“Oh, of course I do, it’s medicinal.”
“For a cold.”
“Not for pleasure.”
“Never pleasure.”
“Never, no.” Lev picked up my hand—I’m ashamed to say I jumped, but his touch was so welcome and warm it shocked my system. He inspected my fingernails. “So let me guess. A working girl.”
“That’s right, Comrade. What else could I hope to be, as a functioning member of society?”
“Then you lost everything, too.”
I shook my head. His home, I thought, must’ve been magnificent, with gold woven into the curtains for texture and window lintels of dustless mahogany. It was tempting to pretend I was indeed the kind of girl he imagined, wealthy and fallen, with my own fond memories of angora rabbits kept as pets and a taste for expensive, peppery wine. But I didn’t want to lie. Whether I thought it would’ve been an insult to him or to my parents I’m still not certain. “Never had anything to lose,” I said.
“Hmm.” Lev moved his fingers down my own; they traveled light. A drop of water. Spray of rain. I could see my hand, beneath his, as almost delicate, though his nails were buffed and mine were not. He lacked calluses, but still. It was in the way he handled me. “I can’t say I entirely agree.”
I felt—my tongue grew very warm. I wanted to touch his neck, to smell his hair. I wanted him to reach into my mouth and count my teeth and see what the years had done to me. It was sex, but it was also the rest, unspoken: that we’d lost more than money when we lost our homes. That we didn’t just escape a bad situation when we snuck across the border, we’d allowed our whole world to be washed away. Grammar, subject, object, tense. And that somehow together we could tally up those losses more completely. Already I wanted to press my tongue against his ear and see if I tasted a Russian fall. Watermelon. Jam. Smog. My mother and father. But here we were, two people in a school for girls where propriety was the watchword. I sat perfectly still, hoping he wouldn’t drop my hand. His eyes flicked to the watch on his left wrist.
“Forgive me again, Zoya. I think I have somewhere to be.” He stood, and I remained where I was. Couldn’t have moved. Wouldn’t have. Wanted to imprint the moment more permanently on my mind. “But I’ll be seeing you again, won’t I?”
There was no need for me to agree.
There was a period, following, that passed like a dream, when everything I did was augmented with the fluttering, light-headed quality of sleep. I would find myself sitting at the table at home and not quite remember getting there, only to put a spoon into my mouth with no notion of what was on it. I’d close my eyes and wait for the flavor to break on my tongue: cranberry preserves or chicken stock, wild rice with butter or, one time, chocolate sauce, as if I personally had no power over what I ate or where I went, subject perpetually to a series of dramatic reveals. I worked with purpose in the greenhouse, but even there I was dozy and occasionally daft: John found me once putting rose petals in my mouth and chewing them up, a line of pink spittle dripping from the corner of my lips. When he asked me what I was doing I got flustered and made something up about how, in the old country, we tested for spider mites by taste.
“What if you’ve put on insecticide?” he said. And I had to tell him that no, those methods didn’t usually go together. He frowned.
“But don’t you treat your plants with it sometimes? Here, I mean?”
Of course he was quite right, but I wasn’t about to discuss it. I waved a hand and distracted his attention with some other matter, a plugged drain near the rear sink that I’d been struggling to unclog, and when he wasn’t looking I spat out the flower pulp and dropped it into a pile of mulch.
I had never been in love before. Never even really had a crush that I could give the name. When Lev and I waved to each other across the courtyard my heart would beat in my ears for half an hour, making me so dizzy that Hilda started threatening to give me pills, though I took pains to hide the depth of my feelings. In free moments I stared at the changing fall color, electric reds and yellows sending signals to my brain like live wires. The leaves in the United States had a different quality from the ones I’d known in Russia—not brighter, but more insistent somehow; less a part of the landscape and more of a treasured commodity, painted onto plates and mugs and stitched onto shirt cuffs and advertised in magazines as a local attraction. They were just as priceless here, but still felt somehow for sale, and I stored that idea away as a possible topic of conversation with Lev, as I did at that time with everything that passed through my mind. I thought of him constantly, repeated his qualities to myself incessantly. He was always clean and smelled of something new and alive, but had ink on his fingers like a dirty little pilgrim. If we passed on the grounds close enough to talk we would share a brief joke or observation, always in Russian, always quick as a flash. Christos Voskres, he might say, watching me stand up after tying my shoe. Christ is Risen. Holy, holy. When he caught me on the roof of the science building helping John trim ivy and laughing at my own clumsiness when I dropped the clippers, Lev called up Pochemu t’i vesyolaya takaya? Meaning both, why are you so high up, and why are you so happy?
I couldn’t find the words to tell him, but I didn’t have to. He knew. One day I stood under a covered walkway on my lunch hour, reading a concert poster someone had tacked up for a quartet in town that night playing Bach, when a hand slid into mine. I jumped, assuming it was one of the Donne girls planning something mean. But when I spun around Lev grabbed my shoulder and held me in place. “Tolko ya,” he said. It’s only me. “Tvoy dobry dryug.” Your gentle companion. Your dear friend. The first time he’d touched me since the day we met, and he made it seem so natural. It hadn’t been completely clear to me that he’d ever touch me again.
I flushed, expecting to be distracted any minute by a student running up with a question, or a pair of teachers in deep conversation. A man shaping hedges or sweeping the stairs who would want a word with me, and would be shocked by what he saw. But instead of letting go of my hand, Lev brought it to his lips and kissed it just below the knuckle, holding my eye the entire time. We were alone. As if fate had deserted us there, in that hour, to do what we wanted and go where we wished.
“Shall we?” he said. And I followed, without bothering to ask what he meant.
He took me first in his locked office, hands down the front of my pants, looking directly into my eyes. He proceeded to repeat our earliest meeting back to me, but not how it happened, a whole other way. In this version a flock of birds made pinwheels above our heads—the birds weightless, atomic mist, scattered in the losing blue of the sky. You didn’t know anything about me, I said to myself, pleasure flooding my unexplored places. Why didn’t you tell me there was more? He kissed my hands again, he kissed my wrists, my ribs. As if to take one out of me and build something new.
“It’s like I sensed you,” he whispered. “Not just here, but everywhere. Like everyone I’ve ever loved was leading up to this, to you, to us.”
He turned me around and my stomach rubbed raw against the edge of his desk, but I had no breath to protest. I wanted him to fling me, to pound me into powder. And I wanted to return the favor. The room was dim, but on the top of his desk I saw a stack of typing paper, covered with notes in feminine handwriting. I touched the edge of a page, a scratched-in signature—just a hash mark followed by a V—but then he turned me again and put his mouth to mine, and everything else was lost in sensation, friction, and the sounds of his still quite eloquent diction.