FIVE

SAM AND I are in bed. A silvery pool of moonlight spills on the floor beneath our open window. The night is mild, calm.

The light looks like mercury, Sam says as he points to the floor. Like rain in an Atget photograph. Or like you.

Me?

I am at his side, one forefinger on his chest. Where his pectoral muscle and rib cage meet, the hair grows shorter, finer, sleeker, not curly and coarse as in the dark mat sheltering his breastbone. Following the slope of his chest, my finger runs a circle around one raised nipple, returning to the smooth side, where his ribs form a staircase that curves around to his back.

Here, he says. His fingers descend; the middle one parts me. He presses gently, then begins slipping downward. His finger’s still in me. Now his chest is at my pubis; our hairs mingle. The soft bristle of his chin makes me pulse hard, and I tighten around his finger.

He’s on his belly. His eyes close, then reopen. They’re in shadow, but I catch their gleam. Pale moonlight washes his back. He presses one cheekbone against my inner thigh, then does the same for the other, his head swaying back and forth, his breath warm, roving. I begin arching, and his mouth plays me. I clench and clench until the chord spends itself.

Through our window wafts a scent. It swirls densely, though it smells nothing like smoke. It smells like a man and a woman mingled, a malty, piquant tang. The swirling thickens, solidifies, and assumes the shape of a man in a tuxedo. He’s tall and lean, his dark hair tousled. He wears a black eye-mask and white gloves. In one outstretched hand, he holds a small glass bottle shaped like a whale, its spout glinting in the moonlight.

The man’s fingers squeeze the whale bottle gently. I see a scent emerging, a fine, full spray.

Sam sits up. Are you something like a genie? he asks the man in a tone of helpless awe.

Something like that, answers the man. He speaks with an accent—a Russian accent, I now realize. The timbre of his voice is reedy, seductive.

Actually, he adds, I am more like a conjuror.

Can you conjure children? asks Sam.

The man’s eyebrows dip into a frown. Children?Nyet! Too complicated! As Mayakovsky said: “Who can control this? Can you? Try it . . .”

I sit up. I’ve figured out who this man is: he’s my father in disguise. I begin yelling, my voice loud and hoarse.

You’re quoting Mayakovsky? He was talking about love! Remember whatthatis, Jordan?

Of course I do.

No you don’t! You don’t know a thing about it!

Please, my dear. It was time for me to exit. As you were well aware—you helped me off the stage! Let us not forget the facts.

Paying no attention to our exchange, Sam gazes earnestly at Jordan. Try, he pleads.

Try what? asks Jordan, perplexed.

Try conjuring a child!

Ah, my poor friend, says Jordan, his tone indicating he’s just figured out what Sam is talking about. For that, you will need a different partner. This one here (he points at me) is following another path! I respect this—after all, I never intended to become a parent myself. It happened entirely accidentally. This daughter of mine has made her choice: no children. Yet she’s left with a residual feeling of—oh, what’s the English word? Ah yes,gloom!How to cheer her, reassure her? How to tell her—

Oh, fuck off, I interrupt in disgust.

He gazes at his whale bottle, then leans over and begins murmuring to it.

She doesn’t understand, my darling, he says consolingly. And now she’s angry, our daughter’s so angry with me! Camilla, chérie, what should I do?

Get lost! I shriek at him.

Lost? He smiles wanly at me. But I already am, my dear. I already am.

There’s a swirling of opaque light. Now Jordan is wearing a white eye-mask whose contours are ringed with rhinestones—only he’s not Jordan anymore, he’s Meyerhold. The disguise has been dropped.

The director shakes a long forefinger at me.

You did indeed help your father off the stage, he says, his tone coolly admonitory. And it was your decision to do so.

He wraps his cape tightly around himself. I cannot see his eyes, still concealed by the mask, but I sense the heat of their gaze.

And don’t make the mistake, he adds, of thinking your father wasn’t grateful for your assistance. He certainly was! But he was silenced by his need for privacy. Ask yourself this: Is disclosure your natural instinct? Might you not extend a little sympathy for the old man’s failure of nerve? Yes, he should have told you about Eve . . . Yet on that score, you’re not the only person owed an explanation, after all! What about Danny?

Another swirl of light and I awake.

HAVING ENCOUNTERED, on the same street corner within a ten-minute stretch of time, the full complement of men in my life, I returned home both stimulated and fatigued. I ate supper, went to bed early, and fell immediately into a deep sleep.

Awaking the next morning to an indefinably charged scent, I realized I’d had another strange dream. Sitting on the edge of my bed, still drowsy, I made myself focus as hard as I could. In the dream there’d been some sort of altercation with Jordan. Sam had also been there; something took place between the two men. And Meyerhold had been onstage as well. He seemed to be turning into a regular presence in my dreams.

I made up my mind to borrow from Stuart a couple of biographies I’d read years ago. It was time to reacquaint myself with the Russian director’s ideas about theater. About the pleasures and perils of disorientation. And theaters as sites of dreams.

I SHOWERED and put on my work uniform, as Stuart calls it. Every day I wear the same thing: chic black jeans, a white T-shirt (V-necks, in fine cotton or silk), a blazer (linen in summer, gabardine in spring and fall, cashmere in winter), Italian loafers or boots, and gold jewelry. I carry a small, elegant knapsack. My uniform’s expensive, but the expense is part of my cost of doing business. When you’re a dealer in inessential and costly objects, dressing scruffily is not a good idea.

Heading out the door, I remembered that I had a lunch date with Sam. At The Fourth Wall, I phoned him and left a message suggesting a time and venue—relieved that he rarely answers his cell phone, preferring to treat it as a beeper. He needn’t call me back, I told him, unless there was a problem.

At ten (early in my business—most collectors are night owls), a young actor came by with a collection of stage properties from various productions that had been mounted in London in recent years. He’d just broken up with his British boyfriend, he said, a professional props man (and, it seemed, a likely pilferer), from whom he’d received a small treasure trove of props that he now wished to trade for fast cash. I ended up taking the whole terrific lot, including a beautiful crop and bridle from a Broadway run of Equus. (These items, I saw, were authentic; they bore the PT stamp of the Plymouth Theater. I figured they would impress a client of mine who, being heavily into both theater and horses, considers Equus the best play ever written.) The deal was concluded affably and in my favor.

An hour later I sold a wide-brimmed black hat to a client who’s an obsessive collector of Samuel Beckett memorabilia. The hat entered my shop on the head of a woman who looked to be around sixty. After introducing herself, she told me her story. Apparently Beckett’s Ohio Impromptu (a wonderful little stage piece with two characters, a Reader and a Listener) had premiered at Ohio State University in 1981, and this woman had been in charge of props and costumes. One of the props (there were only two) was a hat; the other was a book that lay open on a table throughout the performance. (They’d used a French dictionary, an amusingly Beckettian touch.) Would I, she asked, be interested in the hat?

Her story had to be true, and her hat was in mint shape. I made her an offer that she happily accepted, evidently feeling no strong attachment to her headpiece. Then I called my Beckett-besotted client, who showed up within minutes, checkbook in hand, and paid me very handsomely for the hat.

I phoned Stuart to brag about my morning’s take. After congratulating me, he told me I’d missed a golden opportunity: I should’ve asked the seller if she still had the dictionary as well. Or perhaps she’d kept one of the long black coats worn by the play’s speakers? I got off the phone and kicked myself for not doing exactly as he’d suggested.

THE IMAGE of a black coat, however, prompted me to recall a few more details from the previous night’s dream. In it Jordan had been whispering something to a small perfume bottle. Whale shaped, it had actually spouted its scent—a nifty bit of bottle engineering.

The whale bottle in turn reminded me of a conversation with my father that had taken place when I was in sixth grade. It concerned a report on sea creatures that I was writing for science class. I’d asked Jordan what made dolphins and whales so special.

I don’t know about dolphins, he’d answered, but ambergris is one thing that makes whales special. Sperm whales secrete it. A very heady scent. Makes some people a little dizzy.

Like ammonia? I asked.

No, in a nice way. (He didn’t add—I would have been too young to understand—that ambergris is said to smell strongly like a woman’s secretions.)

How do you get it out of the whale? I asked.

You have to kill the whale, he said. Which is why ambergris is rare and expensive. Most ambergris these days is artificially produced—except in Russia, where they get it straight from the source.

I expressed outrage at the idea of Russians hunting and killing sperm whales, and Jordan shrugged.

Whales aren’t the only animals in Russia that produce scents, he said. There are Russian beavers, whose glands produce castoreum. It has an earthy, leathery smell. Makes an excellent fixative. But getting the oil from the beaver is tricky, because its sweat glands are located right between the anus and the genitals in both the male and the female.

This embarrassed me, but Jordan seemed not to notice.

Canada, he continued, produces a better castoreum. But there’s one thing from Russia that nobody can beat: birch tar oil, from the birch trees that grow over there. It’s used to make the cuir de Russe fragrance, Russian leather. The Russians also do a nice harvest of roses. And clary sage, and certain umbellifers. Those are weeds—at least that’s what we call them. In Russia not everything we consider a weed is a weed. Over there they have different ideas about things.

I’d gathered as much from my social studies class, but I said nothing.

Russians, Jordan continued, have been involved in fragrance for a long while. Actually it was the Venetians who first brought the Russians into the European perfume market. Venice had a trade triangle going between southern Russia, Egypt, and Venice. The Venetian merchants used to nab teenaged boys from the Black Sea area and sell them off in Egypt, to serve in the army. The Venetians probably swapped perfume for those boys in Odessa or some other Crimean port. Clever people, the Venetians! Excellent traders.

For the first time, I’d realized how well informed about perfume my father was. He’d acquired most of his knowledge while working for Coty, which had its own Russian connection: Ernst Beaux, the St. Petersburg-born creator of Chanel No. 5. Beaux was a technical innovator whose formulas made use of newly created aldehydes—molecules that smelled something like a hot iron on damp cotton. They could spur raw materials to greater depth and loveliness, and they gave the entire perfume industry a boost. (Beaux was rumored to have developed Chanel’s famous scent while working for Coty. A few years after No. 5 appeared on the market, Coty began selling a fragrance called L’Aimant that bore a powerful resemblance to Chanel’s perfume, although nobody was ever able to prove that the Russian had tricked anyone.)

Jordan knew all about Beaux’s aldehydes, but they weren’t his passion. What riveted him was the paradox of a perfume’s birth. That birth always begins with a death—“the agony of the flower,” as his French colleague Roudnitska called it, which occurs during its harvesting. After a flower is cut, its scent goes through moment-by-moment transformations that make it highly unstable and unpredictable. For the perfumist, the challenge lies in capturing the right smells from this rapidly shifting spectrum before they evanesce altogether.

This obviously requires considerable technical skill. A good perfumist, however, begins not by manipulating molecules but by recollecting unusual and powerful experiences. Distinctive perfumes require distinctive origins, said Roudnitska. Feelings first, science second.

My father satisfied Roudnitska’s requirements. He could recollect in its entirety an experience utterly foreign to his peers: that of watching a wife expire in a room filled with the smells of parturition. The flower’s agony.

THOUGHTS OF Jordan and the dream had led inexorably to my mother. This time, though, instead of feeling what I normally felt when confronting her in my mind—guilty, glum, and alienated all at once, like a child scolded for not crying at the funeral of a relative she didn’t actually know—I felt anger, a sudden gust of it gyrating across me.

I pulled aside the curtain concealing my dartboard, opened my drawer of photos, and contemplated my options. Choosing a pair of head shots, I fixed them to the board and began tossing my darts. I took aim first at my mother (whose picture I’d photocopied for this purpose) and then at Eve—Camilla, Eve, Camilla, Eve—hitting them over and over, hard, until I’d covered both their faces with tiny pricks. Then I removed the targets and sat at my desk.

What, I wondered, would Stuart think if he were to walk in and discover me engaging in this secret pastime? This is how you’ve chosen to pay for being an understudy, he’d say. You see yourself as second fiddle, and you’re paying with resentment! That’s one thing you’ve got oodles of, isn’t it?

ALMOST NOON: time to meet Sam. My dart tossing had let off some steam, and my mind felt nicely vacant.

As I made my way east, yet another detail from my latest dream came to me. Jordan had been wearing a tux, just as he had in the juggling episode. Although I’d never actually seen my father in formal attire, I knew he’d been no stranger to it.

I recalled the sight, in my dream, of his white-gloved hand around a whale-shaped bottle of perfume. And his odd accent—but wait, no, that hadn’t been Jordan—it was Meyerhold. He’d impersonated my father, pretending to be Jordan before revealing that he wasn’t.

The tumblers were falling into place now. Sam, perturbed, had asked Meyerhold to conjure a child. For that, the director had replied, you will need a different partner. And hadn’t Meyerhold said something about an explanation owed to me, and to Danny as well? About Eve?

“Cammie?”

Sam’s voice startled me. I’d arrived at our appointed spot on Grove Street, unaware that I’d actually stopped walking.

“You look zoned.” Sam gave me a hesitant smile.

“I am, a little,” I said.

“Well, do you want to go in, or would you rather collect yourself first?”

I stared at his face, which remained more familiar to me than anyone else’s; I knew its every mark and line. “I’m getting collected,” I answered after a moment. “Though I’m not particularly hungry.”

“That makes two of us,” he said. “Don’t know why I have no appetite—maybe it’s the balmy weather?”

I scanned Grove Street, seeing as if for the first time the recently budded pale-green leaves, their tracework shadows spilling over the sidewalks.

“Let’s—”

“—walk,” Sam finished with me, our voices landing on the word at the same time.

We began strolling westward in easy adjacency, our knapsacks slung over our outer shoulders so they wouldn’t collide. As we walked we chatted. I heard about Lila’s volunteer work at Abby’s school, about the Williamsburg gallery’s increased insurance premiums, about Sam’s newest photo-book projects. His favorite, he said, was a Wegman-style collection of pet portraits featuring not dogs but birds—in particular an irascible mynah bird named Cockpit, whose owner (a former pilot) had captured the bird’s antics in a stunning series.

From me Sam heard about The Fourth Wall’s latest acquisitions and sales. He was also told about several plays I’d seen during the spring, about Stuart’s computer problems, and about the garden store that had replaced Eve’s. He did not hear anything about Nick. Sam and I never discussed the Paramour in any but the most cursory terms. Ditto for Lila. No sand in the crankcase, Stuart had once said, and Sam and I obeyed that rule.

TALKING, WE wound our way up, down, and across streets we’d walked countless times: Hudson, Commerce, Barrow, Jones, Morton, Leroy, Carmine. We covered the length of Bedford Street (past The Fourth Wall, at which we both cast a proprietary glance), finally turning east on Christopher Street.

In Sheridan Square we settled into a booth in a café. Neither of us alluded to the fact that we were spending not just a lunch hour but the better part of an afternoon in each other’s company. By the time we’d ordered our second iced coffee, we’d dispatched a good many topics, though Danny wasn’t among them.

I was the one to insert her obliquely into our conversation. After hearing about Sam’s latest car, a secondhand Audi, I mentioned that Danny and I would be driving Jordan and Eve’s old Volvo wagon to Ithaca.

“It’s still up and running. Which is unbelievable, really, considering it’s over twenty years old,” I said.

“So you’re making Danny do the driving.” Sam was putting his toe in the water.

“I hate to drive unless I have to, as you know. This whole idea’s hers, remember? I’m just going along for the ride.”

Sam gave a short smile. “Oh, I suspect it’s somewhat more complicated than that.”

“But of course.” The smile I returned was similarly brief. “With her it tends to be, doesn’t it?”

Sam waded in a bit further. “We talked last night. She told me about Eve’s having been artificially inseminated.” He paused. “What sort of arrangement do you think Eve might’ve made with that guy—what’s his name, Bobby?”

“Billy. Billy Deveare, Danny’s father.”

“Yeah, I suppose.”

My face must’ve registered my confusion. “There’s no way of knowing for sure that he was the father,” Sam said. “All Danny’s got is a piece of paper stating Eve was inseminated. The donor’s not listed.”

“But Billy’s on the birth certificate,” I said.

“Which means only that he agreed to sign his name. It’s not proof.”

“What are you saying? You mean Billy didn’t—but why would he do that?”

“Who knows?” Sam answered. “Money, maybe. Or perhaps he just wanted to lend Eve a hand in a tough situation. Maybe he felt sorry for her and agreed to be the father, but on paper only. Maybe she had some other guy in Ithaca.”

I shook my head. “Too complicated, Sam. There’s a much simpler scenario. Eve decided she wanted a kid, and Billy was willing to be the father in the physical sense—and legally. But they weren’t actually lovers, so she borrowed his sperm.”

Sam shrugged. “That may be what happened, but nobody knows for sure. No one can know, with Eve. You know how it was—always plenty of men in her life . . .”

OUR BOOTH felt suddenly confining; I nearly signaled the waitress for a check, then thought better of it. There was more for us to talk about.

“Well, your ideas sound far-fetched,” I said. “And I bet they sounded that way to Danny, too.”

Leaning forward, Sam put his elbows on the table. “Stuart’s right, you know—what he said, the other day. About Danny being in a messy place. And there’s something else. She seems to have this idea that you’re holding out on her, Cam.”

Something like exasperation coursed through me, a similar jazzing of my nerves but more distressing. Out of nowhere came a memory of Eve in Frenchtown, the summer of Jordan’s death. Eve tending his backyard with a spade and a trowel, weeding, watering. Acting like the woman of the house.

“As far as my cousin was concerned,” I said, “her lovers were never any of my business. That includes Danny’s father.”

Sam’s left hand pumped an invisible brake. “I know. And I’ve told Danny she’s got to accept that you might not want to talk about certain things.”

“Such as?”

“Such as your father.” His gaze held mine steadily. “I don’t know what you’ve already shared with her . . .”

I shook my head. “You and Stuart are still the only people who know how Jordan died.”

Again he frowned. “Yes, but you need to realize something, Cam. Danny’s got pretty clear memories of that day. She was six years old, it’s not just a big blur to her. She’s got specific recollections and questions. And she feels you’ve been keeping secrets about that. As well as about Eve.”

Another tap dance of my nerves. “Well, I guess she’ll just have to be mad at me, then,” I responded. “Because I made a promise to my father, and I don’t plan to break it—especially since Eve was involved. Don’t push me on this one, Sam.”

He lay a hand over both of mine, his touch less reassuring than strange; I couldn’t remember the last time my fingers had been cupped in his.

“I’m just disturbed that she’d be thinking of herself as having somehow failed,” he said.

“Failed at what?”

“Dealing with Eve. Accepting her as she was—a lousy mother, an unhappy woman. I think Danny’s worried that her anger made Eve all the more withheld. She always longed for Eve to be open with her—”

“I know that. But Danny would never have gotten what she wanted. Eve was incapable of being open with anyone.”

“Except your father, maybe?”

“Perhaps,” I answered. “I have no way of knowing. Eve certainly couldn’t be open with me. Or with Danny. Or you, for that matter.”

He looked away, and when he spoke again, the pain in his voice was palpable. “Did you and I do enough for Danny?”

“We stepped into the breach. And we can keep doing that, Sam.”

He nodded. “You’re right. And it’s ended up good for both of us, having her in our lives. Don’t you think?”

I heard no uncertainty in his voice. He wasn’t looking for a confirmation of his own belief; he wanted to know what I felt.

“I think so. Now.”

“We needed a kid.”

“It didn’t help.” The old heartbreak, not yet dispatched. Dormant, it could still be jostled into stinging life. “You can’t will such things, can’t order yourself to want your own child. I wish I’d known that, for your sake. Having Danny in our life was enough for me. But for you . . .”

My sentence required no finishing. Something like embarrassment, a deep surprise at the unexpected rawness on display, came over us. We stared off into nowhere until a waitress slid a check onto our table.

MY AFTERNOON with Sam triggered memories. Most were of Eve after her return from Ithaca to Manhattan. Random details: her answering machine’s jingle (the tune from the Yogi Bear cartoon series); a set of framed botanical prints in her bedroom; her enjoyment of macaroons and marzipan (the stickies, she’d called them, licking her fingers while eating them). And an amber necklace I’d found on the sidewalk when I was five, which I’d given to her. I could still recall my fierce pride when I’d presented it—how pleased I’d been to make her blush in happy surprise.

Eve hadn’t been one for verbal acknowledgments. She’d had other ways of signaling thanks: with a bunch of fresh rosemary tied in twine, or an African violet in a clay pot. And her own way of laughing, too: a low, skittish trill, at once alluring and evasive. It was the laughter to which she’d treated Sam and me while commending us for rescue work performed on her behalf.

We’d done plenty of it. Within a few months after Eve’s return from Ithaca, my studio apartment had become Danny’s second home. Then, after I met and married Sam, our apartment became the place where Danny could most often be found when she wasn’t in school. Eve’s garden shop was in Chelsea, and her landscaping clients lived all over the city and on Long Island. She was incessantly, aggressively on the go. Gradually her busy schedule began edging Danny out.

There were, of course, day care centers and after-school programs where a single mother could deposit a young child, and Eve took advantage of these—but she also had a cousin nearby. When all else failed (and it frequently did), Sam and I were there to pick up the slack. Eve had no real friends, no one else to ask for help. So Sam ended up keeping track of Danny’s pediatrician and dentist appointments, and I took her shopping for school clothes, books, toys, and games—always with cash supplied by Eve, who was careful never to incur any financial obligations to me. Sam and I both attended Danny’s school plays and athletic events. Our work and social schedules were flexible and seldom jammed. We liked hanging out with Danny, and we usually had room to maneuver when Eve found excuses for not maneuvering herself.

Beneath the issue of our availability lay something more basic. Sam and I wanted what Danny offered us: regular doses of warmth, and a mix of silliness and verve to which we both grew addicted. Occasionally we’d wonder aloud what Danny herself was making of Eve’s unmotherly behavior—how it was affecting her at some hidden level. But of course neither of us spoke about this with her, and I knew there’d be no speaking of it with Eve.

THESE MEMORIES linked with others. Of being married and coming unmarried, as in unglued.

When Sam and I finally got round to confronting the issue of parenthood, sometime in the fifth year of our union, I was overwhelmed by ambivalence. Or so I called it, though my version seemed more intractable than that of other women I knew. Sam, I suddenly understood, was expecting me to convert without angst to his way of seeing things. For him, having a child was an inevitability, not an option. How had I managed to overlook something so obvious? And how had he failed to plumb the depths of my uncertainty? Beneath love lay bewildered incomprehension.

Meanwhile there was daily life to attend to. The Fourth Wall was earning a steady income, but after a time, Sam grew less gung ho about it than I was. He left the running of it to me, instead pursuing his central enthusiasm—the photo-book projects he’d begun undertaking as a freelancer. And because he was also thinking about opening an art gallery, he spent his spare hours making visits to potential spaces and developing contacts with artists and dealers.

One of his dealer friends employed Lila as an assistant. Sam didn’t pursue her until he and I were divorced, but she was there: an alternative future, with full-time parenthood built in.

BY THE time he and I did begin trying in earnest to conceive, I was in my late thirties. Months went by and nothing happened. I didn’t become pregnant, nor did either of us make an appointment to talk with a doctor or explore other possibilities for “starting a family,” as the antiseptic saying went.

Near the end of a long stretch of scheduled copulating, my resolve gave out. One evening in the fall of 1990, we both gravitated toward separate beds. Sam threw a sheet and blanket on the living room sofa, and I headed for the daybed in our small guest room. The next morning I arose and walked into the bedroom we shared, expecting to find my husband there. Our bed lay empty, its spread pulled over its pillows. I remember exactly how it looked, unrumpled and unremonstrative, as smooth-faced as a confessor.

Sam entered the room right behind me, his surprise at the sight of the pristine bed as evident as mine. Later that week, after we’d both dumped buckets of tears (Sam wasn’t the crying type, and the sight of his sobbing was at once oddly beautiful and heart-stoppingly sad), we separated.

We were divorced on a beautiful morning in May, the kind that brides-to-be pray for. We took the subway downtown to the municipal building, where we sat in an open courtroom with a half-dozen other couples. Waiting patiently to be sundered, we held hands the entire time. When our moment arrived, the judge, a woman, threw a puzzled glance at our interlocked fingers. Were we sure, she asked, that we wanted to do what we were about to do? Her question, so like the one posed by the person who’d married us, drew a wan smile from us both. We nodded like a pair of well-mannered children too shy to talk.

The judge pronounced and gaveled, then signed our rupture into reality. We got back on the subway and returned to the Village, where we entered a café and drank coffee dazedly, like two people who’d just walked away from an explosion. I remember Sam’s and my parting: the two of us on the sidewalk, smiling bravely. Sunlight glinting everywhere. A swift embrace of hands. A prickling sensation in my fingertips afterward, which lasted hours and felt purposive, like a code, though I couldn’t crack it.

OUR MARRIAGE was over, yet Danny was still in it.

Sam and Lila were married in July of 1996. Eve, Danny, and I attended the wedding. A party took place after the ceremony, in a large, ramshackle loft belonging to a painter friend of Lila’s.

At the request of the bride and groom, Eve had decorated (transformed, really) the loft. There were rose petals all over the floor, as well as quantities of red roses strewn on a bed pushed into one corner. A lamp above the bed illuminated the entire garnet-colored mass. It was so attractively done, I remember thinking. Tasteful and amusing at once—just what Sam would want.

At one point during the party, I found myself standing with Eve off to one side, near the rose-covered bed. People were dancing; the party was in full swing. Eve turned to me, raising her champagne flute.

“Cheers,” she said, and we tapped glasses. She wore a long green dress, deeply V’d in front and back, which showed off the column of her spine and her strong collarbones and décolletage. Several men did double takes as they walked past her. Her fragrance, Lune, surrounded her lightly, a sublime aura. Inhaling it, I felt as if I’d entered an invisible chamber; the fragrance wasn’t only in the air but also, and perhaps chiefly, in my memory. Lune was Eve, the woman I’d adored and raged at (silently, fiercely) since the day she’d first started wearing my father’s perfume. Since she was fifteen.

“I just had a flash,” she said, “of the fathers. Ours.”

“Jordan and Dan?” I asked, nonplussed. Eve rarely mentioned either man.

She chuckled softly. “Can you believe Dan’s been dead twenty years? And how many has it been since Jordan died?”

I counted. “Fourteen.”

She nodded. “Ever miss him?”

Possible answers sparred within me. “Sometimes I’d like to ask him a few questions,” I said.

“About?”

“Oh, theater, his travels . . . Things he’s seen and done and smelled.”

That low trill. “You make him sound like an old dog.”

“He was, in a way.”

“No, Dan was an old dog. Jordan was someone with an excellent nose. And a need for privacy.”

I’d never heard Eve state such things about my father. “He did keep to himself,” I said. “And he wasn’t into memorabilia, that’s for sure. Ten years in that house in Frenchtown and almost no possessions. It was easy for Stuart and me to clean the place out after he died.”

“Nothing to give him away.”

I glanced at her. “I guess so.”

“You think that’s how he wanted it?” Her question was uninflected by any emotion I could detect.

“I guess,” I repeated.

“Me, too. But you’d know better, being his daughter.” She set down her glass of champagne. Returning her gaze to the dancers, she extended one hand, gesturing lightly. “Why didn’t you have one with him, Cam?”

I followed the trajectory of her forefinger. She appeared to be pointing at Sam, who was dancing with Danny to an upbeat number that had brought lots of people onto the dance floor. “Have one what?” I asked.

“A kid,” she answered.

I turned to stare at her, wondering if I’d heard her right.

“I mean, would it really have been such a hard thing to do?” she added.

“I suppose I didn’t want it enough,” I replied. “It was always hypothetical for me.”

Eve said nothing, and we sipped our champagne and stared at the dancers. Then she lit a cigarette. She smoked infrequently and only at parties, when enough other people were doing it. She levered her cigarette up and down with her thumb, using it as a pointer.

“Do you know if he’s slept with her?” she asked.

Again I followed the gesture’s trajectory, the lit tip of the cigarette. My astonishment was so large I could barely say the two names.

“Sam?” I asked. “Sam, you mean—with Danny?”

“Yes,” said Eve, “that’s who I’m talking about.”

Her face told me nothing. “Eve,” I said, “are you really asking me if while Sam and I were married, he ever—”

“No,” she broke in, “of course not, Cam! Not while you were married. Danny was too young then! I mean sometime later. Like during the past year or so.”

For a moment I wondered if she was drunk, though I knew that was highly unlikely. She’d probably had no more than a glass of champagne all evening.

“What on earth are you talking about?” I said. “What sort of a man do you think Sam is? And have you forgotten he started dating Lila over a year ago?”

“No,” she responded, “I haven’t forgotten. But he and Danny did take that trip to London a few years back.”

For her twentieth birthday, Sam had offered to accompany Danny on a five-day trip to London. It was her first journey abroad. They’d gone to a bunch of plays and galleries, and she’d had an excellent time.

“Listen to me,” I said, putting down my glass. “I met the two of them at the airport when they returned from that trip. And I can tell you they didn’t sleep together while they were over there. Because I would’ve known right away—”

“I believe you, Cam. But admit it. You weren’t entirely sure until you saw them. Aren’t I right? There’d been a little question in the back of your mind . . .”

For a moment I felt as though she’d placed her hands over my eyes and whispered something malevolently irresistible in my ear. “As soon as they walked through the gate at JFK, I knew nothing had happened. Nothing,” I repeated.

The smoke from her cigarette formed a pale gray wreath around her head. “I expect that’s true,” she replied. “Nothing happened in London. It’s afterward I’m thinking about.”

“Afterward?” I came unstuck. “This conversation’s absurd,” I snapped. “Sam’s been like a father to Danny, and she’s like a daughter to him—and you ought to know that better than anyone else. Why are you saying these things?”

Before I could add anything else, she’d taken my hand, pulling me behind her. We were headed, I saw, straight for Sam and Danny. Reaching them, Eve released me and took one of her daughter’s hands, pivoting Danny away from Sam and leaving him to me and me to a shocked silence that Sam mistook for my usual unruffledness.

He and I danced together briefly. When the tune ended, he kissed my cheek, handed me off to Carl (who received me graciously), and went off in search of another partner—his bride, in all likelihood, since he’d scarcely seen her all evening.

MY COUSIN and I did not revisit that conversation. For several weeks after the wedding, I avoided her. I was too angry to deal with her even perfunctorily. As I saw it, she’d set out deliberately to provoke and distress me.

This had nothing to do with Danny, I decided. Eve’s aim had been to rattle me. She’d wanted to drive a wedge between Sam and me, just as she’d sought, when we lived in the family apartment, to insert herself between my father and me. Some old frustration or resentment was driving her now, causing her to make ridiculous statements.

Thereafter I made sure that our conversations about Danny were confined to the mundane. For her part Eve seemed content to leave well enough alone. It dawned on me (and as the months passed, I grew more committed to this thought) that my cousin hadn’t actually believed what she’d suggested about Sam. It had been something to toss out, a verbal hand grenade whose bang—my dismay—was worth the ensuing mess.

I SPOKE with no one, not even Stuart, about what Eve had said to me. The best thing to do, I concluded, was to treat our exchange as if it had never taken place. But it had, and I found myself wondering whether I’d missed something. Before Lila, in that interval of confusion after Sam and I parted, what assuagement might he have longed for—Danny being, after all, no longer a girl but a woman?

I thought of Sam’s body, the languid heat of him in my recent dream, when he’d pleaded with Meyerhold for the child I’d resisted—the child he hadn’t figured out how to claim. Meyerhold had told him, sternly, that he’d need to find himself a different partner.

No, I thought. Not Danny. That couldn’t have happened. But there was something I’d missed—there had to be. I couldn’t be dreaming so much for nothing.

STUART AND Carl stopped by at around ten the night before Danny and I were to leave. I’d just placed my packed duffel bag in the front hall when the doorbell rang.

“Surprise!” they chimed. “We’ve come to pay you,” Stuart said solemnly.

“Actually,” said Carl, “we were out for a stroll, and I remembered we owed you money.”

Stuart grinned. “That box of books you gave me? We sold every last one of ’em today. For a tidy sum! Thanks to him,” he added, jerking his thumb in his partner’s direction.

“Dumb luck,” said Carl. “Some guy comes in, flirts with Stuart for a while, then tries acting all serious with me—like I’m the book guy and Stuart’s the fun guy.” He rolled his eyes. “So I showed him your box and told him the contents were really something else indeed.”

“Were what?” I laughed.

“That’s what I kept saying—a bunch of high-minded shit like quite extraordinary, really something else indeed . . . And the guy was totally convinced! He won’t read the books, of course. He’ll display them. Brag about them.”

“Although he did know his theater,” said Stuart, fake wistfully.

“He wasn’t talking to you about that,” Carl drawled. “I have eyes and ears, pal.”

Stuart chuckled as he handed me a wad of bills. “Two hundred and fifty smackers! Happy now?”

“Oh yes,” I said, stuffing the bills in a side pocket of my duffel. “You’ve just supplied my play money for Ithaca.”

“For a spot of gambling, maybe?” Stuart mimed the shuffling of a deck of cards. “Or some twenty-year-old rum?”

“No—cigars,” said Carl. “You don’t even have to smoke them. Just show ’em off. I can just see you and Danny in some student pub at Cornell, lighting up a couple of those nice long Cubans . . . That’ll get the boys’ attention.”

We all laughed, and Stuart gave me a parting hug. “Have fun, babe. You look tired—get some sleep. If you have more dreams, try to remember them! And don’t forget, you can always call me.”

It was true: I could always call him, I thought as I lay in bed an hour later, tossing uneasily. But I wouldn’t. Better for Danny and me to venture forth with no one to rescue us when we slid down the rabbit hole, as I felt certain we would.

INTERLUDE

PUTTING THE ex-husband on stage in Camilla’s latest dream proved more effective than I’d imagined. One never knows! Dreams are ever rambunctious . . .

Every play, Seva once said, is produced unfinished. The final, crucial revision is always made by the spectator. And as the sole spectator of her own nocturnal dramas, Camilla had to be kept on her toes, wondering how things would pan out.

I pause the action now to fill in some important information related to Seva’s career. And linked, too, with Camilla’s crucial revision . . .

FROM HIS Petersburg days to the mid-Thirties, Meyerhold’s artistic ascent proceeded virtually unchecked. By the Twenties, he’d become the chief luminary in Soviet theater and a personage known throughout Europe and even in America. Then his career fell—was felled, I should say, like a tree.

Russia in the Thirties was a place of everyday preposterousness. As the evidence of abuses and terror mounted, millions of Russians went about their daily business, pretending everything was fine. With one shot from his revolver, Volodya Mayakovsky had permanently removed himself from the national drama. Thereafter Seva and his colleagues found themselves forced to bushwhack a trail through increasingly dense thickets of political uncertainty. This they did with varying degrees of success, and always with anxiety.

Fortunately Seva possessed large reserves of confidence in his professional capabilities. It was nearly impossible to flap him; plenty of people had tried all along to do so, but to no avail. His imperturbability was a result of the amount of time he spent on the stage, first as an actor, then as a director. For Seva a stage was a construction site, a director very like an architect. Actors were sculptors: with their voices and bodies, they lent shape to words. Beneath the words lay music. It was always there, if only metaphorically—and it was what most excited Seva.

YEARS EARLIER, Seva had told Anton Chekhov that he finally understood the challenge of staging The Cherry Orchard. The director must get the sound of it, Seva said—by which he meant the underlying cadences of the play’s action.

At the start of his career, during rehearsals at the Moscow Art Theater, he’d held several long conversations with Chekhov about such matters, and he’d chronicled those talks in his journal. Anton Pavlovich had harbored serious misgivings about the way in which most dramas were being staged. In one journal entry, Seva recounted how Chekhov had scoffed at the sets for The Seagull.

“Get rid of these damn bits of trees and those flowers,” the playwright had urged the cast, amiably but firmly.

The actors, proud of having lugged such props onto the stage, gave Anton Pavlovich chagrined looks.

“Why do you need all that stuff anyway?” Chekhov added.

“To make it real,” one actor answered.

“Real?” retorted Chekhov. “But the stage demands a degree of artifice! It reflects the quintessence of life!”

After hearing that remark, Seva committed himself to devising new ways of staging that would disrupt everyone’s assumptions about theatricality. Hilarious and bewildering, Seva’s productions had viewers literally yelling in the aisles—and the critics baffled or outraged. His daring strategies worked: people flocked to his theater.

FOR A while, Seva’s star rose and shone. But then Volodya killed himself, Sasha Golovin died, and everything started coming undone.

In 1932 the playwright Nikolai Erdman was arrested and deported to Siberia. In 1936 Dimitri Shostakovich was condemned by the Party for his so-called formalism. In 1938 Seva’s former mentor Stanislavsky died.

Dramatic enchantment, said Seva (quoting Pushkin, whom he revered), vibrates three chords of the imagination: laughter, pity, and terror. Among Russians the first two chords had ceased vibrating; only the third, terror, still resonated. In 1937 the directorial approach favored by Comrade Meyerhold was described by one Soviet critic as a “systematic deviation from Soviet reality,” which in turn constituted a “hostile slander against our way of life.” For months everyone was on edge, wondering what might befall Seva.

In 1938 he was allowed to take over the lead of Stanislavsky’s Opera Theater, to the surprise of his colleagues. Was a lull setting in at last? The worst of the purges seemed to be over; perhaps the darkness was lifting.

Not yet.

That same year Lavrenty Beria became Internal Affairs Commissar. The following May, Seva attended a meeting of the Writers’ Union, where he let slip a few remarks about the banal subject matter of Soviet literature. Afterward several telephone calls were placed to key government officials. Apparently Seva was denounced by (among others) a Russian journalist named Koltsov, who linked him with the counterrevolutionary Bukharin.

Not good. Or as the Americans put it, way not good.

ONE MORNING in June of 1939, Seva was dragged down the stairs of a flat in Leningrad by several men who transported him to Moscow. He was thrown into a dark, filthy cell in Lefortovo Prison and eventually transferred to the Military Collegium. His wife and friends obtained no information regarding his whereabouts.

Thus began the vanishing.

Now imagine the actual ending. After many months of imprisonment, Seva is standing in his darkened cell, awaiting a sham trial scheduled for the next morning. Picture him pinned at the terminus: no exit. He sits in an unbreachable concrete block, a bare, all-revealing space, perfect for so tragic a farce. He couldn’t have designed a better set himself!

Did he attempt to prepare for the moment when the executioner would barge in? Did he repeat his defense to himself silently? Or did denial take over, urging his thoughts to drift backward and swirl languorously in eddies of memory?

Zina: visions of her flashing like popped lightbulbs before his closed, swollen eyelids. Zina in extravagant costume for The Lady of the Camellias . . . Zina in bed in the flat on Gorky Street, wearing one of his nightshirts . . . Zina perched on the steps of the Bolshoi, panting slightly and grinning after one of their long rambles through Zamoskvarechie, over the bridge to the Kremlin, past the gardens, through the gates to Prospect Marx, to the theaters.

A letter he’d written her a few months earlier, from the countryside: You are golden . . .

Did he remember, at the very end? Or could he remember nothing, not even her beloved face? This is a question to which I will never have an answer, for it arose as Seva was being sundered from his life, and I from him.

SEVA DIED in Moscow on February 2, 1940, in the basement of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union, near Red Square.

His death went unremarked. As far as the average Russian was concerned, Vsevolod Emilevich Meyerhold ceased to exist after that morning when the NKVD came for him. References to him were excised from books and journals on Russian theater; theatergoers and critics were forbidden to mention him in public. It was as if his productions had never been staged in Moscow and St. Petersburg, not to mention Paris and Berlin. As if his astonishing offerings to the theater had never materialized anywhere, period. As if they were a dream.

Zina couldn’t have helped. A few weeks after Seva’s abduction in St. Petersburg, she was arrested in Moscow, then released and returned to the Gorky Street apartment. A few days later, her slashed, crumpled body lay in the middle of the living room floor. Neighbors told of two men and a car. No suspects were ever apprehended.

Zina’s daughter had forty-eight hours to remove her mother’s and Seva’s clothing and other belongings, including books and papers, from the flat. She was traumatized, of course, but also thorough. Afterward she emphasized that whoever had committed the murder had not burglarized the apartment, at least not in an obvious fashion. Nothing at all was missing except, apparently, the contents of an unlabeled manila envelope.

Shortly after the place was emptied, a young female member on the staff of Commissar Beria moved into half of the apartment. Beria’s chauffeur took the other half. The chauffeur eventually left; his roommate stayed on until her own forced eviction, nearly fifty years later. (Picture her, purple-faced: “I am an old woman! This is my home! Why, Comrade Beria himself was responsible for my being in this apartment! Have you no sense of history?”)

One unlabeled envelope . . . Nobody knew what it had contained, and nobody thought much of it. I did, however. And I happened to know it hadn’t been taken by Zina’s killers, whose only assigned task had been as follows: delete that slut wife of that Jew traitor Meyerhold. The papers inside that envelope were missing because Seva had already delivered them (via a visiting English journalist, whose suitcase was fitted with a false bottom) to Jordan Archer.

THERE: I’VE done the necessary catching-up work.

Camilla’s next dream took place in what might be called the theater of unaccepted loss. And since a fine set—that loft in which her ex-husband and his second wife celebrated their nuptials—had already been constructed, I decided we might as well use it for our next act.

In it Camilla’s cousin and mother join forces unexpectedly. A disconcerting alliance, as Meyerhold makes sure to point out. On we go!