Nadezhda stretched out contentedly. Tom surveyed the scene. The coastal plain was hazy in the late afternoon light. There was Anaheim Stadium, the big hospital in Santa Ana, the Matterhorn at Disneyland. Other than that, treetops. Below them the houses and gardens of El Modena caught the light and basked in it, looking like the town’s namesake in Tuscany.
He asked her about her home, ignoring the ghosts in the grove. (A young couple, in there laughing. Beyond them children, planting foot-high trees.)
She was from Sebastopol in the Crimea, but spoke of India as her home. After many years there, she had moved back to Moscow. “That was hard.”
“India changed you?”
“India changes everyone who visits it, if they stay long enough, and if they stay open to it. So many people—I understood then how it would be possible to overrun the Earth, and soon. I was twenty-four when I first arrived. It gave me a sense of urgency.”
“But then you went back to Moscow.”
“Yes. Moscow is nothing compared to India, ah! And then my government was strange regarding India. Work there and when you came back you found no one was listening to you any more. You were tainted, you see. Made untouchable.” She laughed.
“You did a lot of good work anyway.”
“I could have done more.”
They sat and felt the sun. Nadezhda poked a twig through dead leaves. Tom watched her hands. Narrow, long-fingered. He felt thick, old, melancholy. Be here now, he thought, be here now. So hard. Nadezhda glanced at him. She mentioned Singapore, and it came back to him again, stronger than ever. She had been one of the leaders of the conference. They had had drinks together, walked the crowded, hot, color-filled streets of Singapore, arguing conversion strategies just as fast as they could talk. He described the memory as best he could, and she laughed. It was the same laugh. She had a kind of Asian face, hawk-nosed and imperious. Cossack blood. The steppes, Turkestan, the giant spaces of central Asia. Slender, fashionable, she had dressed in Singapore with liberal flourishes of Indian jewelry and clothing. Still did. Of course now she sailed with Indians again.
He asked about her life since then.
“It has not been so very interesting to tell. For many years I lived and worked in Moscow.” Her first husband had been assigned to Kazakhstan and she had done regional economic studies, until he was killed in the riots of a brief local insurgency. Back to Moscow, then to India again, where she met her second husband, a Georgian working there. To Kiev, back to Moscow. Second husband died of a heart attack, while they were on vacation. Scuba diving in the Black Sea.
Children?
A son in Moscow, two daughters in Kiev. “And you?”
“My daughter and her husband, Kevin’s folks, are in space, working on solar collectors. Have been for years. My son died when he was young, in a car accident.”
“Ah.”
“Kevin’s sister is in Bangladesh. Jill.”
“I have five grandchildren now, and a sixth is coming in a month.” She laughed. “I don’t see them enough.”
Tom grunted. He hadn’t seen Jill in a year, his daughter in five. People moved around too much, and thought that TV phones made up for it. He looked up at the sun, blinking through leaves. So she had had two husbands die on her. And here she was laughing in the sunlight, making patterns with dead leaves and twigs, like a girl. Life was strange.
Back down the hill, in the sunset’s apricot light. Tuscany in California. Kevin and Doris’s house glowed in its garden, the clear panels and domes gleaming like a lamp lighting the surrounding trees. They went inside and joined the chaos of dinnertime. The kids dashed around shrieking. Sixteen people lived in the building, and at dinner time it seemed most of them were kids. Actually only five. Rafael and Andrea were clearly delighted to see him; they had worked together on El Modena’s town charter, and yet it had been years…. They embarrassed Tom by getting out the good china and trying to get the whole house down to the table. Tomas, however, wouldn’t leave his work screen. Tom knew Yoshi and Bob, they had been teachers when Kevin was in school. And he was acquainted with Sylvia and Sam, Donna and Cindy. But what a crowd! Even before the great solitude had descended, he couldn’t have lived in such a constant gathering. Of course it was a big place, and they seldom got together like this. But still…
After dinner Tom poured cups of coffee for him and Nadezhda, and they went out to the atrium, where chairs were set around the fishpond. Overhead the skylight’s cloudgel fluttered a bit in the breeze, and from the kitchen voices chattered, dishes clattered. The atrium was dark and cool, the cloudgel clear enough to reveal the stars. The open end of the old horseshoe shape of the apartment complex gave them a view west, and they were just enough up the side of the hill that the lights from the town bobbed below, like the lamps of night fishermen on a sea. They sipped coffee.
Doris rushed in, slammed the door, stomped off to the kitchen. “Where’s my dinner?” she shouted.
About fifteen minutes later Kevin came in, looking pleased. He had been flying with Ramona, he said, and they had gone out to dinner afterward.
Doris brought him right back to earth with her news of the zoning proposal. “It’s definitely Rattlesnake Hill they’re after.”
“You’re kidding,” Kevin said feebly. He collapsed onto one of the atrium chairs. “That bastard.”
“We’re going to have a fight on our hands,” Doris predicted grimly.
“We knew that already.”
“It’s worse now.”
“Okay, okay, it’s worse now. Great.”
“I’m just trying to be realistic.”
“I know, I know.” They went into the kitchen still discussing it. “Who the fuck ate everything?” Doris roared.
Nadezhda laughed, said quietly to Tom, “Sometimes I am thinking perhaps my Doris would not be unhappy if those two got back together.”
“Back together?”
“Oh yes. They have had their moments, you know.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Nothing very much. And a long time ago. When they first moved into this house, apparently. They almost moved into a room together, but then they didn’t. And then Doris came over to work for me for a time. She told me about it then, when she was really feeling it. Then when she returned things were not working out so much, I guess. But I think she is still a bit in love with him.”
Tom considered it. “I guess I hadn’t noticed.” How could he, up in the hills? “She does watch him a lot.”
“But then there is this Ramona.”
“Yeah, that’s what Kevin just said. But I thought she lived with Alfredo.”
Nadezhda filled him in on the latest. Telling him about the affairs of his own townspeople, and with a buoyant, lively curiosity. With pleasure. And she made it all so… suddenly he wanted to feel like she did, he wanted that engagement with things.
“Ah,” he said, confused at himself. Hawk-nosed Asian beauty, gossiping to him in the dark atrium….
They sat and watched stars bouncing on the other side of the cloudgel. Time passed.
“Will you be staying here tonight?” she asked.
The house had several spare rooms, but Tom shook his head. “It’s an easy ride home, and I prefer sleeping there.”
“Of course. But if you’ll excuse me, I think I will be going to bed.”
“Sure, sure. Don’t mind me. I’ll be setting off in a while.”
“Thanks for taking me up on the hill. It’s a good place, it should be left alone.”
“We’ll see. I was glad to go up there again myself.”
She walked up the stairs to the second floor, then around the inner balcony to the southeast curve of the horseshoe, where the best guestroom was. Tom watched her disappear, thinking nothing. Feelings fluttered into him like moths banging into a light. Creak of wood. So long since he had done any of this! It was strange, strange. Long ago it had been like this, as if he slept years every night, and woke up in a new world every morning. That voice, laughing on the streets of Singapore—was it really them? Had it happened to him? Impossible, really. It must be. And yet… a disjuncture, again—between what he felt to be true, and what he knew to be fact. All those incarnations made his life.