EQMM, June 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "I am going to Moscow today,” said Anna Sergeyevna. “I think I told you. For a few days. I will be taking the morning train at eleven."

  Von Diderits looked up from his paper. His wife stared dully out the window, her fair hair pinned against her head, her breakfast plate nearly untouched. He did not speak, waiting for her to turn her gray eyes back his way.

  "Your food has gotten cold,” he said finally, when she failed to look at him.

  "I'm not hungry,” she replied. “I don't feel well."

  "Is it your ... Is it the ‘internal complaint’ again?” he asked, and the phrase became bitter in his mouth, tainting the sweet aftertaste of his meal.

  Anna Sergeyevna gave a slow nod.

  "You know,” he continued, his voice even, unperturbed, “we have very good doctors here as well. That is part of my responsibility, the responsibility of my committee on the zemstvo, to ensure the presence of excellent doctors here. Perhaps they are not as plentiful as they are in Moscow, but they are well trained and eager to help.” They had traveled this path before—as many times now as the number of trips she had made to Moscow—and both of them knew the way. “I am happy to arrange an appointment for you."

  "Zhenya,” she said, his nickname a plaintive sigh, and Evgeniy at once resented her pleading, pitying tone. But before he could speak, one of the servants came in to clear more plates. The couple remained silent while the young scullion tidied the table, and after the girl left, Anna Sergeyevna once more assumed a firmer tone. “I have already made an appointment in Moscow,” she said, “with the doctor I have consulted there. He already knows my situation. I trust him."

  "And yet despite your trust in him, your many visits have not alleviated this internal distress, am I correct?” He smiled broadly. “Perhaps you should trust me instead this time?"

  "I have already made the appointment,” she explained again, not raising her voice. “I have already purchased my ticket. I have telegraphed Petersburg as well. My sister is meeting me in Moscow. We have made plans to attend the theater."

  "Your sister...” began Von Diderits, thinking of the questions he could ask next—What time will your sister's train be arriving? What play will you be seeing? Which day?—and of the requests that he would make upon her return: I have read about that play; remind me about the story. And: Where did you dine in Moscow? I have eaten there myself; did you speak with Taraykin? She always had the correct answers, delivered without hesitation. When he checked the timetables later, he would find that the Petersburg train was in fact scheduled to arrive at the time she had said. There had indeed been a performance of La Corsaire at the Bolshoi or Dyadya Vanya at the Art Theatre. No, she had not seen Taraykin at the Prague (so there was no way for him to confirm who had accompanied her), but she had ridden the new electric tram from Strastnaya Square to Petrovsky Park—an unverifiable, and therefore useless, detail.

  Evgeniy closed his paper, rose from his seat. Walking around the table, he stood over her. “Very well,” he said, believing, not believing. “You may go."

  He leaned down to kiss her cheek, and past the dense smell of sausage still permeating the room, he discovered, as he had dreaded, the odor of jasmine and bergamot behind her ears and around her neck. Novaya Zarya, he knew, the scent that he'd bought her at the parfumerie on Nevsky Street during one of his own trips to Moscow—and he despaired to think that she now wore it only when she was making the same contemptible journey herself....

  * * * *

  The scene had taken Philip days to write, drafting, revising, erasing completely—more nights spent working at the computer, as furiously as ever, his “key” into the story only unlocking more questions. Now another sunset approached, Catherine out yet another evening, dinner with friends this time, a long evening ahead.

  Philip penned a question mark over the word contemptible. Would Chekhov really have used the word in such a context? Or anything so bald as despaired, except in dialogue? And the problem wasn't just the individual words but the whole approach. The details smacked of too much research. Chekhov himself would have called it “the newspaper,” not the Kiev Telegraph. He would not have bothered with the names of restaurants or the brand name of the perfume. The reference to Dyadya Vanya was too self-consciously clever. And Chekhov would have crafted the entire exchange with more subtlety, kept the emotions even more restrained. “When you want to touch a reader's heart, try to be colder,” Chekhov had written in one of his letters. “It gives their grief, as it were, a background against which it stands out in greater relief."

  Evgeniy leaned down to kiss his wife's cheek, and discovered the odor of jasmine and bergamot behind her ears and around her neck. He recognized it as the perfume that he'd bought her on one of his trips to Moscow, and he knew that she wore it now only when making the same journey herself.

  The doorbell rang—just past seven P.M. One of the neighbors? A door-to-door salesman perhaps? Their friends rarely dropped by unannounced.

  Philip leaned over to glance out the window. A green Land Rover sat by the front curb—not a vehicle he recognized. He turned back to his notes, waiting for the person to go away.

  The doorbell rang again, the person pressing longer on the button. Insistent, thought Philip. Or is it persistent? Persistently? He laid down his pen and got up, then grabbed his copy of Chekhov and stuck his finger between the pages as he stepped into the living room. The detail would let his visitor know that he'd been interrupted. Through the window inset into the front door, he saw a man's head in profile, cocked back at the neck. The stranger's lips were pursed as he blew a stream of smoke into the air.

  "Can I help you?” Philip asked, opening the door only enough to lean out.

  "Hi,” said the man on the porch. He shifted his cigarette to his left hand and held out the right. “You must be Philip."

  The man stood slightly taller than Philip, trim and athletic. Tanned or, rather, ruddy—his red hair made him ruddy. One too many buttons loosened on the front of his Oxford, the hair thick on his chest. With the Land Rover framed above his shoulder, he looked like a commercial, but for what, Philip wasn't sure.

  "Do we know each other?” Philip asked, opening the door wider and reaching his free hand out.

  "No, I don't think we've met,” the man said. Shake, release. “I'm a friend of Catherine's. Buddy Shelton—well, Robert, really, I'm trying to get back to Robert, but back in college it was Buddy, so...” He laughed lightly. “Didn't Catherine mention I was coming by?"

  "Catherine's not here. She's gone out to dinner with some friends."

  Buddy smiled. “Well, I guess that would be me.” Cigarette to the mouth. A deep drag. He shook his head slightly, blew the smoke out of the corner of his mouth. “I'm sorry to have bothered you. I must have misunderstood about where we were going to meet. I thought we were all getting together here first."

  They were meeting several classmates from school, Buddy explained. He had just moved back to Raleigh recently, rented a house over in Vanguard Park. He was in pharmaceutical sales, and the Triangle “...well, it's about the capital of the world for that, you know. You're teaching at State, right?"

  "Close,” Philip said. “Wake Tech."

  "Gotta start somewhere.” Buddy shrugged. “And I guess it gives you plenty of time to write, huh?” It was nice to be back in the area in general, he went on. It hadn't taken him long to run into some friends from school, and the next thing you know plans were being made. “Of course, it's just like me to get the plans wrong somehow.” Buddy laughed, but Philip detected no real lapse of confidence. What was the connection between self-effacing and self-assured? Philip assumed it just depended on the self involved.

  "Well, nice meeting you,” Buddy said, stepping off the porch. “Guess I'll just try to catch up with everyone.” Then halfway across the yard, with a quick turn, walking backward for a moment: “Hey, wanna join us?"

  "No, I've—” Philip started to hold up his book and explain that he was working, or
protest that he was only wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and sandals, but then realized that he wasn't expected to say yes. Buddy had never even stopped walking. “No,” Philip called after him. “You all have a good time."

  "Oh, I'm sure we will,” said Buddy, and he thumbed the cigarette butt into the street as he climbed in the truck. A wave from the window as he rounded the curve.

  Philip started to turn back inside, but instead walked out and sat for a while on the porch swing he and Catherine had only recently found time to install. Soon the sun would go down, and even now there were few people on the street—a pair of joggers, a couple pushing a stroller, a bicyclist in Spandex shorts. The chains supporting the swing creaked, the grass in the yard had begun to wither, paint peeled on the perimeter of the porch—little chores neglected. From somewhere in the neighborhood came the dull, distant roar of a lawnmower, or perhaps a hedge trimmer. Philip's thoughts wandered back over the conversation with Buddy, and he found himself troubled by the cigarette butt in the middle of the street. The joggers, the couple with the stroller, the cyclist—none of them seemed to notice it. Finally, he walked out to pick it up, deposited it in the trashcan on the side of the house, and then came back to the porch. He opened up the Chekhov collection.

  The theater scene in S—. Gurov and Anna rushing away from the crowds at intermission. They walked senselessly along passages, and up and down stairs, came to rest on a narrow, gloomy staircase.

  "I am so unhappy,” she went on, not heeding him. “I have thought of nothing but you all the time; I live only in the thought of you. And I wanted to forget, to forget you, but why, oh, why have you come?"

  On the landing above them two schoolboys were smoking and looking down ... Gurov drew Anna Sergeyevna to him, and began kissing her face, her cheeks, and her hands.

  "What are you doing, what are you doing? ... I beseech you by all that is sacred, I implore you.... There are people coming this way!"

  Someone was coming up the stairs....

  Philip closed the book in mid scene, bothered as always that the “someone” never arrived. Who was that someone? And why had he or she stopped? A similar event in Yalta—Anna and Gurov sitting at breakfast: A man walked up to them ... looked at them and walked away.And this detail seemed mysterious and beautiful, too. But what more did the detail signify? What did Chekhov intend? Simply some reminder of the outside world barging in, ever-threatening to discover the affair? And how early would Von Diderits himself have known that his marriage had gone terribly wrong?

  * * * *

  Evgeniy shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Anna Sergeyevna glanced toward him, away from the stage, her furrowed brow asking, Is there something wrong? He smiled and shook his head, patted her knee. His wife smiled in response before turning her attention back to the scene before them—the Tea House of Ten Thousand Joys. A parade of kimonoed figures with thickly powdered faces danced in unison, strummed lutes, poured tea for lounging British sailors. Evgeniy's wife tapped the tip of her fan against the bridge of her lorgnette, the latter a trifle he had bought her—unnecessary since their regular stall was on the third row, but she was always pleased by such precious accessories. “Men make love the same in all countries,” the Frenchwoman on stage had said. “There is only one language for love.” And when the wizened Wun-Hi replied, with those troubled r's, “Yes, me know—good language before malliage, after malliage, bad language,” everyone laughed.

  Evgeniy had paid little mind to the plot—a stew of misguided passions, flirtations, jealousy ... a song about a goldfish. It was easy enough to let one's attention wander.

  * * * *

  And ever as my samisen I play

  Come lovers at my pretty feet to fall,

  Who fancy—till I bid them run away—

  A geisha's heart has room enough for all!

  —

  Yet love may work his will, if so he please;

  His magic can a woman's heart unlock

  As well beneath kimono Japanese

  As under any smart Parisian frock.

  * * * *

  Evgeniy turned his eyes once more toward the governor's box, but still saw no one but the governor's daughter seated in front, leaning forward, her elbows on the coping. He had nodded in the direction of the box during the bustle before the start of the play, aware from the parting of the curtains behind her and the partially glimpsed hand on the sash that the governor himself stood back there watching—that perhaps the governor had in turn seen him. Evgeniy hoped that at the interval between acts he would have the opportunity to speak with the man. There seemed little harm in reminding a superior that you were there, that you existed at all.

  At last the first act ended. The curtain fell.

  "Excuse me, my darling,” Evgeniy said, standing. “There are several people I must speak with.” And he stooped over quickly to kiss his wife's cheek before leaving her in the stall, proud that everyone could see what a model marriage they had. She was indeed his darling, his plum, his precious baby bird. In the aisle, he encountered Pyotr Alexeitch, and the two men began speaking as they walked toward the door outside, where several other gentlemen had already gathered to smoke.

  But he had barely caught the smell of tobacco drifting through the door when a brisk movement across the room seized his attention—a woman rushing hurriedly through the crowd. A mere flash of a moment, but enough for him to recognize his wife's gown, the particular way she pinned her hair back, and that familiar, though now hurried, gait. Had a problem arisen? Perhaps she had suddenly taken ill. Was she searching for him?

  "I beg your pardon, Pyotr,” he said, with a slight bow. “I fear there is something I must attend to.” It was, he considered, no breach of manners to look to your wife in her time of need.

  He walked through the laughing, chattering crowd, heard a person humming one of the refrains from the play, saw another stifling a giggle as she stiffly mimicked the bow of one of the geisha girls.

  His wife had gone through this door, surely, he thought, and it opened up onto a busy passageway leading around the auditorium. A glimpse of her gown to the right, and as Evgeniy moved in that direction, he saw that another man was following closely on his wife's heels.

  "Excuse me,” he said to each person whose elbow he jostled, “pardon me.” He eased as swiftly as he could through the crowd without disrupting them too terribly, without drawing too much attention—casting a quick smile or a friendly nod to those he knew, striving at the same time to keep his eyes on the figures ahead. They seemed to move endlessly along passageways, and up and down stairs. At times Evgeniy gained on them, at others he fell behind, until at a last turn he reached the base of a narrow, gloomy staircase, hidden from the crowd. The sounds of his wife's voice echoed down the stairs—"I beseech you by all that is sacred, I implore you"—and Evgeniy mounted the first step hastily, primed to defend his wife's virtue, his own honor, until he heard an unexpected tenor in her next words: “There are people coming this way!"

  He stopped in mid step. There was an urgency in her tone that had struck him strangely, a desperation, a passion, a—

  "You must go away.... I will come and see you in Moscow. I have never been happy; I am miserable now.... I swear I'll come to Moscow. But now let us part. My precious, good, dear one, we must part!"

  A moment passed in silence, an emptiness in which Evgeniy's imagination trembled. Then he heard them coming down the stairs rapidly, and he slunk back along the passageways ahead of them, once more fighting the throng as he struggled toward the security of their accustomed stall.

  Near midnight, Philip sat alone in the living room, his gaze wandering from one object to another. The weave of the fabric on the couch, marred by a stain whose origin he couldn't remember. The air-conditioning vent in the corner, rattling intermittently as the system switched on and off. Over the mantel hung an abstract painting that Catherine had completed in college: two broad, bold, S-shaped swaths of color, red and purple. Divergent at each extreme, they
curved closer together in the middle and touched lightly at various points. What was the name of it? Duet something? Romance? Romantic Red Pairs Passionate Purple? There was a precious cleverness to the title, Philip recalled, but his mind was too muddled to remember it clearly. Densely chaotic jazz murmured from the stereo's speakers, the volume turned low so as not to disturb Catherine's sleep.

  They had kissed soon before he left their bed a half-hour before, and her lips had tingled at the time with the mint of her toothpaste, masking the faint aftertaste of her evening out. But now it was the undertones of those tastes that lingered in his memory. The briny lure of tequila, the tang of limes. Residues, castoffs. Like the bracelet she had discarded on the end table when she walked through the door, or the pocketbook standing like a challenge on the other chair.

  "Did your friend Robert find you?” he had asked her after she came home.

  "Robert?” she said. “Oh, you mean Buddy. Why? Did he call here?"

  "He stopped by looking for you. He assumed you were meeting here first before dinner."

  "I wonder why he would have thought that,” she said, and he thought she seemed genuinely puzzled. No, he hadn't mentioned stopping by, she went on to explain, had just apologized for being late when he got there and joined them at the table. How many others? Oh, five or six—let's see ... Miriam and Alex, Ken, Alice, Lucy ... Buddy, of course. So how many is that? Six? Seven, including Catherine. Lucky number seven. “You know, just a bunch of us who'd been together back in school."