by Lauren Groff
It is cold in the apartment and smells feral, and there are so many beer bottles and takeout boxes that Bit knows immediately Helle is not here. She cannot abide a mess.
They stand in the glum kitchen, and Ilya says in what Bit thinks is a Russian accent, Tell me. So. She is dead.
She is? Bit says.
I don’t know, Ilya says. I thought that is what you have come to say.
No, Bit says. May I sit?
Yes, yes, yes, yes, Ilya says, clearing a chair of newspapers. I am sorry I did not ask first. I believed you were the bearing of bad news.
No news, Bit says. I wanted to see you.
No news is bad news, Ilya says and smiles, showing briefly his brown teeth, the recessed gums. He sits also and fiddles with a cigarette and draws on it, pulling his yellow skin against his bones. When he breathes out, his face is soft again.
And so you have come to ask if Helle is here or if I have seen her. I can only say, No. To my greatest sorrow, as you understand.
Bit does understand. Helle had come to Bit just after her marriage with Ilya had dissolved. He is a violinist with the orchestra and a troubled man. Helle had told Bit about the rages, the furniture splintered on the walls, the time he held her by the throat over the upstairs banister. They had met during Helle’s last time in rehab, the time in her early thirties when she spent a whole year there. She had left Ilya when he grew so sad he tried to stab himself in the heart. He only grew sadder when he woke in the hospital to find her gone. It took him two years to emerge from the hospital and play his instrument again. By then, Helle was with Bit, and Grete was already one.
I should be happy if she were to come to me, Ilya says, now with great effort. But, alas, she will not. I am going home.
Home? Bit says, looking up. Russia?
Odessa, Ilya says gently. I am dying, and would like to die around my own. And this country has lost what has made it magic, of course. The exuberance, you know. Things, I am afraid, are soon to fall apart. The center cannot hold, all that. As it is, it is no different from Ukraine. So, to go back, in the end, from whence I come. There is a certain lovely symmetry, yes?
Bit isn’t sure what to say. A bell chimes down the hill and Bit loses count. He says at last, I am sorry you’re sick. I know we’re not friends, but it makes me very sad to hear that.
Oh, no, I am dying, Ilya says. Not sick. I am born dying. But I am not so unusual. There are many like me in the world. And you, why should you say that we are not friends? You and I are not enemies. Quite the contrary. Brothers-in-arms, the walking wounded. A connection to Helle. We are not so different.
He looks at Bit for a long moment, then looks away. However, if you ask me, and it does strike me that you have not, you might stop looking for her.
Why? Bit says.
I do not think she is alive. I have had a feeling for some time. I am sorry if this hurts you.
Well, I feel strongly that she is, Bit says.
Yes, says Ilya, we are similar in many things, it is true, but we are not the same. You have idealism still.
They sit for a very long time in the sour kitchen. There is a plastic clock on the wall that ticks and ticks and ticks.
Would you like to have my house? Ilya says suddenly.
Oh, Bit says. He imagines Grete here, space, peace, privacy, going to the school at the bottom of the hill. She could have a whole playroom: he could have a darkroom. A quieter pace, the river down the hill murmuring in their dreams at night. But he wouldn’t have his job, his friends.
The house is beautiful, he says, but our lives are in the city and I have no money.
Ilya flicks his delicate violinist’s fingers. No matter, he says. I do not need money where I am going.
Ukraine? Bit says, and Ilya laughs and puts out his fourth cigarette in the short time they have sat together.
I give you it. The house. You can sell, do whatever with it, I don’t care. On one condition, he says and seems almost hysterical with the idea in his head. He leaps up and begins to pace. His hands, loose in the room, seem like spiders, too big for his small body.
What would that be? Bit says, feeling a little sick.
You give me a photograph of the little girl. Helle’s daughter. Your Margrete.
With this, Ilya laughs and laughs, a warm laugh full of a strange dark joy.
Bit takes a moment to think. There is no harm in showing the picture. Bit would have sent photos regularly had he known Ilya wanted them. Yet somewhere within him a small beastie protests, urgently opposed. He waits, trying to understand why.
When Ilya’s smile seems about to break, Bit pulls his wallet from his pocket and takes out the most recent photograph he’d developed of his daughter, Grete holding a jack-o’-lantern, feet sturdy, her smile as broad as the pumpkin’s. There is Abe’s calm confidence in her gaze, Hannah’s lush lips.
Ilya takes the photo and stares at Grete for a long time. Bit squirms. He is just about to ask for it back, but then Ilya looks up and there are tears in his eyes. He smiles, but there is something of the crushed insect to his mouth. He shakes Bit’s hand and Bit squeezes back too hard, and belatedly remembers the tender violinist’s bones. Ilya winces, holding his hand to his chest.
I’m sorry, Bit says.
Ah. I won’t be needing the hand either, Ilya says. So. We have a deal. He shows Bit out, patting him gently on the shoulder.
Have a good trip home, Bit says. Yes, Ilya says, slowly. Yes, I think it will be good. And with a wink, he shuts the door.
Bit comes home on the clacketing train. There is a woman at the end of the car, facing him, whom he had barely noticed when he first got on, but who becomes more beautiful the more he looks at her. She has long wing-black hair and heavy brows and the kind of nose that reminds Bit of Greek statuary. Her earrings catch the glint from her overhead reading lamp, and gold coins of light dance on her jawbones. He would capture her in collodion, with its beautiful imperfections, its long, slow stare. Her hands are quick and nervous when she turns the pages of her book, and her face so sensitive and mobile that it is almost as if he is reading along with her: here a beautiful moment, here a tense one, here a release into a laugh, here a love scene. She bites her lip, and her face fills with a gladness that makes Bit know how she would be in bed, giving, soft, bird cries rising up from her throat. He could love this woman, he knows. There is nothing between them but an aisle and some seats and a quantity of air to move through; nothing to keep him from sitting down and her shy smile lifting from the book.
Hello, he would say. Hello, she would say. And the rest of his life could begin.
There is nothing keeping him, that is, but Helle. Her invisible hands are fetters, her invisible eyes watching. Her parsnip white body that he cannot stop believing is, just now, waiting for him at home, in the small close apartment, dozing until he slips back into the sheets they bought together those very few years ago.
The woman stands at an anonymous stop and moves to the door. She goes out to the platform and the train begins moving again. One blip in the window, shining with street light, and there goes the woman, forever gone to him.
In the morning after their first night back together in over twenty years, he ran out for Nutella sandwiches and coffee, and found Helle crying great ripping sobs when he came back. It took hours for her to say, I’ve done so many bad things in my life. I don’t deserve you.
The city was toxic to her, full of temptation and fear. He’d had no money. He was assisting photography shoots and selling only a few pieces a year, and his salary at the university was laughable. His apartment was above a Chinese restaurant; he thought his heart palpitations were coming from the MSG aerosoled into the air. But he borrowed from Cole, from Sweetie, from Regina and Ollie, and rented a little stone farmhouse in the country for a year.
If asked what time in his adult life was nearly as round and full as his childhood, nearly perfect, Bit would have said this year in the drafty old farmhouse. Every day waking to Hel
le in tattered pajamas and woolen socks, at the kitchen table, a cup of tea steaming in her hands. Those months of lying in the grass, of walks through the hills, of wanders through damp, chill barns overladen with antiques. Helle could spend an entire afternoon watching a swallow build its nest in the eaves. They drove all the way to Vermont for the farmers’ markets. The spring eased into summer, into fall. Helle let her hair grow out, gained weight so she looked flushed, not skeletal, and, to her delight, grew breasts for the first time. By October, she was showing Grete.
They had the luxury of time. They spent hours talking, and Bit would describe the life he longed for their baby to have, what kind of a world they would build for her. One night, watching the long angle of Helle under the tented sheet, he described a tight, beautiful community, filled with people he loved like family, living closely and relying on one another, a world with music and stories and thought and joy, of earthy happiness. He realized as he spoke that it sounded like Arcadia and laughed as he said so.
Helle’s voice, so distant, when she said: You’re not remembering right. Your memory’s doing some kind of crazy gymnastic routine to get happy out of our childhood.
What? Bit said, feeling a creeping sickness in him.
Oh, Bit. I can’t believe you don’t remember. It was cold, Helle said. We were never warm. We never had enough to eat. We never had enough clothes. I had to wake up every single night to someone fucking someone in the Pink Piper. Everywhere I was smelled like spunk. Handy let me drink the acid Slap-Apple when I was like five. What kind of hallucinations does a five-year-old have? For two months, I saw flames coming out of my mother’s mouth every time she talked. We were like guests at the Mad Hatter’s table, but didn’t even know the world was flipped around.
Helle turned to him, her belly swollen. Her eyes were red at the rims. She said, I’m dying of boredom, Bit. I want Thai food. I want life. This was good for a little while, this isolation, the little house in the middle of nowhere. But two people isn’t enough, Bit. It’s not enough. Let’s go back to the city. Please, please.
He didn’t say, Not enough for what? He didn’t say, Do you think you’re ready for that? He said, All right, and called the landlord and began to pack.
Amenable Bit, good-hearted Bit, gentle and generous Bit. He hates that man. Wishes he’d had any kind of backbone, the guts to say No. If he had, she would still be here. If he were more commanding, he would not be a person people would leave.
The black-and-white darkroom is in the basement of the arts building, which has long shadowy hallways and furnaces that clank and murmur. When he is alone here at night, the wood floors release the pressure built up over the day in sharp cracks that sound like footsteps. The only time he can use the darkroom for his own work is during the holidays, like this Thanksgiving week, when his students are all home, getting drunk, seeing their high school sweethearts in bars.
Hannah and Grete are at a play for children tonight, dressed like glamour queens, with sparkle on their cheekbones. Bit will use his time as well as he can. He had felt the old flame in himself. The tingle in the fingertips. He is eager to begin. He comes in whistling; someone has left the safelight burning, he sees with dismay, and takes off his coat and rolls his sleeves. When he looks up, he sees that the dark heap by the bank of enlargers is a person, watching him.
Hello, Professor Stone, says Sylvie.
A claustrophobic feeling thickens in the room. Bit frowns and says, Sylvie. What are you doing here?
I’m passionate about my art, she says, and she laughs.
Bit wavers. What is it about this girl that bothers him so much? He is half ready to get to work, start developing his film, damn the impropriety, when she speaks.
Actually, she says, I’m getting away from my family. Everyone is drunk and fighting. My dad is off somewhere doing work, per usual. We’re such a mess. Her voice throbs a little.
Sorry to hear that, he says. Families are tough.
You getting away from your family too? she says.
No. Holidays are when I get my own work done here. I can only work alone.
She smiles, her cheeks dimpling in the dim red light. But with me here, she says, you’re not alone.
Exactly, he says. He puts his coat on again. Happy Thanksgiving, he says and goes out the door, and even though Sylvie calls out, Wait, I’m sorry, he doesn’t stop.
He is irritated, irrationally angry. To calm down, he stops on the way home at an all-night diner where he has a linoleum table and a pot of coffee to himself. When people come in, he tries to guess who they are. Tonight it is too cold to tell. The insomniacs could be whores, could be drunken revelers, could be wealthy divorcees hungering for a hand on their skin. They sit here in the darkness, trusting. That the coffee will be hot and unpoisoned. That no raging madman will come in with a gun or a bomb.
It leaves him breathless at times, how much faith people put in one another. So fragile, the social contract: we will all stand by the rules, move with care and gentleness, invest in the infrastructure, agree with the penalties of failure. That this man driving his truck down the street won’t, on a whim, angle into the plate glass and end things. That the president won’t let his hand hover over the red button and, in moment of rage or weakness, explode the world. The invisible tissue of civilization: so thin, so easily rendable. It’s a miracle that it exists at all.
He imagines snapping his fingers, making all the people in the diner stand, at once, and become their better selves. The woman with the cragged oak-bark face throws off her hood and shakes her hair and her age drops off of her like bandages. The man with a monk’s tonsure, muttering to himself, leaps onto a table and strikes music from the air. Out of the bowels of the kitchen the weary cooks, small brown people, cartwheel and break-dance, spinning like upended beetles on the ground and their faces crack into glee and they are suddenly lovely to look at, and the dozen customers start up all at once into loud song, voices broken and beautiful. The song rises and infiltrates the city and wakes the inhabitants, one by one, from their own dark dreams, and all across the island, people sit up in bed and listen to it lap around them, an ocean of kindness, filling them, making them forget all the evil leaching out of the world for a very long moment, making them forget everything but the song.
He laughs to himself and the vision dissolves. There is lassitude, the door opening to the cold air and single bundled bodies coming in. The silent waitress ministers to those who sit down. The night draws into morning. Here they are forever, sitting at their tables, separate, alone.
It is Thanksgiving Day.
Grete is napping. The Tofurky roasts among the root vegetables, and Hannah has just sat down beside Bit at the kitchen table, taken a long breath, dived in. She is saying, The trouble is, Bit, that you can’t start to live your life again until you make yourself let go—But the doorbell interrupts her.
Grocery delivery, Bit says, though he knows it isn’t. He feels a little ill. You can give me the business after I tip the man.
All right, she says, disgustedly. She was early at the booze, is on her third tumbler of bourbon already.
Bit buzzes without answering and holds open the door. The elevator pings and the doors part to Abe’s beaming face. He is the same, always. His face has as few wrinkles as Bit’s, and his shoulders and arms are vast from wheelchair racing. He gives Bit a kiss on the cheek, and here is the old scour of beard against Bit’s skin. Abe gestures at the bottle of Pappy Van Winkle bourbon on his lap, Hannah’s favorite, and winks.
Just what we need, Bit says loudly. You can put the groceries down on the kitchen table.
Hannah is rehearsing her interrupted argument with Bit when Abe wheels in. She goes very still. He pushes himself to her. They are the same height, sitting, and he takes her hand. She lets him.
Oh, Abe, she says, after a while. She can’t keep the happiness from her face.
I know, he says. I’m an asshole.
Yes, she says.
But you
love me.
Unfortunately, she says.
Haven’t I been punished enough?
Hannah wipes her eyes, still smiling. The problem is, she says, I’m really only punishing myself.
So you think, says Abe. I can’t live without you, my Hannah.
Well, that was my plan, she says. I wanted to kill you.
I know, he says. But wait until you see the house. Honestly, it’s a thing of beauty.
Was it worth it? she says, sour again.
Not a single day of our separation, he says. Not a moment. But if you come back to me, I can have both. The answer, then, would be a solid maybe.
She looks at Abe, her face drawn with exhaustion. Bit is wrenched for a moment out of his own sorrow. He sees now what he should have been attentive to all this time: the terrible hollowness of Hannah’s days. How her body at night would reach for the warmth of Abe beside her, as it had lain there for forty years, only to find a cold sheet; the dry, dusty feel of her anger, how stuffed she was with it, how bitter it tasted on the back of her tongue.
She scowls. Abe smiles and touches her nose with the tip of his finger.
Oh, all right, she says at last. I thought I’d make you beg more, but who cares. We’re not getting any younger. She looks at Bit significantly and says, You only have so many days in your life to try to be happy.
She turns back to Abe and says, Give me a few more weeks until the semester is over and I’ll drive back home to you. You irresponsible, irritating, lying old man.
Abe smiles and leans to kiss her, but she’s not ready for that and pulls away. God. You always get what you want, she says.
Although his voice is apologetic, Abe says quietly, I do.
They eat at four, when the city is so quiet it could be a village. It is dark enough that the thousands of windows Bit can see from his apartment have begun to glow.
This is nice, says Abe, looking out the window at the flicks of falling snow. I always thought it was odd, you living in the city when you were born and raised on a commune in the middle of nowhere. Having to deal with all the pollution and stink and poverty and rats and junk. But days like this, I get it. It’s almost sweet, today. Or, at least, palatable.
