Realizing that she had done all that in response to my mournful tone made me a little teary; this in turn disturbed me more — I was losing control and there seemed to be nowhere I could turn.
“Oh, darling,” Svetlana said, and she put her arms around my neck, thrusting her small breasts against me.
I stood there, trying to find a way into that embrace, a place that would allow me to yield to an open heart.
“Lana,” I said after coffee and sex.
“Yes, my darling.”
“What did I say that night?”
She didn’t ask me what night. She knew. Our moments together were more predictable than a timetable. There was only one night that stood out.
“I don’t remember — not exactly. Why?”
“I don’t remember anything,” I said, “except that you were asking me something and then I was standing there and you were on the floor.”
“I asked you about when you were a child in California.”
“And what did I say?”
Svetlana sat up in the bed and hunched over, her large, pointed nipples just touching her slender thighs. As I watched her body, I began to feel nervous, uneasy.
“You said... let me see, you said, ‘It was all a long time ago and there’s nothing anyone can do about it,’ and then you threw me.”
“I threw you?”
She nodded, the pain of the fall reflected in her face.
“I didn’t just stand up and send you sprawling out?” I asked.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “You, how do you say, heaved me like a sack of wheat. You went down and came up pushing your arms out.”
Svetlana hit me with the palms of her hands, pushing me over on my side in the bed. Then she crawled up on top of me and licked my face like a friendly cat.
“I liked it,” she said in a deeper voice. “The next night I masturbated four times thinking about how strong you were.”
I was simultaneously aroused and petrified. Svetlana’s almost masculine admission, her leaning there on top of me, reminded me of something that, at the same time, I could not remember. It was naked desire with none of the little modesties and lies that I was used to.
“Fuck me, Ben. Do it right now.”
In the morning Svetlana was already up and dressed in T-shirt and jeans when I roused sleepily.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Go back to sleep. It is early.”
“No, no. I’ll go.”
“No,” she said. “You don’t have to. This is your house. I am your woman. You can stay in my bed. Why not?”
“You goin’ swimming at the gym?” I asked, just to be saying something, trying to feel like I belonged.
“Yes. Then I go to class. Will you stay again tonight?”
There was something in her voice, or maybe it was in my mind, something that was asking more out of me. The expectation, hers or mine, exhausted me and I fell back into a troubled slumber.
In my dream Barbara “Star” Knowland was standing before a medieval room with a thousand tables. There were acrobats and clowns, jugglers and fire-eaters. One man was selling whole, full-feathered ducks; a dozen of them were hanging by their necks from a bloody cutting board that was somehow attached to the man’s chest. He had a crazed look in his eye and an evil curved blade in his left hand.
“That’s what you call a dead duck, huh, son?” my father joked.
“Dad?”
He was there at the table and so was my mother, Svetlana, Seela, Mona, a man I had never met before, and Cassius Copeland. The strange man, a white guy wearing a cowboy hat, was looking off toward the back of the room, which was very far away.
My parents were sitting side by side, deep satisfaction radiating from them. They loved each other. They loved me — they said. I sat there watching them and feeling that I was somehow in that faraway distance that the stranger at our table was looking into.
The man I didn’t know turned to me and asked, “Are you interested in real estate, Ben Dibbuk?”
“What kind of real estate?” I asked, wondering why he used my full name. Why not say “Ben” or “Mr. Dibbuk”? I was stuck thinking about his use of my name when Barbara Knowland began speaking.
“I’ve seen thousands of people die,” she announced. “I’ve seen them shot and hacked, knifed and blown up, poisoned and beaten to death with steel batons. I’ve seen whole towns annihilated, countries decimated by famine. I’ve walked through infirmary halls with the smell of death so thick that if you cut it with a knife, it would bleed all over you.”
Everyone was rapt in her hypnotic hyperbole.
What nonsense! I thought.
But the man I didn’t know leaned over and whispered, “Only the innocent can deny sin, my friend.” Then he gave me his card. The name was written in runes but the title Cowboy was in plain type.
I got to work five minutes early. I was about to use my card on the turnstile when someone called to me.
“Ben.”
It was Star, standing near the coffee concession that made its business out of a nook in the east wall of the huge entrance hall.
She was wearing dungarees and a tie-dyed T-shirt of mainly purple and yellow. Her hair was down and she wore no makeup. For a moment I thought I recognized her from another time, but that flash of insight faded.
I stayed where I was and she approached me.
“Ben.”
“What?”
“You’re still saying that you don’t know me?”
“Lady, I don’t have the slightest idea who you are,” I said. “I saw you the night before last. I read a review of your book online... but I don’t know you.”
“We spent almost twenty-four hours living on whiskey and sex,” she said. Her green eye seemed to shimmer while her brown one receded.
“What can I say? I did that a hundred times when I was drinking and rambling around.”
“Why did you come to my talk?” she asked.
“I told you. My wife is working for Diablerie.”
“I know. I called her office. I asked her why she brought you and she said that you usually didn’t come to things like that.”
“Did she also tell you that she made me go this time?”
“What are you up to, Ben?” Star asked. “Are you trying to hurt me? Do you want something?”
“NO. NO. I don’t even know you.”
Once again the suspicion shone in her face. She backed away a few steps and then turned. She walked a few steps more and turned again.
It all seemed very dramatic, histrionic.
She left and I went up to work.
There were a few lines of code in a tax percentage program that I had to m o w almost every year because of ever-changing tax laws. I wanted to work on the subroutine but there was too much on my mind: Mona’s abandonment, Lana’s openness, and now Star’s paranoia. Maybe I should have asked her what happened all those years ago. Maybe I should have pretended that I remembered her, that I missed her.
But why bother? What could she do to me?
I couldn’t imagine any danger she might present but still I was uneasy, panicky even. I tried to concentrate on the printouts but for once they gave me no solace. I couldn’t hide behind the jury-rigged logics, the objective commands that were perfectly precise but often wrong.
I was lost that day, but I told myself this feeling would pass. Over time Mona would come back home and Star Knowland didn’t matter. Whatever she remembered, or thought she remembered, was more than twenty years ago and a thousand miles away.
At noon I gave up trying to work. I called my manager, Brad Richards, got his answering machine, and said, “Hey, Brad. This is Ben Dibbuk. I have some kind of virus or something so I’m going home. I should be better by tomorrow.”