1972
12 March
Arizona
Morning, ma’am. Is Mr. Evans here?
From my front porch, I stare at this young shrub of a reporter. Quite possibly, under normal circumstances, with his blue eyes and cherubic cheeks, cleanly shaved, he is a perfectly decent southwesterner, a baseball dad and low-handicap bowler, as well as an expert carver of Thanksgiving turkeys. But these are not normal times. Which he well knows. Else why brandish notebook and pen on my porch at seven-thirty in the morning?
I tell him that Mr. Evans has gone into town. I start to close the door of my new little house—everything in it, including this door with its heavy brass knob, still feeling foreign to the touch—but he’s quicker than he looks and manages to get his foot in the way.
Is Mr. Evans residing here, ma’am? Are you two separated? Are you going to file for divorce?
Like all good hunters, he has been careful to catch his prey unawares. I stand before him in house clothes and callused bare feet, an owl’s nest of hair. Such an awkward human picture that internally he’s berating himself for not bringing a camera, I can see it in his eyes.
Absolutely not.
Then why are you living out here? Why aren’t you at Taliesin?
The Fellowship believes in communal living, I attempt to educate him, not in children or families. So my husband and myself, we agree it’s better for our son to have separation from the Fellowship. We bought this house together.
That’s not what the Fellowship’s saying. They’ve sent out a statement.
Statement? What statement? Who says this? I know nothing of any statement. Show it to me.
I don’t have it on me, but it’s definitely authentic. Official Fellowship stationery.
I know that stationery, I think, with the Architect’s famous crest and lettering. The Widow loves nothing more than to disseminate her philosophies and revisionist histories to the public on its bleached surface.
I see. So what does it say, this statement?
It says you’ve abandoned your husband, Sid Evans, and he’s seeking a divorce.
The woman’s a liar.
Mrs. Wright? He seems genuinely shocked, as if I have just damned his queen to hell. Then he gathers himself, cheeks flushed by the prospect of imminent promotion at The Arizona Republic, and neatly flips open his notebook to jot down my remarkable words.
Two days later, I am holding an envelope of that very stationery, addressed to me in the Widow’s black-inked hand. The stamp—she must have an awfully large supply of them—bears a likeness of her late husband, with his flamenco dancer’s black hat and flowing mane of white hair. I ask Pam, who has come to live with us, if she would take over feeding Yasha his lunch, and I slit open the envelope with the tip of a paring knife and carry the Widow’s letter out to the porch to read in private.
Your message has reached me as you intended. Rather than reply in kind, I invite you to return to the Fellowship for your husband’s sake. Assuming, of course, that you will agree to live by our rules.
From the beginning I offered you a mother’s love, which you chose to spurn. Rest assured that the invitation I make to you today is of a purely practical nature and will never be repeated.
I have no intention of returning to that place where one’s freedom is forever chained to the iron peg of that woman’s egotistical will. I want Sid to come to me of his own free thinking. Though with each week of separation that continues between us I am faced with the greater reality that our reunion will not happen. Never would I have imagined that this big strong educated man from the American West would prefer to live enslaved rather than free. But I must face the fact that he has lost his desire for independence, if indeed he ever had it. The chain has become his friend or, perhaps better, his lover. Or it has become himself, his very being, a thought that I tell you makes me sick to my soul because it means it is already too late for us, we are an ending without a story.
21 March
It’s Yasha’s pediatric nurse who suggests I see Dr. N. The nurse’s name is Roberta, and she notices that I am not myself these days, a bit beleaguered, stumped by circumstance. Or it could be my hair, which admittedly is not looking superior. Or my cigarette smoking, a rejuvenated vice. But more than anything, I suspect, it is the pound and a half that Yasha has recently lost (to say nothing of the seven I have gained). Concerned, Roberta questions me about his feeding habits and digestion, and when I am not as clear in my answers as she expects, when I seem a step or two behind in my maternal comprehension, she opens a drawer in the examination room and takes out a card and hands it to me.
This is the name of someone to talk to, she tells me in confidential tones. A psychiatrist. I think he might be able to help you.
Dr. N is a phlegmatic middle-aged Jewish man, balding, round-faced, and deeply tanned. He has exchanged his dress shoes (I can see them neatly lined up by his desk) for gentleman’s slippers. A bag of golf clubs leans against a corner of his soporific office.
Tell me a little about your family life, he begins, following ten minutes of informational this and that.
You mean Yasha?
Sorry, I meant your original family. Parents, and so forth. You’re from the Soviet Union, I believe you said?
Is he suggesting that he has no idea who I am? Why are you asking me this question? I demand.
Despite my aggrieved tone, Dr. N’s smile is patient, encouraging. He holds his tanned head perfectly still and waits for me to expose myself further.
I am here to save my marriage, I plead in a softer voice.
And if your marriage cannot be saved?
The question shocks me. What do you mean? But this is why I have come to you.
I understand, he says. And if I can help you succeed in this, nothing would make me happier. But life is rarely so simple, I’m sure you know, or I’d be out of work. And if it turns out that your marriage can’t be saved, for whatever reasons, you will still be you. Wherever you go. So that’s the person I’m asking you about.
I will never go back to Dr. N. Let us say that the person he insists on interrogating me about is not any person I wish to dine with again. And so I leave a figment of that hectored woman in his office, with the golf clubs and the slippers and the ingenious tan, and turn back on my own resources, as Americans are fond of saying—a turn of phrase that could have been invented only in a country with resources to burn.
2 April
I am folding baby socks. Yasha finally down for his afternoon nap, his wardrobe of miniaturized garments, still warm from the automatic drying machine, piled on the kitchen table before me. I think that breathing in the innocence of these clothes, their lack of mileage and cynicism, such repositories of love, is one of the few truly peaceful acts I have known. My American son asleep in the next room. For him, love is not yet knowing what is to come; for me, it is trying to forget what has passed. These two sides of our love, how we reach across time to be here together…
Never mind. I am thinking too much. Breathe; let go; fold; breathe…
In my driveway, where no visitor is expected, a car door slams.
I am on my front porch before the Widow can take two steps; I don’t want her inside my house, near my child. Her turquoise chapeau, black woolen shawl, and wide-legged pants so elegant and preposterous as to seem part of some costume drama unfolding for no clear reason in my average desert yard. Her makeup too heavy for this afternoon matinee. Waving off her personal physician and architect stud muffin, who have driven her in her dead husband’s Cherokee red Mercedes (he collected them, he collected them all), she walks slowly, fiercely upright and unaccompanied, trailing an aura of cold triumph, from the car to my porch. In her hands a small box wrapped in exquisite handmade paper.
So. You have made me come to you.
There is no point, I warn her.
There is always a point, if people are open to reason. Won’t you invite me inside? As you can see, I’ve brought a gift for Jacob.
I square my body in front of the door to keep her out, amazed that she still believes I can be bought for what she’s selling. Yasha is taking a nap.
Sid will be disappointed. I wait, but she makes no move to leave. I promised him I would say hello to his son, she persists.
Why doesn’t he come himself?
He feels unwelcome. And he’s extremely busy. Did you know he was in Iran again? The Fellowship is thriving. Projects are abundant, creative spirits more deeply engaged than ever. Of course, raising funds for our great work remains a constant challenge. And yet, out of all this, there is only one thing that disappoints. Do you know what it is? I’m quite serious. You must stop slandering me to the public. Immediately.
You are the ones telling lies to the press, not me.
Oh, I think you know the truth. She takes another step forward, her face now so close to mine I can see the crevices in her forehead, which no paint can fill. Listen to me carefully, Svetlana. We come from the same part of the world, you and I. Of all the people you will meet in this country, I am the one who knows what you really are. In the end, you’re just a murderer’s daughter, aren’t you?
I raise my hand to strike her. I would crush that face, those brown eyes streaked with yellow. She does not flinch because she knows I lack the conviction to go through with it; she has poisoned me with my own doubt. Behind her the handsome fellow who does or does not know he’s a lackey has leapt from the car, prepared to take the threatened blow instead of his dominatrix, while the personal physician, secure in his seat, doesn’t move a muscle.
The gift is for the boy, the Widow hisses like a Gypsy curse. She turns stiffly and signals the young man. Help me down these stairs!
Once they’re gone, I tear off the exquisite wrapping and open the box. Inside, on a bed of cotton, is a framed photograph of the Widow and the Architect—an image captured, one could fairly say, during their glory years. Across the bottom of the photograph, written in oil pencil, an inscription: For Jacob—Truth Against the World.
I return to my kitchen. Seeing it now for what it truly is. I have lived here no time at all. To call this home is to not know what home is. Only my son’s clothes on the table, light as they are, have any reality, any heft. I put my hand on the jumbled pile and feel how the warmth has left them. If you do not catch innocence as it happens, can it be said to ever have existed? My father loved me once, I know he did. I think of him forever having Kuntsevo torn down and rebuilt again around the single room he lived and worked in, the one room he never allowed to be changed. He must have guessed that it was the only room where what little that was human in him still resided, and known that if he ever destroyed that too, there would be nothing left.
14 April
My marriage to Sid is over.
I should not have gone to see him tonight. It was weak of me, but I needed to know. I could not continue existing in this limbo between our polar realities, ignored into inconsequence as if I’d never happened to him at all. As if our child had never happened. As if I had made it all up in my own head.
I asked Pam if she would watch Yasha for an hour or two. When she hesitated—it was her night off and she was dressed to go out to dinner with friends—I said I’d pay her double her usual salary. It was crude and thoughtless of me, and it offended her; after months of working for us, she has come to feel like part of our little family. Still, she agreed, hugging me as if I were the wounded one. Of course, she said. Do whatever you need to. I’ll stay with Yasha. And I grabbed the car keys and went out.
Twenty minutes later, I was turning the Dodge off the highway, hearing the fenders scraping and grating over the unwelcoming rocks of Taliesin road. The moon high and full, its cold light throwing the cacti into long shadows. I parked on the side of the road and stepped out. The stars were quilted overhead. From my daily peregrinations with Yasha I was familiar with every hillock and shrub of this landscape, none of it as strange as the life I’d led here. I began to walk. There was no one about at this hour, and my footsteps were muted.
Our apartment overlooked the road through a sliding glass door. At certain times I’d hated that door—groups of tourists constantly peering in from the outside as if we were apes in a zoo. Other times, though, I came to feel that the desert view the door afforded was the anchoring point of my sanity: as long as I could apprehend it, it must be real; and if it was real, then I must be real as well.
While I was having these thoughts, my foot painfully struck something on the ground: a rock about the size of my hand. For no reason I was aware of, I picked it up and continued walking. Soon our apartment came into view, its one illuminated room and that glass door staring back at me like the lens of some giant camera. In the dark, outside, I could get close enough to observe intimate details of the life going on within.
Sid had changed nothing about the place since I’d left. (In truth, he’d changed little after I’d first arrived.) Hanging on the wall among an assortment of antique weapons was the sword he’d been given by the Iranian government in gratitude for his work there, a string of dried flowers dangling from its curved blade. His collection of rock crystals and geologic nodules (a word he taught me) were still arranged on shelves, along with his library of art and architecture books.
He was sitting with his back to me. Wearing a dressing gown, his feet bare, watching some show on television.
He must have heard the glass door slide open, must have known it was me, but he did not turn his head. He did not move. For some time we remained like that—I standing just inside the door, he facing the television as if I weren’t there; the show’s mindless, fake laughter. And then, slowly, I moved closer, until I was close enough to touch him. And still he did not turn his head.
Sid, I said. I had begun to weep, but quietly. I put my hand on his shoulder from behind. And still he did not respond.
Sid, I’m leaving. I’m taking Yasha to Princeton. I will divorce you, if that’s what you want.
His head sank—perhaps a nod, perhaps a surrender. And still without looking at me, he reached back for my hand on his shoulder.
I left my desert rock on a table on my way out. For his collection.