He came up behind her and slid his arms inside hers, twenty fingers rimming the outer edge of the sink, the tips of hers still frightened and blue, his dark and thick next to hers.
“I don’t even know what we’re arguing about half the time,” she said. She swiveled inside his arms, facing him. “I think about that all day long. That’s not what I want to think about all day. I want to be calm.” The sleep was gone from her eyes, and she, too, stared at him with the weary recognition of something one has expected to take place for some time. “I’m scared,” she said. She exited the rim of his arms and sank down to the floor, running her arms around her legs. She vanished against the white subway tile.
He slid down next to her and took her fingers in his, rubbing out the blue sleep. The cat parked itself on the edge of the sink to listen in from above.
“If you sit on cold tile,” he said, trying for levity, “you won’t have kids. So the wives say in their tales.”
“I like when you tell me about those things,” she said. “You never talk about it.”
“Gentlemen have much to fear as well, Grandfather says.”
“Sexy talk,” she sighed. “How is he? With everything.”
“He’s more fine than he says,” Slava said. “He’s blessed. He never pays enough attention to anything for it to touch him.”
“Don’t say that,” she said.
“It’s the truth,” he said resentfully.
The weight of his secret pressed all about him, a stupid, blunt heaviness with no center or edge. He had to hold out only a little bit longer — the application deadline was just days away, and then he would be free, and they would be back to each other the way it was that first night. Slava didn’t want to think about the other possibility: that their sudden awkwardness had nothing to do with his secret. That it was, quite simply, them, that the introductory luster of their connection was a fraud now giving way to the pallid fact: They were foreigners to each other. Even in the midst of an argument, they wished to tear off each other’s clothes, but the depressing thought struck him that this wasn’t enough, necessarily.
He thought of Otto, the day’s first recollection out of the hundred to come, an unpleasant dream that wasn’t a dream. Slava copped a bit of martyrdom from the victims of fate scattered around South Brooklyn — of course he had to be caught. At Century, he could invent entire townships and newspapers without raising flags. Here, no. Someone else gets away with murder. He — he pays.
The list of letters that remained to be written before the deadline burned from the pocket of his jeans across the room, as if it contained the phone numbers of other women and not eighty-year-olds. He had read that a group of survivors was lobbying to press the German parliament to revise the terms of restitution to include a broader cross section of evacuees and, for the first time, Red Army soldiers. He wanted it to end and he didn’t want it to end.
“Does your head hurt?” she said. “From the shelf.”
“Oh. No. No, it can stay. Really.”
“No, we’ll get rid of it. It was already here—”
“No, no.”
They stopped speaking at the same time.
“Something’s strange,” she said, a stiff smile on her face.
“Something,” he nodded.
He extended his arms. Slowly, warily, she lowered herself into them. The cat leaped off the counter, its paws hitting the tile with a dull thud, and joined them. Slava had never had animals, but he liked the cat. In the moments when he and Arianna didn’t know how to be warm to each other, they could be warm to the animal. The animal didn’t mind. It nestled between them, a package of simple, dumb, euphoric flesh, and issued a great yawn. The two humans made jokes about how boring their fight was.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s do something. Unless you’re working.”
“I’m taking a day off,” he announced.
She produced a sound of disbelief.
“Easy, now,” he said.
“Let’s walk,” she said.
“It’s a hundred degrees outside,” he said.
“Then that’s our first clue,” she said. “We want air-conditioning.”
“It’s cool here,” he said, eyeing the bed.
She grinned. “Later. Let’s get dressed.”
He thought about doing what she had done that day several weeks before, when he had to leave for the library. Ask for five minutes, peel off her clothes, and push her down on the bed. She had shown him that you could impose on each other this way; the other would impose another time. Love was not equality but balance. On the bus ride back to his side of the borough, he had felt used but closer to her. However, he couldn’t imagine doing the same thing now. The doleful corollary to her rule was that this kind of imbalance was possible only when the rest was steady. It had been in their first week, but less so the more time they spent together, a dismal irony. He rose and got dressed.
The city that had felt mellow and forgiving as they walked from Bar Kabul to Straight Shooters on their first night together now felt hyper and choleric. The thermometer affixed to the doorjamb of Arianna’s apartment building said one hundred. However, the heat had emptied the streets, lending them the feel of a holiday weekend, which always created for Slava the illusion that the city was briefly his. “Where to?” he said, swatting at his forehead demonstratively.
They walked in the direction of the Museum of Natural History. When the Bocks of Brentwood began to visit New York with little Arianna, this was always the first stop; the Eagle liked eagles. (Sandra Bock, uncharmed by wildlife, waited in the café.) The museum plaza was empty save for gaggles of pigeons — these would survive the final desolation. Inside, in the sacerdotal dark, the light reserved for antelopes stunned in midleap, camp children mixed with Japanese and German tour groups, individual families gliding between them with the freedom of the unaffiliated. Arianna had dressed in sandals, a low-cut sailor shirt with short sleeves, and black shorts with gold buttons that ended right below the rim of her ass. Men contrived, in the gloom, to inspect this exciting genus, but even more so the women, reminding Slava of Uncle Pasha’s insistence that it counted the most when the women looked. Slava thought about Pasha with weary amusement.
Arianna, trained by city sidewalks, cut a lane through the crowds, occasionally reaching back to make sure Slava was there. He followed like a kindergartner. She stopped now and then to say something about the ibex, the lynx, the coyotes that howled in the Los Angeles hills. All the animals looked the same to Slava: horns, hooves, enlarged watchful eyes. He listened with a rancid feeling. To him, she was synonymous with the city, but all this was also known to her. He loved this about her; she brought surprise to his life. But everywhere they went, she narrated. What if he had spent his boyhood trooping through the Museum of Natural History instead of deciphering letters and dictionary-tripping at his wood-paneled desk? Would he know as much as she did? Or was it something about her?
Stopped at a display, he wrapped his arms around her from behind, her collarbone familiar against his forearm. She stopped speaking and leaned into his chest. She had straightened her hair; he inhaled its burnt, smoky dryness. He lifted the tips with his fingers and kissed her neck. “I want to go,” he heard himself say.
“You want to go home?” she said.
“I would like to show you a place now.” He said it before he was certain of the destination, but the feeling was sure.
She nodded eagerly. “But let’s stay like this for one more minute.”
Outside, the wet air attacked immediately, and he stuck out a hand for a taxi. She noted the luxury — they always took the subway. He colored, embarrassed. My credit-card statements don’t go to the Eagle, he wanted to say, but held his tongue. Did observant Arianna also notice that they had spent every night of the previous month at her apartment? No, this imbalance went unremarked. But he preferred her apartment. He was hopelessly tangled. He held the door as she climbed into the cab.