WHAT ENDED AS HABIT HAD BEGUN BY CHANCE. Alice and Evlanoff had returned to his flat in the midst of their first quarrel, a stupid one: looking for the restaurant where they’d planned to have dinner, they’d lost their way.
“You never get addresses right,” he’d said. “You never do. You don’t bother.”
“Yes, I do.”
“No. Obviously you don’t.”
“Is it hunger that’s making you so cross?” Alice had stopped walking to face him. She was talking loudly, her hands on her hips. She didn’t care about making scenes; in fact, the presence of a potential audience encouraged her to raise her voice.
“No.” Evlanoff cared very much about avoiding scenes, and the even, low tone of his voice was a measure of his irritation. “I’m just saying that details like street numbers are the sort of thing you can’t be bothered about. It’s part of your slapdash relationship to life.”
“Slapdash?”
“Yes. Careless, if you prefer.”
They returned to his room without having eaten. He stood at the window, arms folded, staring out. After Alice tired of sitting on his bed, fidgeting and sighing and rattling the pages of a magazine, she got up and stood behind him. Saying nothing, she rested her cheek between his shoulder blades. When he stepped back from the window and turned, she stepped back with him, her arms around his waist. He walked to the bookcase to lay his wristwatch and cufflinks on its top; she followed, arms still locked around his ribs; then together to the closet where he used the toe of one shoe to push down the heel of the other and kicked them both in.
They kept walking. “Why is it like this, anyway?” Alice asked on the first lap around the big, unmade bed.
“Like what?” Evlanoff said.
“Bed in the middle.” Her voice was muffled against his back.
“It’s as it was when I moved in.”
“You never thought of moving it so that the headboard was against a wall?” The apartment was an almost perfect square and had a sink and mirror but no private bath or water closet. It was furnished with bed, bookcase, desk, two chairs and a wobbly drop-leaf table. Of these, all except the bed were pushed tightly against the wall. The bed sat in the center of the room, a margin of five or six feet on all sides.
Evlanoff walked, she followed, moving her feet in step with his, the occasional stumble, breasts and stomach tight against his back. “No,” he said.
“Really not?”
“Is that so odd?”
Alice shifted from walking with her feet apart, outside of his, to short quick steps following his longer stride. Too awkward; she switched back. They’d circled the bed a half dozen times and still hadn’t found a rhythm. “Most people,” she said, “I think they’d want to, you know, take possession of a place by moving things around.”
“What are we doing?” Evlanoff asked.
Alice squeezed him. “I’m not letting go until we make up.” She closed her eyes, and rubbed her forehead up and down against his spine. “Besides, you like it, don’t you? Being in step?” Alice tripped as she made this observation, stubbed her toe on a chair leg.
He laughed. “Except you never seem to be, quite.”
“I like the clumsiness, too. Element of suspense. And your back. It’s … I don’t know. Big. Warm.”
“Well, then,” he said, his voice no longer cold. “It must have been for you that I didn’t move the bed.”
Alice looked around the room; she walked on her toes to see over his shoulder. “You don’t think it might be that if you moved it against a wall it would block the door or the window, or be too close to the radiator, or keep you from opening your closet?”
He shook his head, bumping hers. “No. Not for those reasons.”
“Maybe you really are a romantic. Rather than a pragmatist.”
“Oh, I think so. I am Russian, after all.”
“Well, then, why be so mean and curmudgeonly about addresses? Why, when one restaurant disappears, not be charming and romantic and find a charming romantic bistro? Instead you invent character flaws for me. Carelessness. Slapdashery.” Alice nipped the tender crease between his arm and shoulder blade, pressed her groin suggestively into his buttocks.
“Not fair,” he said. “To use my own lust against me.”
“All right,” she said. “I’ll stop.” And she stepped away, separating their bodies. He reached around, pulled her back against him. She let one hand drop to the front of his trousers, felt how hard he was. “Very effective strategy,” she said. When he took her hand she thought he was going to move it away, but instead he guided her fingers up and down the shaft of his penis.
“It’s not that restaurants disappear,” he said. “But that spoiled little girls don’t bother to check addresses.”
Alice had undone all but the top button of his trousers and was trying to find her way past his underclothes. “I’m lost again. If you rescue me, perhaps you’ll find that spoiled girls have desirable qualities, as well. Abilities more important than those used to locate restaurants.” Evlanoff took her hand and pushed it past the waistband of his drawers, curled her fingers around the taut smooth skin of his penis.
They continued in a slow rocking gait, tilting left, tilting right. Around and around the big bed, some laps silent, others bantering, his stride more even than hers. “It’s difficult for me to stay in step,” she said defending her stumbles. “Your legs are longer, you have the advantage of being in front.”
“Take the lead,” he offered.
With her hand Alice directed the shaft of his penis right, left, up, down. “No. Instead, I’ll use this for a tiller.”
“You can be in front and still use your tiller. They are at the back of boats, you know.”
Alice shook her head against his back.
“Why not?”
“I like it like this. I like how big you are in front of me, pulling me along. And I like not looking where I’m going. Walking with my eyes shut.”
“Ahh.”
“What do you mean, ‘Ahh’?”
“I mean that at last we have the answer to the puzzle of Alice.”
Alice’s hand stopped moving. “What is the puzzle of me?” she asked. Evlanoff put his hand over hers in order to guide it back into motion.
“The historic question of why the little girl got off the train. It’s the inevitable fate of a personality who wants to be pulled along with her eyes shut.”
“You don’t think you’re making a bit much of this?” Alice said.
“Of what we’re doing now, or of the train?”
“Well, I meant now, but either, I suppose. Besides, haven’t you ever done a thing you can’t explain?”
Evlanoff, attending to questions posed by fingers rather than lips, didn’t answer.
“Haven’t you?” Alice asked again.
He nodded, eyes closed, his whole body rocking forward with his head. Forward and backward, Throwing her off balance once again.
“What?” Alice persisted.
“It’s, it’s a thing of a different order. It’s not to do with going off with anyone.”
Alice waited through a few laps of his silence. Then, “Won’t you tell me?” she asked, and she gave his penis a little shake.
“Yes. All right. My father bought me a microscope when I was ten. Not a child’s toy but a real one—he got it from a jeweler. A power of magnification of eight hundred and fifty.” Evlanoff stopped for a moment, then continued. “The body was brass. It had an oak case lined with velvet. Little indentations to hold the eyepieces that weren’t being used. It wasn’t new, but it was magnificent.”
“Go on,” Alice prompted when he paused, using the same method as before.
“If it’s a story you want, you’ll have to stop squeezing. Otherwise you’ll get something else.”
Alice withdrew her hand from his trousers. “Story first.”
Evlanoff replaced the hand. “I didn’t say stop touching.”
Around the room again, Alice sighing with impatience. “I loved it more than any gift I’d ever received,” he finally said. “I was in awe of it. Truthfully, such a microscope seemed too good a thing for a boy to have. When I was apart from it, at school, I thought of what might happen to it, how the case could be knocked from the shelf in my room, how a thief might steal it. And when I was home, when I wanted to use it, I imagined myself dropping the eyepieces. Breaking one of the lenses.”
“What did you use it for?” Alice asked. “What did you look at?”
“Insect wings. Blood from a scrape. Feathers. Hair. Bits of plants. Dirty water from the fishbowl. That sort of thing. No great science, no revelations. Except to me.”
“And? What happened?”
“I put the microscope, case and all, into my knapsack, and I took it far from our house, to a field, and with a hammer I smashed it. I broke the case, the lenses, bent the body. Everything.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know. That was the point of my telling you this story, remember? It was to be a thing I’d done and couldn’t explain.”
Alice was silent. Then, “Were you angry about something?” she suggested. “Were you angry at your father?”
“I told you, I don’t know why.”
“Were you sorry after?”
“I was. I wished for it back.”
“Your father, did he find out?”
“No. I lied and said it had been stolen. And I was sorry about that, as well, because suspicion fell on one of the servants. She’d done a few other things my mother hadn’t liked, so I suppose her position was not secure anyway, but she was let go because of the microscope. I used to think I saw her in the street, following me.”
They had stopped walking. “Do you think you broke it because you loved it so much, that it was a way of, I don’t know, escaping from worry over it?”
“If that were true, then wouldn’t you be in danger?” he asked. Alice pulled away, intending to punish him with a little pinch or a slap, but he caught one of her arms and pulled her back. He pushed her onto the bed. “At last,” he said, “we’ve arrived. He used one knee to keep her down as he pulled off her skirt. “I’d thought of it myself, that breaking the microscope was a way to end its tyranny, but I don’t know that it was as simple as that.”
Alice nodded up at him. “So we’re even.”
“A good match. Two authors of inexplicable acts.”
“Don’t you think everyone must be?”
“Do you?” Evlanoff was heavy on top of her. He’d pinned her arms, her legs, and she squirmed under his weight, claustrophobia intensifying lust, compounding the need for release.
“Well, everyone except Eleanor Clusburtson,” she said, struggling to breathe, freeing one leg for no more than a moment before his stronger one recaptured it.
“Is she supremely rational, your Miss Clusburtson?”
Alice’s eyes were closed. Under her lids, the color changed each time he thrust. It went from red to purple. “I think so,” she said, finally. “Did you get another?”
“Microscope?”
“Yes.”
“No. My father offered … He offered to replace it. But I said no.”
“Didn’t he … He didn’t …”
Evlanoff stopped moving. “No more talking,” he said, and he released her to reach for a pillow.
“He didn’t want to know why?” Alice folded the pillow in half; she put it under her head, plumped and shoved and pushed her fists into it until her mouth was at just the right height.
“Why what?”
“Why you didn’t want another.”
“He,” Evlanoff said, straddling her face, sucking in his breath as she bit down, very gently, just teasing, moving her teeth against the smooth, smooth skin, grazing it, reminding him: yes, there were teeth to consider; it wasn’t that she was at his mercy; no, he was at hers.