Something Unbelievable

by Maria Kuznetsova

  * * *

  —

  But now, sitting at the bar of the Lair as my cranky husband returns to me, I feel like I’m the one who should say I told you so to Mama, that I knew what I wanted all along, and it was not this, not at all.

  Does Yuri even fucking remember who I was when he met me? I was hot, I wore heels, I was a regular on CBS prime time and drank like a fish. Who was the person he fell in love with, if not her? I can’t get started with all that, so I open my phone and scroll through Instagram, looking at all the likes and comments on my post about my audition—and it’s kind of nice, having dozens of people I don’t care about cheering me on while my husband basically told me I was washed up.

  I check my more recent post—baby Tally smiling up at me from her crib, where I wrote We smile now! #HeartfullAF #tanksoempty #ActressMama #nailedit #shesnotacting, which I can’t help but notice got three times as many likes as my post about my audition. People don’t really give a shit about the almost two decades of blood and bullshit I’ve given to make it as far as I have, but as soon as I got knocked up and pushed a kid out, everyone acted like I solved global warming.

  Still, I think as I look at my audition post again, I would have been better off staying at home tonight, preparing for yet another audition in a few days, another bullshit part as an Uber-driver-slash-spy with five lines on a less-prestigious-but-still-not-bad TV show, instead of sitting here hating my clueless husband. I keep glaring back at the kitchen, though I know the score there. Frankie’s the only cook, and though he’s damn good, he’s always high and takes his time. My stomach feels like an enormous empty balloon that’s gonna pop if I don’t eat something ASAP.

  “There you go, talking to your real friends,” Yuri says, shaking his head at my phone. He is of course above it all and does not use social media, not even Facebook.

  “Maybe I am,” I say, kicking him under the bar.

  Finally, Mel comes over with the cheese balls, wings, and nachos, but I have lost my appetite. Yuri and I have drained our glasses but we’re too defeated to ask for more.

  “Smile,” I tell Yuri, taking a picture of him looking miserable over the food. It’s a terrible photo, but I post it anyway: #Datenight!

  “Please don’t post that.”

  “Too late.”

  He reaches over for a cheese ball, and those things are way too hot, you have to wait at least five minutes before touching one, but I don’t warn him.

  “Jesus,” he says, spitting the thing out. “I think I just burned my tongue off.”

  “My grandmother nearly starved to death, but she never really complained. She even had to eat a cat, once. Did I tell you she had to eat a cat?”

  “Now you’re just being mean.”

  “So what if I am?”

  We wait for the too-hot food to cool in near silence, mostly out of principle, because this is our fucking big night out and I’m not going to go home and sulk and eat Trader Joe’s chana masala, not tonight. When we try to settle, Mel just gives me a wink and says, “On the house.”

  “See?” I say to Yuri. “Nice place.”

  * * *

  —

  “How was the audition?” says Stas.

  “It was shit,” I say, tossing my bags by the door of my shit apartment. Shit, shit, shit. Everything is shit, and has especially been shit for the past three days since my botched date night. Except my baby girl, who evidence says is sleeping in her crib in the next room—yet again not needing to fall asleep in my arms to drift off. Though I’m relieved I don’t have to immediately go into mom mode when I walk in, it would also be nice to see her little gremlin face for a moment, to be reminded that there is still some good in the world, even if that good is slowly making me go insane. Alas, she’s not up to remind me that I shouldn’t care that I definitely did not book the Uber-driver-slash-spy role, which would have given me twenty seconds on prime time, ten of which I would have spent saying, “Please, I am innocent! Give me another chance!” and the rest sliding down a flight of stairs with two bullet holes in my head.

  I say, “They basically flat-out said I was, like, too American for the part. Which is bullshit because my Russian accent was perfect.”

  “They really said that?”

  “Basically.” He raises a brow and I continue. “They just kind of gave me this look. I know what it meant.”

  “You sound a bit paranoid if you ask me.”

  “I didn’t ask you.”

  “No, you just asked me to watch your baby,” he says, but he’s not done. “If it’s so stupid, then why do you keep doing it?”

  “What do you mean, why? This is my life. I need to get back into the game. What else am I supposed to do, stay home?”

  “Aren’t there some other options?”

  “Such as?”

  He looks at me blankly like this is obvious. “You said it yourself—you might as well put on your grandmother’s story as a play….”

  “I was joking before. I’m not going to make a damn play of Baba’s story. How the fuck could I even pull it off?”

  “Why make it so complicated? Can’t you just do it all yourself?”

  I laugh at how stupid he is. “Sure I can. I’ll just do a one-woman show and will get the stage ready and write the fucking thing and promote it all by myself. That’s a great idea. I have all the time in the world to do something like that. Why don’t I ask you for advice more often?”

  He laughs. “Maybe you should. I think it would make you happy.”

  “I don’t want to be happy, you moron. I want to be successful. Putting on this play isn’t going to get me noticed again.”

  “Ah,” he says, looking so smug I want to smack him. I move closer to do just that, but I second-guess myself. Maybe I’m better off not touching him at all.

  “It must be nice, to be so above it all. And how many poems have you published, Mayakovsky?”

  “Hey, hey,” he says, lifting up his hands. “I’m on your side, remember? I think it’s amazing that you put yourself out there, Sterling, really, I give you props. I don’t think I could ever do it.”

  “Then why write?”

  “Have you heard of this whole ‘art for art’s sake’ thing?”

  “But who came up with that anyway? Some famous person?”

  He laughs. “Probably.”

  “I can barely function as it is. And what, I spend the summer trying to make this thing work—I find a stage, I promote the event, I write the fucking thing—and then, if I even do convince her to come, she’ll see the wreck I’ve made of her life during her last trip to America? Then I can say I’ve actually done something meaningful as an actress, even if nobody gives a fuck?” I realize I’m tearing up. I need to sit down. I need to breathe for about a year. And yet, I feel excited for the first fucking time. Whenever I close my eyes these days, instead of thinking about my next audition, I see my grandmother as a teenager before my eyes. Those cold, far-off mountains. Her sweet, tired, father. Her sister and her beloved cat. Her shifting affections for my grandfather and his brother. “It would be completely ridiculous,” I say, but I see the slow smile spreading on his face and I know that he knows me for some reason, and now that he’s got me sinking my teeth into this idea, he won’t let it go.

  He smiles and goes back to his book. “Sounds pretty doable to me.”

  “Fuck off.”

  We have a standoff. I don’t know why he’s so up my ass about this, or why he cares. But he’s standing pretty fucking close to me so I move away and get kind of nervous, so of course I ramble on and on.

  “The last time I wrote a play was like, ten years ago, when I wrote Diddler on the Roof, a play about a Hassidic child molester. Some of the Babies thought it was in poor taste, but it was hilarious! It nearly broke the group up, but the committed people put on quite a show. T
hen some Jews got all offended and spoke to the Times about how today’s youth was ruined, calling me out by name! I was just so excited—never in a million years did I think I would be in the Times. And guess what? I got a better agent after that.”

  “You’re a credit to your race.”

  “I thought so anyway,” I say, tapping my foot.

  I think I hear my daughter, but it’s just the stairs. Then I hear the key grumbling in the lock. Yuri walks in, in a wrinkled shirt, looking tired but happy. I give him a hug and rub a bit of marker off his cheek.

  “How was the audition?” he says.

  “It was shit,” I say again.

  “I’m sure it wasn’t.”

  “But it doesn’t matter because she’s going to put on a play about her grandmother’s life,” Stas says, and I kick his foot. I didn’t expect him to blurt it out like this, not when I don’t even know what I really think about the whole thing. Yuri gives me this kind of blank look and I think, why not test him out?

  “A one-woman show at that,” I say. “What do you think?”

  He laughs and kisses me on the forehead and only after he drops his bag does he realize I’m not kidding. Or, rather, the alarmed look on his face, as if I had said something truly crazy like that I was thinking of going to medical school or that I was pregnant again, or thinking of scaling our building makes me see that maybe I am not kidding after all. And Stas, twenty-eight-year-old, ponytailed Stas, is more on my side than my husband is. He’s the one who gets me right now.

  “And when would you get that done, exactly?” Yuri asks.

  “When do I get anything done? When the baby is napping,” I say, all defensive all of a sudden when moments ago I didn’t even take Stas’s idea seriously.

  “Are you serious?”

  “Serious as a heart attack,” Stas says.

  “Shut up,” I tell him.

  He lifts his hands like, Don’t shoot, as if he’s so innocent.

  Yuri looks from me to him and back to me again. “Interesting,” he says.

  “Listen, I’m going to go,” says Stas. “Sorry, man,” he says, looking at Yuri, not me, like I’m the one who’s fucked everything up instead of him. He tells us he’s off to see about a server job in Harlem, the first I’ve heard of it. As he puts on his shoes and then the coat he doesn’t need, I think, No, no, don’t go. But what good could come of him staying? What’s he going to do, take me in his arms and declare that I should be able to put on this play if I fucking want to? Tell me I’m beautiful and talented and make sure Yuri knows it? He leaves and it’s quiet, quiet. I pick up poor neglected Sharik and stroke his hair, and then I look up at Yuri.

  “Are you really serious about this?” he says.

  “Let’s say I am,” I tell him. “I haven’t really done anything for myself since Tally was born. Or even since I got pregnant, really,” I say.

  “Look, I know you think I have all this time to do my own thing, but when I’m not here, I’m in teaching hell, trying to get students who don’t care about science at all not to drop out of my class or leave me RateMyProfessor reviews saying that I’m ‘boring and dense,’ and sucking up to my bosses so I can get tenure and a decent chance at a normal salary. I’m not just trying to screw you over here.”

  “I didn’t say that. I know it’s not all fun and games when you leave the house. But I would actually like leaving for a few hours every day to do some work. And auditions don’t count,” I say.

  “That’s because you actually like your work.”

  “Some of it.”

  “I wish I got to do some of the things I liked more.”

  “Like what?”

  He’s quiet for a minute. “Like,” he says, “I haven’t gone fishing in a million years.”

  “Fishing?” I say. “Fishing? You haven’t fished since my dad died.”

  “I haven’t really wanted to.”

  “You do realize it’s not the same thing?” I say.

  “Yes, I know fishing is not my passion. I don’t know where I’m going with this, I’m so fucking tired, Natasha.”

  “Me too.”

  “You know I love you,” he says. “I’m not the bad guy.”

  “You’ve said that a number of times.”

  “Which makes it true, obviously.”

  “Is that how that works?”

  “Mm-hm.”

  He gives me a long, tender kiss, but after a moment we both stop to crack up because we can hear Sharik behind us, sucking his little cat-dick, which doesn’t sound all that different from Tally sucking her pacifier.

  “Sharik! Foo!” I say, swatting him and pulling him out of his seated position until he meows and walks into the kitchen, defeated. “Bad boy,” I say, though I know it’s pointless.

  Yuri laughs again. “I think he’s on to something.”

  “Is that so?” I say, and this time, when I kiss him, it becomes very apparent very quickly that we were going to fuck for the second or third time since my baby girl came into the world, that soon, there would be something much more welcome between my legs.

  “Come here, you,” Yuri says, reaching for my dirty shirt.

  “Always.”

  “This,” he says, “is our real date night.”

  He takes off my shirt and unsnaps my stupid nursing bra, and I’m anxious about having my new mom tits out like that, but he doesn’t seem to mind. I unbutton his workshirt and pretty soon his pants are off, too, and we’re down to our underwear and I feel almost, almost shy. I take off my bra and try to ignore how heavy my tits are, and run a hand across his chest while he strokes my hair.

  It feels exciting, unfamiliar, to fuck again, since we didn’t exactly fuck all the time when I was pregnant, except during these crazy bursts of horniness I would get. But now, feeling him inside me, reliable and warm and not so different from before, I remember the early days when we couldn’t stop fucking, and am also relieved to confirm that apparently I’m not a complete cave down there. When we’re done, I rest on him for a while and even briefly drift off and I wake up to him stroking my hair. I check my phone to see my #Datenight post from a few days ago had racked up a shit ton of likes, too, more than the one about my second audition, but I can’t say I’m surprised.

  “I miss you,” Yuri says, and I kiss him.

  “I miss you too,” I say. “I’m sorry I’ve been so out of it.”

  “What are you sorry for? I’m sorry for you. You should do whatever you want to do, Natashka,” he says.

  “I’m just—I’m not ready to give up yet. My mom wanted to sing when she was young, but then she just became an accountant. I don’t want to die wishing I had really given it everything I had.”

  He stops stroking my hair and turns to me. “Why didn’t you tell me that before?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. I don’t even know why I’m telling him now. I hate talking about my mom. “It was kind of a family secret, I guess.”

  “Well, we’re family,” he says, and then he gives me another kiss. He can tell I don’t have anything else to say on the subject and I love him for it.

  “I just don’t want to clean up hairballs for a living,” I say, and this cracks him up.

  “I didn’t say you had to, darling. I was just making a suggestion. Haplessly.”

  “Okay,” I say. “All right.”

  I even consider going for round two, which would be ambitious after a bunch of nothing, months of it, but then Talia stirs, and for once, I don’t mind going into the room to pick her up in my arms and guide her to my breast.

  It’s crazy, how much she looks like Yuri. Stephanie told me it goes back to the cavemen, that babies are born looking like their dads as proof of paternity, so they keep going out into the bush to kill meat for the family instead of abandoning ship. Well, there’s no doubt h
ere—the square jaw, the horizontal brows and big blue eyes and protruding ears, it was like she came straight from him, like I had nothing at all to do with the reproductive process. I, however, look like my mother, but not as pretty, though she seemed determined to hide her beauty. When Talia was born, I kept straining to find myself in her face, coming up empty.

  My daughter’s blue eyes are getting bigger every day, or maybe her big ears are just getting smaller, whatever it is, she’s starting to look just a bit more human, and I’m even pretty sure two tiny tufts of hair are getting ready to sprout on the back of her head. After I nurse her, she doesn’t settle right away, and I don’t mind that either. I take her into the living room, and onto the balcony, and though the streetlights shine down on her almost-bald little head, she does get back to where she needs to be, her sweet little eyes closing as she lets go completely, and for about one delicious minute of my life, I feel like I know exactly what I’m doing.

  * * *

  —

  I lower a sleeping Tally into her crib and climb into bed next to Yuri, but I can’t turn my mind off. I stay up all night sweating and shivering, those damn postpartum hormones raging through my body as I remember how good it felt to fuck my husband, but then it gets all mixed up with Stas, who returns to the apartment at some point, with spending all that time with him arguing about art and how he stood up for me doing my play while Yuri thought it was a waste of time. And then I think more about my grandmother’s damn story, of how she obviously had a thing for my uncle Bogdan over my grandfather, but she was with my grandpa because he was a good guy, because he liked books and didn’t rebel against his family. Was that what I did—sign up to spend the rest of my life with a guy who thought all I was good for was walking dogs just to avoid throwing wine bottles against the wall once in a while?