Boris Boris didn’t like it.” He peered at her shrewdly. “Neither do you.”
“Try again,” she said gently, gesturing at the machine.
He turned to it. “This fax should be attached to a yacht,” he said, tapping out the number. “It would make a fine anchor. Ah, yes, the signal of busyness. The only sign of economic activity in all Moscow, the fax machine at Soviet Television TV Center on Korolyov Street.”
After three more tries, the call did at last go through, and Grigor fed his two pages of jokes, asides, and suggestions into the machine, then carried the originals back to his room, paused to take his medicines, and at last they could leave for their drive in the country.
This was probably the last cycle of the seasons Grigor would ever see. Susan’s cousin Chuck Woodbury, the AIDS research doctor, had soon after Grigor’s arrival in the States passed him on to other doctors, experts in his particular kind of radiation- induced cancer, and while various medicinal combinations they’d tried had put his illness into slight remission for short periods of time, the advance of the disease was still inexorable, and gradually accelerating its pace.
Grigor had arrived in this mountainous terrain, less than a hundred miles north of New York City, in late May, and had so far seen the finish of spring’s green burgeoning and the flowered lushness of summer. Now he was seeing the first of the great autumn foliage display; every day, more leaves on more branches had turned to russet and ruby and gold. He would most likely see this change all the way through to bare black trees against a white sky, standing in great drifts of rusty leaves; he would probably see the first snowfall of winter. But would he experience the end of winter? Unlikely.
The country rolled, rich in reds and yellows, backed by the dark green of pines. Susan drove through little gray-stone towns and newer clapboard or aluminum-sided developments.
Grigor talked about the beautiful vistas of this new land he’d never known he would visit, and sometimes talked about the beautiful vistas of Russia as well; unstated between them was the knowledge that he would never see those Russian vistas again.
The drive was tiring for Grigor eventually. “I hate to go back,” he finally said, “but...”
'There’s tomorrow,” she reminded him. She almost always spent Saturday night at a motel near the hospital, so she and Grigor could have the two weekend days together. He’d never come to the motel with her, nor had either of them raised the suggestion that he might.
That was a taboo area, by mutual consent. Susan wondered sometimes if her feelings for Grigor were merely self-defensive, if she were just protecting herself from a real, adult, dangerous relationship with a man by concentrating so exclusively on someone who simply could not offer a long-term commitment. But her feelings for Grigor seemed so much stronger than that, more profound. She’d even thought at times about the possibility of having his child, helping him to leave some echo or reminder of himself in the world. She’d never mentioned that idea to him, knowing instinctively that, rather than please him, the prospect of fathering a child he would never see, who would never be alive in his lifetime, would appall and sadden him.
Was he even capable of sex? Weakened, all the systems of his body slowing and failing, would it be possible for him any more? Susan shied away from the question, uncomfortable even to find herself thinking about it.
She’d forgotten the anti-nuclear demonstration. Their roundabout aimless drive, drifting through the falling leaves, had taken them to another approach toward the hospital, and all at once, as they topped a low hill, flanked by yellowing birch and beech and elm and dark green pine, there it was laid out before them, as frenzied yet compact as a scene in a movie. Which in a way it was, since almost all demonstrations are actually composed for television news coverage. So it was in the usual manner that the triumvirate of demonstrators and police and television technicians boiled away furiously together down there, enclosed within an invisible pot; one inch outside camera range, pastoral placidity reigned.
“I think I can get past,” Susan said, hands gripping the wheel as she braked, coming slowly down the slope.
The left side of the road here was flanked by tall chain-link fence with razor wire at the top. Behind it, the woods were, if anything, more lush than anywhere else in the neighborhood, since the power company had added extra trees, mostly pine, to hide the plant tucked into the folds of hills. Only the access road, with its electric gate and guardpost and discreet sign, suggested what lay inside.
The demonstration was centered on that plant entrance. It spilled out to cover the entire road, protestors weaving in their ragged oval, waving their signs, shouting their catchphrases, while local police and private guards contained and controlled them, and the television crews moved and shifted around the perimeter like sharks around a shipwreck. Scuffles kept breaking out in the middle of the action, drawing more observers and participants, but then snuffing themselves out; it was to no one’s advantage to let this confrontation get out of hand, move beyond an acceptable predetermined level of hostility. No side wanted to harm its reputation in Washington and Albany and on Wall Street, where the real decisions would be made.
On the right, the land was wilder, scrubbier, with more underbrush and more visible dead branches or the remains of dead trees. The power company owned this land as well, to protect itself, but didn’t bother to manage it. The shoulder on that side, opposite the plant entrance, was broad and weedy, with a shallow ditch. It seemed to Susan she could leave the blacktop and make her way around the demonstration without getting caught up in it. The alternative was a detour of about fifteen miles, and Grigor was already very tired. She’d chance it.
Up close, the sights and sounds were ugly. Passion and righteousness twisted the faces of the demonstrators, while leashed animal rage froze the faces of the police and guards, and the faces of the TV people bore the placid untouched evil beauty of Dorian Gray. Though the car windows were rolled up, Susan could plainly hear the lust for carnage in all those raised voices, like a primitive tribe psyching itself up to attack another village. Blinking, she drove at a slow and steady pace, the car slanting into the ditch on the right, bumping over the uneven ground.
“They’re right,” Grigor said, looking out the windshield. He sounded unlike himself, bitter and angry and defeated.
They were nearly past when another quick outbreak of violence occurred, just beyond them on their left: a sudden release of pressure, boiling over of rage, like bubbles in lava. Police wands swung, wedges of protestors moved and swayed, and a TV cameraman looking for a better angle backed directly into Susan’s path, forcing her to stop.
She was afraid to sound her horn, not wanting to attract the attention of any of the participants, and while she was waiting there, growing more and more frightened, two people came reeling out of the scrum, a man and a woman, supporting one another. Or he supporting her, his arm around her waist, her hand on his shoulder. He looked up, saw the car, and as he raised his free arm in supplication, she thought, Ben! What’s he doing here?
But of course it wasn’t Ben Margolin, whom she hadn’t seen since college, whom she’d been madly in love with for one semester (and part of a second). Still, that instant of false recognition predisposed her in his favor, so she nodded as she met his eye, and gestured for them to come to the car. The woman, she could see, had a short diagonal cut on her forehead, a line of dark red blood, straight on its upper side, ragged below, like a line in a graffiti signature.
The TV cameraman moved closer to the action, out of Susan’s path, as the man who wasn’t Ben Margolin opened the rear car door, helped the woman in, and piled in after her. Susan immediately accelerated, bearing down hard on the pedal, the car jouncing, rear wheels spinning before catching hold.
Grigor had the box of Kleenex tissues out of the glove compartment, and had twisted around to offer it to the woman, who gave him a baffled look, then shakily smiled and took two tissues. She was about thirty, dark-haired, exotically
attractive, not thin.
The man with her didn’t really look much like Ben at all, except that he was tall and blond and big-boned. But he had a very different face, more open and easygoing and friendly than Ben’s. (Ben had been a tortured intellectual.) He said to Susan, “Thanks for getting us out of that. I think if s gonna turn bad.”
“It already did turn bad,” Susan said. Clearing the last of the demonstration, getting back onto the road, she could look in the rearview mirror at the woman daubing at her cut forehead with the tissues.
“Worse,” the man said. “Much worse. I’ve seen a lot of these things, I know.”
“You demonstrate a lot?” Susan couldn’t keep the frostiness out of her tone. She didn’t care about the rights or wrongs of specific arguments; all she knew for sure was, when people turned ugly and mean and violent they were wrong, no matter how noble their cause.
“I watch demos a lot,” the man said. “I’m a sociologist at Columbia. I was there to observe this thing, and then this lady got hit by one of the demonstrators’ signs—”
“It was an accident,” the woman said. She had an accent, rough but not unpleasant.
The man grinned at her, easy and comfortable. “I know,” he said. “You got hit by your own team. You still got hit, though. It was still time to get out of there.” Grinning now at Susan in the rearview mirror, he said, “Lucky you came along. Lucky for us, I mean.”
“Glad to help,” Susan said. Something about this man attracted her, but something also—maybe the same something?—made her apprehensive.
The man leaned forward, forearm on the seatback behind Susan’s head. “My name’s Andy Harbinger,” he said.
“Susan Carrigan. And this is Grigor Basmyonov.” She’d become quite practiced by now at saying Grigor’s last name.
They exchanged hellos, and then everyone concentrated on the woman, who looked up from dabbing at her forehead to say, “Oh, yes, excuse me. I am Maria Elena Auston.” She sounded weary, even sad.
17
It was no good. Nothing was any good. Nothing worked the way it was supposed to. Maria Elena’s head throbbed where the sign had grazed her. Riding in the backseat of the car with three strangers, alone in a land she would never understand, she felt sick, exhausted, and in despair. She couldn’t even take part in an anti-nuclear demonstration without being hit in the head by one of her own comrades.
She couldn’t do anything, right, could she? She couldn’t even keep her husband.
At first, it had all been so perfect. She and Jack Auston, together. In Brasilia, every day working with him, every night sleeping with him, his sexual interest a surprising delight, unexpected that such a quiet man could be so voracious in bed.
One day the necessary papers were signed at the city clerk’s office and with the American embassy, and then one other day they went down to the public register and were married in a private ceremony and went back to his apartment—she’d moved in some time before—and made love again, sweet love, and that was their honeymoon.
Jack then had two months remaining on his contract with
WHO, and that was the most satisfying time of Maria Elena’s life. Her miserable first marriage with Paco was forgotten, her dead children nearly forgotten, her lost singing career no longer painful to think of, her self-loathing buried so deeply beneath this new self-assurance that she seemed to herself to be a thoroughly new person. And she was going to America.
Her happiness was so great in those days that she barely ever even thought about the original reason for wanting to go to America, for wanting to induce—seduce—John Auston into marrying her. Occasionally the memory would come, particularly when they were in the field at some especially horrifying site, but the fantasy had more or less shrunk from a plan or a hope back to the simple childish fancy it had originally been.
The first month or six weeks in America were dazzling and distracting, the town of Stockbridge in Massachusetts as alien to her as a different planet in a different solar system; yes, even the sun seemed like another sun. Learning to shop at those stores, to drive on those roads, to live in that house, had all been so heady and intense, requiring such concentration, that she couldn’t even count that time as happiness; she was too busy then to be happy. And also too busy to notice for some time that she’d lost Jack.
She knew now what it had been. In Brazil, his sexual excitement had blocked out every other facet of his personality, like a radio jammer. But that kind of excitement, based in the alien and exotic, had inevitably faded once they’d returned to his normal mundane world. In Stockbridge, his insatiable craving for her body had drained out of him with the speed and irreversibility of water out of a cracked swimming pool. And when it was gone, there was nothing left.
Jack didn’t care for her, it seemed, had nothing in common with her, neither liked nor disliked her, was absolutely indifferent to her presence. There was no longer any sex at all between them, and her few efforts to rekindle his passion had been such humiliating failures—how gendy and kindly he had excused himself from performance—that she’d quickly given that up, but then had no other way to try to reach him. He had returned to a previous research job at a Massachusetts medical laboratory, and the people and events of his work were absolutely all that held any interest for him. He didn’t actively object to Maria Elena’s presence in his house, cooking his meals and doing his laundry, but if she’d left he would have found another maid without a second thought. In fact, it would probably be easier for him to have a maid who wasn’t inexplicably all over his bedroom every night.
In a way, it would have been easier to understand and live with if Jack had found another woman, but he had not, and might never. He was a kind and gende man, but he just simply wasn’t much of a physical creature. His job absorbed his interest. His on-site chat with co-workers was all the social life he seemed to need, and that was it. His sudden spurts of sexual excitement must be terribly rare, surprising and pleasing while they were going on, but then gone without a memory, without a regret.
That was the worst of it; Jack couldn’t even seem to remember what it was about her that he’d liked. And she knew now that it was only that deep polite indifference at the core of him that had made him agree to marry her, that had permitted her to succeed in her machinations. Oh, how clever she’d been!
If only she could talk to the first wife, that mystery woman three thousand miles away in Portland, Oregon. Had the same thing happened with her? Had Jack suddenly noticed her body, gone into that frenzy, worn it away inside her, and then reverted to his natural phlegmatic self? (Except, of course, that a child had resulted that other time.) And had the wife at last been unable to stand for another instant that bland polite indifference?
How would an American woman react to such an existence? Maria Elena was at a total loss. Nothing in her experience showed her how to handle a passionless man. In her world, passion was a major constituent, for good and for ill. When she and Paco had come together, it had been like storm systems colliding over a jungle, and when they’d parted, the storms had been even more fierce. They’d drawn blood, both emotionally and physically, and if Maria Elena was eventually battered into an acceptance of Paco’s hateful view of her, it was nevertheless the result of a war, not the result of an ice age covering the Earth.
And when she had sung, and the public had responded, that had been passion, too. She had been for a while the latest in a tradition of forceful South American performers, almost a cross between the emotional intensity of an Edith Piaf and the showbiz intensity of a Liza Minnelli, but propelled by a purely Iberian torrent of feeling. How powerfully she had been able to sing about sorrow and loss, then, before she had known them. How far she was from singing now.
She had brought with her from Brazil the memorabilia of that career, the albums, the rolled-up posters, the magazine articles, the photos, all stacked in two cartons stored away in the Stockbridge attic. She thought of them up there sometimes, thought about listen
ing to one of the albums—Live in Sao Paulo, for instance, with its almost terrifying roar of audience response—but she never did.
Frustrated, shamed, alone, Maria Elena clung at last to the wreckage of the idea that had caused her to be united with John Auston in the first place. Somehow, she had to find the people who owned the factories, the people who were indifferent to or ignorant of the horror they brought into the lives of less powerful human beings in less influential parts of the globe. Somehow, she had to reach them and convince them to change their ways, reverse their policies, stop the slaughter. But who were these people? How could she find them? How could she make contact with them? How could she make her argument compelling to them?
Finally, there had been no route open except to repeat her earlier political phase in Brazil: join the protestors. It gave her a way to fill her days, it gave her a way to use her untapped passion, it gave her, at least at moments, at least the illusion of accomplishment. She wasn’t doing what had to be done, but she was doing something.
But even there, satisfaction was elusive. Her grasp of English, adequate in every other respect, was too clumsy for the slippery nuances of political discourse. Even this demonstration; it apparently wasn’t opposed to the nuclear plant as such, but to some sort of research going on within it. What did Maria Elena know of science? Nothing; only its leavings. Still she persisted, because something is better than nothing, because movement at least distracted from the emptiness of her life, and because maybe she was doing some good. Maybe she was.
But it didn’t really work, it didn’t really distract, and it certainly didn’t fulfill. She picketed in front of the U.N., signed group letters to the New York Times (that usually weren’t published), contributed toward the cost of advertisements on environmental issues, showed up to help swell the ranks of protests, traveled to Washington on buses chartered by action groups; and always she was alone, always just a little to the side of the group, slighdy lost, slightly out of sync.
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