But today he wasn’t in his usual good spirits. Still trailing Marina, but sulkily, he ignored questions and commands, resisting the minor tasks she tried to assign. A grumpy little man with descended brows, he threw her sponge back at her. Almost toppled her pail. Laughed only after she’d tripped over the vacuum cleaner’s cord. An extra burden was something she didn’t need. Her probes into his psyche were unsuccessful until turning to a subject that quickened the pulse of even the most hopeless candidates. Krolik didn’t have to think long before proclaiming his absolute favorite: kugel.
OK, said Marina, a bit mystified. But what does Krolik feel for pizza?
Pizza! cried Krolik. Pizza’s existence had slipped his mind.
Does Krolik want surprise?
Surprise! he screamed.
Her finger instructed patience. Her purse was upstairs. She managed a puff of a cigarette — from Shmulka’s secret stash — before returning with a triangle of tinfoil.
Getting wind of what was about to happen, Krolik hiccupped from joy, a sudden shift of fate. His gaze was superglued to Marina’s chafed hand as it peeled back the petals of tinfoil with agonizing slowness. The boy stopped breathing. He stopped blinking. He stopped—
But when Marina finally presented the slice, Krolik’s excitement transformed. He gawked. He seemed befuddled, stumped.
My daughter’s favorite, said Marina. You don’t like?
Krolik’s head shook, though without conviction. His jaw had fallen open. He continued to stare at the cold slice, tomato sauce on the surface like burst capillaries, neat circles of pepperoni with curled edges, little red bowls.
Try, said Marina, her own mouth filling rapidly like the bathtub on the edge of which she sat.
Krolik took a few greedy bites and ran off with the rest of the slice. Marina set off after him, but it was as if he’d vanished. She moved on from the basement to the first floor, and upward. It was slow going, rough. She was unable to summon the Cinderella sensation, the famous-actress delusions, the good-for-my-biopic mood. Her arms and legs were heavy. The house leaned on her. Neither could she work up momentum or recall why she’d thought this was funny. Where was that pungent humor? I’m an actress, she said to herself, an undercover agent, a spy, as she scrubbed around the house’s hundredth toilet bowl. I’m a Russian lady embarking on middle age. That term — middle age — never failed to lower the sluice gate of self-pity.
• • •
YOU’RE the PAVEL NASMERTOV, said a woman with eyes taking up half her face, further enhanced by dramatic, expertly drawn shadows. Perching on the sofa, she gave Pasha a moment to acquire that face, which she’d borrowed from one of the nocturnal animals kept in special enclosures at the zoo. Renata Ostraya, she said, as if this were the elusive title of a painting, meant to illuminate something while giving nothing away. Otherwise she was a regular plump lady, apologizing for not being there to greet him when he’d arrived, which she hoped wasn’t too long ago. Pasha confirmed that he’d walked through the door no more than ten minutes ago, fifteen at most, but Renata wasn’t paying attention and he also wasn’t sure why he was going into detail.
In any case, she said, at last we meet.
The introduction took place only on the surface level of consciousness and was performed to appease that level, so its security guard wouldn’t get suspicious. Ancestral intermingling in more formative times was possibly at the root of this feeling.
I’ve deemed you guest of honor, she said. I hope you don’t mind if we ask you to recite a few poems.
What poet would mind?
A modest one. But that’s pure speculation.
You could smell the stories. If men hadn’t spilled blood over her, they’d surely threatened to. She found in all of it a good laugh. She was an actress, her flesh involved but spirit unconvinced. As a lady poet, she fought frivolity with exaggerated expressions of seriousness — frowns, gathered brows, pursed lips. Now her face leaked into these masks and had to jostle out of them. She grew increasingly substantial, a matronly effect conjured up by a lack of shuffling. Her body was an extra fixture of the sofa, hips as sturdy and impersonal as armrests. She counterbalanced the anchoring tug of her body with an overly expressive top eighth, though her proportions in this sense, too, weren’t the Vitruvian ideal; her small head must’ve been rather a ninth of her height. Women like her seemed to always be squatting. They were reminiscent of drawers that, pulled open, released a woody, smoky, dusty odor. Not Pasha’s type, and surely Renata could tell. She knew she’d been made for particular tastes.
Though the evening’s caliber was excessive, shades of sloppiness were ubiquitous. All the elements of a superb party were there — beluga caviar, Krug champagne, a microphone. Maybe this was the problem. A checklist was in the air. People wore their best attempts, no one capable of trying harder. But the plates didn’t match, and there were volume-control issues with the speakers, which to some extent had to be the case at every party that tried for matching anything. Usually only the hostess noticed flaws, her guests remaining oblivious, but now no one was oblivious except the hostess. Were these evenings played out, or was Renata exhausted? Prior to settling beside Pasha, she’d picked up a glass of cognac someone had left behind. A hostess’s reflex: clear abandoned drinks. But after five minutes of rotating the glass in her fingers, she took it down.
A proper hostess never stayed in one spot for long, even if that spot was beside the guest of honor. A goosey girl with hypersensitivities and self-abnegating tendencies took Renata’s place, balancing a large plate on her bony knees. The food was artistically arranged. The colors, the proportions — marvelous. The creative act was still in progress as she commenced moving the food around with delicate but assured strokes of the fork. That she was coming to public events was a miracle — or a modern psychiatric marvel. Pasha found a window. A joint was being passed around. It didn’t evoke the appropriate Russian-intelligentsia-dabbling-in-dope feel but a cows-out-to-pasture one. Admittedly, he was afraid of it and looked in the other direction while remaining acutely aware of the joint’s location, particularly as it neared him. The roach was tiny and wet when he lent it his own dab of saliva. The smoke scratched an itch in his left lung, an itch he didn’t know he had. Renata Ostraya began to seem like a tragic figure. Misha circulated throughout the room, manic, a brochure of twitches. It was as if time were manipulating him more savagely. He shot glances at Pasha. His eyes were like photographed cat eyes, not glowing neon but glowing paranoid. Who was Pasha talking to? And did Pasha notice who Misha was talking to? Because Misha talked to a bouquet of interesting, accomplished people — poets, critics, the painter Dolbintsov, prose writer Bliznyats, Misha knew them all, and the young woman by the glass menagerie collection, too, the one in the black dress, a turtle in her palm.
Pasha, evidently, had been staring. Her composure captivated — amid a murmur of still-crinkly conversation, the handling of drinks and utensils, crowd maneuverings, female and male laughter (starkly different), the young lady gave the impression of perfect stillness. Which was advantageous, as it afforded an opportunity to admire her plump white arms and champagne-glass waist.
That’s Lilya, said Misha. Her father’s an experimental filmmaker, mother a Bulgarian puppeteer. She drinks coffee, translates ancient Bulgarian philosophers. I tried, most do. Her younger sister, Elza, is even more beautiful, but haunting. She lacks something human.