That worried him. “What is it?”
“A release. It says I haven’t contracted any diseases or been physically abused.” She laughed again, a single note clear and bright as a piano tone. “As if anyone would sue Eternity.” She took his face in her hands and studied him. Then she kissed his brow. “I love you so much,” she said, her lips still pressed to his skin. He was too dizzy to speak.
She settled back, holding his right hand in her lap. “Do you know what I want most. I want to talk. I want to talk with you for hours and hours.”
Chemayev loved to hear her talk—she wove events and objects and ideas together into textures of such palpable solidity that he could lie back against them, grasped by their resilient contours, and needed only to say “Yes” and “Really” and “Uh huh” every so often, providing a minor structural component that enabled her to extend and deepen her impromptu creations. The prospect that he might have to contribute more than this was daunting. “What will we talk about?” he asked.
“About you, for one thing. I hardly know anything about your family, your childhood.”
“We talk,” he said. “Just this morning…”
“Yes, sure. But only when you’re driving me to school, and you’re so busy dodging traffic you can’t say much. And when we’re at your apartment there’s never time. Not that I’m complaining.” She gave his hand a squeeze. “We’ll make love for hours, then we’ll talk. I want you to reveal all your secrets before I start to bore you.”
He saw her then as she looked each morning in the car, face scrubbed clean of makeup, the sweetly sad pragmatist of their five hundred days on her way to the university, almost ordinary in her jeans and cloth jacket, ready to spend hours listening to tired astronomers, hungover geographers, talentless poets, trying to find in their listless words some residue of truth, some glint of promise, a fact still empowered by its original energy, something that would bring her a glimpse of possibility beyond that which she knew. For the first time he wondered how America and freedom would change her. Not much, he decided. Not in any essential way. She would open like a flower to the sun, she would bloom, but she would not change. The naiveté of this notion did not bother him. He believed in her. Sometimes it seemed he believed in her even more than he loved her.
“What are you thinking?” she asked, and smiled slyly as if she knew the answer.
“Evil things,” he told her.
“Is that so?” She drew him close and slid his hand beneath her skirt. Then she edged forward on the stool, encouraging him. He touched her sex with a fingertip and she let out a gasp. Her head drooped, rested on his shoulder. He thrust aside the material of her panties. All her warmth was open to him. But then she pushed his hand away and whispered, “No, no! I can’t!” She remained leaning against him, her body tense and trembling. “I’m not ashamed, you understand,” she said, the words muffled by his shoulder. “I can’t bear the idea of doing anything here.” She let out a soft, cluttered sound—another laugh, he thought. “But there’s no shame in me. I’ll prove it to you tonight. On the plane.”
He stroked her hair. “You’ll be asleep ten minutes after take-off. You always sleep when we travel. Like a little baby.”
“Not tonight.” She broke from the embrace. Her face was grave, as if she were stating a vow. “I’m not going to sleep at all. Not until I absolutely have to.”
“If you say so. But I bet I’m right.” He checked his watch again.
“How long?” she asked.
“Less than half an hour. But I don’t know how long I’ll be with… with whoever it is I’m meeting.”
“One of the doubles. There must be a dozen of them. I can’t be sure, but I think I can tell most of them apart. They vary slightly in height. In weight. A couple have moles.”
“What do you call them?”
“Yuri.” She shrugged. “What else? Some of the girls invent funny names for them. But I guess I don’t find them funny.”
He looked down at the counter. “You know, we’ve never spoken about what it’s like for you here. I know some of it, of course. But your life, the way you spend your days…”
“I didn’t think you wanted to talk about it.”
“I guess I didn’t. It just seems strange… but it’s not important.”
“We can talk about it if you want.” She wrapped a loose curl around her forefinger. “It isn’t so bad, really. When I’m not at school I like to sit in the theater mornings and read. There’s nobody about, and it’s quiet. Peaceful. Like an empty church. Every two weeks the doctor comes to examine us. She’s very nice. She brings us chocolates. Otherwise, we’re left pretty much to our own devices. Most of the girls are so young, it’s almost possible to believe I’m at boarding school. But then…” Her mouth twisted into an unhappy shape. “There’s not much else to tell.”
Something gave way in Chemayev. The pressures of the preceding months, the subterfuge, the planning, and now this pitiful recitation with its obvious omissions—his inner defenses collapsed under the weight of these separate travails, conjoined in a flood of stale emotion. Old suffocated panics, soured desires, yellowed griefs, lumps of mummified terror… the terror he had felt sitting alone at night, certain that he would lose her, his head close to bursting with despair. His eyes teared. He linked his hands behind her neck and drew her to him so that their foreheads touched. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry it took so long.”
“It wasn’t long! It’s so much money! And you got it all in less than a year!”
“Every day I see enough money to choke the world. I could have fixed the books, I could have done something.”
“Yes… and then what? Polutin would have had you killed. God, Viktor! You amazed me! Don’t you understand? You were completely unexpected. I never thought anyone would care enough about me to do what you’ve done.” She kissed his eyes, applied delicate kisses all over his face. “When you told me what you were up to, I felt like a princess imprisoned in a high tower. And you were the prince trying to save me. You know me. I’m not one to believe in fairy tales. But I liked this one—it was a nice fantasy, and I needed a fantasy. I was certain you were lying to me… or to yourself. I prepared for the inevitable. But you turned out to be a real prince.” She rubbed his stubbly head. “A prince with a terrible haircut.”
He tried to smile, but emotion was still strong in him and his facial muscles wouldn’t work properly.
“Don’t punish yourself. Can’t you see how happy I am? It’s almost over now. Please, Viktor! I want you to be happy, too.”
He gathered himself, swallowed back the tight feeling in his throat. “I’m all right,” he said. “I’m sorry. I just… I can’t…”
“I know,” she said. “It’s been hard for both of us. I know.” She lifted his wrist so she could see his watch. “I have to go. I don’t want to, but I have to. Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’ll be fine,” he said. “Go ahead… go.”
“Should I wait for you here?”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, wait here, and we’ll ride up together. As soon as I’m through with Yuri I’ll call my security people. They’ll meet us at the entrance.”
She kissed him again, her tongue flirting with his, a lush contact that left him muddled. “I’ll see you soon,” she said, trailing her hand across his cheek; then she walked off toward a recessed door next to the fireplace at the far end of the room—the same door that led to Yuri Lebedev’s office and, ultimately, to the inscrutable heart of Eternity.
Without Larissa beside him Chemayev felt adrift, cut off from energy and purpose. His thoughts seemed to be circling, slowly eddying, as the surface of a stream might eddy after the sudden twisting submergence of a silvery fish. They seemed less thoughts than shadows of the moment just ended. On the television screen above the bar a child was sitting in a swing hung from the limb of an oak tree, spied on by an evil androgynous creature with a painted white face and wearing a lime green body stocking, who lurked in the shadows at the edge of a forest. All this underscored by an anxious, throbbing music. Chemayev watched the video without critical or aesthetic bias, satisfied by color and movement alone, and he was given a start when the bartender came over and offered him a drink in a glass with the silver initial L on its side.