Invitation to a Bonfire

by Adrienne Celt

  “Psst!”

  Nadine appeared from nowhere and whapped my head with a dish towel.

  “Psst yourself, private eye. Long time, no see.”

  “Don’t be grouchy,” I said. “I’ve been busy.”

  “I know, Miss Moneybags. John told us. So is that why you’re here? To show off some new gold rings? Silk shirts? What’s going on?”

  I tried to look casual, downplaying my interest by inspecting a bowl of fruit salad, moving the grapes around with a set of tongs. Then, as an afterthought, “Is there a new teacher this year?”

  Nadine shrugged, and looked to Hilda, who did the same. “There’s always one or two. Someone gets sick, retires. Someone finds a better post. Why?”

  “Nothing,” I said, picking up a slice of apple and nibbling the end.

  “Malarkey.”

  “No, really. I just thought I saw someone I knew.”

  “You?” Now Hilda was interested. “Like, another graduate? Or something else. You mean a Soviet?” She looked perturbed.

  “It’s probably nothing. Just a writer I like.”

  “Oh, him.” Hilda laughed. “Well, then I was sort of right, wasn’t I?”

  “You’ve met him?”

  “He came through with Mr. Round, he and his wife. She’s pretty, if you like ’em mean.”

  “Should fit right in around here,” I suggested. At the time, I didn’t know we were talking about Vera, though I’m not sure it would have changed what I had to say.

  Nadine made a hmm sound in the back of her throat and handed me another piece of apple. “So. You like his … writing? His … big ideas?” I turned immediately red.

  “Yes, I do. And what’s your point?”

  “No point.” She smiled. “Just trying to make sure we’re on the same page.”

  I popped the last bit of apple into my mouth and tried to swallow without really chewing, then coughed. Hilda had to slap my back. “Well, I think it’s time for me to get out of here.”

  “You do that. We’ll keep an eye out for your Mr. Writer.”

  I left with the sound of laughter following me—a friendly sort of humiliation. I would never have admitted to them that I was intrigued by Leo Orlov, but I was pleased anyhow that they were on the case, ready to share any news they came up with.

  That night at home I pulled all my Orlov books off the shelf and piled them around me, curious to see if they gave off any new energy now, my body having approached so close to their maker. I flipped through my favorites, pausing on the pages I’d folded down at the corner and rereading passages I’d underlined with pencil. In my hurry, I got a paper cut on my index finger and sucked the blood away until it dried, then went on checking the biographies printed on the rear flaps of the novels hoping to note any changes in them over the years, however small. I wanted to know when he’d moved to the United States, when he won his first award. I wanted to know everything about him.

  29.

  I learned soon enough: Leo Orlov was a flirt. A burning flirt. I didn’t need Nadine to tell me, either; I heard it straight from the Donne girls, who’d begun using the warm corners of the greenhouse to gossip while pressing red petals between their fingers. Plucking those petals from the flower and bringing them idly to their lips. Girls spilling over with themselves and their enthusiasms.

  “He sat on Katie’s desk,” one said, “and asked her to recite from Byron.”

  “Oh yeah? Well, he said he wanted to measure the hem of my skirt, and the ruler was touching my leg the whole time.” A swoon sound.

  “I heard he brought a bag of candies to class and threw one right into Nora’s mouth. She almost choked, but she said it was worth it. Right from his fingertips onto her tongue.”

  During these confessionals I made sure to carry out minute tasks, things requiring the appearance of my full concentration. I wound vines up stakes, searched for and eliminated caterpillar eggs, trimmed dead branches off the flower bushes. In my state of pathological attention, the girls soon forgot about me; it was a convenient camouflage. But often I heard more than I cared to.

  “He told Sophia how short to cut her hair.”

  Leo Orlov wouldn’t do that.

  “He graded Bridget’s paper B for Buxom.”

  Leo Orlov is respectable. Leo Orlov is married to a beautiful wife. It didn’t matter that I had the same designs as everyone; the idea that he would stoop to flirting with children insulted me. I wanted to give all these girls a talking-to, shake Orlov’s books in front of their noses and tell them—what? That great men didn’t stray? Even I wasn’t that naïve.

  One afternoon, about a month into the semester, I was sitting outside taking a break and enjoying the last of the waning fall sun when I heard a screech coming from a stand of laurels. Flashes of color whipped through the branches, too quick to make sense of. Then a girl jumped around a nearby tree and leaned against the trunk, grinning. Panting. It was Daphne, the onetime freshman—now senior—who used to haunt my greenhouse during finals week, trying to relax among the green. She looked insane.

  “Come out, come out,” a voice called. Daphne pressed herself tighter against the bark, nearly melting into the tree despite her giggles. If you squinted, her arms were branches, her hair the bloom.

  “Oh for god’s sake,” I muttered. Except, not wanting Daphne to overhear me, what I really said was Bozhe moi. Russian still found its way to my tongue now and then, for secret keeping. Useful, as it turned out.

  A hand reached around and tapped Daphne on the shoulder, and she squealed.

  “Now, my dear,” said the droll voice attached to the hand. “Run away to class, I know you’re late. You’ve made a quick study in the art of escapism, brava.”

  I watched. She scampered off across the lawn, her little slippers so light she seemed to be dancing a ballet. Spring fawn, grand jeté, grand jeté, grand jeté. In retrospect I always imagine myself, in this moment, smoking a cigarette in furious protest, but that wasn’t yet my vice. I’d learn it from Lev soon enough.

  “Nu, chto zdes est’?” What have we here? A man—my man, the same fellow who had peered into my greenhouse, the same pair of eyes that first dreamed up the words in Felice, which I’d just finished devouring that morning—walked over, wiping his hands on a pocket square, which he then deftly re-tucked. “Prostitye, kto est’.” Forgive me, who.

  “Who, what, where,” I replied. Hoping to sound cool. “It doesn’t matter what I am, because you don’t have me.”

  “Oh, very nice. I like that very much. But really, I need to sit for a moment. These infants are exhausting.”

  Just like that I was sharing a patch of grass with Leo Orlov, hero of my reading life, current delicious villain of the rest. I tried to ignore the fact that he’d said exactly what I wanted him to say, and that he smelled like umber—the color, I mean. I wasn’t sure how he did it, but was too afraid to sound foolish asking. It crept up on me, invading my sinuses and my good sense.

  “You seem to enjoy them well enough,” I told him.

  “Well, one enjoys young creatures. The enthusiasm of the barely born. Don’t you think?” He asked me the way one asks a fellow traveler. A connoisseur. Then he leaned back against the greenhouse, glass creaking slightly beneath his weight. From the corner of my eye, I noted his mussed hair. The long hollow of his smooth-shaven cheek.

  “I think they’re terrible.”

  “T’i stishesh,” he said: You’re joking. He moved so easily into the familiar t’i that I hardly had time to register it. “How can something so naïve be terrible? They don’t have the strength.”

  Without speaking I held out my arm, showing off a dime-sized burn on the inner curve of my elbow. Just a scar, now, but still a standout. Its twin itched on my leg, though that one had at least appeared accidental when it happened.

  “No,” he said. “Them?”

  “The very same. Baby animals. Sharp teeth.”

  He corrected: “Sharp fangs.”

  At last
I turned to regard him straight on. “I’m Zoya,” I said. “Zoya Ivanovna Andropova.” I laughed. “You have no idea what a relief it is to say my whole name for once.”

  “Lev Pavlovich Orlov.” He held out a hand, which I shook. “And I think I might.” Lev switched back into Russian without missing a beat. “There are days I can’t stand talking to anyone at all here. I just want to crawl into my bedroom and lock the door. Leave all those dreadful Hey Misters outside and take a sleeping pill with a glass of vodka.” He employed a dreadful American drawl to say Hey Meeester.

  “You don’t really drink vodka.”

  “Oh, of course I do, it’s medicinal.”

  “For a cold.”

  “Not for pleasure.”

  “Never pleasure.”

  “Never, no.” Lev picked up my hand—I’m ashamed to say I jumped, but his touch was so welcome and warm it shocked my system. He inspected my fingernails. “So let me guess. A working girl.”

  “That’s right, Comrade. What else could I hope to be, as a functioning member of society?”

  “Then you lost everything, too.”

  I shook my head. His home, I thought, must’ve been magnificent, with gold woven into the curtains for texture and window lintels of dustless mahogany. It was tempting to pretend I was indeed the kind of girl he imagined, wealthy and fallen, with my own fond memories of angora rabbits kept as pets and a taste for expensive, peppery wine. But I didn’t want to lie. Whether I thought it would’ve been an insult to him or to my parents I’m still not certain. “Never had anything to lose,” I said.

  “Hmm.” Lev moved his fingers down my own; they traveled light. A drop of water. Spray of rain. I could see my hand, beneath his, as almost delicate, though his nails were buffed and mine were not. He lacked calluses, but still. It was in the way he handled me. “I can’t say I entirely agree.”

  I felt—my tongue grew very warm. I wanted to touch his neck, to smell his hair. I wanted him to reach into my mouth and count my teeth and see what the years had done to me. It was sex, but it was also the rest, unspoken: that we’d lost more than money when we lost our homes. That we didn’t just escape a bad situation when we snuck across the border, we’d allowed our whole world to be washed away. Grammar, subject, object, tense. And that somehow together we could tally up those losses more completely. Already I wanted to press my tongue against his ear and see if I tasted a Russian fall. Watermelon. Jam. Smog. My mother and father. But here we were, two people in a school for girls where propriety was the watchword. I sat perfectly still, hoping he wouldn’t drop my hand. His eyes flicked to the watch on his left wrist.

  “Forgive me again, Zoya. I think I have somewhere to be.” He stood, and I remained where I was. Couldn’t have moved. Wouldn’t have. Wanted to imprint the moment more permanently on my mind. “But I’ll be seeing you again, won’t I?”

  There was no need for me to agree.

  30.

  There was a period, following, that passed like a dream, when everything I did was augmented with the fluttering, light-headed quality of sleep. I would find myself sitting at the table at home and not quite remember getting there, only to put a spoon into my mouth with no notion of what was on it. I’d close my eyes and wait for the flavor to break on my tongue: cranberry preserves or chicken stock, wild rice with butter or, one time, chocolate sauce, as if I personally had no power over what I ate or where I went, subject perpetually to a series of dramatic reveals. I worked with purpose in the greenhouse, but even there I was dozy and occasionally daft: John found me once putting rose petals in my mouth and chewing them up, a line of pink spittle dripping from the corner of my lips. When he asked me what I was doing I got flustered and made something up about how, in the old country, we tested for spider mites by taste.

  “What if you’ve put on insecticide?” he said. And I had to tell him that no, those methods didn’t usually go together. He frowned.

  “But don’t you treat your plants with it sometimes? Here, I mean?”

  Of course he was quite right, but I wasn’t about to discuss it. I waved a hand and distracted his attention with some other matter, a plugged drain near the rear sink that I’d been struggling to unclog, and when he wasn’t looking I spat out the flower pulp and dropped it into a pile of mulch.

  I had never been in love before. Never even really had a crush that I could give the name. When Lev and I waved to each other across the courtyard my heart would beat in my ears for half an hour, making me so dizzy that Hilda started threatening to give me pills, though I took pains to hide the depth of my feelings. In free moments I stared at the changing fall color, electric reds and yellows sending signals to my brain like live wires. The leaves in the United States had a different quality from the ones I’d known in Russia—not brighter, but more insistent somehow; less a part of the landscape and more of a treasured commodity, painted onto plates and mugs and stitched onto shirt cuffs and advertised in magazines as a local attraction. They were just as priceless here, but still felt somehow for sale, and I stored that idea away as a possible topic of conversation with Lev, as I did at that time with everything that passed through my mind. I thought of him constantly, repeated his qualities to myself incessantly. He was always clean and smelled of something new and alive, but had ink on his fingers like a dirty little pilgrim. If we passed on the grounds close enough to talk we would share a brief joke or observation, always in Russian, always quick as a flash. Christos Voskres, he might say, watching me stand up after tying my shoe. Christ is Risen. Holy, holy. When he caught me on the roof of the science building helping John trim ivy and laughing at my own clumsiness when I dropped the clippers, Lev called up Pochemu t’i vesyolaya takaya? Meaning both, why are you so high up, and why are you so happy?

  I couldn’t find the words to tell him, but I didn’t have to. He knew. One day I stood under a covered walkway on my lunch hour, reading a concert poster someone had tacked up for a quartet in town that night playing Bach, when a hand slid into mine. I jumped, assuming it was one of the Donne girls planning something mean. But when I spun around Lev grabbed my shoulder and held me in place. “Tolko ya,” he said. It’s only me. “Tvoy dobry dryug.” Your gentle companion. Your dear friend. The first time he’d touched me since the day we met, and he made it seem so natural. It hadn’t been completely clear to me that he’d ever touch me again.

  I flushed, expecting to be distracted any minute by a student running up with a question, or a pair of teachers in deep conversation. A man shaping hedges or sweeping the stairs who would want a word with me, and would be shocked by what he saw. But instead of letting go of my hand, Lev brought it to his lips and kissed it just below the knuckle, holding my eye the entire time. We were alone. As if fate had deserted us there, in that hour, to do what we wanted and go where we wished.

  “Shall we?” he said. And I followed, without bothering to ask what he meant.

  31.

  He took me first in his locked office, hands down the front of my pants, looking directly into my eyes. He proceeded to repeat our earliest meeting back to me, but not how it happened, a whole other way. In this version a flock of birds made pinwheels above our heads—the birds weightless, atomic mist, scattered in the losing blue of the sky. You didn’t know anything about me, I said to myself, pleasure flooding my unexplored places. Why didn’t you tell me there was more? He kissed my hands again, he kissed my wrists, my ribs. As if to take one out of me and build something new.

  “It’s like I sensed you,” he whispered. “Not just here, but everywhere. Like everyone I’ve ever loved was leading up to this, to you, to us.”

  He turned me around and my stomach rubbed raw against the edge of his desk, but I had no breath to protest. I wanted him to fling me, to pound me into powder. And I wanted to return the favor. The room was dim, but on the top of his desk I saw a stack of typing paper, covered with notes in feminine handwriting. I touched the edge of a page, a scratched-in signature—just a hash mark followed by
a V—but then he turned me again and put his mouth to mine, and everything else was lost in sensation, friction, and the sounds of his still quite eloquent diction.

  “A farm girl,” he said. “And yet your body speaks in volumes, your mind, your mind—” He kept repeating this, until I realized he was actually saying You’re mine.

  32.

  Afterwards, I pulled my work pants back up, pausing to straighten even the cuffs, because attention to detail seemed important. Lev came over and buttoned my shirt for me, caressing my breast through a gap in the fabric before pulling back to inspect his work. I wanted to ask: And the others? All those girls? Have they been here with you, have you undressed and then dressed them after the act, taking so much innocence as if it was your due? But jealousy seemed cheeky. After all, the writing on those pieces of paper almost certainly belonged to his wife.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked, a critical look on his face. Already he knew me too well.

  “Nothing.”

  “Well that’s not true.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “No.” He didn’t seem disappointed by the lie, though. “Listen. I have to get home now—it’s past six o’clock. But I want you to meet me tomorrow at my house.” He tore an edge off one of the pages, making sure to leave the typescript intact but taking away a bit of notation; nothing legible. In the case of and then below that visi– and below that –ly askew. Lev wrote down his home address, which I tucked into my pocket. A part of me wanted to secure it in my bra, next to the skin, but one can only do so much to change their essential nature in a single day.