Stas stomps around with his hands on his hips, like he has something to say. He was supposed to read over the final version of my play last night but hasn’t said anything yet. Maybe he didn’t get to it. He’s been busy as hell, ever since he moved out of our place last month to crash at the studio of a friend in Harlem who is going to be gone the rest of the summer, close to the restaurant where he’s working. I was glad Yuri and I were left alone, finally, but I missed him more than a little, though I tried to tell myself it was mostly because of the help he gave me with Tally. Still, when I asked him to come with me, I thought he was coming partly out of guilt, since I had been with Tally around the clock pretty much since he left, though Yuri’s been helping more since his summer classes ended. Anyway, it was a good thing Stas and I hadn’t been alone together much because it seemed like some of that heat, or the heat I had imagined earlier, had cooled along with the hint of fall in the late-summer air.
But now, standing on the stage, just the two of us, I feel shaky. I’m still getting used to his short haircut, though he’s had it for a while. It makes him look, I don’t know, more respectable, less like a fuckboy, which only makes me more nervous.
“Well?” I say.
“Looks good,” he says, kicking the boxcar. “It really does.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Ah,” he says, understanding. “The play wasn’t bad, Sterling. Not bad at all.”
I feel a flood of relief. He actually fucking read it. And didn’t hate it, in spite of his high standards. But he just keeps walking around the stage without looking me in the eye.
“But?” I say.
He smiles. “But nothing. I just thought it was kind of funny that you left out the Orlov family. I mean, weren’t the brothers kind of the point?”
I shrug. “It would have been too hard to pull off by myself. I started writing it with them in it and just saw how much easier it would be without them, so I went with that.”
“Fair enough,” he says. “You think your grandmother will care that you changed the story?”
“She’ll just want to see the best I can do,” I say.
He makes like he’s going to take a step closer to me but he doesn’t. “All right then.”
He’s giving me this intense look that makes me scared as hell. I know I’m being a complete idiot. I must be the only person dumb enough to be capable of flirting this much with an almost-six-month-old at home. Most moms at this stage are probably still tending to their wounded vaginas and desperately enjoying their sad date nights, yet here I am, in need of something more. I know this can’t end anywhere good, and that once the play is over, I won’t have an excuse for hanging out with Stas solo, that we’ll only hang if Yuri is around. Unless—
We climb into the boxcar, sitting down on the one bed with a little window behind it meant to be the place where my grandmother and her sister slept. It’s dark in here, and musty. Though I cut my grandmother’s return to Kiev, I picture her in this boxcar, accepting Grandpa Misha’s proposal in an utterly perfunctory way. With Uncle Bogdan looking over her shoulder, hearing the whole thing. Then he comes toward her, speaking to her for the last time before her wedding, really, and she doesn’t know what to do, or how to tell him how she feels.
“Do you think my grandmother should have been with Bogdan instead?” I say.
Stas sighs and looks at the car’s ceiling. “Who is to say? What if they got together but got sick of each other after a while?”
“You really think that would have happened?”
“How am I supposed to know?” he says, and he sounds tired, defensive. It has been a long day. Schlepping the last of the props across the city. Sweating like crazy. Wondering what the hell is going on between us.
“I’m not asking you to know. I’m asking for your best guess.”
“What does it matter? What’s done is done,” he says. “For her anyway. As for us, I don’t know,” he adds.
“Us,” I say, swallowing hard.
I scoot away from him and then a slow smile rises on his face. He gets up, takes me by the hand, and leads me backstage and I don’t even question it. We’re standing near a cardboard mountain Slavik painted and then told me to scrap because it looked too cartoonish. But right now, I feel like I could take another step and start climbing it, like I can almost see my grandmother’s factory town in the distance. Stas pushes me against it and kisses me, hard. I feel like my legs are going to melt, that I’m just going to turn into a puddle right now and no one will ever hear from me again. I pull away and feel embarrassed and excited and confused, all at fucking once. The smoky taste of his tongue lingers in my mouth.
“Why did you do that?” I say.
“Why did I kiss you?”
“No. Why did you pull me out of the boxcar?”
He laughs. “Because I do have some limits, Sterling.”
This makes me laugh, a little. What, he didn’t want to corrupt my grandmother’s train? There’s a sick kind of logic to it. I’m scared of the silence so I feel compelled to talk again, walking back onstage. “When I was a teenager, I’d visit my grandmother in Sevastopol during the summers, and she was always having these ‘friends’ show up—she’d leave me on the beach and go have her flings.”
“Huh,” he says. “What about your grandfather?”
“I’m not sure if he knew. There was only one time when I thought he might have,” I say, but it doesn’t feel like the right time to go on about my sweet grandfather, a kind, thoughtful man who seemed to genuinely care about my acting, through his silly notes. “Baba’s not sure if he knew either. Honestly, I have no idea,” I say.
“It’s better off that way, isn’t it?”
I get ready for a whole big conversation about what this meant, what will happen from now on, what is the meaning of a good life, how can it all mean anything, how can we even dare to suffer when we know what our grandparents and parents went through to get us to this fucking country. I’m relieved when he doesn’t say anything else, when he takes my hand and leads me back inside the boxcar, where I sigh and rest my head on his shoulder. I have questions for him—how does he really feel about me? What happened with that girl in Boston?—but they’ll just have to wait.
What was my grandmother’s story supposed to tell me if not this? A tiny part of me wishes I could ask her what to do, but I’m not nuts, I don’t want to let her down. Besides, she’s so busy setting up her sea home that she hardly has time for me these days, not that I would trouble her with my romantic problems anyway, since I want her to think I have my shit together. Anyway, could she really tell me what to do—if this was beyond a stupid, meaningless crush? I scan the boxcar for an answer, but I just grab a thin gray blanket and cover myself with it and close my eyes, knowing that nobody, nobody in the world, can tell me what to do.
I’m going out of my mind so I finally take Stephanie up on her offer to get shithoused at the Lair after our babies have gone to bed. She had definitely been my favorite coworker there, probably because she was also an actress, and I was devastated when she quit two years before I did because she got married to a customer who happened to work at JPMorgan and immediately had a baby with him and did the whole thing, a brownstone in Park Slope and all. Though we don’t see each other that often, she’s still the best friend I’ve got, and it feels nice, being back at the scene of the crime with her, even if it is where Yuri and I had that terrible fight. Mel’s out this time, and there are two hot twentysomethings working the bar who don’t know us, and aside from Scotty the regular, who waves at us, we are pretty anonymous and that’s how I want it to be. Yuri had to finish planning his fall classes, and I spent fourteen hours straight with Tally, and I’m just pumped to talk to someone who can actually talk back to me.