“Yes,” she said. She clasped his hand. “It was courageous. Not everyone would have done such a thing.”
“Well,” said Aleksandr. He felt the thrum of social tables turning; he knew that he could take his time answering and that she would wait for him. “It was self-interested, you know.”
She laughed a little. He could smell the champagne she was drinking, vaguely vinegary; cheap, he thought. He wanted to buy her something better. “Rationally self-interested,” she said. Later, he’d look back and realize how, at the beginning, Nina would often say a catchphrase or a snippet of some academic or intellectual jargon, sometimes out of context and often obliquely; this kind of talk seemed to suggest deep understanding, vast knowledge. It soon proved that she’d internalized a certain number of terms that, when deployed alongside a knowing expression, could make men believe she had a brain, if they were already inclined to hope so.
“Yes,” he said. “Rationally self-interested. Don’t tell my handlers.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it. That Rusayev. Tell me. Is he really as ugly up close as he looks on television?”
They laughed. He told her anecdotes, partially embellished, about Rusayev’s hygiene and habits and quirks and demands. He performed an extended impression of Rusayev’s tendency to learn forward and taunt you with the mad hope that he might be ready to make his move, then lean back again, then forward, then back, until you were beset with nervous exhaustion. He also tended to leave his finger on his piece for a comically long time, rolling his wrist, leaving one hand, then two fingers, then one finger, retreating more slowly than the Americans from Vietnam, he said, and Nina laughed. It was a lovely laugh—bell-like and clear. It wasn’t necessarily a laugh that seemed to reflect actual amusement, but that didn’t matter to Aleksandr just then.
At some point in the evening, he started looking at her harder. He realized she was someone whom he would need to remember meeting, and so he tried to make a mental note of what she was wearing, and how she looked, and what she’d first said to him. If this went somewhere, he’d want to remember those things.
At the end of the evening, he walked her to her door and gazed at her fondly but did not, for the moment, kiss her. He could have, he knew, he could have done anything he wanted; he did not fear rejection. But he wanted to be able to tell her later about how he’d wanted to kiss her and had been too shy. He wanted that to be part of the story they would tell each other.
The next night he did kiss her, and he took her home. And after that, they were a couple.
He took her to private clubs with private leashed-off balconies, with gleaming vats of vodka and fresh juices already waiting for them. He took her dancing. Her took her to the ballet. She wasn’t an intellectual, but neither was she a philistine—she loved visual art, she loved singing. She didn’t know art history or music history, but it didn’t keep her from responding to art and music; she wasn’t a theorist, and how refreshing that was. For her, he suffered through opera—twice—and it was worth it, almost, to see Nina rapt: the beautiful blankness on her stricken face.
She became interested in biorhythms, in energy fields. She liked to watch Kashpirovsky’s mass-healing séances on TV. She did not care for politics. She found public displays embarrassing. They watched the coup together on television, agog, but she did not want to go outside once it was all over and Yeltsin had saved the country. He tried dragging her down to Moscow for the Yuri Shevchuk concert, when 120,000 people swayed in Palace Square, but she rolled her eyes. She’d sooner cry in public, she said, than get sentimental about a pop singer in public. And that ended the conversation, since Aleksandr had never—not once—seen Nina cry, though he’d suspected her of secretive offstage crying once or twice over the months.
It didn’t matter. It did not matter. Here was a woman who could love him for what he was, not what he had tried—ineptly!—and failed—miserably!—at being. If this woman wanted competence, he had that to spare. If she wanted ruthlessness, he was learning. Better to be loved—or whatever—for our own actual sorry selves and not for some distorted version of who we might have been. It was that discrepancy that led to disappointment, among other things.
And then there was this: he was thirty-two. It didn’t have to be Nina in particular, but for decency’s sake, it had to be someone. He was still decent when it came to family: he’d rescued his mother and two of his sisters from their backward hovel in Okha (the third had married a semi-toothless sturgeon fisherman and had refused to come).
Nina and Aleksandr might have been mismatched, but their dual mismatch provided a kind of symmetry: she was so much more beautiful than he, he was so much more talented and accomplished than she, and was this not the trade-off made by most powerful men? It was a tenuous understanding, an uneasy policy of mutually assured destruction—either of them could wound the other with all the ways in which he or she was not what was wanted once. If he’d wanted to hurt her, he could have pointed out that there were countless gorgeous women in the world, and there was only one chess champion (currently: him). He could have pointed out that beauty was fleeting. But she could have pointed out that everything was fleeting—chess competency was only slightly more enduring than beauty; both, it turned out, were games that favored the young. Anyway, what was power on the chessboard vs. power in the bedroom? Chess was a metaphor for war, but sex wasn’t a metaphor for anything. So whose power was more real in the end?
They fell into a routine in which she was playfully critical of him, and he was eye-glazingly tolerant of her, and this seemed to flatten the unevenness of their relationship’s landscape. Aleksandr might be a chess champion, but he was also just a man and was thus deserving of the ambient scorn of beautiful, exacting women. He did not disagree; in fact, he felt he deserved more scorn than even Nina would be able to provide him, though for reasons he never discussed with her.
He bought them a gorgeous apartment overlooking Nevsky Prospekt (expensive). He bought them a high-maintenance little dog with a lazy eye (also expensive). After an appropriate interval, Nina and Aleksandr were married.
A decade passed in slow motion, then faster and faster. When Aleksandr looked back, it returned in snatches, on repeat, hiccupping and distorted sometimes, like a scratched record. There were some good times, of this he was sure—some nice nights with Nina, especially at the beginning, though in memory it became difficult to ascertain how many of the nights were actually nice. Was it one night or two or a half dozen or a dozen? Or was it typical, was it usual, for them to slow-dance in front of that enormous picture window, with St. Petersburg cracked open before them, backlit by the moon, shining with all the grandeur of ancient Rome? What you imagine is what you remember, and what you remember is what you’re left with. So why not decide to imagine it a little differently? It is possible that it wasn’t all a horrendous mistake from the outset. It is possible that they were happier than he sometimes suspected.
But when he tried to remember the good, most of what emerged was the mundane: there’s Nina in 1993, combing her hair in front of the mirror; there she is again in 1997, maybe, her hair slightly longer, her frown slightly deeper. He remembered her evolving sleepwear, the cyclical courses of her shoes—seasonal, astronomical, in their regularity. He remembered the things they acquired: the sound system that seemed to seethe in the dark, with an array of dials and knobs and buttons that looked to Aleksandr like the operational apparatus of a spaceship; the computers that began as looming presences, half the size of Aleksandr, and slowly shrank down to sleek nefarious objects, bafflingly unobtrusive. He remembered also the parade of Nina’s friends, wearing bright colors, talking conspiratorially. They came for lunch, they came for dinner, they came—eternally—for drinks. They were a rotating cast: he could never get their names straight and was always mixing one up with the other, and always being scolded, and always making a point to remember, and always, always, immediately forgetting again. The women often mocked one another for failings that Aleksandr couldn’t see or understand—anyone who missed the evening was considered fair game. No matter how thoroughly a particular woman had been eviscerated by the others in her absence, the next time she appeared, she would be greeted with the same breathless concern, the same false smiles, the same astonished arching of eyebrows at the same grim litanies of the outrageousness of children, the callousness of men. Then there was the same hearty agreement, the same clinking of glasses.