And West Is West

by Ron Childress

  “What he’s done with the red impasta is something,” says her drinking companion. He moves nearer to the canvas and raises a hand toward it as if to push through a door. Zoe notices he has a long lacquered thumbnail and for a moment she fears he will dig it into the paint.

  “Impasto,” she says sharply, noticing his overlarge but handsome face, his broad shoulders and chest. Her mouth twists into a half smile as she realizes that he is famous and she doesn’t recall his name.

  “Dean Cato,” he says and offers her the hand with the strange nail.

  Zoe stares but doesn’t otherwise react. Her expression might be a frown.

  “Sorry. The nail’s for a role I’m playing,” Cato says. “Some kind of warlock. But a good one.” He holds out the thumb like an artist sizing up a tree for a landscape. “Creepy, isn’t it?” Cato looks about thirty, both boyish and manly, and she wonders how much of an act he is putting on—the pretense of being a regular guy.

  “If you’re Dean Cato, where’s your entourage?” she asks.

  Cato’s grin grows. “I’m here alone.”

  “So you’re here to hook up.”

  He tilts his head. “I love art lovers,” he admits.

  Zoe’s eyes drift from Cato’s, passing through and over the noisy crowd, which has left the two of them a circle of space as if they are a pair of street fighters being wagered on. But this crowd is not betting on Dean Cato’s attempt to score. Why would they be? They are the famous and celebrated and are engaged in their own small duels—all except one who is famous only to Zoe. Her heart speeds a bit upon seeing him.

  “Eth,” she calls, though he has already disengaged from the man with whom he was speaking, a man in a windbreaker. Her ex seems ready to dissolve backward into the crowd.

  Ethan is not smiling. He never did when it did not come naturally. Clearly he still has no concept of how important dissimulation is for making others give a damn about you. What’s more, he’s no longer following the UIB dress code—he’d kept the manual on their dresser. Now with his uncut hair camouflaging his ears, the stretched-out Izod pullover, the ill-fitting jeans and scuffed dress shoes, he radiates an unfamiliar shabbiness. He holds himself apologetically stooped and then lurches forward. She rises onto her toes and Ethan awkwardly accepts her kiss on his cheek.

  “You came,” he says, less in gladness than like a man relieved of a burden.

  “I was surprised Alex invited me. Isn’t he supposed to be your best friend?” Zoe says through a smile. But she is being too glib. Ethan has a tendency to extract meaning from small talk.

  “Alex doesn’t really hate you,” he says, confirming to Zoe that Alex probably kind of hates her. But this is not really news.

  Zoe keeps her smile. “Anyway, it’s nice, not being really hated enough to get an invitation.”

  Ethan looks away. “I’m the one who undeleted you from his list.”

  Her smile fades. “Why?” she asks. If anyone has a right to hate her, Ethan does.

  “Maybe for the same reason you came tonight?” he says with a faint upturn of his mouth.

  “I was in town,” Zoe says, afraid Ethan will imagine that her presence here has a hidden meaning.

  In the silence that follows, Dean Cato pops back into Zoe’s periphery. “So, like, you two were an item of yore. Or still are?” he asks.

  “Of yore?” Zoe says meanly.

  “Did I say yore? I’m still half in character. It’s difficult to turn off,” says Dean, marking his territory as a somebody, probably for Ethan’s sake.

  “Acting must really be hard. Dean, this is Ethan. He’s in finance,” she says even as she realizes that Ethan’s derelict appearance is embarrassing her.

  Now the two men face off—Cato grinning upward self-confidently, Ethan looking down like a pilot circling in a fog and unable to land. Zoe can’t help but compare the two men to Ethan’s disfavor.

  “Bonsoir, Dean!”

  Cato does an about face into an open pair of toned forearms. “Juliette!” he responds.

  Zoe sees a glittering face, a face as taut as a Greek mask depicting ecstasy, above Cato’s shoulder. “You have bought Money Shot! Congratulations.”

  Cato lifts the woman, spins about and lands her.

  Juliette is older but obviously flogged daily by the whip of a personal trainer. Her dress is a brief costume—a silver halter that exposes the wings of her back and, below, reveals a tanned thigh through a slit. Gladiator platforms augment her height, show off her sculpted calves. This is a woman Zoe would hate to confront in any arena—especially dressed down as she is in the waistless black dress and thong sandals she’d found in Marla’s closet.

  Nearby a camera fires and Zoe and Ethan, bit players, retreat from the photo op. For a flash, Zoe regrets that she won’t be finding out how spectacular Dean Cato’s apartment might be.

  “You’re up from DC?” Ethan asks her, the scruff on his face shadowing his cheeks. This or they are hollow from lost weight.

  “No. Washington is over for me.”

  Ethan leans forward, just short of pressing his folded arms into her breasts. Or is someone pushing him from behind? The art crowd, closing in on them, makes him glare to the left and right as if fearing a stampede. “Let’s get out of here,” he tells her.

  AROUND THE BLOCK in a diner booth, Zoe forks disinterestedly through a plate-size waffle. Meanwhile Ethan pours sugar into his third refill of black coffee. Zoe checks his shaking hand to stop the cup from overflowing.

  “Still the sweet tooth,” she says and Ethan eyes her as if they had never lived together and she should not know this detail. Yet he has already updated her about losing his job, his UIB lawsuit, his money woes, the days he spends helping Alex, and Juliette, who is supplanting him in his friend’s life.

  “She’s even trying to get me a job to get me out of Alex’s studio. That guy I was with when I saw you wants to hire me. Sergei. He’s been courting me for months.”

  “But that’s great,” Zoe says.

  “I don’t want to work on Long Island. I’ve got things to do here.”

  “And what if you don’t get a judgment against UIB? You’ll have sold your apartment for nothing and not even have work?”

  “At least I’ll have fought.”

  The obvious stays behind her lips—that Ethan should stop tilting at windmills and take the offered job. Zoe stares down at Ethan’s hands, which are strangling his coffee cup. His fingernails are stained and grimy.

  “Paint,” he says apologetically and relaxes his grip on the ceramic. “From cleaning Alex’s brushes.”

  “That’s nice of you,” Zoe says, thinking that Alex should do his own dirty work.

  He reads her disapproval. “I don’t mind. Repetitive tasks are like Zen. Ommm,” he hums briefly then coughs. “Still working on the circular breathing.” His humor, poor though it is, reveals a seed of sanity. Zoe feels herself relaxing.

  Zoe understands that Ethan’s state is a mirror of hers, that though apart they have been traveling similar downward paths. She tallies her obvious wrong turns—sleeping with her boss, moving in with her boss, denying that this course was unsustainable, losing her career because of the bribery mess. The loneliness of where she has arrived is killing.

  “Don’t,” she tells Ethan, whose eyes emit a compassion she had never received from them before. Maybe he wasn’t joking about the Zen and has begun working on his karma.

  “Zoe,” Ethan breathes, and she feels herself choking up.

  “I’ve completely screwed up my life,” she blurts.

  Zoe’s tears are not quite welling but it won’t take much—silence or the touch of Ethan’s hand across the table.

  Unexpectedly Ethan’s face lights up. “You need a reboot,” he says. “That’s what I’m doing. What my lawyers are helping me do. Wipe the slate so I can start over. Prove that my supervisor moved that decimal point, not me.”

  Zoe cannot completely follow Ethan’s burst of talk. Nonetheless
the idea that, just like a machine, all she needs is a reboot, douses her in ice water. The old reductive Ethan has returned and he has broken her mood.

  “Start over from the very beginning? You mean like reincarnation?” she is able to quip.

  WHEN ZOE ARRIVES in front of Marla’s building, Sun Wah grocery is closing its sidewalk produce stand for the night.

  “Half price,” Mr. Wah tells her. He offers a box of raspberries that look overripe.

  Ms. Wah, toting a crate of peaches, speaks sharply in Cantonese at her husband or brother. Shrinking, Mr. Wah turns a tea-stained grin on Zoe. “Free for neighbor,” he says, bowing in apology. Zoe bows back.

  Upstairs she finds Harry awake on his terrarium’s island and she places a mushy raspberry in front of him. He pulls his head into his shell.

  “Hey, mister, it’s the way you like them.” Zoe stares at the turtle’s patterned back, but Harry refuses to come out. “Do you want to hear more stories?” Her grandfather’s folder is by Harry’s tank. She’s read aloud to him the news clippings about her mother. “Well, maybe this will get your interest,” she says and pulls off her dress. Then she uncovers the nearby bathtub, an old tenement tub, opens its hot tap and plugs the drain.

  While the water rises, Zoe burrows into Marla’s liquor cabinet, comes out with a fifth of raspberry vodka, a wood box stamped PROSECCO DI VALDOBBIADENE, a Dewar’s miniature, a sticky bottle of amaretto. She opens the miniature and swallows. The liquor burns her throat like arctic air. She inspects the Prosecco box. Two bottles remain and she removes one.

  From higher cabinets, she takes down a tall tumbler and a coffee can of candles and incense sticks. She pops open the Prosecco, fills the tumbler, and immediately half drains it. With matches from Balthazar, a restaurant where once she ate ceviche with Ethan, she lights a candle and drips wax on the rounded rim of the tub, getting a few candles to stand on the rim. She surrounds the tub with incense, mounting the sticks in the seams of the wood floor. She lights the candles and incense and turns off the kitchen lights. She gazes at her handiwork, which has some similarity to an altar. But she is not quite ready yet.

  In the weeks that she’s been living at Marla’s she’s resisted digging through the medicine cabinet. But now she starts to rummage among the sulfur salves and sleeping pills, the antihistamine tablets and acid-reflux chewables, the creams for wart control and yeast infection. At last she locates Marla’s Vicodin and Soma. In college Marla used them to manage her scoliosis spasms, though sometimes she and Zoe abused them recreationally. The dusty labels have expiration dates from early in the Obama era, which possibly indicate that the yoga Marla practices has helped her spine. Zoe gathers up the old drug booty and, taking along a fresh bath towel, returns to the kitchen.

  There she sees that Harry has come out and is looking at her as she stands naked in the hazy, incense-darkened candlelight. Zoe almost regrets the filthy kitchen window. She is just a blur to any voyeur on the fire escape or across the street peeping through a blind. Somehow she wants an audience. It’s as if by living in Marla’s space she has channeled an actor’s desire to perform.

  Unfortunately, no one is on the iron-barred escape. They are alone, she and Harry. And the solitude Zoe feels serves as a reminder. She playfully constructs a small pyramid of raspberries on Harry’s little islet. Harry won’t starve on her account if this goes on for a few days.

  What? She’s indulging in a little ritual of self-pity. A reboot is what Ethan suggested. And this is close. Getting completely wasted. Touching bottom so you can push back to the surface.

  She refills her tumbler with Prosecco and then follows it with a cocktail of Soma and Vicodin, no doubt half strength at their age. She’s allowed to self-prescribe, no? After all, she is a physician’s granddaughter—and his daughter as well. But she’ll think about that later.

  Lifting a foot over the tub rim, Zoe dips a toe in scalding water and hops back on her grounded heel—causing Harry a tsunami when she bumps his terrarium. “Sorry,” Zoe says, but Harry’s already ducked into his shell. She opens the cold tap for a minute before stepping in. Going down she seems not to displace much water, she sinks like bones due to her diet of late—lentils scavenged from Marla’s pantry or a brown banana courtesy of Ms. Wah. Even tonight’s Belgian waffle with Ethan brought no inspiration. She’d simply hacked at it.

  She settles against the curved back of the tub, her mouth at the waterline. Now the water has become too cool. With her toes she turns the hot tap to a trickle and, through fluttering eyelids, watches the candlelight rippling over the bathwater’s surface.

  CHAPTER 28

  New York City

  To: zoeleston2@nyu.edu

  From: flytiger3.1416@gmail.com

  Subject: Last night

  Zoe,

  I know I’m breaking our radio silence. I’ve given you space this past year just as you wanted when you moved to DC. No calls, no emails, no texts. But maybe now, after last night, we can start again. Let me explain.

  I will not say that I had no hopes for us after last November, after that last night together. For days afterward I waited to hear from you, for you to tell me our night meant something more than your reaching out for comfort. But now I know this is all it was. And I can accept that.

  I guess what I’m stumbling to say is that I’d like us to be friends. I can do this now and I think you too are ready, maybe more than you know. By coming to the opening you took your first step home. And by home I mean a place where people care about you.

  As for me, after our talk last night I decided to look into Sergei’s job. Tomorrow I’m off to Long Island for a couple of days to check things out. Can we talk when I’m back? Hope we’re past all the bad stuff.

  E

  CHAPTER 29

  Sagaponack

  The Town Car, which had picked Ethan up in front of the Popeye’s below his walk-up on Lexington, now deposits him in a driveway off Hedges Lane in Sagaponack. Ethan can smell the ocean as he stands below a multileveled, Gehry-influenced structure that towers over him in glass, steel, and cedar. One story too high for local regulations, the village has levied the building a ten-thousand-dollar-a-week fine—a cheap bribe compared to Russia, Sergei had told Ethan when they’d arranged his visit. He is being courted and it is flattering.

  Expected by the staff, Ethan is escorted to his room, which has a private bath and windows that overlook not the dunes but a field of high grass. He is here at Sergei Sokolov’s Long Island home, or is it a base of operations? Ethan sits on the bed and shuts his eyes.

  “Mr. Winter,” a voice calls from the open door. It’s a young woman wearing a jacket bearing Sergei’s SAS logo—the A for Aleksandrovich—which is monogrammed everywhere here. “Mr. Sokolov will see you now. He is on a very tight schedule.”

  In an elevator his escort holds a finger to a touchscreen panel. “Biometrics,” she explains as the doors close. Ethan’s stomach rises, but he cannot tell how far down they are going. The ride becomes motionlessly smooth. There’s not even a bounce at the end before the doors are sliding away. And here is Sergei.

  “Mr. Winter. At last,” he says.

  Sokolov is wearing one of his SAS windbreakers, as if transmitting to everyone who works for him that he, too, is just part of the team. He grips Ethan’s hand and Ethan almost expects a bear hug to follow. But it doesn’t. “This way,” says the Russian. Though a head shorter than Ethan and almost as slim, Sergei fills the space with his dynamism. This is a type Ethan recognizes, a force of nature, a person who, tornado-like, sweeps others up into his enthusiasms.

  Lengthening his stride Ethan chases Sergei down a corridor that, from its halogen lighting, glows warmly like the interior of a Hollywood-imagined spacecraft. Ahead Sergei steps through a portal resembling an airlock door found in a submarine. “This is the vault,” he says from the other side. “Secure against everything from ocean surges to Chinese hacker attacks.”

  After ducking under the door header Ethan
finds himself in a low, wide, depthless room that is lit just as delicately as the corridor. The next thing he is aware of is the hum, the familiar-to-him hum of a serious mainframe. Its subtle vibration takes Ethan back to UIB, to his old office which adjoined the server room. In that space he had felt much as he is beginning to feel here, like he is at the center of a beehive. But unlike Ethan’s solitary chamber at UIB, Sergei’s operations center is a bullpen that doesn’t offer even the privacy of cubicles. The arrangement suggests that Sergei, as if in a nod to old communist Russia, expects everyone to work for the benefit of the whole, that employees should expect fewer of the superficial inducements of capitalistic prestige prominent on Wall Street—the fancy job title, the corner office, the toy-box swag of watches, electronics, golf clubs. There are in this common room perhaps a dozen workstations, which are mounted on several conference tables as opposed to separated desks. And bent over these dozen or so stations, clicking away at keyboards, are workers who seem as focused on their jobs as drones in a hive. None have even glanced up at Ethan and Sergei’s entrance. But Ethan knows why. These young men, for they are all young men, are coders fixated in their solipsistic coding universes, which nonetheless can alter societies. “Cozy, isn’t it,” Sergei says. “This is where you will be programming.”

  Ethan just smiles. For although he has signed a confidentiality agreement, he has not yet signed an employment contract—even if Sergei’s offer is not one he can imagine refusing. Coding is what holds him together, his deepest pleasure, his essence. But now, standing in this chilly space, something twists in Ethan’s stomach. It is not a distaste over the communality—he will not have to rub elbows as there is plenty of room between the workstations. It is something deeper, rawer.

  As Ethan’s stomach gurgles he notices that Sergei is studying him and guesses that the Russian is waiting for a response, a positive statement that will counter the stony face Zoe had often criticized him for, and which he can sense overcoming him once again. He should try to smile and talk admirably about what Sergei has built here. But he decides to ask another question. “Mr. Sokolov—” he says.