One day he chose the least muddle-headed of all the muddle-headed women he’d met and married her.
In the dining car he immediately felt good. He had a shot of vodka, turned on his computer, and started working. The vodka had nothing to do with it. He liked his work. And travel. Spatial displacement was stimulating. The writer valued detachment. To describe something, you have to detach from it.
He wrote for two hours, then was tired and had another drink—not because of his weariness but in order to prolong his pleasure. A little later the young woman came into the dining car with the same heels, the same smile, and the same ass, and sat down opposite him. The writer—an experienced night train passenger—had gone to the dining car earlier than the others and now occupied a four-seat table; he had set up his smart electronic device among the coffee cups and not a single hungry person had sat down with him all evening. Everyone had appeared in groups or pairs and found free seats without disturbing the writer; or, more likely, they had taken the writer not for a writer but for the restaurant manager tallying his debits and credits, since the table was the last one, next to the kitchen. Whatever it was, the writer was not surprised at the stranger’s proximity. It is fairly risky, when you have such high heels, to sit alone in a dining car at two in the morning when four traveling salesmen—wet brows, ties askew—are dozing in one corner, and two crew-cut alpha males, together weighing five hundred pounds, are drinking beer in another. If the writer were a young woman in heels, he would have sat with someone like him. Short, almost sober. Computer on his left, notebook on his right.
And so, she was on her way to see her lover. She was free, he was married; she was in one city, he was in the other. He didn’t want to divorce (his kids? the writer asked; his companion nodded), he paid for her weekly trips and hotel (generous, the writer said; his companion shrugged).
The writer introduced himself as a writer and added that the titles of his books were scarcely known to the general public.
She livened up a little.
He bought her alcohol.
“I feel like a fool,” she admitted, relaxed after her third shot. “The relationship has no future. I don’t want to be wasting time. He’s much older and I don’t love him. But he’s nice. Respectable, strong, and smart. High-ranking,” she clarified, slurring a little. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Have another drink,” the writer suggested.
“No, I’ve had enough,” she responded. “I want to but I won’t.”
“What should you do?” he repeated. “It’s very simple. Relax. You’re young. Enjoy yourself. You want to sleep with a man—do it. You want to drink some more—do it. Be happy. Do you feel good now?”
“Yes,” she answered after thinking it over. Her drunken gravity and the gaze into nowhere of her well-fogged eyes cheered the writer up.
“That’s just great,” he said. “Hold onto that feeling. Savor your pleasure. I’m forty. I got married at twenty. I dropped out of college and got a job. I haven’t stopped ever since. I kept thinking like you. I worried about the future… I was afraid of wasting time… To hell with that. Live in the here and now and don’t be afraid of anything. Youth is given to be enjoyed.”
“Yes,” the young woman said, and she gave him a grateful look. “Ask them to bring more vodka…”
He excused himself and went out on the platform to smoke a cigarette. When he returned, one of the alpha males was leaning over his companion. Evidently he had made a vulgar suggestion. The other was waiting at their table sucking on a pale shrimp.
The writer thought ruefully that he had no chance. If, say, he smashed a bottle and jammed it into his back or shoulder… In any event, the only way to beat the square-shouldered heavyweight was by surprise and cunning. He’d never last in hand-to-hand. The young woman, however, politely and curtly rejected the solicitation, and the alpha backed off before the writer could come within striking range.
“It must be time,” she said.
He nodded and asked for the check. As they moved past the alpha males, the writer turned away, and a few seconds later thought that he shouldn’t have walked by as simply as that, and he felt a primitive vexation.
He didn’t want the girl and didn’t care whether the girl wanted him. He should have jammed something sharp into the alpha-giant’s shoulder for his own sake, not the girl’s. The writer had grown up in a small factory town and from his early youth had known that a girl sitting at someone else’s table was someone else’s girl. It didn’t matter who she was, who she came with, or who she left with. What was important was who was pouring for her at that moment. This simple thought should have been brought home to those alpha-jerks, preferably with the help of a blow to the head. But the writer didn’t strike, didn’t even throw them a look. He was afraid. He had the good sense not to look for adventure.
Good sense has a nasty aftertaste, he thought sorrowfully as he climbed up onto the top berth and turned toward the wall. When his new acquaintance returned from the bathroom and wanted to continue their conversation, the other neighbor, now awake, joined the conversation desultorily, and she started talking about love (what else?); the writer thought with relief that the girl just liked to chatter, and he fell asleep.
The hotel was a five-minute walk from the train station. The writer had stayed at this hotel a few times before, and when his wife asked him to recommend a decent place, he not only told her the address but called and reserved a room himself. The same one he usually stayed in. He reminded them that he was a steady customer and they immediately took care of everything. By all accounts, the minihotel belonged to intelligent people; the staff was good-natured, and they valued steady customers. And the writer valued those who valued him—if not as a writer, then at least as a steady customer.
A private five-room hotel, a former communal apartment in an ordinary apartment building—no, not ordinary, the real deal, a classic Petersburg building with a series of mercilessly asphalted courtyards linked by arches. Iron roofs, sprawling staircases— special twists for those in the know. Around the corner, three local cafés right there, each with its own local color: alcohol and bikers in S&M leather in one; ladies with cakes and no smoking in the next; and in the third, the food was good and cheap. Fifty paces away was Nevsky Prospect.
The damp immediately grabbed hold of his face and hands. Cold and humid; the writer was shivering even before he reached his destination.
He watched the dark, curtained windows of the room for a long time. Eight in the morning. Either she’d already run off on her affairs, which would be bad, or else she was just about to wake up and turn on the light, which would be good; then he could see the silhouettes. He could tell his wife right away by her lush, long hair. If there was someone else in the room, the writer would try to tell if it was a man or a woman. If it was somehow clear that the second lodger was a man, the writer would head back to the station and leave on the very next train.
For instance, if the room’s other guest pulled back the curtain, opened the window, and lit up.
Although his wife couldn’t stand tobacco smoke and would scarcely allow him to smoke.
Or did she love him and allow him anything?
His best friend once said, “They should love us smoking, drinking, and poor.”
When the windows lit up the writer panicked a little but quickly calmed down.
In his youth he’d done a bit of surveillance. He would get hired to find people who had borrowed money. Strange though it seems, in the early ‘90s the business of collecting debts was considered boring and not very profitable; smart people who began working on these cases switched at the first opportunity to something more interesting, like selling candies or trousers. The writer did exactly the same and subsequently recalled his street exploits without the slightest pleasure. Surveillance requires someone with an unremarkable appearance, and the writer was a skinny, mean kid; when the time came to send someone to prison, the citizen victims would have easily identified the writer.