“We kissed,” I tell him as I finally manage to get my heels off.
“You and Stephanie? Aren’t you a little old to get into all that again?” he says, but his smile falls halfway through and he understands me perfectly. He puts a hand to his neck, like he’s adjusting a phantom tie.
“It was just once,” I tell him. “Yesterday. I—I don’t know what it means.”
“What it means?” he says, backing away from me, toward the couch. He sighs. “Look, I thought you and Stas were flirting a bit, but you flirt with everybody so I didn’t really care. I didn’t realize—if you don’t know what it means, then why did you bother telling me?” He stands up.
“I don’t flirt with everybody.”
“Come on. You do too, but I don’t care that much.”
“I just wanted to be honest.”
“No, you wanted to be selfish. You wanted to burden me with your mistake.”
“Couldn’t it be a bit of both?” I say. “Anyway, I just—you fell in love with a hard-drinking foulmouthed actress, didn’t you? And now you just want me to change diapers all day and become a professional dog walker or whatever.”
“That was not exactly how I put it,” he says. “And are you telling me that this is why you—”
“I’m not blaming you. I just—he kind of, reminded me of who I was before I got knocked up.”
He puts his head in his hands. “I still love that hard-drinking foulmouthed actress. But I also love you as a mother, all right? And I’m not trying to change you, I’m just trying to find a way to make this—new version of you happy.”
“Keep looking, then,” I say. I sink down into the couch. “You do understand that I’ve been having a hard time, don’t you?”
“I’m not fucking blind, Natasha. Of course I understand. I do what I can when I’m not working. But lots of people have a hard time without—fucking around.”
“Lots of people are better at this than I am.”
“Stop it. You can’t make me feel guilty right now, all right?”
He shakes his head and moves even farther away from me, his back against the balcony door, which I covered in Christmas lights even though he thought it was tacky, while I insisted it was festive, and dressed up our dreary fucking place. His eyes are glazed over, like he can’t even look at me. He slides the glass door open and steps outside, and I just watch him standing there with his hands on the railing, his strong back rising and falling as he tries to get ahold of himself.
I hear the jingle of Sharik’s bell, and the boy jumps on the couch and then starts the predictable suck, suck, suck that means he’s going to town on himself. I had three perfectly good cats, some who died even before he did—of all of them, why did the dick-sucking one have to survive? Or was there something about the dick sucking that helped him survive? These questions are beyond me right now.
“Foo, foo, disgusting!” I say, kicking him off the couch, which still smells a bit like Stas’s cigarettes. When he sneaks off to his litter box in the bathroom, I regret it, getting rid of my only friend in the world, but he has to learn his lesson. I don’t know what else to do so I scroll through my phone. Babies Vera is posting about booking one line on Victims Incorporated, as if anyone gives a shit. I like it and even congratulate her.
Yuri returns from the balcony looking even madder than before. In fact, he’s not walking, he’s more like marching toward me, his fists balled at his sides, looking like a little boy determined to deliver his big line in the school play. The last time he looked like that, his brow furrowed with such intense determination, was when he asked me to marry him, just after we visited my father’s grave on his birthday, in the parking lot outside the cemetery on a cold gray winter day. I couldn’t help it then, I burst out laughing as I watched him go down on one knee because it was such a funny time to ask someone to marry you and he laughed too and said, “I know, I know, I was going to ask you this weekend, but I couldn’t wait another second,” and I said, “I know that, and neither can I.”
But obviously no proposal is currently forthcoming, though I am genuinely curious about what he will say to me with such determination, given our circumstances. He takes one, two steps closer to me and his lips part. You can imagine my surprise when the words, or rather, the word that comes out of his mouth is a woman’s name, and not mine either.
“Evgenia,” he says, fists still clenched. I move closer to him, tilting my head, hoping this encourages him to elaborate. But he only says it again: “Evgenia,” he says, moving closer to me. “Evgenia,” one more time, his hands unfisted by then. I try to rack my brains—do we know any Evgenias? Maybe a second cousin on his mother’s side? A long-forgotten friend of my mother’s? My father’s former teacher?
“Normally,” I say, “I go by Natasha.” This fails to make him smile.
“Evgenia Kupershteyn,” he says, sternly. “Do you know who that is?”
“I would guess she’s no American.”
“After your father’s funeral, when you asked if I was seeing anyone, I said no. But this wasn’t true. I was seeing Evgenia Mikhailovna Kupershteyn, a nice girl I met at a faculty mixer, a biologist from Moscow. We had been seeing each other for six months at that point. Though it wasn’t the most passionate relationship, we had a good time together and she was a smart and serious woman. But one kiss from you—and I broke it off with her the next day.”
“You’d have to be smart, with a name like that,” I say. “And?”
“And, I could have been with Evgenia, but I chose you. I have made my bed and now I must lie in it. I knew what you were, I knew you would break my heart, but I just had to have you. Being with you was the only exciting thing I had ever done.”
He even raises his voice at the end of this little speech. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him raise his voice before, especially not when Tally is sleeping. It’s enough to make poor Sharik slink into the other room, tail raised in objection.
“So that’s all I am to you, some exciting thing?”
“You know that’s not what I mean.”
“And now you regret it. Now you wish you had formed an alliance with Evgenia what’s-her-nuts—Mikhailovna Kupersburt.”
“Kupershteyn,” he says, looking utterly defeated. “And that’s not exactly what I’m saying. I just want to tell you that I’m not mad at you. I’m surprised it took this long for you to get sick of me. At least, as far as I know—”
“Yuri, please—”
“I was standing at a crossroad and I took a step toward you. Nobody forced me to do it. Even if you are utterly magnetic, I could have turned you down. I didn’t have to see this through. And now—”
“I made one mistake, all right? That doesn’t mean I’m going to run away.”
Yuri sighs and puts his head in his hands. Though I feel terrible, I’m also annoyed by his little martyr act, like I’m some wild, hopeless creature who couldn’t hold herself back. Even if that is how I feel, I wanted him to expect more from me.
“You could blame me at least a little bit,” I say. “I deserve it.”
“Or I could blame him,” he says, his lips set in a firm line. “He’s always fucking around like this. He fucked around with every girl in the neighborhood, just so you know. A real heartbreaker—of course, I was off at college, but I heard all about it. I love the guy, but he’s kind of a joke.”
“Maybe it’s because nobody ever gave him a fair chance.”
“I see that you think you have a lot in common, but you don’t, Natasha, not anymore.”