“My grandmother nearly starved to death, but she never really complained. She even had to eat a cat, once. Did I tell you she had to eat a cat?”
“Now you’re just being mean.”
“So what if I am?”
We wait for the too-hot food to cool in near silence, mostly out of principle, because this is our fucking big night out and I’m not going to go home and sulk and eat Trader Joe’s chana masala, not tonight. When we try to settle, Mel just gives me a wink and says, “On the house.”
“See?” I say to Yuri. “Nice place.”
“How was the audition?” says Stas.
“It was shit,” I say, tossing my bags by the door of my shit apartment. Shit, shit, shit. Everything is shit, and has especially been shit for the past three days since my botched date night. Except my baby girl, who evidence says is sleeping in her crib in the next room—yet again not needing to fall asleep in my arms to drift off. Though I’m relieved I don’t have to immediately go into mom mode when I walk in, it would also be nice to see her little gremlin face for a moment, to be reminded that there is still some good in the world, even if that good is slowly making me go insane. Alas, she’s not up to remind me that I shouldn’t care that I definitely did not book the Uber-driver-slash-spy role, which would have given me twenty seconds on prime time, ten of which I would have spent saying, “Please, I am innocent! Give me another chance!” and the rest sliding down a flight of stairs with two bullet holes in my head.
I say, “They basically flat-out said I was, like, too American for the part. Which is bullshit because my Russian accent was perfect.”
“They really said that?”
“Basically.” He raises a brow and I continue. “They just kind of gave me this look. I know what it meant.”
“You sound a bit paranoid if you ask me.”
“I didn’t ask you.”
“No, you just asked me to watch your baby,” he says, but he’s not done. “If it’s so stupid, then why do you keep doing it?”
“What do you mean, why? This is my life. I need to get back into the game. What else am I supposed to do, stay home?”
“Aren’t there some other options?”
“Such as?”
He looks at me blankly like this is obvious. “You said it yourself—you might as well put on your grandmother’s story as a play….”
“I was joking before. I’m not going to make a damn play of Baba’s story. How the fuck could I even pull it off?”
“Why make it so complicated? Can’t you just do it all yourself?”
I laugh at how stupid he is. “Sure I can. I’ll just do a one-woman show and will get the stage ready and write the fucking thing and promote it all by myself. That’s a great idea. I have all the time in the world to do something like that. Why don’t I ask you for advice more often?”
He laughs. “Maybe you should. I think it would make you happy.”
“I don’t want to be happy, you moron. I want to be successful. Putting on this play isn’t going to get me noticed again.”
“Ah,” he says, looking so smug I want to smack him. I move closer to do just that, but I second-guess myself. Maybe I’m better off not touching him at all.
“It must be nice, to be so above it all. And how many poems have you published, Mayakovsky?”
“Hey, hey,” he says, lifting up his hands. “I’m on your side, remember? I think it’s amazing that you put yourself out there, Sterling, really, I give you props. I don’t think I could ever do it.”
“Then why write?”
“Have you heard of this whole ‘art for art’s sake’ thing?”
“But who came up with that anyway? Some famous person?”
He laughs. “Probably.”
“I can barely function as it is. And what, I spend the summer trying to make this thing work—I find a stage, I promote the event, I write the fucking thing—and then, if I even do convince her to come, she’ll see the wreck I’ve made of her life during her last trip to America? Then I can say I’ve actually done something meaningful as an actress, even if nobody gives a fuck?” I realize I’m tearing up. I need to sit down. I need to breathe for about a year. And yet, I feel excited for the first fucking time. Whenever I close my eyes these days, instead of thinking about my next audition, I see my grandmother as a teenager before my eyes. Those cold, far-off mountains. Her sweet, tired, father. Her sister and her beloved cat. Her shifting affections for my grandfather and his brother. “It would be completely ridiculous,” I say, but I see the slow smile spreading on his face and I know that he knows me for some reason, and now that he’s got me sinking my teeth into this idea, he won’t let it go.
He smiles and goes back to his book. “Sounds pretty doable to me.”
“Fuck off.”
We have a standoff. I don’t know why he’s so up my ass about this, or why he cares. But he’s standing pretty fucking close to me so I move away and get kind of nervous, so of course I ramble on and on.
“The last time I wrote a play was like, ten years ago, when I wrote Diddler on the Roof, a play about a Hassidic child molester. Some of the Babies thought it was in poor taste, but it was hilarious! It nearly broke the group up, but the committed people put on quite a show. Then some Jews got all offended and spoke to the Times about how today’s youth was ruined, calling me out by name! I was just so excited—never in a million years did I think I would be in the Times. And guess what? I got a better agent after that.”
“You’re a credit to your race.”
“I thought so anyway,” I say, tapping my foot.
I think I hear my daughter, but it’s just the stairs. Then I hear the key grumbling in the lock. Yuri walks in, in a wrinkled shirt, looking tired but happy. I give him a hug and rub a bit of marker off his cheek.
“How was the audition?” he says.
“It was shit,” I say again.
“I’m sure it wasn’t.”
“But it doesn’t matter because she’s going to put on a play about her grandmother’s life,” Stas says, and I kick his foot. I didn’t expect him to blurt it out like this, not when I don’t even know what I really think about the whole thing. Yuri gives me this kind of blank look and I think, why not test him out?
“A one-woman show at that,” I say. “What do you think?”
He laughs and kisses me on the forehead and only after he drops his bag does he realize I’m not kidding. Or, rather, the alarmed look on his face, as if I had said something truly crazy like that I was thinking of going to medical school or that I was pregnant again, or thinking of scaling our building makes me see that maybe I am not kidding after all. And Stas, twenty-eight-year-old, ponytailed Stas, is more on my side than my husband is. He’s the one who gets me right now.
“And when would you get that done, exactly?” Yuri asks.
“When do I get anything done? When the baby is napping,” I say, all defensive all of a sudden when moments ago I didn’t even take Stas’s idea seriously.
“Are you serious?”
“Serious as a heart attack,” Stas says.
“Shut up,” I tell him.
He lifts his hands like, Don’t shoot, as if he’s so innocent.
Yuri looks from me to him and back to me again. “Interesting,” he says.
“Listen, I’m going to go,” says Stas. “Sorry, man,” he says, looking at Yuri, not me, like I’m the one who’s fucked everything up instead of him. He tells us he’s off to see about a server job in Harlem, the first I’ve heard of it. As he puts on his shoes and then the coat he doesn’t need, I think, No, no, don’t go. But what good could come of him staying? What’s he going to do, take me in his arms and declare that I should be able to put on this play if I fucking want to? Tell me I’m beautiful and talented and make sure Yuri knows it? He leaves and it’s quiet, quiet. I pick up poor neglected Sharik and stroke his hair, and then I look up at Yuri.