“We’ll have to figure out how to take care of it,” Billy said. “What it eats and so on.”
Jane thought they must both be thinking the same thing: that Felicia would know how to take care of the snake. The ghost of Felicia, glimmering faintly, seemed to float just behind them as they moved up the street. Now that it was dark, it was hard to stay strictly to one side of the sidewalk. Once Billy’s arm accidentally brushed Jane’s sleeve, and she stepped quickly onto the grass.
“It’s too dark for you to bike,” Jane said. “And anyhow, you’ll have to take the snake. I’ll drive you.”
“Thanks,” Billy said.
So Jane went down to the basement and unearthed the fish tank from the storage room and brought it upstairs, while Billy stayed with Maisie and made sure the snake didn’t disappear under the couch or into the radiator screen. They put it on some newspaper in the tank, and Billy carried it out to the car. All the time Jane kept thinking how strange it felt to have the three of them working together as a family, and yet how natural and ordinary. As she strapped Maisie into her car seat and got behind the wheel, it was almost as if they were all going on a family trip together.
Masha had gone out and carried snakes; now Maisie had a snake, too. Because of Felicia—Felicia was the link in the chain. Her ghost had followed them into the car, would follow them forever, one way or another. If she forgave Billy or didn’t forgive him, it wouldn’t make any difference. But if she didn’t have this baby—if she had an abortion instead—there would be a new ghost, a second ghost, haunting them.
“This thing I told you tonight,” she said, heading out Johnson Street to the other side of the isthmus, “I know it’s terrible timing.”
Billy’s hands gripped the sides of the tank. “It’s not your fault,” he said. Then after a minute he thought to ask, “How are you feeling? Physically, I mean.”
They drove past the store that sold polished rocks, the coffee shop with the best peach muffins, the sandwich place they’d eaten at the day they’d flown out to look at houses. Less than a year here and already they had a history, as a family, in this place. “I’ve felt better,” Jane said.
Billy spoke out suddenly in the dark. “I just wanted to say—again, clearly—how sorry I am for what happened. What I did. It was wrong: inexcusable, and I know that. I want to make sure you know I know that.” His voice was tense and urgent but so quiet she almost couldn’t hear him over the engine.
Jane turned on her brights, speeded up. She wanted to tell him not to talk about it. She wanted to just keep driving—all the way out to the edge of the city and beyond, the three of them shooting through the darkness together, not knowing where they were headed exactly and not caring. Instead, half a mile up the road, she slowed and turned down a side street. In the back seat Maisie had fallen asleep.
“So,” she said. “Are you still seeing her?”
“No!” Billy said. He sounded truly shocked. “No, of course I’m not!”
Jane thought about that, waited to see how it made her feel. Better—a little better. But there was still something else she needed to ask.
“How many times did you sleep with her?”
Billy didn’t answer for a minute. Then he said, “I don’t see what good it does, talking about it.”
“You brought it up,” Jane said. “How many times?”
“Three,” Billy said.
Three! It could have been much worse, of course, but still somehow Jane had expected him to say one, only one, just one time: an aberration. But three. That was enough to fall into habits, to develop a routine. Her hands grew hot on the steering wheel. She wondered whether three referred to the number of different times they’d been together or to the number of total times they’d had intercourse in, perhaps, a single night. Which was worse? “Why did you have to do it!” she cried, pulling up in front of Vince’s house. She couldn’t tell whether she meant the question rhetorically or not.
Billy hung his head—or else he was just looking down at the snake. “I’m a jackass,” he said.
“No,” Jane said, “you’re not! That’s why it’s so hard to understand!” And for a moment, she felt better. She liked this—this intimate conversation in the dark car. It was painful, but it also felt true to her: honest. She felt she was on the verge of some kind of a breakthrough and she waited, hands still on the steering wheel, but it didn’t come. It didn’t come the next moment either or the moment after that, and by the time Billy opened the door and ferried first the snake in its tank and then Maisie into the house, the feeling had disappeared altogether.
Chapter Eighteen
THE NEXT DAY, Saturday, Jane decided to go see Sigelman. She got into the car and drove over to Shorewood, where trees shaded the quiet streets and flowers bloomed in every yard, pink azaleas and bloodred roses, purple irises dripping white and yellow beards, magnolia trees heavy with waxy blossoms. The whole world teemed with growth and color while Jane, her hands icy, rang the bell and waited, rang it again. At last she heard footsteps and the door opened, but it wasn’t Sigelman standing in the hall. It was Felicia, dressed for summer in yellow nylon track shorts and a red ribbed wife-beater stretched over her pear-shaped breasts. Her toe-nails were painted orange, and her hair was pulled back in a long, thick braid. Her eyes were a startling green behind gold-rimmed glasses, greener than Jane remembered.
Jane forced herself to speak first. “Hello, Felicia,” she said. “What are you doing here?” A cool anger ticked through her, giving energy to her tight smile.
Felicia tossed her head so that her shiny braid swung. Her eyes glinted behind the glasses. “I was just doing a few things for Otto,” she said. “He hasn’t been feeling well.”
Otto! Jane thought. She stood up a little straighter and narrowed her eyes, feeling her face harden.
“He’s agreed to supervise my thesis,” Felicia continued. “Of course, I’ve changed my topic slightly.”
“Have you,” Jane said, and then laughter, like a string of bubbles escaping from a bottle, burbled up from her chest. The world seemed suddenly sharp and obscene and hilarious. Even the pattern of blue chevrons on the wallpaper looked dangerously jagged. Felicia and Sigelman! “How nice,” Jane said, struggling to control herself. “He’s very brilliant, as of course you know!” Fury burned from her like a crown of light.
Felicia fixed her cold green eyes on Jane, then looked away and rubbed at a spot on the hem of her shorts with studied boredom. “Very brilliant,” she echoed.
“Can I come in?” Jane said.
A flicker of irritation crossed Felicia’s face. “He’s sleeping.” But just then footsteps rattled the ceiling, and someone coughed, and Sigelman’s voice called down the stairs, “Who is it? Who’s there?”
Jane and Felicia looked at each other, hard. “It’s Professor Levitsky,” Felicia called back up, still holding Jane’s gaze.
“Really!” Sigelman sounded pleased. “Let her in. I’ll be down in a minute.”
Felicia stood back, and Jane stepped into the house and went into the living room. The drapes were closed, and the room felt chilly despite the warm day. Felicia followed her and went around opening the curtains as though she lived there, which Jane supposed maybe she did. “Felicia,” Jane said. “Why did you sleep with Billy?”
Felicia stopped what she was doing. A complicated look crossed her face, part surprise and part satisfaction. “It was just sex,” she said, the way Jane sometimes said to a complaining student, “It’s just a B.”
Dusty sunshine flooded in through Sigelman’s windows, so much brilliant glare it was hard to see. There were so many possible responses to this absurdity, ranging all the way from hilarity to violence, that Jane hardly knew which one to choose.
“But he’s my husband,” she said at last, settling on artlessness, though she knew even as she spoke that it was pointless, that the fact of her marriage meant nothing to Felicia.
Felicia shrugged. “Nobody forced him,” she said.
“Felicia!” Sigelman’s phlegmy voice trickled down the stairs. “Pick up those things now, won’t you?”
“I have to go,” Felicia said. She turned her head and called, “I’ll be back soon, Otto,” and sauntered out of the house.
The door slammed shut. The house fell silent. Jane went to the window and looked out at the sunny front yard, at Felicia jangling the keys to Sigelman’s silver Saab, her braid swinging like a filly’s tail. If Jane had had a rock in her hand at that moment, she might have thrown it, but at the same time a cooler part of her head was already wondering how things would end for Felicia, whether her brains and body would get her to the top or not. Would some jealous wife or former lover shoot her down, wreak some clever or violent revenge? Would she fall in love? Was she capable of love? Jane remembered how good she had been with Maisie—patient and always striking the right tone. There was no making sense of people, she thought. People, in their contradictory muddle, were beyond her.
The car backed down the driveway and sped off down the street, sunlight glinting off the windshield. Jane hoped it would crash, go up in a plume of fiery smoke. She hoped it would drive away into the morning and never come back. But she knew she would never be rid of Felicia, or of the other Felicias of the world—the people who would take whatever they could get by whatever means necessary. The trick was to learn to live with them—live among them—without turning into one. Was she capable of that?
The stairs creaked as Sigelman descended. It took a long time for him to get down them, and then at last he came into the room and stood for a moment in the doorway, breathing effortfully, one hand on the jamb to support himself. Jane had seen him only a couple of weeks before, but he had changed visibly. He looked haggard and gray, and he seemed to have lost weight. This wasn’t a virus or the flu. His flesh hung from his bones. Jane thought of the scene in The Lime Trees in which Sergey visits his brother Fyodor, who is dying of consumption:
His skin had the delicacy of tissue paper, so that it was hard to believe the bones would not break through at the slightest movement. His eyes burned like black fire in his skull as though all that remained of life in him was concentrated there, glowing and smoldering, fighting not to go out.
“I didn’t know you were sick, Otto,” she said.
Sigelman shuffled over to a rocking chair, moved a stack of papers to the floor, and sat down. Jane cleared a place for herself on the couch. She wanted to jump up again and open the windows or offer to make coffee—any excuse to get herself out of the room—but she forced herself to stay and look at Sigelman. She thought again of Sergey’s horror at the sight of his brother and his amazement at his wife Natalya’s apparent ease in the face of Fyodor’s nearness to death:
Women, Sergey thought, seemed to have a natural understanding in the face of death. They knew what to do, where to look, how to behave. Death was not for them—for his wife or his sister-in-law either, the pretty Yelena—the same horror it was for a man.
Shows what you know, Grigory Andrevich Karkov, Jane thought. She said, “What’s wrong with you, Otto?”
He screwed up his face in disgust. “Let’s not talk about illness,” he said. “It’s so boring.” He looked at her to see if she would challenge this, his skin the color of wet cement, his legs in baggy trousers poking out from under his robe.
“All right,” Jane said, happy to pretend he wasn’t dying if that was what he wanted. The edges of her lips turned up, though less in a smile than in a look of grim determination. “Let’s talk about work, then.”
“Work,” Sigelman agreed. “My favorite subject.”
“I went to see Greg Olen.” She watched Sigelman. His eyes flickered, but that was all.
“Did you,” he said.
“He showed me the manuscript,” Jane said.
Sigelman hesitated, as though deciding whether to deny he knew what she was talking about. But then he said easily, “I’m surprised. After all, I told him it was worthless.”
“You lied to him,” Jane said.
Sigelman leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes, rocking slowly back and forth like the old man he was. “Olen is an idiot,” he said. “Oh, his pretensions! His embarrassing idea of himself as a writer. The blood of Grigory Karkov has been diluted in him to the consistency of grape juice.”
“Maria Karkova wrote Lady of the Snakes,” Jane said flatly, knowing that Sigelman knew this as well as she did, whether he would acknowledge it or not. “That manuscript proves it.”
“Maria Petrovna!” Sigelman scoffed, opening his bloodshot eyes. “She was the wife of a genius who got tired of her! An unbalanced woman, writing her sentimental diaries, copying out his manuscripts, producing brat after brat. Is it any wonder she lost her mind in the end?” A smile twitched at the edges of his mouth.
“The manuscript is in her handwriting, edits and all,” Jane said, refusing to acknowledge his taunts. She seemed to have found her footing again, to be picking her way carefully from one truth to another across a dark, swirling river, the next one clear in front of her, and then the next.
“Yes, yes. In her handwriting! Maybe he dictated his corrections and she wrote them down!”
Jane kept her eyes fixed on his. She thought about enumerating the evidence as she would when she wrote her article, but he knew it as well as she did. “Otto,” she said, “you know that isn’t it.”
He coughed, and his face tightened. “Don’t tell me what I know,” he said.
“You were going to destroy that manuscript if he sold it to you,” Jane said. “Weren’t you?”
Sigelman raised his bushy eyebrows, their whiteness now yellowing like old parchment.
“If?” he said. “I don’t know what you mean by ‘if.’ I’m quite sure he’ll sell before the summer’s out. He’s rather desperate for money. It’s just a matter of settling on a price.”
She stared at him—old, ugly, sinister: a skull grinning. Yet burning still, his ardor not for truth but for victory. “He told me he won’t sell,” she said.
Sigelman shrugged. “Believe that if you want.” His grin spread wider, the gray skin tight against the bone.
“You have no right to buy documents just to destroy them!” Jane said, feeling for the next foothold. “Or to hide them, either. You’re a scholar. Your work is supposed to be in the service of truth!”
“Yes,” Sigelman said coldly. “For me it has always been about truth.”
“Then why did you steal that letter from the Newberry?” Jane said. “The one that says Karkov had a sexual affair with the copyist! Why did you steal those other two letters and hide them in the corner of your basement?”
Slowly the expression on Sigelman’s face changed, the flesh growing even paler and grayer. “Listen to me,” he said, and his eyes darkened and he leaned forward, gripping the arms of his chair. “You want the truth? I’ll tell you the truth! Grigory Karkov was a great man—that’s what the truth is! I’ve spent my whole life reading him, studying him. Appreciating him! I am his greatest reader and his most important champion. And you—people like you—you would give anything to tear him down. A great writer in a great tradition, but is there a place for that tradition anymore? You and your kind make your livelihood scratching away, nibbling away at all that like termites at work on a great house. All I have ever done in my life is make it clear that Karkov is one of the pantheon. And that is what I am still doing.” Color suddenly flooded his cheeks—not a healthy pinkness but a bright, bloody crimson. He began to cough again.
“Karkov is one of the pantheon,” Jane said. “I don’t deny it. But you have no right to keep another writer from the place she’s earned!” Sigelman tried to answer, but he couldn’t stop coughing. He tapped his chest with his gray fist. Frightened, Jane crossed the room and knelt in front of him.
“Do you need a glass of water?” she said. “Should I call an ambulance?”
He shook his head, held out his hand to keep her words at bay, and at last manage
d to quiet himself.
“Otto,” Jane said softly, still kneeling at his feet, “you may not have all summer.”
“You can’t stop me,” he said, but his voice was rough and weak.
“I took those letters, Otto,” Jane said. “I have them now. The one you stole from the Newberry and the other two. Where did you steal those from?”
“I stole nothing!” Sigelman pounded his knee. “Galina Pisareva gave me those letters for love!” He sat back in his chair and gaped at her, his chest convulsing silently, trying to keep the terrible coughing under control.
For love, Jane thought. She knew who Galina Pisareva was—Masha and Grigory’s descendant through their daughter, Katya. Had Sigelman really known her—sought her out, perhaps, for seduction, hoping there might be something tangible in it for him? Was he making the whole thing up? It hardly mattered now. “What do you even care if Karkov slept with boys?” Jane said. “Does it make him less of a writer? Less of a man?”
“I say what makes Karkov who he is!” he said. “That’s how it’s always been.”
Yes, Jane thought, that was how it had been, but things were changing now. She remembered what she’d said to Billy on the morning of the day she’d discovered him and Felicia: I can feel the world turning. The world kept on turning all the time, but Sigelman had stopped, and he wanted the world to stop with him.
“Otto,” Jane said. “You’ve done such great work. You made Karkov who he is! But you can’t control everything forever.”
He opened his mouth to speak, but the coughing overtook him again. It was as though he had said everything there was to say, used up his life’s allotment of words, and now there was only this, the great, dry, suffocating coughing that went on and on, punctuated by strained, horrible gaspings for air. He was like an ancient star collapsing into gas and dust.
Horrified, Jane watched, sure that he was dying before her eyes. She had killed him. Feminist, historicist criticism as personified by Jane Levitsky had killed him! She knelt staring at him in terror and fascination as he heaved and gasped and choked and, slowly, began to breathe again. By degrees he began to recover. He mopped his face with the wrinkled handkerchief and sank back into his chair, eyes shut. She should have known he wouldn’t die that easily.
Lady of the Snakes Page 28
