by Skip Horack
“Pelmeni,” she said.
Viktor was next to Sonya, beaming, and he rubbed his stomach and winked at her as she pulled Marina into the kitchen. He led me from the door, and we lowered ourselves into the overstuffed chairs that flanked either side of the couch. “Put your feet up,” he said. “It is nice.”
I told him I was content, but he wouldn’t accept no. Finally I popped the lever and got thrown back horizontal. My legs were stretched out in front of me, and I felt defenseless, as if he had captured me somehow.
“You see?” he said.
Soon Sonya came with half liters of syrupy Baltika beer and two glasses. She poured a glass for me and a glass for her husband. It was like being tucked into bed, lying there in my gray socks. I thanked her, and she went back into the kitchen. Viktor kicked up his own leg rest, got himself settled, then tapped at the remote control balanced on the arm of his chair. There was a bomb blast as the killer whale came crashing to the sea. My hands bounced, and black beer sloshed in the glass I was holding. I looked around, trying not to spill, and saw small speakers screwed into every corner of the room.
Viktor eased the volume down, but not by much. “A theater system!” he shouted.
Up on the TV the killer whale had paired with another just off some coastline, and an English man was narrating. The man told us these were South American sea lions we saw spread across the beach, that the two orcas were hunting. Four of the sea lions had strayed too far, and the killer whales came surging in on a big wave, their dorsal fins cutting through the water like blades. They caught a sea lion apiece, then swam back out to the deep and began tossing their crippled victims into the air, torturing them.
“And high definition!” Viktor shouted. “It is the finest!”
“Damn,” I said. It was as if those playing whales were about to come out of the wall and land on me.
Later we took seats at an actual dinner table in an actual dining room, and that meal was the best I’d had in a long time. Pelmeni turned out to be little meat-filled dumplings, and Sonya served them with mashed potatoes and a cucumber salad, sour cream and dill. Marina was quiet at first, but after a second bottle of red wine was opened she became more sociable. Sonya and Viktor were arguing over something in Russian when she asked me about my finger. I had my left hand in my lap, but she’d either spotted the stump already or Viktor had told her.
“Show me,” she said, interested suddenly.
I hesitated but then set my roughneck hand down on the table. So many cracks and scars and calluses. It would have been an ugly hand even with all five fingers.
Marina leaned closer to look. She was wearing a strong, cotton candy perfume. “You must work very hard,” she said. “I was warehouse girl before America.”
I mentioned I wouldn’t be rotating offshore any longer. That in a few months I’d have the money I would need to retire and then some. She didn’t seem surprised, so I assumed Viktor had been wise enough to share that part of my essay with her. But I was surprised. There’s no two ways about it —I was sitting there trying, albeit in a roundabout way, to sell her on the idea of a life with me as a husband.
Marina patted my knee and said I should see myself as lucky. “This is something, but this is also nothing. Do you understand what I am saying?” She had dark, dark eyes. Black, almost. Some Cajun women have eyes that color.
I put my hand back in my lap. “I think so,” I said.
“Then good, then.”
I wondered if that meant she’d decided to marry me —and whether, once told, she would conclude that me being a registered sex offender was something, but also nothing. “You’re from Moscow, right?” I asked.
“Yes. I come here six months ago.”
“Only six months?”
“Da.”
“And you’ve been working for that family the whole time?”
She nodded. “The Colemans.”
“Where in the city are they?”
“Do you know Presidio? Next to Presidio.”
“Your English is really good —especially for just getting to America and all.”
“No. But thank you.”
“Did you study that in school?”
“Some. Yes.”
Marina appeared to be bored again, and I tried to think of what else to ask her. Nothing was coming to mind. For the moment she seemed through with me as well, and we both went back to eating. When everyone had finished she and Sonya cleared the dishes. It was only me and Viktor in the dining room now, but there was vodka on the table. He lined up two shots and raised his glass, waiting until I did the same.
“Za vas!” he said.
We touched glasses, then drank the crisp vodka down.
Viktor poured two more and capped the bottle. “Do you like her?” he asked.
“I like her plenty. But if she —”
The TV in the living room exploded to life, and he jumped from his chair. I followed him. Dina was lying in the corner, and Marina was sitting on the living room floor herself. Her white jeans blended perfectly with the carpet, and that made it look like she was melting. Like all that had saved her from disappearing was her shimmering blue top. I’d seen a reverse of this earlier. The sight of Joni’s bright blue sweatshirt vanishing into the house on Marvel Court.
Marina had the remote control beside her, and though I could tell that was bothering Viktor a great deal, he motioned for me to join her. Then he left us for the kitchen, and I sat down on the leather couch to watch more of the sea lion hunting. Dina came over to me, and Marina seemed impressed. She dropped the volume. “Dina hates me,” she said.
I scratched the Saluki’s slender neck. “I doubt that’s true.”
She shrugged, and I was thinking I would ask if she’d like to go for a cigarette when I heard muffled techno music. She pulled out her phone, and I listened as she spoke some quick Russian. She snapped the phone shut and rose. “I have to leave,” she said. “My friend is here to drive me now.”
“Where are you going?”
“This I do not know,” she said, moving to the door. “Do svidaniya. It was very nice meeting you.”
She put on her pink coat and came back across the room. I stood, gave her a clumsy hug before she went to find Viktor and Sonya. I was by myself, all alone in the living room except for willowy Dina.
A minute or so passed, then Viktor swooped in and grabbed the remote off the floor. Marina was with him, but she didn’t look at me. A horn honked, and she went outside for her boots. I watched the door close.
“She is sexy, yes?” said Viktor.
“Yes.”
“So you would like to have a real date with her? She wants very much to see you again.”
“You sure about that?”
“Of course.” He had the remote pointed at the TV now; the volume was slowly rising.
“Then okay,” I said, almost shouting the words. “But how do you know?”
Viktor laughed. “I know because this is what she tells me!”
I was lying on my sleeping bag in the black dark of the apartment, a waking dream of Joni and me visiting Lake Claiborne sliding out of my mind like the last scene of a movie. A nice dream, one so pleasant and comforting I didn’t want to see it end.
Before I left Viktor’s place that Saturday, my two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar check in his pocket once more, he had explained that unfortunately, due to Marina’s work schedule, he thought our date might not be until Monday or even Tuesday night. He knew I had to be gone from San Francisco on Thursday, understood there was no way I was going to report as a sex offender just to extend my stay —so again he’d asked if I was interested in meeting the other two women, and again I told him I’d like to concentrate on Marina for the time being.
I closed my eyes then, counting Sam’s whistled snores until that Lake Claiborne dream ende
d and a new one began. I saw some concrete tenement building in Moscow. The night shift is over, and Marina has taken the train home from a warehouse in the industrial outskirts. Dawn soon. It is summer, the middle of a Russian heat wave, and somehow I’m there as well, with Marina in her room. She’s wearing gray coveralls, and we’re standing together, smoking my Winstons. The building is a big hollow square, and her open window overlooks a courtyard crisscrossed with lines of drying laundry. In the twilight, through that galaxy of damp clothes, I can see into other rooms across the way. People are already reclined on their windowsills, burning their own first cigarettes of the morning. Marina and I finish with ours, and she undresses. Once she is naked I step toward her, but she tells me to sit down on the bed. She is even shorter in her bare feet, her body a soft, rolling flow, her nipples dark against her skin. She carries her socks and underthings to a sink and turns the faucet. A stream of water begins pooling in the cracked basin, and she adds a measure of washing powder. She soaks her small bundle, working the fabric, cleaning it, and I’m wondering whether she still wants me in the room with her. Then she wheels her socks out on a clothesline she shares with someone across the courtyard, returns to the sink for the rest. The sun is up now, and she is sweating. Beads of perspiration have formed between her heavy breasts. Finally she sits in a chair by the window and stares, trying to decide something about me. There’s a glass of water on the windowsill, and inside rests the broken half of a plastic comb. She takes the comb from the glass, still watching me as she draws the wet teeth through her hair. I tell her I’m sorry, that it had been wrong of me to believe I could just select her and have her be mine, and at last she comes over as if that apology is what she’d been waiting for all along. She pulls at my boots, then my clothes, until I am naked myself. She’s lying with me on the narrow bed now. The plywood under the thin mattress flexes beneath us as we kiss, and the heat makes us slick against one another. My vial of dirt is slapping at her chin, and she takes it into her mouth. I look away. Across the courtyard smokers are peering out from their own windows, but I don’t think they can see us in the shadows. When we are done we lie there. I’m thirsty like I’m dying, but I’m not willing to chance the water from that sink. I glance over at Marina, but she says nothing. I’m afraid she wants me gone, and I begin to gather my clothes. After I’ve dressed I turn back to her. She has fallen asleep, but then she wakes, sees me standing over her, a Cane River swelling between us. “No,” she begs. “Swim to me. Take Marina with you.” And I do.
Outside was cloudless and sunny, jeans-and-T-shirt weather for my daily hike to Lincoln Park. But it was also a Sunday morning, and Sundays have always depressed me —so even under that Easter egg sky I was feeling beaten down.
My science-teacher mother once told me evolution might account for why many people have a phobia of all snakelike creatures. The smartest cavemen had the good sense to run from everything slithery, and that fear eventually led to the invention of dragons and the serpent that came calling for Eve. Myths that have been around so long we’ve forgotten our fears, not our stories, came first. Maybe a similar uneasiness is triggered by Sundays. This is a country founded and formed by believers. And maybe generation after generation of our most prosperous and successful ancestors spending the Sabbath feeling guilty became a heritable quirk. Maybe science explains the hitch I get in my chest on the Lord’s Day. I’ve inherited their fears, if not their god.
I stopped for coffee across the street from Lincoln Park. I’d spent an hour in Café Sun on Thursday, trying to read some of Salted Waters, but the squat, middle-aged Korean woman who owned the place had chatted me up. Her name was Sun, like the café, and she looked happy to see me again now. “Good morning, Leroy,” she said.
My north Louisiana drawl had been a challenge for Sun, so I guess to her I was Leroy. I didn’t bother correcting her. Café Sun was empty today. Far as I could tell, it was often empty. I pictured Sun in the kitchen of a small apartment. Cash on one side of a table, bills and invoices collected on the other. She’d told me she was born in Seoul and had come to the U.S. just two years back. California was her first and only stop, and I wondered if she appreciated how big America was. Whether, like me, she now fantasized about places where getting by didn’t have to be this hard. I’ll make a deal with you, Sun. You leave San Francisco when I leave Grand Isle. We’ll go searching together for where the bluebird sings to the lemonade springs.
I filled a paper cup from one of the push-top thermoses, but before I could pay, a man carrying a clipboard ducked inside and beat me to the register. He was a white guy, but his hair was in long Rastafarian dreadlocks. I got behind him, and he started asking Sun if she sold fair-trade coffee.
“Think I can settle up with the lady?” I asked.
I don’t go looking for fights, but I realize I have the worn-and-torn appearance of someone who might. And every once in a while that can be to my advantage. The man didn’t say anything; he just left. “Thank you, Leroy,” said Sun, but she didn’t sound pleased. The guy was probably off to hassle someone else, but by her logic that was a potential customer lost. She punched at the register, and I handed her three dollars for her kitchen table.
“Keep them,” I told her, when she tried to give me some quarters. She did a slight bow. Sarcasm. I didn’t know Sun had that in her.
Then I got dealt a joker. I’d grabbed a seat in the back when I heard the bells on the front door jangle, and a girl walked in. A teenager. Pin-straight brown hair, blunt bangs, tall, very pretty. She was in jeans and, though the day had been steadily warming, a fringed buckskin jacket. The Midnight Cowboy Joe Buck kind. A seventies jacket for her seventies hair. And I was feeling thunderstruck even before Sun sang out, “Joni! Oh! Where have you been, young miss?” Marvel Court was two blocks up the road, so I’m not saying it was a complete miracle for Joni to be standing there in Café Sun—but still, I have to shake my head sometimes at how the world works. At the tricks it will play on you.
I thought of Nancy Hammons and her fucking investigator. There were decent odds that at some point Joni had gotten her hands on a picture of me to study on, and though I’d been hoping for a break such as this, my first reaction was to hide. I shielded my face with my coffee cup, watching as Joni paid for a small carton of something. Coconut water, I think. Her conversation with Sun was a murmur, but I could see her much better than the day before. And here, now, was the mind-blowing, heart-stopping, you are not the last Joseph moment I hadn’t quite felt on Marvel Court . . . because one thing was clear —she looked enough like Tommy (and a lower-mileage Roy Joseph, I suppose) for me to forever quit questioning whether we really shared blood. More than anything, though, this confident, laughing Joni resembled her grandmother. Not the woman who raised me, so much, but the long-limbed girl I’d seen in old photos. The courthouse bride who’d chosen my father over her own family. She had Mom’s same high cheekbones and tiny nose. That same glossy hair. Grief never leaves, it just mutates. Time eases pain only because we forget things or learn how not to think about them —but the grief is always there, adapting, metastasizing, and to stare at Joni was to mourn my dead mother. To remember the woman who went from the girl in those photos to the wailing stranger my father and navy men had to carry into our home, me watching from the doorway as she floated down the hall.
Joni led me north on Thirty-Second Avenue. I assumed she was aiming for home, and I was hurrying to catch up with her when instead she passed Marvel Court without turning. I lagged back, still caught off guard from Café Sun, thankful for this chance to gather myself, as she walked another block. The street ended, and she went east, entering a neighborhood called Sea Cliff. I began to wonder whether it had been a mistake to leave the FOR OUR TOMMY album in the apartment. Whether it was foolish to be saving that for some second meeting when I couldn’t be sure how this first one might go.
The stockbroker Viktor drove around was a Sea
Cliff resident, and Viktor had also told me Sharon Stone once lived there, that Robin Williams still did. The decamillionaires of Sea Cliff would piss on my two-and-a-quarter-mil portfolio, and you’d expect there to be a goddamn moat around such a place. A fence tinseled with razor wire. A minefield. But the Sea Cliff mansions only smirked and smirked as I passed them, their lawns all glowing the same nuclear green. A road sign warned TOUR BUSES AND VANS PROHIBITED, then a man in jogging shorts and a bicycle helmet overtook me on one of those Segway deals. He went whirring down the sidewalk, a sleeveless emperor on his electric chariot, gliding toward Joni. She was sauntering as if she was on a nature hike, but I kept my distance, steeling myself for the introduction, worried the right words would never come.
We walked and walked, and after fifteen minutes Joni finally waltzed her way through Sea Cliff and entered the dark, cool forest of the Presidio. Somewhere nearabout lived the Colemans and nanny Marina. What had once been an army base was now just their playground.
Joni’s route had us going downhill, and I could sense we were running out of land even before I saw the sign for a beach. Baker Beach. I followed her through the forest like a fairy-tale wolf, down a blacktop road that led to a parking lot. She tossed her coconut water into a trash can, and in due course I came along and dropped my coffee cup. We were now level with a portion of beach speckled with sunbathers. The Golden Gate itself —a bottleneck of rough water connecting the bay to the ocean. To the west was the flat expanse of the Pacific, and right there to the east: the crayon-red cables, towers, and deck of the Golden Gate Bridge.
I’d read a poem in Salted Waters set here. A poem about a shark attack. “Baker Beach, 1959.” Two college students are swimming when a great white slams into the boy. The salted water is pink, and the boy is shouting at the girl to save herself. But she swims to him. The girl is Catholic. The boy has no specific faith. Though she gets him to the beach, he is bleeding out. She baptizes him with Golden Gate splashes, then asks if that is all right. He gives her his permission to continue, and she has him repeat an act of contrition after her. Then, before unconsciousness, he whispers his last words: “I love God, and I love my mother and I love my father. Oh God, help me.”
