They were marvelous winners, Nikolai and Vivian. Their arms-around walk back to the hotel was practically a strut that was practically a dance. They’d beaten the house, the Omniscient favored them; they were cleverer than fate, the angels were hovering, circling, doing loop-the-loops above their heads.
That emotional climate carried over into their love-making.
The next afternoon they went exploring around the small town and ended up climbing one of the surrounding hillsides, a steep open slope with grass so tall and thick it made the going strenuous. Vivian called it “hiding grass,” because when they lay down in it they were out of sight, except for whatever was in the sky. They kissed a lot. After that romantic laziness they had an excellent light dinner at Katzenberger’s Adler in the nearby village of Rastatt. They were at the casino by ten.
It had been decided that Vivian would do the playing. She saw no reason why they both shouldn’t, but Nikolai really didn’t want to. His previous night’s play had been a short high-feverish sort of positive experience that he felt would be better left singular. Even winning again would dilute it.
Vivian had the twenty thousand they were ahead to play with.
The angels weren’t around. By midnight it was lost.
“Sixteen!” she muttered on the way back to the hotel. “Fucking sixteen.” Several times during her play she had bet heavily on number 16, but, perversely, it wouldn’t come up except when she wasn’t on it. It was as though the number disliked her. When they arrived at the suite they went straight to bed. Vivian didn’t even remove her makeup, which was not like her. There was no mention of the casino, but Nikolai doubted that it was very far back in her mind. She got right into her current reading, a book entitled Angels and Man, skipping pages to get to that part headed “Angelic Responsibility.” Nikolai dozed off. Gambling was surprisingly enervating.
He awoke around four. Vivian wasn’t there. He called out to her but didn’t really expect a response. He knew immediately where she was, and for a while considered getting up and going there. However, he reasoned it would be worse if he did. He remained in bed, waited in the dark. He couldn’t recall having felt lonelier. At close to five he heard her come in quietly. There was the stealthy sound of her barefoot steps on the rug, the rustle of her undressing, the puff of the pillow as it received her head, the frictional whistle of the sheet on her skin as she pulled it up over her. Nikolai sensed her condition, the hurt. She was like a wounded creature torn by a trap. He reached for her, brought her to him, silently soothed her, cupped and stroked her head. The tempo of her heart against him gradually slowed. She was drained.
He was certain she had lost, but actually it made no difference whether she had or not.
When she was deep asleep, Nikolai got up, careful not to disturb her. Noiselessly as possible, and automatically, as though having no choice, he removed his things from the wardrobe and its drawers and from the bathroom. He packed in the sitting room and then dressed. He didn’t inflict upon himself the pain of a look in on her before he went out. He hired a car to take him to Stuttgart, where he caught the first available flight to Frankfurt. From there Aeroflot would take him home to Leningrad.
Vivian’s eyes opened at ten-thirty that morning. Consciousness came to her with the dubious tidings that she was once again broke, fresh out except for a leftover thousand or two. There’d be mortgages in her immediate future. Merde, part of her said. Tant pis, said the other part. She would tell Nikolai over breakfast, she decided. She’d grin and admit to having been defeated. Would she have to say how sorry she was? She called out, and when there was no reply thought he might be out for a walk, perhaps gone up on the slope again. She imagined him sitting up there, his gaze fixed on the windows of the suite, waiting to see the drapes drawn, telling him she was awake and to hurry to her.
She didn’t realize the extent of his absence until she was in the bathroom peeing and noticed his razor and brush and other such essentials were gone from the marble shelf above his sink. She went to the other room and saw the empty wardrobe, his luggage not in the foyer closet.
She couldn’t remain standing, lowered herself to the edge of the sofa, hunched tightly, elbows on knees, fists jammed to cheekbones. She was beyond crying. The air seemed anesthetic. She was numb all over. Her mind tried to come to her rescue. It’s only a tiff, it said. Nikolai was probably hurrying back to her this instant.
Finally, she presented something to herself that she could put stock in: Self-preservation, Viv, is an antidote for panic.
CHAPTER
16
ARCHER BELIEVED HE KNEW HIS VIVIAN, IF NOT PHYSICALLY at least psychologically, better than anyone. What he was for her now would be extremely important in nourishing what he hoped she would be for him in the near future. Don’t be too hasty or clumsy in picking up her pieces and putting them in your pocket, he cautioned himself.
He gauged the depth of Vivian’s hurt and took a position on the edge of it, a vantage from which he would surely know when it reached the stage of healing over. He filled it as much as possible with listening. In her unhalting manner, as though to drain a wound, she related to him the entire episode in detail, from Madrid to desertion. In fact, she went over it twice, as though searching for anything she might have left out. Throughout, Archer soaked up her words with concern, understanding frowns, sympathetic well-timed nods. Now and then, trying to splash a little laughter up out of her, he threw in one of his most arid or cynical quips. He also suggested distractions on the chance that she might grab hold of one and pull herself more quickly up out of this emotional mire. For instance, would she care to go trout fishing in Nova Scotia? Nothing salvages certain sunken hearts more readily than the taking of a couple of ten-pound browns. Or would she want to go somewhere and shoot something? What better way to separate the wrath from the woes?
The farthest Archer succeeded in getting her to go was to dinner at La Tante Claire. He had to wangle a reservation from a club crony who’d booked that scarcity a month ago, promised the fellow a stack of expensive favors in return. As it turned out, Archer might as well have taken Vivian to a fish-and-chips place. She didn’t care what he ordered for her, just anything, she told him, and sat there sucking on the slice of lime that came in her Perrier without making a sour face. She didn’t want to talk about her Nikolai dilemma anymore. She didn’t want to talk about anything. Nothing was worth words.
Thus, Archer had to fuel the conversation, hardly a pleasure for him. He could see everything he said passing right through her as though she were incorporeal. Hearing so much of only himself and coming up against the blanks of so many mute moments made him realize how tiresomely dull he’d probably been all along. Anyway, not nearly as amusing as he’d thought.
Another revelation for Archer was his own reaction to Nikolai’s absence and the prospect that it might be permanent. The departure of Nikolai was not surprising to him. He’d anticipated that eventuality. However, now that it had come to pass, Archer felt part of himself was missing; a fresh, fairly potent hollow had taken a place within him where all his longtime most personal hollows dwelled. Of course, Archer thought, Vivian could alleviate that if only she were able to sustain a genuine smile in response to him and indulge in some of her normal wry rapport. Well, couldn’t she? In the course of his one-sided conversations Archer steered around the mention of Nikolai as though it were a perilous obstacle. Several times he forgot and came within a syllable of collision. His public-school mentality suggested that now that his rival was down he should kick him, but for some reason, he could not bring himself to denigrate Nikolai. Besides, his better judgment advised that that would be an unwise and ineffective strategy.
What then might he do for her, and therefore do for himself, that would at least assuage if not cure?
Had Vivian not been Vivian but an ordinary sort, a visit to the jewelers, to Collingwood or Garrard, would have been regenerating. A Burma-ruby-and-diamond necklace would have been just the ticket to g
etting her down the road in the direction of being cheery. And quite possibly a sable from Fendi to knock around in might have been the what else needed to get her within one good carry-me-up-the-stairs drunk of destination.
But not Vivian.
She wouldn’t even allow Archer to buy her something ugly that she could sell. He showed up at her door with a pair of Louis XIV marine barometers. Worth fifty thousand if a penny. Vivian didn’t answer her bell, poked her head out her second-story window, saw him and the hideous valuables his chauffeur was carrying, and refused to let them in. No amount of pleading by Archer could persuade her. He left the two barometers on her doorstep. So did she. They weren’t there the next morning, and she phlegmatically assumed that someone, most likely the trash collector, had lugged them off.
Vivian wasn’t being intentionally perverse. She just wasn’t the same Vivian without Nikolai, and for the time being she didn’t feel like trying to be. Life was punishing her and she was struggling with the issue of whether or not she deserved it. How much easier, much better, it would have been if Nikolai had stuck around and confronted her. They could have had a good healthy relationship-cleansing fight, thrown a lot of verbal punches and counterpunches, accusing hooks, jealous jabs, threatening lefts and demanding rights. Perhaps they might even have carried it a bit further than a shouting match, really wrestled and clawed it out and dealt with it and not been deprived of the making-up enjoyments.
Instead of this miserable frustration.
She had phoned Nikolai’s Leningrad apartment, which was where she believed he would most likely be. The Russian operator told her that Nikolai’s instrument was out of order. I hope so, because mine surely is, Vivian thought. His office in Leningrad had refused to be helpful, recited a string of Russian that made her feel more helpless. When she had phoned his London office her calls were relayed to the embassy, where a human answering machine told her: “Mr. Borodin is not in. Do you wish to leave a message?” Again and again. Vivian phoned there so many times one day that she felt a nuisance and resorted to placing a tissue over the mouthpiece and disguising her voice. Grasping, she had also tried to reach Savich in Moscow. He was a delightful worldly man, she thought, he would be helpful, he was Nikolai’s boss and would know his whereabouts. She got through three secretaries but not all the way through. She left her number.
Having hit all those dead ends, she went to the Soviet consulate and applied for a visa. All the red tape, filling out an application form, supplying three signed photographs of a specific size, the brief, personal interview, even the booking of a flight at the Aeroflot office on Piccadilly was unduly difficult for her; the effort seemed to be across the grain of her mettle. Her approved visa came by post. That same afternoon she went to Hyde Park, helped herself to a folding chair from the Park Department shed, and chose a spot way out on the lawn, as removed as possible from everyone. She was there only a few minutes before a vagrant approached her and begged a shilling, and two young boys with string wound around their fists ran to her and wanted to know if she’d seen where their kite had fallen to. She pointed in any direction to have them gone.
She bent over and lowered her head. Her heavy, straight hair fell forward. She swished it freely back and forth so that when she sat up it completely covered her face. Now she had her public privacy, the insularity she was entitled to. She imagined a succession of irrelevant things before coming to the fantasy of a high-flying-bird’s-eye view of herself—a speck of a person treading to keep afloat in a lake of green—and that brought out from one of the most frequently used gates of her memory that fragment of time when she had last seen her mother alive far out alone in that cold lake in Scotland.
I’m not going under, Vivian vowed, no matter what. She would have her mourning, a period of awful, aching missing. She was already in it, but she wouldn’t wallow any more than she would flounder. Nor would she resist it all that much. This was a debt. Unlike the sort she so habitually incurred. This was a karmic debt, a trial she owed her existence from a previous lifetime. It was entirely up to her whether or not she paid it, and in what coin.
With her frame of mind a notch improved, she went home. She canceled her chase to Leningrad, dropped her passport and visa into an everything drawer, undressed, and lay nude on the sofa with one leg up on the fat back of it. A shamelessly exposed, solitary position. In the gloaming of the London day with only the perpetual strains of the city for accompaniment she considered options and potentially therapeutic impulses. Such as opening another shop, a different approach this time, a place jammed madly with all sorts of worthwhile, charming junk for which she would charge outlandish prices. She would serve cheap wine to customers and act the obsessed collector so in love with every item that letting anyone purchase something was almost out of the question. (She’d soon tire of that.) Tomorrow she might benefit from being packed to the chin in warm mud like some tropical frog or having her hair cut too short. She could go platinum, had always wanted to. (Changes might be in order, but not self-destruction, not even to that extent.) She could become a female Gareth, a medium tout. Gareth didn’t have a corner on being blessed by racing angels. She’d noticed in that morning’s paper that in the 4:10 at Doncaster there were only five horses entered. A perfect race for angelic touting. Something must have influenced her to notice that. (Maybe she should try to chuck that way of thinking. Anyway, limit it.) She could drive down to Devon, purposely speed, and get a summons for it on the way down. Wake up early and have a big brekker, smoked kippers perhaps, surely some splits. The jam she had there, excellent raspberry she’d put up with Nikolai’s help last summer, but she’d need to get the scones and the cream and everything would be closed in Pennyworth. Besides, shouldn’t she go to the bank tomorrow and arrange a mortgage? (Not yet.) Shouldn’t she remove Nikolai’s things from her closet? (Positively not yet.) Why was it that for the second time since Baden-Baden that Irish punter she’d encountered three years ago during the March meeting at Cheltenham had come to mind? Matty “the Boy” Flynn. Why was it she was able to picture his face so clearly, fast smile, windburned complexion, slightly crooked lower front teeth? Said he’d been a priest way back. On the boat coming over he’d won twenty-some thousand at poker. What a devil! It had been at the bar of the Cottage Lake that, simultaneously, Matty’s eyes had taken her and his voice given her a twenty-to-one winner. (As her taste had then it would still find him too much the dandy.) Not so long ago she’d read somewhere and thought it just so much scientific bull the theory that love was merely the brain overdosing on dopamine and norepinephrine—she’d memorized those substances, thinking they could be put to use during table talk. Well, if there was any truth to it, perhaps they knew of something—an injection?—that worked as an antidote. (She wouldn’t take it even if they did. Not yet.) If, farther down the road than she’d be able to see now even if she were standing tiptoe on the peak of Mount Everest, lonely push came to lonely shove, wouldn’t she remarry Archer? (She was too fond of him to ever do that to him.)
Night had come. The lamp on the table behind the sofa was one with an old beaded pull chain. She extended her foot, felt around with it, and tried to get the pull chain between her large and second toe. After five minutes of trying she managed it. Illumination brought the room back to being the room. With only her and her moping in it.
She got up so quickly she was a bit light-headed on her way into the kitchen. She found the particular cookbook she’d bought with good intent last year at Hatchard’s and split it open to the place she’d marked with an old unopened Harrods bill. She read the recipe for blinis aloud three times. It didn’t seem difficult. Blinis were nothing more than a sort of pancake. If she’d realized they were this simple she would have had a go at making them long ago. Mother Russia, she thought, you’re about to be exposed. She got out everything that was called for. Except for the buckwheat flour. She didn’t have any but assumed regular flour would do. She would be well organized, not have to stop and search her cabinet
s for something as she usually did. She lined up the utensils and ingredients on the counter in the order they’d be used.
Before beginning, she went to the study for her compact disk player and powerful little speakers. Brought them into the kitchen and put them on the counter opposite. For inspiration and company she chose the “Polovtsian Dances” from Prince Igor, by Nikolai’s great-great-uncle Alexander Borodin, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra. She turned the volume way up, so loud it seemed to claim the air and contribute to making her kitchen microcosmic.
One of the early sections of the piece, a whirl of woodwinds, was, Vivian thought, perfect accompaniment for her whisking of the egg and the milk, and as she went along the music was like a personal underscore for the various motions required of her hands, all the way to the spooning of the batter onto the hot surface of the butter-greased iron skillet.
Vivian’s spirit was sailing as she watched the circles of batter cook. Blinis were one promise she could check off her past-due list. See? Their upsides were beginning to texture with little bubbles exactly as the recipe said they would. Vivian flipped the blinis over and saw that their cooked sides were burned black. How could that have happened? She’d been standing there watching them every second. She hurriedly threw the overdone blinis into the trash container beneath the sink, got them out of sight, making it easier for her to pretend that the next batch was the first. She should be allowed that much of a handicap, she thought. After all, she wasn’t Russian.
She didn’t give up. Not until around midnight. Borodin’s In the Steppes of Central Asia and his Nocturne for String Orchestra from Quartet No. 2 were with her all the while, over and over. She blamed everything, ingredients, recipe, stove, skillet, before getting around to herself. The making of blinis was an unmerciful little trick, she decided. Someday she’d have another go at it. She turned off the stove and the Borodin and left the mess she’d made. To clean it up now would be tantamount to being beaten and enslaved.
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