“Too stubborn,” Papa mumbled, his eyes growing heavy. “Too beautiful.”
Yuri and I barely manage to make it out for our first real date night, which is, of course, at the Lair. He had some fancier ideas, but I turned him down, insisting that we didn’t need to go to some dumb new sushi place in the Village we couldn’t afford anyway; I just wanted to get out of the house, with him, and would have been happy going to Gray’s fucking Papaya. When we walk in the door, dripping with early July sweat, the scent of the Devil’s Lair takes me back to a time when I was exhausted but excited about the big, glowing world. I’d get off work at three, four in the morning, and walk five blocks home in Toms, holding my heels, feeling like I was doing something big, like I was part of something. And now here it is: the scent of old red wine and the greasy kitchen food, and then Mel, who hangs up his towel and walks over to our side of the bar and gives me a big hug—it’s only the second time I’ve seen him since Tally was born—and then shakes Yuri’s hand.
“Big Mama,” he says. “How are you?”
“Tired.”
“Well, you look good.”
“Don’t flatter me, Mel.”
“I’m doing nothing of the kind, girl. I have four myself, so I know how it is,” he says to Yuri. “Drinks?”
“Please,” I say, and then we take a seat at the bar and shoot the shit as he pours a glass of wine for me and a beer for Yuri, but Mel knows to leave us alone. I spot two regulars: Scotty, a retired elementary school teacher and alcoholic, and Isabella, who works at Yard Sale, a bar a few blocks away, but refuses to drink in the place where she works on principle. I’d been at the Lair for the last four years, and it was by far the classiest of the bars where I had worked, a place with frayed red lamps and paintings of women in lingerie and fake candles and soft pop in the background, a place to take your mistress. I got the job when I moved in with Yuri to the rent-controlled apartment he’d lived in for a decade and I never looked back. Before that, I worked at Tequila Predator in Murray Hill, a post-college douche bro bar with a table for beer pong and even an N64 setup in the back to boot, and I hated it almost as much as the endless subway ride to Inwood. But that wasn’t nearly as bad as No Satisfaction, a place true to its name in Astoria where I worked after I dropped out of NYU after one semester, where the manager didn’t care that I didn’t have my license but knew it would make it hard for me to leave and cupped my ass one too many times as a result. Compared to all that, the Lair was basically heaven. I was sad to quit when I got too pregnant to stand on my feet for that long.
“This is a nice place,” I say, and Yuri laughs. “What?” I say. “I mean, it’s nice, for a bar.” When he keeps laughing, I say, “I’m sorry. We should have gone—”
“No, no, who needed to schlep downtown? I don’t care, I just want to see you. I’m just laughing because you just said it like—like this was Versailles or something.”
“Maybe it was, to me,” I say, though I have never been to any country but America and Ukraine. I’m already feeling the first glass hitting me, hard, and I order another round and some food because it takes about an hour to get even a grilled cheese. When I take a few sips of my second drink, the room is practically spinning, though that is likely from exhaustion and not the fact that I haven’t had more than one glass of wine in about a year.
“Man, I am so fucking tired.”
“Me, too,” Yuri says, cheersing me with his beer. “Though not, of course, like you.”
“No. Of course not.”
He sighs, looking hurt. “Hey, ouch.”
“Ouch yourself.”
“I just feel like I still do thirty percent of the work and am treated like I do zero.” And it’s true, he does do some shit around the house, like cleaning the litter box, hauling all the diapers to the trash, and so on, but it hardly registers.
“I think you do twenty percent of the work and I treat you like you do ten.”
“How about we agree I do about twenty-five percent and you treat me like I do fifteen.”
“Deal,” I say, taking another gulp of my wine. “I can’t believe I actually thought this would be kind of like taking care of the cat. I mean, I know I wouldn’t just, like, brush her and feed her and change the litter box once a day. I’m not an idiot, but I just thought babies nap the whole time, and I don’t know, I thought I’d just get—a moment to breathe. And people are like, It gets better, it gets better, but I feel like the longer she’s here, the worse I feel, because my gas tank is running more and more empty….”
“About that,” he says, taking a cautious sip of his beer.
“Oh no. I should have seen this. When I said I wanted a date night, I thought you got excited because you wanted to see me, not because you wanted to have a talk.”
“Can’t we have a date night that includes a talk?”
“A talk on the theme of…”
Yuri sighs. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him drink more than two beers in a row, so he must also be feeling it. “Look,” he says, “I don’t think it’s too late for you to go to school. I don’t mean this fall, but maybe in the spring? You’ve always loved taking care of animals and, well, I’m not saying you should go to vet school, but you can get an associate’s degree, you can work as an assistant to a vet or at a pet daycare—”
“Why can’t I go to vet school?” I say, and he smiles, because he thinks this line of questioning, instead of What the fuck are you talking about, shows that I have some interest in his idiot plan.
“What?”
“You said, blah, blah, associate’s degree, so why not vet school?”
He smiles. “Well, first you need a bachelor’s degree to apply, and then, it’s very competitive—”
“You don’t think I’m smart enough.”
“No, no, that came out wrong. It would just take, what, at least eight years before you made any money, and it’s a lot of long nights studying—”
“You’re not helping your case, Shulman.”
“Then please help me take my foot out of my mouth. Okay, forget what I said about vet school, and just listen to me. I just think it would be good for you, for us, to have another plan that doesn’t involve going back to the Lair. You love Sharik, you loved all those other pets, you even cat-sat to make some extra money in high school, no?”
“I love the Lair. What’s wrong with the Lair? On Friday and Saturday nights, I’d walk out of here with a couple hundred bucks in my pocket. And I made that and more doing voiceover work. How much does it pay to—take the temperature of some cat up the ass? Probably a lot less than that.”
“Definitely less, but it’s a path to a more stable future. Do you want to work at the Lair when you’re fifty?”
“I would fucking love nothing more than to work here right now, instead of changing diapers and getting my tits ravaged,” I say, and my voice is so loud that Mel even raises a brow. “And I can always do voiceover work.”
“When you can find it.”
I close my eyes, willing myself not to cry. So fine, The Americans is over, and nobody else has been begging me to speak Russian in the background of their show for thirty bucks an hour, but I’ll get another break eventually. I think of my poor mother again, singing in the fucking backyard during her last months on Earth. And then I think of Stas, who is back at home while Tally is sleeping. He would never tell me to clean cat shit for a job.
“I know you’ve given up on me having a career,” I say. “But I haven’t, all right? I’m just in a low period because of the pregnancy and the baby, but I’m not ancient yet.”