So he told his wife he’d be meeting a friend for drinks, and dressed himself in a suit that was as close as he could get to black tie without raising suspicion, and then walked a few blocks before hailing a taxi to the hotel where the event was being held. He was, he told me, proud of himself for taking a stand, however secret. Had a glass of champagne at the hotel bar before taking the elevator up, to celebrate his good mood. “I must’ve turned my back for a few minutes,” he said. “Just a few, you know. Maybe I talked to the bartender for a little while, lost track of time.” When he’d paid for his drink he went upstairs and threw his coat at the first man he saw who appeared to be a butler. The host of the party walked over immediately, and said he was delighted they’d changed their minds. Lev laughed as he replayed the conversation: “ ‘Hmm?’ I asked the man, and he told me, ‘Well, your wife is right over there, she said you’d be up in a minute from the bar.’ And there she was, in the corner, making some old country-club type lean in too close to hear what she was saying. She caught my eye and that was that—she knew me better than I knew myself. There was no escaping.”
I expected him to frown or something at the end of the story, but he looked, if anything, impressed.
At some point I went downstairs to fetch our drinks from the coffee table where we’d abandoned them, padding through the empty rooms in bare feet. This time, I walked right up to the photographs on the wall, curious to see who this woman was that had so disarmed Lev for so many years, who could find him at a party in the biggest city in the world, sensing him as if by radar across the boroughs. I think back to this moment, now, with a rising anticipation. Was my heart in my throat? Was my skin abuzz? Did I know that something was about to change? And, well. I most certainly did not.
I remember, also, that morning in the library with Caroline, Cindy, and Adeline years before. How convinced I was that they were afraid of me in a supernatural sense, that they really looked at me and perceived something spectral, malign. Smoke rising off me, maybe. I have to stop myself, often enough, from thinking of Vera in that same way. When I spotted her picture on Lev’s wall, I was certain that she could see me, her portraits sending messages back to the source. Wedding dress white as cream. Helmet of hair shining beneath her stark wedding veil, eyes glittering with private wisdom. Not evil, necessarily, just powerful as a boogeyman. Vera, Vera, on the wall. It didn’t occur to me that she found him at that New York party simply because she read his mood, or that they had friends in common whom she might have called for information. Even now it’s hard for me to believe she’d need to bother with something so mundane as that.
Did she feel my presence that afternoon when I walked into her house? When I strolled through the rooms in a man’s shirt, her man’s, with the cuffs rolled up. My hair loose around my shoulders. I wonder if she got, at least, some sense of the surprised recognition that made me reach out to touch the picture’s lips and see if it was really there. Perhaps she heard the disbelief in my voice as I whispered her name—her original name, her father’s name, not the one she took from her husband. “Volkova,” I said under my breath, remembering the girl who walked out of our scout group and never came back. After so many years, here she was again at last, that strange creature lost in the wilderness of time. My opposite in every sense: dark where I was light. Wild where I was tame. At least, where I had been tame.
Volkova. The wolf.
Fall hardened into winter, and Lev went out of town on occasion, sometimes with Vera, sometimes not. When they were together, my mind was a flurry of imagined scenarios: her leaning over to sniff his jacket and smelling me, the echo of our past encounters. Lev kissing Vera’s ear, so that she sighed into him, her hair falling across one eye. Vera convincing him to leave the city, the state, the country—which was of course ridiculous, since she was the reason they’d come to Maple Hill at all, her insistence that Lev needed stability and quiet after a lifetime of wandering and war. I wore my old green coat, which I still took religiously to the dry cleaners at the start of each season and scoured with a lint brush every night when I got home. It remained bright and lovely, if a bit young for me now, and several years less fashionable than it had been. I cooked for myself, and once or twice for Lev as well. Steak au poivre, green salads with lemon in the dressing, pasta with fresh greenhouse tomatoes and so much garlic it made me embarrassed of my breath. The day after I made that dish I woke up sweating garlic in my bed, the entire room stinking with it. My tongue furred, my hair emanating a flavor aura.
That year the snows were heavy and slumberous as Christmas came over Maple Hill, then passed. I never much cared for the holiday, myself: my sites of worship were more private. Bundled up inside my house, or in the greenhouse surrounded by the fumes of greenery, I reread Felice to fill the hours when Lev was not available—I wanted to be with him every minute, and this way I could. It struck me as odd, and somehow enchanting, that the same man who could write such extraordinary violence against a girl, and in such careful detail, could also grant her redemption and revenge. Justice, let’s call it. It made his hands look dangerous and fair to me, which was a combination I enjoyed. The women in Lev’s books tended to live traumatic lives, but he was always trying to save them.
I’ve never been able to forget this passage, for instance, about Felice and her husband, Peter, who drove her both to her death and her rebirth:
This was their love: his hands on her face, smudging it into some semblance of a smile. Fingers pushing between her teeth, scraping the roof of her mouth and pressing her tongue back until she gagged on it. He shook her until her head came undone, brain rattling around like eggs in a basket. Cracking, leaking all over itself. She remembered one day in particular, crawling across the floor while Peter stomped on the hem of her dress. “You’re so pretty when I look at you from above,” he told her. That night he took her out to dinner, after brushing her hair and helping her apply lipstick. And she did look pretty, just as he said. Pink in the cheeks, with her hair arranged just so. He tied her belt for her, fitted tight around her waist, and kissed her so hard it brought tears to her eyes.
She had tried to leave him before, and when she came home, he was the one who always cried.
I thought: yes, he would cry. Not because he was sorry, but because each return would prove that Felice hadn’t understood him yet, that he hadn’t gone far enough. For Lev, I thought, the pain of her returns must have been equally acute. Making a monster being, after all, not so different from becoming one. Perhaps he embraced his monstrousness just so Felice could be a hero. Maybe all those Donne girls froze their fingers so I could be proud of protecting the greenhouse glass from balls of ice.