I was devastated. So this is it, I thought bitterly, this is my passionate Russian experience — a hundred and twenty bucks for sushi, half a bottle of Grand Marnier and a rush-hour schlep to the airport and back. I sat there, a little sick in the stomach, and listened to the sad expiring click of the turntable as the record ended and the machine shut itself down.
With all she’d had to drink, with the time change and the long flight from Moscow, I figured she’d probably hit the bed in a cold faint, but I was wrong. Just as I was about to give it up, heave myself out of the chair and tumble into my own comfortless bed, she appeared in the doorway. “Casey,” she murmured, her voice rich and low, and in the muted light I could see that she was wearing something silky and diaphanous — a teddy, a Russian teddy. “Casey,” she crooned, “I cannot seem to sleep.”
It was about a week later that she first asked me if I knew Akhmatova. I did know her, but not personally. She was dimmer to me even than Pushkin or Lermontov, a fading memory out of a drowsy classroom.
“We studied her in college,” I said lamely. “After she died — in the sixties, right? It was a survey course in Russian literature. In translation, I mean.”
Irina was sitting cross-legged on the couch in a litter of newspapers and magazines. She was wearing only a T-shirt and a pair of panties, and I’d just watched in fascination as she applied a glistening coat of neon-pink polish to her toenails. She looked up at me a moment and narrowed her pale-blue eyes. Then she closed them and began to recite:
“FROM THE YEAR NINETEEN-FORTY
AS FROM A HIGH TOWER I LEAN,
ONCE MORE BIDDING GOODBYE
TO WHAT I LONG AGO FORSOOK,
AS THOUGH I HAVE CROSSED MYSELF
AND AM GOING DOWN UNDER DARK
VAULTS.
“It is from Akhmatova’s great work, ‘Poem Without A Hero.’ Is it not sad and beautiful?”
I looked at her toenails shimmering in the light of the morning; I looked at her bare legs, her face, her eyes. We’d been out every night — I’d taken her to Chinatown, Disneyland, the Music Center and Malibu pier — and the glow of it was on me. “Yes,” I said.
“This is a great work about dying for love, Casey, about a poet who kills himself because his lover will not have him.” She shut her eyes again. “‘For one moment of peace I would give the peace of the tomb.’” She let the moment hang, mesmeric, motes of dust floating in a shaft of light through the window, the bird of paradise gilded with sun, the traffic quiet on the street. And then she was looking at me, soft and shrewd at once. “Tell me, Casey, where does one find such a hero today? Where does one find a man who will die for love?”
The next day was the day she took my bike to the Beverly Center and we had our first falling-out.
I’d come home late from work — there was a problem with the new person we’d hired, the usual semiliteracy and incompetence — and the place was a mess. No: actually, “mess” didn’t do it justice. The apartment looked as if a troop of baboons had been locked inside it for a week. Every record I owned was out of its jacket and collecting dust; my books were scattered throughout the living room, spread open flat like crippled things; there were clothes and sheets and pillows wadded about, and every horizontal surface was inundated with a farrago of take-out food and crumpled wrappers: Colonel Sanders, Chow Foo Luck, McDonald’s, Arby’s, Taco Bell. She was on the phone in the back room — long-distance to Russia — and she hadn’t changed out of the T-shirt she’d been wearing the previous morning. She said something in Russian, and then I heard her say, “Yes, and my American boyfriend he is so very wealthy—”
“Irina?”
“I must go now. Do svidaniya.”
I stepped into the bedroom and she flew across the room to fling herself into my arms, already sobbing, sobbing in midair. I was disconcerted. “What’s the matter?” I said, clutching her hopelessly. I had a sudden intimation that she was leaving me, that she was going on to visit Chicago and New Orleans and New York, and I felt a sinkhole of loss open up inside me. “Are you — is everything all right?”
Her breath was hot on my throat. She began to kiss me there, over and over, till I took hold of her shoulders and forced her to look me in the eye. “Irina, tell me: what is it?”
“Oh, Casey,” she gasped, and her voice was so diminished I could barely hear her. “I have been so stupid. Even in Russia we must lock up our things, I know, but I have never dreamed that here, where you have so much—”
And so I discovered that my eight-hundred-dollar bicycle was no more, just as I was to learn that she’d sheared the blades off the Cuisinart attempting to dice a whole pineapple and that half my records had gouges in them and that my new white Ci Siamo jacket was stained with lipstick or cranberry juice or what might have been blood for all I knew.
I lost my sense of humor, my forbearance, my graciousness, my cool. We had a scene. Accusations flew. I didn’t care about her, she shrieked; things meant more to me than she did. “Things!” I snorted. “And who spends half her time at Robinson’s and Saks and the May Company? Who calls Russia as if God Himself would come down from heaven and pay the bills? Who hasn’t offered to pay a penny of anything, not even once?”
Her hair hung wild in her face. Strands of it adhered to the sudden moisture that glistened on her cheekbones. “You do not care for me,” she said in her tiniest voice. “I am only for you a momentary pleasure.”
I had nothing more to say. I stood there fuming as she fussed round the room, drawing on her jeans and boots, shrugging into the baby-blue patent-leather jacket and tamping out a cigarette in an abandoned coffee mug. She gave me a look — a look of contempt, anger, sorrow — and then she snatched up her purse and slammed out the door.
I didn’t sleep well that night. I kept listening for her key in the lock, kept picturing her shouldering her way through the punks and beggars on the boulevard and wondering if she had friends to go to. She had some money, I knew that, but she hoarded it like a capitalist, and though she knew all the brand names, she bought nothing. I saw the absurd go-go boots, the fringed jacket, the keen sexy spring in her walk that belied her phlegmatic Russian nature, and half-a-dozen times I got up to look for her and then thought better of it. In the morning, when I got up for work, the apartment was desolate.
I called home sporadically throughout the day, but there was no answer. I was angry, hurt, sick with worry. Finally, around four, she picked up the phone. “It is Irina,” she said, her voice tired and small.
“It’s me, Casey.”
No response.
“Irina? Are you all right?”
A pause. “I am very well, thank you.”
I wanted to ask where she’d spent the night, wanted to know and possess her and make demands, but I faltered in the presence of that quavering whispery voice. “Irina, listen, about last night…I just want to say I’m sorry.”
“That is no problem,” she said. And then, after a pause, “I leave you fifty dollars, Casey, on the table in the kitchen.”
“What do you mean?”
“I am going now, Casey. I know when I am not wanted.”
“No, no — I didn’t mean…I mean I was mad, I was angry, that was all. You’re wanted. You are.” I was pleading with her and even as I pleaded I could hear that I’d subconsciously picked up something of her diction, clipping my phrases in a too-formal way, a Russian way. “Listen, just wait there a minute, will you? I’m on my way home from work. I’ll take you wherever you want to go — you want to go to the airport? The bus? Whatever you want.”
Nothing.
“Irina?”
The smallest voice: “I will wait.”