There’s just one thing, she tells herself, looking into the mirror for the four hundred and forty-third time (so this is it, for the rest of my life?)—the mirror is cloudy, with moldy-green spots (what do you expect from a cheap apartment in a poor neighborhood)—at her face, crudely touched-up by approaching old age (thirty-four years old, no fucking joke!). Just one. They never taught us, all our literature with its entire cult of tragic love—Ivanko and Marichka, Lukash and Mavka, my students were enthralled and declared Forest Song superior to Midsummer Night’s Dream, you bet—they somehow forgot to warn us that in reality tragedies don’t look pretty. That death, no matter what form it takes, is first and foremost an ugly business. And where there’s no beauty—how can there be truth?
It’s too bad. It’s too damned bad. Should I head out to the balcony for a smoke?
A discovery: this is how frigid women see the world! There was a time—the last few days of living together and right after the breakup—when, on seeing an erotic scene on television, she would start to cry. Now she watches calmly, like a zoologist watching lizards copulate (hmm, I wonder, how do lizards do it?): two half-naked people in bed, the man places his hand on the woman’s thigh, moves it up, she turns toward him, her legs, bent at the knees, spread; she throws her arms around his neck and the two of them, moaning and tussling about, melt into a kiss… Thank God, next scene.
She had once blurted out, without thinking, in a so-called shared moment of an interesting confidential observation: “You know? Just don’t misunderstand me, don’t be offended: it seems to me that you’re open to evil.” That was about the third or fourth day after his arrival in the Pennsylvania boondocks where the good-hearted Mark is happy to invite, at the expense of his department, all the poets and artists of the whole world at the same time, if only they would help him escape the storms of hell at home for an hour or two (every time he called her in Cambridge he related, in a voice that would go well with a bird’s tilted head: cuck-oo: “Today I met a lovely little Russian girl,” “There’s a black girl here kind of interested in me”—who’d be interested in the poor thing, an awkward forty-year-old schoolboy with excellent grades, with his duck’s waddle, the tummy of a teddy bear, nose-hairs showing, and thinning hair on his crown—and then he’d return again to his home life with the intonations of a hurt child: today he had to do all the dishes and was late to work because of it, and the only thing