Evgeniy turned his eyes once more toward the governor’s box, but still saw no one but the governor’s daughter seated in front, leaning forward, her elbows on the coping. He had nodded in the direction of the box during the bustle before the start of the play, aware from the parting of the curtains behind her and the partially glimpsed hand on the sash that the governor himself stood back there watching — that perhaps the governor had in turn seen him. Evgeniy hoped that at the interval between acts he would have the opportunity to speak with the man. There seemed little harm in reminding a superior that you were there, that you existed at all.
At last the first act ended. The curtain fell.
“Excuse me, my darling,” Evgeniy said, standing. “There are several people I must speak with.” And he stooped over quickly to kiss his wife’s cheek before leaving her in the stall, proud that everyone could see what a model marriage they had. She was indeed his darling, his plum, his precious baby bird. In the aisle, he encountered Pyotr Alexeitch, and the two men began speaking as they walked toward the door outside, where several other gentlemen had already gathered to smoke.
But he had barely caught the smell of tobacco drifting through the door when a brisk movement across the room seized his attention — a woman rushing hurriedly through the crowd. A mere flash of a moment, but enough for him to recognize his wife’s gown, the particular way she pinned her hair back, and that familiar, though now hurried, gait. Had a problem arisen? Perhaps she had suddenly taken ill. Was she searching for him?
“I beg your pardon, Pyotr,” he said, with a slight bow. “I fear there is something I must attend to.” It was, he considered, no breach of manners to look to your wife in her time of need.
He walked through the laughing, chattering crowd, heard a person humming one of the refrains from the play, saw another stifling a giggle as she stiffly mimicked the bow of one of the geisha girls.
His wife had gone through this door, surely, he thought, and it opened up onto a busy passageway leading around the auditorium. A glimpse of her gown to the right, and as Evgeniy moved in that direction, he saw that another man was following closely on his wife’s heels.
“Excuse me,” he said to each person whose elbow he jostled, “pardon me.” He eased as swiftly as he could through the crowd without disrupting them too terribly, without drawing too much attention — casting a quick smile or a friendly nod to those he knew, striving at the same time to keep his eyes on the figures ahead. They seemed to move endlessly along passageways, and up and down stairs. At times Evgeniy gained on them, at others he fell behind, until at a last turn he reached the base of a narrow, gloomy staircase, hidden from the crowd. The sounds of his wife’s voice echoed down the stairs — “I beseech you by all that is sacred, I implore you” — and Evgeniy mounted the first step hastily, primed to defend his wife’s virtue, his own honor, until he heard an unexpected tenor in her next words: “There are people coming this way!”
He stopped in mid step. There was an urgency in her tone that had struck him strangely, a desperation, a passion, a—
“You must go away... I will come and see you in Moscow. I have never been happy; I am miserable now... I swear I’ll come to Moscow. But now let us part. My precious, good, dear one, we must part!”
A moment passed in silence, an emptiness in which Evgeniy’s imagination trembled. Then he heard them coming down the stairs rapidly, and he slunk back along the passageways ahead of them, once more fighting the throng as he struggled toward the security of their accustomed stall.
Near midnight, Philip sat alone in the living room, his gaze wandering from one object to another. The weave of the fabric on the couch, marred by a stain whose origin he couldn’t remember. The air-conditioning vent in the corner, rattling intermittently as the system switched on and off. Over the mantel hung an abstract painting that Catherine had completed in college: two broad, bold, S-shaped swaths of color, red and purple. Divergent at each extreme, they curved closer together in the middle and touched lightly at various points. What was the name of it? Duet something? Romance? Romantic Red Pairs Passionate Purple? There was a precious cleverness to the title, Philip recalled, but his mind was too muddled to remember it clearly. Densely chaotic jazz murmured from the stereo’s speakers, the volume turned low so as not to disturb Catherine’s sleep.
They had kissed soon before he left their bed a half-hour before, and her lips had tingled at the time with the mint of her toothpaste, masking the faint aftertaste of her evening out. But now it was the undertones of those tastes that lingered in his memory. The briny lure of tequila, the tang of limes. Residues, castoffs. Like the bracelet she had discarded on the end table when she walked through the door, or the pocketbook standing like a challenge on the other chair.
“Did your friend Robert find you?” he had asked her after she came home.
“Robert?” she said. “Oh, you mean Buddy. Why? Did he call here?”
“He stopped by looking for you. He assumed you were meeting here first before dinner.”
“I wonder why he would have thought that,” she said, and he thought she seemed genuinely puzzled. No, he hadn’t mentioned stopping by, she went on to explain, had just apologized for being late when he got there and joined them at the table. How many others? Oh, five or six — let’s see... Miriam and Alex, Ken, Alice, Lucy... Buddy, of course. So how many is that? Six? Seven, including Catherine. Lucky number seven. “You know, just a bunch of us who’d been together back in school.”
“Sounds like fun,” Philip had said, and in his mind now he emptied out the pocketbook sitting across from him: lipstick and powder, several Kleenex, her wallet, a tampon, her cell phone, her Palm Pilot.
“Excuse me,” Evgeniy said to each person whose elbow he jostled, “pardon me.” He moved as swiftly as he could through the crowd without disrupting them too terribly, without drawing too much attention — struggling to cast a quick smile or a friendly nod to those he knew, to maintain some equilibrium.
“Well, it’s great that you got the chance to catch up with him,” Philip had gone on. “Good that Buddy’s turned up here in town.”
“It really is nice,” Catherine said. “I’d forgotten how much I missed him.”
“How long has it been since you last saw him?”
Years and years ago, she replied. They had been such good friends when they were in school — had taken several classes together, gone out to the same clubs. But once graduation came, so many people headed their separate ways. Buddy had moved out to the West Coast, to Sacramento — a job he couldn’t refuse. Catherine had promised to come out and visit, had really meant to. She hadn’t been particularly pleased with her own job then. She’d felt aimless, unambitious... unhappy, really.
I will come and see you in Sacramento. I have never been happy; I am miserable now. I have thought of nothing but you all the time; I live only in the thought of you...
“But I never went out to see him,” she said. “Eventually, each of us got so busy. I got the job at Ligon. We stopped calling each other as often as we had... You know how easy it is to lose touch.”
Soon, Catherine had prepared to go to sleep — removed her makeup, brushed her teeth, pulled on a pair of his boxers. By the time Philip joined her, she had already settled between the sheets, was nearly asleep. He turned out the light and felt his way into the bed, recognizing in the darkness the scent of the new perfume he’d first noticed several nights before. She leaned over. A kiss. Lips redolent with mint, the taste lingering as she pulled away. They lay for a while in the half-darkness together, in the glow of the streetlight through the window, under the faint outline of the ceiling fan overhead. Philip tried to catch the dim sound of its motor spinning amidst the silence.