“Can you blame him?” he went on. “You think he had plans to leave Minsk in 1941? No, he ran from the Germans. Then he came back and was a Jew under the Soviets for forty-five years, which is to say a lower life-form. Then America. Here you’re not a Jew anymore. Here you’re an immigrant. Go back where you came from, Commie. You don’t think he’s due?” The rehearsal of Grandfather’s arguments came with wondrous facility to Slava. He rested his hand on his forehead contemplatively, to see how it felt.
“I want to tell you a story,” Arianna said carefully. “There was a Soviet family that was settled near us. We’d sponsored them, actually. I had been pen pals with the son before they were released — you know the story. And so Mother Bock says, ‘Harry, get them memberships in the synagogue.’ And my father, he’s not as quick as my mother, but then he will surprise you. And so he says: ‘I don’t think that’s for them, Sandy.’ Meaning, they’re not religious. And Sandra says, ‘How will they ever become religious unless people like us—’ and so on and so forth. Harry, as always, in the end, he does what Sandra says, and he gets them synagogue memberships. One hundred fifty a person, times three, and this was fifteen years ago. Also, the synagogue has limited seats, he had to talk to the registrar, get special permission. But we don’t see them — the Rubins, they were called. Instead, we see another family, also three — Americans. They get to chatting with my parents, it’s Friday-night services, everyone has a couple of shots. And they tell them this Russian family sold them the memberships. Sandra — you should have seen her face. After all the lifts, that face doesn’t really telegraph emotion, but at that moment she could have been in the opera. She kept her mouth shut only because she was mortified. Harry just chuckled to himself. She wanted to call the police! And he said, ‘Just let them be. Think about what they’ve been through. Give it thirty years, then they’ll ask for it.’”
“Exquisite magnanimity.”
“Slava, I’m on your side.”
“Why do you call your parents by their first names?”
“I don’t know, that’s how it’s always been. I don’t always.”
“Your father bent the rules himself — he got a special favor from the registrar.”
“Are you really going to compare?” she said. “It was for a good cause.”
“Who gets to decide what’s a good cause? You said it: a thirty-year dispensation. Let the savages lie a bit to the Germans.”
She placed her palm on his forearm. “You can’t.”
“You’re full of instructions.”
She turned away.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “This isn’t me. This is—”
“I know.”
She knew. There was nothing he could say that she didn’t already know. His irritation wouldn’t abate, but he forced himself to ignore it. “Are your grandparents still alive?” he said.
“Just my grandmother,” she indulged his effort. “Ninety-four young. Swims every morning, e-mails Zen declarations.”
“For instance.”
She brightened. “‘Hi my doll Ari.’ That’s what she calls me. ‘I am finally too old to give a crap what anyone thinks. I wish I’d gotten here fifty years sooner.’ And then the next day, ‘Ari, doll, do you think a ninety-four-year-old woman can’t shake her hips? Yes, she can.’ My grandfather’s gone, all her friends are gone, and all of a sudden she likes a sip of Maker’s and then to the jukebox. Do you know that poem: ‘On the way we passed a long row of elms. She looked at them awhile out of the ambulance window and said, What are all those fuzzy-looking things out there? Trees? Well, I’m tired of them and rolled her head away.’ My God, I am just rambling.”
“Did you cover the mirror when your grandfather died?”
She shrugged. “I was five. I had a dance recital that weekend, so I was doing pirouettes like a loon. I was so sad all the mirrors were covered. I’m named after his father. Ariel. You?”
“I don’t know,” Slava said. “Slava means ‘glory.’ Or ‘fame.’ Depending on what you mean. I covered a mirror. I didn’t feel anything.”
“It’s like weed — you don’t feel anything the first couple of times,” she laughed, ushering stridency out of the conversation. This time he went along. “A shiva lasts for a week,” she went on. “You keep the mirrors covered. Then you see what you feel.”
“I see,” he said.
“Or not,” she said. “You take on too much, so it’s too much, and then you want none of it. You’d rather do nothing than have to do all that. But you can choose your own amount.”
“I would like to teach you something as well,” he said.
“Please,” she said.
“I meant I also would like to find something to teach you.”
“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think you could.”
“You’re just doing a favor for a colleague.”
“If you think so, Slava, you’re not as smart as I hoped. But finally, yes, I dragged you out. It was easier to get hired by Century.”
A slurry smile appeared on his face. “The upside of professional mortification. Why me?”
“You’re not like the others.”
“That’s a foolproof fact.”
“What do you want, Slava?” she said. “You want to publish in Century so badly?”
“I guess not,” he said. “I remember the first time I saw it. I was just killing time in the library. A lot of time killing time in the library at Hunter. I’d gone through half the magazines in the periodical rack. And then Century. There was a piece about a rape in South Africa, and Sheila”—Sheila Garbanes (pert, tart, groovy) was a staff writer—“had a piece on these two philosophers at the University of Chicago. Ask me if I knew the first thing about philosophy, but I read the whole thing.”
“God, I read the same issue,” she said.
“Arch—”
“On the farmers. The father farms organic and the son farms industrial,” she said. “Imagine if we were reading it at the same time, fifty blocks apart.”
“I want to write something people will read,” he said. “And say, There goes the fellow who wrote that.”
“So do that,” she said. “Wake up tomorrow and write something new. And send it somewhere else. Not Century. Some other place. Are you listening? Look at me.”
“I will,” he said, straightening.
“And another thing,” she said. “You don’t think about this anymore between now and then. It can’t help you.”
“Okay,” he said.
“And then the third thing.”
“Yes.” He tried to focus the glaze out of his eyes.
“Take me home.”
In the taxi, he ripped the sleeve of the Balenciaga from her shoulder. He sprang back, remembering Skinny Jeans’s valuation, but she shrugged it away. Her tongue was cool and thick, her breath smoky and clean despite everything they had been drinking. They bit each other’s lips, breathing each other in. He imagined the air spread to every corner of her, down to the dead fingertip, where it stopped.
At the wheel, Hamid Abdul was trying not to watch them. Hamid, his immigrant brother. How Slava was exceeding his immigrant brief with this fine-skinned American specimen. See Slava take the milk of this American skin into his mouth, Hamid. Look at her fingers disappear from your rearview mirror. We are miscegenating with the natives, Hamid, we are assimilating, are we not?
Irvin the doorman did not share Hamid’s interest in Slava’s quarry. He wanted only Slava’s “John Handcocks” for a pair of slacks from dry cleaning. Slava told him that he was going to buy some skinny jeans and be done with this slacks business. “It is absolute,” Irvin nodded obediently.