Thirty-three Swoons

by Martha Cooley

  Afterward we flopped onto my bed and lay on our sides, facing each other. My tension, which sex had momentarily doused, rekindled. Within me rose a sharp, unprecedented urge to slap him hard enough to bring tears to his eyes. Yet I knew, too, that it was my own face I wanted to slap, and with equal frustration.

  Nick appeared not to be picking up on any of this, but the appearance was misleading. “How’re you doing?” he asked, putting a hand on my shoulder and giving it a little shake.

  I said nothing.

  “I mean, how’re you doing, really,” he added, no longer shaking but squeezing my shoulder. It dawned on me that he wasn’t alluding to the fact that I’d let my answering machine field all his recent calls to me; he was addressing something else.

  “You’re talking about Eve?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  I was greatly surprised. He hadn’t inquired into my feelings about my cousin since the day of the memorial service; I had no idea he’d kept her death in mind or had given any thought to how I was handling it. “It’s all sort of settling in,” I answered him.

  He nodded. “That’s how I felt for a couple months after my father died. I went day by day, until after a while I got to the point where I could just miss him and not feel worried.”

  “Worried?” A further surprise. “What about?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Not having him around to consult with, I guess.”

  “You used to do that a lot?”

  “No, not so much. But when I really did need to run something by him . . .” His muscular thighs gripped my knees in a warm vise. “Thing is, I knew he’d go—like you knew your father would, right? They’re old, it’s their turn, you can’t do anything about that timetable. But with your cousin, she was only, what, sixty? And in good health. Everything happened so fast, without warning. That’s a whole different game.”

  Pressing my face against his neck, I felt his vocal cords vibrating beneath my cheek as he continued speaking.

  “I’m sorry you’re solo, Cam,” he said. “I can’t pretend to know what that’s like. I mean, I’m swimming in family! At least you’ve got Danny. And she’s lucky to have you.”

  At the declivity of his throat, his aftershave was dominated by one note, vetiver. I inhaled its earthy, astringent scent. “I don’t know,” I said. “Right now I’m having trouble thinking of either Danny or myself as lucky.”

  “You haven’t seen much of her recently, have you? Apart from this weekend, that is.”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, maybe it would help if you spent some time with her.”

  I wasn’t about to tell him of Danny’s request for time off. “It’d help her, you mean?”

  “Actually,” he said, “it might help you. Give you a sense of what your role is, now that Eve’s gone.”

  I saw where he was heading. “So I could be more like a mother to her?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Ah,” I said, unleashed now. “Well, when I had a husband, it was suggested that I ought to become a mother. But I nixed that idea, seeing as how I don’t know shit about motherhood. So I’m not likely to give it a whirl now.”

  I turned away from him and lay on my back, addressing the ceiling. “Since we’re on the subject of help: I used to say to myself, well, if I could see Nick whenever I felt like it, I’d be a cheerier girl. But lately I’ve begun wondering if maybe what would really help would be for you to leave me alone. That way I could quit pretending otherwise. Get on with things.”

  He fixed me with a look of affectionate skepticism. “Get on with things . . . like dating?”

  “Don’t,” I said. “You’ve never been mean to me. Start now and I’ll kick you out faster than you can blink.”

  He ran his fingers slowly through my hair, his wide palm cupping the top of my head. “You ask me to leave, I’ll leave,” he said quietly. “I’ve always known you might, one of these days. But I hope it’ll be because you find someone, you know, right for you—”

  “Sure,” I snapped. “That’d be swell.” I rolled away and went for my clothing, humiliation spreading over me like some hot, sour odor I was powerless to suppress. Keeping my back to Nick, I pulled on my jeans and T-shirt. After a few moments, he got up and began unhurriedly searching for one of his own T-shirts in the bottom drawer of my dresser, where I kept spares for him.

  I waited for him to finish dressing. Approaching me, he pried my arms open and pulled me to him.

  “I haven’t a clue what ‘right’ means—for you, me, anyone,” he said. “And I didn’t really mean you ought to be Danny’s mother either.” He gave me a little shake. “I just meant you might be, I don’t know, not a substitute exactly, but in the same league. . . . Necessary—that’s what I’m trying to say.”

  Releasing me, he checked his watch. “Gotta go. I’m late for an estimate and it’s a good building. I don’t want to lose a shot at the work.” He fixed me with his clear-eyed gaze. “It’ll all sort out—give Danny time. And one more thing: don’t ask me to leave you unless you mean it, Cam. Then I’ll go—not gladly, but I’ll go. Tell me what you want and I’ll do it. Haven’t I always?”

  AS SOON as he’d left, I went to my desk, took out a sheet of paper, and wrote “Dear Danny” at the top. After staring at the two words for a little while, I crumpled the paper and threw it out.

  Stuart and Carl weren’t home, I knew; they were downtown, attending some play on which I’d taken a pass. There was nobody else I wanted to see or talk with. I could stay home; I could take a walk. Throwing on a light jacket, I headed outdoors.

  It was eight o’clock, the temperature perfect for strolling. I wandered northward. At Twentieth Street I turned east, then north again for a half-dozen blocks on Sixth Avenue until I stood in front of Eve’s former shop.

  Its gates were fully drawn, like those of the other retail outfits on the block. The shop’s new owner had painted the gates a dull matte green; they were no longer awash in bright colors. Eve, Danny, and I had spent a long day decorating those gates, ten years earlier. Danny had favored pink, so by the end of the day, dozens of pink polka dots had been strewn across the larger swaths of color Eve and I had applied with big sponges. The effect had been eye-catching, just as Eve had wanted it to be.

  Danny had enjoyed herself that day—although to my surprise, she’d made no wistful references to our gate-painting adventure the next time I saw her. She seemed to have learned to accommodate her mother. I couldn’t recall her ever whining or moping when Eve was scarce. And yet (I’d thought at the time), wouldn’t the day arrive when my questions about Eve’s remoteness would become Danny’s, too? And with a vengeance?

  I TURNED around and headed back to the Village, cutting east at Ninth Street. It’d been many months since I’d last passed by my old home.

  The building looked unchanged, though its formerly drab lobby had been freshly wallpapered. Crossing the street, I craned my neck so I could see the front windows of the family apartment on the third floor. I pictured Jordan up there, packing for one of his trips. I could readily imagine him in his bedroom, could see his shoes, suits, umbrella, and briefcase—yet I couldn’t picture myself, or anything belonging to me. It was as though he and I had never once acted together on that same domestic stage.

  A shadow crossed behind a louvered window (someone moving about the living room, or en route to the kitchen?), and I remembered how much, as a child, I’d longed for my father to pull back the curtain of his diffidence. Would he ever show me I could spark in him that same fierce need he roused in me?

  No, I’d concluded, he would not.

  But what about the woman in her coffin in Paris, whose namesake I was? Had my father unmasked himself for her? Allowed himself a fierce love? And then decided he couldn’t bear to do so again?

  A light went on, then off, in the living room window. As if signaled to leave, I headed home.

  BACK IN my own kitchen, I poured a shot of vodka and drank it in on
e go. It made me instantly light-headed, so I forced myself to eat a small chunk of cheese, the only thing I’d ingested since breakfast. I still wasn’t hungry.

  I stared at the blank whiteness of my kitchen wall. Open that one: a voice, commanding, returned to memory now. Boxes—yes, in my latest dream there’d been two, and I’d had to choose between them. Meyerhold was pointing, telling me to open the smaller one, the one marked “Russia” . . .

  The basement: Jordan’s box was down there.

  Keys in hand, I exited my apartment, went to the end of the common corridor on my floor, and descended four flights of stairs. In my building’s basement, residents store large or bulky possessions in wire-mesh cages. By the time I’d made my way to my cage, opened it, and found the carton for which I was hunting, my arms and hands were gritty with dust.

  I hauled the box upstairs, wiped it and my hands clean, and tore open the top. Its old masking tape gave way instantly. Inside lay a mess of manila envelopes I vaguely remembered having examined with Stuart, nearly twenty years earlier, in Frenchtown. Riffling through what looked like the tourist and travel information (Russian hotel and museum brochures, theater and concert programs—nothing signed) that had lost my interest two decades ago, I found some handwritten pages that had been torn from a notebook.

  Although each page bore a number in its upper-right corner, all but the first few were out of order. I sorted them out. On the initial half dozen or so, Jordan had scribbled notes about perfume outlets in Moscow. There were a few references to GUM, the huge department store in Red Square, as well as to shops on Gorky Street. Jordan had marked their locations on a little map. He’d also attempted, in crudely penned Cyrillic, to capture the names of several Russian fragrances.

  Next I came across miscellaneous sheets of paper torn from another notebook; the paper was different. These pages contained hastily written comments on performances Jordan had attended at concert halls and theaters in Moscow—the Bolshoi, the Maly, and a few others. It took me several minutes to straighten out these pages, and as I did so, I encountered yet another set, interleaved among the theater notes, which were held together with a metal clip. These sheets were heavier—more like actual stationery than the lightweight notebook paper Jordan used while traveling.

  I located the first of these pages after a bit of shuffling. I was holding, I realized, a letter, written by my father and dated a few days before his death. He’d put it where he knew I’d find it eventually. Though no doubt he’d taken me for a better sleuth than I turned out to be.

  I unplugged my phone, made a small salad and forced myself to eat it, then drank a mug of strong black tea. I wanted a clear head, if not a calm heart, before reading.

  INTERLUDE

  THIS SEEMS as good a point as any for a pause. I ought now to recount Seva’s end. I’ve been putting this off; it’s the hardest of all my experiences to revisit . . . but what happened does need airing.

  “It is man’s nature to lose his way when he finds no means of linking himself to what came before him and will come after him.” So claimed Pyotr Chaadaev, a colleague of the poet Pushkin, roughly a century before Seva’s time. He was right, of course. There’s really no higher purpose (in art, politics, family—it doesn’t matter) than to serve as an instrument of linkage.

  And what might a man’s double become, if not a kind of baton passed from one mind to another? I’d seen Vsevolod Meyerhold lose his way, egregiously. Now Camilla Archer wasn’t going to lose hers; not if I had anything to do with it.

  SEVA DREAMED of stages while he was in prison: multitiered, banked, in the round. He dreamed of lights, curtains, props.

  He dreamed of plays and playwrights. Of Mayakovsky and Blok. He dreamed of the Interlude House and those attentive soldiers, some dying, who’d served as the audience for his acting studio in St. Petersburg. He dreamed of actors backstage, keyed up, waiting their turns to go on.

  Not all of his dreams were sourced in happy recollections, however. Some of them revived frustrations, obstacles, failures.

  He dreamed of Zina in costume as the widow Popova in one of Chekhov’s amusing farces, The Bear. He saw her hand slyly sweeping one suitor’s bouquet of roses off the piano as she succumbed to the embraces of another. She’d comported herself well, but as Seva watched himself, in his dream, watching Zina from the wings of the stage, he knew the production was a failure despite its vaudeville touches and his wife’s flair. “We tried to be too clever,” he’d admitted to his assistant. “Chekhov’s light transparent humor was crushed beneath the weight of our theories.” They’d made the worst possible mistake, that of heavy-handedness.

  He had other dreams of flops—particularly Natasha, an overwrought drama about a heroine on a collective farm. He’d tried to appease the Party by staging the play in a naturalistic manner, but his efforts had been risible (who could not laugh at cabbage patches onstage?), and the play hadn’t even made it out of rehearsal.

  Not long after Natasha, Pravda had issued a blistering attack on him: “Meyerhold cannot and, apparently, will not comprehend Soviet reality.” At the end of a subsequent public debate, held in Moscow over a three-day period, Seva had confessed his failings only to be savaged by numerous speakers, his own actors among them. His stage carpenter had been the sole man brave enough to express support for him.

  Seva had responded by arguing that he was by nature an experimental director. “This is not so much my fault,” he’d stated, “as my misfortune.” (Shades of Pushkin!—“It’s the devil’s fault I was born in Russia with spirit and talent.”) He’d promised to rethink his entire worldview. Yet it was useless; his assembled listeners, an audience of self-proclaimed judges, had voted to affirm every point in the Pravda article. Meyerhold had been, they said, insufficiently contrite.

  HE DREAMED of being onstage: his final public appearance.

  The All-Union Conference of Theater Directors had opened on June 15, 1939. He’d shown up wearing a white shirt, somewhat rumpled, and no jacket, because of the heat. The crowd was lively; everyone acclaimed his arrival with loud clapping. He was quickly ushered to the platform, to the evident dismay of the chairman, a clumsy Party hack named Krapchenko.

  At the side of the wooden podium, on a little bracketed shelf, sat a glass of water. He saw himself take a sip before launching into an impromptu, rambling, and not entirely sense-making speech in which he’d begun by praising Comrade Stalin, “the friend of toilers throughout the world.”

  In his dream he watched himself perspiring in the warm, poorly ventilated hall. He listened to himself talking about the future of Soviet theater, heard himself pulling back from the truth, losing himself in needless detail, weaving baggy arguments. Observing the faces in the audience, he saw some of them twisted in preordained grimaces of condemnation; others, though, were full of hope, expecting more from him, their expressions increasingly bewildered.

  He floundered, sensing the words that were forming in the mind of an exasperated critic named Moissei Yankovsky—words Yankovsky would utter the following day: “Meyerhold destroyed everything that he has stood for throughout his life. Comrades, can we honestly agree that on the strength of what Meyerhold the man said yesterday, Meyerhold the artist never existed? For that is what officially he announced to us.”

  He knew, too, that I was gesticulating at him from the wings. Shaking his head, he made a gesture communicating his refusal to say something self-serving—no, self-saving: I can’t do any more, it’s just too much, I’m tired, I’ve had it.

  He concluded his speech. The applause greeting him was at once heartfelt and full of disappointment. He couldn’t bring himself to look at his confused colleagues’ faces; he headed straight for his seat, seeing nothing. In his mind he heard one of Mayakovsky’s poems, in which Volodya had railed at the angels—heaven’s swindlers, he’d called them:

  again they’ve beheaded the stars

  and the sky is bloodied with carnage!

  THE REST of the directors’
conference unfolded noisily, a blur of talk and argument. Seva left early for Leningrad to direct a student production at the Lesgaft Institute, so he missed the conclusion. At the end, the conference chairman stood to render judgment. Comrade Meyerhold had made a purely formal apology, asserted Chairman Krapchenko. He’d admitted nothing about the real nature of his wrongdoings. “The Party teaches us,” Krapchenko reminded the audience, “that it is not enough merely to admit our mistakes.”

  Everybody heard the words and guessed what they could mean.

  In Leningrad, Seva dreamed of decapitated stars bleeding across the sky. He dreamed of punishment—of being hung, as Volodya had imagined, on a celestial scaffolding:

  a gibbet astride the Milky Way

  seize me and string me up, a criminal . . .

  AT FIRST, after his arrest and incarceration in Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison, Seva had maintained a lively dream life. But once the interrogations began, his dreaming grew more erratic. In the evenings, before actually falling asleep, he sometimes dropped into a state resembling stupor. He awoke with the same feeling, leaden, insensate.

  Comrade Kobulov was clever at his job. As head of the NKVD’s Special Investigative Section, Kobulov had been given the “good cop” role in Seva’s case. He treated the theater director respectfully, offering him a glass of tea before their conversations, as he called them. But below the affable surface, Kobulov was hard as steel. In an appeal to Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet premier, Seva described his interrogator’s techniques. Kobulov had been persuasive in suggesting that the prisoner’s problems were of his own making. “I was plunged,” Seva wrote in his letter to Molotov, “into the deepest depression, obsessed by the thought ‘It serves me right.’” He’d begun making up crimes that he must surely have committed, since the Soviet government was convinced he had. “In this process,” Seva commented acidly, “my interrogator proved to be a well-experienced assistant, so we set about inventing things together in close collaboration.”