Honeytrap

by Aster Glenn Gray

  Well, Gennady had told Arkady about Paul in 1960; and it was also possible that some other Soviet agents had learned of Paul’s proclivities on their own. (Those sordid places Paul mentioned in his suicide note, after all.) Either way, Paul would have died even if Gennady stayed in Moscow in 1975.

  And it was so like Daniel to take the trouble to write to Gennady now that the political atmosphere made it possible.

  At the dacha that summer, Gennady told Dasha and Oksana and Aunt Lilya about Daniel. Not the whole story, of course. An expurgated version, his picaresque adventures with his American friend, which he had not told them before because it was officially secret. “Isn’t it still a secret?” Aunt Lilya said, querulous with the echo of Stalinist era paranoia.

  “Which of you is going to tell the KGB?” Gennady asked.

  “Anyone could tell the KGB once that girl’s done writing a song about it!” Aunt Lilya said, gesturing at Dasha, who strummed with seeming aimlessness on her guitar and grinned. And Gennady lay back in the grass and smiled at the sky, and Daniel became a fond memory, something fine and beautiful and far distant that had happened long ago.

  But then the Soviet Union fell, and the gangsters took over the black market, and they’d shoot you as soon as look at you. There was no reason to stay in Russia anymore, and, as Oksana reminded him, “You always wanted to travel, Gosha.” And he remembered that he had never seen New York, or the Great Lakes, or the deserts that Ilf and Petrov had considered so fine; and so he wrote to Daniel that he was coming to America.

  He had no misgivings about it till he actually got off the plane at Washington Dulles, and contemplated the fact that he would soon see Daniel face to face, which was a very different thing from making peace with a Daniel who existed as a memory and a few words on the page. And the thought struck him, for the first time, that if he wanted, if there was still anything between himself and Daniel, which there couldn’t be after all this time and pain, but if there was –

  He wouldn’t have to defect in order to stay. He might be able to be with Daniel without throwing everything else in his life away.

  Perhaps he had hoped visiting Paul’s grave would bring clarity. As if Paul would rise from the grave and give him a sign.

  Any sign from Paul would undoubtedly say, Fuck you. And that was only fair.

  On the third day of his trip, just a little north of the Florida state line, Gennady took an exit. He stopped in the shade to pull out his map and plotted a course on the old highway system instead of the interstate. This would take him through all the little towns, like the roads he and Daniel had traveled all those years ago.

  But the little towns seemed to have died in the years since 1959. The downtowns were empty, the drugstores and diners and department stores closed, their windows covered over in fading newspaper. Only the government buildings clung on, courthouses and Carnegie libraries, lone tired outposts on the empty streets.

  He wished he could take some pleasure in it: see how capitalism has hollowed out America! But capitalism was coming for Russia now, too. Not that socialism had done so well for it (what kind of country created a booming market for black market cassette tapes, after all?), but there had to be another way. Dasha made Germany sound idyllic – Germany of all places. Couldn’t Russia have copied that instead of the Wild West, complete with gunslingers?

  Gennady took a detour for the sea.

  He found a quiet beach, almost empty on this rainy Tuesday in late February. The waves lapped at the sand and the seagulls called, and the water stretched away toward a vast distant horizon. Gennady walked along the edge of the waves so the warm water sometimes washed over his feet.

  He had come to America because he remembered being happy here. He thought it would make him happy again, that he could recreate one of the happiest times in his life, rolling down the endless American roads, as if the road had been the most important thing and not Daniel in the seat by his side.

  He looked out at the sea, and watched the waves roll up the beach, and let out a breath and drew it all in.

  Then he went back to his car, and headed north.

  ***

  It was late when Gennady arrived at Daniel’s apartment, 7:30, but Daniel still wasn’t home. He didn’t arrive for another half hour, when he tromped down the hall with his head hanging low, a bag of takeout in his hand. He didn’t notice Gennady until Gennady stood up.

  Daniel dropped the takeout. “Gennady! Did the car break down?”

  “No, no. The car is fine. I came back because…” He didn’t want to have this conversation in the hall. “Let’s go inside first.”

  “Yes, of course,” Daniel said.

  He unloaded cartons of Chinese food on the kitchen island, but he kept glancing at Gennady. The hopeful smile on his face should have made things easier, but nonetheless Gennady was not sure where to start, and he began to talk almost at random.

  “Your interstates are very boring,” Gennady said. “I left them to take the highways, but those are boring now too, Daniel, all the downtowns are dying, it’s like the streets themselves have caught the Dutch Elm disease that once infected the trees. Of course all the downtowns were always very much alike, every American town very much like all the others, it was not perhaps any inherent interest about them that made our trip together such a pleasure, but the fact that I took it with you.”

  He caught his breath, and stopped talking, and felt a sting nearly like tears in his eyes. “I came back because I hoped…” Gennady had to catch his breath. “Will you come with me?”

  He raised his eyes to Daniel only as he spoke the last sentence, and found Daniel staring at him. Then Daniel crossed the space between them, and crushed Gennady in a bear hug, and kissed both his cheeks like a Russian. “Yes, yes,” Daniel said, and Gennady put both hands on Daniel’s face and went up on his toes to kiss him on the lips.

  They kissed a long time, until Gennady said, “Your food will get cold.”

  “To hell with it,” Daniel said. “That’s what microwaves are for.”

  But he let go of Gennady, and tore two paper towels off the roll to use as napkins, and filled two glasses with water. “I may not be able to leave right away,” Daniel said. “I’ve got a lot of vacation time saved up, but I’ve got to get it approved before I can go anywhere. You don’t mind waiting a little while, do you?”

  “It’s been thirty-two years. What are a few more weeks?”

  Daniel swooped in and kissed him again. “Do you like fried rice?”

  “Yes, probably. Nothing fried can be too bad.”

  Daniel popped the lids off two of the plastic containers and used them as plates, naming the dishes as he loaded them on: vegetable fried rice, orange chicken, General Tsao’s chicken, moo shu pork.

  “You bought all this food for yourself?”

  “I like to have leftovers. It’s easier than going out every day.”

  Once Daniel set the last carton aside he didn’t sit down to eat, but caught Gennady by the shoulders and kissed him again. “After the trip,” Daniel said. “Will you stay?”

  Gennady moistened his lips. “There will be so many issues with immigration, with my visa, it will be so complicated…”

  “Gennady, Gennady, Gennady.” Daniel kissed him until Gennady shut up. “Gennady, I know it won’t be simple, I know it might be hard as hell. But what was it you always said: you should grab happiness when it’s on offer? And for the first time you can actually stay, the Soviet Union can’t suck you back in like a black hole.”

  “The Soviet Union wasn’t a black hole,” Gennady protested. “All my family lived there, all my friends, everyone who meant anything in the world to me, except you. I wish that you could meet them, Daniel, I wish that you could see…”

  And then a new vista seemed to open up before him. The Soviet Union had fallen. The borders had been opened. “You could come visit,” Gennady said. “You could come to see Russia with me.”

  Daniel’s lips parted. Gennad
y lifted a finger to Daniel’s mouth before he could speak. “We will have to wait till the situation stabilizes,” he warned Daniel. “It may be some time. And certainly it would take some time for them to give you a visa to visit, a former FBI agent, it may move very very slowly.”

  Daniel kissed Gennady’s finger. “Do you remember that day on the Boston Common, when the cherry trees were in bloom?” he said. “And we talked about visiting Moscow and Leningrad…”

  “They are calling it St. Petersburg now.”

  “The Polyakovs must be so pleased.” Daniel kissed Gennady again.

  “You could meet my Aunt Lilya,” Gennady said. “She flew fighter planes during World War II. And my cousin Oksana, who has been like a sister to me, and her daughter Dasha, if we can convince her to visit from Berlin…”

  Daniel was looking at him, his face tender. “Would you like me to meet them?” he asked.

  “Why else would I invite you, my friend?”

  Daniel smiled. “Then of course I’d like to go.”