Paulina would flirt shamelessly with us when we left the restaurant in our inebriated state. I believe I was the one who slid to her our address, scribbled on the inside of a Petrograd matchbook cover. “Do they ever give you a night off around here?” I said.
She half smiled and replied, “Sure. We’re closed on Sundays.”
“Ah,” Bertrand chimed in, content in the afterglow of a Petite Sirah Port. “The Lord’s day. What could be more fortuitous?”
Paulina and I regarded each other quizzically, neither of us entirely sure what Bertrand meant. Still I said, “Well, by all means, join us some Sunday evening. Come for dinner. We’re excellent cooks.”
“We’re modest, too.” Bertrand helped me into my winter coat.
Paulina laughed politely. “No reason to be modest, you know. No one would fault you for crowing a bit. Most of your attributes are readily discernible.”
Bertrand slipped her a handsome tip. “You shovel it all so seamlessly,” he said sweetly.
She winked at him and stuffed the tip in her pocket.
It had been two weeks since we’d last been to Petrograd, so Paulina was not uppermost in our minds when our downstairs buzzer bleated loudly early one Sunday evening just prior to Christmas. The noise startled us from our mindless gazing at the oversized television screen.
Bertrand stretched and said, “Who could that be?”
“Shall we buzz it up and see?”
He said, “Why not?”
We got up from the comfy couch and then buzzed up our visitor.
We couldn’t have been more pleased when we saw Paulina — dressed in her Sunday best — step off the old freight elevator out in the hallway.
“It’s Paulina,” I said happily.
“So it is. Well, come in, Paulina. Make yourself at home.”
She came inside. “You neglected to give me your phone number, so I took it as a sign.”
“Of what?” I asked curiously, helping her out of her lovely coat in our entryway.
“That I was welcome anytime. That calling ahead would have only been a formality.”
Bertrand and I smiled at each other. He said to her, “How right you were, love. You know, you have quite a good grasp on the English language.”
“I know,” she said pertly. “Now, what are we drinking? Are we going to get festive with it being so close to Christmas?”
“Around here,” Bertrand said, “we even get festive on Arbor Day. Why don’t you ladies relax in there by the fire and I’ll whip up something wonderful in the kitchen.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“I’ll think of something. Maybe something frothy or steamy, or creamy — I don’t know. I only know that it will be brimming with possibilities and there will be plenty to go around.”
“And then what about dinner?” I wanted to know. “Should we plan on ordering up?”
“No,” he said. “Let’s cook, the three of us, together. Can you cook, Paulina?”
“Not really,” she said. “But I can follow directions; I’m easily taught. You know, I grasp things well.”
“I’m sure you do,” Bertrand said, eyeing her perfectly manicured fingers. But beneath her high-toned appearance, she was just a little tart, Paulina was, and Bertrand and I enjoyed it thoroughly — the aural bait she was dangling. “We’ll definitely work those pretty fingers of yours to the bone,” he went on. “We’re excellent teachers. I’m sure the three of us will concoct something memorable.”
I took Paulina by the hand and led her into the living area. Our loft had not come with an actual fireplace; we’d had a quasi-one designed for us, though. It was elevated on a brick platform, with a bronze vent above it and encased in bevelled glass. There were logs on a grate and amber flames; it looked impressive. But it was more an elaborate Sterno pit than a source of any real heat.
“How cosy,” Paulina purred. “And for such an enormous room. Not an effect that’s easy to achieve.”
“We had time on our hands,” I assured her.
“And money, I’m guessing.”
“That, too. Shall we sit?” Without a moment’s hesitation, even in her expensive skirt and sweater, Paulina stretched out on the rug by the fire. I sat down beside her. “Where are you from?” I asked her.
“Oh, far away,” she replied vaguely. “Lots of ice and snow, you know, that sort of place.”
“And what did you do there?”
“A little of what you do here, I should think.”
“Here, as in America? Or here, as in our apartment?”
She looked up at me. “Your apartment,” she said coyly.
I leaned over and kissed her, just a quick kiss, on the side of her face. Her skin was soft. She smelled pretty. “Fascinating,” I said.
“What is?”
“You, your secret world.”
She shrugged. “And you don’t have any secrets?”
“None,” I said quietly. “There’s been nothing that’s been that important.”
“What about him?”
“Bertrand?”
“Yes.”
“An open book — ask him anything, you get an answer. Not always the answer you’re hoping for, but an answer, an honest one.”
“And he likes to cook?”
“We both do. We love food — the pleasure of it. There was a time when we didn’t have much.”
“Pleasure or food?” she asked.
“Food,” I said decisively. “Between us, there has been no lack of pleasure.”
“And yet you’re both so thin. The hedonists I knew in my country were always on the fleshy side, and, sadly, always in such a hurry to get undressed and show it off.”
Hedonists? The word made me laugh. “Your vocabulary is certainly impressive, Paulina.”
One of her perfectly manicured hands reached up and lightly stroked my cheek. “And you’re pretty, too,” she said. “They aren’t always as pretty as you.”
Bertrand came into the room carrying a pitcher and some glasses. “We’ve a rum punch for starters,” he announced. “Is that festive enough?”
“Rum punch!” I enthused. “It goes perfect with Christmas fudge. I’ll go get a tray from the kitchen and bring some in.”
In the mere moments it took me to arrange the fudge on a glass tray and bring it into the living area, Bertrand had managed to remove Paulina’s pretty Italian shoes and was gently massaging her feet through her stockings down there on the floor by the fire. Her stockings were black with a pretty, all-over lacy pattern.
“Wolford,” I said, sitting down next to them with the tray of fudge in hand. I set it down on the floor.
Paulina said dreamily, “Pardon me?”
“Your stockings — I recognize the pattern — Wolford hosiery. I saw those at Bergdorf’s.” Bertrand had filled our glasses with the rum punch and they were lined up in a neat little row on the elevated hearth in front of us. I leaned over Paulina and reached for a glass. I added, “Being a coat check girl must pay very handsomely to afford Wolford.”
She said slyly, “You’d be surprised.”
“Nothing surprises us any more, does it, dear?”
Bertrand, content for the moment to be rubbing Paulina’s feet and driving her quietly into ecstasy, said, “No. Nothing does. Not any more.”
Moaning softly, Paulina barely left her reverie when she mused, “I would have liked to have known you both then.”
“When’s that?” I said. I was the only one among us who was not immediately heading into some type of swoon. I helped myself to a piece of fudge.
“Back when things surprised you,” she said.
Bertrand smiled at the remark. He parted Paulina’s legs and stared at whatever it was he could see up under her skirt.
“I was right, you know,” I said, though no one seemed to be noticing me. “About the fudge, I mean. It goes great with the rum punch, if anyone’s interested: sugar on top of sugar, you know. They complement each other. Of course, a little goes a long way.”
Bertrand leaned over and grabbed Paulina by her hips and slid her down the rug closer to him, her skirt sliding up around her waist as he did so, revealing that her expensive stockings were the stay-put kind. She was not wearing garters. But she was wearing a tiny pair of silk panties, ruby red with a black lace pattern overlay. They looked stunning against her bone-white skin. A half-moon-shaped scar on her pelvis peeked out at the top of her panties. I ran my finger lightly along the scar.