“So, you know Bega,” Joshua said. “Small world.”
“I know him. He lives close.”
“Captain Ponomarenko and Larissa are here too. They hate the thought of me.”
“Yes,” she frankly confirmed. “But I like you.” There was the momentary purse of her lips and a flash of the dimples before she smiled, rendering Captain USSR and his wife harmless and irrelevant. She bespoke the supreme authority of the governing hostess — everyone in her domain was going to be taken care of. Kimmy had a similar quality, but her domain was spare: he and Bushy were the only ones populating it. Ana pulled up her bra and Joshua compliantly followed her to the kitchen.
“You know Bega?” she asked.
“We’re in the same screenwriting workshop.”
“What is workshop?”
“Oh, we share our work with others and then talk shop about it.”
“Nice,” she said, in a way that suggested that she understood what he was talking about. Kimmy claimed that the workshop format had emerged at the same time as group therapy, but she hadn’t experienced Graham’s workshopping, which was as far from healing as can be.
In the small kitchen, there was a man taking up half of the space. A cleaver in hand, he was dismembering what appeared to be a whole lamb stretched on a plank, its eyes about to pop out in roasted surprise. Whenever the man brought the cleaver down, everything on the counter leapt up and the lamb raised its head. Barbed wire was tattooed in a circle around the man’s neck, as if to keep his head and body segregated.
Ana said something to the man, and he revolved to give her an angry look, responding with a word that, to Joshua, sounded gutturally ugly. The man did not look at Joshua once, waving the cleaver around as he was getting wound up about something. Ana stood between Joshua and the door, blocking off the retreat route, so he looked around the kitchen with feigned interest: a calendar from a butcher shop on the wall; a cuckoo clock with weights and an unmoving pendulum; the spice rack, spiceless. He nodded, as if to show his admiration for the simple, human ambition of the kitchen. The Levin syndrome: always seeing himself from someone else’s point of view, as if in a movie.
Finally, mercifully, Ana said: “This is Esko, my husband.”
“Pleasure to meet you, Esko,” Joshua said. “I’m Joshua.”
Esko moved the cleaver from his right to his left hand, as if considering shaking Joshua’s hand, still saying nothing. His jaw was wide and not only unshaven but layered with unshavenness; a big, blackish wart protruded from the depths of his hirsute cheek. Joshua understood at first glance that Esko disliked him.
“I’m Ana’s English teacher,” he said, unnecessarily.
“Good,” the man said and returned the cleaver to his right hand. A scene presented itself to Joshua: Esko grabbing his right hand, carelessly offered for a shake, then swinging the cleaver and slicing it off, the blood spraying the kitchen walls. Instead, Esko went back to dismembering the lamb, the splinters of meat flying about excitedly.
“My husband was born in boat,” she said.
“Oh really?” Joshua said. “That’s fascinating.”
“That’s what we say in Bosnia when somebody doesn’t know how to be nice.”
“That’s okay,” Joshua said. All of his utterances felt wrong, as if English suddenly were a language foreign to him. Esko placed the lamb’s head on the board, complete with its grotesquely googly eyes, and split it in two with one powerful blow. He picked up a piece of the brain with the cleaver and licked it off the blade. Born in an abattoir, more likely.
“It is not okay. He was not really born in boat. He is from good city family.”
She was upset, he realized.
“He is my second husband,” she said, which Joshua elected to understand as not my first choice. She was grinding her teeth, snorting instead of breathing. He had an urge to put his arms around her and squeeze her hard, just to see how strong she was. She made choices: she was strong. But there were no dimples in sight.
“I like your place,” Joshua said, helplessly.
“Go look around,” she said.
He slipped past her out into the hallway, but there was little to look at. He could hear Ana speaking to Esko with restrained fury, riddled with hard Eastern European consonants. Obediently, he opened the first door and it was the bathroom: towels, mirror, moldy dampness. He opened another one and it was their bedroom. The bed was unruly, as if sex had just been had in it; chairs covered with clothes; the smell of married bodies. A tower of books stood to one side, on top of which was Let’s Go, America! 5. On the closet door handle, there were her bras, bundled like scalps. As a kid, Joshua had thoroughly searched his parents’ bedroom whenever they’d gone away: he’d frisked his father’s inside suit pockets, finding condoms; he’d looked through his mother’s dresser drawer, dug through her bras and underwear; he’d gone through their documents: bills, bank statements, letters to lawyers. He’d kept tabs on them; he’d found out unmentionable things. He’d known well before Rachel that Bernie had been fucking Constance on the sly. He closed the door.
“It’s crazy messy,” Ana said, right behind him. There was only one more door to open: a handwritten sign on it said “Welcome to Hell!”
“Room of Alma. My daughter,” Ana said, but she didn’t open the door for him, and he didn’t insist. What could’ve been in there? Script Idea #62: A secret door in a teenager’s closet leads to an alternate universe, where she is the heiress to a powerful empire, her life endangered by her evil stepfather.
* * *
Ana placed him at the head of the table, so that everyone now regarded him with expectation, as if he were supposed to conduct a workshop, or affirm his authority by delivering a salutation of some sort. No authority, however, was affirmed except for Ana’s, as she went around the table introducing all of her guests. Their names consisted entirely of unpronounceable sounds, therefore incomprehensible and impossible to remember. When she got to Bega, he said something that made her laugh.
“We go way back,” Bega said in English and winked. The woman sitting next to Bega was Ana’s boss, it turned out, and she was Russian. She had coal-black hair and biblically dark eyes, which made her appear very young. Joshua hadn’t even known Ana worked but he refrained from inquiring. Everyone at the table was now quiet, still waiting for Joshua to say something, and he couldn’t think of a single word to utter. Everything excellent is as difficult as it is rare.
In the meantime, Ana packed a plate and set it down before him. “Little bit of everything,” she said. When Esko walked in with a pile of lamb on a platter, she picked a boneless piece for Joshua and dropped it on his plate, to which everyone responded with an appreciative “oooh.”
“What do you want to drink?” Bega asked. “There is everything.”
“I like wine,” Joshua said, before he saw what was on the table. There was little doubt he looked like a snob.
And thus he drank some overoxidized wine and it was vile, but people talked at him and he could not fend off their foreign blather without alcohol, and he drank a lot of it, oxidation be damned. Ana was seated next to him, their thighs rubbing. It seemed that she was looking for ways to touch him surreptitiously, and mind he did not. She refilled his glass with the dreadful wine, while she sipped Johnnie Walker. Esko came in occasionally to bring more food or another bottle of booze, but he pretty much spent the evening in the kitchen. There was a cloud over his head, and everyone quieted down whenever he came by. “He doesn’t like parties,” Ana told Joshua by way of explanation. “Because he doesn’t like people.”