Benny walked to the window and Alexi followed him. It offered yet another unobstructed view of the skyline, as if the entire city had been built to brag about the same postcard image. Alexi looked out at the treetops, the low-slung buildings and the water beyond, the light so sharp he wondered whether his eyes were still adjusting after his time indoors or if it was, simply, a truly beautiful day. Even the undershirts fluttering from the clothesline seemed particularly white, the trash bins on the sidewalk a glorious green — and though he had no idea where Ellen’s apartment fit within this scene, the fact that she and Katherine were out there somewhere, that they too could be going for steaks tonight and pancakes in the morning but doing everything in their power to avoid running into Alexi, suddenly made him feel queasy and warm, and he backed away from the window, turned to his son and said, “Forget San Francisco. Let’s blow it off and head to Napa. That’s how I want to spend my first weekend out — to relax somewhere, just the two of us. Who knows, maybe we’ll make it up to Oregon.”
“Really?” the kid said, sounding more excited than he had all day, and Alexi, suddenly excited himself, said, “Really.” This was what it meant to be out in the world again. To change plans on a whim, to speed down that narrow one-way street with his son beside him, leaving the city behind as he steered onto the bridge, the windows down, the possibilities flying everywhere.
SOMEWHERE IN Napa, Alexi realized he had no idea where he was. Part of the problem, he knew, was that he’d been there only once, three years ago, and he hadn’t been driving. He had been drunk in the back with Julia Wexler, the film’s head writer and cause for so much of the trouble in Alexi’s marriage to begin with, while the husband-and-wife producer team drove them from winery to winery. Stella and Jack had been going to Napa for the past fifteen years, even before it was Napa, when it was just a handful of vintner families scattered across the valley, trying to make a living post-Prohibition, and that entire weekend had felt meandering and glorious, discovery after discovery.
Now he was lost, and it was dark, and the towering oak trees and skinny dirt roads that had once felt so inviting seemed menacing and sinister. For almost an hour he couldn’t find a single place to stop. Benny was staring out the window, his cheek against the glass, and Alexi passed orchards and cattle farms and rickety wood houses, feeling more and more hopeless, until finally, in the distance, he saw an inn and pulled over.
“Stay here,” he told his son, and jogged inside. It was no-frills but perfectly adequate, with overstuffed leather chairs and dark green walls, like a hunting lodge without the guns or taxidermied animals. Through the glass doors Alexi saw picnic tables, and his mood immediately lifted as he envisioned a decent night’s sleep after a year on that stiff, dirty cot and a lovely breakfast on the patio in the morning, coffee and juice, eggs and fresh muffins. The pretty redhead behind the desk was reading a thick paperback she set down then and said, “Welcome to the Pinecone. Just you?”
“One room, two beds,” Alexi said. “For me and my son.”
The woman smiled at him. Her hair was pulled away from her face and Alexi admired her long, creamy neck, the tiny, almost inconsequential buttons climbing up her blouse. It had been twelve and a half months. There had been a time in his life when it would have felt so easy to lean over the counter and ask this woman when she got off work, then meet her for a drink, or three or four. But her skin, her lips, the sparkly blue stones in her delicate earlobes — all of it gave him a jolt of sadness, just another reminder Katherine wanted nothing to do with him.
“That’ll be eighteen dollars,” she said, and Alexi cleared his throat. If he paid for this room, he and Benny would be sharing a pack of gum for dinner. He realized he had no idea what things cost in Napa — everything had always been paid for, Stella and Jack opening doors to every inn, winery, restaurant, and all that was ever expected of Alexi was that he glide right in. He was struck by a feeling he hadn’t had in so long, a feeling that had thrown him into a crippling panic when he was in his early twenties and first auditioning: of being an imposter, a single step away from being found out. He raked a hand through his hair and looked at the woman. A trio of brass mirrors hung behind her and he could see himself reflected back, dozens of tiny blinking Alexis.
“Just give me a minute. Let me get my wallet from the car,” he said, backing out. He let himself into the driver’s side and took a long breath. Benny was bobbing along to some radio song that sounded to Alexi like all backup vocals. “It was crummy inside. We’ll find something better,” he said, and threw the car in reverse.
He sped down another dark, curvy road. He had no idea where to go. Benny didn’t seem concerned, though — he perked at the task. “There’s one,” he said, pointing to a vacancy sign, and when Alexi drove right past he pointed out another, as if they were simply playing car games on a family road trip. He knew his son was trying to help, but he hated the game—I-Spy Another Inn My Father Can’t Afford—and when Benny pointed out a third, Alexi mumbled, “You don’t think I see them too?”
Benny looked as if he’d been struck in the face.
“I’m sorry,” Alexi said quickly. “Oh Benny, I’m sorry.” But his son had already slunk into his seat, and Alexi stared ahead at the road and wondered how the trip was, so soon, panning out this way. Driving with Benny through the night, possibly being forced to, at a certain point, pull over to the side and sleep in this borrowed shitheap. He’d once, not so long ago, won the starring role as Lev Gorelik, hardscrabble peasant turned war hero. The Russian paratrooper from the tiny, impoverished village of N., who, when forgotten behind enemy lines, finds himself trapped in a collapsed building with seven SS soldiers. Before he’d landed the part, Alexi had been stuck singing hair-care ads for the radio, and he couldn’t believe, sitting in the Paramount lot in his Red Army fatigues, that for much of his adult life he’d actually gotten up in the morning to sing jingles like Wildroot Cream, a little goes a long, long way without wanting to kill himself. The Unknown Soldier had been a serious and character-driven project, following Lev’s fateful encounter with the Germans — a moving film, the publicists promised, with “drama to touch the heart of every woman, adventure to stir the blood of every man.” It had been, in all possible ways, the part of a lifetime, and everyone — the casting director, the producers, Julia Wexler — had believed that he, Alexi Liebman, a working-class Russian himself, was perfect for the role.
Of course, not one of those people knew that, while Alexi may have been born in Russia, he had lived in Queens since he was two. That he hadn’t grown up wealthy by any measure but had been perfectly comfortable; that in fact his parents had dedicated their lives in the States solely to maintaining this level of comfort, his father spending his days off from the bottle factory in their driveway, waxing his beloved Model A, his mother stashing away every Sears catalog that came in the mail and combing through them slowly and obsessively in the evenings, her personal pornography. That communism was the exact reason they’d escaped when they could, saying it had only made their lives more miserable, and that, beyond sharing news about relatives still there, they never mentioned Moscow at all. That as a boy, Alexi, in a desperate attempt to seem like more of an American, had dropped the i at the end of his name, and that, by the time he got a high school scholarship to Collegiate and had a whole new group of friends in Manhattan, he was already known by everyone, including his parents, as Alex. That when he was eighteen and both his parents died of heart failure the doctor was certain had been brought on by the stress of their early lives, he found himself barely thinking at all about Russia, a place he had not a single memory of. That it was only when he moved to Los Angeles and wasn’t even getting callbacks for hair-care ads that it occurred to him his heritage could make him stand out in a good way, could actually give him leverage, when trying to break into an industry run by his own people. And so right away he went back to calling himself Alexi, even paying extra to have all new headshots printed with the name change, fifteen extra dollars just to have that i back where it belonged.