"Are you serious?" I hoped she was. Or wasn't; most of all I wanted her to tell me clearly. But her smile was truly enigmatic. I thought it said what I was learning for myself from so many girls at Alyosha's: what does it matter if I move on to someone else for a quick screw?
"Why should I mind, she won't snap it off"," she added. "Go on to her. But hurry back to me."
She urged me to my feet. A sudden memory of her tale of the two Georgians who took her nine times in twelve hours convinced
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me she was in earnest. After all, she herself had told me about her promiscuous streak. I went to the bed. The girl rolled over, opening her warm legs to me.
When I returned to the kitchen, Anastasia was asleep. Months later, when Alyosha told me she was feigning this after watching my performance in furious hurt and loathing, I realized I'd misinterpreted everything, even why she had been willing to talk of her earlier lovers. It was all done to observe my reaction: she already suspected I was going the way of Alyosha in bed.
"Apparently she loved you," said Alyosha to my plying. "I didn't know. She swallowed a pile of pride to stay after her test of you that night."
The incredible thing was not that I needed someone else to tell me I'd behaved like a pig, but that even then, when my insensitivity clinked in my ears, I pretended not to have known what I did to her while I was doing it. It was "just a screw."
She could not see me the rest of the week. On the weekend, we had our first row. Naturally it concerned trivia.
She had lost her "passport," the identification document Russians are supposed to carry at all times. It was her second loss of the vital folder since I knew her, but this could hardly explain my pique. She, not I, had to waste a Saturday afternoon on police lines for a replacement. I pressed the bills for the fine on her, silently contemptuous of her for her eternal carelessness, and of myself for my hypocrisy in playing the benefactor. My disgust for my own meanness shifted back to her negligence, without which my shoddy reactions wouldn't have been provoked.
The next day, she was caught on a bus without a ticket, the inspector adding a lecture to his fifty-kopek fine. Anastasia's temper snapped. "For God's sake stop the 'social responsibility' song, it grates." The inspector summoned a cop who led her to his precinct station, me trailing behind, wondering whether my presence would help or hinder. With lesser looks she might have spent fifteen days for hooliganism in a stinking jail.
We emerged impossibly late for a restaurant lunch to which I'd invited Alyosha. I bought two ice-cream sticks to celebrate her release and waited until our nerves had recovered.
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"What was the point of that, scrumptious? You told me you'd paid the damn fare."
She strode on, not answering.
"Whatever were you trying to prove?"
"Oh stop," she snapped. "I didn't have the right change."
"Why didn't you ask me? You never pay when you do have change."
"Drop it, I don't want to have this discussion." The peremptory nastiness in her voice pulled me up. It struck me that she was always trying to prove something with her demonstrated uninhibitedness. With nowhere to go and no way to telephone Alyosha, we were just wandering—toward the Krimsky Bridge, I noticed, of our enchanted kiss. I realized my grievance would pull us down further from that seemingly distant exaltation, but could not suppress it.
"Sure I'll drop it—having bailed you out of the station. You can pretend you're above everything again."
My bitterness amazed me. The worst was not my anger at her using me—taking my help when needed but rejecting every word of accompanying advice—but shame, somewhere, for the shabbi-ness of my resentment; which of course amplified it. I was allowing a young girl to dominate me, even asking for it; and she scorned me, rightly, for my pettiness.
"Why are you beside yourself about five kopeks for a bus? Why can't you let me worry about what's fair for myself—about who does the real cheating around here?"
"I'm the first to agree that the way the system cheats you, you deserve a million free rides. But what's the advantage of striking back with these kind of 'victories'? The real reason is your infatuation with playing the naughty innocent."
She stepped off in another direction. When I caught up with her, she exploded; and the argument dredged up personal grudges that dismayed us. I spat up resentment, growing clearer by the minute, that beneath her captivating recklessness lay a spoiled child's heedlessness of others.
"You always want to be 'liberated' from the 'petty rules' binding 'less sensitive' people. Like paying your way, or coming on time for an appointment. Elevate cheating to a principle—a splendid way to demonstrate superiority."
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She hissed back that bragging about helping her in the poHce station would have been far beneath Alyosha but was characteristic of me, since I was trying to ape him, with none of his maturity or generosity.
"You're often an imitator, artificial. You're not guided by your feelings, but by what you think they should be. That's why you always react first to the secondary things: theater tickets and bus fares, not people. Lacking real instincts, you try to act on the basis of—ugh!—of what you read."
Oh God, how right she was! How I yearned to be able to laugh with her about the police sergeant and passport fine. But I pretended that my stodginess was linked to some better part of me that tried, at least, to understand others'* arguments. The proof of her perception about my being guided by what I thought I should feel was that I held myself back and tried to make peace, congratulating myself at not stalking off in her kind of fury.
Letting her have the last salvo, I took her arm, which she surprisingly hugged to her side. We were still walking aimlessly. One of her best qualities was the ability to make up almost instantly after an outburst. But I no longer felt I had to love her: I was beginning to see her as an ordinary person. And although she might help me get beneath my measly poses and defenses, the closer we approached our inner cores, the stronger I sensed our essential dissimilarities. We came to a river beach and she herself summarized one of the most important.
"The difference is that my ambition is only to see what happens to me. I could be happy sunning here for a whole summer. You'd be nervous because you weren't accomplishing something—which is why you will one day."
"The difference is that you've lain on fewer beaches. Naturally you want more of it."
But this was a half-truth, offered to avoid further debate. We were products of different societies. Growing up in hers, it was natural that she saw freedom as getting away with something, the good life as lazing on a beach. Instead of feeling constantly inferior, / had something to tell her about goals in life, but she didn't want to hear.
The twist of me urging her to be a better Soviet citizen was part of it. What I wanted to say was that not giving a damn
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about accomplishing anything wasn't the answer. And that my irritation over her bus caper was connected with the notion that true individuaHsm demands more worthy expression.
"Look, Nastyusha," I kept saying—to myself. "When rebellion comes, it should be useful to mankind, not your mosquito bites." This pompousness provided the laugh at myself I was after, but Anastasia's fancy-free stance remained frayed. She was a little like Zelda, doing everything in her delicious power to keep Scott down. However insignificant I was compared to him, I sometimes longed to be myself, rather than the more dashing but less true variant affected in her presence.
We needed more walking. It was strangely asexual, as if revealing even as much as I did to her had bled away my potency. We came to an area of wooden cottages and suddenly I was thinking of the Brooklyn house where we lived until I was four. Whenever we returned from somewhere the sight of it brought a flush of comfort, but almost immediately the anxiety began and I was afraid to go inside. The roof would collapse, I sobbed; termites might be undermining the timbers this very minute. I could put no trust in this home where I hated myself for hoping my parents would go on screaming at each other instead of me; this seemingly sound structure that might crumble before my eyes. . . . How hard it was to come to terms with Anastasia's defects, already weakening our beams. How I wanted her strength to match her beauty!