I took her out to Harry’s that night for Italian food, and she was radiant, beaming, almost giddy — she couldn’t stop grinning at me, and everything I said was the funniest thing she’d ever heard. She cut her veal into neat little strips, chattered at the waiter in a breathy fluid Italian, tossed off one glass of Chianti after another, all the while pecking kisses at me and entwining her fingers with mine as if we were sixteen-year-olds at the mall. I didn’t mind. This was our reconciliation, and the smoke of sensuality hung over the table.
She leaned toward me over dessert — mille foglie with a cappuccino and Grand Marnier — and gave me the full benefit of her swollen eyes. The lights were low. Her voice was a whisper. I expected her to say, “Do you not want to take me home to bed now?” but she surprised me. With a randy look, she cleared her throat and said, “Casey, I have been wondering”—pause—“do you think I should put my money in CD or mutual fund?”
I couldn’t have been more stunned if she’d asked me who played third base for the Dodgers. “What?”
“The Magellan has performed best, has it not?” she whispered, and the talk of money seemed to make her voice sultrier still. “But then the founder is retiring, is this not so?”
A sudden anger came over me. Was she hustling me, was that it? She had money to invest and yet accepted her room and meals and all the rest from me as if it were her divine right? I stared down into my cappuccino and muttered, “Hell, I don’t know. What are you asking me for?”
She patted my hand and then said in her fading slip of a voice, “Perhaps this is not the time.” Her mouth made a little moue of contrition. And then, almost immediately, she brightened again. “It is early yet, Casey,” she said, quaffing her Grand Marnier and rising. “Do you not want to take me to the Odessa?”
The Odessa was a club in the Fairfax district where Russian émigrés of all ages would gather to sit at long cafeteria-style tables and listen to schmaltzy singers and third-rate comedians. They drank water glasses of warm Coke and vodka — the Coke in the left hand, vodka in the right, alternating swigs — and they sang along with and got up from the table and careened round the room to the frenetic Tatar strains of the orchestra. We stayed past closing, danced till we were soaked in sweat and drank enough vodka to fuel a 747. In the course of the evening we toasted Gorbachev, Misha Baryshnikov, the girls of Tbilisi, Leningrad and Murmansk, and drank the health of everyone in the room, individually, at least three times. Irina passed out in the car on the way home, and the night ended after she vomited gloriously in the potted ficus and I helped her to bed as if she were an invalid.
I felt queasy myself the next morning and called in sick at the office. When I finally got out of bed, around noon, Irina’s door was still closed. I was brewing coffee when she slumped through the kitchen door and fell into a chair. She was wearing a rumpled housecoat and she looked as if she’d been buried and dug up again.
“Me too,” I said, and I put both hands to my temples.
She said nothing, but accepted the coffee I poured for her. After a moment she pointed out the window to where one of my neighbors was letting her dog nose about in the shrubs that rimmed our little patch of lawn. “Do you see that dog, Casey?” she asked.
I nodded.
“It is a very lucky dog.”
“Lucky?”
“Yes,” she said, slow and lethargic, drawing it out. “It is a dog that has never tasted wodka.”
I laughed, but my eyes felt as if they were being sucked into my head and the coffee set my insides churning.
And then she took me by surprise again. Outside, the dog had disappeared, jerked rudely away at the end of a leash. The coffee machine dripped coffee. Someone gunned an engine two blocks away. “Casey,” she said, utterly composed, utterly serious, and she looked deep into my eyes. “Do you not want to marry me?”
The second blowup came at the end of the month, when the phone bill arrived. Four hundred twenty-seven dollars and sixty-two cents. I recognized a few calls — my lawyer’s number, Rob Peterman’s, a drunken cri de coeur I’d made to an old flame (now married) in Santa Barbara. But the rest were long-distance overseas — to Moscow, Novgorod, London, Paris, Milan. I was outraged. I was in shock. Why should I be responsible for her bills? I did not want to marry her, as I’d explained to her the morning after the Odessa. I told her I’d just been divorced and was leery of new attachments, which was true. I told her I still had feelings for my wife, which was also true (of course, those feelings were exclusively antipathetic, but I didn’t mention that). Irina had only stared at me, and then she got up from the kitchen table and went into her room, shutting the door firmly behind her.
But now, now she was out somewhere — no doubt looking at popcorn makers or water-purifying systems at some department store — the house was in a shambles, I hadn’t even loosened my tie yet and the phone bill was sending shock waves through me. I’d just poured a drink when I heard her key in the door; she came in beaming, oblivious, in a rustle of shopping bags and cheap trinkets, and I was all over her. “Don’t you know what this means?” I shouted. “Don’t you know that the telephone isn’t free in this society, that somebody has to pay for it? That I have to pay for it?”
She gave me a hard cold look. Her eyes narrowed; her chin trembled. “I will pay it,” she said, “if that is how you feel.”
“How I feel?” I shouted. “How I feel? Everybody pays their way in life, that’s how I feel. That’s the way society works, like it or not. Maybe it’s different in the workers’ paradise, I don’t know, but over here you play by the rules.”
She had nothing to say to that — she just held me with her contemptuous look, as if I were the one being unreasonable, and in that moment she reminded me of Julie, my ex-wife, as if she were in league with her, as if she were her double, and I felt bitter and disgusted to the core. I dropped the bill on the coffee table and stalked out the door.
When I got home from work the next day, the phone bill was still there, but there were five pristine one-hundred-dollar bills laid out beside it like a poker hand. Irina was in the kitchen. I didn’t know what to say to her. Suddenly I felt ashamed of myself.
I drifted into the room and draped my sportcoat over the back of one of the chairs and went to the refrigerator for a glass of orange juice. “Hello, Casey,” she said, glancing up from her magazine. It was one of those women’s magazines, thick as a phone book.
“Hi,” I said. And then, after an interval during which the level of the orange juice mounted in the glass and I gazed numbly out the window on a blur of green, I turned to her. “Irina,” I murmured, and my voice seemed to be caught in my throat, “I want to say thanks for the phone bill — the money, I mean.”
She looked up at me and shrugged. “It is nothing,” she said. “I have a job now.”
“A job?”
And there was her smile, the sharp little teeth. “Da,” she said. “I have met a man at the Odessa when I go for tea last Thursday? Do you remember I told you? His name is Zhenya and he has offered me a job.”
“Great,” I said. “Terrific. We should celebrate.” I lifted my glass as if it contained Perrier-Jouët. “What kind of work?”
She looked down at her magazine and then back up again, holding my eyes. “Escort service.”
I thought I hadn’t heard her right. “What? What are you saying?”
“It is an escort service, Casey. Zhenya says the men who come here for important business — in the movies, banking, real estate — they will like me. He says I am very beautiful.”
I was stunned. I felt as if I’d had the wind knocked out of me. “You can’t be serious?” My voice was pitched high, a yelp. “Irina, this is”—I couldn’t find the words—”this is not right, it’s not legitimate. It’s, it’s prostitution, don’t you know that?”