by Olga Grushin
He held up his drink in a squat crystal tumbler. I heard the ice clink invitingly against the glass, and thought: No plastic cups for this one. He was looking at me over the rim, one eyebrow lifted. The cat was looking at me too. Their eyes were alike, light and cold and amused. I renewed my assault on the door.
“Thank you, but I don’t drink whiskey.”
Oh, what the hell was wrong with this thing, did it turn right or left—
The man spoke unhurriedly.
“Is this a principle of yours, or do you simply not care for the taste?”
“I’ve never tried it.”
“Then forgive me the obvious question: How do you know you don’t like it? Personally, I’m an ardent follower of the immortal lessons of Dr. Seuss.”
“Who?”
“Dr. Seuss. Green Eggs and Ham. You know. Try them, try them, and you may?”
“I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about,” I said, abandoning the lock to look at the man once again. I was intrigued by my sudden realization that he was only a year or two older than I, and yet I did not see him as a boy, the way I summarily perceived—and dismissed—all the boys in my dormitory or my classes.
“Oh, no. I thought I’d detected an accent. You must be one of those unfortunates who didn’t imbibe Dr. Seuss’s classics with their mother’s milk. This simply can’t go on, it must be remedied this instant. Please follow me.”
He had spoken without smiling, then, before I could object, turned and walked off, not pausing to check whether I followed. I did, after a moment’s hesitation. We threaded our way through the confusion of the noisy living room, to a door shut at the end of a corridor. “My humble abode,” he said with a half-bow, opening the door, sweeping me inside, closing the door behind me. The music and the stomping grew remote. I tried not to wonder about the soft click of the lock, and then forgot to wonder about it, distracted by the room in which I found myself.
It did not appear to belong to the apartment we had just crossed. It was spare and refined, furnished in uniformly muted gray tones—a soft sea-gray rug, velvety mossy-gray curtains, a thick gray throw on the bed, a slim floor lamp with a mushroom-gray shade. In spite of my profound obliviousness of, not to say distaste for, all things interior decorating, I discerned that everything here bore a mark of distinctive taste. There were architectural engravings in black and white frames on the walls, bookshelves of leather-bound volumes, and on the ceiling, for some unfathomable reason, an enormous mirror. It made me uncomfortable, this room. I felt as if I myself had strayed into someone else’s story, and I was not sure that I liked the style.
“I can only stay for a few minutes,” I announced sternly, just in case he had misinterpreted my presence.
“Yes, your paper on Monday, I remember.” He topped off his glass from a cluster of bottles on a silver tray, reached for a book, sat cross-legged on the floor, his movements leisurely yet precise. “Not to worry, it’s very short. I’ll read it to you, it’s best when read aloud.”
As I settled across from him on the carpet, the gray cat flowed off his shoulders and pooled into my lap.
“Dorian likes you,” he said. “It’s a great compliment, he doesn’t like just anyone, I assure you. Did you know that a group of domestic cats is called a pounce, and a group of wild cats a destruction? Have a sip in the meantime . . . Now, the happy creature here is Sam-I-am, but we never get to learn the name of the grumpy one. It used to bother me quite a bit when I was a child . . . What do you think, by the way?”
“Interesting. Tastes like smoke, wood, and acute angles. I can’t say I’m fond of it.”
“Well, and now you know. Here, try this, this is sweeter, a coffee liqueur.”
“I don’t really drink,” I explained.
“Oh, but this isn’t drinking. This is sampling. Purely educational in spirit.”
And so I sat on the floor in the soft gray twilight of the strange room with the cat warming my thighs, listening to the light-eyed man read about eggs and ham, and thing one and thing two, and the clocks full of tocks, and the shoes full of feet, all the while sipping from an array of plump multicolored glasses that kept appearing before me out of nowhere—this one a golden-smooth honey of almonds, that one a sharp jolt of a plunge into a cold lake at sunrise, the last a dusty mouthful of vintage lace and genteel regrets.
He laughed at that.
“I knew it,” he said with satisfaction, and touched his glass to mine. His fingers were very long and thin, an aristocrat’s fingers. “I would recognize a fellow poet anywhere. Something about the way you hold the words in your mouth a fraction of a second longer, as if tasting them. Read me some of your poems.”
“No,” I said, though I felt secretly pleased. “I don’t read my poems at parties. Words are not to be bandied about like cheap coins.”
“But parties are precisely where one’s poems should be read. Where then would you read them? Poetry seminars? Libraries? I must say I’m shocked. Next you will tell me your poems do not rhyme.”
“Sometimes they do. Not always. And I don’t read them anywhere.”
“But this is heresy!” he cried. “Poems demand to be read, otherwise they are no better than solitary trees falling in the woods.” (Didn’t someone say something much like this to me before? I could not remember, but an odd feeling of recognition started inside me, and I felt myself growing flushed with an unfamiliar thrill.) “And of course they should always rhyme properly. Their very power derives from that anguished tension between the poet’s flights of fancy and the fetters of the form within which he labors. ‘The best words in their best order,’ as Coleridge noted, ‘order’ being the crucial idea here. Rhyme imposes order on dreaming, and the greatest poets rise to true greatness by transcending that order from within, by exploding preset boundaries and clichés with beauty and passion.”
He spoke with all the fervor of conviction, but the colorless eyes in his narrow, agile face were bright with mockery, and I could not tell whether he was being earnest or making fun of me. Someone had begun to knock on the door.
“Read me some of your poems,” he repeated.
“No. They are all in Russian anyway.” I was beginning to feel rather giddy, but pleasantly so. The light was very dim now, though I had not noticed him turning it down. “Shouldn’t you see what they want?”
“No, just ignore them and they’ll give up after a while. Why don’t I read you one of mine, then, to break the ice? Though I warn you, it has nothing on Dr. Seuss.”
The knocking on the door became a pounding and a rattling, gray Dorian purred in my lap, and his low voice wove in and out in a rhythm that would soothe for a line or two, then jar with an unexpectedly jagged, urgent word, and I knew it was brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Then the pounding went away and I thought I heard the distant slamming of a door. It occurred to me that much time had passed since I had entered the muted gray room—an hour perhaps, perhaps two—and now the music had stopped, the party seemed over, we were alone. He had finished reciting and was looking at me, as ever with that gently mocking smile on his lips; and though I wanted to praise it, I found that I could not recollect a single word of it, for it had been just like the pungent smoke drifting from the cigarette in his hand—melting wisps of mist refusing to shape into anything tangible.
“But wait a moment,” I said, realizing something. “There was no rhyme!”
“All rules exist to be broken,” he said, and shifted closer to me across the carpet, so I took a drag on his odd hand-rolled cigarette, and coughed, and talked. I talked because I was suddenly nervous, but also, mainly, because all at once I no longer wished to be a solitary tree falling in the forest. So I told him about rhymes not being the only way of ordering poetry, and of my grand ambition to catalogue the entire human experience in poetic cycles, of which I had already completed a few: The Cycle of Exhaustion (a mode
rn take on Tsvetaeva’s Insomnia poems), The Cycle of Home, The Cycle of Memory, The Cycle of . . .
“The Cycle of Love?” he suggested, studying me with his penetrating pale eyes.
“No, no,” I said, moving away a little, “nothing so banal”—and I might have felt uneasy again, but I was genuinely curious to find out what he thought of various things. Take, for example, Proust’s haunting melody that had floated in the universe until discovered and set down by a composer—or, similarly, Michelangelo’s claim that he merely rescued the already existing statues from the marble blocks in which they had been trapped—did he think that this Platonic idea could likewise be applied to poetry? Was there perhaps a treasury of perfectly resonant, universal phrases somewhere out there, waiting for their Shakespeare or Pushkin to set them into harmonious words, and if so, how would one circumvent the problem of language, languages being particular and divisive? True, the most profound, most basic poetry crossed linguistic barriers with no effort—“To be or not to be” was just as powerful in Russian, though, to be fair, I could not vouch for Finnish or Chinese—but what about more nuanced sentiments? Or was that precisely what distinguished the monolithic universality of truth from the intricate embroidery of beauty: its meaning transcended its expression?
He splashed a bit of something into my glass and said that, speaking of Shakespeare, he himself dabbled in the theater now and then, as a matter of fact he had played Hamlet in a modest production last year, had I seen it perhaps, ah, a pity. Anyway, he had been working on an amusing little theory of his own, inspired by the Bard’s “All the world’s a stage,” namely, that the playwrights of genius had touched humanity so deeply because each of them had been able to distill the essence of a wholly unique worldview into their plays, and even centuries later, all of us mere mortals unconsciously molded our own lives into would-be plays penned by this or that giant, our very natures reshaped by someone’s words and plots. Some cheated and schemed through a Molière farce, others longed for a better existence in the dreary monotony of Chekhov’s uneventful drama, still others attempted to love in tragic Shakespearean terms, and the less one said about the hapless crowds stumbling through Ionesco’s and Beckett’s worlds, the better.
“And you, you definitely belong in Oscar Wilde,” I said, laughing.
“I will take it as a reference to my taste and wit only, not to any extracurricular activities,” he said, “as I hope to have a chance of proving to you shortly.”
I opened my mouth to form some clever reply, and could think of nothing, and then he was kissing me, and his kisses were not at all like the rubber kisses of my Moscow youth. And even as I was falling into some dark, hot, dizzying swirl, a small, clear-minded part of me stated coldly: This is rather predictable, a bit of a cliché in fact, for I believe I am being seduced, which is obviously what happens often in this soft, warm, gray room with low beige lights and the mirror on the ceiling and the cat with those unnatural white eyes slinking off to stare at us from the top of the dresser. But later, when the clear part of my mind had long fallen silent, another, deeper voice continued to speak—because it was all interesting, and frightening, and intoxicating, and I felt myself changing, becoming someone new, yet staying myself, always myself in some still, secret place reached only by words, a kernel of me at the very heart of this whirlwind, this chaos, and the voice continued to speak, imposing order on the chaos, and somewhere in that small, secret place, quite apart from the world, I found myself writing a poem, my first poem in English, a poem with proper rhymes.
Met.
“Nyet.”
Bet.
Duet.
Pet.
Wet.
Not yet.
Beset.
Let.
Sweat.
Regret?
Not yet.
Cigarette.
9. My Dorm Room
The Sacrifice
The telephone shrilled in the hush of my dorm room, jolting me out of cramped armchair sleep; I had dozed off while waiting. I let it ring another time before lifting the receiver, willing my heart to slow from a gallop to a canter, then said “Allo” with all the brightness I could muster. Lisa’s voice burst into my ear mid-laugh. She was just calling to tell me she would be spending the night at Sam’s, but oh, the funniest thing had happened to her this morning in the cafeteria, could I imagine—
“Lisa,” I interrupted, “you know I can’t tie up the line right now.”
“Oops, it’s Sunday, I forgot.” She hung up before she had finished speaking.
Carefully putting the receiver down on its cradle, I sank back into the armchair, checked the clock. It had been an hour already. Sometimes they were able to get through right away, but it often took two or three hours, longer on occasion. Too anxious to read, I thought of smoking a joint, then decided against it: I wanted my head to be clear. Music drifted through the half-open window—Constantine was readying for another party. The March breeze made the lowered shade rattle lightly against the pane.
I settled back for another stretch of expectant silence.
Every Sunday, as I waited by the telephone, I could picture them with that rare clarity for which I treasured these weekly vigils—my father at his typewriter, working with only half his usual absorption, ready to pick up the second line at a moment’s notice, my mother perched on a stool in the corridor, dialing, hearing the hateful busy signal, dialing again, hearing the busy signal, dialing again, her lips pressed taut with concentration, willing into being the operator’s curt response. Our conversations themselves were disappointing, five minutes’ worth of forced cheer shouted over static; but the hours of anticipation allowed me to convince myself that my home truly existed, that my childhood had been real—that it had not all been an invention, a fairy tale I told myself whenever I felt lonely, a heartrending song of stars and destinies, dissipating in the harsh light of days and the neon glare of nights conducted with the dry precision of a foreign language.
Sitting immobile for so long had made me stiff. I stretched, yawned, closed my eyes; when I opened them an instant later, the world had shifted: the familiar earthy smell lingered in the air—perhaps I had rolled that joint after all—and the room was flooded with silence and darkness. The silence had a different quality to it, a humming thrill of unreality, and the darkness was deepest in the armchair across from mine.
“So,” he said matter-of-factly, “you’ve decided to break it to them at last. They won’t be pleased, you know. No, don’t turn it on, or you may just see a dragon instead of a handsome youth.”
“Aren’t you getting your myths mixed up? I’m hardly Psyche, and you’re too old to be Cupid.” Still, I moved my hand away from the lamp. “In any case, I’m not worried, I know they’ll understand. I’ve sent them some of my poems.”
“Yes,” he said. “Your On the Other Side cycle. It wouldn’t have been my first choice—it’s more Dionysus than Apollo, too much raw feeling, not enough thought. And that ditty about a nun sleeping with the devil, that’s painfully obvious, really, and as close to pornography as is acceptable in civilized society. Well. You’ve practiced your arguments, I assume?”
“I’m hoping my poetry alone will be enough,” I said, a bit dryly.
“But if it isn’t?”
“Then I will tell them that going home is a predictable thing to do, and someone once taught me not to take the path of least resistance.” I paused for the sound of acknowledgment, but the darkness lay still around me. “Fine. I will tell them that I’ll be twenty-two in just a few months, but I have yet to start living. I’ve spent my entire existence until now sheltered under the parental roof, in library cubicles and dorm rooms, and my future is all mapped out for me as well: my old Moscow routine waiting to close in upon me, a short interlude of graduate school followed by a desk job in some dusty institute, a marriage to someone like Vasily, then children, then
middle age, then death. It’s like one giant board of tic-tac-toe, spanning years and years, and as life crosses off one square, I’m expected to obediently put my O down in the next logical place, knowing all the while that the game can’t be won. But somewhere out there—somewhere out there are street carnivals and mountain peaks and sunlit squares, and I just want to—to get off the board for a while.”
“But what exactly will you do, my dear?”
“I don’t know. Does it matter? Maybe move to New York. Or New Orleans. Or San Francisco. Rent a studio. Wait tables in some smoky den. Learn how to mix mean cocktails and play the guitar. Master poker. Take up karate. Work at an art gallery or a post office. Get a job as a conductor on a train between the coasts. Or a backup dancer. Or a window washer. Anything. Everything. I’ve never even been anywhere. I want to throw myself into adventures. Plunge into the twentieth century before it runs out, so I can write about it in the fullness of experience. Because no one can discover anything new while staying within four walls of a bookworm’s cell, never venturing out to taste joy or pain. Art is all about stretching the limits of being human, is it not? It can’t be born of a small, predictable life.”
A night breeze swept into the room, and the shade beat a fluttering rhythm against the windowpane. I peered into the shadows. “Are you still there? Hello?”
“I wish,” he said, and I could hear him stifling a yawn, “I wish you hadn’t fallen into the trap that has claimed so many others. An artist doesn’t need to lead a life of distraction in order to create. In fact, if you are ever to prove worthy of a myth, you must devote all your time to your calling and leave the manufacturing of adventures to your future biographers. For you must remember: Limits are best stretched by going inward, not outward; pain will find you no matter how cramped the cell you hide in; and joy—joy is always only a poem away. And there are no such things as small lives, there are only small people.”
I felt a sudden flare of irritation at the smooth readiness of his maxims, at his seeming inability to understand anything about real choices in a real life.
