“A farm girl,” he said. “And yet your body speaks in volumes, your mind, your mind—” He kept repeating this, until I realized he was actually saying You’re mine.
Afterwards, I pulled my work pants back up, pausing to straighten even the cuffs, because attention to detail seemed important. Lev came over and buttoned my shirt for me, caressing my breast through a gap in the fabric before pulling back to inspect his work. I wanted to ask: And the others? All those girls? Have they been here with you, have you undressed and then dressed them after the act, taking so much innocence as if it was your due? But jealousy seemed cheeky. After all, the writing on those pieces of paper almost certainly belonged to his wife.
“What are you thinking?” he asked, a critical look on his face. Already he knew me too well.
“Nothing.”
“Well that’s not true.”
“Isn’t it?”
“No.” He didn’t seem disappointed by the lie, though. “Listen. I have to get home now—it’s past six o’clock. But I want you to meet me tomorrow at my house.” He tore an edge off one of the pages, making sure to leave the typescript intact but taking away a bit of notation; nothing legible. In the case of and then below that visi– and below that –ly askew. Lev wrote down his home address, which I tucked into my pocket. A part of me wanted to secure it in my bra, next to the skin, but one can only do so much to change their essential nature in a single day.
“Alright,” I said.
“Three thirty.” He buttoned his shirt cuffs. “Don’t make me wait. I’ll be miserable every moment till then.” In a second, he was gone.
The next day I would walk into his house and be met by the portraits of Vera on the wall. I would know then; alone in the hallway outside Lev’s office, I did not. But still something drew me to the scribbles on Lev’s note—not just his, but the mysterious others. Askew, askew. I traced the word with the tip of my thumb.
A few girls came into the hall and brushed by me, slipping something into a nearby mail slot. Then they turned to face me—but interested, for once. Bristled, but not overly aggressive. I was a different kind of creature there, stinking of my own body, flushed to the teeth. And we faced each other as animals in the dark, neither predator nor prey.
Some sort of kin. Wicked, sated beasts.
An Oral History of Vera Orlov, née Volkov
Recorded by the Maple Hill Police Department
“Yes, his wife’s another funny wicket. Not a problem, exactly, just not quite what any of us expected. When Orlov got hired, Sophie and I hoped the two of them would make a bridge pair, or keep us company at faculty dinners, at least—you see, Sophie’s always looking for another lady to conspire with. We’d heard the wife was an émigrée, like her husband, and that she helped with his work—gossip had it she did everything, actually, from grading term papers to licking stamps, but we didn’t believe that. Sophie’s a heavy lifter too, and she’s been snubbed for it. Not everyone can hold their own in sophisticated situations.
“Anyway, we thought, how can she resist Soph? She’s really well read, my wife is, see. Trollope, Brecht, Pound. Even a little Cervantes in the original! Took Spanish in boarding school, and of course we’ve traveled to Madrid. We figured they’d be thick as thieves. But Mrs. Orlov—I never have gotten comfortable calling her by her first name; she always twitches when you do it—she doesn’t exactly engage. First time we met them for cocktails at George’s house, Sophie mentioned that Mrs. Orlov might want to join her book club. I think they were reading Willa Cather or Pearl Buck, one of those bestseller types, and Sophie was all in a tizzy about it. Mrs. Orlov stood there for a while and listened to her describe the club—which is, admittedly, a bit more pugnacious than suits my own tastes—twirling the cocktail onion in her martini around and around and around. And then, when Sophie finished and said, ‘So, can we expect you on Friday?’ Mrs. Orlov just said, ‘No,’ and she left. Not left the conversation, left the party. Set her martini down on the table without taking a drink and walked out the door. George told us later that she’d taken ill, but there wasn’t any indication of it that I saw. He’s a real diplomat, George is. Oh well. A pity for Soph.
“I’ve taken an interest in watching Mrs. Orlov since then, when we run across one another in social situations. And it’s always the same. Absolutely magnetic when she wants to be, and not just because she’s a beauty. I’ve seen entire rooms turn to listen to what she has to say, especially if it’s in support of her husband. Can’t fault her there, certainly. Holds his arm, steers him around the room, aims him like a gun, you know! Just has no interest in chatting. More of a looker out of windows. Likes to read the labels on wine bottles. And with a husband like Orlov, she can afford to be that way. No one on the faculty was going to touch him, after that book of his made such a splash.”
“A lovely woman, and unique. Sharp as a tack. Cold as a Frigidaire. Every ounce admirable. Are we done here?”
“Oh, that lady? Yeah, she comes in sometimes in the afternoons. Not sure why you’d go all the way to a restaurant just for coffee and a cookie, but whatever, she leaves tips. Picky, sure, but I can handle picky. What else do you want to know? She always wears, uh, I don’t know, nice clothes, with these little details you can’t help but notice, like a piece of ivy embroidered on the seam of her jacket, or her buttons are shaped like dried flowers. Things like that. She has a kind of mean expression a lot of the time, but really, compared to some of the jerks who come in here she’s sunshine and roses. I think she scares a lot of the older men at the counter, which suits me fine. I always liked her. [Notes indicate that Bridey shrugs and goes back to wiping down tables, but then calls the officers back over.] Hey, I just remembered something. This one time? That lady came in for coffee like normal, only this time she brought in a stack of mail, you know? Letters and things. And at first I thought, ok, she’s just stopped at the post office and now she’s getting ready to pay bills or write back to whoever. But she takes some of the letters and starts blacking out half the words. That’s weird, right? So I got a little closer, because I was curious, and it looked like all the letters she was blacking out had two people writing them—like, vacation postcards, you know? Where you write hi and your mom writes hi and your brother writes hi? Like that. And she was crossing out everything that one of them wrote. I came over with a coffee pot to offer a warm-up and asked her what she was doing. And she said, ‘Privacy,’ which, come to think of it, doesn’t really answer my question. But anyway.
“When she was done she folded most of the letters back up, and then she asked for a match, and she burned two of them into an ashtray. Not the blacked-out ones, a different set, I think. I must’ve looked surprised, because she made sure to tell me they were her own letters that she’d written to her husband, as if that made it alright. I said I don’t care what they are, you still can’t do that here, and she just looked at me and smiled. And then left a real whopper of a tip, so I didn’t complain.”