The white Hes were minimal. Despite the spontaneity affected, I rewrote a dozen times, hoping the prose would evoke our best days. The hint about putting it down after a sleepless night was also misleading: I worked on it an entire day, adding the first paragraph as an afterthought. But in the sense that earlier sleepless nights in my room and outside her dormitory were the equivalent, this was poetic licence.
I merely omitted the central truths: that the real reason for my disappearing act was cowardice, plus greed for the girls at Alyosha's. In that sense, it had the elegance of simplicity.
I took the occasion to enter a library for the first time in months, borrowing a Russian style book from there. My other loan was of a typewriter for the final draft, partly to give myself something to do the following day too: a clean Russian page took an hour. And to preserve my heartbreak in carbon. I hadn't written anything for ages. I liked the embellishment of my anguish.
Time imposed its humdrum relief True to the platitudinous pattern, part of me continued to resent my reconversion from tragic hero to old me, even drearier without my princess. But I also resisted rehabilitation because the thought that life might become tolerable without Anastasia was itself intolerable: the recovery of an amputee reconciling himself to a legless future. At this stage too, my impulse to dramatize my sense of loss did not prevent me from genuinely feeling it. Everything was true.
I'd started spending every day with Alyosha. And I did forget, sometimes even gloated. Other times I went down a different pit and could no more feed a line to, let alone sleep with, some salesgirl than eat coal. This polarity extended to Anastasia. Some mornings in bed, I choked with desire for her as a purely carnal object. My tongue licked the air where I visualized her body's
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shapes and smells. But usually my respect for her soared above lust; I limited my longing to becoming her buddy again. With that comfort, I could survive, simultaneously proving my purity.
Daydreaming of six months hence, I sometimes saw myself as a daring gambler who had stoically lost on his highest card. But in the hours when my sorrow filled me with tenderness for every living creature, I felt that this new capacity to feel could not be for nothing. My trial had been imposed to temper me for a truly holy union—perhaps not even with Anastasia, although I tried to suppress the blasphemous thought.
The relapses were like muscle cramps. I am on an old shopping street sanctified by our strolls. I pass the flower shop into which I dashed one afternoon having asked her mysteriously to wait and returned to delight her with a bunch of lilies. The sight of the same window causes a spasm, and I push through crowds searching for a telephone booth like an asthmatic seeking oxygen.
Temples pounding, I dial her dormitory. Blessedly, she comes to the telephone. I try not to overdramatize, simply stating, as if she is already a doctor, that her absence is suffocating me. Amazingly, she says she will see me this evening. My relief is instantaneous.
The rest of the day is a thicket of joyful chores. Alyosha gives me the apartment to entertain her "at home." But I buy the food, grateful for this project, at last, worthy of my time. An obliging American correspondent helps me get steaks and tomatoes from the Western colony's sources and I pick out an embroidered tablecloth from the best folk-crafts store. The final hour goes to folding napkins, polishing glasses, much trivia I'm good at. This is the kind of giving—like supplying Revlon nail polish and theater tickets—I always puffed up because I somehow tried to make it substitute for the more important things I held back. But I admit these failures now.
The table gleams; she'll be pleased. Forty-five minutes after the time, I begin to plead. Please come Nastenka, even if you're three hours late. To my dismay, my anxiousness swirls over the line to the old resentment when she made me wait.
I've started the steak. It won't be rare, as she loves it. She never let me perform at my best—even for her.
Anastasia^ 295
I remember my vexation over her favorite irrationalisms. Her willingness to let food rot—remains of the treats Alyosha set out for us—because putting it back in the refrigerator was boring. I'm a fool to have spent a frantic day on this lavish meal she'll spoil. When all is said and done, it was instinctive wisdom that saved me from the trap of her impetuousness.
But she's knocking! My heart leaps to answer, my profane resentment burning out like a defective match. She has responded to my plea and is framed in the doorway, her face as glorious as I remembered.
A new lemon blouse, the old amber necklace: she has dressed up for me. Her eyes focus on the foie gras, then rise to me. Once again she is high on delicacies, seasoning each dish with a graceful compliment. And perhaps my brief anger has helped loosen it, my tongue is equal to my table. I do not mention today's telephone-booth crisis, let alone The Subject. She sits in her straight-backed way, cocking her head in amusement during my story of a Christmas spent in Dallas. Through the chatter, I attend to her wine glass with an Alyosha-like deftness as host.
I switch from Vivaldi to Rachmaninov on the record player. The concerto's lilt transforms the room, and she has a new nickname for me, playing on kulik and kulinar: woodcock and culinarian. It's going so well that the measly part of me hopes it ends soon, before I run out of entertaining jabber. Partly to make things more exciting, but also because I already feel the withdrawal pangs of when she'll go, I relax my control and begin questioning.
"But how could this have happened to us? This impossible separation."
"I don't know. I'm sometimes appalled myself."
Her voice has a new wisdom that will teach me, I swear, how to sustain romance forever. At last we're going to have our heart-to-heart talk. I suspect I have engineered everything, even the break, just for this.
"We're so much better than others," I say. "Even this evening."
She straightens her new pleated skirt. I visualize the old one, which made her plainer but more obtainable. I want them both.
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the superior woman and the collective-farm maid; want to dominate and submit to a female being of disdainful grace.
"I want to tell you in the spirit of our friendship," I say gravely. "You mustn't throw away devotion of this magnitude; you may never find it again."
She blinks. I rush ahead because I'm afraid she may laugh.
"Ours was opening up to possibilities in ourselves that few people have. Believe me, I'm older."
"You've already pointed that out. Tell me something new. What are you and Alyosha up to?"
Ignoring this, I cautiously ask about her "friend." She says only that to leave him now would tear her in half. I curse my amorphous age.
"But logically you're mine. My feeling for you is as strong as the survival instinct."
I can't quite believe that at just this moment she has to excuse herself Walking out like an office secretary, she closes the bathroom door instead of inviting me, as of old, to the celebration of her peeing. Confronted with our lost intimacy, I have to start from the beginning when she returns.
"I'm deeply grateful to you, but you still don't know why. I'm grateful for introducing me to love and its colors. In my ignorance, I always dismissed fairy tales, poetry, romantic novels as fakery. Now I understand: how Paris stole Helen, why Tristan will never forget Isolde, what motivates the families in this very building. The real and allegorical meanings in life and literature—that's what you've given me."
She puts a finger to her lips, but again her eyes permit me to continue. The emergence of my literary allusions without conscious thought reinforces the dependence they proclaim, like prayer strengthening faith. But I can't tell what she's thinking beyond wanting more wine. The professor has obviously taught her to drink a lot.