Back to Blood: A Novel

by Tom Wolfe

  Whooooooosh—back she came from her astral cosmos just as quickly as she had beamed up to it.

  And, of course, Sergei looked perfect in this setting. Quite in addition to his profile, his strong chin, the firm jawline without so much as a semblance of surplus flesh… there was also his hair. It was thick and deep brown with streaks of sun-bleached blond and swept back on the sides as if by an airstream… although in fact the two of them were inside the air-conditioned cocoon every sane driver in South Florida turned his automobile interior into. Blip—what about Norman and his open convertible? But Norman was insane!

  Sergei glanced toward her—those eyes of his!—those gleaming mischievous blue eyes! A slight smile… Since neither of them had brought up an amusing subject, a tourist from Cincinnati might have called that little smile smug. That was by no means the word that occurred to Magdalena. Oh, no. Debonair, suave, sophisticated… those were more like it. And his clothes… so rich-looking… his jacket—cashmere?—so soft, she felt like burying her head in it… a lustrous white shirt—silk?—with a high, open collar made to be worn open… Of course, she was a number herself. Amélia’s dress with its plunging neckline… Now and again she caught Sergei stealing a peek at the inner curves of her breasts. She felt… hot.

  When Sergei pulled away from the curb, the car’s engine barely made a sound. By now they were going north on Collins Avenue… not a lot of traffic… Condominium towers whipped past… on and on, a wall that kept any random passerby from being aware there was an ocean about two hundred yards to the east.

  Magdalena kept racking her brain to come up with something… anything… interesting to talk to Sergei about. Thank God! Part of his sophistication was his ability to pull small talk out of thin air… no anxious silences…

  Magdalena couldn’t remember going this far north on Miami Beach before. They must be getting close to where Miami Beach became part of the mainland.

  Sergei slowed down and gave Magdalena the merriest of smiles. “Ahhh… we’ve just entered Russia. This is Sunny Isles.”

  From what she could make out from the streetlights and the moonlight and the big plate glass windows lit up here and there in the tall buildings, it looked like standard Miami Beach to Magdalena… the same wall of towers east of Collins Avenue that monopolized the views of the ocean… and on the other side, west of Collins, old buildings, small buildings, huddled together for God knows how many miles.

  Sergei slowed down even more and pointed toward that huddled mass and picked out a Low-Rent side street. “See that shopping strip?” he said. It wasn’t very imposing, not to anybody who had ever been in Bal Harbour or Aventura. “If you cannot speak Russian, you cannot buy anyzing in zose shops. Oh, I suppose you can point at zomzing and take out zome dollars to show zat you mean, ‘I buy?’ Zey are real Russians. Zey speak no Engleesh, and zey haf no desire to be American! It ees like being on Calle Ocho in Miami and valking into a shop, and you cannot speak Spanish. Zey haf abzolutely no eenterest to be ze ‘Americans,’ eizer…”

  “But what’s that?” said Magdalena.

  “What ees what?”

  “That big sign. It looks like it’s up in the air floating by itself.”

  Just beyond the shabby little shopping strip, a lurid sign blazed away in red, yellow, and orange neon: THE HONEY POT. In the darkness it didn’t seem to be connected to anything below. Sergei dismissed it with a shrug. “Oh, zat. I dohn’t knohw. I zink eet ees wonna zoze streep clubs.”

  “For Russians?”

  “No, no, no, no—for zese Americans. Russians dohn’t go to streep clubs. We like guuurls. Ze Americans get crazy over zeeze pornography. Nobody else goes zat crazy.”

  “It’s all over the internet,” said Magdalena. “It’s something like sixty percent of all hits are for pornography. You’d be surprised how many prominent men become addicted to it. They’ll spend five, six hours a day watching it on the internet; they do a lot of it at work, in their offices. It’s sad! They ruin their careers.”

  “Een ze office? How een ze office?”

  “Because at home his wife and children are there.”

  “How you knohw all zees?”

  “I’m a nurse. I once worked for a psychiatrist.” Magdalena studied Sergei’s face for signs that he knew about Norman… Not even a hint, thank God. This little discourse on pornography—a triumph at last! She had proved it again… she wasn’t just a little number with a beautiful face and a hot body… he would have no choice, would he… he would have to take her seriously… and Amélia’s voice whispered into her inner ear, down the auditory canal, and set her tympanic membrane to vibrating: “Do you plan to give him some papaya tonight?”

  It depended! It depended! Such decisions always depended!

  Once they left Sunny Isles, heading farther north, the scenery became less and less like Miami Beach… Hollywood… Hallandale… “Now we enter the Russian heartland.” He chuckled, to show Magdalena he found that pretty amusing.

  He turned off Collins Avenue onto a smaller highway that ran west. Magdalena had no idea where they were now.

  “Tell me again,” she said. “The restaurant we’re going to is called…?”

  “Gogol’s.”

  “And it’s Russian?”

  “Eet eez ferry Russian,” he said… with his suave smug or smug suave smile.

  They headed west in the darkness… then came around a curve—and there it was, in a blazing backlit sign as lurid as the Honey Pot’s: GOGOL’S!… a porte cochere out front framed by a vast riot of nude nymphs rendered in a bas-relief deep to the point of hallucinatory: GOGOL’S!

  Beneath it was a regular hive of valets, young, fair-skinned. Cars were pulling in and going out at a terrific rate… a regular throng of men and women going inside…

  Sergei was joking with the valets in Russian. They knew Gospodin Korolyov very well. As soon as he and Magdalena walked in, a tall, hefty man—he must have been six-feet-five or -six—in a dark suit, a white shirt, and a navy tie, his remaining black hair combed straight back over his pate—rushed up and gushed with great enthusiasm, “Sergei Andreivich!” The rest was in Russian. The man seemed to be the owner or manager at the very least. Sergei said to him in English, “This is my friend Magdalena,” Thee sees my freend… The big man bowed slightly in a fashion Magdalena took to be “European.” The place was vast… Every square inch of wall space was covered in a deep-mauve (synthetic) velvet lit only by battalions of small downlights in an otherwise black ceiling. The deep mauve was a backdrop for every form of glitter a team of Russian decorators could get their hands on. A pair of staircases leading to a second level, no more than five feet above the first, had more extravagant curves than the ones at the Paris Opera. The banisters were inlaid with striations of polished brass. Gogol’s white tablecloths—a great flashing sea, thanks to the minute sequins somehow woven in… The small lamps on all the tables had mauve shades supported by flashing faux-crystal stems… At Gogol’s, wherever it was possible to attach glitter rims and fringes and trims and brims—they were attached. All these things were meant to create a flashing glamour within a rich but sedate mauve gloom… but they didn’t. They weren’t even gaudy. They looked prissy, dinky, finicky, fussy, and gussied up. The whole cavernous dining hall looked as though it had come out of Grandmother’s jewelry box.

  A regular swarm of men, his age or older, gathered about Sergei. Were they loud! Were they drunk? Well, maybe it was just their way of saluting their beloved comrade, but they sure seemed drunk to Magdalena. They gave him big bear hugs. They cracked up, disintegrated, dissolved over every sentence that came out of his mouth, as if he were the greatest wit they had ever encountered in their lives. Magdalena would have given anything to have known Russian at that moment.

  Sergei was no longer even trying to introduce her to these men as they came up. It was hard to introduce anybody who had you in a bear hug and was bellowing loud nothings into your ear. The only attention she got were lascivious looks
of men lifting the lust in their loins all the way to their faces.

  From all over the place came the deep manly laughter and the manly baritone cries of men… drunk. At the nearest table a big man, about fifty, if Magdalena was any judge, reared back into the middle of a banquette with a great grin and proceeded to down one, two, three, four shot glasses of something—vodka?—and then let out a great ahhhhh! His face was a blazing red, and his grin was as self-satisfied as any Magdalena had ever seen. He ground out a guttural roar of a laugh from somewhere deep in his gullet. He handed a shot glass full of whatever it was to the woman next to him… young or young-ish… it was hard to tell when a woman had her hair done up in a big bun in back, like Grandmother’s… she stared at the shot glass as if it were a bomb… Guttural roars all around…

  Sergei managed to disengage himself from his admirers and motioned to Magdalena. The towering house hefty led them to a table. ¡Dios mío! It was a table for ten… and Magdalena could see what was coming. Eight men and women were already seated, and two empty seats remained… for Sergei and herself. As soon as they saw Sergei, they all rose to their feet with huzzahs and God only knows what else. Just as Magdalena feared, Sergei was not hereby escaping his noisy worshipful cluster… He was merely substituting a new one. She was not happy. She began wondering if Sergei had brought her here to show what a hotshot he was on his home grounds. Or maybe it was worse than that. Maybe he didn’t care if she was impressed or not. He just liked a nightly bath in all this adulation.

  At least this time he introduced her to each Russian, Russian, Russian… a great clutter of consonants… She didn’t catch a single name. She felt like she was being buried in all the z’s and y’s and k’s and g’s and b’s. Eight Russian strangers… all looking at her, men and women, as if she were some alien curiosity. What do we have here? Do something… Say something… Entertain us… They were all yammering away in Russian. Directly across the table sat a blocky-faced man with a bald dome and veritable thickets of black hair, obviously dyed, sticking out wildly on each side below the dome line, culminating in muttonchops growing gloriously unkempt down to his jawbones. He seemed to be studying her face with a pathological intensity. Then he turned to a man two seats away and said something that left them both chuckling… in a way that indicated they were trying their best not to erupt into guffaws… over what?

  On the menu the dishes were printed first in English, with curly Russian letters immediately below. Even in English, Magdalena scarcely recognized a single one.

  A waiter materialized silently beside Sergei and handed him a folded piece of paper. Sergei read it and turned to her and said, “I must say hello to my friend Dimitri. Please excuse me. I’ll be right back.”

  He said something to the others in Russian and rose and left the table with the waiter, who would lead him to “Dimitri.” Now Magdalena found herself with eight Russians she didn’t know, four men—in their forties?—and four women—in their thirties?—with fussy hot-roller-curled hairdos and “dress-up” dresses from some era gone by.

  But mainly… there sat the man with all the sub-dome hair and the skin-crawling stare. Sergei had introduced him as some great chess champion. “Number five in the world back in the time of Mikhail Tal,” Sergei had confided behind his hand. None of it, including the great Mikhail Tal, meant anything to Magdalena—only the man with the explosive rim of infra-cranial hair. His name, if Magdalena had caught it correctly, was Something-or-other Zhytin. The way he stared at her unnerved her. She couldn’t take her eyes—or, rather, her peripheral vision—off him. She avoided looking right at his face. He was creepy and crude to the point of sinister. ::::::Sergei, hurry up! Come back! You’ve left me alone with these horrible creeps—or with one, at least. He looks creepy enough to fill a whole room full of creeps.:::::: He had his elbows on the table and his forearms wrapped around either side of his plate and his back hunched over so far his head was not even six inches above his enormous cache of food. He ate everything with a spoon, which he held like a shovel. He was cramming gobs of potatoes and some sort of stringy beef into that voracious maw at a spectacular rate. Hunks of meat the spoon couldn’t deal with he picked up with his fingers and gnawed at, glancing to this side and that side. He looked as if he were intent upon safeguarding his food from buzzards and dogs and thieves. Occasionally he lifted his head and flashed a knowing smile and dumped unsolicited comments—in Russian—upon the conversations around him. Dumped was the word. In Russian his voice sounded like a dump truck dumping a load of gravel.

  Magdalena was fascinated… all too fascinated. The World’s Number Five chess player lifted his head to straighten out a conversation nearby and caught her staring at him. He stopped, his head still down low over his food—a mountainous hunk of stringy beef still on his spoon—and brought her up short with a big mocking smile and said in English, with an accent but fluently, “Can I assist you in some way?” Can I asseest you in zom vay?

  “No,” said Magdalena. She was blushing terribly. “I was only—”

  “What do you do?” The you do got buried beneath the two fingers he was sticking into his mouth in a game try to pull beef strings out from between his teeth.

  “Do?”

  “Do,” he said, flinging a string from his mug to the rug. “What do you do to get food, to get clothes, to get someplace to sleep at night? What do you do?”

  In some way she couldn’t figure out, he was mocking her… or being just plain rude… or something. She hesitated… and finally said, “I’m a nurse.”

  “What kind of nurse?” said the former Number Five.

  Magdalena noticed that several people at the table were motionless. They had their eyes fixed upon her… the man there with the shaved head sitting next to a woman so obese that her huge costume jewelry necklace lay flat upon her bodice as if it were a tray… and the two women there with pillbox hats and hair netting from way back in the last century. They wanted to hear this, too.

  “A psychiatric nurse,” said Magdalena. “I worked for a psychiatrist.”

  “What kind of psychiatrist, a logotherapist or a pill therapist?” Magdalena had no idea what he meant, but his sly little twist of the lips and the way he narrowed one eye made her feel like he was merely trying to establish how ignorant she was about her own field. She looked about quickly. If only Sergei were back! With a wary voice she said, “What is a logotherapist? I don’t know that word.”

  “You don’t know what a logotherapist is.” He said it not as a question but as a statement of fact. Now his tone was like a grade school teacher’s. It as much as said, “You’re a psychiatric nurse—who doesn’t know the most basic things about psychiatry. I guess we’d better start at the bottom.”

  “A logotherapist ‘treats’ his patients”—treats was soaked in irony—“with talk… the ego, the id, the superego, the Oedipal complex, and all that… mainly the patient’s talk, not his. The logotherapist mainly listens… unless the patient is so boring his mind wanders, which I imagine must be very, very often. The pill psychiatrist gives his patients pills to increase the flow of dopamine and inhibit the reuptake and give them a synthetic peace of mind. Logos is Greek for ‘word.’ So which is the psychiatrist you work for?”

  “Worked for.”

  “Okay, worked for. Which was he?”

  These questions were making Magdalena anxious. She couldn’t figure out why. The former Number Five wasn’t saying anything insulting or out of bounds. So why did she feel so insulted? She just wanted to pull out of it. She wanted to say, “Look, let’s talk about something else, okay?” But she didn’t have the nerve. She didn’t want to sound cranky in front of Sergei’s friends. Once more she swept Gogol’s glittering interior… begging Sergei to reappear. But there was no sign of him—and somehow she had to respond to the champion.

  “Well, he did prescribe some drugs, but I suppose he was mostly the other… what you said.” The what you said was like flinching before the blow she knew was bound to c
ome next.

  “Good for him!” said the great chess player. He said it without any trace of a smile, as if he really meant it. Magdalena’s hopes rose—not her spirits, just her hopes. “A wise man! Logo is the way to go!” he continued. “I’m sure you’ll agree—right?—the talk therapists are the slickest extortionists that ever existed.” He drilled his eyebeams into her eyes and held her in place. There was no way she could get free.

  “I don’t know what you mean…” ::::::Please! Somebody! Get me out of this! Get him off me!:::::: “Extortionist… ¡Dios mío! I can’t really see that…”

  Now it dawned on her: The entire table had stopped talking and stopped eating and even stopped drinking vodka… in order to watch the champion torment her.

  “You can’t really see that?” said the champion, as if that were a pathetic way to try to get out from under this. “All right, then, let’s start with… tell me what an extortionist is.” His eyes bored into hers more intently than ever. His voice insinuated that if she didn’t know the answer to that, then she had no education whatsoever.

  Magdalena gave up. She folded completely. “I don’t know. I don’t even know how to say it. You tell me.”

  This time he cocked his head and twisted his lips in a way that struck Magdalena and her sinking heart as openly contemptuous. “You don’t know.” Once more, not a question but a sad declaration of the obvious. “An extortionist is someone who says, ‘You do what I say, or I will see to it that you suffer in a way you cannot stand.”… I vill zee to eet zat you zuffer in a vay… “Your logotherapist spends the first few sessions making you believe that only he can save you from your depression or your fear or overwhelming guilt or compulsions or self-destructive impulses or paralyzing catatonia or whatever. Once he convinces you of that, then you’re his. You’re one of his assets. He’ll keep you coming until the day you’re cured… a day that never comes, of course… or you run out of money… or one day you die. That’s the psychiatrist you worked for, isn’t it. I don’t know how old your employer was, but if he’s old enough to have two generations of these poor people on his hook, he’ll be a very rich man for life. Of course, he’ll have to sit still for a lot of whining and utterly pointless cerebration—the patients all love to go on about the meaning of their dreams and all that… but I’m sure your employer thought about other things while they driveled on—his investment portfolio, a new car, a girl with no clothes on, a delivery boy who petrifies him—anything’s better than actually listening to these idiots’ logorrhea. Just keeping them in his pen, that’s all he has to worry about, turning them into lifers, making sure they don’t start thinking for themselves and getting… ideas. That pretty well describes your employer, right? Maybe you were and maybe you weren’t aware you were working for a learn-ed, genteel extortionist. But you were—am I not right?”