Our Woman in Moscow

by Beatriz Williams

  Daddy had laughed. “She’s a beauty, all right. Poor little Iris.”

  Iris hadn’t stuck around to hear what Grandpa Walker thought of that, or maybe she just didn’t remember. But she did remember those words poor little Iris. They had whacked her like an electric shock. True, she’d heard that kind of observation plenty of times before—pretty much everybody was dazzled by Ruth and felt only pity for Iris, if they noticed her at all. But she’d never before heard Daddy call her poor little Iris. Until now, Daddy had always treated the two of them with strict evenhandedness. Everyone else might exclaim over Ruth’s beauty and brains and spirit and then turn politely to Iris and squint up his face with the effort of conjuring a compliment, but Daddy never failed to dole out his admiration in equal shares. So it shocked Iris to learn the truth. What he really thought of his two daughters.

  As it turned out, of course, those were among the last words she ever heard from her father, so they echoed in Iris’s head ever after—poor little Iris, the diminutive to Ruth’s superlative.

  So maybe that was why Iris climbed laboriously down all those stairs and hobbled with her crutches and her plaster cast to the Vespri Siciliani to meet Sasha Digby for coffee. To Sasha, she wasn’t poor little Iris. She was dolce Iris. Yesterday evening, he’d looked at Ruth as if she were loathsome, and he’d turned to Iris and kissed her hand. Iris would have hobbled ten miles to meet Sasha Digby for coffee, but luckily he chose the café with consideration for her injuries, and she only had to hobble a couple of hundred yards before she arrived there at ten minutes past eleven, a little breathless.

  Sasha rushed out from beneath the awning to help her with her crutches. He almost carried her to her seat. He called the waiter and ordered her a cappuccino and a piece of olive oil cake, specialty of the house, and he beamed at her.

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t come. I thought it was too much trouble.”

  “Of course not. I need a little fresh air.”

  “Then I was worried about all those stairs.”

  “Ruth helped me.”

  “Oh, of course.” The smile drooped a little. “Did you tell her where you were going?”

  Iris hesitated for an instant before she decided that she would never lie to this man, ever. “No,” she said firmly.

  “Why not?”

  “Because she thinks she should protect me, for some reason.”

  The smile ratcheted back up. “I can’t imagine why.”

  “I’m not as innocent as I look, you know. I’ve read Balzac.”

  “I know. I saw you in the museum, remember?” He leaned forward. “Let them think what they want, I say. Let them underestimate you.”

  Before Iris could come up with anything to reply to that, the waiter arrived with the coffee and the cake. Sasha asked did she mind if he smoked. She said of course not.

  “But you don’t smoke, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I never wanted to.” The cappuccino was almost too hot to sip, but Iris tasted it anyway. It was so much easier to pay attention to coffee than to Sasha. He was so big and electric! And they were sitting so close! This was nothing like sitting together in the hospital. This was like a man and a woman who were interested in each other, meeting for coffee to find out just how interested they really were. Sasha’s long legs stretched out past the opposite edge of the round table. His shoulder nearly touched hers. He wore a conservative suit of navy blue, probably the same one he’d worn at the Villa Borghese. His big, bony fingers struck the match and lit the cigarette that stuck from his mouth.

  Iris liked the shape of his hand and the smell of strong Italian coffee and the proximity of his leg to hers. She loved his eyes, even though she wasn’t looking at them.

  “Tell me about Spain,” she said.

  “Spain? What about it?”

  “Why did you go?”

  He made a ribbon of smoke. “It was the thing to do, I guess. If you were a young fellow just out of college, impatient with injustice—”

  “A Communist?”

  “And if I was?”

  “I’d say it sounds just like you. Filled with hope and idealism. Were you?”

  He smiled. “Not a party member, no. But I had Communist friends, and I wasn’t unsympathetic. Capitalism’s a shambles, misery everywhere, that’s obvious to anyone who thinks. And none of your capitalist so-called democracies gave a damn about Hitler.”

  “You must have been devastated about the pact. The Nazis and the Soviets.”

  He looked away. “I was disappointed, yes. But every country’s got a right to protect itself, even the Soviets, and by then everyone else was just kowtowing to Germany. I guess Stalin did the best he could. I don’t say I agree, I don’t say I wasn’t disappointed, but who gave in to Germany at Munich? Not the Soviets.”

  Iris looked at the side of his face and thought how sharp and noble his profile was. “Is that why you ended up in the State Department?”

  “Oh, muddled my way in, really. Went to Spain, as I said, with the Herald-Tribune. Saw enough of war to make me think I should try to do something to prevent it, so I came home and crammed for the civil service exam. Spent a year in Washington before they sent me here, summer of 1939.”

  “Only a year? They must think highly of you.”

  “Or wanted to get rid of me.”

  “What about the war?” she asked.

  “What about it?”

  “What will you do? If Mussolini goes with Hitler, I mean.”

  “Not if. When.”

  “Well, then? What happens? You can’t stay here, can you?”

  Sasha set the cigarette in the ashtray. “Of course we stay. A neutral embassy plays a vital role in war. How else do we get all these Jews out of Europe? Embassy staff stays to the bitter end, it’s part of the job. You, on the other hand.”

  “Me?”

  “You and your sister. You’ll have to evacuate.”

  Iris glanced to the side, where a man and a woman shared a little round table identical to theirs. The man wore a plain gray-green uniform and the woman sat so close to him, you couldn’t see a single crack of sunlight between them. The man nuzzled her cheek and whispered something. The woman ducked her head and just like that—quick as a snake—he kissed her neck. Iris was mesmerized. She tried to keep her mind on the war.

  “Ruth says Hitler’s going to invade France any day now.”

  “She might be right. But Mussolini won’t declare himself, not at first. He’ll wait to see which way the wind blows.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “He’s a canny old bastard, that’s all. Like all Fascists. They don’t care about ideals.”

  To Iris’s right, the man looked up from his lover’s neck and winked at Iris. She tore herself away and glanced up at the side of Sasha’s face. “But you do.”

  Sasha looked down and smiled at her. Probably he saw the whole exchange—Iris mesmerized by the intimate couple, the man winking back.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  Sasha insisted on walking her back to her apartment and helping her up the stairs. It was all his fault, he said, because he should’ve taken her to coffee that day at the Villa Borghese. He should have worked up the nerve to greet her sooner.

  “How long were you following me?” she asked.

  “Since you walked in.”

  “I didn’t realize I was so intimidating.”

  They paused on the landing between the first and second floors, so Iris could catch her breath. The stairway was shaded and cool. Sasha kept his hand under her elbow. “Harry tells me you’re an artist yourself.”

  “Did he say that? I draw, that’s all.”

  “Are you any good?”

  She looked right up into his eyes and said, “I think so.”

  “May I see some of your work?”

  “Right now, you mean?”

  He glanced up the stairs. “Why not?”

  Iris ch
ecked her watch. Ruth was supposed to have a gig at noon today, and it was ten past the hour. “Only if you have the time.”

  “I’ll make time.”

  The apartment was empty, thank God. Iris called Ruth’s name, just to be sure.

  “She’s at a photo shoot,” Iris said to Sasha.

  “Of course.”

  The apartment seemed larger than before. The crutches echoed from the walls as Iris opened the window shutters to let the sunshine in. “Would you like something to drink?” she asked.

  “Don’t trouble yourself. I can fetch it myself.”

  Sasha disappeared into the kitchen and Iris swung herself into the armchair, which still stood like a throne in the middle of the floor. She propped up her ankle with a sigh. Sasha returned with two glasses of gin and tonic. He handed her one.

  “It’s very strong,” she gasped.

  Instead of taking the nearest chair, Sasha walked to the window and leaned his shoulder against the frame. His eyes seemed to disappear underneath his heavy brow. “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a pair of twin sisters less alike than you and Ruth.”

  “That’s what everyone says. I take after my mother, I guess.”

  “And Ruth? She takes after your father?”

  “No, she’s more like my aunt Vivian. Tall and blond.” Iris smiled. “Like you.”

  “Then I guess it’s true, that we’re attracted to our opposite.”

  Iris coughed on her drink. Sasha started toward her, but she waved him away and hoisted herself back on her feet. “I should get those drawings before they miss you at the embassy.”

  “There’s no rush,” he said.

  She hobbled to her bedroom and pulled the sketchbook from her nightstand. When she turned around, Sasha stood in the doorway, holding his drink and hers.

  Iris held out the sketchbook. “Be kind.”

  He set down her drink and took the sketchbook from her hand. “I am always kind, Iris.”

  Iris retreated to sit on the edge of the bed, sipping her gin and tonic. The mattress was old and creaked every time she shifted, so she sat still and looked around the room, everywhere except directly at Sasha, who leaned one elbow on the dresser and examined her sketches, one after another. He furrowed his brow and took his time. Whenever she glanced from the corner of her eye to his face, he was frowning. Her hands shook a little. She drank the rest of the gin and tonic in a gulp, so she wouldn’t spill it, and tucked her other hand under her thigh.

  “These are very good,” said Sasha.

  “Do you think so?”

  “Yes.” He pointed to Ruth’s profile. “You’ve got the sense of her, not just the look of her. You can almost tell what she thinks of the book. And the potted palm, the proportions just right. Excellent.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It’s how you look at things, you know. It’s how you really see them.”

  He stared at her again with his technicolor eyes, as if to prove his point—as if Iris were the only person in the universe, the only person who mattered. Iris couldn’t speak. Ruth would probably have had some clever reply ready, but then Ruth could never have drawn those sketches. It was one or the other, really.

  Sasha set down the drawings.

  The bedroom was not quite square, maybe twelve feet by ten feet. The door was open partway, but the stuffy air and the shuttered window made Iris feel that they were together in some kind of cave. This room, in which she’d slept for months, became a new room altogether. It even smelled different, because of the gin and tonic and all the cigarette smoke steeped in Sasha’s clothes. He moved his arm, and Iris thought he was maybe going to fish out his cigarettes, but he only leaned his elbow on the dresser as he stared at her.

  “Does your family understand this? How good you are, I mean?”

  Iris shook her head.

  “No, I guess they wouldn’t. Your crowd—our crowd—you know who I mean—they think they have taste, but they only like what they’re told to like. What’s already been approved by some gallery or museum or the arts page of the New York Times.”

  “Some man, probably.”

  Sasha’s eyebrows rose. “Yes, some man, undoubtedly. Nobody takes a woman’s art seriously. Not even women.”

  “Of course not. It’s too sentimental, isn’t it? Too banal or trivial or domestic. Not important enough.”

  “What’s important,” Sasha said, “is what’s important to you.”

  “Oh, that’s easy to say—”

  “No, I mean it. As long as you know you’ve done something worthwhile.”

  “But what use is that? If nobody else cares. If nobody else sees.”

  “I care.” He set his fingertips on the sketchbook like a spider. “I see them.”

  He wasn’t looking at the drawings, though. He was looking at her—so earnestly that Iris thought maybe he was looking at the ugly bruise on her cheekbone, or a smear of dirt, or some other mesmerizing flaw. She flexed her fingers around the empty glass. She had something to say, but she didn’t know how to put it into words. There was nothing in the whole English language that could express what she was thinking.

  Sasha turned his head away. He lifted her hairbrush and ran his thumb along the bristles, put it down and examined a lampshade—a book—he grunted when he saw the title, The Good Earth—approval or disapproval?—the cheap fountain pen on her desk. When he set the pen down again, it rolled right to the edge, and he caught it just in time, though his head had already turned in the opposite direction, toward the mirror above the dresser. Iris could just see the reflection of the left side of his face, and it startled her. He looked so old! Not like an old man, of course, but a man of experience. Worldly. A dozen years older than she was.

  But—he was nervous! He was more nervous than he was in the hospital, when he all but admitted that he was in love with her—yes, she was sure of it, he was in love with her!—all because he was in her bedroom now, not a hospital room, and there was no nurse hovering by the door and no sister in the other room—nobody at all but the two of them.

  His eyes met hers in the mirror and looked swiftly away.

  A burst of joy rushed all the way to Iris’s fingertips. Joy and—what’s the word?—not so much confidence as sureness, the knowledge that she was absolutely right, that their meeting here in Rome, two American misfits who belonged to nobody else, bore the fingerprint of fate. She could say this to herself—fingerprint of fate—because she was a romantic and so was he.

  It wasn’t easy to stand up when you had a broken ankle, and your arm was already sore from propping yourself on crutches all morning and all yesterday afternoon, but Iris figured this was the most important thing she’d ever do in her life. And maybe it was. She made enough noise that Sasha turned around, a little alarmed. The room was small, remember, and it took only a step or two to reach him. She ran her fingertips along the line of that pugnacious, determined brow. She continued along the side of his face and the rim of his ear until her palm settled on the warm skin at the back of his neck. They kissed each other at exactly the same instant.

  Iris didn’t tell him she’d never been to bed with a man before, and he didn’t ask. Only afterward, when he lay shuddering on top of her, and she gripped his wet shoulders for dear life, did he whisper—humbly, wonderingly—into her hair, Was I the first?

  She nodded.

  He lifted himself on his elbows and stared down at her. His skin gleamed, his cheekbones were as bright as raspberries. His eyes were so blue, it was unearthly. Her damp stomach stuck to his damp stomach, how extraordinary. Inside her, he was perfectly still. She wondered vaguely if she would have a baby. Wasn’t that what happened when you went to bed with a man? But the thought didn’t frighten her. Nothing frightened her anymore.

  Well? she whispered.

  He dipped his head and kissed her lips. You’re very brave, he told her.

  Brave how? she wondered. Brave for not telling him she was a virgin? Or brave for going to bed with
him at all, in the middle of the day, in the middle of Rome, when she was an innocent and they’d only just met?

  She slid her hands southward until she reached the curve of his bottom, which felt to her as if it had spent its whole life just waiting for her palms.

  Well, I’m glad, she said.

  After a few more drowsy moments, Sasha lifted himself away, opened the shutters, and walked to the bathroom. He returned a moment later with a damp cloth, which he handed diffidently to Iris, and picked up his clothes from the floor. She rolled laboriously on her side and watched him. Through the window came a draft of warm spring air, smelling of sunshine and metropolitan grime. She offered to knot his necktie, so he knelt on the floor next to the bed. When she was done, he picked up her clothes, folded them, and put them on the nightstand. Then he kissed her.

  “I’d stay all afternoon if I could,” he said.

  “No, you’d better go.”

  “When will I see you again?”

  “Whenever you want. But not here. I don’t want Ruth to know. Not yet. She’ll have kittens.”

  He winced. “No, of course not. How do I find you? Telephone?”

  “Yes, telephone. I’ll make sure to answer first.”

  Iris marveled at herself, so composed and assured, making arrangements with her lover. What a difference from an hour ago! Now she’d seduced a man. There was no question who had seduced whom—she was the one who unbuttoned his shirt—she was the one who drew his hands to the zipper of her dress. Objectively, she knew she was bruised all over, that she had a plaster cast on her left leg plus stitches on her forehead near her hairline. Still she felt utterly beautiful, absolutely irresistible. She idled her hand on his cheek.

  “Damn it all,” he said. “I want to see you again. Tonight. And the next night, and the next, and all the nights after that.”

  “Then Ruth will know for sure.”

  He swore again. “Can’t you get away at all?”

  She squinted. “I could tell her I’m going away on a drawing holiday. There’s this class I’ve been taking at the American Institute. I could say we’re going to sketch monasteries in Tuscany or something.”