“It’s not that, honey,” I said.
But she hung up on me.
I didn’t have the strength to call back.
There was nothing I could do. Mona had betrayed me many times over. I didn’t mind that she had a lover — but to turn me over to his criminal investigation? And he wasn’t even law enforcement, just an investigator for a sensationalist rag.
Why would Mona betray me? But then I thought, why not? I was like an old doorway in her life, something she passed through each day. But I just served a purpose; a barrier against the wind, a surface upon which some suitor might knock. Nothing I said had made Mona laugh in years. I was there to help take care of our daughter and, less and less, someone to go through the motions of physical love with. I brought home a paycheck when she was between jobs, but she never laughed or came or needed me to help her understand a thing.
I watched a children’s movie on the hotel pay-per-view system. It was about a young sorcerer with a past he could only guess at. At the end of the film, when he was still in the dark about himself, I became teary.
While the credits were rolling, the phone rang.
It had to be maintenance or maybe the turndown service wondering about the DO NOT DISTURB sign I had hung on the doorknob. No one outside the hotel knew I was at the Reynard. I’d used cash to pay the two-week bill upfront.
“Hello?”
“Can I come up?” Svetlana asked.
“How did you know I was here?”
“Star sixty-nine.”
She entered my room all in a rush. She hugged me and kissed me, stared into my eyes as if she were looking for some sign across a vast twilight terrain.
“What’s wrong, Lana? Why are you here?”
“Don’t you want me anymore, Ben?” she asked.
“Yeah, sure. But I just needed to be alone, to think.”
“I wanted to talk to you,” she said.
“About what?”
“Sit.”
Svetlana was wearing a tiny black dress, no hose and no jewelry. She didn’t have any makeup on either. There was something vulnerable about her and the fact that this was probably a calculated vulnerability made her seem all the more defenseless.
She sat next to me and put her hands against my chest. I wondered if she wanted me to kiss her. It didn’t seem so. Lana was looking for something, for a way to stop me from moving on, moving away.
“I’m here, honey,” I said.
She put her strong arms around my neck and squeezed with all her might. It was a painful embrace. I would have tried to push her off but she was crying. Her faded perfume was a scent that was musky and not at all sweet. I remembered the first time that I met her when she was waitressing at Bulfinch’s C&e-Restaurant. It was this scent that opened my nose and made me talk to her.
“I told Sergei not to call me anymore,” she said, her voice muffled against my chest.
“What?”
She leaned back, still holding my neck with her powerful fingers.
“For a long time you were telling me that you were going to leave me,” she said.
“I never said that.”
“You said that you expected me to go,” she retorted. “Is that what a man says who wants a woman? You would come to see me in the daytime mostly and if I ever said I was busy, you would never complain. It was like you just needed a pretty girl to be on your arm sometimes, or a whore to help you relax because your wife was not so interesting.”
“I never said any of that.”
“But now, when you finally look at me, Sergei calls and you tell me you cannot see me.”
“Who is Sergei?”
“Why didn’t you call me back after I hung up on you?”
“I don’t know, Lana. I got a lot on my mind. I made you mad once... I figured anything I said after that would just make you angrier.”
“Because you are mad about Sergei.”
“I don’t even know who he is.”
The words finally got through to her. She was so passionate, so sure of why I was doing what I was doing, that she had mis-calculated. She came to tell me that her lover didn’t matter when I had only the mildest of suspicions about the rude Russian on the telephone.
I didn’t want to duel with the young grad student. I didn’t know what I felt. Everyone except maybe Cass had betrayed me. And in turn I had let down everyone I knew. I didn’t want revenge. I didn’t want to be angry.
“I never made love to him without condom,” she said. “And I never let him kiss my pussy or put his thing in my mouth.”
Her gray eyes were not quite human to me at that moment. Her blunt honesty made me want to smile.
“Sometimes you wouldn’t see me for two weeks,” she said, reading her own guilt into my silence.
“And you needed company,” I said. “You’re a pretty young woman. Beautiful.”
“Don’t throw me away, Ben. I told Sergei that I wouldn’t see him anymore. I mean it.”
“But why?” I asked. “Why wouldn’t you want a young man who speaks your language and wants to be with you?”
“Why do you say these things to me?” she cried. “Don’t you want me?”
For the moment I had the glimmering memory of another woman crying somewhere, another woman asking me for something I didn’t understand.
“I did not love Sergei,” she said. “He was just there and he wanted to see me.”
“The night you called me and said that you were from my job,” I said. “Was that because Sergei wouldn’t come to you? Were you using me to make him jealous?”
The gray eyes turned suddenly human. Svetlana jumped to her feet and ran for the door. I let her go. I didn’t want her to leave but I let her go. I hadn’t meant to vex her with my question. I was just trying to understand-no, nothing so deep as understanding; I just wanted to imagine a world outside my mind.
The door slammed behind her. Now Lana was gone from my life too. At least she didn’t know anything about Barbara Knowland. At least she couldn’t betray me to Harvard Rollins.
I didn’t see Lana being with Sergei as unfaithfulness. She was young and smiling and I paid the rent. I might have done it without the sex.
I had been going to Bulfinch’s for a few months, mostly for the chance that I could have a brief chat with the Russian girl. One day she was telling me about how hard she worked.
“I work seven days to pay for everything,” she said. “I work so hard that I can only take one class a semester.”
I asked her how much it all cost. It wasn’t much, less by far than Seela’s tuition and room and board were at NYU.
“I could pay for that,” I said, realizing that it was an offer as it came out of my mouth. “And if you become a big-time international businesswoman, you could pay me back.”
It wasn’t until the second month of my paying the bills that she had me over for dinner. It wasn’t until the third dinner that we went to bed.
It seemed somehow inevitable that we became lovers. It was like a shared responsibility. I never believed that she wanted me. Somehow I thought that all Russians looked down on black people. I don’t know where I got that from.
But, I felt, Lana was trapped. She needed someone to take care of her. And if a man foots the bills, then she had to play footsy with him.
There came a knock on the door. Svetlana rushed into my arms again. This time we kissed. I could taste the salty tears on her tongue. This excited me. I threw her on the bed and slapped her when she tried to rise. Then I was on her. Then she was on me.
The love we made was oceanic. She was feeling adrift from me and I was like a man dropped in the middle of an unending sea.
“I need you,” we said together, laughing at our synchronicity.