambrosia,” I said, startled by the words, sure I must have heard them somewhere before.
“You are a relativist.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant. “Yes,” I said. “Is that bad?”
“Morally,” said Boris, without much conviction. He smiled. “How old are you?”
I smiled. “I’m twenty-two.”
“Why were you in Italy?”
“You don’t need a good reason to go to Italy. Everyone should go to Italy. Why aren’t you in Italy?”
“Because there is no money there, at least not for me.” Boris eyed me suspiciously. “Why did you come back?”
I pushed my ragout con lepre around my plate. “I got sick of the food,” I said and Boris smiled.
Boris had left Russia sometime in the seventies. I pictured Boris as looking much the same only slimmer, with more hair, wearing brown polyester pants. It was easy to convince the Americans—who hated the Russian government—that everyone had some pressing reason to escape. Some people did. Boris didn’t. He thought his opportunities were better in America. And they were.
“I learned English quickly because I speak French,” Boris said.
“Don’t you miss Russia?”
“No,” he said.
“Don’t you miss your family?”
“Most of them are dead. Here, I have started a new life. Isn’t that what America is for?”
“Sure, if you’re not American.”
Boris laughed again. “You make me laugh,” he said, as if it were a problem. He shifted his weight in the chair and looked around the room. He seemed nervous that someone would see us, but there weren’t that many people eating. It was early, around seven, too early to eat in the city. There was one large party, a family, complete with two grandparents, three middle-aged men, brothers, who all looked alike although slightly balder, fatter, or grayer than one another. There were three anxious wives to go with the brothers, one applying lipstick, the other two with chairs turned inward, wrapped up in some gossip. The table was littered with wine bottles and two small boys were hiding under the table hatching a conspiracy. At another table a woman picked at a salad while hammering away at her laptop computer. She looked like a lawyer. The sounds were all muffled and the dim light made every table seem strangely isolated, as if we weren’t really there. I wondered if the other diners felt the same way or if it was just my jet lag. I looked back at Boris and was surprised to see him there. He was done with dinner, done with the bread, and looked at me with frank suspicion.
“Tell me about Russia,” I said.
“What is there to tell?”
“You’re a writer,” I said. “Tell me a story.”
Boris regarded me closely then nodded to himself. He pushed back from the table and crossed his legs. “Once, when I was a small boy on vacation in Georgia, there was a place on the mountain,” he showed me the shoulder-height mountain, “where they did experiments on monkeys and apes. I was driving with my family on the road near the mountain. I don’t know how it happened, but all the animals had escaped. There were baboons running here and there, so we stopped the car. All of a sudden there is this, what is this, the big red one…”
“Orangutan?”
“… on the hood of my father’s car. He got up there and we stopped and he masturbated for half an hour. My mother was in the car. She covered my eyes. My grandmother was in the car. She started to pray.”
“Then what happened?”
“That’s the story. After that, it is not so interesting. We drive home. We read newspapers and brush our teeth.” Boris shrugged. “I grow up and come to America.”
“That’s it?”
“I die. I am buried and no one comes to my funeral. All my acquaintances say that I was a bastard and that they are happy now without me.”
“Wow,” I said, “that’s a great story. Tell me another.”
“First dessert.” Boris said. He glanced down at the dessert menu.
“Tiramusu?” I suggested.
He shook his head. “Not here. Here, we eat zuppa Inglese.” Boris raised his hand for no waiter in particular. “You tell me a story.”
“Me? About what?”
“You.”
“No,” I said. “I’ll tell you about her.” I looked over at the woman with her laptop. “She’s not really working. She’s alone and doesn’t want to look stupid. She’s typing, ‘How stupid it is to be alone. I make two hundred thousand dollars a year. You’d think I could find someone to eat dinner with me.’ She types that over and over.”
“That’s not a story,” said Boris.
“I’m not a writer. Tell me more about Russia.”
“Why this interest in Russia? Russia is just like America only colder and with less money.” The waiter came over and Boris ordered the zuppa, some coffee, some dessert wine.
“Please,” I said.
He nodded again and shrugged as if defeated. He took the last of the bread and with his mouth full said, “My great uncle Alexei was covered with violent scars.”
“Scars? How do you know they were violent?” I asked.
Boris smiled in a patronizing way. “Scars like this you don’t get from falling off your bicycle.”
“How did he get the scars?”
“From gunshots, from bayonets.” Boris ran his finger around the rim of his wine glass. “He did not say where he got these wounds.”
“But didn’t you know?”
“He was a quiet man. We would holiday together. There was a house by a lake,” said Boris. “He had strange habits.”
“What strange habits?”
“Uncle Alexei,” said Boris, “drank the still-warm blood drained from the necks of cows.”
“Why?”
“Because of his blood sickness.”
“Blood sickness? You mean hemophilia?”
“Maybe. He never said.”
“Drinking cow’s blood helped him?”
“Only when he drank it warm.”
“That’s not a story,” I said.
Boris shrugged and turned his attention to dessert.
I closed my eyes and pictured Uncle Alexei wrapping his aristocratic fingers around a clay cup filled with steaming blood. He was a thin man in his late sixties. His hair was white and carefully parted. His beard was trimmed to a refined point. He wore no shirt, but long woolen underwear. His back was pocked with scars. These oval-shaped scars had edges of raised, pink skin. The centers were sunken and the effect was that the man’s back was covered with two dozen unblinking eyes. His white skin had a bluish glow. His mouth was fine and his lips were thin and red. He brought the cup to his mouth and drained the blood, then fell back into his low chair. His eyes grew drowsy and one pale hand slipped to the floor, the palm tantalizingly open and upward.
“What are you thinking?” asked Boris.
“I think,” I said, “that you’re trying to seduce me.”
Boris pondered this. “Do you want to be seduced?” he asked.
“Possibly,” I said. “Do you have anything planned for this evening?”
I accepted Boris’s invitation to go back to his apartment for a glass of wine. On the walk home, I was still sober. I could feel that start of fall, an edge in the warm evening air. I held Boris’s arm, because he was stumbling a little, although he was unaware of it. He was talking about European philosophers, scholars, and writers, all of whom were his good friends, all of whom I was hearing of for the first time.
“You are very pretty,” he said. I took the keys from his hand and quickly unlocked the door.
Boris disappeared into the bedroom. The bathroom was off it and I could hear first Boris’s thundering urination and then a violent throat-clearing. I poured myself another drink and took off my shoes. I was sitting there patiently, with my feet on the sofa and my head on my knees, when Boris appeared at the threshold of the living room. He was solidly naked, which was surprising, although not that surprising. Boris was stocky and strong. He had wide feet with a high arch and an impressive spread of toes. Reddish hair sprouted from the tops of his feet and laced up his trunk-like legs, except for two or three inches of bare skin where his thighs met his groin. A street lamp through the open window illuminated a thick, blue penis lying like a robin’s egg in a nest of hair. Boris’s belly was round and hard, the belly of a satyr. His breasts were plump and slantwise on his chest.