A Replacement Life

by Boris Fishman

  –5–

  Bar Kabul had imported from Afghanistan nothing more than the name: a dive with brightly painted, uneven walls, and a small stage backed by heavy velour shades. Blissfully, there were no kilim rugs on the floor or kebabs on the menu.

  Outside, two whittled young men smoked rolled cigarettes. One wore jean cutoffs, a holey undershirt, and a pair of boots, the other wing tips that didn’t match and tight black jeans with a zipper from the shin to the ankle. Slava nodded. They raised their cigarettes.

  “Little Darlings?” Slava said expertly.

  “Little Darlings.” Skinny Jeans nodded, a triangle of hair falling into his eye. “Nice jacket.” Risking terminal lateness, Slava had detoured to his apartment and thrown on the outfit he had cribbed from Arch Dyson. It had sat in his closet since the ignominious day, unused and resented.

  “Nice jeans,” Slava said, to say something.

  “Thrift store,” Skinny said. “Seventy-Seventh and Third.”

  “I live nearby,” Slava said.

  “Stop by,” Cutoffs chimed in. He kicked the asphalt with the lip of his boots. “Get you some Clarks. Some of the Earthkeepers they have are pretty badass, too. Practically out of the box.”

  “People there have nice clothes they get rid of after two wearings,” Skinny said. He sang “Score!” and the two exchanged a high five.

  “Thirty-four?” Skinny said, eyeing Slava’s groin.

  “Say what,” Slava said, stepping back.

  “Your waist.”

  “Oh,” Slava said defensively. “No.”

  He frowned. “I hate when I’m off.”

  Slava moved toward the window. It didn’t take long to pick Arianna out of the bodies mashed on the dance floor; the place was small, smaller than it had seemed online. She was right by the stage, the bun of her hair loose, her shoulders swaying. The band had a keyboard; a tuba; and a snare drum belted around one of the players. A small circle opened as Arianna and a tall, thin consumptive in a fedora danced with each other. He tried to insert his knees between her legs, but she pushed him away and slimmed back into the crowd, pleasing Slava.

  “What’s she look like?” Cutoffs said. His hand was on the door handle, Skinny behind him. “We’ll keep an eye for you.”

  Slava smirked. “I don’t think she needs any help,” he said. “The one with long black hair by the front. In the gray—”

  “That’s a Balenciaga,” Skinny said reverently.

  “Don’t say you saw me,” Slava said.

  He watched them go in and stomp the floor. Skinny’s dancing style involved a perennial look of surprise, his mouth in an oval. The duo worked its way toward some women and cornered them with acrobatic moves.

  Slava stood around, trying to look busy, but this got more taxing than simply going inside. She saw him quickly, the eyes betraying no surprise. She wove her way through the crowd and embraced him, her breasts pushing into his chest. It was more touch than they’d ever racked up. Apparently, they would get to make new rules of engagement here, outside the office. He sniffed at her neck: perfume, shampoo, sweat that was recently vodka.

  “What the hell are you wearing?” she said.

  He colored: She didn’t remember the day he had gotten dressed up. Even then, she had said nothing about it. For a moment, he regretted coming. “You changed, too,” he said defensively.

  She pulled him toward the dance floor, pausing at the bar to feed him a tall glass of vodka with lemons, generously dispensed because she knew the bartender. Skinny and Cutoffs held up their thumbs.

  Little Darlings consisted of four skinny young men in tight jeans and T-shirts, all black save for the pink bows around their necks—they were little darlings—and heads shaved on one side. They performed a kind of rock and roll that was difficult to dance to, though Slava gave it his all, trying to remember the dance moves Grandfather exhibited on the dance platforms of the Russian restaurants where Slava used to accompany him. In the Soviet Navy at the tail end of the war, Grandfather had served with the full panoply of Soviet nationalities, had learned the Ukrainian kazachok, the Georgian lezginka, the all-Soviet chechetka. Sometimes, to emphasize a point, he would break into one, just because. On the paltry square of the Kabul dance floor, Slava twitched in mental approximation. Arianna swayed and pumped with exasperating grace.

  “Why is it called Kabul?” he pretended to want to know, the noise level requiring another visit to her neck.

  “I don’t know!” she shouted back. “Rocking the casbah or whatever? I don’t know!”

  “Casbah is Moroccan, I think,” he said, drawing closer again.

  “You should be a fact-checker, Slava,” she yelled. “Don’t worry about it! Dance, drink. You have things to forget!”

  “How can I, with you reminding me,” he said.

  “Oh, I know I have no influence on that brain.” She tapped his head with a fingertip. “I can’t feel in that fingertip. Sliced it off with a mandoline once.”

  He pressed the fingertip like a button. She let him get away with it. “Take nothing on faith,” she confirmed.

  Onstage, the Little Darlings whined about playgrounds and beer, Arianna’s face flashing in and out of view in the hopping red light. Eventually, he persuaded her to sit down. She breathed heavily, like a figure skater just off the ice. There was a spray of freckles around her eyes.

  “Show me how you pick up a girl in a bar,” she said.

  He grunted in objection.

  “Are you celibate, Slava?” she said. “Please tell me you never join for anything at work because you’re otherwise engaged chasing tail.”

  “That’s it exactly,” he said.

  “Give me the rundown,” she said.

  Rundown: Slava walked into his first American classroom with an old man’s part in his hair, a striped velour sweater, and the papery smell of the Ivory (cheapest, at seventy-nine cents for four bars) of which the Gelmans availed themselves. Thirty pairs of American eyes assessed this new flotsam and resumed spitballs and notes. Slava could not distract himself from himself as easily. It was not until the following year that he was able to ask for the attention of Diana Gencarelli, whose father owned a bakery in Bay Ridge, which Slava once patronized in the hopes of spotting Diana covered in flour. He would help her dust it off and then they would hold hands as they walked past the Arab groceries. Alas, Diana was not there. Diana was not there even when she was in front of him at PS 247. The rundown ran downhill.

  In succeeding years, Slava Gelman was not without attention from the opposite sex. He did not look like most of the people in South Brooklyn. (He imagined that leaving the neighborhood accelerated physical alteration, as if the elements functioned differently in Manhattan.) There was nothing he could do about his height—he was from the stunted plains—but he had finagled from God olivish skin that saved him from being identified as an Eastern European barbarian rather than a sun-dappled Turk or even a Spaniard, black eyes completing the Mediterranean picture. His hand bore a long scar from a bottle shard he had dragged across its pillowy skin at six years old; the stubbled line of his jawbone bore a readiness to greet all interruptions with impatience. All the same, next to Arianna, agitating in her beautiful clothes, he felt like a smudge. He stripped off his jacket. Oh for two. It was too hot, anyway.

  Vodka sluiced down the rusty pipe of his throat. The events of the preceding forty-eight hours coursed in the opposite direction. All of it ran together, clotted, settled, drained, ran off. He felt a little deranged. He scratched at his jaw, then leaped up and removed himself to the next table. He relished Arianna’s puzzled expression. She listened to him give an imaginary date directions to the bathroom. Then he leaned over. “I have sixty seconds,” he said. “She’s a lovely girl—lovely. But we aren’t right for each other. It’s an almost thing. You’ve had those—nobody’s fault. And then you’re sitting at the next table over. Tell me your name. And your number. Thirty seconds.”

  Arianna stared at him, openmou
thed.

  “Twenty,” he said. “Come on. She pees quick.”

  Arianna broke into laughter and began clapping. “You can pick me up any time,” she said. She curled her tongue in a funny way when she sipped from her drink.

  He didn’t want to let go of the feeling he’d had a moment before, him advancing on her instead of vice versa. Music clamored from a wheelbarrow-sized speaker directly above them, so it was difficult to think clearly. But he didn’t have to think. Everything that had happened at the office was pleasantly falling away—only for the evening, he knew, but good enough.

  “Take me to another bar,” she said. “I can’t hear myself think here.”

  They took a meandering route through the neighborhood, louche and gentrified all at once. Slava had come here only once or twice, each time in connection with a story he was researching. They kept stopping because she was pointing out landmarks. She volunteered in this garden. Some music club of renown had been located here. Here—she announced overdemonstratively—she’d had a dark-alley liaison. Purposefully, he didn’t say anything. “So you’re not the only one picking up tail in a bar,” she added unnecessarily, and he relished his victory.

  He asked about her outfit, in hopes that she would notice his with greater fascination. These were ponte-knit pants, she said. Supposed to be slimming. “‘You can hold up a bank with those hips, Arianna,’ as my dear mother used to say,” she said. They swerved to avoid a phalanx of nearly undressed women eating the sidewalk.

  “She’s not around anymore?” Slava said cautiously.

  “My mother?” Arianna said. “Oh, she’s around. Very around.” She ran her arm through Slava’s, and he tried to fall into step with her. “Brentwood,” she said. “Mother Bock had to work out for herself the joy of having a daughter with childbearing hips versus a daughter with wider hips than every girl at the synagogue.” She waited. “This is the part where you say it doesn’t show.”

  Slava smiled. “And your father?”

  “Spandex factory. Half my yoga class is dressed by the Eagle.”

  “Why the Eagle?”

  “El Aguila,” she said in a cute Spanish accent. “That’s what the Nicaraguan ladies on the floor call him.” She touched her nose with the tip of the dead finger. “He’s got an amazing escarpment.”

  “Not you, though,” Slava said.

  “Nose job, sweetheart.”

  “It doesn’t show,” he said.

  “There you go.”

  “You’re close to them,” he said.

  “My mother called me a dilettante the other day because I’m not kosher out. I’m like, Ma, that’s a big word! Apparently, the rabbi had a whole sermon on dilettantes.” She pushed her arm farther into Slava’s. “But I like poems, thanks to my dad. Robert Frost was his favorite. ‘Frost is like life, Arianna—as deep as you want to look.’ Then my mother beat it out of him.” They neared a crosswalk and stopped even though the light was theirs. Slava didn’t mind. “They moved to a more religious neighborhood. They don’t talk about Frost at those tables. The Eagle’s an enforcer now.”

  “We don’t have to talk about it,” Slava said.

  “I don’t mind,” she said, turning toward him. “I don’t mind telling you.”

  “I want to hear a poem of yours,” he said.

  “Negative,” she said. “I don’t write poems.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said.

  He withdrew his arm and placed it on the cup of her shoulder, turning it toward him. Beneath his fingers, her skin felt taut and giving at once. It was thick, as if the skin descended deep down into her, her center buried somewhere far beneath.

  She rolled her eyes. “You have no class. Zero class. You insist on embarrassing me.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “You don’t own embarrassment today.”

  She rolled her eyes again. “No one made you write that. Take as good as you give.” She pulled back and looked at him. Her breath was soft, flavored with something human but pleasant. “I loved what you wrote. I knew it was yours when I read the first line.”

  “Is that why you stood up for me?” he said.

  “Of course not,” she said. “Most of the Jews in America—that’s where we come from. I grew up listening to my grandmother’s stories. And you form a certain image. And then you read something like what you wrote, and it’s nothing at all like what you thought.”

  “So that was why.”

  “No,” she groaned. “You’re exhausting. Yes, in part, but the number one reason is it was good, really good. You brought it alive. Just that it isn’t the kind of piece that runs in Century. It wasn’t right for Beau—but that means everything?”

  He nodded. All of a sudden, he felt very tired. He felt it in his shoulders, a long, draining weight. He imagined himself taking a seat on the pavement and staying there for a long time. “Why didn’t we go to the poetry reading?” he said.

  “Those things are boring. I go only to see if people are better. If they’re bad, I’m the most satisfied person in the room. Satisfied, satisfied, satisfied.” She tapped out the words on his chest.

  “You say out loud things other people think,” he said.

  “I am Human 2.0,” she said. They laughed, then fell silent.

  They watched each other without comment, too long for it to mean anything other than what it meant. He lowered his lips toward hers, his hand on her cheek. They kissed slowly, the human traffic of First Avenue taking them into its indifferent arms, the city’s special combination of curiosity and resentment. He tingled with a strange sensation; he was unconcerned with the walkers around him in return, but amiably so.

  When he pulled back, he said, “Come on. I want to hear it.”

  “Jesus!” she said. “Fine.” She took his arm and pushed him around the corner. The gleam and noise of the avenue receded. Slava felt the building’s wall at his back, the bricks still warm from the day. She was shorter only by an inch or two; if she wore heels, she would be taller. She was sideways to him, holding his arm with her palm. “It’s a poem about weather,” she said in exasperation.

  “The weather,” he repeated.

  “Weather, weather,” she said. “The thing people talk about when they have nothing to say.”

  “The satin skies, that sort of thing.”

  “Slava!” she said. “In the dictionary, next to asshole—you.” She slammed a fist into his chest.

  “Sorry,” he agreed.

  “You’ve got me wound up, now I’m hot to say the poem.”

  “Say it,” he said.

  Her eyes settled at his neck. He tried to lift her chin, but she swatted his arm away. She spoke in such a rushed, low monotone that he had to make her stop and start over. “Just let me finish,” she said.

  “No,” he said, making her look up at him. “Please. Slowly.” So she started over. She spoke clearly this time, and he listened intently, but he could hardly focus on the words.

  The bar they were heading to, Straight Shooters, arrived too soon. Here, too, Arianna knew the bartender. They really were straight shooters on the alcohol issue, or perhaps it was Arianna’s acquaintance that secured them such brimming glasses. The music was mellower, Southern if he had to guess, and there was a more committed row of solitary drinkers at the bar. She made him twirl her before they sat down. His head heavy with drink, he tried, in the noise, to distinguish why he was here—to be with her or merely without himself? Slava was not much of a drinker, but gazing at the solo patrons seated down the length of the bar, locked away from each other and the world by the crisp pints in their hands, he sensed clearly the appeal of their American pastime. His legs helixed with Arianna’s at two bar stools.

  “You haven’t told me a thing,” she said. “I told you about my hips, for God’s sake.”

  “My grandmother died yesterday,” he blurted out.

  “Shit,” she said as if she had done something wrong. “Are you serious? Are you all
right? Don’t answer that. I don’t know why people ask that.”

  “It was a long time coming,” he reassured her.

  “I’m sorry.” She took his hands.

  He shook his head to say it was fine.

  “Were you close?”

  “Yes. No. It’s hard to answer.” His head weighed two tons. He freed a hand and tried to get the bartender’s attention.

  She slid off her stool and returned a minute later with two shot glasses.

  “You don’t clink,” he said.

  She nodded and drank in one gulp. He sipped his. “Tell me something about her,” she said.

  Slava gazed past Arianna’s shoulder. The bar drinkers were undermining their noble solitude by staring into the blue screens of cell phones.

  “You don’t have to,” she added.

  His mouth felt dry. “My grandfather,” he said, “you have to give him credit. At eighty, the wheels are still turning.” He finished the drink, a brown burn.

  She awaited more. “She’s a survivor,” he said. He tipped his forehead to make his meaning clear—Holocaust survivor—but Arianna did not require the clarification. “Only she and her sister,” he went on. “The rest of the family—gone. It takes sixty years for her to get restitution. How do they calculate it? Five thousand for a mother, four for a father, three for a grandparent? What if you were raised by the grandparents? What if the grandparents are the parents? You have to agree: It’s tricky.”

  “Don’t say things like that.”

  He studied her. Did questions like this cease to exist because you didn’t bring them up? He took her hand in his. To restrain his irritation? Because it would dispose her toward him? Her fingers felt smooth and dry. She allowed them to be clasped. “The point is,” he said, “the restitution letter came just days before she died.” He opened his hands. “Isn’t.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “My grandfather says, ‘Send it in anyway. Write it about me.’ But he was evacuated.”

  “You can’t do that,” she said.

  “Can’t I?” he said. “Did you know that they fertilized crops with human ash? After the war, the tomatoes were the size of an infant’s head.” He gave the words the same inflection that his grandfather did, only in English. They had a new but not unfamiliar sound on his tongue. He knew how to say them. She looked away.