I lean toward Sergei, unafraid. “Actually,” I say, “I pity Mama quite a bit.”
“Foolish girl,” Mama says, understanding me perfectly. “What, in the name of Karl Marx, have I done to deserve her? Why does she insist on sucking my blood?”
Then my brother stands up and I’m terrified of what he’s going to say.
“I just don’t believe he’s related to Mussolini,” he says.
I follow him up to his room, which is a mess, with words in French and Japanese scrawled on his crooked whiteboard, math textbooks opened on the floor, piles of bright dirty clothes scattered near his bed, and some kitsch items from our recent trip to visit our grandmother in Kiev on his windowsill: a regular nesting doll and one of Putin as a dog, a Ukrainian flag and broom, and a generic painting of the Maidan, the plaza in the center of Kiev. My brother isn’t starting high school until next fall, but he’s already trying to make himself more interesting, and I applaud him. He’s losing his baby fat and it’s apparent that he’s going to be very handsome soon, which Mama thinks is the reason all of his friends are girls.
He reaches under his pillow and gives me the turquoise beaded necklace.
“I got this at the mall. I thought it was pretty,” he says, and I try to keep it together when he puts it on me and it really does look pretty, brightening my dull eyes. Then he says, “Don’t worry about me. I know they’re clueless about that stuff.”
I bite my lip and wonder if he is lying. He must need me. I run a hand over the necklace.
“It’s beautiful,” I say. “One day,” I tell him, “you’ll be able to leave too. You’ll get to go anywhere you want.”
Shifty leads me to the gate of Gramercy Park a few shots of Grey Goose later. He pulls out an intricate silver key that fits neatly in his palm, curlicues blooming from its sturdy base, and eases it into the lock. The gate creaks open for us. The park is silent on this warm night, with its green benches and birdhouse and a statue of a man in a robe with his hand to his chest, looking down slightly, like he can’t believe what we’re thinking of doing there. It’s like a park in a movie set. Shifty takes my hand and I try not to trip.
He puts the key in his pocket and I say, “How much does it cost to replace it?”
He looks slightly embarrassed. “A thousand,” he says.
“Have you ever lost it?”
“Never,” he says. “And I’ve lived here for almost a decade now.”
“That must be nice,” I say. His blond hair is slick with gel; his green eyes are shining. The statue, I am sure by now, is glaring at me, and I redirect my gaze.
“If you could own all of Central Park, would you do it?” I ask.
He smiles slowly, not sure what to make of me. “How could anyone own the park?” he says. “Like, legally own it? Does that mean no one else could go there?”
I shrug and say, “Forget it.”
I move toward him, running my hands down his chest. His kisses are sweet and eager and he’s more like a puppy than like Patrick Bateman. When I open my eyes I see his are closed, delicate blond lashes catching the moonlight. I try to heed Lee’s advice and stroke his hair, and he strokes mine, and I can see his pulse in his throat and it’s too much, not something I am supposed to see. I lead him to a bench, where he puts down the key and I straddle him under the gaze of the judgy statue, though he is still too gentle. I yank his shirt open so hard two buttons pop off, pattering on the cement.
“Hey,” he says, a bit alarmed, but sort of into it too. I run my hands under his shirt and all I can hear are my hands on his body, no party, no cars, not even a man walking his dog.
“Hey yourself,” I say.
I unbuckle his belt and dig my nails into his huge arms. But he’s not so innocent; he has a condom in his wallet and he slides it on his thin long dick. I push my underwear to the side and guide him inside me, which is when I realize I’m only sort of wet, so I pull his cropped hair as best as I can and bite his neck and it begins to work and he starts getting rougher too. He gets this deranged gleam in his eye and squeezes my sides kind of unpleasantly, because not everybody is good at fucking this way, but I can’t stop him except by slowing down myself. Now he’s really on this gripping and grabbing and biting kick and he takes hold of my hair and my necklace, which breaks off into a million little pieces, beads flying into the night.
“What the fuck?” I say, easing off him and pushing him away. He’s pissed as I fix my skirt and pick up the pieces, pretty stones I put in my pocket along with the chain, wishing I were the kind of girl who knows how to put a necklace back together.
He gets up and I imagine he’s another statue in the park, somber and muscular and genteel, and he turns away before I understand what he is doing. He jerks off into a bush and moans a bit as the sad little spurts tumble out. He’s not a statue anymore; he’s a fountain. He buckles his pants, wipes his hands on his lap, and glares at me.
“Who the fuck do you think you are?” he says. “Really.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, gathering more beads. “I’m engaged to a man I love.”
“Lee?” he says, looking back in the direction of his apartment. “Fuck, I thought—”
“You don’t know him,” I say. “His name is Matthew Mussolini.”
He shakes his head and storms out of the park without tucking in his shirt or catching his breath or looking at me one last time. Which is a shame, because if he had done any of that, then he might have noticed that I’d swiped his key. I lock the gate before I leave, to be a good citizen, to keep out the riffraff.
* * *
—
It’s three in the morning and I’m exhausted, but I can’t bring myself to return to my apartment in Greenpoint. I consider my options. I can go downtown to Papa’s old office, a short walk from the fallen towers, and I can stand in front of it, wondering what he would think of how my family turned out, of the direction the country is headed, and if he too would disapprove of the garish new skyline. I can go to the Freedom Tower and stare into the abyss. Or to Veselka, my brother’s favorite twenty-four-hour diner, where he loves to embarrass me by speaking his surprisingly good Russian to the waiters. But the thought of seeing any of those places exhausts me. I buy a Gatorade at a deli and start walking to Penn Station.
A few months after Papa died, my friend Lily dragged me to get wasted at a sushi place in the West Village that didn’t ask for IDs; then she forced me downtown to face the Goldman building. She furiously waved a bottle of Stella at the vacant building on the deserted street. “Fuck you, Goldman Sachs!” she had cried, tossing the bottle at the entrance, though it didn’t break through the thick glass, and we ran away, cracking up. I was still too numb to work up that much anger or to really thank her.
But I am brimming with feelings by the time I make it to Chelsea. “Fuck you, Goldman Sachs!” I shout at a street of brownstones, tossing my Gatorade at a trash can. A couple turns back to scowl at me and then walks faster, as if I pose a threat.
I end up sitting on a stoop across the street from my fiancé Matthew Mussolini’s dance studio, a silver building with tall glass windows, which Mama had once pointed out with her signature smirk. I have only spoken once or twice to Mama’s friend Yuri, a handsome bald man with a mustache who told me I looked exactly like my mother back in high school, which no one had ever said to me before or since. Just one of the rooms of his partner’s studio is illuminated, a bright rectangle two floors above the ground, surrounded by darkness.
A dark-haired woman flutters under the lights, moving gracefully for all the world to see her, or maybe for nobody to see her, she just loves to dance that much. I’m not even sure she’s real; for all I know she’s a dreamed-up tropical fish shimmying in a tank. My skull is throbbing, my brain wants to ooze out of my ears, and I wouldn’t care if it did. I didn’t ask to have a mind, or a body, or for any of this.<
br />
My phone rings and I think it’s late for Mama to be calling, but I see it’s Lee.
“Shifty’s freaking out,” he says. “He thinks you took his key. You did, didn’t you?”
“I’m watching this dancer practicing. She’s so fucking beautiful.”
“Don’t be a cunt, O. Bring back the key. I don’t care about you and him. Please,” he says.
“I wish you could see her,” I tell him. “She’s so free.”
“Are you serious right now? There’s nothing free about being a dancer, O. It’s all a performance. I thought you knew better.” He tells me again to come back, his voice so steady he could be reading from a book, and I wonder who is going to read me to sleep from now on, whose voice will soothe me so much it enters my dreams after I drift off and vibrates in my bones long after I wake up.
“I’m going to school in California next year. I already accepted,” I say.
Lee laughs a sad, big-throated laugh; I can see it. “They can still call you out there, you know,” he tells me.
“Well,” I say. “They need me.” I hang up before he has anything to say about that. My phone tells me I have ten minutes to catch the 5:14 to Jersey. I know that’s where I need to be.
I stand up and scatter the beads from my pocket at the door of the studio, like birdseed. Maybe they will be of use to somebody. The plaque tells me the studio doesn’t belong to Matthew Mussolini after all but to another man. I’ve been at the wrong place this whole time.
* * *
—
I get off the train as the sun drifts up, bathing the sky in hot-pink light. The walk home’s not long. The buildings close to the station are little brick boxes just inches apart, but the houses are larger and pastel-colored as I get farther away, passing streets renamed after local soldiers who died in Iraq. An old couple sits on their porch, with mugs of coffee steaming before them like tiny cauldrons, and they give me comradely nods though I must look like shit. I stumble toward my family’s house, my underwear sticking to my ass. I sneak into the house through the back, walk through the kitchen brimming with serving dishes and elaborate bouquets awaiting the party guests, and creep up the stairs.
My brother is in bed, staring into the void of his computer, surrounded by a half-empty Coke, a bag of Cheetos, my tattered copy of The Bell Jar, French flash cards, and The Romanovs: The Final Chapter, so he’s still winding down, nocturnal creature that he is. He lifts a hand and gives me a lazy smile.
“You changed your mind,” he says.
“I tend to do that.”
He studies me and frowns. “What happened to the necklace?”
I put a hand to my neck and say, “I left it at home.”
I am officially no longer drunk, just delirious, and my brother’s bed is not my old bed from high school but a crib, and the Coke is a baby bottle, and Mama and Papa and a preteen me are peering down at him as he sleeps.
“Such a pinched face,” Mama says with a frown. “He looks a bit like Yeltsin.”
“Nonsense,” Papa says, putting an arm around both of us. “He is perfect.”
“More like a drowned rat,” I say, but Papa sighs so I add, “but he’s no Yeltsin.”
“Shame on you, Oksana Banka. The child is perfect,” Papa says, shaking his head at Mama and me. “Treacherous women, you just don’t see it.”
Misha is staring at me and I know I need to tell him I am leaving in a few months, that I won’t be able to come home as often, that he won’t be able to visit me in the city anymore but that he can always call and I will answer. That he has to call, in fact.
“You are perfect,” I tell him.
He rolls his eyes. “And you are drunk. I’m ready to sleep.”
“Same,” I say, and he doesn’t kick me out, so I join him under the covers, the sun already slinking in through the blinds. I say, “Remember the last time Papa took us to the city? To Central Park? That was such a good day.”
“I don’t remember the park,” he says. “I remember he let me have so much ice cream I got sick and puked all over his shoes. He was so mad.”
“Now, that I don’t remember,” I say, laughing a little.
“Maybe I dreamed it, then.”
I move closer to my brother and smooth down his hair. His bed is perfectly warm. I reach into my pocket and say, “I got you something.” I turn the key over in my hand. It really is beautiful, shiny and silver and ancient.
My brother holds the key up in the thin dusty light.
“What does it open?” he says.
Anatoly Petrovich arrived in Yalta to try to bed my grandmother a fortnight into our trip. I was already going insane by that point, realizing that my plan to take a break from the mess I’d left behind in California was a bust, feeling more annoyed by my grandmother than usual because I was lovesick. I had only been living on the West Coast for a year and had already managed to screw up my romantic life more than I ever had back in New York. So when Baba’s suitor appeared and began to distract her from annoying me, I felt myself relaxing slightly, thinking the remaining half of my trip might be more bearable.
He joined us on our hotel’s veranda, where we drank Georgian wine and watched the sun go down. As we opened our second bottle, a troupe of girls with daisy garlands in their hair walked past.
“Oh! Youth,” said Anatoly Petrovich. “It makes the soul dance.”
“What nonsense,” my grandmother said. “One day, those children will be old and ugly, just like you and me. That goes for you too, Oksana,” she told me.
“Thanks for looking out for me,” I said.
“You are neither old nor ugly, my duckling,” Anatoly Petrovich said, squeezing Baba’s hand. He lowered his voice and hovered his mouth near her ear. “Come on, Sveta, one night with me and you won’t regret it.”
“Who are you to know what I won’t regret?” my grandmother said.
“Don’t be that way, my rabbit….”
“Get out of here, you old toad. Before I regret talking to you at all,” she said.
Anatoly Petrovich bowed and kissed her hand and then mine. “It has been a treat to see you again,” he told me. “You’re all grown up. You look just like your father.”
“That’s what people tell me,” I said.
“Only a little,” Baba said, tilting her head to study me. “Her nose is much bigger. And her father’s eyes were as blue as the sea. Her eyes are the color of storm clouds, just like mine….”
I hadn’t seen Anatoly Petrovich since I was a kid, but he had known my father well. He had been the director of the Kiev children’s choir when Papa was a member. Anatoly Petrovich had fallen for my grandmother the moment they’d locked eyes when she’d brought a nine-year-old Papa to the choir audition. A few years later, Anatoly Petrovich was transferred to the more prestigious Moscow choir, but once my grandfather died shortly after that, he took the train from Moscow to Kiev to see my grandmother year after year, though she never gave in to him. Their semi-romance had cooled after Baba moved to America with us but had picked up when she’d retired in Kiev. I had the sense they were platonic because Baba didn’t reveal intimate details about their time together to me like she did about the others. Still, they acted like lovebirds.
Her suitor walked away with perfect posture, head held high. With his white whiskers and formidable belly, he looked like an elegant walrus. He was staying at the Oreanda Hotel, which was named for the region of Yalta visited by the lovers in Chekhov’s story “The Lady with the Dog.” I had already visited the picturesque namesake town for research purposes. The tricky little story about two ordinary married people who meet on an embankment on summer vacation and fall in love in spite of themselves was the reason I had come to Yalta, courtesy of my PhD program.
Baba and I were staying at the thousand-room industrial monstrosity, the Hotel Yalta.
It looked like a corporate office and the sheets smelled like ammonia, but Baba refused to stay anywhere else. As we climbed into our twin beds, I saw she was exhausted, that all the toughness she had put on for her suitor had melted away. I tried giving her a look to show I’d never forgotten the adventure of sharing a room with her when I was a kid, that I’d forgiven her rude comments, and that I too was confused over matters of the heart.
“Don’t make that face,” she said as she turned off the lights. “It’s unattractive.”
* * *
—
“Consider yourselves ‘underground men,’ ” Dr. Vainberg had said, rubbing his hands together. “Or ‘women,’ ” he added, winking at me and the other girl there, a mousy thing named Marnie.
I was at the orientation for first-year PhD students in the crypt-like basement belonging to the Slavic Studies Department of UC Davis. As the chair droned on, I tried to hide my despair and studied the cobwebs all over the room to calm down. I’d moved to Davis because I wanted to be as far away as possible from New York, but I was already bored out of my mind in the too-hot cow town, realizing that if a place was two hours from the ocean, then it could be anywhere at all. I hadn’t exactly pictured myself on a beach with a strawberry daiquiri in hand, ardently discussing Quiet Flows the Don with spectacled versions of Fabio, but I still wanted it to feel more different—beyond the palm trees and bikers—or maybe I just wanted it to make me different. I must have failed to hide my feelings, because a guy across the table smiled at me.
My new classmates and I escaped the underground lair for the farmers’ market. After we ordered beers, the guy who’d seen me sulking introduced himself. His name was Roman.
“Are you all right?” he said.
“I think I’ve made a huge mistake,” I answered, sipping my beer.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “It’s not too late to switch to wine.”
Oksana, Behave! Page 14
