“When I was little,” she said, “my father would take me in the backyard, we would lie down just like this, and he would make me find shapes in the clouds. A dinosaur, a briefcase, an apology. Or we would go to the beach and I would tell stories about the waves. The sea is a tongue spitting out seeds. The sea is a head rushing with thoughts. The first time I wrote a poem, it was from one of those days.”
“What does an apology look like?”
“Gnarled over. Hunched.”
“You miss him,” he said.
“He’s different now. He would be embarrassed to go look at waves with his daughter.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. They don’t tell you why they change.”
They listened to the city hum somewhere out there, past the line of light that waited beyond the edge of the park. Waited like a bad thought, Slava thought, remembering Oleg, and smiled. In his sci-fi story, Oleg had unconsciously melded the Odysseus story and the failed 1991 anti-Gorbachev putsch, in which the leader of the unfree world learned, upon reaching his vacation site in the Crimea, that power had been seized in the capital. By the time Oleg’s hero, sleekly but rustically named John Strong in concert with the technological but agrarian future, had reached his mind destination of Usuria (a bizarre blend of “usury” and Illyria — Slava was getting an analyst’s glimpse into the writerly mind), the codes had been rewritten wherever they were written, temporarily suspending all mind travel and stranding in-transit “expeditioners” like John Strong. Slava had sent Oleg edits and, as promised, one of the false letters. Oleg sent back a revision, a second story about the manager of a Japanese café franchise on the moon, and an unshy suggestion on how to improve the Holocaust letter, amusing Slava. Fifteen miles south of Central Park, there labored newfound kin to Slava, a secret operative.
“They say that if you can make out the Seventh Sister, the tiniest one,” she said, “you have twenty-twenty vision. Up there.” Arianna extended a finger, but his vision was not twenty-twenty. “After Atlas had to carry the world, Zeus turned his seven daughters into stars so they could keep him company.”
Slava propped himself on an elbow, as if to get a better look, but really he was studying her. In sneakers, gray tights, and a hoodie, somehow cold even in this heat, she was more beautiful than a woman dressed up. Despite the confusing tenseness between them, this fact presented itself without reservations. He wished to embrace her, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. If he kept his distance, at least he was being true to the fact of his betrayal, not pretending to give while he withheld so much.
He flopped back onto the grass and glared at the stars — where else to look? They would disappear as soon as he and Arianna reentered the light, though they would remain up there, something you had to believe without evidence.
“Saltshaker,” he said.
“Hm?” She looked over at him.
“The stars, like somebody shook out a saltshaker.” He looked back. “Your turn.”
She laughed through her nose, shy and grateful. She took his arm, and he let it be held. “A necklace,” she said. “A necklace of stars.”
“White cherries.”
“Rice grains.”
“Rice grains in ink.”
“Tonight we are pleased to offer rice grains in squid ink.”
“Only the night sky has freckles.”
“The biopsy showed a profusion of light.”
“A celestial rash — heavenly spores.”
“Ew.”
“A placenta.”
“Who’s the father?”
“Only Jerry Springer can say.”
“And the children? The Seven Sisters?”
“No, the children are us.”
They kissed.
11
THURSDAY, AUGUST 24, 2006
The Rudinskys’ two-story brick slab squatted next to a disheveled pillbox belonging to Orthodox Jews. Half a dozen side-locked children in matching gabardine outfits spun around the singed grass on their side of the lawn. The Rudinskys’ half was treacherous with lawn product. To the shrieking children, the young man wending his way through their game was as invisible as a spirit.
Slava’s knock was answered with thundering feet, and then Vera swung open the door. He wore a miserable expression in deference to the awkwardness of their last encounter, but she issued a broad, bland smile. She wore a pair of velour shorts stamped with Hello Kitty characters. In the distance, past an ornate Persian-style runner and a lacquered flamingo sprouting a spume of pink tendrils, a large television jumped with Russian pop stars.
“Ver-ka!” boomed from upstairs. “Who is it?”
“Sla-va!” she shouted back.
Slava squeezed out a smile and stepped inside, Vera’s bare soles slapping the tile, tiny prints from the television remote on her thigh. Her legs had yet to slough off their adolescent plumpness. He felt a momentary sting — she hadn’t bothered to dress up. They stood in clumsy silence at the foot of the stairs. In the living room, chartreuse and puce vases of Bohemian crystal trembled in tune to the permed crooners thrusting on television. Finally, the upstairs voice made its heavy way down: Aunt Lyuba. Slava felt a second sting at being handed off to the adult. After all, it was Vera who had called and asked him to come, not that he hadn’t thought about picking up the phone himself many times.
“Slava!” Aunt Lyuba reached the first-floor landing and embraced Slava with soft, bunching arms. He answered, his arms reaching around the puckered bun of her. They stood grasping each other as if he’d just come home from the war. From Aunt Lyuba’s grip, Slava watched Vera steal off to the living room.
“Did you see my God-fearers next door?” Lyuba said, releasing him. “One year and three months since we bought this house, do you think that woman — Malka, Schmalka — has come by to say ‘Hello, welcome to the neighborhood’? I made the mistake of going over there once — I needed flour! Her face turned the color of snow. She just ferries that army of believers day and night, till Moshe comes home. Then you don’t see her. I’ve been asking Garik to please go over there; those children trample my lawn every day. But I have to do everything myself.”
Aunt Lyuba took Slava by the hand and strode into the kitchen. “You saw our Vera?” she said. “Darling?” she called out brutally into the living room. Vera peeked out. “There she is.” Lyuba’s voice became tender again. “Not the girl you remember, eh?” Vera blushed.
Lyuba instructed Slava to sit down at the rose-colored banquette around the kitchen table and went shoulder-deep into the refrigerator, her rump struck outward. Vacuum-sealed ham emerged, smoked chicken thighs, a bowl of beet-colored vegetable vinaigrette. “Slava, you are half a meter taller than I saw you last,” she said from inside. “Tell me how things are. I haven’t seen you in years.”
“Nothing, Aunt Lyuba,” he said. “I work at a magazine—”
“Well, we’re making do,” she interrupted him. “Garik’s driving the cab. He wanted to start a limousine company”—she quit shuffling in the fridge to calibrate how much Slava knew about the argument, though only her rear end could judge—“but it didn’t work out. He’s a geologist by training, you know. Used to these large open spaces, rocks bigger than a house. Now he’s twelve hours a day in that box of a taxi. You should see his eyes when he comes home.” She closed the fridge and turned around. “You know what my husband the geologist does now? He sings for his fares. For extra tips. Russian war songs. He was chief geologist, State Institute of Earth Materials, Minsk.” She pointed to the cramped square of the backyard, where stones with pretty striations loomed in various sizes like bird droppings. “One day he got a ticket because he was lugging home that chunk of obsidian. God knows where he got it. Isn’t that a beautiful name, obsidian? It’s like an Armenian name. Vera!”