Memories of that last night are very sketchy. I was back late but she was up with the baby. Little Lucy, full of milk, slept unaware of her father’s fingers stroking the disappearing fluff on her head. Peg reassured me her hair would grow back, and probably blonde. I remember saying I wasn’t sure I could take two Jean Harlows in the house and I remember her saying “Jean Harlow was from a bottle.” I’m sure we said many things later but that was the last fragment of conversation I recall having with Peg.
In bed, Lucy was lying on Peg, who gently burped her. With her eyes closed she looked like a little blind animal, a human puppy with a limited repertoire of movements, a head stretch, an arching of the back, a soft smacking of little lips and the pure talent of the tiny for undisturbed sleep. Peg’s sleeping positions were a perfect complement for little Lucy. Usually she slept on her side, her face buried under her arms, but with Lucy balanced on her chest, she acquired a Zen stillness, even her head remained absolutely statuesque and her breathing was as soft as a moth’s, puffing up into the darkness above her. Her thick, blonde eyelashes lay on her sleep like soft guardians, and with the helpless little puppy daughter on her chest, they were life in its entire curious miracle, unaware of the disaster that waited next day. I didn’t sleep, but watched them all night and as Lucy rose and sank gently on her mother’s chest, I resolved yet again not to go over but to take my chance with the authorities. I argued through the night against the certainty that this path would lead to the chair or the gallows and I would lose them that way. But I had been round these delusions many times, and inevitably they vanished. My boats were burned and I knew it.
Lucy woke at five thirty demanding breakfast. My hangover was punching hard. I assumed the role of an actor playing the ordinary morning routine, got ready for work, left, then the performance collapsed and I re-emerged in front of Peg and Lucy, briefcase clasped tightly, and hovered, staring at them. Lucy slipped off the breast and her piggy little eyes turned up at something beyond me. I wondered if she knew who and what I was, if I were a visual imprint and a smell that meant something to her. Peg looked at me and said “Yes?” there was a pause and I said “Nothing.” Then her mother came into the bedroom and pushed me out. Milky breasts and husbands should not mix. That “Yes?” was the last thing I heard Peg say.
Black Sea – April 1999
One gun stays in the house, the other goes with him everywhere. He pines for the days when thugs walked in fear of party members. Now he is condemned to paranoia waiting for the Slav face and the knives. Every dark Merc passing through the village bottles his diaphragm. The police, of course, have done nothing and he is grateful for that. Shota is right: being called as a witness would be certain death.
Masha has emerged from her long solitude and they spend parts of days together, keeping some fragment of Gia suspended between them, mainly in silence. The sea is their sound, its different tones changing their feelings like key shifts. On warm days it marauds the beach and falls on it resonant and full voiced. On white days it slips ashore in a quiet hiss.
“I find it difficult to grieve him properly because of this damned anxiety.”
She says nothing. She has no response to anything. She moves through the days like an injured cat.
Waves tickle the horizon with spume. Their coffees under Shota’s magnolia have long gone cold. They sit huddled against the world. Max struggles with his desire to ask for financial help for a set of killings. It gnaws at him, barely under control but he must assess the best time. Her mental condition must at least be a little more in tune than it has been, but her native unpredictability makes such assessments almost impossible. No one knows how Masha is at any given time, least of all Masha.
“I’ve had to buy a couple of guns.”
“I may borrow one.”
He refuses to rise to it. He must make his point.
“We know who killed Gia.”
Her eyes do not flicker from the horizon. Her reaction to a lover’s infidelity had always been savage. But she must have known about Gia and the Moscow tarts. Everyone knew everything about Gia. Even his name would raise a laugh.
“I don’t want to think about that.” It was crisp and clear as the chill on the wind, and the cue for Max to drop the subject, but he was advocating for his life.
“There is a solution.”
She stirred not an eyelid, a turn of the head, but seemed to drop into stone, fixed on an unseen place beyond the horizon.
“It would be relatively expensive. I have some money, but not enough.”
“Solution! What a ridiculous word.”
He was down to the final pitch: the last fragment of anything that had ever existed between them had to be thrown in the ring.
“My life is in danger. There’s no doubt about that. Does that mean anything to you?”
“At the moment: no.”
It whispered away from him leaving no rage or disappointment, just a numbness creeping slowly over his old skinny limbs. They sat in another of their silences, one that Max felt he could break like a biscuit and scatter on the cold waves, waves that had brought back Gia to him.
One night he suffers a compulsion to ring his daughter. He doesn’t know why and resists for a while then the phone finds its way into his hand and before he has another rational thought he’s through to California speaking briefly to someone who he learns is her husband. The late twentieth century Californian accent is something he has difficulty following. The word ‘like’ litters the sentences. He also has difficulty dredging up his own rusty American English. The husband seems guarded, and claims she is not at home. Max assumes his call is unwelcome and that Lucy has refused to speak to him, which is entirely understandable and a great relief. He leaves no message because he has no idea what to say and has no idea what he would have said if she had come on. The whole thing seems mad and afterwards he feels he has got away with something. But he wakes the next morning to an indefinable sense of regret.
Some days are too much. He can rotate three hundred and sixty degrees and see nothing but flatness and emptiness. He cannot reveal these feelings to Shota; certain things are not disclosed to other males. There is only Masha; some days she is less remote, but there is little give and take. He has to listen on the days when she chooses to talk and is there with the shoulder for her tears, but there are never any tears for or interest in his torments. But he tells her, because there is no one else to tell. He tells her that he feels there is nothing round him, that he is nothing in the middle of nothing and she responds that he is being abstract and arty smarty. Apart from the shared grief of Gia’s death it is clear there is now no other connection between them. Everything has gone as if it never existed.
“I rang my daughter.”
Nothing came back, nothing reflected in the cold surface.
“I started letters to her. Several. But I threw them away.”
She laughed and it jagged him with anger.
“Gia gave me her number and address.”
His veiled reminder of what they got up to on her last night in Tbilisi had no effect.
“You’re just filling the vacuum left by him.” It was said without emotion. “Have you any idea what that girl was like? I know your daughter better than you do. You didn’t even have the decency to give her an afternoon of your time. To show her the town. ”
“This isn’t about me and my daughter. It’s about your childlessness.”
It was days before she would speak to him after that.
She had lost weight since Gia’s death and he wanted to tell her how much it suited her but now these simple compliments would be impertinent. He can’t remember the last time he made love to this woman who had given his life a kind of crazy basis. Nor can he remember the first time. Making love seems strange and alien now. Nature packed it away years ago. He can’t even remember whom t
he last person was he made love to.
“You should paint.”
“No.”
“The translation I’m doing is saving me. I don’t like it, but it gets me out of bed in the morning.”
The translation depresses him. He recognises Thompson has a unique brilliance, but of a kind that bores then depresses him, and, particularly for someone grieving a murder his obsession with weapons seems sick and infantile. Under the baroque defiance there is something of the loser in him too, which touches Max’s contempt. Each day he gets through slightly less. It is a chore that increasingly fails to distract from his problems.
“I don’t want to paint.”
However, he begins to feel the slow seismic change in her. Life takes root like weeds. A leaden normality returns, she is seen more and more about the village. Bursts of anger decorate the cold, nerveless surface she has shown since Gia’s funeral. The resonance of death lowing round her gives way and she begins to look to life after Gia, and talks to Max of spending time in Paris. Good idea, Max thinks, and wishes he were free to make such trips. She rages over problems the idiot lawyer in Batumi is gumming up Gia’s estate with, leaving her to chase outstanding invoices, cancel commissions, gather Gia’s receipts for the bloody tax authorities, do all the work so the sister and her drunk of a husband can inherit everything and let it rot. Anger is life to Masha. When she begins to berate him he will know she is recovered. But the thought of even a few weeks without her touches his desolation, and he begins to think of Paris the way a man begins to suspect someone is his wife’s lover.
California – Spring 1999
On some days, if she had a little cash, she killed the pain with another drink, and the wheel rolled on. Being sober was unendurable, oblivion the only remedy. The looks of others stoned her a thousand times a day. But over the weeks her orbit pulled her closer to AA meetings simply because she had nowhere else to go. Arriving after they started, hiding at the back by the door and escaping before anyone spoke to her, she sought only the meetings where she was not known and never returned to them. In many meetings no one knew she was there and that suited her.
These bleak rooms in hospitals, community centres and churches, with their uncomfortable chairs, blank walls, slogan cards saying ‘Keep it Simple’ or ‘Stick with the Winners’, and bad coffee, were the chambers where she had once found hope and the weird current of power that kept her sober. But she found out that there is no lonelier place than the outsider’s among the insiders. That power still buzzed around but she was untouched by it, and sat on the edge, separate, different, dreaming of bars.
Over time a small voice started nagging her to open her mouth. Meetings are for listening and saying. She barely listened and never said. But meeting after meeting passed and the mouth stayed stubbornly shut. Quakers sit till they quake with the urge to speak, and she quaked her way from Newport to Venice Beach and back. The quakes would start and the need to speak swell her gorge, but the mouth produced not a squeak, and she left each meeting beaten by her own cowardice.
“I’m Lucy and I’m an alcoholic.”
It just popped out one day and surprised her.
“Hi, Lucy,” the backs in front of her mumbled, but she took so long to find the next word that faces turned and read her like an open book. She scanned the shoe sole smudges on the floor for inspiration.
“I’m sitting here behind you all because I don’t want anyone to look at me.”
The faces turned away.
“I don’t look at myself. If I like catch my reflection in a window, you know?”
Another silence stretched patience. The clock on the wall swept away a minute.
“I’m back after a relapse.”
No shit, Sherlock.
“I was found in the street. I don’t remember. I woke up in hospital. And I had a sexually transmitted disease… I sometimes feel it would be better if I had died in that street.”
Sunlight glowed on the leather waistcoat and ten-gallon hat of a black dude under a window, nodding in rhythm on a stack of tables that hiked him high enough to display his rhinestone cowboy style. He knew what she meant.
“I had four years of sobriety then I had an encounter with my father and… I suppose I was just looking for an excuse. I remember someone saying when you first get sober the universe is like a benign, friendly place? That’s how it was with me first time. Maybe it was like benign hysteria.” A couple of people let out soft laughs of identification. An old man craned round. Flesh-coloured hearing aids filled his ear cavities. He wanted to lip-read her share. She flicked her head back to the floor.
“Tooth fairy stuff, but… But this person said when you go out again and try to get back, the universe is just that little bit colder. I can vouch for that. It’s frozen out there.” Another couple of heads nodded in the corner of her averted eye; as her share proceeded she was becoming less original. “I got married and then, like, took off. I used to live with him before and make coffee in the morning and stuff? Ordinary stuff. Deciding what to eat. Which movie to see? It’s like it happened to someone else.”
The old man was eyes front again and there was that eerie silence she had known in the rooms when someone was bringing a warning from the doors of death. This time she was the trailer for everyone if they ever lifted a drink: the state that comes with a nod to a barman or the clang of a liquor store door.
“My father is…” A couple of faces flicked back at her in the pause, but she had curtained herself off with her thick hair. “My father is an American scandal. He’s Max Agnew. The traitor. He defected when I was three weeks old. I suppose some of you old-timers will remember him. I remember nothing. I don’t give a flying fuck about your politics by, the way. I’m telling you this because I’ve spent my whole life not telling it to anybody. That’s all. With good reason, you know: there’s a lot of jerks out there just looking for another excuse to hate someone. But also, of course, because… well, how do you say it? So I haven’t said it. Till now. ”
She had to pause and release a huge sigh that was threatening to choke her. A couple of deep breaths punched into her and blew themselves straight back out at a square of floor in front of her scuffed shoes. The rest of the meeting waited patiently for her to continue, all the backs, fat necks bulging from collars, long hair and short, broad, bulky shoulders and the bony T-shirts of the thin ones, barely moving, all faces dutifully turned away from her.
“I suppose if you have to keep something from people all that time, it becomes second nature. You kinda have problems with trust. I trust nothing. I hear a lot about God in these rooms. I don’t think he can find his ass with both hands.” Defiance had a narcotic effect on her; once started its sweetness could race her off to disaster. She felt the rush – there were always a few Holy Joes in a meeting and she liked to have a dig – but suddenly her mood swung the other way and made her afraid she had pissed people off.
“I always had wild dreams as a kid and my drinking just brought on the wild dreams wilder. But this Fellowship gave me a life below my wildest dreams – little, ordinary things, you know, but precious. I know I can get them back. I know that I could walk down the street and look people in the eye without burning up with shame and wanting to fucken die, you know? Or look at myself in the mirror. If I just get sober. Simple. But what I really want right now, more than anything else in the world, is another drink.”
Lucy trudged from Venice to Newport, from meeting to meeting and AA members inflicted themselves on her till she began to subside into days without drinking. Nights were insomniac but fused into mornings of catnaps. Coordination of hand and eye returned. Her skin regained a glow.
They were tumbled out of the Mission first thing and not allowed back till evening. She padded the streets, head down, away from the contempt in strangers’ eyes, but one day on the Newport sidewalk she caught a look from
a young dude in a surfer headscarf that suggested she was not as far down the food chain as she thought. She noticed traces of interest in other men’s glances; the normality of life began to get at her, and slowly the unthinkable issue of her husband insinuated into context. Timmy rented her conscience till she shared about him at a meeting and a woman flipped open a cell phone and offered it. “No time like the present. Just dial.” Her evasions were swept aside by a fusillade of reassurances. She made the call knowing he would be out and left a message on the answer machine. But the heads grinned at that old dodge, and suggested she try his work, where a hard-voiced bitch made fetching him sound like the relief of Iwo Jima.
When his diffident voice came on the line, she felt the scale of her loneliness. The group around her discreetly distanced itself and Lucy and Timmy wrestled with the awful prospect of finding the next sentence.
A week later she rang again and Timmy suggested they meet just to talk. She had no desire to be hauled from the lovely limbo of being rubble beyond the world’s call towards the obligations of life. Nor had she any intentions of asking Timmy to take her back; it was too complex. In her present state she could only think minutes ahead. The amends would be made and she would leave. But when she made it to his apartment she was confronted by two wedding presents from Georgia that sucked the air out of the room. Gia’s chest of drawers fashioned from pale, speckled wood and subtle curves that seemed to breed each other filled the place with her transgression. An oil-sketch of a hideous woman and child, hung in a beautiful hardwood frame above it.
“It’s Jesus and Mary, believe it or not.”
Mary’s terrified eyes drilled accusations at Lucy and the Holy Child screamed from his mother’s shrunken paps.
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