A poster board was mounted above the Lechters’ fireplace. It displayed the winning article in Beau Reasons’s recent competition for a story about the adventures of an urban explorer. Above the article, in the unmistakable Century font, the byline said: Peter Devicki. Slava strained to make out the story from his perch across the room but couldn’t.
After he finished conferring with Beau, Peter disappeared from the room. When he reentered, he held a black Sharpie in his hands. “That’s a big kitchen,” he said. “To the Lechters!” Beau shouted. “To the Lechters!” Mr. Grayson seconded. “To the Lechters!” Charlie Headey’s girlfriend shrieked. The rest of the room joined in.
While the staff of Century celebrated the Lechter family of Ridgewood, New Jersey, Peter Devicki went up to the poster board displaying Slava’s article, uncapped the Sharpie, and drew a fat line across the byline. Above it, he wrote: Slava Gelman. Again, the room erupted in cheers. “To Peter Devicki!” people shouted. “To the Lechters!” “To the Lechters and Peter Devicki!” Even Avi Liss had risen from his seat, thrusting his glass outward, the Lechters’ white couch by now covered with the colors of a half-dozen drinks.
Slava sat motionlessly. He couldn’t rise, though he needed to. He watched Arianna, who was not toasting with the rest of the group, walk up to the poster board and study it like a painting. Then, she turned around and walked toward Peter, who stood by a wall covered with brick faceplates to resemble a wall of exposed brick in the city. She wrapped her hand around his forearm, lowered her eyes, and began whispering into his neck.
A terrible feeling entered Slava’s chest. He had to intervene but couldn’t move. Was he there? He was there. One person noticed him. His grandfather noticed him. He stood in a corner across the room, like a schoolboy who had been disciplined. Slava felt a needle of irritation—the old man would say something to embarrass him.
His grandfather was wet, head to toe. He wore clothes, his usual clothes, corduroy pants and a wool sweater even though it was summer, but he was soaked and shivering, his teeth chattering, gold knocking on gold. Inside the corduroys, it was as if there were no flesh covering the bone of the knees—the left kneecap rattled against the right. The hands that emerged from the sweater, however, were fully fleshed. One over the other, they covered his balls as he cried out from fright.
Slava awoke with a start, ramming his head into a shelf above Arianna’s bed. Whose idea had it been to build a shelf directly above the place that one slept? Was its use, whatever it was, not outweighed by the uselessness of ramming one’s head into it immediately upon waking, as Slava had expected to since his first night with Arianna—the expectation haunted his sleep, and when he wasn’t dreaming about Peter Devicki, he dreamed that he had rammed his head into the shelf, only to wake up and realize no, not yet. Finally, it had happened, and the dull ache, along with the weary recognition of something one has expected to take place for some time, spread across the back of his head as Arianna shifted in her sleep.
She slept like a tank. War could erupt on West End Avenue. Not that he could say a word about the shelf. She kept her books there, or her night glass of water. “You’re not concerned that a glass of water is going to end up on your face in the middle of the night?” he asked one morning. “You’re expecting an earthquake?” she answered, and he was made to dissolve in double entendres about earthquakes in bed. When they had sex afterward, he pushed with extra energy because he wanted the cursed glass to fall and show her, but it didn’t. The second time he mentioned the shelf, it wasn’t funny anymore. The third time, she simply pretended she hadn’t heard him.
Now she turned toward him and draped her hot leg over his thighs. This one’s body temperature rose to dangerous levels in the night, a fever that broke only with dawn, Slava massaging her suddenly blue fingertips until the color returned to them. For this reason, she had no air-conditioning, only ceiling fans attached to peeling, ornately molded ceilings by threadbare chains. Slava spent the night expecting to have his head mashed by the items on the shelf above his head and his legs by the fan dancing above him. That was the reason for his stupid dream! He slept in a state of constant anxiety.
She stirred. “I can hear you being angry in my sleep. What is it?”
He looked over. “I just rammed my head into the shelf.”
She rolled her eyes. “Slava, for Christ’s sake, we’ll remove the shelf. You’ll be a handy guy and remove the shelf.”
“I need coffee,” he said to say something.
“Make me a cup?” she said, trying to sound gentle, and turned to face the other side of the room.
He folded his arms across his chest and leaned his head gingerly against the perfidious shelf, a peace offering.
“You had a bad dream?” she said from the other side of the bed, her lips in her pillow.
“You ever think what you would do,” he said, “if someone said . . . You have two children, and someone says, ‘Choose which one lives.’”
“Jesus, Slava.” She sat up and looked back at him. “No,” she said flatly. “Can I answer after we have coffee?” She tossed aside the covers and rose. He watched her walk toward the bathroom, the sleeves of her T-shirt rolled up to her shoulders. At some point, she had started to wear underwear and a T-shirt to bed instead of the usual nothing. He wondered now if it was a small gesture of distance. All the same, Arianna Bock in underwear and a T-shirt was better than most girls naked. He swept aside his cover and followed her into the bathroom. Unwilling to miss the action, the cat darted inside after them.
She stood with her hands on the edge of the sink. Whenever she stood in place like this, she rested one foot against the ankle of the other, making a triangle of her legs. Sometimes, as she washed dishes late at night, he would sit at the kitchen table behind her and trace the curve of her ankles as they met each other at the tip of the triangle, an infinite loop.
He came up behind her and slid his arms inside hers, twenty fingers rimming the outer edge of the sink, the tips of hers still frightened and blue, his dark and thick next to hers.
“I don’t even know what we’re arguing about half the time,” she said. She swiveled inside his arms, facing him. “I think about that all day long. That’s not what I want to think about all day. I want to be calm.” The sleep was gone from her eyes, and she, too, stared at him with the weary recognition of something one has expected to take place for some time. “I’m scared,” she said. She exited the rim of his arms and sank down to the floor, running her arms around her legs. She vanished against the white subway tile.
He slid down next to her and took her fingers in his, rubbing out the blue sleep. The cat parked itself on the edge of the sink to listen in from above.
“If you sit on cold tile,” he said, trying for levity, “you won’t have kids. So the wives say in their tales.”
“I like when you tell me about those things,” she said. “You never talk about it.”
“Gentlemen have much to fear as well, Grandfather says.”
“Sexy talk,” she sighed. “How is he? With everything.”
“He’s more fine than he says,” Slava said. “He’s blessed. He never pays enough attention to anything for it to touch him.”
“Don’t say that,” she said.
“It’s the truth,” he said resentfully.
The weight of his secret pressed all about him, a stupid, blunt heaviness with no center or edge. He had to hold out only a little bit longer—the application deadline was just days away, and then he would be free, and they would be back to each other the way it was that first night. Slava didn’t want to think about the other possibility: that their sudden awkwardness had nothing to do with his secret. That it was, quite simply, them, that the introductory luster of their connection was a fraud now giving way to the pallid fact: They were foreigners to each other. Even in the midst of an argument, they wished to tear off each other’s clothes, but the depressing thought struck him that this wasn’t enough, necessarily.
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br /> He thought of Otto, the day’s first recollection out of the hundred to come, an unpleasant dream that wasn’t a dream. Slava copped a bit of martyrdom from the victims of fate scattered around South Brooklyn—of course he had to be caught. At Century, he could invent entire townships and newspapers without raising flags. Here, no. Someone else gets away with murder. He—he pays.
The list of letters that remained to be written before the deadline burned from the pocket of his jeans across the room, as if it contained the phone numbers of other women and not eighty-year-olds. He had read that a group of survivors was lobbying to press the German parliament to revise the terms of restitution to include a broader cross section of evacuees and, for the first time, Red Army soldiers. He wanted it to end and he didn’t want it to end.
“Does your head hurt?” she said. “From the shelf.”
“Oh. No. No, it can stay. Really.”
“No, we’ll get rid of it. It was already here—”
“No, no.”
They stopped speaking at the same time.
“Something’s strange,” she said, a stiff smile on her face.
“Something,” he nodded.
He extended his arms. Slowly, warily, she lowered herself into them. The cat leaped off the counter, its paws hitting the tile with a dull thud, and joined them. Slava had never had animals, but he liked the cat. In the moments when he and Arianna didn’t know how to be warm to each other, they could be warm to the animal. The animal didn’t mind. It nestled between them, a package of simple, dumb, euphoric flesh, and issued a great yawn. The two humans made jokes about how boring their fight was.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s do something. Unless you’re working.”
“I’m taking a day off,” he announced.
She produced a sound of disbelief.
“Easy, now,” he said.
“Let’s walk,” she said.
“It’s a hundred degrees outside,” he said.
“Then that’s our first clue,” she said. “We want air-conditioning.”
“It’s cool here,” he said, eyeing the bed.
She grinned. “Later. Let’s get dressed.”
He thought about doing what she had done that day several weeks before, when he had to leave for the library. Ask for five minutes, peel off her clothes, and push her down on the bed. She had shown him that you could impose on each other this way; the other would impose another time. Love was not equality but balance. On the bus ride back to his side of the borough, he had felt used but closer to her. However, he couldn’t imagine doing the same thing now. The doleful corollary to her rule was that this kind of imbalance was possible only when the rest was steady. It had been in their first week, but less so the more time they spent together, a dismal irony. He rose and got dressed.
The city that had felt mellow and forgiving as they walked from Bar Kabul to Straight Shooters on their first night together now felt hyper and choleric. The thermometer affixed to the doorjamb of Arianna’s apartment building said one hundred. However, the heat had emptied the streets, lending them the feel of a holiday weekend, which always created for Slava the illusion that the city was briefly his. “Where to?” he said, swatting at his forehead demonstratively.
They walked in the direction of the Museum of Natural History. When the Bocks of Brentwood began to visit New York with little Arianna, this was always the first stop; the Eagle liked eagles. (Sandra Bock, uncharmed by wildlife, waited in the café.) The museum plaza was empty save for gaggles of pigeons—these would survive the final desolation. Inside, in the sacerdotal dark, the light reserved for antelopes stunned in midleap, camp children mixed with Japanese and German tour groups, individual families gliding between them with the freedom of the unaffiliated. Arianna had dressed in sandals, a low-cut sailor shirt with short sleeves, and black shorts with gold buttons that ended right below the rim of her ass. Men contrived, in the gloom, to inspect this exciting genus, but even more so the women, reminding Slava of Uncle Pasha’s insistence that it counted the most when the women looked. Slava thought about Pasha with weary amusement.
Arianna, trained by city sidewalks, cut a lane through the crowds, occasionally reaching back to make sure Slava was there. He followed like a kindergartner. She stopped now and then to say something about the ibex, the lynx, the coyotes that howled in the Los Angeles hills. All the animals looked the same to Slava: horns, hooves, enlarged watchful eyes. He listened with a rancid feeling. To him, she was synonymous with the city, but all this was also known to her. He loved this about her; she brought surprise to his life. But everywhere they went, she narrated. What if he had spent his boyhood trooping through the Museum of Natural History instead of deciphering letters and dictionary-tripping at his wood-paneled desk? Would he know as much as she did? Or was it something about her?
Stopped at a display, he wrapped his arms around her from behind, her collarbone familiar against his forearm. She stopped speaking and leaned into his chest. She had straightened her hair; he inhaled its burnt, smoky dryness. He lifted the tips with his fingers and kissed her neck. “I want to go,” he heard himself say.
“You want to go home?” she said.
“I would like to show you a place now.” He said it before he was certain of the destination, but the feeling was sure.
She nodded eagerly. “But let’s stay like this for one more minute.”
Outside, the wet air attacked immediately, and he stuck out a hand for a taxi. She noted the luxury—they always took the subway. He colored, embarrassed. My credit-card statements don’t go to the Eagle, he wanted to say, but held his tongue. Did observant Arianna also notice that they had spent every night of the previous month at her apartment? No, this imbalance went unremarked. But he preferred her apartment. He was hopelessly tangled. He held the door as she climbed into the cab.
“Where are you taking me?” she said.
“Following the moment,” he said, staring at the cabbie’s brown neck. He made himself take her hand.
They rode silently. The Upper West Side turned into Midtown, then Chelsea, the West Village, Battery Park—self-conscious, he splurged for the tunnel—and into Brooklyn.
“Where are we going?” she laughed.
“You don’t love being in the dark?” he said as unstiffly as he could, though it came out stiff all the same. Now they had to keep holding hands to pretend they weren’t angry at each other. Slava stared out his window. The street slowly revealed itself as familiar—he knew it only relative to the subway, so he recognized it with delay. He had been mugged here. Grandfather and Grandmother lived nearby then, before they found the better subsidized apartment in Midwood. The mugger had been Slav—not a Jew, but still, one of theirs. He had violet splotches of sleeplessness under his eyes and a long knife under his T-shirt—comically long, with a gilt handle, like a circus saber. Graciously, he explained: His family had just spent their savings on bail, and he needed cash for a lawyer.
Slava was with Igor Kraz, the boy who would become the proctologist. He had taught Slava how to karate-kick properly, and how to masturbate into a pillow, so there was use to having him around. He was studded with diamonds. Slava had nothing more than a silver bracelet and necklace, even these like insects he wanted to brush off. The jewelry had nothing to do with them; they were broadcasting their families’ progress in America. Grandfather was upset with Slava for agreeing to nothing richer than silver. “But we can do better,” he said again and again. “Why does he wear gold and you only silver? What, we don’t have?”
When the mugger asked for their jewelry, they handed it over. The young proctologist had forgotten all his karate kicks. And when the thief asked for their addresses, to keep them from squealing, they told him the truth. He must have realized the angelfaces he had collared that day, because then he told the boys to be at the same corner an hour later with a thousand dollars. When they phoned their parents, the first thing they said was they needed a thousand dollars.
/> They were their parents’ and grandparents’ children. They did what they were told, parents or muggers, as they had been taught. Compliance with instructions—just say what the rules were—was as molecularly satisfying as a cool plum on a hot day. When he was little, the satisfaction of it reached to the part of Slava that burned when the tea he was drinking was too hot. So how had he turned out a forger? Had his grandfather’s fraudulence found its way into him despite the Gelmans’ best efforts to raise an obedient person? You can’t stop the blood, it goes where it wants? Maybe the Gelmans, older and wiser, understood this and had been trying to keep him close in order to shelter him from it. This part of him—his proper and corrupt soul—appeared only when he squirmed out of their reach. He wished badly to ask Arianna, because he knew she would offer something that he hadn’t considered, that would make him think about it differently. But he couldn’t. He groaned, and she squeezed his hand.
The taxi stopped on Brighton Sixth. She opened her wallet, but he covered her hand and paid. Whipped by wind from the water, the air was less thick here, the sun exhausted by the punishment it had been meting out all afternoon. They stood looking down Brighton Beach Avenue, Arianna waiting for a signal from Slava. He glared at the doomed souls wandering past them, their legs varicose and bent, the jowls swimming in fat, bellies hung over the legs like overripe fruit. (Had Otto made his way down here, to see firsthand what he was dealing with in his folders, or did he prefer to keep his distance?) Yes, they weren’t easy to be near. The mesh bags stuffed with discount tomatoes, the lumbering bodies heedless of traffic lights, the threadbare emporia that had to traffic in furs and DVDs and manicures to squeeze from the stone of this life the blood of a dollar. And these were the honest ones. After fifty years of Soviet chatteldom, they had come here to get fucked in the ass for a little bit longer before packing off to a spot at Lincoln Cemetery, even this impossible to acquire without money being passed under the table. They never even voted.
A Replacement Life Page 23
