He had the slightly tired face of a man in his mid-thirties, with a firm jaw, light wavy hair, and a trimmed beard. He wore sandals that revealed big feet with neat toenails. There was a bit of underground-lair cobweb on his big toe, and I wanted to touch it. I was surprised by the deep blue of his eyes and didn’t know how I had missed them earlier. It was the color of the ocean I had been dreaming about. Eyes that made me want to tell him everything, which is what I found myself doing.
I told him I’d left my job at the literary agency in Manhattan when I realized it was the worst place in the world to work if you actually liked to read. I told him I’d loved reading since I’d moved to America when I was seven and my father read to me in Russian every night so I wouldn’t forget my native tongue. I told him it didn’t feel like anyone in the program actually liked literature, that they only cared about Marxism and deconstructionism and other isms that seemed to exist only to ruin reading, and the creepy chair didn’t put me at ease. I expected him to think I was crazy for rambling, but he reacted with a calm that steadied me.
“Don’t let Vainberg scare you. He’s not so bad,” he said.
“I don’t want to be an underground woman. I don’t even like Dostoevsky. He’s fucking insane,” I said. Now I was just complaining because it felt good.
“He seems perfectly rational to me,” he said. When I made a face, he laughed. It was nice to see his stern face break into a smile. It felt like something I had earned. He said, “I may be a bit biased because I named my dog after him. Fedya.”
“That’s a little intense,” I said.
“I’m a little intense,” he said.
We watched a clown juggling oranges for a crowd of extremely blond children. Marnie the Mouse brought over a sliced watermelon.
Roman bit into his slice like a boy, the juice dripping down his big hands, his chin, his torn jeans, with a joy that delighted me and made me wish I could do a single thing without overthinking it. He got shy after he finished eating and wiped his chin, watching me watching him. I was sure the others could feel the wild thing between us, but they just chatted about their new seminars. I knew almost nothing about this man except his name and the name of his dog, but I knew we had to be together. Later, I would tell him it was love at first bite.
“I think you should give Dostoevsky another chance,” he said. “And you should give the program another chance too. It’s a little early to be drawing conclusions, don’t you think?”
“Sometimes you know right away,” I said.
* * *
—
The lovebirds and I took the ferry to the Swallow’s Nest a few days after Anatoly Petrovich arrived. He had his arm around Baba as our rickety boat chugged through the sea. The water was a dumb, ordinary color, a blue-crayon blue, and it was pretty enough in the sunshine, but it didn’t move me. The happy pair were reminiscing about the first time they’d seen each other, or, rather, Anatoly Petrovich was reminiscing while Baba drank cognac from a plastic cup.
“You should have seen your grandmother when we first met,” he told me, stroking the air. “She came toward me holding your father’s hand. There were dandelion seeds in her hair. As I reached over to brush them off, we were hit by a jolt of static electricity….”
“What dandelion seeds, you old fool?” Baba said. “I was so busy with work and family that I was hardly outside long enough to spot a dandelion back then, let alone have time to get covered in the seeds of the idiot flower. It was dust, no doubt. I had been cleaning the house all morning.”
“Do not be contrary. You felt it too.”
“I felt my back aching. My feet also,” she said, but she gave him a coy smile.
The Swallow’s Nest, it turned out, was a Disney-looking castle perched on the edge of a cliff. It was supposed to be the symbol of the entire Crimean peninsula, but it wasn’t that impressive. It had just one short tower, a few spires, and an observation deck. Anatoly Petrovich informed me that it was built for a German businessman in 1912, which did not pique my interest. It looked even more precarious as we got off the boat and onto solid ground. At the harbor, we passed a battalion of merchants peddling trinkets. Some of them had hawks on their shoulders. I shrieked when one of the birds jumped on my arm and dug its claws into my skin.
“Take your picture, miss?” his owner asked.
“Get it off me!” I shrieked. Baba and her boyfriend laughed.
The owner took it away, leaving me shaken.
“Relax, Oksana,” Baba said. “You are too sensitive.”
I argued that my reaction was appropriate, but she and Anatoly Petrovich walked ahead holding hands, not moved by the fact that I wasn’t following. Fuck the Swallow’s Nest, I decided. It could crumble into the sea at any minute, and I didn’t want to be inside when it did. Besides, it was built after Chekhov’s death and was useless for my research; I needed to see the author’s house, not this cartoonish building.
I surveyed the trinkets for sale, hoping to find something to give Roman if he would accept it when I returned to California. There were miniature versions of the Swallow’s Nest, magnets from Livadia, and paintings of the Foros Church, but there was nothing even vaguely literary, nothing that would make his heart leap. I thought of ways to make Roman laugh the next time we spoke. “You wouldn’t believe it,” I’d say. “The sexual tension was so thick you could cut it with a cane.”
When the lovers returned from the castle, Anatoly Petrovich loped ahead of Baba, gathering wildflowers into a bouquet. From the way he moved, you wouldn’t guess he was seventy-seven, a few years older than my grandmother. I couldn’t help but be charmed by this man, just as Papa had been. They’d stayed in touch until Papa died, calling each other on their birthdays. “Old Tolik, that rascal!” Papa would say when their conversations were through, shaking his head as he hung up the phone, still a schoolboy with a crush on his teacher.
On the boat ride home, I waited for Anatoly Petrovich to step away to smoke so I could be alone with Baba.
I said, “Why can’t you just be with him?”
“It’s complicated,” she said, sniffing her bouquet.
“It doesn’t seem complicated to me.”
“That’s because you don’t know anything. Anything at all,” she said. “You were scared of a bird that can’t even fly.”
* * *
—
Roman had taken me out to dinner a few nights after our first conversation. And then to another dinner. And another. He was nine years older, and his parents had moved to Palo Alto from Leningrad when they were teenagers. I had never met a West Coast—or a second-generation—Russian American Jew before, and everything seemed easier for him. Even when he spoke of how his parents and older sister were doctors who were baffled by his previous career in publishing and by his decision to study literature, he didn’t seem tortured about it. He lived in Sacramento, one train stop away. He was a real man compared to the idiots I’d dated in New York, married corporate losers or failed musicians whose hookup tactics included sharing a cab home and saying “Mind if I come up to piss real quick?” when it pulled up at my place.
I knew he liked me, but he wouldn’t make a move. After our fourth dinner, I decided enough was enough.
I said, “You can only eat so much.”
He laughed and said, “I can’t get enough of you.” As he said it, a waitress hovered over us and pivoted away. He turned toward her and said, “I was talking to my pasta,” but she was gone, and I laughed until his face became somber and he turned off his phone.
“It’s not a great idea for us to be together,” I said. I considered listing all the reasons. There were only six people in our cohort. If it didn’t work out, it would mean years of awkwardness, walking into underground-lair cobwebs to avoid each other. Also, he was my only friend in the state. My other classmates didn’t even get my jokes.
When he came over and finally fucked me that evening, I felt utterly consumed, so beside myself I could barely do more than lie there and howl. It felt criminally good. I saw that I had not been alive until that moment. I had been living a false life, a life the world saw that meant nothing, when inside I had just been waiting for Roman to find me, and he had been waiting for me too. When he collapsed next to me, I waited for him to echo my feelings with one of his careful phrases. When he didn’t, I searched for a way to tell him what he had done to me.
What came out was, “That was like the grand opening of my vagina.”
He laughed, and I made a silent vow to leave the poetic language to the masters I studied. Still, I hoped he’d say something poetic in return.
He gave me a look that frightened me as he dressed. He said, “I need to walk my dog.” I followed him to the door, wishing I could say more and wanting more from him all the same.
“I think I’m in love with you,” he said.
“You don’t think with your heart,” I said, and he gave me a smile, which seemed sad for some reason, and walked to his car at a fast clip. He drove off without turning on his lights.
* * *
—
Baba and I were alone on the beach a week into her suitor’s visit. I still had not found the right gift for Roman. I had been good about only turning on my phone once a day, on the off chance I would hear from him. Baba indulged in one of her romance novels while I reread “The Lady with the Dog” in Russian at a snail’s pace. She kept trying to get me to go in the water, but I refused. It was crawling with jellyfish. I’d never seen so many in my life, and that included every summer I spent at the beach in Florida and later the Jersey Shore, watching my parents drink beers and canoodle. Lately, though, the only time I went to the beach was in the Hamptons with Mama, my brother, and my stepfather, Sergei, who had a summer home with a private beach that made me long for the crowded mess of the Shore, jellyfish and all.
“Don’t be such a spoilsport,” Baba said, nodding at the water once more. “A few jellyfish never hurt anybody.”
“That’s not exactly true.”
“Fine, fine,” she said, frowning at me. “Tell me—how are your studies?”
“Challenging.”
Baba had been a biologist for thirty years and wouldn’t be able to understand my reservations about my murky career path. But I didn’t plan to tell her I might quit, because I didn’t know what I would do next. Maybe I would write poetry again, or try my hand at a novel. Maybe I would get a marketing gig in Silicon Valley. Maybe I would audition to be a clown at the farmers’ market. Or I would leave the country altogether and join my friend Lily at her meditation temple on a remote Korean island. It all seemed equally possible. A subject change was in order.
“Listen to this,” I said, holding up my book. I was at the part of the story where middle-aged Gurov feels overwhelmed by passion when his mistress, Anna, returns to her provincial town after what he thought was just another summer fling. Back in Moscow with his wife and daughter, he can only think of Anna. I read, “She did not visit him in dreams but followed him about everywhere like a shadow and haunted him.”
“That old windbag,” Baba said, shaking her head. “He needs to cut to the chase. Listen to this,” she said, sitting up. “He sucked on her ripe, pulsating breasts like a hungry child. Oh! The sweetness!”
We had captured the attention of a nearby family, but she didn’t care. I tried to hush her.
“No offense, but aren’t you too smart for those books?” I said.
“I’ve read the classics. Who needs to read about suffering at my age? I need look no further than my own life. Look at me running around with Tolik like some hormonal teenager….”
“I think it’s sweet. I just don’t get it. All these years—why didn’t you marry him?”
“Oh, there was some talk about it after your grandfather died. But then Tolik had a heart attack, then Alla got sick, and then the Soviet Union collapsed and I left with your family; you know how it is. And now,” she said, “it is beyond too late, though the rascal keeps coming back. Sure, we could have a few good years together, and then what? I don’t want to spend my dying days cleaning a bedpan. This isn’t like your mother finding Sergei—she is a smart woman and they have many years of companionship ahead of them.”
I tried not to roll my eyes at the thought of my mother’s husband, whom I had been trying to accept. “But you and Anatoly Petrovich love each other,” I said.
“No,” she said. “Your grandfather and I loved each other, forty years ago. It’s too much of an effort to work up the love muscles after that. But this man, I have known him for too long for it to be—as casual as I would like it to be at my age.”
Baba almost never mentioned her dead husband, and I was stunned. By then I knew that when she said her husband had “died of being a Soviet male,” it meant that he’d drunk himself to death, though Mama assured me that they had a great love in spite of that hiccup. I wanted to know so much more, but now was not the time. I needed to refocus her efforts on Anatoly Petrovich.
“You’re thinking too much,” I said. “There’s something to be said for living in the moment….”
“And that’s just what we’re doing here, my darling, isn’t it?” she said. Now she was the one desperate to change the subject. She ran a hand over my tattered book and said, “Don’t worry, my dear. We’ll go to Chekhov’s house soon.”
“I’d love that,” I said, as if this mattered at all.
It occurred to me that all of the things I used to think mattered—running four miles every other day, calling my mother and brother at least once a week, reading books I loved, maybe even my research—didn’t mean a single thing once Roman had repeated my full name back to me.
* * *
—
In the middle of our second semester, Roman told me he was married. We had taken a weekend trip to Berkeley to escape the liquid-hot boredom of Davis and had spent our last morning there walking down Telegraph, passing by the psychedelic pipes and handmade dream catchers and disheveled undergrads. Roman had gone to undergrad there, and I told him I wished I’d gone to a place like Cal instead of Duke, where people cared more about what you wore than what you read.
He came to a halt in front of a bookstore called Randy’s. Books were stacked up outside, and FINAL SALE signs were plastered to the windows of the tired, unremarkable building. He looked like someone dear to him had just gotten hit by a bus.
“You know how much time I spent in there?” he said. “This is where I learned to love books.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You don’t get it.”
He was quiet over lunch, at a restaurant where we ordered fifteen-dollar sandwiches in a cave with tattoo-smattered waiters. I knew I wouldn’t understand what the store meant to him and that it was better to leave it alone. As I watched him staring out the window, it was hard to imagine that this was the person I’d felt closest to in the world just that morning, the man who had gone down on me for so long that afterward, once I recovered, he said, “I guess I am an underground man after all,” making me laugh and laugh as I smacked him with a pillow.
But there were tears in his eyes now. I wanted to fix him so we could go back to having fun.
I said, “One day we can open our own bookstore. After we become insanely rich as Slavic studies professors…” I could see this wasn’t working.
“You do know I’m married, right?” he said, rather sternly. I stared at him, waiting for an explanation. “I thought you knew,” he said.
I held my coffee to steady my hands. How had I not seen it? He wasn’t affectionate in public, though neither was I. He didn’t call me his girlfriend, though I’d never asked him to. He never stayed the night, but he sai
d it was because of his dog. He lived in Sacramento, after all, and who knew what he did there—he had never invited me over. Maybe I did suspect that something was wrong, but I’d chosen to ignore it. I was a poor grad student. I only wanted to use the facts that would strengthen my argument.
He said, “I thought you knew because of that time at dinner. You said it wasn’t a great idea for us to be together—”
“Because we’re in the same tiny fucking program!” I said. “Your dog. Is he even real?”
“Of course he’s real,” he said defensively, as if he had a leg to stand on.
He told me a story I had heard a million times before from the married men I’d slept with in New York. “We were together for so long that I couldn’t imagine being without her,” one said, slipping his ring back on as he left the shitty apartment I shared with four other girls. “She was the only person I had ever been with, and I love her, even if we have nothing in common anymore,” another whispered as he said goodbye to me in front of my downtown office. “Our families love each other. We have the same friends. I can’t disentangle myself,” one man had told me as he drove me away from the city to his cabin.
But those men meant nothing to me. Roman was the only one who mattered, though he told the same story. As he talked, I watched his lips, trying to understand. He said she was like family to him, that he absolutely adored her parents and did not want to let them down, but I didn’t know these parents I would never meet and didn’t care.
The only part of his story that interested me was that his wife was a large-animal vet—he said she was never around, like that would make me feel better. I only felt worse, picturing her as a focused, useful person saving the lives of beloved horses while I sat in a seminar, hungover, debating whether there was historical evidence that Catherine the Great rode her horses to achieve orgasm.
He said, “I’d been fooling myself into thinking everything was fine, until I met you.”
Oksana, Behave! Page 15
