Slava had spent most of the night excavating the sheets on his side of the bed, grateful for the dead way in which Arianna slept. At last, he rose, the hour too early for light even in summer, and sat at her silver-leafed kitchen table, his hands clasped — a guilty person. He tried to reason through his options, but even though, restless in bed, he could think of nothing but sitting across from Otto, their conversation writing itself in his mind like a false letter, now, at the table, his head filled with a stubborn blankness. He chuckled sullenly. And what would Grandmother say about this turn? Was she an accomplice in Grandfather’s subterfuges, and if so, an eager one or ashamed? Slava couldn’t imagine Grandmother ashamed, even of sin. And yet, she was an upright person. So upright he couldn’t imagine her loving Grandfather more than her own uprightness. But she was upright only toward loved ones. Slava mashed his hands together in agony, his eyes burning with a fatigue that made clear thinking impossible. He had been writing letters about his grandmother for weeks, but in moments like this, he felt as if he knew her barely at all, like a territory that grew larger the more of it you walked. It was the same with Arianna, he noted bitterly. Worse: Grandmother only became more unknown; Arianna became more unfamiliar.
He checked the kitchen window for light, but you could see little there, as it overlooked one of those poetic brick walls on which so many New York windows gaze. The clock said a quarter after five. Slava stole back into the bedroom and lifted his cell phone from the pocket of his jeans. Arianna remained in oblivion, but the cat opened a knowing gray eye. Slava froze in place, then ridiculed himself — his guilt was such that he was ready to answer to an animal. Advertising his indifference to the bulk of black fur, he strode out of the room.
He swallowed heavily as the telephone rang. She would be up, she had to be at the pharmacy at half past six, but no one dialed for leisure at five A.M., and indeed, when his mother snatched up the phone, her voice was frantic with fear. Now only one old Gelman remained about whom bad news could arrive at this unholy hour — why did old people die only in the night? — and though she had checked in with Grandfather in the evening (he had complained about the springs in his mattress, would these be his last words to her? how hopeless and absurd), her son was now in contact with the old neighborhood more than she was. He might know first.
“Everything’s fine, it’s fine,” he reassured her.
“What is it?” she said, her voice giving up fear but not puzzlement. No one was dead, but her son would not call just to call. She’d had to enter intimate terms with this new understanding in her life, like an illness.
Dear Mother: Was your mother a liar, a cheat? Did she look the other way while Grandfather fenced cars, smuggled gold, sold minks on the black market? Or was she his conspirator, his handler, his Bonnie? Did her uprightness extend only to the people she loved? What would she tell me to do now?
Instead, he said: “Summer’s ending.”
“Slava?” she said. “What is it?”
“Do you remember Mariela?” he said.
“The Spanish girl?” she said. Slava and Mariela had dated for a year and a half during college and had given it up — unusual wisdom, such young people — when they began to ask more of it than it could give. But for several months, they had been inseparable, the daughter of Colombian Catholics and the son of Soviet Jews making out in an empty room at the Met.
“I told Grandmother about her,” he said. “She was sick already.”
“Mariela? Have you seen her?”
“Do you know what Grandmother said?” he said. “She listened carefully. Then she said: ‘Does she know how to cook?’”
His mother snorted.
“I said no. You remember Mariela — she didn’t own a pot for macaroni. Grandmother thought about it, and then she said: ‘What a putz.’”
His mother laughed, her voice less cautious. “Have you been going to the grave?” Slava said.
“Every weekend,” she said.
“Maybe you should take some time from the pharmacy,” he said.
“No, no,” she said. “This way, my mind is busy. Working at the pharmacy, you get the impression that there are no healthy people in the world. The normal condition is not health but illness. It makes you feel better in a way — I used to ask God why only she became ill — but then you feel guilty about it. And I still ask God, only a different question: If so many are ill, why did she have to die? And I feel terrible, like a hideous person. But I miss my mother.”
“As I miss her,” he said.
“You can’t sleep,” she said.
“I can’t sleep,” he confirmed. “Would she have gone along? With what I’m doing?”
“She loved you so much,” she said.
“But what I’m asking.”
“She loved all of us. There was nothing you could do that she wouldn’t go along with.”
“This is just a nice thought. When she found me with Lusty Lena, she got me by the ears, I can still feel it.”
“I don’t know what you want me to say, son — we were having a nice conversation.”
He apologized and gave in to silence. “It’s getting light,” he said at last. “Is it getting light by you?”
“Yes,” she said. “You know the heat makes me crazy, but I think about fall, and I start crying. It’s a crime for a person to die in the spring because everything is just beginning, and it’s a crime for a person to die in the fall because everything is ending as it is, and a person can’t die in the summer because it’s the summer. A person should die in the winter. Only in the winter. I hope I die in the winter.”
“Then the ground is icy and you probably have to pay the diggers more,” he said, and they laughed at this joke about their frugality, the frugality of all immigrants.
“You have to go,” he said. “You’ll be late.”
“So I’ll be late,” she said.
“We’re performing a service, aren’t we?” he said. “You keep them in prescriptions — you keep them alive — and I keep them in funds.”
“It feels good to be on the same side as you,” she said. “I am envious, however. They get to see you every day. You’ve skipped over us. I mean your father and me.”
“You’re too young to qualify,” he tried to joke.
She laughed politely. “No, it’s true, the grandparents are the ones with the stories. We always thought telling you less was the right way. Maybe your children will come to us.”
“Say hello to her when you go to the cemetery,” he said.
“You’ve remembered your Russian so quickly,” she said. “No, you speak better than you used to. Shouldn’t you visit her, too?”
“I visit her in my own way,” he said.
Even though they, each for his own reason, did not wish to end the conversation, they had come to the end of what they could say in peace, and said goodbye.
He returned to the bed, sliding in gently so as not to rouse the cat despite their earlier disagreement. He listened obediently to Arianna’s unlabored breathing, intending to be in someone’s, something’s, good graces. She slept heedlessly, her lips slightly ajar, her face an oval cameo. He discovered an intimate paradox: He had looked at her every day for more than a month but had not registered the color of her eyes. Now that her eyes were closed, however, he was without doubt that they were gray, a shining gray, though they seemed darker because of their thick lashes, which was why if someone had asked Slava what color they were, he would have said black, almost black.
Before they began to see each other regularly, her eyes were filled with a smirking amusement, which irritated him — she was making fun of him, his nose buried in work. Belatedly, he understood that smirk to have been an expression of self-protection, because soon it gave way to tender excitement, even admiration. And periodically to worry, to a futile intent on restraint — the two of them were moving so quickly. It was different now. When Arianna’s freckled lids, the left with its divided birthmark, opened from sleep, they would gaze upon Slava with doubt and dread. He wanted her to keep sleeping, as in a fairy tale. Among these thoughts, finally he fell asleep.