CHAPTER 25

One Saturday evening, Susan Frankl and Sylvie Kimura sat cross-legged in Susan’s window seat, holding playing cards; on a cushion between them that served as a table sat a cribbage scoring board with pegs and a saucer full of ashes and butts. The window was open, and Sylvie was lighting a cigarette.

“You’re going to burn up your cards, Sylvie,” Susan warned her. “Twenty-five.”

“Go,” said Sylvie.

Despite the summer heat, Susan had cooked dinner for Alcott and Sylvie, relying on the weatherman’s promise of a cold front by afternoon. Now, at 8:00, a clap of thunder tardily announced the change of weather, and chill, unruly bursts of wind filled the room. Alcott, too, was late. The financial arrangements for the new film had begun to unravel, and he could not afford to ignore a summons from his backer that had come just as he and Sylvie were preparing to go uptown from the Village.

Susan assured Sylvie that the dinner would hold until Alcott arrived, and the two of them had been sipping wine and playing cribbage for nearly an hour. Susan wouldn’t hear of Sylvie going down to the stoop to smoke in the rain. Her apartment, snug and filled with cooking odors, felt doubly welcoming now that it was so wild out-of-doors. Rain, confidences, and wine all poured freely.

“I haven’t played a card game, any game, really, since high school,” Sylvie said. “No one plays games anymore, Susan. Just video games.”

“I like games,” Susan said, dealing deftly.

And Sylvie remarked to herself how Susan’s phoniness, her repugnant pseudoaplomb, fell away in the game. Susan-the-gamester had an authentic, barbed way of talking and sharp-edged competence.

“When I was growing up,” Susan was saying, “my mother—cut, Sylvie—was dissatisfied with everything about me. I wanted to play the piano and she wanted me to dance. She was always trying to cut my hair off. She gave up and left me on my own when I was about six. She just kind of canceled my childhood. My father was the opposite. He thought everything about me was perfect. He was—he is to this day—so miserable if he thought anything was going wrong for me, especially my love life, that I couldn’t let him know. So growing up, I never had anyone to lean on. I was always on my own—like you, but for different reasons.”

Sylvie nodded, thumped a card down on the pillow, and blew smoke into the rainy night. “Um, this is a run, right?”

“Yes, you learn fast. When I met Chris, I thought—I’m not alone. I can talk to him. But after just a few weeks, he began to find me frustrating. I’m too moody, and he doesn’t like my taste in anything—music, fiction, movies. Last week, he said I should think about going to medical school. He said I was getting this musicology degree only because my father wanted me to. He didn’t think I had a scholarly bent or a lot of musical insight.” Susan sounded as though she expected Sylvie to be amused at this.

“Chris is a suburban aesthete with arrested development,” Sylvie said blandly. “He wants to be more cool than anyone else, and he thinks that means liking the latest thing before anyone else and getting bored with it sooner than anyone else. He doesn’t really have tastes. My deal, Susan.”

“That’s rather harsh, isn’t it?” she said. She thought she should be offended out of loyalty to Chris, but, disconcertingly, she wasn’t. “Besides, he’s probably at least partly right. My father always regretted that he didn’t become some kind of scholar or teacher, and I think it might well be true that I’m just trying to give him a vicarious experience of something I have no real vocation for—not to say that I don’t love what I do, but love and talent are two different things.”

“No, they’re not. People can’t really love work they can’t do. They can only love the idea of doing it. Look, I get the idea, Susan,” Sylvie said, stubbing out her cigarette, “and I don’t like it. You can’t listen to Chris when he says that stuff, or things could turn out wrong. I know what I’m talking about.”

“Sylvie, I’m perfectly capable of—That’s Alcott,” said Susan, interrupted by the buzzer. She pressed the button to admit the caller, but when she opened the door, Chris, not Alcott, stood there dripping.

“Were you here last night?” he said without preamble, and he walked in without invitation.

“I thought you were in Cambridge,” she said. Timidly, she made as though to embrace Chris, but he moved past her. Susan’s card-player edge was already gone, Sylvie noticed, replaced by a nonchalance so false that a less loyal friend than Sylvie might have found it a bit disgusting.

“I ran all the way from a Hundred and Tenth in this deluge and all you can say is—” Chris broke off when he saw Sylvie standing at the window, looking at him with an expression so blank and cool that Susan thought he would certainly infer they had been telling stories about him. This was hard to watch, Chris’s sweet boyishness, his civilized ease, subjected to such an openly hostile suspicion—and all on the basis of Susan’s stories, which were probably prejudiced and inaccurate.

“Hi, Sylvie,” he said, and walked around the room. He looked appealing, with the refined near homeliness of his face, wet hair slicked back, and a wet shirt that clung to his slender form. He observed the table set for three and, behind Sylvie, cards scattered on the window seat.

“I really am glad to see you. I’m just surprised that you didn’t go to Cambridge,” Susan said. “I’m having company—Alcott will be here in a minute.”

“Changed my mind,” he said matter-of-factly, and wiped rain off his face with a tissue he took from her desk drawer. “You’re playing cards? Susan, you are really—” The buzzer rang again.

“Alcott,” said Sylvie, in such a pregnant voice that Chris turned and looked at her.

“I’ll come back later tonight,” said Chris.

“No, stay!” Susan replied, her voice tight with anxiety. “We’re just having dinner. I’ll set another place.”

Once more, when she opened the door, she was surprised not to see Alcott. Instead, Alexei Mikhailov was getting off the elevator; he gave an awkward smile as he walked to the door. He was hardly wet at all. “Alcott dropped me off,” he said, his handsome features twisting into some sort of unpleasant grimace, which Susan diagnosed as a product of shyness. He had met Susan only once before, at Mallory’s party. “He asked me to just tell you he’s trying to park. He’ll be here in a minute.”

“Alexei,” said Sylvie, “it’s bad news, isn’t it.”

He nodded and avoided looking her in the eye. “Let him tell you.”

“Please, come in,” Susan said, but the invitation sounded forced and saccharine. Alexei looked from Susan to Sylvie to Chris and flushed a little at Susan’s obvious reluctance.

“I have to go. I’m really late,” he said stiffly, with a hint of an accent. His eyes swept Susan’s rooms involuntarily, as this might look as if he would like to come in, but he couldn’t help staring at the cards scattered in the window seat, the piano, and the place settings on the table. Again he made the indescribable grimace, of mixed scowling, perfunctory smile, and something vulnerable, and turned to go. Susan saw that this was because he felt unwelcome, and she was ashamed. But it would be so hard for them to talk with him there. His manners, moreover, verged on the uncouth.

“Alexei!” said Chris genially from the other side of the room, where he was sitting on the piano bench. “What’s up?”

The trace of excess ease in Chris’s voice grated on Alexei. “Good-bye,” he said to no one in particular, neither ignoring Chris nor responding to him. He fumbled with the locks on Susan’s door until she opened it for him, then left with a final nod to Susan.

Susan, Chris, Sylvie, and Alcott had a great deal to discuss when Alcott finally arrived, as rain soaked as Chris had been.

“My backer is pulling out,” Alcott said, pacing up and down Susan’s living room. “He says he has no faith in the script and everything is being mishandled.” Alcott was restless and agitated, though, not depressed, and wouldn’t accept sympathy, not even from Sylvie; he pulled away when she tried to put her hand on his arm.

“There’s still a chance he’ll change his mind,” he insisted, as if Sylvie were arguing with him, although she had said nothing. “When he thinks about it, he’s going to see that legally he can’t do this no matter what his lawyer’s telling him.”

“If you lose him,” Susan asked, “can’t you find enough money to finish somewhere else?”

“I’d have to can the whole thing. I’d never pull together that much money for a project that already has one serious vote of no confidence.”

Susan didn’t ask what the film was. You never asked Alcott, and he rarely told. Only a few of the people working on the film, in fact, would understand more than a couple of scenes and fragments. The money problems and the backer’s threats, however, could be, and were, openly discussed and occupied them all through dinner.

“What happened to Alexei?” Alcott asked abruptly when the subject had been exhausted and the meal nearly consumed. “Didn’t he come up?”

“He said he couldn’t stay,” said Susan, once more ashamed that she hadn’t made the invitation with more enthusiasm.

“Is he still seeing Mallory?” asked Chris. “She really had no business getting mixed up with him that way.” Susan looked at him despairingly across the table. She could never make Chris understand that couples had private communications. Mallory wouldn’t want her little affair getting around, and here it was being broadcast from Susan’s table by her own boyfriend.

“Mallory and Alexei?” asked Sylvie, frowning. “What is this?”

“But it’s an interesting mistake for Mallory—very interesting,” Chris continued, ignoring Susan’s signals. “Here’s our reliable, good, nice Mallory, who always knows where people went to college and whether their parents are rich and would rather write dreck for the Gazette than political analysis for an e-zine. She doesn’t often go wrong, but when she does it’s for sex with almost an embarrassingly good-looking and sweet, uneducated, broke guy who is, shall we say, no ‘challenge’ for someone like her—she’s totally in control. What an eye-opener.”

“Unfair! Unfair to Mallory,” said Susan, shaking her head, despite the fact that she herself had had similar thoughts that she had more or less expressed to Mallory herself.

“Unfair to Alexei, too,” said Alcott, staring belligerently at Chris.

“Totally off,” protested Sylvie, “on both counts.”

“But, Susan, you yourself told me that she didn’t take him seriously,” said Chris.

“Oh, I just meant that it’s not a big deal for her,” said Susan, trying to soften this, which had been another comment meant only for Chris’s ears. “She likes him, and she thinks he has a lot of natural ability. She says he’s definitely smart.”

“But in fact she can’t really take him seriously,” Chris added. “He’s just not from her world.”

“You may think that way,” said Alcott with a hint of contempt in his voice, “but don’t slander Mallory.” Neither Alcott nor Chris, Susan realized, really knew Mallory, but Chris understood her better through what he’d heard from Susan. She wished he would keep quiet about Mallory and Alexei. Still, Chris didn’t mean to be unkind, and Sylvie and Alcott themselves were condescending when they insisted on judging Alexei by different criteria from those they used to judge their real friends and themselves. In the long run, Mallory’s attitude might be kinder; Alcott and Sylvie would draw Alexei in and increase his ultimate sense of exclusion and disappointment. Obviously, Alexei suffered from his awareness of his handicaps, and no amount of tolerant, condescending affection could change that.

“Susan, did you know,” Sylvie asked, “that Alcott has hired Alexei?”

“I heard something about it,” said Susan, not wanting to divulge another word of what Mallory had told her. She wanted them to talk about something else.

“I need a cigarette,” said Sylvie. She lit one and went again to the window seat, followed by Alcott, who also took a cigarette from her pack and sat beside her to smoke it.

“What are you doing?” Sylvie protested, aghast. “Put it out. Don’t be ridiculous. Is it because you’re tense about the money?”

“I’m doing it because you are. I can’t let you die alone, can I? If you smoke, I’ll smoke, too. I used to smoke, actually.”

“This is coercion,” she said, looking fierce, “and I don’t like it.”

“I didn’t think you would.”

“Come on, put it out.”

“We both smoke, or neither smokes. I’ve thought about it, and that’s the only way.”

Sylvie snatched Alcott’s cigarette from his hand and angrily stubbed it out in the saucer.

“I knew I could count on you,” he said, smiling, and he tore away her own cigarette, leaving the filter between her fingers, and crushed it, too, into the saucer.

“Let’s discuss it later,” she said. She flushed angrily, and Alcott made a show of being unconcerned.

Late that night, Susan played solitaire at the table and felt low, ruminating on how quarrelsome the evening had been and feeling guilty for Chris’s gossip about Alexei and Mallory. I suppose I have to let Mallory know, she thought. Chris, however, was in a good mood. He sat at Susan’s desk and tinkered with a printout of the last scene of his newest play, a sort of counter–love story that he thought had a good chance of being produced.

“I don’t need to ask how it went today,” Susan said, seeing that he was closing up his laptop. “You’re so up, you couldn’t go to Cambridge.”

“No, I had to see you,” he said. “I can’t tell you how annoyed I was when I got here and you had all these people over—and I was ready to jump into bed.” He put his arms around her and pressed his face against her neck.

“You were so annoyed, you told everyone about Mallory and Alexei? How I wish you hadn’t done that.”

“You don’t need to make such a deep, dark secret out of something like that. It’s not a big deal. You know, it’s also very annoying the way you sit here for an hour playing this idiotic game.”

“But you should let me make that decision,” Susan said as she gathered the cards from the table and put them in her desk drawer. “Mallory is my oldest friend, and she told me this in confidence. She’ll be upset when she finds out.”

“So don’t tell her.”

“I don’t want her to find out from someone else, which she definitely will sooner or later. I want her to know that I wasn’t just ignoring her wishes.”

“So you’re going to tell her I’m the bad guy? That’s nice.” But, seeing Susan’s expression darken, Chris retreated. “Look, I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair. I’m really, really so sorry, but I had no idea you regarded it as a sacred trust or something. Look, I feel terrible. Don’t be mad, Susan.”

Susan forgave him, but not herself. From now on, she would be more reserved with such confidences. And she would arrange no foursome dinners with Sylvie and Alcott.