Honeytrap

by Aster Glenn Gray

  “They’re beautiful,” he said. Then he remembered a comment in one of Daniel’s Zurich letters: Elizabeth is a painter. “They’re yours, aren’t they?”

  He had envisioned sweet little pictures: pretty little flowers, perhaps. Not towering bold hollyhocks.

  She laughed. “Yes! I suppose I can’t hope for an objective comment on them now. You can hardly tell your hostess that you hate her paintings, can you?”

  “No,” he agreed. “But I like them,” he added. “They are so alive.”

  She laughed again. “Thank you. Come down into the conversation pit, why don’t you? We’ll have our lemonade there.”

  The conversation pit proved to be an actual sunken space in the floor. Three steps led down to a pit lined with couches, with a glass coffee table in the center and a fireplace at the far side. “It’s like a Roman…” Gennady didn’t know the word in English. “A Roman room for eating, with the couches.”

  “A triclinium! Yes, it is, isn’t it?” She set down the tray and poured two glasses of lemonade. “I’m afraid I’ll have to stand in for the Gaulish slave girl at present.”

  “You are French?”

  “On my mother’s side. She came to the United States as a war bride after World War I. And wasn’t she proud of it! She used to tell us that she modeled for Renoir.”

  Yes: Elizabeth looked very much like one of Renoir’s women. “This is how you became interested in art?”

  “How does anyone become interested in anything? I just always liked to draw.” She was on her feet again. “Do you want something to eat? I made cheese straws.”

  “Yes, thank you,” he said. She left, and he collapsed back into the colorful pillows on the couch.

  The truth was that he had not expected to like Elizabeth. He had conceived a slight antipathy toward her when he read Daniel’s six-page letter about his honeymoon. Daniel and Elizabeth had driven across the United States in a camper, sleeping under the stars, fleeing a grizzly bear in Yellowstone, walking on the beaches in California, where Elizabeth set up her easel and painted as the sun set. (And then, Gennady had thought sourly, expanding upon Daniel’s gentlemanly ellipses, Daniel and Elizabeth fucked on the beach.) They skinny-dipped in the Colorado River: “She rose out of the water with a snake over her shoulder, like some ancient river goddess, and she didn’t even scream when she saw it – only let it slide back into the river and then ran like hell for the bank.”

  Until Gennady had received that letter, somehow he had envisioned Daniel frozen in amber, still pining away by the roadside. Of course it was not so: Daniel had moved on, just as Gennady had. But it was unpleasant to receive such a lengthy letter about Daniel’s wedded bliss right when Gennady’s own marriage to Alla was beginning to come apart.

  They had been drawn together, Alla and Gennady, by a shared interest in za granitsa: abroad. They met standing in line for tickets to foreign films at the Moscow House of Cinema: this pretty dark-haired girl with thick dark brows, whose wide dark eyes kept catching on Gennady’s, until one day at last they found themselves next to each other in line.

  These lines generally lasted for hours, and they spent those hours talking together, and when at the end they really did get tickets to Fellini’s 8 ½, it seemed like a sign from fate. At the end of the movie they kissed, and left the theater hand in hand, and walked the streets of Moscow where the sun shone on the wet pavement after rain.

  Within three months they were married. Alla had never been abroad and wanted very much to go, and so Gennady began to push for a posting. Not only for Alla’s sake, of course; Gennady wanted to go abroad too, had dreamed of travel since he was eight years old, had chosen his profession because it was one of the few in the Soviet Union that offered the opportunity to pass the borders.

  When at last they were posted to Zurich, they toasted each other with a bottle of champagne. There was the flurry of packing, tearful goodbyes, finally a plane ride, and at last their dream came true, and they were abroad together, in the sunny mountains of Switzerland.

  And Alla hated it. Not just Zurich itself, but the whole experience of being a stranger in a strange land. Never mind that her German was good, better than Gennady’s, and so what if a few mean people laughed at her accent? It was the nature of humans to laugh at each other, you couldn’t take it too seriously. Wouldn’t she like to come see Lenin’s Zurich home on the Spiegelgasse? To go to the opera? (In Moscow, Alla loved the opera.) To hike or ski in the Alps? To leave their apartment for any reason at all, please?

  And so Gennady had conceived a dislike for the Elizabeth of Daniel’s besotted letters, this woman so fearless that she did not scream even when a snake wrapped itself around her shoulders. But in the face of the actual woman this dislike evaporated: he even forgave Daniel the tactlessness of writing six whole pages, and felt only a faint ruefulness because, of course, when he had such a charming wife, Daniel could hardly have an interest in Gennady anymore.

  Well, that had never been very likely. Gennady washed his disappointment down with a gulp of lemonade. Probably it was better this way. Certainly an affair would have been dangerous, and anyway it was still possible that Alla might change her mind about the divorce.

  Elizabeth returned, plate of cheese straws in hand. She refilled Gennady’s lemonade glass. “Was it a very hot walk?”

  “Yes, but not unpleasant,” he told her. “I’ve never been in a room like this before.”

  “It’s not very homey, is it?” she said. “This front room is mostly for cocktail parties. We have a few every year, people from the art world mostly. It’s easier than transporting these monsters to a gallery, and I’ve sold more paintings than you might expect that way. They think it’s hilarious coming out to the suburbs.”

  A smile flashed across her face as she spoke, good-natured mockery of the conceit of art buyers. Gennady gulped his lemonade and blurted, “Where is Daniel?”

  “He’s dropping the children off to stay with my parents for the weekend,” she said. “I would have thought he’d be back by now. He’s been so looking forward to your visit.” She touched his arm lightly and added, “He’s told me a lot about you.”

  Gennady had the feeling that a lot meant everything – really everything – and now she was either warning him off or…

  Well, perhaps giving her blessing; but this thought made him intensely uncomfortable. He fiddled with one of the colorful crocheted blankets on the couch. “Perhaps you will show me the house? No, the garden,” he said, relieved at the idea. It seemed like a good idea to get out into the fresh air and the sunshine.

  But a rumbling noise intervened. “That’s the garage door,” Elizabeth said, rising to her feet with a smile. “Daniel must be home.”

  ***

  They had dinner out on the patio: a big tossed salad, straw potatoes, the promised chicken Kiev oozing with butter. They drank wine and lingered over cups of coffee, chatting, until Daniel heaved himself from the chair and began to gather the plates. “Gennady, would you like to see our cabin?”

  “Your cabin?”

  “It’s just a little place up in the mountains. No electricity, no indoor toilets, just a pump over the sink.”

  “A dacha.” Gennady was enchanted. “You have a dacha?”

  Daniel looked bemused. “Well – I guess so.”

  “Do you grow tomatoes? Are there mushrooms in the woods?”

  Daniel and Elizabeth looked at each other. “There are wild raspberries,” Elizabeth offered. “And blackberries. We go up in the summer to pick them.”

  Most Americans wouldn’t recognize a morel if it bit them. “Take me there sometime and I will look for mushrooms for you,” Gennady promised. “Next spring perhaps, when it is the season for – oh, I don’t know the English word – for smorchok, a queen among mushrooms, you cook it in butter and it’s the best thing you’ve ever tasted.”

  “Well, send some back if you find them,” Elizabeth said with a smile. “I’ll get the dishes this once, Dan
iel. You’d better get going if you’re going to make it before dark. The roads are pretty winding in the mountains,” she added to Gennady. “It’s a bad place to drive at night.”

  Gennady was startled. “Tonight?”

  Daniel had piled the plates on his arms like a waiter. “Unless you need to get back to the city?”

  “No…”

  “Don’t forget the picnic basket,” Elizabeth told Daniel.

  Gennady felt flustered and breathless. He had come here with the idea of seducing Daniel, but he had expected it to take months at least, if it ever came to anything, and really he had not thought it likely that it would. It unnerved him to find things moving so quickly. He had thought there would be more time to prepare.

  Unless of course Americans often invited their former lovers to their dachas overnight for completely normal friendship purposes.

  But even as his mind whirled, Gennady was following Daniel into the kitchen, where they left the dishes on the kitchen counter; and following him out to the garage (two cars! A bourgeois extravagance); and climbing into the car, and Daniel was backing down the driveway, and driving down the quiet street beneath the rustling trees.

  And then Daniel said, almost casually, “I could drop you off at the subway stop if you want. There’s no reason to drive all the way out to the cabin unless you… unless you’re interested in… Oh, Christ.” He ran a hand over his face. “Listen, Gennady. I know that you’re married, so stomp on me if this is out of line, but I thought I might as well ask. Do you want to sleep with me again?”

  Gennady nearly choked. “Are Americans always so blunt?”

  “No,” Daniel said, “but I thought it was better to be blunt than to pussyfoot around it till the last night before they recall you to Moscow.”

  “There were good reasons why we did nothing before then,” Gennady protested. “It wasn’t just ‘pussyfooting’.”

  “Yes, I know. And – as I said – Alla…”

  It annoyed Gennady to hear Daniel say her name. “She’s very angry that I continued to apply for foreign assignments after Zurich, after it was clear she did not want to go abroad again,” Gennady said. “We argued a great deal, we discussed divorce, and perhaps we will and perhaps we won’t, but she told me she will not sit in Moscow faithfully waiting while I am gone, and if she does not consider herself bound then certainly I don’t.”

  “Gennady. I’m so sorry.” Daniel’s voice had gone soft with sympathy.

  Gennady flushed. His voice came out rough when he said, “But of course there is your wife. What about Elizabeth?”

  “Elizabeth’s fine with it. I think she’s kind of into it, now that she’s seen how cute you are.” He glanced at Gennady, saw perhaps Gennady’s incredulous look (cute?), and added, “She was practically shooing us out the door, Gennady. With a picnic basket.”

  “Why?” Gennady demanded. At the end of the day, after all, a Russian could beat an American at bluntness every time. “Why would she encourage this?”

  “I suppose swinging hasn’t made it to Moscow, either.”

  “You should read about our Silver Age poets,” Gennady snapped. “America is not on the forefront of everything.”

  “I know that, Gennady,” Daniel protested. “There’s no need to pick a fight. Just tell me to drop you off at the Metro and I will. It’s been fifteen years, I understand if you’re not interested anymore.”

  “It’s not that,” Gennady said, because it was not. It was just that it was all happening so fast, he felt off-balance, as if he teetered on the verge of falling, and he did not know how to slow it down without putting a stop to it altogether. “It’s just… You have so much to lose. Your wife, your children. Your nice house. Your happy life.”

  “I promise you, I promise you, Elizabeth really doesn’t mind. We can do whatever you want,” Daniel said. “Or nothing at all, if that’s what you want. No harm no foul.” He turned off the end of the tree-lined avenue and pulled up outside the Metro station: bright lights and graffiti, the pavement littered in cigarette butts. “Do you want to meet at the cafeteria again? Same time next Thursday?”

  Gennady thought about the dark Metro tunnels, the stench of cigarettes and old sweat in the swaying cars. His empty apartment, silent and dark.

  He twisted the seatbelt around his wrist. He could not look at Daniel. “I want,” Gennady began, and felt a catch in his stomach, as if he had tripped over a crack in the pavement, and fallen. “I want to see your dacha.”

  After all, if you didn’t grab happiness when it was offered, it might never come again.

  ***

  Daniel’s dacha sat in a clearing among the trees at the end of a winding gravel drive. The car’s headlights illuminated the little log cabin briefly as Daniel parked; then Daniel turned off the car, and the clearing plunged into darkness.

  “Should’ve gotten an earlier start,” Daniel said.

  “Yes,” Gennady agreed, gripping the edges of the seat.

  Daniel led the way up the porch steps with a flashlight. Once they were inside he lit a lantern, which revealed a sink with a long-handled pump, a little Primus stove, a heavy wooden table where Daniel set the picnic basket. Shadows gathered in the corners of the little room, swung across the wall as Gennady worked the pump handle. Cold water spurted out, and he splashed his face. “Is this water safe to drink?”

  “Yes. Here, have a cup.” Daniel fetched an old jam jar and then leaned over to open the dark square of a kitchen window, letting in a breeze that ruffled the lantern light. Gennady filled the jar and drank the water off in slow nervous gulps as Daniel went to open the other windows.

  When Gennady had toyed in his mind with the possibility of this affair, he had thought of the good things. The sweetness of Daniel’s mouth. The pleasure of waking up in his arms – for Gennady had woken again and again the night that they spent together, afraid of missing his train, and each time he had snuggled in against Daniel’s chest and listened to his heartbeat, happy in the knowledge that he did not have to get up just yet.

  But now that things had come down out of the realm of golden possibility and into real life, the memory that gripped him was his panic when Daniel had tried to unbutton his shirt; the ghost of Arkady’s dirty fingers on his buttons.

  And of course it had been fine, fine, Daniel had been patient and kind; but that was fifteen years ago and he had been in love with Gennady then.

  Daniel returned. Gennady gulped the last of his water so hastily that a little spilled over his chin. He wiped it away, embarrassed.

  Daniel hoisted the lantern. “Come on,” he said. “Let me show you the place.”

  There was only one other room downstairs, a living room with a comfortably shabby couch and a wood stove, dark and cool right now. “Do you cook on that?” Gennady asked. His voice sounded compressed and breathless.

  “In the spring or fall. In the summer we use a camping stove in the kitchen, because it heats up the house less.”

  Between the two rooms a narrow dark staircase rose to the attic, stuffy in the summer heat. Daniel flashed the lantern over the two slant-roofed attic rooms in turn. The first held twin camping cots; the other, a double bed covered in a quilt with a spiral pattern, the colors rich in the lantern light. Gennady saw Elizabeth’s hand in its selection, and his nerves pulsed as if touched by an electrical wire. “It’s so hot up here.”

  “Let’s go downstairs,” Daniel agreed. He plunged back down the stairs and disappeared briefly into the kitchen, the lantern light receding. Gennady’s heart thumped as he followed down the steep dark steps.

  Daniel reappeared just as Gennady reached the bottom of the stairs. They bumped into each other, and Gennady leaped like a startled cat.

  Daniel stepped back. “Am I going too fast?” he asked. “We don’t have to do anything tonight, you know.”

  “You drove me out to your dacha! Of course we have to do something!”

  His voice sounded too loud, panicky. Gennady felt naked s
uddenly, pinned and inspected like an insect and found wanting. Daniel would go home to Elizabeth and they would laugh about him. I drove him all the way to the dacha and he chickened out. Can you believe it?

  “I’m sorry,” Gennady gasped.

  “It’s all right.”

  “No, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. It’s just that it has been so long…”

  “Listen, Gennady, it’s all right. I know you haven’t had a lot of experience with men…”

  “No,” Gennady agreed. He felt he could not breathe, it seemed impossible that he should be able to talk without any air in his lungs, but he blurted, “Only you and Arkady.”

  “Arkady?” Daniel echoed, as if he didn’t recognize the name. But saying the name aloud seemed to connect some circuit in his mind, and his eyes widened. “Arkady?”

  “I need a cigarette,” Gennady said, and fled to the front porch.

  It was very dark outside, only a sliver of moon, a hundred million stars. His lighter flared garishly bright as he fumbled to light his cigarette. He could see the future rolling out before him like a rug. The long sleepless night – or no, Daniel would not want to wait till morning; they would leave tonight, they would risk the winding road in the darkness. The long endless drive back, the awkward silence in the car. That false American cheerfulness at the end. “See you again soon!” Daniel would say, when really they would never see each other again, and this night would spoil even the memory of their friendship that Gennady had treasured in a small lacquer box in the back of his mind.

  Just as Gennady managed to light his cigarette, the door creaked open. Light spilled on the porch. “Do you mind if I come out here?” Daniel asked.

  “It’s your own dacha.”

  “Yes, but…”

  “Oh, sit,” Gennady said, and gestured at the porch steps with his cigarette. “Unless you’ve come to drive me back.”

  “No,” said Daniel, and then choked, visibly gagging, as if on a bad oyster. “Yes, of course I’ll drive you back if that’s what you want. I’m sorry. I’ve been inexcusably pushy all evening; of course you want to get out of here. Let me get the house closed up…”