The table broke into careful laughter. Grandfather nodded, permitting amusement, and some people hooted. These were the stories Slava would tell until his own grave — the “bearing arms” story, the story of Lusty Lena and the mulberry bush. This would be the total of Grandmother, as far as her offspring knew.
“She was better than all of us,” Grandfather said, cutting through the noise.
“Hear, hear.”
“The new generation continues our work,” Benya Zeltzer said, repeating an old Soviet slogan. Eyes turned to Slava, to Benya’s hopefully named grandson Jack.
“What we have been through, may they never,” Benya’s wife said. Arms extended with cognac thimbles, though no one touched rims. Clinking was for celebrations.
“But remember.”
“But remember, yes.”
“You know the expression,” Uncle Pasha said, winking at Slava. “The best way to remember is to start a new generation.”
Someone whistled. Eyes returned to the young people, marooned in their obviousness. Jack Zeltzer was, what — seventeen? An apron of fuzz hung over his lip.
Mercifully, the table dissolved in conversation. Uncle Pasha waddled out of his chair and dug his meat-pie hands into Slava’s shoulders. Slava felt the enormous globe of Pasha’s belly at his back. Pasha had the girth of a bureau, but he wore a silk shirt underneath a nice Italian blazer.
“Slavchik!” He crumpled Slava’s jacket like a piece of looseleaf. The scent of cognac encircled Slava again. Pasha ran a limousine for Lame Iosif and drew from a camouflaged flask of Metaxa throughout the day.
“Look at you, Slavchik,” Pasha whispered into Slava’s ear, sweat from his upper lip touching Slava’s earlobe. “Shoulders like a boar. The girls jump for you? I bet they jump for you. We don’t need to have the prezervativ conversation, correct? Man or not, too young to be a father.”
Slava rolled his eyes. “Everything’s in order, Uncle Pasha.”
Uncle Pasha was Slava’s mother’s second cousin. Pasha drove a large car, tipped well, and wouldn’t let up until he had given attention to every unpartnered woman on a dance floor. Aunt Viv only approved. Smoke machines belching cold mist, strobe lights raiding the dance platform, a heavyset peacock in magenta lipstick belting out hity on the stage (“Yellow, yellow roses! You are mine forever! Yellow, yellow roses!”), and Uncle Pasha doing the ellipticaclass="underline" the guarantees of an evening at Odessa or Volga or Krym, the restaurants where they all got together for birthdays, the last reason they got together with the exception of death.
“That’s what I like to hear,” Pasha said. “Your aunt and I, we could have waited a little bit.” He pointed a fat finger at Aunt Viv, bulking in swaths of black crinoline decorated with daisies. Her name was Vika — Victoria — but in America, after seeing Caesar and Cleopatra with Vivien Leigh, she had decided that Viv was more glamorous.
“Maybe she’s no beauty queen now,” Pasha said, “but when she was young? People turned. Not only men. Women. That’s the highest compliment, by the way, when the women notice. Hair like a fire alarm. Used to be, used to be.”
Slava nodded politely.
“What I’m saying is?” Pasha said. “Tfoo, you come to say one thing…” His jowls jiggled and he scratched at his chin, releasing a belch. “What I’m saying is: Over there you couldn’t work like a normal person.” He pointed at the black window and, beyond it, their former life. “There was no work. They had five people doing one job. Why work? ‘Get yourself noticed, get yourself problems,’ as we used to say. But what we have here is normal? I think America’s next big invention will be how to live without sleep. I am in the limousine five a.m. to nine p.m., and I am not the biggest earner. Your grandfather is always asking me why I don’t come visit. I am in that goddamn car! You think I was this fat back home? I was disc-throwing champion at my high school. Sometimes I ask myself, nu, Pasha, how is the trade? That for this? After all, you know?
“But look here. When I come home, I see that woman.” A big, hairy thumb pointed to Aunt Viv. She inspected them from the sides of her eyes. Belatedly, Slava realized that it was her lathering that had sent Uncle Pasha into action. “And she sets everything straight. Out there”—now it was America outside the window—“it’s someone else’s. But with her? I’d go into a foxhole with her. She’s one of us. You follow?” The sausage fingers rested inside the black waves of Slava’s hair. “You know what I’m talking about, Slava.” One of Uncle Pasha’s thumbs pivoted inside Slava’s shoulder blade until Slava was staring at Vera. “You’re off taking care of a man’s business, I understand. You think I liked listening to my mother? I went into the Red Army half to get out of that house. Six o’clock in the morning, she’d pull the covers off me. One morning, God bless her, she emptied a vase over my head. But you know what happened when I got into the army? Six in the morning would have been a gift from the skies. How about four-thirty in the morning? And they don’t pour water on you if you stay in bed; they break your legs, especially if you’re a little Yid with a big nose. They’ll take any excuse to give you something to remember them by. I missed my mother a lot in the army. You don’t know what you have until you’ve given it up, like a young idiot. Don’t be an idiot, Slava.”
Slava didn’t say anything. You just had to let the pitch run its course. Uncle Pasha held Slava’s shoulders like a rudder. They gazed emptily at the strange horizon before them.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Slava lied.
“Slava, Slava,” Pasha sighed. He nodded and kissed his nephew with big blue lips. Then he slapped Slava’s shoulders and walked back to Aunt Viv, the army of love in retreat.
Slava rose and ducked into the kitchen. He opened the faucet so it looked like he was doing something and watched the water come down, a solid, unwavering cylinder. With a tick of irritation, he noticed another body enter the room.
“I haven’t seen you in forever,” Vera said in an English swollen by both Russia and Brooklyn.
Slava looked up at her with a wild, dumb expression. “You remember me,” he said.
“How do you mean?” she said, confused. “You look the same.”
“You, too,” he rushed to lie.
She had a round face with long, lined eyelashes, and her black skirt was tighter than you would find in a funeral etiquette book. Slava could see the unstarved ball of her knee behind black panty hose. He felt a warm liquid slosh in his stomach.
“Your grandmother—” she started to say, then the tips of her nails flew up to cover her mouth, and a second later, she burst into tears. A second after that, she was weeping into Slava’s shoulder, a shudder with each sob. Her palms pressed his shoulder blades, her breasts pressed his chest, and her tears dripped into the shoulder seam of his dress shirt. Frantic, he arched out his ass to put some distance between his groin and her groin.
She pulled away. “I got mascara all over your shirt,” she said, laughing through the tears. He reached to brush it off, but her fingers closed over his. “No, no,” she said. The cubes of her heels clicked past him. She leaned into the fridge, giving him an uncensored view of her rear end, and withdrew a bottle of seltzer, whereupon she began to dab his shoulder with a paper towel soaked in bubbles. His hard-on retreated.