He returned to Morning and said, ‘May I have this dance?’
‘Delighted,’ she said and coughed. Her white silk kimono hung from her failing body.
They went to the main mess hall. The noises and voices of War and Peace echoed off the marble columns, clattered amid the crystal chandeliers. After setting her on a velvet sofa, he pushed tables aside, flung chairs away, rolled back the carpet.
Natasha Rostov and Prince Andrei Bolkonsky were waltzing now, Ludmilla Savelyeva as Natasha, Vyacheslav Tikhonov as Andrei, original film score by Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov conducting one of the Moscow symphony orchestras.
George lifted his wife off the sofa and extended her arms. And they danced. A wise, benevolent god entered their blood, instructing them. Adeptly they revolved through the Russian palace, round and round, one two three, Ovchinnikov’s melody pouring through them, one two three, notes soaring, gleaming half notes, burnished quarter notes, then came the sixteenth notes, thin and silver, needles weaving airborne tapestries, one two three, and Morning was smiling, and the hall was hot, and now she was laughing, and it seemed as if the autumn-leaf red were back in her hair.
‘I’m so glad I married you,’ she said.
‘Would it have lasted?’ he asked.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘Forever.’
The waltz quickened. Love blossomed between Natasha and Andrei.
‘You’re good at dancing,’ she said.
‘So are you,’ he said.
‘The sex part was good, too.’
‘First-rate, I thought.’
The orchestra reached full velocity. The notes burned as they struck the air.
‘I once heard that it’s great to have a dog jump in bed with you in the morning and lick your face,’ she said.
‘That’s true,’ he said.
A dotted half note soared by, trailing fire.
‘Good-bye, husband,’ she said.
‘I’ll miss you,’ he said.
Her bones turned to balsa wood, and she threw all of her remaining substance into a kiss. Painlessly she quit the world, became dust, less than dust, a mute vibration, a thing never christened, born, or conceived, a notion kept only in the frail memory of a man staggering across a mess hall in an ice-bound nuclear submarine, carrying a silk kimono and weeping like an orphan.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Each midnight he walked the carpeted corridors of the City of New York, master of an empty ship, his ears turned to the sound of his boots, hoping their thumps would lull him to sleep. Sometimes he heard pale whisperings issue from some dark alley or forgotten passageway, but when he investigated there was nothing. In this sunken and deserted city even George’s own hallucinations declined to keep him company.
As dawn approached he would rub his eyes, force his face into a yawn, and collapse on the nearest bunk in a parody of exhaustion. Useless – Morpheus was not fooled. George stared at the ceiling, pawed at his blankets. And then, come noon, his teeth would begin grinding so briskly he expected to see sparks, and he knew that a new day was upon him. Did I dream? he would wonder. It pleased him to remember one, for this meant he had actually slept.
‘Be ready,’ Morning had said.
Monday, the tree. He went to the missile compartment and searched among the remaining specimens from Project Citrus, eventually finding the runt of the orchard, barely four feet high, perfect for his purposes, with frail branches and scrawny fruit – no question why it had not been among those selected for the honor of lynching a war criminal. He cut it down, bore it away, set it up in his cabin.
Tuesday, the ornaments. After securing a hammer from the torpedo room lower deck, he ran through the ship smashing every bright and gaudy object he could find – gyros, compasses, gauges, valves, pumps. He collected the shards in a duffel bag.
Wednesday and Thursday, the presents. His goal was ten. That seemed a substantial number for her to open, whereas twelve or fifteen would have smacked of overindulgence. He went to Sverre’s cabin and appropriated the white alabaster raven, the captain’s stovepipe hat, the globe, and an empty gin bottle. From the Silver Dollar Casino he took a stack of poker chips and a poster of a harlequin whose word balloon contained the rules for blackjack. He wrote the names of countries on the chips. The main galley yielded an assortment of utensils. He put them in a cardboard box, labeling it SUPER DUPER COOKING SET with a Navy-issue laundry marker. The library was a disappointment – not a single children’s book in the stacks. So he made one, transcribing the fable he had once improvised for her in which a bunny with Holly’s personality conquered self-doubt, learning to ride a two-wheeler bicycle. He illustrated it with stick figures.
For the ninth gift, George devised a rag doll out of patches and swatches cut from commissioned officers’ uniforms. Its eyes were brass buttons.
The final gift had been hanging in his closet for months.
Half a day. So short. Best to trim the tree in advance. After all, she would have all those presents to unwrap and play with. For hooks he used the paper clips that held the pages of Captain Sverre’s bad poetry together. By Friday afternoon the former orange tree had become a cheerful mass of glittery, twisted armatures and curled, nameless metal.
He beat the lid from a canned ham into a star. Christmas trees without stars on top were totally unacceptable. He moved the step-ladder into place…
Why am I lying on the floor? he wondered. What am I doing staring at the ceiling? He glanced at the rivet-studded walls, the unfinished tree. I am lying on the floor because there is no point to anything. People are extinct.
Midnight came. He stood up. ‘The point,’ he said aloud, ‘is that Holly and I are not extinct.’ He placed the star where it belonged.
Saturday, the final preparations. He wrapped the ten gifts in aluminum foil and set them under the tree, stacking and restacking them in an effort to find the perfect arrangement.
Sunday.
Seven AM.
Round and round the Christmas tree he cut a path of nervousness and doubt, periodically stopping to rearrange the presents or reposition an ornament. She wouldn’t like the doll. She would start fussing. Something…
Eight AM Nine AM Ten AM.
After Chester the cat had died, they had decided to give him a proper burial, complete with a little headstone inscribed CHESTER that George had prepared at the Crippen Monument Works from a stray scrap of granite. Holly hated the whole idea; she refused to attend the funeral and screamed at her parents for dreaming it up. But the very next day, just as George and Justine had predicted, she began telling everyone about the big event – the monument, the grave, the cardboard coffin from the veterinarian – and continued doing so for months…