Suddenly I saw the blank windows of my dream.
Ou est ta maman? the nylons asked, the trouserlegs asked. Elle revient, I said, but I didn't believe it.
My mother jumped out of a taxi in her Afghan coat with the embroidery and the curly wool trim. She screamed at me, grabbed me. The bottle slipped from my hands. The way the milk looked on the sidewalk. Shiny white, with sharp pieces of glass.
ON THE WAY home from school, I copied the battlefield photograph and sent it to her with four cut-out words, loose in an envelope:
WHO REALLY ARE YOU
I SAT ON the rag rug in my room after dinner, cutting old magazine covers into shadow puppets with the X-acto and sewing them onto bamboo skewers I'd saved from Tiny Thai. They were mythical figures, half-animal, half-human — the Monkey King, the antlered man who was sacrificed each year to fertilize the crops, wise centaur Chiron and cowheaded Isis, Medusa and the Minotaur, the Goat Man and the White Crow Woman and the Fox Mistress with her latest moneymaking scheme. Even sad Daedalus and his feathered boy.
I was sewing the Minotaur's arm to his body when there was a soft knock on the door. Musk, the smell of something stolen. Sergei leaned against the door jamb, his muscled arms folded, in a crisp white shirt and jeans, a gold watch like a ship's clock on his wrist. His eyes flicking around the room, taking in the clutter — clothes piled in boxes, my bags of full sketch pads and finished drawings, the flowered curtains fading to pastel. His glance took in everything, but not like an artist's, seeing form, seeing shadow. This gaze was professional, wordlessly estimating the possibilities, how hard it would be to get what he wanted through the window and out to the truck. Nothing that he saw was worth bothering about. Threadbare carpet, old beds, Yvonne's paper horse, a paperweight with glitter instead of snow that said Universal Studios Tour. He shook his head. "A dog should not live here," he said. "Astrid. What you going to do?"
I tied the Minotaur's arm to the skewer, held it in front of the lamp, made it go up and down, miming his words. "A dog should not live here," I said, imitating his heavy accent. "Children, yes. But dogs no. No dogs." The Minotaur pointed at him. "What you got against dogs?"
"Play with dolls." He smiled. "Sometimes you are woman, sometimes little girl."
I put the Minotaur in a can with the others, a bouquet of paper demigods and monsters. "Rena's not here. She's out getting loaded with Natalia."
"Who say I come to see Rena?" Sergei peeled himself away from his doorjamb and came in, casually, just wandering, innocent as a shoplifter. He picked things up and put them down exactly where they had been, and he never made a sound. I couldn't stop watching him. It was as if one of my animal-men had come to hfe, as if I had summoned him. How many times had I thought of just this moment, Sergei come a-calling, like a cat yowling on the back fence for you. I emitted some civetlike female stink, a distinct perfume of sexual wanting, that he had followed to find me here in the dark.
Sergei picked up Yvonne's paperweight and shook it, watched the glitter fall. Out in the living room, the TV was on, Yvonne absorbed in some trendy nighttime drama about hip young people wearing clothes from Fred Segal, with good haircuts and more stylish problems than hers. He stuck a finger in Yvonne's eyeshadow tray, traced some on his eyelids. "What you think?" he smiled, cocking his head, looking at himself, smoothing his blond hair back with one hand, vain as a woman. He watched me in the mirror.
He had wide sleepy eyelids, the silver suited them. He looked like a prince in ballet, but his scent was distinctly animal, he filled the room with his musk. I'd once stolen a T-shirt of his, for just that smell. I wondered if he ever found out.
"Astrid." He sat on the edge of my bed, put his thick rope-veined arm along the back of my headboard. You didn't even hear the springs squeak when he sat. "Why you avoid me?"
I started to cut a mermaid with long, art nouveau hair from the cover of an old Scientific American. "You're her boyfriend. I like living here. Therefore, I avoid you."
That purring cat voice. "Who tells her? Me? You?" he said. "I know you a little, Astrid krasavit[a. Not such good girl. People think, but not what I see."
"What do you see?" I asked. Curious as to what bizarre distortions my image had undergone in the translation within the sewer system of Sergei's mind.
"You see me, you like. I feel you watch but then look away. Maybe afraid you get like her, da?" He jerked his head toward the front of the house, Yvonne, gesturing a big belly. "You don't trust. I never give you baby."
As if that were it. I was afraid, but not of that. I knew if I ever let him touch me, I would not be able to stop. I remembered the day my mother and her friends went to drink at the revolving bar on top of the Bonaventure Hotel, and I was pulled toward the windows, the nothingness was pulling me out. I felt that feeling every time I was in a room with Sergei, that sliding toward a fall.
"Maybe I like Rena," I said, making tiny cuts down the mermaid's tail for scales. "Women don't like it much when you screw around with their lovers."
His smile wiped his face like a mop. "Don't worry Rena." He laughed, a rumbling laugh that came from beneath the neat belt, the tight jeans. "She don't own thing long. She like to trade. Sergei today, somebody tomorrow. Hi, bye, don't forget hat. But for you, something else. Look."
He pulled something out of his shirt pocket. It caught my eye like a firefly. It was a necklace, a diamond on a silvery chain. "I find this lying in street. You want?"
He was trying to buy me off with a stolen necklace? I had to laugh. Found it in the street. In someone's nightstand, more likely. Or around her throat even, how could I know? / take the sliding glass door off the track of a two-story house in Mar Vista. A child-molester offering you candy, a ride in his car. So this was how someone like Sergei seduced a woman he wanted. Where just his smell and voice and the blue ropes of vein in his arms was enough, those sleepy blue eyes now sparkling under silver lids, that criminal smile.
He pulled a sad face. "Astrid. Beauty girl. This is gift from my heart."
Sergei's heart. That empty corridor, that unaired room. Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven't really got. If I were a good girl, I would be insulted, I would kick him out. I would ignore his smile, and shape of him inside his jeans. But he knew me. He smelled my desire. I felt myself slipping toward the windows, pulled by thin air.
He hooked the chain around my neck. Then he took my hand and put it on his groin, warm, I could feel him getting hard under my hand. It was obscene, and it excited me to feel him there, a man I wanted like falling. He leaned down and kissed me the way I wanted to be kissed, hard and tasting of last night's booze-up. He unzipped my polyester shirt, pulled it over my head, took my skirt off and threw it onto Yvonne 's bed. His hands waking me up, I'd been sleeping, I hadn't even known it, it had been so long.