Honeytrap

by Aster Glenn Gray

  Chapter 7

  It was nearly the end of January before Gennady actually came to Daniel’s house. Daniel was lying on a couch in the conversation pit, trying to read but really checking his watch every other minute or so.

  Not that Gennady was late. Daniel was just impatient.

  In fact Gennady arrived about five minutes early. He looked like an Abominable Snowman, his scarf and his hat both encrusted with snow, and Daniel laughed at him. “I could have picked you up at the station.”

  Gennady shook his head. He was stomping the snow off his boots and unwrapping his scarf at the same time, and when cold air touched his face, he began to cough thickly.

  Daniel shut the door hastily to keep out the cold air. “Are you sick, Gennady?”

  Gennady waved a deprecating hand. “A cold, it’s nothing.”

  “And you walked all the way from the station! You shouldn’t have come.”

  “I might infect the children,” Gennady agreed, and made as if to wrap his scarf up again. “I’ll go.”

  “No, no! I didn’t mean it that way. It’s just the walk from the station in this cold… I really could have picked you up, you know, you could have called me from the pay phone.”

  Gennady sat heavily to take off his boots. “I don’t know your number.”

  “It’s in the phone book. There ought to be one in the phone booth.”

  “The phone book?”

  “Don’t you have phone books in Moscow?”

  “They are always out of date.” Gennady hung his coat over the coat rack.

  “Well, let me write my number down for you.” Daniel checked his pockets for a pen, and then Gennady started to cough again, deep frightening chest coughs. “Oh, Christ. No, let’s get you warm first. C’mon, I’ve got the fire going in the conversation pit.”

  “It’s ridiculous that you have a pit in your house.”

  “It absolutely is. Emily knocked out two of her baby teeth falling over the side when she was three. Bounced off the couch and knocked into the coffee table… Here, take this afghan. There. Elizabeth’s mother crochets them. How long have you been like this?”

  The purple afghan rose as Gennady shrugged. “Since yesterday.”

  “You should have let me know.”

  “And what? You will show up at my office with soup?” Gennady scoffed.

  This was impossible on so many levels that Daniel could only smile weakly in reply. He checked Gennady’s forehead for a fever, but his skin still felt chilly from his long walk in the cold. “Stay here for a few days,” Daniel urged.

  “Impossible.” Another series of deep chest coughs.

  Daniel stroked Gennady’s hair. “It’s not impossible. We’ll put you up in the guest room.”

  But Gennady shook Daniel’s hand away. “And what will I say when I call into work? ‘I’m ill, but don’t come check on me, I am staying at my American friend’s house?’”

  “Well…” Daniel’s voice dwindled. A terrible feeling of helplessness clawed at his throat.

  Gennady patted his hand. “It’s okay, Daniil.”

  “I’m going to have to send you back into the cold to die of pneumonia, and that’s okay?”

  “I don’t have pneumonia. And, after all, there are a few hours before I have to go anywhere. Stop worrying and get me a cup of tea.”

  “We’ve only got chamomile.”

  “Chamo…” The unfamiliar word defeated him. “Yes, fine. As long as it’s hot.”

  Daniel kissed his cold cheek and went to brew the tea.

  When Daniel returned with a steaming mug, he found that Gennady had drawn another afghan around him, this one vibrant green. Daniel sat down beside him as he sipped, and touched his fingers to Gennady’s neck to see if he could get a better read on his temperature now. He felt warm, but not fever-hot.

  “At least stay the night,” Daniel coaxed.

  “I don’t want to infect you, my friend. And what would be the point? You can’t stay with me anyway.”

  “Elizabeth won’t mind,” Daniel insisted.

  Gennady was incredulous. “You’re going to stay with me in your guest room? With your children here?”

  This was a compelling point. Certainly Daniel would have balked if Elizabeth had wanted Ronald Benson to spend a night under their roof.

  “I could sit up with you,” Daniel suggested at length. “We could put sheets on this sofa here and I could sit up in one of the chairs…”

  “Oh, Daniel.” Gennady started to laugh, and the laughter turned into more coughing. “I’m not dying. You always think I’m dying,” he complained, “and I have never once been dying in all the time you’ve known me.”

  “It’s true,” Daniel admitted. “It’s just you, too. I don’t worry nearly as much about anyone else that I know dying. But then,” he mused, “you’re the only one who got stabbed on my watch. And the only one who lives in a totalitarian dictatorship.”

  Gennady sighed. “I do not.”

  “Gennady.”

  “Stalin is dead. We haven’t had totalitarianism since Stalin died.” He began to cough again, wretchedly, and when the coughing fit was over Daniel held out his arms to him, and Gennady burrowed in against Daniel’s sweater. “Your family won’t walk in?”

  “Elizabeth’s gone out with her camera in search of inspiration. She loves snow scenes. And the kids are sledding over at Slater Hill. Emily’s in seventh heaven because she got to go along with the big kids.”

  He could feel Gennady smiling against his chest. “And the big kids? They are glad to have a tagalong?”

  “I wouldn’t say glad, but David’s tolerating it, at least. He’s much more patient with Emily than I was with Anna at that age.”

  “Mmm. Yes, my cousin Oksana and I used to fight like – what is the American expression?”

  “Cats and dogs?”

  “Yes.” Gennady yawned. “During the war Oksana lived with us and she was a little hellion. I suppose she missed her mother.” A cough, softer this time. “Sometimes Oksana’s little daughter Dasha stays with Alla and me. She sings all day until we all want earplugs, but we love her very much.”

  Daniel smiled down at him, and then kissed the top of his head. Gennady mumbled something that might have been Russian but might equally have been the unintelligible gibberish of sleepy protest.

  “Daniil,” Gennady mumbled.

  “Hmm?”

  Gennady resettled himself against Daniel’s chest. Daniel stroked his hair, and smiled as Gennady’s breath evened out, and Gennady fell asleep in his arms. For once in his life he might get to hold Gennady as long as he wanted.

  In between the warmth of the fire and Gennady and the afghans, Daniel fell into a doze too, and woke only at the sound of the back door opening.

  It was Elizabeth; Daniel recognized her footsteps. He was still blinking sleep out of his eyes when she came into the living room, extremely pretty with her hair still flecked with snow and her cheeks flushed from her walk.

  She paused when she saw Gennady burrowed against Daniel’s chest. She smiled, raising an inquiring eyebrow at Daniel, and Daniel nodded and touched his finger to his lips, shhhh. Elizabeth slipped back into the kitchen.

  Daniel gave Gennady a little shake. Gennady woke and looked around with confused eyes. “Gennady,” Daniel said. Gennady’s eyes fastened on Daniel, and Daniel smiled. “Elizabeth’s here.”

  Gennady blanched and propelled himself out of Daniel’s arms. “I should go.”

  “Gennady. It’s so cold. You should stay here and rest.”

  “It’s disrespectful,” Gennady insisted hoarsely. He tried to rise, but fell to the couch when Daniel tugged the afghan.

  “Gennady, please. Elizabeth’s been looking forward to your visit, so just stick around for a little while, okay? If you still want to leave later, I’ll drive you to your apartment.”

  “To the station. You mustn’t be seen at my apartment.”

  “Christ! Fine. I’ll drive you to
the station and you can infect all the other passengers. Happy? Just give it a few minutes, okay? Elizabeth was planning to make hot chocolate, and she’s going to be so disappointed if you’re not here to have some.”

  Gennady looked incredulous, but he didn’t have time to protest, because at that moment Elizabeth appeared from the kitchen, balancing a tray on one hand as she came down the two steps into the conversation pit.

  “These servings are small, but they’ve very rich,” Elizabeth said, smiling at Gennady as she slid the tray onto the coffee table. “I make my hot chocolate just the way my mother did. Chopped chocolate melted directly into the milk… How much whipped cream would you like?”

  Gennady looked at her, mute and miserable. Daniel told Elizabeth, “Emily’s going to be devastated if she finds out we had hot chocolate without her.”

  “Oh, I’ll make some when they get back from sledding. The whipped cream would go to waste otherwise, anyway, the recipe makes so much…” Elizabeth dolloped whipped cream on Daniel’s hot chocolate, and also her own. “Gennady?” she said kindly.

  “Yes, whipped cream, please,” Gennady managed.

  His embarrassment filled the room like a fog. Daniel wanted to put an arm around him, but he suspected that would drive Gennady right out of the house, so instead he cleared his throat and said, “The kids are in for a rude awakening when they figure out the rest of America makes hot chocolate using a powdered mix.”

  “Oh, I’m pretty sure they’ve already been awakened. Mrs. Hancock brought along a Thermos last time the kids went sledding, and David told her that was not hot chocolate…” Elizabeth said it in such a perfect imitation of David’s very definite voice that Daniel had to laugh. “Mrs. Hancock was taken aback. I was a little surprised that she offered to take the children sledding again, honestly.”

  Her eyes were on Gennady, who hunched under the afghans, looking as if he wanted to shrink away into nothing. Elizabeth glanced over at Daniel, and Daniel spread his hands in a small gesture of bafflement.

  Elizabeth set aside her hot chocolate and came to sit on the hearth beside Gennady. “Is there anything I can do to make you more comfortable?” she asked. “I think maybe you’re feeling guilty, and you have nothing to feel guilty about, you know. I know about you and Daniel, and I don’t mind a bit.”

  Gennady stared at her as if she were speaking Martian. “I know that artists have bohemian views about these things,” he said, “and the French too. But still I think it is not expected in France that the wife should pour hot chocolate for the mistress and make polite small talk…”

  “Did you think I was only putting up with you because I could pretend you didn’t exist?” Elizabeth asked. Gennady opened his mouth, and then closed it again, and coughed softly. “We all had a wonderful time at dinner last summer, didn’t we?” Elizabeth added.

  “Daniel and I weren’t fucking yet.”

  Daniel winced at this bluntness. Gennady himself blushed, and even Elizabeth looked a little taken aback.

  Then she put a hand on Gennady’s arm. “Listen,” she said. “I appreciate that you’re concerned about my feelings. But please believe me when I say that I’m not jealous. I think,” she said, and paused, “I think that people just have different natural levels of jealousy, and mine happen to be pretty low. Of course,” she said, and suddenly her brow creased, “I understand that a lot of people aren’t like this. Maybe you’ve only been able to put up with me because you could pretend I don’t exist?”

  “No!” Gennady protested, his voice so vehement that it set off a series of coughs. He soothed his throat with a sip of hot chocolate, and said, “No, of course not. Daniel, you have brought her the things, the mushrooms and berries and…”

  “Yes, of course,” Daniel said.

  “Those mushrooms were the talk of our last cocktail party,” Elizabeth added.

  Gennady nodded fervently. “Yes, they’re very fine, a gold mine. It was a gift – all these things were gifts for you. I can see that you and Daniel are so happy together, and a happy marriage is a beautiful thing, and I have worried so much about damaging that.”

  Elizabeth looked chagrined. “Maybe we should have talked about things last summer instead of proceeding on an unspoken understanding.”

  “No; how would that help? The picnic basket spoke well enough. It’s just that this was six months ago, your feelings might have changed in this time.”

  “That’s why I kept asking you to come to our house again,” Daniel told him. “So you could see that everything really was all right.”

  “I thought perhaps… American courtesy,” Gennady said, with a vague sketchy wave of his hand. “You make invitations you don’t mean.”

  “Well, it’s true, Americans do,” Elizabeth admitted. “But this is a real invitation. We had such a pleasant evening last time that you came to dinner.”

  Gennady managed a smile. “Of course it’s my pleasure to come to your dinners,” he told Elizabeth. “You are a wonderful cook.”

  “Oh, well, that’s my French mother. It certainly didn’t come from the American side.”

  “Hey!” Daniel protested. Both Gennady and Elizabeth laughed, and then looked at each other and laughed some more..

  “Really, it’s been very selfish of Daniel to keep you all to himself,” Elizabeth said.

  “Hey!” Daniel protested again, but it was entirely pro forma: really he was pleased.

  Gennady’s laughter turned into coughs. Elizabeth rose from the hearth and put a hand briefly on his shoulder. “Drink your hot chocolate,” Elizabeth told him. “It will coat your throat. Then you’d better try to rest. Daniel, you’ll look after him? I want to get some work done on that spider web painting before the kids get home.”

  “Yes, of course,” Daniel said.

  She left. For a while Daniel and Gennady remained at opposite ends of the couch, sipping their hot chocolate. At last Daniel finished his cup, and set it back on the tray, and scooted down the couch to put an arm around Gennady. “Did you think I was lying to you when I said it was all right?”

  “No, I knew you believed it. But of course that does not mean it is the truth.”

  Daniel leaned his cheek against Gennady’s hair. “But you believe me now?”

  “No,” Gennady said. He drew the green afghan around him. “I believe Elizabeth.”

  “Yes,” Daniel agreed, after a moment’s thought. “I suppose that’s wise.”

  Chapter 8

  They moved from the conversation pit in the living room to the den, a little room upstairs with a door that shut. Gennady shuddered at his own carelessness in falling asleep in Daniel’s arms in that living room with a whole wall of windows. “You can’t see into the conversation pit through the windows,” Daniel pointed out.

  “Yes, well, so.” Gennady rubbed his cheek against Daniel’s scratchy sweater and breathed in the warm woolen scent. He coughed again and said, “I’m sorry,” because that was less embarrassing than saying, thank you.

  “Don’t worry about it. You know it’s the dream of my life to hold you for hours.”

  Gennady’s laugh very quickly turned into another coughing fit.

  “I mean it, you know,” Daniel said. His chest rumbled under Gennady’s cheek. Gennady turned his face against Daniel’s chest, and Daniel kissed his hair.

  Daniel stayed for a couple of hours, until the children arrived back from their sledding party. Then he plumped up some pillows and tucked Gennady in firmly under yet another one of those crocheted blankets, and Gennady fell asleep again.

  He woke up to see a large pair of eyes peering at him, perhaps half a foot from his face.

  When Gennady sat up, the eyes moved respectfully away. They were attached, he saw, to a little blonde girl, dressed in corduroy pants and a sweater, who stood with her hands clasped behind her back. This must be Daniel’s daughter Emily.

  “Hello,” she said. “Are you one of Mommy’s friends?”

  “No.” Gennady’s
throat was clogged with phlegm. He cleared it. “One of your father’s friends.”

  “Oh.” She sounded surprised, then shrugged, and smiled winsomely up at him. “We can play checkers if you want.”

  He almost laughed. “Yes, all right,” he said, and she was off like a shot.

  Gennady had not been telling the truth exactly when he told Daniel that Alla didn’t want children. Alla loved children, and an evening at her brother’s apartment toting around her little niece always brought back to her some of the sparkle and joy that had left her in Zurich.

  After one such evening, as Gennady and Alla walked home late in the frosty night, Alla began to cry. She cried so hard that they had to stop walking and sat on a bench in the cold, while Gennady held both her hands.

  When it seemed that she might be able to talk, Gennady squeezed her hands and said, “What is it, Alla?”

  “I want to have children,” she gasped out.

  “Well, after all, why not?” Gennady said, relieved almost, because he was fond of children, and this at least was a wish that could come true.

  But Alla shook her head and kept on crying, until finally she managed to gasp out, “I don’t want to have children here.”

  Here. In Moscow, in Soviet Russia.

  Perhaps she had cherished dreams that they might defect and have their children elsewhere, and those dreams had died when she had realized that she could not cope with the difficulties of being a stranger in a strange land.

  He put an arm around her shoulders and they sat together until she calmed down, or perhaps simply grew too cold to cry; and then they walked home in the icy Moscow night.

  But if that conversation had ended differently, Gennady might have had a little daughter about Emily’s age. Dark-haired instead of blonde, probably (Alla was dark; her mother was Armenian), but like Emily, she might have set up a checkerboard with her tongue poking out of her mouth in concentration, and played her checkers with exactly that intensity of interest. Perhaps her eyes too would have filled with tears when she lost the game; perhaps she also would have rubbed her nose and given a big sniff and managed to say, “Do you know how to play fox and geese?”