After we had texted babysitter information to Cynthia, were seated by an eager Italian man, and had ordered our food and received and poured our bottle of wine (I filled Vlad’s glass twice as full as mine, and being male, he did not notice), we turned to discussing his book. I had reread it over the past few weeks and made careful notes about theme, symbolism, his deft use of irony, his startling word choice, his use of plot as metaphor, his vivid set pieces. When I was a young and insecure teacher I decided that the greatest service I could do for my students was give them my focused attention. Kill them with care, was my motto. If you’re unsure of your brilliance, give your time. A student who feels seen by you is yours forever. And even though it cost me hours of sleep, and probably came at the expense of my fiction career, the habit of close reading has become the way I teach and the reason that, until all this hoopla with John, I was one of the most popular professors on campus.
Our table sat against the glassed-in wall of the porch looking over the brook. Vlad couldn’t stop exclaiming about how charming it all was. The decor was a little outré—red-checked tablecloths, Chianti bottles coated in wax holding candles, large old fake cheeses hung with straw in the rafters—but the fireplace and the contrast with the rural upstate New York exterior that surrounded us made the decorations feel special rather than silly.
I pulled my notes from my bag. I couldn’t meet Vlad’s eyes as I was speaking—he was too interested and eager. I alternated looking at my notes and at the brook outside, watching a long-beaked bird pick at the carcass of a frog, digging and pulling at its gelatinous corpse.
“What I find so remarkable about your book, Vlad, is that you’ve created a work of extreme restraint that never reminds the reader of its leanness. You move so deftly from scene to scene it feels continuous, and only after I finished did I realize how impressively you pushed time forward. Your use of tense is fascinating, as well as the switch-offs between first and third person. I took these shifts as our narrator’s shifts in self-knowledge, and the impossibility of knowing the self. We reflect, we identify, we seek distance, we seek intimacy, all tactics fall short when it comes to actual perception—the views of ourselves are always conditioned. The writing is like a trapdoor: it gives the reader a sense of knowledge behind and around what the prose is presenting—a fascinating sleight of hand. The recurring appearance of paintings and photographs forced me to consider the representation of experience as it was being represented, which was dizzying and exhilarating. I thought often of John Berger and not only Ways of Seeing but also his photography book—do you know that one? I’ll lend it to you. The character of the boy is pitiable, lovable, hilarious, tragic, and the relationship with the father has a warm and lived-in feeling. Do you know those rides that spin so fast that you’re pinned against the wall? Yes, like in the Godard film Breathless, or sorry, what is it? That’s right, the Truffaut film 400 Blows. I know they are so different but I can’t help but mix them up in my mind because I watched them all during one specific time in my life. So anyway, like in those rides, I feel like what is in the center, what everyone is afraid of falling into, what everyone is spinning to avoid, is the body. The material sense of aliveness, animal-ness, humanness. And yet the body is there—it’s the pit, it’s the center, it lives, molten at the core. I admire that the body is there but that you skirt direct mention of it—ever since Roth and Updike it seems as though men can’t write a book in which the physical is present but not didactic…”
And so I continued. At one point Vlad interrupted to ask if I minded if he recorded what I was saying. I said of course not and that I was also happy to provide him with what I had written. Our food came—we both ordered salads and soups. As I spoke, I occasionally topped up his wineglass and watched his eyes become glassier with the effect of the alcohol. I went through my pages—three legal-sized sheets—and when I finished I leaned back in my chair, pleased with myself. I was comprehensive, and complimentary without fawning. I told him I thought he might pay more attention to compression as he neared the final third, my only substantial criticism.
“I want to kiss you,” Vladimir said. And though I knew it was just an expression my heart rate seemed to double, and I felt queasy. He told me that it had been a very long time since he had gotten feedback like that—in fact he had thought the days of hearing his work reflected or analyzed in that way were over. He would be reviewed in the future, he would hear from advisers about what he could change to help sell a manuscript or from publishers about parts that weren’t clear or from a copy editor about usage and grammar, but he hadn’t expected to hear someone fully reflect his work back to him—what he was trying for—with such specificity or rigor.
“Cynthia’s a good reader,” he said. “But her advice is always so holistic. She’ll say, ‘cut this part’ or ‘that guy seems fake.’ ” He waved his hands at me, as if to say I was “too much.” “I knew I was excited about our date for a reason.”
“Well, I didn’t want to read your book. And then I was very jealous of you when I first started it. But then I realized it was very good, and when something’s very good, it doesn’t make me jealous, it makes me happy that it exists.”
“No more—I’ll float away on my own inflated ego.”
I put my elbow on the table and leaned my head against my fist, in a gesture of total attentiveness. “How’s the next book coming?”
Badly, he said, he didn’t have enough time to work on it, so he could never find the kind of rhythm he needed for an honest start. It was hard in the condo—he missed his writing space in his apartment. It had been a closet, he had stared at a blank wall—there had been nothing picturesque about it—he had sat in a folding chair that murdered his back. Still, it was where the first book came from. Also, as a first-year tenure-track junior professor, he needed to publish in some journals, so he had to keep working on an essay he was writing comparing Zamyatin’s We, Huxley’s Brave New World, and recent trends in apocalyptic television. The essay was taking him forever, because as he was writing it he kept forgetting why the topic had ever been interesting in the first place. Finally, with his next book he felt he needed to “swing for the fences” and write something really big—historical, maybe, or with multiple perspectives, or concerning a social issue. He felt scattered, he kept changing topics, he couldn’t settle on something true.
“I think, what do I care about? And for a moment I’ll convince myself that I care about veterans from Afghanistan, or drone operators, or Russian political hackers, or sex slavery, or cults, or the friendship between Babel and Gorky. And I’ll do all this research—this will be it, this will be my big novel. And then I’ll start to write and it will feel so dead and so false that I can’t go on. I think, genre twist, I think personal, and then I’ll think, why am I trying so desperately to find what to write? Doesn’t the world have enough books in it? I should just give up.”
The waiter approached and inquired about dessert. Vlad asked for a cappuccino, but at the risk of appearing domineering, I told him to hold off and asked for the check. “Their coffee is terrible,” I said after the waiter had left. “Not worth it. And also—” I hesitated. The lunch had gone better than I could have dreamed. My dining companion, I could tell, was in an agreeable emotional state and a high level of intoxication. If I were to enact the next steps in my plan they would most probably succeed. And would I want them to? I pictured the alternative—driving him home, dropping him off at the front door of his condo, watching him walk inside, a bomb of hollow sadness falling upon my breast, knowing we would most probably never engage like this again. He would find appropriate friends, other parents his age, “that sexy playground,” as Grace Paley named it. I would get older, we would become familiar with each other, in faculty meetings we would get on each other’s nerves, our interactions would be reduced to mostly brief, pained, “so busy” smiles as we passed each other in the hallways, as it was now between David and me.
No, I couldn’t bear that. I let myself look at him, fully in the face, nurturing a feeling of warm affection: loving the puffy bags beneath his eyes, the large pores on his chin, his spiky nostril hairs, his self-doubt, his neediness…
“I want to show you something,” I said, as though confessing an intimate secret. “May I take you somewhere?”
He said I sounded mysterious and that he was intrigued. And that yes, he would go with me anywhere I wanted. He breathed heavy sighs—“I haven’t felt this kind of release in a long time,” he said. “Do you remember that fairy tale, where the soldier or the prince or the pauper—I forget who—puts the bands around his chest to keep his heart from breaking?”
“You stop that,” I said. “I was just thinking of that story recently.”
“I feel like that, sometimes. Like I need to keep myself held together with bands of iron. For my daughter, for my wife. I have to use the bathroom.”
He stumbled away from the table. I’d had one glass of wine, he’d had the rest, and our harvest salads and minestrone soups—no breadsticks for low-carb Vlad—couldn’t effectually sop up the wine, which came in at an astonishing 15.5 percent alcohol level. (Not too many years ago, you were unlikely to encounter a wine greater than 11 percent; somehow in the past decade we had internationally agreed we needed to get drunker faster and for less.) He had mentioned his “wife” again. “My wife.” “Mine.”
I checked my phone. I had a missed call from John, but no voicemail. He’d texted a photo of attractively arranged wrap sandwiches on a platter with the message The execution will be catered. I searched the internet for the story about the iron bands and found that it was a small detail from Grimm’s The Frog Prince. In the story, when the prince is turned into a frog, his manservant is so grieved that he has three metal hoops soldered around his chest. When the prince is kissed and turned back to human form, and the manservant is driving the couple home to the kingdom, the manservant is so happy that the hoops snap off. Strange, the detail of a servant loving his master so dearly. Homoerotic, perhaps, which is fun to consider, or a teaching tool of oppression, most likely.
I’d paid the check by the time Vlad returned. He protested, but I waved him off, telling him I wasn’t the one saving up for a down payment on a house. As we were gathering our bags the owner turned on a Cuban dance song, and Vlad assumed a stiff upper carriage and gracefully cha-cha’d out the door.
“I was a salsa nerd in high school,” he said. “Florida in the nineties. I was this skinny, zitty kid but they liked me at this one place. I cleaned the floors and got to dance with all these thirty-year-old women in stretchy flare pants and belly chains. It was”—there was a dreamy, sexualized look on his face—“formative.”
My cabin was only a twenty-minute drive from the restaurant. When we arrived and Vlad exclaimed about what a perfect idyll it was, I fought the urge to tell him that he could have it. I wanted to. In the past, early on with friends, and later with boyfriends, I had always been overgenerous—giving away my doll if another child said she liked it, or spending an egregious amount of money on Christmas presents for girls I admired and receiving nothing in return, or giving men free use of my car or place, which often ended in disaster.
I told him to go look out at the lake—and while he walked ahead I opened the trunk and slipped my toiletry bag, the limes, and the cachaça into my work tote, which was voluminous enough to conceal their contents. I yelled that I would be inside when he was done, and hurried into the kitchen. If I was to do what I had planned, I would have to do it now. I wasn’t sure how compulsive Vlad was—he was Russian, he probably had a high tolerance, he clearly liked to drink, but he was also ambitious and a father. I couldn’t tell if he would have more than one cocktail. I pulled out the pill box from my toiletries and rolled a Seconal between my fingers. Would it be possible to seduce him on my own? He seemed to be flirting with me, speaking about sex in indirect ways and suggesting that he and I had a special connection. But no—that was only my own projection, he behaved that way with everyone, I was sure, and besides, compared with Cynthia I was repulsive, an old woman. Real life did not work out like that, with surprise reciprocity—that was a juvenile fantasy, a foolish ideation. I resolved to stay steadfast to the plot. Pushing deliberate thinking from my mind, as though I were in an exercise class and someone was telling me to complete the motions, or, more, like those moments when I turned off my critical brain and forced myself to “just write,” I crushed the pill with the sugar for his drink, muddled the limes, and mixed them with ice and cachaça. I’d started fixing another caipirinha for myself when he tapped at the glass doors that opened into the living area.
“Vat is zis?” he said in an over-the-top accent when I handed him the drink.
“Some renters left cachaça.” I showed him the bottle. “And some limes. You were just talking about salsa—I figured, we had to.”
And it had been a sort of coincidence that I had brought that cachaça (I had brought more options should the mood have been different). But caipirinhas were the drinks that John and I had fallen in love to. Near the university where we first met there was a tapas bar—we would go after classes and get deliriously drunk. First with groups of other academics, and then as friends, until one night I convinced him to take me home with him. I remember those nights as half-lit, sparkling and sultry, my body elated with the romance of romance. When I was packing up and came upon the bottle in my liquor cabinet, I remembered and longed to re-create that glorious, fizzing confidence I had felt in myself, in my appeal, on those nights. Also, caipirinhas were incredibly sweet; if there was a medicinal taste to the Seconal, the sugar would probably mask it.
Vlad drank fast. He sat in the medieval beer-hall chair with the carved initials—saying it made him feel like a lord. A chilling wind rattled through the uninsulated gaps in the wooden walls, so I pulled out and turned on the space heaters I had brought up when I was conferring with contractors about winterizing the place.
“This is my dream,” Vlad said. “Somewhere like this—not my home, somewhere else that was mine—where I could get away and write. Spend forty-eight hours in a fever—stay up all night, banging it out.”
That had been the intention, I told him. But when we realized, idiotically, as we were professors, how expensive college was, even for a double-income household, I knew that if we didn’t want to cripple Sid’s chances with debt, we needed a greater income stream. We got the most money from long-term renters—people who stayed for a month or longer—and there were summers when we didn’t even get a week up here. Then Sid had gone to law school at NYU, a perfect fortune even with loans, aid, and a small scholarship, and spent a miserable summer interning in a corporate office before she decided she simply couldn’t work in that environment, that she had to do something meaningful. Working for a nonprofit with her debt would have been utter drudgery—we ran the numbers together and we were shocked—and, well, I wanted to see her both happy and making a difference, of course I did. She wasn’t being selfish or lazy—and what else was my life for if not helping my one child do good for this world? As for winterizing the house—the expense could not be justified. I was so busy during the school year it would be nearly impossible for me to spend significant enough time up here, it would require so much work—the township didn’t even plow the road when it snowed.
I told him things were different now, though. That I was making plans—that I wanted to make it accessible all year-round, that I planned on using it quite a bit more in the future.
“Because of John?” He had drunk most of his cocktail but was still cogent. Having never drugged anyone before, I wasn’t sure how long a shift might take. I looked at his glass and saw the sugar, and what I presumed was the crushed pill, settled at the bottom beneath the ice. My heart seemed to beat faster with each sip he took. “Can I mix you another?” I asked.
“You’re bad,” he said, and then, again in his accent, “Vell vhy not.” I forcefully stirred up the sediment, but made it much weaker this time, worried about the interaction between too much alcohol and the medication. My hands were sweating, my stomach was twisted up. Vlad noted I had barely touched my drink, and while I had planned to take tiny sips, keeping myself alert, his encouragement was all I needed to drain most of the glass. A quiet settled on us then, an awareness that we were alone together.
“What town is this?” he asked. I told him a false name—the words coming out of my mouth before I considered them.
“Never heard of it.” He checked his phone. “Cynthia said the babysitter arrived.” Then he frowned and pawed at the screen. “Is there no reception here?”
“Cell service is bad,” I said. “But you could hook up to the Wi-Fi.”
He put his phone back in his jacket pocket. “What do I need it for.”
I handed him his refreshed drink, we clinked glasses, and he took a long sip. We had the obligatory talk about how rare it was, these days, to not be reachable. He said how when he was in the Peace Corps he would have these transformative moments, camping by a small village, when he would become aware that there was no one in the world who knew where he was, and no way for them to find out. These were the only times he felt the burden of ambition lift from his chest, understanding himself to be an animal among animals, a miraculous, meaningless life-form that had grown from the earth only to be absorbed back into it. I said I had nothing as glamorous to offer, but there were times in the past when Sid was at school and John was away, and I would go for a long drive to another town, or take the train a few stops north and sit in some establishment I would normally never frequent, simply to be somewhere nobody would expect. But I was so safe, I told him, even when I would tell myself to try to get lost, I wouldn’t let myself stray too far from what I knew. I wasn’t an explorer at heart. I was a woman who had been taught to protect her body above all else, and a writer. I lived the small writer’s life—chained to my desk, my couch, my bookcase, my thoughts.
“I need to read your books,” Vladimir said. “Cynthia loves them.” His speech was not yet slurred, but his head began to move up and down in a slow, rhythmic motion.
I said he absolutely did not. They were failures, I said, I would be mortified. I spoke too quickly, though, and with too much force. I didn’t think Vlad had read the books, but for him to admit he hadn’t so casually underlined how little he considered me. His wife clearly thought about me a good deal more. Which made sense, as I was, in some ways, her competition. I remember, at the height of my obsession with David, trailing his wife after she left her office building. I followed her as she stopped by the grocery store, then the laundry to pick up dry cleaning, drove through a McDonald’s for some illicit treat, picked up her daughter, and then drove home, where from a distance I watched her pull into their attached garage. I remember how enraged and pathetic and excited I felt, to see her shadowy figure moving behind the blinds, thinking about her touching the mug that David drank coffee from, or fluffing the pillow his darling head had crushed.
Vlad tried to rise and then immediately sat down. “Head rush,” he said. I told him to stay sitting, ran the tap until the water was clear, and poured him a glass. He drank it all, I refilled it, he drank another, and then shifted in his chair, composing himself. I felt remiss. This had been a mistake. I should confess to him, make him hate me, sever this relationship completely.
“I have them on my bedside table,” he said.
“What?”
“Your books. I want to read them but I’m working my way through all these—” He paused and closed his eyes tightly, trying to gather his thoughts, to find the words that were escaping him. He reached for his water glass and I leaped up to refill it. I didn’t like what I was seeing, I didn’t like watching him battle with a slipping awareness.
I tried to keep my voice playful, masking any concern. “As long as you’re looking at my name last thing before you turn out the light.”
“That and your foxy author’s photo.”
My mouth froze into a kind of sideways open oval shape, and my eyes, I’m sure, looked stunned, like I was caught in a lie. Once more I wondered—had my scheme been unnecessary? Would he have come to me without…? No. It was the drug, I thought. He was a flirt, that I knew. And more than drunk, I assured myself. He didn’t truly mean it.
“Well, youth,” I said, trying to recover, though I was sure I was panting audible breaths.
“Nah,” he said. And he pursed his lips in the flabby, flappy aspect of the severely inebriated.
I rolled, fluttered my eyes and shook my head all at once in what I imagined to be an extremely unflattering gesture. I was hit with a severe craving for a cigarette. Vlad looked at me with dopey, wavering intent.
“What,” I asked.
“You wanted to escape.” He pointed a waggling finger at me.
I shrugged, acting caught. “Of course I did.”
“So you kidnapped me.”
“What?” My breath was heavy in my mouth. I felt myself blinking rapidly, smiling an inane smile.
He nodded, his finger still pointed in my direction, as though he had found me out, but then a layer of awareness seemed to leave him, and the nodding turned internal, a negotiation with himself, his lips moving in an inaudible mumble. After what seemed like a lifetime of this he cocked his head and slurred, “I overdid it.” Then his nodding turned to a shaking of the head, which went on for another interminable period, and the shaking took over his entire body, prompting a sort of wriggling in his spine, a twisting of his hands, a fluttering in his eyelids. It was as though he were performing a sinister dance—even drugged he had a kind of grace, a jittering Nijinsky—his bodily agitation romantic and terrifying. Finally, his movements slowed to a restless shifting back and forth. I tried to speak to him, but it was as though another layer of consciousness had been stripped away, and my heart felt practically seized with fear. Would I need to call 911? When I approached to check on him, as if in answer, he tried to rise out of the chair, knocking his drink and water glass to the floor, and I ran to him and placed my hands on his arms to try and still him, to get him to sit. Sweet boy, his arms were so strong and so firm and yet he clutched on to me so tightly to steady himself, like a child, he clutched me because he needed me, I felt cascades of tender thrills course through me as I led him back to his seat, using all my strength to steer him. On the first try we missed the chair, he fell to the floor on the side, and I had to plead, cajole, push, yank, and eventually slap him in order to hoist him up into the seat. I pushed my full weight against his incredible chest to keep him in position as he writhed. “You’re all right, sweetheart, you’re okay,” I murmured repeatedly to him, pressing my body against his until he fully succumbed to the drug’s physical force and slumped over on his left side, inert and fast asleep.