Evgeniy leaned down to kiss his wife’s cheek, and discovered the odor of jasmine and bergamot behind her ears and around her neck. He recognized it as the perfume that he’d bought her on one of his trips to Moscow, and he knew that she wore it now only when making the same journey herself.
The doorbell rang — just past seven P.M. One of the neighbors? A door-to-door salesman perhaps? Their friends rarely dropped by unannounced.
Philip leaned over to glance out the window. A green Land Rover sat by the front curb — not a vehicle he recognized. He turned back to his notes, waiting for the person to go away.
The doorbell rang again, the person pressing longer on the button. Insistent, thought Philip. Or is it persistent? Persistently? He laid down his pen and got up, then grabbed his copy of Chekhov and stuck his finger between the pages as he stepped into the living room. The detail would let his visitor know that he’d been interrupted. Through the window inset into the front door, he saw a man’s head in profile, cocked back at the neck. The stranger’s lips were pursed as he blew a stream of smoke into the air.
“Can I help you?” Philip asked, opening the door only enough to lean out.
“Hi,” said the man on the porch. He shifted his cigarette to his left hand and held out the right. “You must be Philip.”
The man stood slightly taller than Philip, trim and athletic. Tanned or, rather, ruddy — his red hair made him ruddy. One too many buttons loosened on the front of his Oxford, the hair thick on his chest. With the Land Rover framed above his shoulder, he looked like a commercial, but for what, Philip wasn’t sure.
“Do we know each other?” Philip asked, opening the door wider and reaching his free hand out.
“No, I don’t think we’ve met,” the man said. Shake, release. “I’m a friend of Catherine’s. Buddy Shelton — well, Robert, really, I’m trying to get back to Robert, but back in college it was Buddy, so...” He laughed lightly. “Didn’t Catherine mention I was coming by?”
“Catherine’s not here. She’s gone out to dinner with some friends.”
Buddy smiled. “Well, I guess that would be me.” Cigarette to the mouth. A deep drag. He shook his head slightly, blew the smoke out of the corner of his mouth. “I’m sorry to have bothered you. I must have misunderstood about where we were going to meet. I thought we were all getting together here first.”
They were meeting several classmates from school, Buddy explained. He had just moved back to Raleigh recently, rented a house over in Vanguard Park. He was in pharmaceutical sales, and the Triangle “...well, it’s about the capital of the world for that, you know. You’re teaching at State, right?”
“Close,” Philip said. “Wake Tech.”
“Gotta start somewhere.” Buddy shrugged. “And I guess it gives you plenty of time to write, huh?” It was nice to be back in the area in general, he went on. It hadn’t taken him long to run into some friends from school, and the next thing you know plans were being made. “Of course, it’s just like me to get the plans wrong somehow.” Buddy laughed, but Philip detected no real lapse of confidence. What was the connection between self-effacing and self-assured? Philip assumed it just depended on the self involved.
“Well, nice meeting you,” Buddy said, stepping off the porch. “Guess I’ll just try to catch up with everyone.” Then halfway across the yard, with a quick turn, walking backward for a moment: “Hey, wanna join us?”
“No, I’ve—” Philip started to hold up his book and explain that he was working, or protest that he was only wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and sandals, but then realized that he wasn’t expected to say yes. Buddy had never even stopped walking. “No,” Philip called after him. “You all have a good time.”
“Oh, I’m sure we will,” said Buddy, and he thumbed the cigarette butt into the street as he climbed in the truck. A wave from the window as he rounded the curve.
Philip started to turn back inside, but instead walked out and sat for a while on the porch swing he and Catherine had only recently found time to install. Soon the sun would go down, and even now there were few people on the street — a pair of joggers, a couple pushing a stroller, a bicyclist in Spandex shorts. The chains supporting the swing creaked, the grass in the yard had begun to wither, paint peeled on the perimeter of the porch — little chores neglected. From somewhere in the neighborhood came the dull, distant roar of a lawnmower, or perhaps a hedge trimmer. Philip’s thoughts wandered back over the conversation with Buddy, and he found himself troubled by the cigarette butt in the middle of the street. The joggers, the couple with the stroller, the cyclist — none of them seemed to notice it. Finally, he walked out to pick it up, deposited it in the trashcan on the side of the house, and then came back to the porch. He opened up the Chekhov collection.
The theater scene in S— Gurov and Anna rushing away from the crowds at intermission. They walked senselessly along passages, and up and down stairs, came to rest on a narrow, gloomy staircase.
“I am so unhappy,” she went on, not heeding him. “I have thought of nothing but you all the time; I live only in the thought of you. And I wanted to forget, to forget you, but why, oh, why have you come?”
On the landing above them two schoolboys were smoking and looking down... Gurov drew Anna Sergeyevna to him, and began kissing her face, her cheeks, and her hands.
“What are you doing, what are you doing?... I beseech you by all that is sacred, I implore you... There are people coming this way!”
Someone was coming up the stairs...
Philip closed the book in mid scene, bothered as always that the “someone” never arrived. Who was that someone? And why had he or she stopped? A similar event in Yalta — Anna and Gurov sitting at breakfast: A man walked up to them... looked at them and walked away.And this detail seemed mysterious and beautiful, too. But what more did the detail signify? What did Chekhov intend? Simply some reminder of the outside world barging in, ever-threatening to discover the affair? And how early would Von Diderits himself have known that his marriage had gone terribly wrong?
Evgeniy shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Anna Sergeyevna glanced toward him, away from the stage, her furrowed brow asking, Is there something wrong? He smiled and shook his head, patted her knee. His wife smiled in response before turning her attention back to the scene before them — the Tea House of Ten Thousand Joys. A parade of kimonoed figures with thickly powdered faces danced in unison, strummed lutes, poured tea for lounging British sailors. Evgeniy’s wife tapped the tip of her fan against the bridge of her lorgnette, the latter a trifle he had bought her — unnecessary since their regular stall was on the third row, but she was always pleased by such precious accessories. “Men make love the same in all countries,” the Frenchwoman on stage had said. “There is only one language for love.” And when the wizened Wun-Hi replied, with those troubled r’s, “Yes, me know — good language before malliage, after malliage, bad language,” everyone laughed.
Evgeniy had paid little mind to the plot — a stew of misguided passions, flirtations, jealousy... a song about a goldfish. It was easy enough to let one’s attention wander.