BETTER HALF

THEY WERE BOTH TWENTY-TWO and married ten months. Anya couldn’t remember what half their fights were about anymore, those ongoing, line-crossing attacks. One day Ryan had called her a slut for leaving the apartment in only her long T-shirt. (She’d gone downstairs to get the mail.) Another night it was the scent of trout in the apartment, which he claimed stank up his clothes. He didn’t want to walk into people’s houses and move their furniture smelling like the seafood section. This time they’d argued about the loose change, the dimes and pennies Ryan excavated out of his jeans and left all over the place, instead of dropping them into the glass jar on the counter that she’d set out for just that purpose. That’s why, she said, he and his friends were going to still be buying scratch-off tickets when they were fifty.

That had been going too far, she knew. But Ryan took it even further, grabbing the glass jar off the counter and tossing it with a heavy dead pitch at the wall behind her head. It crashed a foot from where Anya stood, shattering glass and spilling change.

“What are you, crazy?” she yelled. “Are you nuts!”

The pennies and dimes were rolling under the radiator, behind the cabinets.

“Bitch doesn’t shut up,” he said, starting off toward the door.

Ten months earlier they’d driven to the county courthouse in White Plains, just two weeks after Anya’s mother had called from Dolsk to say her father was recovering from a heart attack. Soon he’d be taken to Nizhniy Novgorod for surgery, was what her mother said, in an optimistic tone calculated not to scare her. But the news filled Anya with a throat-closing panic, a fear of time and its consequences. She hadn’t seen her parents in a year and might not for another two or three, depending on how things went for her here. It was time to ask for a favor: marry now and sort out their feelings later.

She’d expected the hard part would be getting Ryan to agree, to offer something more than an ambivalent moan. But to watch him get down on one knee three days later to propose in earnest (because she was his Russian queen, his pot of gold, and doing it halfway was no way), this she hadn’t bargained for.

Stepping over the glass shards, Anya walked to the window in time to catch the reddish-brown top of Ryan’s head. He was cutting across the parking lot, heading toward his old hatchback Tracer. Only two places for him to go, she knew, the Bull & Brew or his mamma’s. She watched the car shudder to a start, then make a wide, sloppy turn into the road before it was gone. There was nothing left to do now but fetch the broom and dustpan from behind the refrigerator and to think about what she was going to say tomorrow when she went to see Erin, her lawyer.

The first time her mother had asked about Ryan’s family on the phone, all Anya could think to tell her was “his mother goes to church.” There was no reason to say the rest, that no father was around to speak of, that the brother was a degenerate gambler who’d spent two years as a guest of New York State. She did not say that Ryan’s mother hadn’t come to the courthouse, and that his brother had only shown up later at the Bull & Brew, where all of Ryan’s friends had come to toast the newlyweds and get properly obliterated.

         

She was already in bed when Ryan’s key scratched in the lock. She could hear the door undo in little creaks. Then he was drawing it closed behind him, gently so as not to wake her. For a moment it was quiet, but she could sense his stiff, lumbering presence in the doorway of their bedroom.

“Either come in or take your pillow to the couch,” she said in the dark, faking a sleepy hoarseness. “Just don’t stand there and keep me awake.”

He shucked off his pants and got in under the comforter in his T-shirt, shifting the weight of the bed.

“I hate you,” she said, pressing her cold feet to his calves.

“Stop it. What are you doing…?”

“I’m freezing.”

He wrapped his arm around her.

“You could have killed me,” she said.

He dipped his hand under her nightgown and cupped the warm roll of her stomach. “No way, I got better aim than that.”

“Are you sorry?”

“Mmmhmm.” His hand slid up higher and greeted her breast with a loyal squeeze. She drew it away. There would be no rewards tonight for trying to kill her. He seemed not to notice her rebuff and only pressed in closer, like a child. Sometimes it was easier to see him as a child who got all his power from being unpredictable and erratic. Her mother had once described some men this way—husbands of women who came to her clinic with their lips busted up like boxers, or who’d had their faces wiped in the same vomit they’d refused to clean up. Ryan wasn’t that demented, though he found other ways to torment her, like coming into the diner a whole hour before the end of her shift, just to sit at the bar and watch her serve customers. Beside her Ryan’s body jerked in a little spasm of sleep, and he drew her in closer. His pot of gold. Did he even hear himself? “You love me,” he’d told her the second night they’d spent together. She thought he’d been kidding, but then he’d said, “You do. If I died tomorrow, you’d come to my funeral and say you loved me.” “Don’t say things like that,” she’d scolded, while a fat tear slid down her cheek. Maybe she really did love him that time. After all, who else was there to?

         

She’d taken the train home from Nizhniy Novgorod right after her exams, worried that her parents would think her plan frivolous. It was the end of her third winter semester, and she was coming to ask them for money to go to Maine; the university had contacts at hotels in Kennebunkport, a town whose very name—chirped by the girls in her English class who’d worked there the previous summer—sounded spry and upbeat in its foreignness. Her parents, it turned out, needed no convincing. They seemed happy to let her go and see the brighter surface of life before its grayer truths set in. That night, having her father’s promise to pay for airfare, she went out with her two childhood girlfriends, one of them already divorced. At a party they tossed their empty bottles off the balcony onto the roofs of the tin garages below, howling. On Sunday morning before going back to Nizhniy Novgorod, she went with her mother to the market, where next to the meat pavilion old men were selling their war medals. A hole. It was the only way Anya could think of Dolsk since she’d started college. You had to know these holes. Sooner or later they closed in around you.

Never could she have dreamed up a place as beguilingly small as Kennebunkport, a fishing village made over into a sovereignty of yachts and jewelry shops. The restaurant where she washed dishes faced a marina. On her breaks she could go out the back to have a smoke and watch the bobbing boats, their nodding masts set off against an eerie confluence of glistening water and dull sky. Even on the most sweltering days, there was a breeze to cool her sweat while she drew on the menthol.

The room she shared with three other girls was in a guest-house belonging to the couple who owned the restaurant, and almost all the money she’d made in the kitchen had gone right back to them in rent. She’d noted the convenience of this arrangement to one of her roommates, a self-important twit who’d replied that the point of their trip was not to make money but to see the world. But August was half over, and what had she seen? Only the kitchen and stretches of Route 9 at night. High grass fields and parked speedboats, passing quickly in the window of the assistant cook’s car whenever James took them on their midnight runs for liquor and ice cream. Every Tuesday, after the last trays of dishes were run through the Hobart, they’d all meet on his porch to drink, and it was on one of these nights that Anya finally asked James whether any of the girls ever stayed past the summer.

“Anya’s always thinking of something,” he said delinquently.

All season she’d found James’s ponytail and overuse of her name to be on the lecherous side of friendly. She’d fallen for both early on, and all that had stopped her from going to bed with him was the fact that one or another of the work-travel girls was always willing to stay later at his parties. It was her provincial pride, she thought, that didn’t sit well with giving in to such passive motives in a man. In her heart she still believed in being pursued. She was glad of it now, leaning against the posts of his porch and lighting her cigarette off his in the sharp, salty wind. He seemed pleased to be invited finally into some transgression, one of a deeper sort than sex. He offered Anya a ride to New York City but told her she’d have a tough time there with rent. His friend’s sister managed a diner in Kitchawank Hills, he said, a rich commuter town named after an imaginary Indian chief. At the end of August, he drove Anya to meet Alexis, the manager, who resembled a goalie on a women’s hockey team and who looked at Anya like a farmer sizing up a mare and asked her if she had a Social Security card. There was only one way to answer this question, and James had already reassured her that Alexis wouldn’t ask to see it.

The diner started her on the slower afternoon shifts, and for a while Anya had the evenings to herself. From the mattress on the floor of her efficiency, she watched TV on an old set that Nick, another waiter, had given her. Nick had taken it upon himself to “train” her, which meant that she now had to abide his criticism and his daily reminders to smile, and also to endure the unpleasant surprises of having him walk up from behind to massage her shoulders, though all of this was worth tolerating for the car rides back to her low-rise, a mile and a half uphill. It was better, she knew, to work the front of the restaurant and not complain, than to be stuck in the kitchen with the Ecuadorians and Guatemalans, who, after five or six years in Kitchawank Hills, spoke worse English than she did and seemed to have no life outside of the restaurant, talking always about who was, and was not, to be trusted there.

The kitchen’s goings-on made their way to Anya through Berenice, the restaurant’s lone Salvadorian. Bernice was twenty-four but looked forty and in her confessional paranoia liked to warn Anya about the Guatemalans, who could bring you a home-cooked meal one day and try to get you fired the next. She had ridden through their sorry mountainous country, she said, and then across Mexico, on a bus with a stench she would not soon forget, where everyone had worn diapers and not been let out to use the bathroom for three days. Every piece of gossip Berenice relayed seemed to have a single point: that trying to escape your tedious fate only led you back to it. Her favorite example of this was one of the cooks, a handsome boy named Sergio, who had started working out at the gym where his cousin washed the towels. Sergio had found himself a rich divorced lady there, but the lady had turned out to be nothing but more work. Now all he ever did was grumble when she called and asked him to come over, since he usually ended up chopping her wood or repairing little things around her big house. He talked of going to nightclubs to meet girls, even though everyone knew he was too scared to step into a club, get his fake ID taken away, and be deported.

In November Anya picked up the dinner shifts and served whomever the other waiters ignored, high school kids after basketball games, mommies who ordered nothing but salad and crackers for their kids to crush, and the Retard Party, which was what Nick called Ryan and his friends when they came in one snowy Thursday night and made a nuisance of themselves by shaking salt out on their tabletop and drawing pictures in it with their fingers. “Yo, take this water away,” one of them called to a waiter. “I’m thirsty, not dirty!”

They made Anya read the specials twice, grinning like monkeys. When she returned with their food, another of them tapped her shoulder and pointed at the smirky, big-shouldered guy across the table. “Will you kiss Ry-Ry?” he said. “It’s his birthday.” She’d turned to Ryan with a murderous look, but he was blushing fiercely under his New York Rangers cap. “I apologize for these scumbags,” he’d said. Later she’d tell him she’d only been nice because he looked like the most nervous person at the table. But it wasn’t true. She’d wanted to stand there a little longer, suddenly the center of all the fuss. They had tried so hard to get her attention, having no idea that she was so lonely.

         

Erin’s degrees hung framed on the exposed brick wall, between her bookcase and black file cabinet. There were few personal touches in her office, Anya had noticed. No pictures of a husband or children, or dogs. Only a Beanie Bear with a tennis racket sitting atop her bound legal volumes, and a potted orchid on her desk, as stiff-spined and pale as Erin herself.

“How is your father?” Erin said. She didn’t look up from her papers.

“He’s better. He has pains when he walks, and he takes lots of aspirin, but he’s waiting for…”

Erin nodded without looking up, probably not listening. She had the face of a neat bird. Her hair was pulled back from her square, somewhat manly forehead. She looked to Anya like a girl who’d been a good student all her life by working hard, even at things that were easy.

“That’s good. You may get to see him very soon,” Erin said absentmindedly. It was the same thing she’d said the first time Anya had come into her office, right after she and Ryan were married and Anya had wanted to start applying for her resident papers.

Now Anya ran her finger along the edge of a wooden plaque on Erin’s desk. Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends a tiny ripple of hope…The first time she’d read it, Anya had asked Erin who had spoken these words. Bobby Kennedy, Erin had said, and added that the Kennedys had done more on behalf of poor people in this country than almost anyone else. So, Erin liked poor people.

Erin’s parents, Anya had learned, were a schoolteacher and a school librarian, a fact that had initially made Anya decide that she liked Erin. It seemed to suggest that becoming a lawyer hadn’t been an expectation for her but a certain kind of generational progress, or at least the mindful choice of one life over another. The first few times in Erin’s office, she’d felt eager to get her advice, to ask if she should transfer her credits and complete her linguistics degree, or start over in something more practical. But such discussions had turned out to be difficult to strike up, with Erin always looking at the clock, or taking phone calls, and never asking Anya any questions other than the necessary ones.

“Where’s Ryan?” Erin said.

Anya removed her finger from the plaque. “At work.”

“Didn’t you say he was coming with you?”

Anya lifted her shoulders in an ignorant shrug. Today they were supposed to get prepped for their marriage interview. But after Ryan’s jar-throwing the night before, she’d let him leave the house without reminding him.

“Look, Anya, you’re the one who needs this,” Erin said. She slid a sheet across the desk. It was a list of questions Anya and Ryan might get asked: how both of them liked their coffee, the title of the last movie they’d seen together, the names of their parents.

Anya read through the list silently. “What if he doesn’t remember my parents’ names?”

“He doesn’t have to know everything. It’s better if there’s a mistake.”

“What if he messes up on purpose?”

“Why would he do that?”

Just because, Anya felt like saying. She had never been able to have a serious talk with Ryan about this whole…process. Every time she tried, he’d start singing some rap tune (…how long will ya mourn me!) and then he’d tell her to relax, which she had begun to think of as the most retarded word in the English language.

Erin leafed through her desk calendar. “You still have time to prepare. The interview might be in two months from now, or it might be a year from now.”

“If we’re still married in a year.”

Erin frowned. “Be careful with divorce. It’s going to really complicate things.”

“I am careful. He’s the one who’s always saying he doesn’t trust me! He threw a glass jar full of coins at me last night. I’m lucky I’m alive.”

Erin’s blue eyes were frozen in uncertainty. She took her time answering. “Anya, if you’re worried about this. I mean, if you can show it’s a problem, then you can probably find a way to self-petition.” Her voice had dropped, not exactly to a whisper, but to a low tone that was more genuinely concerned, more shrewd than any Anya had heard her use before. “He wouldn’t have anything to do with the process,” she added reassuringly.

Anya lowered her eyes to the wooden plaque again. “At all?” she asked, to be certain.

         

The apartment she and Ryan had moved into the previous February sat above a bridal shop on an outlying stretch of Main Street that turned into a through road. In the shop display the mannequins who posed in mawkish and badly sewn gowns stood under a banner advertising “Communion Dresses and Veils.” But by December the banner was gone, replaced with dangling stars and tinsel, the same tinsel that had been stuck to the windows of the diner. At home she would have been finishing up her second-to-last semester, Anya thought, getting ready to take a train home for a few days, where her mother would be waiting for her on the platform, waving madly.

Alexis was closing the restaurant early for the Christmas Party. She’d gone to each of them individually with a pen and legal pad beforehand, to “get a commitment.” By the time Anya and Ryan arrived that evening, everyone who was going to show up was already there, playing a game involving Twizzlers, while Alexis shouted “Sucker!” from the end of a table loaded with food and liquor bottles. She was soused. Most of them were. She screamed at Nick when a half-chewed Twizzler fell out of his mouth. A Twizzler game without hands, it looked like. Around the table the faces were slick with sweat, or red from sucking. The faces of galley slaves.

Nick, out of the game now, found her an empty chair while Ryan hunted for his own. Soon a game of drink-or-dare was begun, with Alexis giving the commands again, instructing a pot washer named Luis to recite a tongue-twister about seashells by the seashore. He mangled it, as expected, to a round of convulsive laughter, and looked glad finally to toss back a drink in the peace of his defeat.

When Berenice’s turn came, she was ordered to stand with her back to the wall and bend backward to kiss it. She arched her spine slowly, trying to stay balanced, oblivious to the display she was giving of her deep breasts spread out and flattened under her Lycra shirt. After the noise died down, Alexis scanned the table, giving each of them a speculative glance. She pulled a long string of licorice out of the sack on the table and twirled it in her fingers, then tossed it to Nick. “One end goes in your mouth,” she instructed, and turned her gummy smile at Anya. “Help him out, honey.”

There was a light drumbeat of fists on the table, and some anonymous kissing noises, which didn’t escape Ryan. He was bent over his whiskey glass, next to her, looking revolted. She smoothed down his hair. There was something almost endearing about seeing him suffer so stupidly over a party game. She stuck the Twizzler in her mouth and closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to look into Nick’s fat, tanned face. The air in the room was as stifling as a kennel. She could hear Nick’s moist chewing sounds on the other end of the licorice, which tasted like leather in her mouth. He smelled not just of drink but of fermentation. She felt the warm, acrid breath too close to her face and bit off.

“Hey, peace in the Middle East, man,” Nick said afterward, trying to pour Ryan a drink.

“You’re standing a little too close, so how about you move the fuck away,” Ryan answered, a vein showing through his temple. Nick moved back to a respectful distance, and his mouth formed the helpless grin of a shit-eater. It was time for all of them to start heading home.

         

She was still trying to latch her seatbelt when the car lurched backward. The interior smelled of alcohol, coming off in hot waves from Ryan’s skin. The Tracer backed out onto the road like a rocket, with a sharp jolting turn, then raced forward.

“Slow down,” she whispered. In the side-view mirror the diner’s sign was receding quickly into a small neon rectangle. Ahead of them the light switched from yellow to red like a blinking eye while Ryan ran the dark intersection.

Anya sat stiffly in her seat.

“Watch the road, Ryan.”

“You watch yourself.”

She didn’t answer.

“You like toying with me?”

The best thing to say was nothing.

“Scheming bitch.”

“Scheming! What would I be scheming about? You’re always coming to the diner to spy on me. Anything I ever did, you know about.”

“Lining up a boyfriend.”

“If your drunk ass gets pulled over right now, my ‘boyfriend’ is who’s gonna be giving me rides to work.”

He floored the brake and sent her flying forward, her nose a centimeter from the glove compartment before her body slammed back against the seat. The car skidded sideways and came to a stop in the center of the lanes. Suddenly the lights were off completely.

“Always playing stupid.”

“No one can see the car! Turn the lights on before someone kills us!”

She moved for the door and heard the hard click of the automatic lock. A pair of headlights behind them was getting brighter.

“He’s laying it on me every day in the men’s room!” The car was closing in, its beams illuminating their cloth-seat upholstery. “Now move!” she shouted.

Ryan switched on the headlights, and the speeding lights behind them veered left with an earsplitting shriek of rubber. Someone was yelling “Assholes!” out the window while honking. An accelerator was ripping back into high gear.

“Fuck you!” Ryan shouted as the other car drove away.

Anya leaned back and breathed heavily. It was a miracle that the other lane had been empty. Their Tracer was rolling again, cruising down the street in dead silence. They were on the main drag of shops, passing a shoe store and a beauty salon with giant faces pasted in the window. Ryan slowed down and pulled over to the curb. “Now get the hell out of my car,” he said as the door locks unclicked. “Your fat ass isn’t getting a free ride no more.”

“Fool,” she muttered, stepping out. She tried to slam the door, but her purse got caught, and the door closed by itself with a light slap. A draft of icy air stunned her thighs. She’d worn the thin velveteen dress she’d hemmed that morning, so foolishly, above the knee. The Tracer rounded the next corner, and soon the rumble of its engine was gone, replaced only by a ringing winter silence.

A skirt of crusted snow fringed the sidewalk. Anya zipped her wool jacket up to her chin and started walking. She tucked her fingers into her armpits and then nearly slipped on a patch of ice. She couldn’t see a single restaurant or bar from which to call a cab. Stores, stores, stores: a Sam Goody, a Payless, all locked up. She licked her tongue along her chapped bottom lip and tasted the ferrous tang of blood. From far off echoed the howl of a train horn, a sonorous, unhuman wail. She could hear the sound of a car from behind. She stopped walking and turned around. Ryan was back. She waited for him to pull up, but the car slowed without getting any closer to the curb. She stepped off the sidewalk, but he sped up again.

“Now who’s the fool!” he shouted through the open window, his voice cutting through the soundless air.

Anya pulled a cold hand out of her armpit and flipped him the finger. “Go make another circle around the block, idiot!”

“Keep walking, fool!” he yelled, pressing the gas.

She walked on ahead, tucking her chin into her chest to hide from the driving wind. How she hated him! To think he’d driven back just to torment her. She could rip up her vocal cords yelling or ignore him; it didn’t matter, he’d find a way to make her suffer. How had she ended up here, alone at one in the morning on an empty sidewalk, unable to feel her hands or face? Just a few nights ago she had dreamed that her parents had come to Kitchawank Hills to take her home. Now she wanted to laugh—she’d never go home. Not to that dreary, snowed-in remoteness, not to her shabby water-damaged dorm in Nizhniy Novgorod, not to a life where her mother spent summers tending tomato patches that she’d been planting for twenty years, and canning those same tomatoes out of some primitive memory of need. She didn’t want to go back to where everything was either unfinished or deteriorating.

She maneuvered ahead, the cold dragging her lungs. Far, far off wailed the siren of an emergency vehicle. The wind seemed to have subsided. Just ahead Anya could see an ATM and beside it, like a mirage, a pay phone.

         

The cab delivered her to the dimmed display of the bridal shop. Their living room window upstairs was lit up. Anya climbed the enclosed stairwell to find the door of the apartment unlocked. The chaos was obvious before she pushed it open all the way. Her hair clips, tweezers, loose cigarettes, cough drops, poker chips, all flung out onto the stained carpet. Ryan was sitting on their old plaid sofa, watching a basketball game. He didn’t bother to turn when she walked in. “Who’s cleaning this up, huh?” she said.

No answer from the couch.

His short clay pipe lay on its little foil coaster on the coffee table. He’d moved it aside to the corner of the table to put up his feet. Instead of the usual pungent odor of his pot, the room smelled of her perfume samples, which he’d evidently also tossed onto the floor. He’d become too lazy to even bother stashing his herb and pipe when he wasn’t smoking the stuff. She walked over to the dresser, where the top drawer had been pulled open. Except for the daisy-printed vinyl lining, it was completely empty.

“Where are my working papers?” she said.

Ryan turned up the volume.

“They were here in a Ziploc bag!”

“You’ll get them back when I trust you.”

She walked to the couch and blocked the TV. “Where’d you put them?”

He tried to swat her away. “Get out of my face, woman.”

“They’re my goddamn papers!”

“Yours? They aren’t yours. You never would’ve gotten them without me. You got nothing here without me.”

She went for the collar of his T-shirt, but he pushed her away. She clubbed him hard in the ear.

“Bitch!” He tucked his ear into his shoulder. It wasn’t clear if he was cursing at her or at the pain.

“You deserve it,” she said nervously.

He grabbed her arm in a wristlock. She tried to twist free, but there was more strength in his hand than he was using.

“You think everyone owes you something?” he said, and shoved her backward on the couch.

She reached for his arm and dug her nails into the fabric. “Shit-for-brain loser.” His palm was in her face, pushing her down again. “Born through the ass!” she muttered. Her leg sprang up in a badly aimed kick at his middle, making Ryan stagger backward. He scrabbled for a foothold, waltzing forward with his arm bent up. And that’s when it came, the blind, bulldozing pain shooting through the bridge of her nose into her eyes, and spreading in a strange, paralyzing heat around her face.

The side of her forehead hit the carpet. She heard the thud of her own skull as her head met the floor. A slick, metallic taste of blood was on her tongue, mixed with the coarse fuzz of carpet fibers and hair. She gagged, trying to spit them out, as the TV droned on in the background.

When she opened her eyes, Ryan was standing over her. She palmed around for the side of the couch and tried to use it to sit up. She felt Ryan’s hand touching her shoulder, trying to help.

“Get away from me.” Anya sat up and closed her eyes against the stabbing pain. She wiped her lip with her arm. “Look what you did!” She dipped her head back and cupped her nose, catching drops of dark blood in her palm. She felt dizzy.

“Why’d you stick your face under my elbow?”

“Shut up!” She looked at the red streak on her arm. “Mmm. My lip.”

“Your lip was bleeding when you came in.”

She got up and hobbled to the bathroom, while Ryan followed behind. He stopped just short of the door as she leaned into the mirror and examined the marks on her face. It looked like someone had rubbed her chin with rope. There was fresh blood under her nose. Her bottom lip had split down the middle, as she’d feared, in the spot where it had been chapped.

“Thanks a lot,” she said. She ran the tap and patted her face with cold water. Ryan maundered back into the living room, looking for his shoes. She heard the jingle of the key chain. “Thanks a lot for my face!” she shouted, as the door slammed behind him.

In the mirror, Anya examined her wet face, not quite recognizing the sneering, fanatical-looking creature. Her lip throbbed along to the pulse in her head. She slicked back her hair and wiped away the runny stamp of mascara under her right eye. She tried to soften her eyes into an empty catastrophic look, but the more determined expression wore its way through.

The living room looked like a post-atomic mess. Anya picked up the remote control, which had fallen on the floor amid the debris of cards, crushed cigarettes, and loose tampons, and silenced the television. She took the clay pipe off the coffee table and rolled up the square of aluminum foil with the remains of Ryan’s weed, then carried both into the kitchen, where a cereal box he hadn’t put away stood on the counter. She shoved the pipe and marijuana deep into the rice puffs, then removed the phone from its cradle on the wall and punched in the police.

         

Sitting in the leather armchair and staring at Erin’s diplomas on the brick wall, Anya felt a kind of numbing safety. It was like the safety of being in school, with its promise that everything could be done the one right way.

“Did you bring the signed affidavits?” Erin asked.

Anya pulled them out from a blue plastic folder. There was one from Alexis, attesting that her marriage to Ryan was genuine and that he was a familiar face around the diner. Before Anya had moved out of the apartment and into a room in a beat-up Victorian, she’d had her landlord write a statement confirming that she and Ryan had been “cohabitating.” Erin already had a copy of the police report and a copy of Anya’s order of protection, which she held up now.

“Do you want to go to court and make this permanent?”

“Do I need to?”

“It won’t hurt your case.”

“I don’t know. He thinks I’m going to get the order lifted.”

“And why would he think that?” Erin said. “Have you been talking to him?”

“No.”

“That doesn’t look good, Anya.”

“I know.”

“He’s out of the picture or he’s not.”

Erin separated the original documents from the copies and gave a set back to Anya. “A restraining order means no phone chatting, no Valentine cards, no calling him if you have a leaky toilet…”

“I got it.” Anya put the folder back in her bag and stood up.

“We’ll talk in a couple of weeks, then,” Erin said.

“Yeah.”

The sky was already gray with twilight when Anya descended the narrow stairwell to the street. It got dark so early she hardly ever noticed the arrival of evenings anymore. She thought of walking the block to the diner and calling Ryan for a ride home but then remembered Erin’s warning. It had been ridiculous to think she could speak to Erin openly, to delude herself that Erin was her friend. She had no real friends here, no one to whom she could explain that in the five weeks since the police had ordered Ryan to stay at least three hundred feet away from her, she’d felt his presence more than ever. If she worked on a Wednesday night, she’d hear from Berenice that Ryan had come in on Tuesday. If her shift was over at six, she’d learn that Ryan had walked in for a burger at a quarter to seven. She had even seen his car in the parking lot of the A&P when she’d gone out for groceries. He was out of the picture, all right. He was out of the picture just about every place she went.

And she had to admit that there were moments when she needed him, when she really did. Last Thursday had been one of them. She’d mixed up the entrées of two different tables, then spilled hollandaise sauce on a customer’s pants trying to sort it out. She knew from the look on the man’s face that there would be no tip, but she hadn’t expected a “YOU SUCK” to be scrawled on the credit card slip he’d left behind. Then she’d had to put in another two hours at work, dragging herself around with a forced grin until eleven. Who wouldn’t need a drink after that? She’d crossed the half-lit parking lot and entered the Bull & Brew at its side door, where the pinball machines and video games stood. She’d felt her stomach tighten with panic, knowing Thursday was the night Ryan went there with his friends. But the main room drew her in with its comforting smells of pizza and beer, so that even when she saw him, she walked by as if she didn’t. He was at the other end of the hall by the billiards tables. He and his buddies had turned their chairs around to watch a game of pool between one of their own and a woman about twice the size of each of them, who circled the table in very restraining jeans and with a healthy amount of attitude.

Anya carried her Cuban martini to the booth closest to the restrooms and stirred it with her pinky. From the safety of her wooden bench she glanced at Ryan and saw that his face had filled out a little, probably from eating his mother’s food again. In the month they’d been apart, he’d let his beard grow into a sort of oval around his jaw. Soon he’d look like his friends, she thought, a sweatshirt pressing tight against a soft lump of stomach. She was smart to have gotten rid of him. She took a sip of her martini and let it leave its vermouthy taste on her lip. One of his friends had spotted her and was tapping Ryan’s arm. It was too late to slide deeper into her booth without looking like she’d been spying. Now they were going to be moaning and negotiating whether Ryan ought to take one for the team and leave by himself, or if they’d show a united front and head out together. He was playing the good soldier now, submitting himself to the chore of getting up, hooking his thumbs through his belt loops, and looking at her dejectedly. She rolled her eyes and motioned for him to sit back down. It was fine.

She lingered over her drink until it was mostly water with an aftertaste of rum and sugar. The pool game was over; the loser was taking out twenty dollars to pay the woman with the big ass. Soon his friends were getting up to leave, and Ryan was giving them the signal to go on without him.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi.”

He looked around. “Is this okay?”

“Whatever.”

“You look…”

“Tired?”

“No. Great!”

She gave him a mistrustful look.

“You do. You want me to get you another drink, or are you gonna call the police on me?”

She slid her glass away and stood up.

“I’m kidding. I’m kidding. Sit down.” He reached to grab her arm but stopped himself. “I saw you moved.”

“What?”

“There was a moving van.”

“You were driving around my place?”

“I just passed it, relax. Where you staying at now?”

“None of your business.”

“Jesus. Look, I’m just coming by to say I’m sorry, okay? It’s my fault, I man up. But it was an accident.”

“Whatever.”

“No. Anya. Just hear me. I’m not saying we have to be back tomorrow. I know you’re doing what you gotta do. And I gotta work out my thing. But I’m just telling you I’m here.”

She breathed in. “I appreciate it.”

“It doesn’t feel so bad, right?”

“What?”

“Us sitting here like this.” After a while he said, “You want a ride home?”

She wasn’t sure why she agreed. It seemed mean to decline the offer now that they’d practically signed a peace treaty. He drove slowly, as though in amends for speeding the last time, or else to drag out the short time they had together in the car. She’d guessed correctly about Ryan moving in with his mother after he’d been forced to vacate their bridal-shop apartment. It was temporary, he said. He was thinking he’d start going to school, maybe to the criminal justice college right here in the county.

“That’s your new plan,” she said, “to be a cop?”

“You always thought I was dumb.”

“I never said that. I think you’re smart.”

“Smart enough to know how dumb I am, right?”

She held back from answering. Ryan always got on her nerves when he started talking this way, expecting her to applaud plans that turned out to be completely hollow. Blithering about the landscaping business he was going to start with his cousin, declaring his proposal to go to culinary school, if he happened to be watching that loud Italian chef on TV. Now he wanted to be a police officer. Bravo. Meanwhile she was still waiting tables, her own life on hold for almost two years. She didn’t want to feel resentful; no doubt he was only trying to show her that he was “thinking about the future.” But a future with Ryan would be like staying in Russia. You could find a man like him on every corner in Dolsk, swearing that he intended to start a clean life as of Monday.

At the top of the hill Anya instructed Ryan to turn left. She pointed to her street of narrow Gothic houses and let him pull up to the curb. A lamp above the door bathed the old porch in dusky yellow light, but most of the windows upstairs were dark. Ryan rested his hand atop her knee in a reluctant farewell, a kindly smile narrowing his blue eyes. He had a face that could make even sadness look pleasant. She glanced up at her dark window again and unlatched her seatbelt.

“Can I come in and see your place?”

“That’s not a good idea.”

“Right.” He patted her knee lightly in agreement and disappointment.

In the restricted space of the car she leaned in to hug him good night, smelling the aftershave-tinged sweat on his neck. And then he turned and kissed her as naturally as if he’d been given permission, the salty flavor of his mouth killing the aftertaste of stale alcohol in her own. Soon her lips were numb and her chin raw. Ryan’s palm had traveled up her side, coming to a reticent stop somewhere between her breast and armpit. She reached in and fumbled with his buckle, grazing the soft hairs of his belly, suddenly and insensibly horny. Ryan was leaning his whole weight on her, while her head jammed up against the molded plastic armrest.

“Oww!”

He moved away and straightened up. “Did I hurt you?”

“No,” she said, annoyed. “I’m just not comfortable.”

“Let’s go in.”

She pushed him back onto his seat. “Whatever we’re doing, we’re doing in this car.” She leaned down and unhitched his belt, going to work on him in an assertive manner that she imagined to be debauched but that would have been more seductive if it weren’t for the sentimental way he kept trying to stroke her hair. “Come on,” he urged quietly, “let’s go inside.”

“Fine,” she said. “Wait here.”

She got out of the car and mounted the front steps, unlocking the door and letting it squeak closed. She tiptoed up to her room on the second floor and found her working papers in the drawer beside her bed. They were in the same Ziploc, only a little bent and creased from when Ryan had stuck them in his glove compartment. Downstairs she made a stop in the dim kitchen and slid the bag under the ice cube trays in the freezer.

Ten minutes later he was in her room unlacing his boots while she lit a candle. He let his jeans fall and kicked them backward into a corner, and strolled around naked for a while, lifting each item on her vanity table: her library copy of Agatha Christie and her keepsake box. He examined the laminated card wedged into her mirror frame—the icon of her name saint, Anna of Kashin. He seemed to be divining facts about her life through these small articles. Anya reclined on her pillow and watched him. The room was small enough that all four walls could be seen at once in the trembling blur of the candle. So this was what their marriage had turned into, she thought, an affair to be kept in the confines of a tiny camera-box of a room.

         

She had dwelled on it—on that evening, on Ryan’s large body in her bed—while she’d been in Erin’s office, nodding at Erin’s reasonable, discouraging voice. She had let him spend that night, and the next, skipping Saturday almost by silent agreement, and meeting again Sunday. How could she explain to Erin how different it was now, to be eating oranges together on her bed, letting Ryan massage her feet—how simple the pleasures were now that she didn’t need to win favor or pacify him. On their third night he’d asked her if they were going to get back together for real, meaning did she plan on lifting his restraining order. “Maybe when you’re good,” she’d purred, ambiguously.

         

The sky was pearly and dark by the time she got home from Erin’s office. The oaks and maples lining her street had become black shapes shrouding porchlights and windows. Upstairs she unlocked the door to her room and found Ryan lying on her quilted bedcover with his sneakers still on his feet.

“What are you doing here, who let you in?”

He pointed at the door to the bathroom, which Anya shared with a Salvadorian couple. “Your roommates.”

She had never called them that. Except for a few meekly smiling greetings, Anya had not spoken to either the girl or the guy. Tomorrow it would be someone else on that side of the wall. The place was like a bus terminal. It would be a while before she’d be able to afford something better, with what she was paying Erin.

“I called you,” he said. “You didn’t pick up.”

“You’re wearing shoes on my bed.”

Ryan pried the heel of one sneaker with the toe of the other and let both shoes drop to the carpet. He slid over to one side of the bed where, on the nightstand, she noticed for the first time a bouquet of flowers. It was made up of yellow mums and orange daisies, hydrangeas, violet snapdragons, and carnations, the sort of mixed bouquet you could pick up at a supermarket, wrapped in plastic with scalloped edges.

“Happy anniversary.”

“You’re kidding. What is this?” She looked at the cardboard box he’d picked up off the floor and set down on the bedspread. Ryan opened up the flap and pulled out a stainless-steel appliance with a U-shaped base and a polished cranium. It looked like a small hunchbacked android.

“It’s a juicer,” he said.

She came closer and touched its chrome hood. Ryan lifted open the top to let her take a look at the serrated cone and gear system.

“Where’d you get it?”

“I saw it on TV and thought of you. You can squeeze oranges, lemons. You can make mojitos.”

“I’m supposed to squeeze juice with this, when?”

“You said you wanted to eat natural so you didn’t have to binge at the diner.”

“Look at all these parts. You think I’m gonna spend a half hour taking it apart and washing it?”

“It’s easy, look—”

“Where am I supposed to put it, Ryan? In the kitchen where someone’s going to take it?”

“Just keep it in your room.”

“And carry it downstairs?”

“Jesus, throw it away then!” He knocked the android down so it fell sideways on the bed.

“Don’t get mad at me, Ryan! You know it’s not going to make a difference. I’m not getting that order lifted!”

He looked at her with a cringing semiawareness of what she’d just said. “I don’t care what you do.” The hurt and disgust on his face seemed less emotional states than physical instincts.

“You can’t just come over like this,” she said defensively.

“I wanted to surprise you.”

“Me and everybody else who saw you.”

“Take a Seconal and calm down. Why are you so paranoid? I’m the one who would get my ass ripped for this, not you.”

“What do you want, Ryan?”

“Wow. You know how to kill a special occasion.”

She made a heroic effort not to roll her eyes.

“We’re still married,” he said.

“We gave it a shot.”

“Bullshit. It’s not giving it a shot when you always act like it’s gonna end.”

She watched him kneel and lace up his sneakers. There were murmurs of Spanish on the other side of the wall, in the bathroom, and the creaking sound of a door opening and closing in the hallway. He grabbed his jacket off the schoolhouse chair by her window. Already she could feel the first clammy touch of loneliness that was going to descend on her as soon as he was gone.

“You never thought it was real,” he said without looking at her.

Anya waited until his footsteps were at the bottom of the stairs and closed her door. They’d managed to have a whole fight before she’d even removed her coat. She tossed it on the bed and sat down on the edge of her mattress, pressing her fingers hard into her eyes. She was so tired, tired of waiting for some big event to occur in her life, while things only dragged on and on. In the locked bathroom, someone was turning on the faucet. She’d have to wait to wash her hands. Soon the shower was running. She’d have to wait to pee. Everything in her life was about waiting. It was over with Ryan, she knew, though it would take time for her desire for him to pass. She’d have to overcome the urge to look for him as she had that time, like some gaunt animal migrating uphill before a flash flood without quite knowing why. She was suddenly glad that her physical exhaustion would keep her thoughts away so she could fall asleep. She heard footsteps on the unvarnished floor downstairs, the shower still running next door, but these noises seemed to come from inside her half-alive mind.

         

Within five months she got her permanent status papers, and almost as soon as she unfolded the letter, Anya knew she was done with all of it—with this town, with the diner, with Ryan. They receded just like that, like signs on the highway. She flew home to visit her parents in the summer, when the evenings in Dolsk stayed light, and joined her father for his therapeutic walks, returning when the sky was dimming and her mother was still weeding the flowerbeds and watering the rows of parsley and onions that grew almost to the steps of their door.

After she moved to New York City, she made a practice of optimism, taking a marketing research class at Brooklyn College and waiting tables at a steakhouse with clubby decor and a big wine list, where businessmen came to impress their clients and left her bountiful tips.

For a while Anya sometimes thought she saw him, coming out of a subway car or standing in the cavernous entrance of a bar in the East Village. But of course the city was full of men with the same oval jaw and big stooped shoulders. She’d zero in on one and tell herself it was him, but only to give herself a little jolt, a little scare as if for pleasure. Once she was almost sure. She’d gotten off at Fifty-ninth Street to walk past the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade, wanting to catch the last of the afternoon spirit before she started her evening shift. The parade had almost been spoiled by the on-and-off rain. It was five o’clock, and the sun was coming out again. Packs of carousers were stumbling into the side streets along Fifth Avenue, hollering drunken, nonsensical messages to one another, directions to pubs where they were planning to meet up later. She saw him then, the side of his face first, flushed from drinking and shouting mock insults to his friends still at the barricades. The same light auburn hair just starting to curl at the back of his neck, the solid body, now half-slumped on a girl under his arm. The girl, judging by her face, was very young but already had the low-slung behind of a woman. She turned first, spying Anya staring, causing him to turn, too. Except it wasn’t him, but a boy with wide-set eyes and a besotted smirk that spread as if at the knowledge of a fate he had avoided. The beating in her chest settled to a slow, hard thump, and her feet carried her on through the dispersing crowd.