Maya winced awake. The room was blurry and she tasted sourness. The mastiff was folded into an impressively compact circle at her feet on the horsehair bed. On the other side of the closed slats of the window, it was still daytime. Her eyes adjusted to discover her son tippy-toed on one of the stools as he rearranged the weeds that lined the cherry-red board. Maya called out for him sharply.
“But it’s mixed up,” Max said. “This is bur marigold, not coltsfoot.” He added defensively: “I waited till she left.”
Maya brought her hands up to her temples and flinched. They felt raw, as if they had been rubbed with sandpaper. She closed her eyes. What time was it? She swept away the sheet that covered her and leaped out of bed. The mastiff opened its eyes. An interrogation of her son revealed that Madam Stella had gone to use the workman’s toilet. Maya paced the room, but the door would not yield the healer. Finally, Maya counted out five twenties, wedged them under the cutting board that held the loaf-log of butter, demonically keeping its shape despite the close heat of the room, and commanded her son to follow her out, which he did, obediently unhanding the clumps in his fist.
Creaking down the stairs, Max’s hand in hers, Maya called to Madam Stella, but no answer came, and she did not wish to embarrass the older woman by banging on the door of the toilet. She yelled that she had left the money under the butter and hurried out.
She drove above the speed limit; she compensated by inquiring of Max three times whether he was wearing his seat belt. The sex Maya had remembered was twenty years old, back when Maya was still teaching Alex. Thinking of those young people was like thinking of other people entirely. The two of them had turned out to be physically matched in a way that could be explained only by luck — sometimes it went your way, too. She treated this fact as a vindication of the reckless decision she had made in marrying Alex — why weren’t things allowed to work out? Alex was not initially an adventurer in bed — the first time she mumbled arduous words into his cheek (“I want to feel it in my chest, in my throat”), his hard-on drooped, and he remonstrated with her to watch a porno film if that’s what she wanted. But he learned, even as he disliked being a student. He was solid, thick-skinned, the fleshly block of him above her like a good fact, and their unflagging desire was as responsible as anything else for moving them through the years. But over time it had cleaved from the rest of their story: an organ driving at full throttle while so much else tripped, sank, got turned around on itself. And since Max’s trouble began, they had not touched each other at all. Their disinterest seemed as mutual as their erstwhile desire; they did not discuss it, simply heeded the feeling, a bitter harmony. She glanced at the car clock: 5:47. They had left just after two. She pressed the pedal.
She berated herself. Unlike her outing on the bus, which risked sacrificing only the mother, she had now disappeared with the most precious cargo of the Rubins’ lives. And instead of paying attention to the road, she was examining the clotted shallows of her psyche. A gruesome word floated up. You are a cunt, Maya, she mouthed silently at the wheel.
Maya turned to Max. “So Madam Stella played the game with me. .” She trailed off, hoping Max would fill in the rest, but he only nodded. “Did anything strange happen?” she said.
“You made noises,” Max said.
Maya ran a hand through her hair. It felt reedy and damp, as if she really had just emerged from a tangle of sheets.
“What kind of noises?” she said.
“Like it hurt you somewhere,” Max said. “But Madam Stella said you were fine.”
Maya nodded, the corners of her eyes filling with tears. She felt a great desire to close her eyes.
“Max, my darling,” she said. “Did Madam Stella play the game with you?”
“We didn’t have time,” he said. “She said we would after you woke up. Let you sleep.”
Maya nodded dolefully and scratched Max’s hair with a failing smile on her lips. “We will definitely go another time,” she said.
Again the gruesome word floated up.
By the time Maya was traversing the final artery between the Corolla and home, she was exceeding the speed limit less out of guilt than an anguished desire to reestablish the contours of her life as she knew them before she’d set off. Much as a lump in the breast felt at nine A.M. makes small pain of the toast burned at eight thirty, Maya recalled the uneasy home in which she lived prior to her trip to Madam Stella’s as a redoubt of solidarity next to the fury she was sure was awaiting her now. As her car pulled into the driveway, she resolved to act nonchalant but solicitous when she entered the house. No one would hear argument from Maya tonight. Then she realized she had forgotten the deer repellent.
Perhaps it is when we are at our most vulnerable that life throws us a line (though not until then). When Maya stepped into the house, clutching Max’s hand for comradeship, her mind trying to measure the distance from the truth she was willing to travel in her explanation and how Max would comment, Maya was accosted by an Alex bewildered not by her tardiness or the absence of deer repellent in her hands but by the unannounced appearance of Bender and wife on their doorstep an hour before. If Alex had once been aware of how long she and Max had been absent, now he was aware only of Time Before Bender and Time After. Raisa was off on a walk around the lake — who walked around the lake for hours; well, Eugene had been on her about her weight — and it was left to the men to entertain these sudden visitors with what sense they could make of the dozen Tupperwares in the refrigerator.
If asked, only a moment before, to rate her enthusiasm for a repeat sighting of Bender, Maya would have thought twice. But now her affection nearly toppled him, also his stout, white-haired wife. Bender repeated his story — he and wife had been in Acrewood for a matinee at the community theater and had decided to drop by and ask about Max. Bender blinked, his wet eyes the color of steel wool, as if awaiting a judgment on his claim. But by then Maya was too busy rummaging in the fridge in order to supplement the pathetic table the men had set up: cold cuts, matzoh-like crackers, and a jar of roasted peppers. For life’s emergencies, some men carried condoms, Band-Aids, umbrellas. Eugene Rubin carried a jar of roasted peppers.
As Maya popped open lids and spooned out self-made hummus, Mediterranean chicken, and lemony salad, she understood that Bender’s story was an unskillful lie. The Rubins’ visit had given Bender cover for a return visit of his own, and with it a potential resuscitation of the acquaintanceship that had fallen moribund as a result of. . what? As Eugene and his son, on a typical night, took their customary post-dinner positions in front of the living room television, the son slumping asleep long before the father, who remained alert late into the evening, staring blankly at news program after news program, Maya often wondered how this pastime acquitted itself in superiority to a cup of tea with a human being, even if that human being was Bender, even if Bender was in mortal combat with Eugene for who could exhibit the greater indifference.
In Kiev, the Shulmans’ living room had up to half a dozen extra bodies if it was a weekday, more on the weekend, usually neighbors (this is how Maya’s mother came by so much of her material), two in the corner slinging bile at the president of the tenant council, two others fixed on a soap opera, a solitary soul smoking wistfully out of the kitchen window while sipping from a thimble of balsam. It was not an astrophysics symposium, in fact the television dominated here as well, but at least it served as an invitation to others. And unlike Eugene — who sneered at the false sophistication of Bender and held up, as a contrast, the purity of his own — those who stopped at the Shulmans’ Kiev apartment for balsam and tea did not consider themselves with special regard, in part because they were professional gossips and knew it, and partly because all their lives had low ceilings courtesy of the state in which they had the misfortune to live. And so there was nothing to brag about, was there, might as well enjoy a thimble of balsam with the neighbor. The Low Ceiling made ambition impossible, so not one of those heads was riveted by the next day’s work docket, and that was the only way Maya could explain Eugene’s preferences — the American economy gave you an excuse not to see people. You were unavailable until retirement; until then, it was one long dark night in the embrace of Profit, the eternally undersexed mistress. While Eugene watched TV, he worked over in his head bills of lading, sales numbers, the new van driver — not something you could do with a Bender in front of you. However, now, one hip propping open the fridge door, she was seized by another interpretation. It filled her with pity instead of the usual bafflement. Did Eugene and Alex avoid acquaintances to avoid the possibility of a careless word alerting Max he was adopted? Perhaps they themselves did not understand it.