“What’s the matter, Ilona?”
She shook her head. “I can’t talk about it.”
“Sure you can.”
“Not now. Another time.” She sipped her cappuccino. “Tell me about your business appointment. Or is it a confidential matter?”
“Someone had a library for me to look at,” I said. “I usually do that sort of thing in the early evening, but we’ve been at the movies every night. I thought I would be safe scheduling it for late last night.”
“Because I have been hard to get, yes?”
“Well…”
“You have another library to look at tonight, Bear-naard?”
“No.”
“I have a few books. I do not think they are valuable, but maybe you can come and see them.” She extended her forefinger, ran it along my jawline, then touched it to my lips. “But perhaps you have another business appointment, and I will have to go home all by myself.”
It turned out she lived on Twenty-fifth Street between Second and Third avenues, in a fifth-floor walk-up over a shop called Simple Pleasures. They sold crystals and incense and tarot cards, and signs in the window advertised classes in witchcraft and bondage.
The stairs were steep, and there were lots of them. I could imagine what Captain Hoberman would have made of them.
She lived in one of the two rear apartments, just one room with a single window that looked across an airshaft to the blank wall of a much taller building on Twenty-sixth Street. She turned on the bare-bulb ceiling fixture, then switched it off as soon as she’d turned on a green-shaded brass student lamp on the little one-drawer desk, then turned that off after she’d lit the three candles that stood on top of an old-fashioned brass-bound footlocker in the far corner. The flames of the candles illuminated the artifacts of a little homemade shrine. There were photos, framed and unframed, an icon of a Madonna and child, another of a bearded sunken-eyed saint, and a collection of other small objects, including a quartz crystal that could have come from the shop downstairs.
Otherwise the apartment didn’t have much to make it hers. A pair of plastic milk cartons housed her books, and a bound broadloom remnant, stained and worn, covered about half of a floor that badly needed refinishing. The bed and dresser looked to have come with the apartment, or from a thrift shop. The walls were bare except for a Birds of the World calendar hanging from a nail and, Scotch-taped to the wall above the desk, a National Geographic map of Eastern Europe. It was impossible to make out much in the candlelight, but it would have been hard to miss the small jagged area outlined in red Magic Marker.
“This must be Anatruria,” I said.
She moved to stand beside me. “My country,” she said, her voice heavy with irony. “The center of the universe.”
“You’re wrong,” I said. “This is the center of the universe.”
“ New York?”
“This room.”
“You are so romantic.”
“You are so beautiful.”
“Oh, Bear-naard…”
And there, if you don’t mind, I’m going to be old-fashioned enough to draw a curtain. We embraced and disrobed and went to bed, but you’ll have to imagine the details for yourself. We didn’t do anything you couldn’t see on television, anyway, if you’ve got cable and stay up late enough.
“Bear-naard? Sometimes I smoke after I make love.”
“I can believe it,” I said. “Oh. You mean a cigarette.”
“Yes. Would it bother you?”
“No, of course not.”
“My cigarettes are in the drawer of the night table. Could you reach them for me?”
I passed her a half-full pack of short unfiltered Camels. She put one in her mouth and let me scratch a match and light it for her. She sucked in the smoke as if it were life-sustaining, then pursed her lips and blew it out like Bacall showing Bogart how to whistle.
“Of course a cigarette,” she said suddenly. “What else would I smoke? A herring?”
“Hardly that,” I agreed.
“It is to lessen the sadness,” she said. “Shall I tell you something? I wanted to make love with you the first night, Bear-naard. But I knew it would make me sad.”
“I guess I must not be very good at it.”
“But how can you say that? You are a wonderful lover. That is why you break my heart.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Look at me, Bear-naard.”
“You’re crying.”
I reached to wipe a tear from the corner of her eye. A fresh one promptly took its place.
“It is no use to wipe them away,” she said. “There are always more.” She took another deep drag on her cigarette. When she smoked, she really smoked. “It is the way I am,” she explained. “Lovemaking saddens me. The better it is, the worse I feel.”
“That’s a hell of a thing,” I said. “I’m almost ashamed to admit it, but I feel terrific.”
“I have a good feeling, too.”
“Well, then-”
“But underneath it is this sadness. And so I smoke a cigarette. I don’t like to smoke cigarettes, but I do it to hold back the sadness.”
“Does it work?”
“No.” She handed me the cigarette. “Would you put it out? You can use that little dish for an ashtray. Thank you. And now would you stay with me for a little while? And hold me, Bear-naard.”
After a while she started to talk. The apartment was awful, she said, but it was all she could afford. New York was so expensive, especially for someone without a steady salary. And the location was good because she often got work in the area of the United Nations, translating or proofreading documents. She could take a bus right up First Avenue, or even walk if the weather was good and she had the time.
She knew there were things she could do to make the place nicer. She could paint the walls, she could replace the horrible rug, she could buy a TV set. Maybe she would get around to it someday. If she was still here. If she didn’t move…
Her breathing changed and I decided she was sleeping. My own eyes had closed by that time, and I could feel myself drifting. But “Would you stay with me for a little while?” wasn’t exactly an invitation to bed down for the night, nor was her bed wide enough for two people to sleep in. It was okay for presleep activity, as long as you didn’t get overly athletic, but when it came time to make a long string of zzzz’s, it was a tad crowded.
I slipped out of bed, careful not to wake her, picked out and put on the pieces of hastily discarded clothing that were mine. Before extinguishing the candles I went to the door and unlocked the locks so I wouldn’t have to fumble with them in the dark.
Then I went to put out the candles and found myself drawn to her little shrine. There was a family portrait in a drugstore frame, a stiffly posed snapshot of a father, a mother, and a daughter that must have been Ilona at age six or seven. Her hair was lighter and her features undefined, but it seemed to me that her eyes already held their characteristic expression of ironic self-amusement.
You’re falling in love, I thought, with a little ironic self-amusement all my own.
I picked up the crystal, felt its weight in my palm, put it back. I looked at the icons and decided they were authentic old ones, although probably not of great value. I fingered a military or ecclesiastical decoration, a bronze medallion with a portrait of a mitered bishop and an inscription in Cyrillic lettering, hanging from a ribbon of gold and scarlet. There was a Maria Theresa thaler, and a white-metal medallion with the bust of some king I couldn’t recognize, reposing in the bottom half of its original velvet-lined presentation box.
Family treasures, no doubt. And there was a tiny menagerie, including a cast-iron dog and cat (hand-painted, the paint gone in spots), another dog of hand-painted china, a trio of china penguins (one missing the tip of one wing), and a very well-carved if stolid wooden camel. Childhood souvenirs, as no doubt were the miniature cup and saucer, the probable sole survivors of a dollhouse tea set.
Another photo caught my eye as I set about snuffing the candles. It stood in an easel-backed frame and showed a man and woman about my age. She had really big hair; it was piled high on her head, and reminded me of the fur hat on the Ludomir vodka label. She was wearing a tailored jacket, and around her shoulders she’d draped a silver fox stole. He wore a belted Norfolk jacket and a flowing silk scarf, and he had one arm around the woman’s waist and was raising the other hand in greeting, and aiming a blinding smile at the camera.