“You’re right, Mol, I know. I should call the guy again. That place on Eleventh is perfect. But… but it’s not as if I’m going to do this job for more than another year, maximum. I think I just had to get the green card and, you know, find a proper footing here after all the arsing around. If there’s one thing about America these days, it’s that you have to be legal. Land of the free and all that.”
She passed the computer with both hands.
Molly placed it beside her on the bed and looked up, her face a picture of understanding.
And instantly Isabella felt the urge to share something real with her friend. It was cruel to push people away all the time. Give something. Anything.
“I had an argument with Sasha last night, is all. After I got back from the work thing.”
“Was it hard-core?” Molly was almost disappearing with delicacy and the countereffort not to seem overdelicate for fear of further drawing attention to any tenderness.
“No. No, not really. Just stupid.” Isabella likewise was almost disappearing, but for burgeoning shame at having raised the subject at all. “He can be an idiot. And—you know this whole thing—he doesn’t work. Well, I suppose he does. But not in the way that we… that is conv—”
“Happen often?”
“No. Hardly ever.”
“Feel like a normal argument that a couple would have?”
“It was just about space. You know.” Isabella found a rueful smile.
“Yes, well, it’s tricky up on your floor. The apartments are half this size.”
Though she knew the time well enough, Isabella glanced deliberately at the old clock. “Damn. I really have to scoot. Here, let me plug you in.” She bent and then came up again all bustle and haste. “I’ll message if I’m up Thursday morning. It’s unbelievable—I’m going to be late again and I have a nine with the Snicker himself.”
“Go, lady, go.” Molly frizzed her hair. “Thanks for breakfast. And really, come down whenever. If I am alive enough to make it to the door, you can come in.”
Isabella looked sympathetically at the ankle. “You’d better take it easy on the ski-jumping and stuff today, Mol. You done with your tea?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
Isabella put her friend’s cup into the brown bag for the recycle bin and collected the rest of her things for work.
“Okay. Bye,” Isabella said.
“See you,” Molly called after her. “Soon as I’m fixed we’re going to check out those sluts.”
Isabella let herself out, careful with the door and gratefully aware that Molly had chosen not to pursue her any further. One day, she resolved, she would sit down and tell Molly everything, instead of all this endless slipping and sliding around the edges. Sort Sasha. Sort work. Sort everything. Just get clear long enough to achieve a reasonable perspective and then…
It was twenty-four minutes from her building on East Thirteenth between Second and Third to the offices of Media Therapy on Greene. And she was in the habit of walking to work. It wasn’t so much that she liked the exercise, or the routine, or the therapeutic affect of witnessing firsthand the sheer size and scale of the city’s endeavors (indifferent to her own)—though all of these. It was more that in some only half-acknowledged way, she continued to take the visitor’s simple pleasure in a foreign city. (What was her father’s phrase? “Expats make the best natives.” Something faintly sinister like that…) She had lived here in New York nearly two years and three before that on and off (as much as various visas permitted), and she had been staying with Sasha at his mother’s place down on Murray on September 11. And though the wide-eyed tourist was long departed, there lingered a related sense of satisfaction at the recognition of certain places, or buildings, or institutions, or instances of what she sometimes termed to herself (for want of a better expression) New Yorknesses. No, it wasn’t the Empire State or the Rockefeller or any of that stuff anymore, but instead it was the pile-it-high, sell-it-cheap furniture shop run by grumpy Poles. Or it was the fact that she could find what she wanted quicker than the ever-changing sales staff in St. Mark’s Bookshop. Or that she liked to cross Third just here and walk through Astor Place where the East Village kids jostled around that big black cube. Or that she was as near indifferent to Washington Square as any New Yorker. Or that, best of all, she recognized some of the owners at the dog run. Same time, same place tomorrow? So their glances seemed to say. And in her mind she would return their query with a most dependable civic nod.
You bet.
She was on Mercer not far from the Angelika—Sasha’s favorite cinema—when her cell phone started ringing. She didn’t notice at first because an ambulance was howling and her remaining attention was partially on an English tourist buying a silly John Lennon beret from the street stand (So that’s who buys them…) and partially on an advertisement for shampoo that infuriated her every morning with its phony tone (Aren’t we just such close girly-girlfriends who just so understand each other, oh what secrets we share, oh how very much we know about each other’s lives—it was the insidious advertiser’s assumption of mutual intimacy that really killed her). And then, when she did realize that it was indeed her own cell that she could hear, she had to rummage in her bag (which she absolutely must get around to emptying) before she could find it. And next her mind became preoccupied with fabricating some excuse for being late—and how ridiculous it was that she probably woke up before all the other employees in the whole place and yet she was most likely the last to get in to the office. And when she finally looked at the screen, there was a generic message indicating that the caller was unknown. And the line was terrible. And she had to stand still and press the phone hard against her ear because of all the noise in the street and all the noise in her head and that’s how news comes: standing on the street on a morning like any morning talking to your brother, who’s saying that your mother is dead. Is really dead.
3
Arkady Artamenkov
The most significant hours of Arkady Alexandrovitch Artamenkov’s life had taken place two years ago, on a day when a cold and pelting rain was filling the million St. Petersburg potholes with a thick and sickly yellow mud and the air tasted more than usual of corrosion.
Late, silent, unshaven, he had splashed his way through the back streets to the appointed café, a recently opened place up from Moskovsky station near the Militia House of Culture, where women liked to showcase their hair and hold their mugs of coffee the wrong way round and never by the handles, the greater to emphasize their empathies. His own hair was wet and straggling. His greatcoat was sodden and heavy. And he knew full well that his boots and jeans were filthy and leaving marks of dirt as he made his way across the parquet wooden floors between the pale pine tables beyond the marble bar, water still streaming down his face.