On a fence where Frederica’s storefront had been, a sign read, “Site of Bank of America’s Midtown Branch.” Frederica’s crystal ball was nowhere to be seen. What a shame, this city changed almost as fast as the ruble.
The Liberty Motel in Berlin, Connecticut, was now my home. I’d be going home now. With my mother’s revenge complete, I was free to go. I’d be glad to leave this city. It was so dirty. No one here bent over to pick up their trash. The garbage stayed where it was dropped and became part of the scenery. Amalia’s son, Alexi, told me why this was so.
“It’s very American,” he explained one morning in the kitchen when I asked him why people threw their garbage out car windows.
Alexi at sixteen had embraced the American luxuries of boredom, disdain for adults, a passion for privacy, and everything disposable. But he would still do anything his mother asked, even steal, and with that he remained Russian.
“It’s someone’s job. They get paid to pick up after us,” he added, leaving for school with his shirttails hanging out.
The buses waiting to depart from the bowels of Port Authority were like fidgeting horses with their rears swaying in impatience to be fed. The front seat with the picture window next to the driver afforded the best view, and as I was first in line, this place of privilege was mine. The bus left the city out the back end of Port Authority. These back-streets were dark and deserted even with the last pieces of sunlight holding onto the sky between the buildings. The few people we passed on the street looked up at the bus as if they yearned to leave the city, too. The alleys felt like places where secrets are kept.
Stopped at a light before we entered the tunnel, my question about Frederica’s whereabouts was answered. A folding table with a crystal ball was set up in front of a building, and there she sat in the same white plastic chair, looking at the split ends in her freshly dyed blond hair. She was taking advantage of a little bit of sunlight bouncing off a window across the street in the brief moment that it was touching her. The bus pushed forward a few inches, cutting off Frederica’s light like a prison door slamming shut. She looked up at the bus, the thief of her light. In my bag I found the picture of my parents I had showed her more than two years ago and held it up to the window. Her eyes squinted to see me and the photograph. As the bus pulled away, recognition came to her face. She pointed to her eye as if she wanted me to see something. Then she pointed behind her back. I turned around, and in the seat directly behind me was an old woman, near in age to my mother, wearing a lemon yellow sweater and a lime green beret with a rhinestone pin that said “I Heart NY.” I looked back out at the nodding Frederica and then to the old woman whose big, broad smile was exaggerated by pink lipstick applied thickly and sloppily over the edges of her lips. Everything around her, even the deserted streets, suddenly felt carefree and filled with possibility. Frederica flashed me a crooked purple smile, and just as the bus entered the tunnel, she disappeared. The old woman yawned loudly, and I sat back and thanked New York for offering me such hope and humor.
As the bus moved in a northwesterly direction, an intoxicating vista unfolded. Blurring signposts, rail guards, and trees along the highway flashed by as the white lines disappeared underneath the bus and the burning sunset on the driver’s horizon gave way to an idea for a new room design. My eyes went dream hazy and I envisioned the “Highway to Heaven Room,” or room number three. This new room would take my customers’ fantasies to a spectacular place. A vibrating “mobile-a-bed” would transport them with top-down convertible style into a perpetually changing and mesmerizing sunset. The wheels of the car would be textured with fleece and the interior lined with satin. It would have a fur-covered steering wheel, and the back seat would be wide enough for a picnic. There would be vanity mirrors everywhere, and the radio would play whatever station you chose. Regulation seat belts, of course. The sunset machine, a multicolored rotating light, would be timed for the length of your stay. I have always found bus rides in America inspiring.
Epilogue: My Other Blunt Self-Portraits
I like to relax in what was Mr. Suri’s favorite heart-shaped tub after a day of serving the needs of my customers. The Liberty Motel can be a wonderful, playful, euphoric place, but it also can be a place of fierce battles and casualties. In any case, every day is a long day, and I look forward to a relaxing, steamy bubble bath. Today while cleaning out the front desk I found a note I never sent to the parents of one of our casualties in the war of love.
This was a few years ago. A pair of teenage lovers went the way of Romeo and Juliet. They left a note that said, “We love this room and each other very much. Good-bye.” I sent this note through the police to the families. I hope they are glad to have something from their loved ones and to know that even in such tragedy the motel had given them a place of peace, however briefly.
Bill Clinton had just been elected president, for the second time. It was late on election night and most of the votes were already counted. Carmela and I were not yet citizens, but we watched on the television and ate lots of popcorn, throwing bits to the cats. In Russia, the elections were never cause for celebration. Democracy was a shadowy illusion of the Kremlin. Elections were always landslides. Little did we know that while we amused ourselves, and Bill Clinton was basking in his triumphant second win, the desperate couple was drinking a poisonous cocktail.
I made my usual fifteen-minute warning call to the room, the Caribbean Sunset Room. After several calls with no response, I went in and found the young lovers in each other’s arms, dead. The double suicide made the tabloid papers. Apparently the young fellow had spurned the older sister of his beloved. The rejected sister went mad and had to be institutionalized. The family never forgave him and tried to keep the lovers apart. The papers made him out to be a ruthless cad. I remember seeing them before they went to the room. They seemed simply young and in love. Business slowed down for a while after that, but not for long. This sad story was soon forgotten.
A couple of years after the suicides, there was a death by hanging, but that one never made the papers. President Clinton was in the news again. This time it was about a stain on a stocky girl’s dress. I never understood what the problem was. I can understand his wife being upset, but he’s a man—they are known for losing their minds when it comes to what my mother used to affectionately call their “Monsieur Mindless.”
“Tell your lover, ‘I miss your Monsieur Mindless,’” my mother said to me one night. “It never fails to fluster them, but men like to know you are thinking about them. Miss your, monsieur—get it, Stalina?” She was simply being philosophical about men. Her experience was limited to my father and Maxim, but her delusions made her expansive with advice. She knew English and French and would mix the languages in our conversations often. I was very confused, and had been crying about Trofim.
“Yes, Mother, I miss his Monsieur Mindless,” I said.
“Don’t bother with him; he’s a two-faced snob. You can always find someone else to fuck.”
I was too shocked to react, beyond choking back my tears. When I told my friends the expression, they thought my mother was hysterically funny. I informed them that she was losing her mind. My friends still loved the expression, and when we would gossip about the men in or out of our lives, “Monsieur Mindless” was always there. Sometimes I still miss Trofim, but luckily, I live here at the motel and have this red heart-shaped tub to soak away any troubles in the water and bubbles.