November. The month of her mother’s suicide. The month which all her life will arrive like a cuckoo clock of despair, calling, You are alone, you are alone, you are alone. This year no better, maybe even a bit worse: she has told me (under the rubric of lawyer-client privilege, I assume) of her recent all-too-brief affair with the journalist Max Kirschner and how it ended. Kirschner is already rumored to be sleeping with his new research assistant, a grad student a third his age.
And Peter Horvath, Esquire? Kind of you to ask. No such romantic entanglements for him. Behold him in early middle age, tucked away in his Park Avenue office, sticking diligently to the professional script as it once was written for young men like himself in the vaunted halls of the nation’s finest law schools. His mentor, Lucas Wardlow, is semiretired and rarely in the building anymore. And without the famous attorney’s worldly encouragement and sophisticated bonhomie to guide his fortunes, it is fair to say that almost the entirety of Horvath’s more civic-minded (i.e., pro bono) practice at Wardlow Jenks has gradually been squeezed aside by routine corporate work, financial contracts, negotiations, and the like, which pay the firm’s and his own hefty bills well enough, but leave him somewhat less than proud.
Among his many clients, however, there remains one notable exception to this rule of widgets and monotony. (Hint: she is Russian.)
She is the client—the only one—whom he regularly telephones during nonoffice hours (and always on a private line, with the door closed), simply to “check in.” The client whose roller-coaster moods he has come to be able to read with the nuance of an expert seismologist. The client whose always undiluted opinions about people, places, nations, politics he has begun—much to his surprise, alarm, and, yes, occasional amusement—to absorb as his own. The client whose level of emotional energy has become the barometer that tells him the atmospheric pressure of his day. The client whose memories of her traumatic past—whether in fact she herself perceives how traumatic—have increasingly come to weigh on him too, as if (though he knows this is fantasy) he were not a relatively recent addition to her life but rather an old and intimate conspirator, someone who had been at her side from the beginning, in a country far from his own, inseparable from the joys and hurts of her foreign, inconceivable life.
And yet for all this, a neutral observer, if such a person existed, might have remarked how during these crucial weeks of our story Peter Horvath himself, ever the professional, continued to conduct his public life without the appearance of any major disturbance of the heart.
But hold on a minute: yes, out there, a wind is beginning to blow.
Thus we arrive at the Thursday before Thanksgiving, 1974. The phone buzzes and my secretary, Beverly, informs me that Mrs. Evans is on the line.
“Put her through.”
“Peter, is that you?”
“I have it, Beverly, thanks. I’m here, Svetlana. Everything all right?”
“Peter, do you have special recipe for cooking turkey?”
A surprising urgency to her question, as if I’m being asked for the nuclear launch codes. “You mean for Thanksgiving?”
“Of course Thanksgiving, what else? I am talking real American turkey.”
“Hmm. Sort of outside my field of expertise. I could ask Martha, if you’d like.”
“Never mind. I can see you have no idea.”
“You’re right,” I quickly agree, relieved to drop the matter.
“Fine, then.” She actually sounds put out that I don’t have a turkey recipe up my sleeve. “Peter?”
“What?”
“You know Bonhoeffer?”
“Bon-who?”
“Bonhoeffer. Theologian. German, but against Nazis. My new friend Dottie lends him to me. His book calls what is happening to me a crisis of faith. Temptation of the spirit, he says. The kind of alone you only feel when God has left.”
“God hasn’t left you, Svetlana. If He was with you before, He’s with you now. God knows I’m no expert on God or Bon-what’s-his-name, but I know that’s how it works. Most of all, I know you.”
A sudden crack on the other end of the line, followed by a buzzing wisp of static. And oddly, as if I were at her side, I can picture in my mind exactly what’s happened: the telephone receiver has fallen out of her hand and landed on the linoleum. I can picture where she’s standing in her kitchen, the twisted length of phone cord. And now I hear what can only be the unscrewing of a certain kind of bottle cap—Smirnoff’s—followed by the unmistakable sound of liquor being poured over cubes of ice.
According to the silver clock on my desk (from Martha, Tiffany’s, engraved for our tenth wedding anniversary), it’s a quarter past three. “Svetlana, are you drinking? It’s the afternoon. Look, maybe it’s none of my business—”
“Why not, if it makes me feel better?” she snaps. (There’s my girl: daughter of the vozhd.)
“For Yasha’s sake,” I remind her. “And because you know as well as I do that drinking’s not going to make you feel better. It’s going to make you feel worse.”
“What the hell do you know? I’m a bad mother. I never learn.”
“You’re not a bad mother. You’re just having a rough time.”
She blows her nose.
“You’re crying.”
“No.”
“Listen, I’ll stop over and see you this evening. Okay? From the station. I don’t know how I’ll work it out, but I will.”
“You’ll check on me,” she accuses me bitterly. “My Park Avenue lawyer.”
“Did it ever occur to you that if I check on you, as you call it, maybe it’s because I actually—”
“Sure. Jenks Wardlow. One hundred seventy-five bucks an hour and all-you-can-eat buffet.”
“It’s Wardlow Jenks, not Jenks Wardlow. And fuck you.” Enraged, without thinking, I hang up on her. (Sixteen years practicing law, and she’s the first client I have ever hung up on.) Pulse still racing, I stare dumbly at the black phone on my desk.
Scared out of my wits, because I’d been about to say that I loved her.
A minute later, the phone buzzes. “Mr. Horvath, Mrs. Evans is on the line again.”
“Tell her I’ve left for the day.”
The holidays pass with no word from her. Has she fired me? Relieved me of my obligations to her, professional and otherwise? The prospect, the silence, the darkness have a paralyzing effect, making me outwardly quiet and dull, a dead man walking in my own home. Carving a fifteen-pound bird at the sideboard in our dining room, Martha’s parents and unmarried sister at the table discussing Watergate and how to get tickets to the Broadway revival of Gypsy, I let my mind drift to wondering what sort of turkey Svetlana ended up cooking after all, and for whom.
“Peter.”
I come to: Martha beside me, holding a stack of plates.
“What’s wrong with you? I’ve been standing here for about a minute.”
“Sorry.”
She hands me the top plate and stares at me a few moments longer—as if reading my mind—before saying, “Remember, Mother prefers dark meat.”
And now it’s Christmas. Jean no longer likes Carly Simon, she likes Led Zeppelin. It is New Year’s. Nineteen seventy-five, the year the Vietnam war will finally end and my daughter will turn fourteen and I, her father, will turn forty-two.
Svetlana will be forty-nine.
February 6, 1975
Dear Mr. Horvath,
My husband and I are giving a small birthday dinner for our friend Lana Evans on the 28th of the month. When I asked Lana which guests she would like me to invite, the only people she specifically mentioned were you and your wife. Would you come? I’m sure it would make her happy. The evening will be a simple affair, as my husband, Thomas, and I—he is Assistant Minister at All Saints’ Church here in town, you may have heard—are not fancy people. But it would be our pleasure to meet you and your wife, and to welcome you to our home.
Sincerely,
Dottie Carpenter
Some evenings now, when I sit in my living room listening to Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations late in his career, the pianist’s ghostly, animalistic moans emanating from the exquisite formal arithmetic of Bach’s musical line, I find myself getting lost not in the ever-extending correspondences of notes but rather in the raw, inchoate exhalations of a man quite obviously on the cusp of some kind of madness. Ecstatic madness, perhaps, but madness all the same. And this reminds me of something, a time and place. Of certain desperate, uncontainable feelings I have known—on whose behalf I see that I too was capable of being a bully and a fool.
Back then, of course, I didn’t explain it to myself this way. A social invitation had been received. There were reasons—good, solid, professional reasons, I insisted—for accepting it, and what was clear to me, possibly the only thing that was clear, was that, because she was my wife, it was Martha’s duty to assist me in this endeavor, for the good of my career and thus, ergo, for the benefit of our family. Oh, I doubt she believed a word of this crap. But then, as I presented it to her over three nights running, gradually, quietly (were we not quiet, polite people?) bullying her into submission, she didn’t have to believe it. She didn’t have to believe anything at all. She didn’t even have to believe in me. All she had to do was agree to go.
As it turns out, Dottie Carpenter’s description of the birthday dinner for Svetlana as “small” is no mere figure of speech. Martha and I are still in the Carpenters’ front hall, handing coats and scarves to Thomas (“Reverend Tom”?) Carpenter, when I notice the grim resentment in my wife’s expression—up to now visible only to me, I believe—suddenly threatening to become explicit. I follow her gaze to the living room and there, standing by herself with martini glass already well in hand (this is not a dry house, I’m relieved to see), is the woman of the hour, wearing a red cardigan sweater over a brown woolen dress.
“Are we early?” Martha’s polite smile evaporating.
“You’re right on time,” Mrs. Carpenter assures her. Then in a lower voice adding: “The other couple had to cancel at the last minute. Their son has tonsillitis.”
“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.”
The Carpenters’ two preteen children, boy and girl, pale and earnest, appear and make respectful hellos to the guests, then start drifting back up the staircase.
“Billy,” the mother calls lightly to the flannel-shirted boy, “don’t forget your guitar.” The boy nods once, and is gone.
Turning back, I find Svetlana kissing my wife’s cheeks—once, twice, three times.
“Martha, you are good to help celebrate my old age! That beautiful blouse you are wearing.”
“Happy birthday, Svetlana.”
“Yes, happy.” The guest of honor’s martini glass is nearly empty. “And you, Peter, what a strange face you have tonight. But you are here, that’s the main thing after such long absence. While we are both not too old to still enjoy life a little, hm?”
“Happy birthday, Svetlana.”
“So people keep telling me. Now, Mr. Staehelin, you must have a drink with me on my special anniversary.”
“Certainly, Mrs. Staehelin.”
It’s not the little smile that’s just popped onto my lips that catches Martha’s attention, I imagine, so much as this exchange of private names that she’s never heard before, uttered in public. Our hosts don’t seem to have noticed, but my wife’s face has morphed into an ominous mask, fitted so as to allow light neither in nor out.
“Why don’t we go into the sitting room for the hors d’oeuvres?” Dottie Carpenter suggests.
On the coffee table sits a spinach and Velveeta cheese dip and a plate of Triscuits. “Dip?” Dottie Carpenter offers. It looks like a bowl of goose guano but is actually not half-bad. Between slathering crackers with green-and-orange goo, Reverend Tom asks Martha if we have ever attended service at All Saints’ Church, and she responds that, to tell the truth, her relationship with organized religion has never been especially pleasant.
“Then perhaps on one of my better Sundays, Mrs. Horvath,” the minister remarks with sly humility, “I hope I might have the opportunity of attempting to change your mind on the matter.”
My wife makes no further comment.
“It was at our church that I first met Svetlana,” Dottie Carpenter tells Martha. “I looked over and thought, Who is that remarkable-looking woman? You know what I mean, Mrs. Horvath. That combination of strength and vulnerability she radiates. A person with the courage to look her own monstrous history right in the eye without blinking. It reminded me a little of some faces we used to see among the Ugandans. Wouldn’t you agree, Thomas?”
I don’t catch the rest because I’ve joined Svetlana at the bar cart in the corner of the room, where she’s taken it upon herself to mix her second martini and my first. If nothing else in America, I note with a certain pride, she has learned how to make our national drink with the necessary degree of hubris. Her idea of vermouth is a vanquished dream that never was.
“You’re not still angry about our phone call, Peter?”
“I’m not angry. I’m embarrassed. I’ve never lost my temper like that with anyone.”
“Because I am not a normal client. And you were being human and emotional—not always usual with you. But listen, I’ve told you this before. Don’t get stuck on little words I throw out between big feelings. Sometimes my brain can be like a fist. A thing which, how do you say…?”
“Clenches?”
“Clenches. So my feelings come out too strong. But you must realize I’m no fist. That was my father. I am more my mother. A turtle, with the soft belly underneath.”
“Okay, turtle.”
She laughs—the sound an unvarnished story flung from deep within her chest; also a gauntlet thrown down. A bit of martini sloshes over the rim of her glass onto my shoe, though somehow this too is charming. We are on the plane from Zurich again, two bank robbers on the lam, making our break for freedom.
She takes a swallow of drink and turns back into the room. “Has Peter not told you, Dottie and Thomas, how he fetched me from Switzerland during my defection?”
“Let’s not bore them with that,” I interject with a quick glance at my wife, whose gaze is chilling my toes from ten feet away.
“Yes,” Martha agrees, “let’s not.”
But Dottie Carpenter is studying me with newfound interest. “That was you?”
“I will tell you how it was done.” A note of rare triumph in Svetlana’s voice as she plops herself on the couch next to Martha and launches once more into our tale of magical, heroic escape from her past.
And so…forward. Time for cake. Somehow we have got through split-pea soup; ham and sweet potatoes; iceberg lettuce with “Russian” dressing. The dishes have been cleared, a cloudy pause fallen over the table, the sky just before lightning. I become aware without exactly being aware that Martha—seated at the round dining table between Dottie and Reverend Tom—has uttered hardly more than a brief sentence or two these last twenty minutes. While Svetlana, placed between Dottie Carpenter and myself and still floating on the ebbing tide of her two early martinis, seems content to let the conversation go where it will (or won’t). The ship of international hospitality is sinking, in other words. But our faithful skipper will not let her go down without a fight.
Captain Dottie emerges from the kitchen bearing a homemade vanilla-frosted cake with a single candle burning on top. Behind her, holding a three-quarters-size guitar and looking full of regret for someone who can’t be much more than twelve, comes her son. “Billy.” Dottie Carpenter nods at him as she sets the cake on the table in front of Svetlana. And Billy commences, somewhat haltingly, to play “Happy Birthday” on his instrument.
We sing, of course. Even Martha does more than lip-synch. And when it’s over and the wish has been silently invoked and the candle extinguished, Reverend Tom says to the boy, “Now, Billy, how about ‘Hey Jude’ for the guests?” And then to us: “Billy’s crazy about the Beatles.”
But crazy or not, Billy shakes his head. He doesn’t want to play “Hey Jude” or anything else for the guests, whoever the hell we might be.
“Come on, William,” his father insists, a note of Episcopal sternness entering his voice. “One song for the table.”
“For God’s sake, leave the boy alone!”
The voice loud. And Russian.
“I beg your pardon?” sputters the Reverend.
“He doesn’t want to sing. So leave him alone now.”
“I’m sure I don’t know who you think you’re speaking to, Mrs. Evans. I’m the boy’s father.”
“That is your problem.” Svetlana scrapes back her chair and stands. The rest of us, even young Billy, remain nailed to our stations. “Reverend, in your own house I will tell you something, since you don’t ask. When I was your son’s age, my father would have his dinners and parties. The whole Politburo would be there, sometimes others too. I would be off by myself, quiet, reading or just thinking, sometimes already asleep and—and suddenly there he was, deciding it was time for me to sing and dance for his crowd, simply because that’s what he wanted. My hair was in braids then. Pigtails. And he would grab my pigtails like this”—with a vicious double-handed yank, she mimes the pulling-back of her head—“and drag me onto floor in front of everyone. He would make me sing and dance for him while they all watched. Can you imagine such a thing for a child, Reverend? No? Then I will show you.”
She stalks from the room. No one else stirs. Through the doorway I watch her open the front hall closet and rummage around inside.
I have an inkling then. But I do nothing to stop what’s happening. I just sit there.
She reenters the dining room wearing a man’s gray fedora and holding a black furled umbrella. The hat too large for her and partially covering her eyes, which are wide but taking no notice of any of us, as though she is seeing into the heart of some awful waking dream.
“Watch how I danced for my father.”
She begins to kick out her legs, first one, then the other. Hard to describe, even now, how cruelly pathetic. Twirling the umbrella like a parade baton, she performs a half turn and then more kicks, following some routine drilled into her long ago and never forgotten. A small skip to one side, a hop; then back, another turn—and now she stumbles, almost toppling over—before somehow righting herself with the umbrella and managing a last, broken pirouette.
Tears are streaming down her flushed cheeks.
Beside me, Dottie Carpenter’s gasp suggests the purest pity. Across the table, the minister fervently regards his lap, praying to his own corporeal reality. And young Billy has fled the premises; the future has defected. Only my wife—leaning back in her chair, chin slightly raised, lips parted, eyes bright with spectacle—seems ready to embrace the horrible strangeness of the moment, this utter humiliation of a once-feared rival.
I can’t stand another second of it. “That’s enough.” I get up and go to Svetlana, now bent over and weeping. Gently I pull the hat off her head and the umbrella out of her fist and drop them on the floor. “I’m taking you home.”
“Peter,” Martha snaps—on her feet, mouth a hard thin line.
“Sit down, Martha.”
“Peter, this is totally inappropriate.”
“I said sit down.”
And my wife, pink-faced as if she’s just been slapped by a stranger, sits back down.
“I’m driving Svetlana home in her car,” I announce to the room. “I’ll call a cab from there.”
I glare around the table. The Carpenters are gawking like rude children, but for once I don’t give a fuck.
“Mr. and Mrs. Carpenter, Svetlana thanks you for dinner. We all do. You’re good people and this is no one’s fault. Come on, Svetlana, let’s go.”
We do not speak on the way to her house. I am driving her beloved green Dodge. How she has managed to hold on to it through all the moves and mistakes, the makings and breakings of the last few years is anybody’s guess. But somehow she has, and now we are under its cover, moving, the heater struggling to warm us. The starless sky eggshell white, promising snow. Signs of a student party, loud beautiful bodies spilling off the front porch of a townhouse, slide by: not for us. Farther on, we pass a Jersey Central Power & Light truck, men in hardhats preparing for a cold night of work. We are invisible. I fish a white handkerchief out of my pocket and hand it to her. She does not ask, as an American might, whether it is clean. She does not care. She wipes her eyes and blows her nose. Her tears are gone. And soon we are at her house.
“You will come in.”
It is not a question.
The babysitter a neighbor’s daughter, a year or two older than Jean. While Svetlana searches for her wallet, I wait awkwardly with the girl in the living room, finding it impossible not to notice, even obliquely, her firm new breasts under her tight cable sweater. Then catching myself and thinking: I wouldn’t want my daughter showing herself off like that.
No? the girl’s expression says back, when our eyes briefly intersect. And who the fuck are you, mister, and what the fuck are you doing here?
“You are okay walking?” Svetlana asks, pressing some bills into the girl’s hand.
“I’m okay, Mrs. Evans, thanks. It’s just two blocks and my mom’s waiting.”
The girl leaves, a gust of cold air entering the house on her way out. And what will she tell her mother, if anything, about the evening?
“I will check on Yasha,” Svetlana says.
I nod vaguely, listening to her steps, a bit heavier from drink, climbing the stairs. Lost in my own fugue state. As if I’ve never been in this house before, yet know it intimately. Like a dream in which every detail of a landscape is at once completely new and completely familiar, and the hand one sees reaching into the unfolding narrative is one’s own, yet different.
I discover an LP cover left out beside the turntable on the shelf. Classic Russian Songs: one of those generic compilations of kitsch that music companies are always putting together and selling on late-night television. The jacket art shows a photograph of a man dressed exactly like one of the waiters from the Russian Tea Room on Fifty-seventh Street.
There’s a knot in my throat I don’t know what to make of.
In her kitchen, I find vodka in the freezer and pour myself a drink. Raising the glass to my lips, I notice my hand trembling.
“One for me?”
While upstairs, she’s removed her cardigan; her arms are bare to the shoulders and pricked with goosebumps. Strong arms still, but softer now in places. Like the brown wool of her sleeveless dress, which looks both coarse and fine. Eight years older than when I first laid eyes on her that morning in the Zurich airport. Both of us. Though what strikes me in the heart is not pity or shame—the wisps of gray in our hair, the few added pounds around our middles—but how she grasped that little dinner gathering of cowardly stiffs (myself included) by the scruffs of our necks and shook us until the masks of our hypocritical composure cracked and fell away, showing us, for just an instant, our true faces. Unlike her own face, which—love it or leave it—has in my experience only ever been true.
That face that I have come to love, and cannot leave.
“Take mine,” I say, handing her the drink. “I’ve had enough.”
But instead of drinking, she sets the glass on the counter and looks right into me.
“So, Peter. What do you think?”
“What do I think about what?”
“Don’t be stupid. You don’t do it very well.”
We are standing very close. Whether I will ever feel more alive than I do at this moment is a question for another day. But now, slowly, her eyes leading mine, she takes my hands and places them on her full, womanly breasts.
“This,” she says. “What do you think about this?”