Savage Feast Page 30

  “Boris, this is Cici,” David said as fish carcasses rotted between us in the prematurely warm night. “You don’t smoke, do you? Cici wants a cigarette.”

  “But you’re a singer,” I said, with all the tolerance for contradiction of one of my parents.

  She pantomimed duress and said, “That kind of day.”

  Did I smoke? I’d smoked a thousand cigarettes in the previous three months. (Literally—ten a day, three hundred a month, a thousand a season.) And yet, in my misguided attempt to drop this habit because I was starting to feel better, just then I didn’t have one.

  “Wait,” I said too loudly, dropped the garbage bag at David’s and Cici’s feet—she danced backward slightly to avoid it grazing the nose of her Hasbeens—and hurtled through the dining room, flinging the kitchen door open so hard that Misha had to dance backward, nearly into the deep fryer. He treated me to a particularly flaying Russian expression.

  “Nikita,” I said. “Cigarette. Can I have?”

  Taking advantage of a slow night, Nikita was experimenting with a dish that involved, somehow, both egg whites and beer. He flung a pack of Parliaments at me. “Thought you were trying to quit, he-he,” he said.

  “Did I ever tell you my mother smokes Parliaments?” I said. “He-he. Can I have two? The singer wants one.” Instantly, I regretted my apparently unfixable inclination to tell these people only the truth.

  “Ho!” he said. He turned to Sasha, who was disappointed with me for coming up with no leads on a bride. As an American, I was supposed to be omnipotent, and my failure to deliver love left him confused. “Sash, isn’t it time for a smoke?” Nikita said. “Let’s keep them company.” I sped out of the kitchen to the sound of their laughter.

  Parliaments smoke down too fast. If we had American Spirits, we could have spoken twice as long. But when we were through, she said she could wait for me at the bar if my shift ended soon. My shift was over, I said. Over, over, over. I could go to the bar now.

  Her name was really Jessica—Cici was a stage name.

  “Why do you need a stage name?” I said.

  “Sometimes people want to stay in your life even when you’re done singing to them,” she said. “You know what I mean?”

  I coughed evasively. No, I didn’t, quite. My awareness of this person’s difference reasserted itself: She was tall, blond, blue-eyed. She wore a country fedora, a ribbed tank top, pleated short-shorts, and those Hasbeens: the uniform of a nation—hipsters—whose citizens felt more foreign than a desiccated blue-hair on the Upper East Side. On what mother ship did they give out the uniforms?

  All that blondness was not Scandinavian, but Irish. She said it sheepishly—the Irish in America embarrassed her. It was easy for them to bray about Ireland because they never got near the actual thing, whereas she’d spent part of every summer there for the past twenty years. I told her about what I’d felt in Ukraine—any closer and the connection would end. Any closer to Nikita, Misha, and Sasha, and the connection would end. Any closer to Oksana and the connection would end. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t have a connection at all. Something like that.

  She owned a science fiction bookshop—she’d decided a long time before that she wouldn’t try to make it in music. “I didn’t want the heartache,” she said. “And the humiliation. I don’t mean rejection, though that, too. I mean the ways you have to degrade yourself just to get a hearing. Especially if you’re a woman. I wanted to continue to love it.”

  I was ready to think of her decision as a failing of courage, but it occurred to me that you could also think of mine—to pursue writing at any cost—as masochistic. And yet, it would have been inconceivable to me to “write for the drawer,” and not because I needed to post results on a scoreboard. I really did love it, and part of that love was reaching people—many people. I loved it so much that it had survived a great deal of rejection and humiliation. I told her so.

  “Then that’s remarkable,” she said. “Then you’re lucky and strong both.”

  “I guess so,” I said.

  She laughed and clinked my cranberry juice. Miraculously, my depression made me allergic to alcohol instead of the opposite, and I liked what I felt when I stayed sober through the kinds of experiences during which I used to drink.

  “I’m trying to write a science fiction novel,” I said. I wasn’t even making that up. I’d never been drawn to the genre, partly because its typically far-off future settings conveniently owed nothing to the restrictions of the present. But what if a novel was set only fifteen years from now? What if things were different by only a little? What would that little consist of? That twist was enough to make me interested, but I knew nothing about the history I was up against.

  “So you should come by the bookshop,” she said. “I’ll make you a reading list.”

  “Comrade Writer,” Nikita yelled into the dining room, his sausagey arm holding open the door to the kitchen. I saw Misha and Sasha piled up at his side. “I’m sorry to report the cleaning crew for your station didn’t make it today.” Jessica and I exchanged the same smile. On the air of that vision, I mumbled an awkward goodbye and sailed off to the kitchen.

  But there was no bookstore meeting. When I wrote the next day, Jessica didn’t reply until after the day we’d agreed to meet, and with no explanation. During the next Thursday at the restaurant, I avoided the dining room and asked someone else to take out the garbage. I felt properly and deservingly singed.

  We did drift into a conversation, again warm and rich, on another evening. I was about to say something about being stood up, but she had to go off to the airport for a friend’s wedding. “I’m away for a week,” she said. “I’ll call when I get back. We’ll make a plan.” A week passed, then two, and three. I ignored her at the restaurant, but she greeted me with the same smile, as if nothing had happened. This sort of inhumanity in dating manifests so frequently in New York that you’re the crank if you won’t just accept it and move on. I couldn’t, so I just avoided her.

  Impossibly for midsummer in New York, the sun was soft and forgiving when I walked outside the bar one early evening in July. I had a good fog in my head—I had been nearly without alcohol for so long that two glasses of white wine, with a friend from out of town, were enough to make me forget all the guardrails. I took out my cell phone and pressed Jessica’s name. “It’s because it’s a beautiful day,” I said to no one, a normal thing in New York. I had never tried with someone a third time. After so many rings, it was time for voice mail, but then she answered.

  “This is so strange,” she said. “I never pick up my phone when I’m here. It’s on silent for two weeks.”

  “But you heard it,” I said.

  “There’s no service here, even,” she said.

  “Where are you?”

  “I looked at it for some reason, and it started to ring. I might lose you, sorry. I’m in a fifteen-passenger van full of groceries.”

  “Where are you? Camping?”

  “South Dakota,” she said.

  “I’ve been there,” I said. I wasn’t making that up, either. A meaningful part of my second novel was set there.

  There was a short silence, but I was swimming too much in my head to fill it.

  “I didn’t call you like I’d promised,” she said.

  “Yes, I’d like to kill you about that,” I said—affably, I hoped. But I was also grateful to her for bringing it up.

  “But you’re calling,” she said.

  “It’s a beautiful day,” I said. “I had an extra glass of wine. You’re the beneficiary.”

  “If I lose you, I’m not hanging up, okay?”

  “I’ve really been to South Dakota.”

  I walked to my apartment, my bike in one hand, the phone in the other. I didn’t want to risk losing the connection in the elevator, so I leaned the bike against the fence of a basketball court, sat on a nearby bench, and jammed my earbuds in to keep out the subway clatter on the Williamsburg Bridge. New York’s
cruel law is: If you’re on the platform, the train doesn’t come. But if you’re trying to conduct a conversation in which both the reception and feelings are tenuous, it arrives with maddening regularity.

  But the South Dakota wires stayed strong. It took ninety minutes to get from Rapid City, the nearest town with big supermarkets, to the Pine Ridge Reservation, where Jessica was going, and it was near darkness by the time we clicked off. She was in South Dakota because she spent three weeks every summer as a counselor at a camp for Lakota kids. They went swimming and camping, hiking and rock climbing. I had to guess at some of what she’d said. I wondered if it was easier to start a relationship in quiet places.

  The conversation stayed sweetly in my head, but I was mad at myself—I hadn’t said another word about the ways she had flaked. I wasn’t fearful of the confrontation—I wanted it, was good at it. But everything about the conversation had felt so fragile that my complaints seemed like a careless hand that would take the tablecloth with it. I went upstairs and wrote her a text: “Again we spoke for so long and so well. But I don’t believe we will meet when you return. If I’m right, could you please release me from this sweet crush?”

  She answered quickly: “It’s not great for text. Can you talk again?”

  “You ready?” she said when her voice was on the other end of the line. She had unpacked the groceries and was heading to a patch of roadway with reception. “I’m married.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “But you don’t wear a ring,” I said.

  “Sometimes people don’t wear rings,” she said. “But I do.”

  “You don’t,” I insisted.

  “It’s a very thin band,” she said. “You didn’t see it.”

  “Fuck,” I said. Had I really not looked? Or, God, had I looked and not seen it? But why had she spoken to me in that close way again and again? However, making people own up to such a thing if they’ve changed their minds . . . Here, too, you were supposed to shrug and move on.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “Why did I speak to you that way?”

  “Yes,” I blurted out gratefully. “Yes.”

  “Now you know why I flaked,” she said. “For which I’m sorry. Those conversations weren’t a lie. I just don’t—”

  “Know how to reconcile that with being married. Yes, I know all about it.”

  “How could you possibly know?” she said, less softly.

  “I’ve been here before,” I said. “It went differently, but I know the general score.”

  “So maybe you don’t know everything already,” she said, even less softly. “It’s not a good marriage. It’s been over for a long time. I just haven’t figured out how to—”

  I was silent. I knew what she meant, but I wanted to make her say it.

  “I wanted to give it every chance that I could,” she said. “It’s very easy to talk to you that way. I’m unhappy at home. But ultimately, I have to go back there.”

  “And then flake.”

  “And then flake.”

  “Why not just speak directly from the beginning?”

  “My ring is right there.”

  “Don’t hide behind your ring. It’s not my job to make sure you’re available while you’re sitting there acting like we’re falling in love.”

  I’d overspoken, and the words hung, heavy and premature, between us.

  “You’re right, of course,” she said. I was pretty sure she was referring to the hiding, not the falling, but I decided not to inquire. “I’m very confused. I’m sorry. I’m telling you now.”

  I stared out at the light fading over the traffic on the bridge. This was the moment to hang up—I had only one foot out of the hole where I’d spent the previous six months, and a second episode increased the likelihood of a third to 70 percent—but I was, finally, getting the truth.

  “Can you tell me everything from the beginning, please,” I said in a tone of voice that I hoped was neither forgiving nor hostile.

  By the time we clicked off, it was dawn. She’d found a patch of ground with reception and walked it back and forth, a young woman alone on a desolate road at three in the morning. The moon was nearly full, bathing everything in a bluish light that made it less frightening. And then it really was day, at least for me in New York, and she had two hours of sleep before she had to fire up the camp stove for forty servings of oatmeal with heaps of butter and sugar. (At home the children got mainly commods—low-quality bulk supplied by the government—so the camp tried to provide better food, but the bridge between Cheetos and oatmeal was long.) A counselor who was supposed to be in charge of the food buy and prep had last-minute canceled, which was why Jessica had been shopping the previous day—was it the previous day?—and why she had to get up to cook.

  I was too wound up to sleep, so I wandered the neighborhood, seeing it the way my father must have seen all those people heading to work when he was leaving his graveyard shift as a doorman. He had a secret as he peered at all those weary faces: He wasn’t one of them. He was heading in the opposite direction, just as he liked it. I stepped into a coffee shop.

  “Early start,” the counterman said.

  “Late finish,” I said.

  “Hope it was worth it,” he said.

  I went home and slept until it was time for my restaurant shift. Many New Yorkers live this life—a job in nightlife or restaurants, sleep past noon, start again. To me, they had always seemed as foreign as people who needed stage names for safety, but now I was one of them, just as our nerd fathers were transfigured into peanut-shelling street hawkers by the secondhand markets in Italy. The restaurant was blissfully quiet that night, and I begged off at nine. That was around the time Jessica told the kids their last stories—they weren’t supposed to sleep in her tent, but they were afraid to sleep in the open—wriggled out past their bodies, and went to Reception Road to try me. Again we spoke until dawn.

  It was only after three days of this that I realized I had no bicycle. That first night, in my trance, I had forgotten it by the basketball court when I went upstairs to write my lovelorn text. It was a monstrosity, a Mongoose mountain bike too heavy for the city, but my ungentrified corner of the Lower East Side wasn’t choosy. My parents never liked coming there.

  We spoke again from nine to dawn the next night, and the next, until we had done it six or seven nights in a row, the effects of the sleeplessness covering everything with a glow that makes it hard to tell one thing from another. At a certain point I said, “Don’t you think I should just come there?” And Jessica said, “I think you should.”

  “I’m going on a trip tomorrow,” I said.

  “Tomorrow?” my mother said. She put her glass of wine down. I had told them I needed to come over, and my father had spent the day cooking: pork roulade, Indian butter chicken, roast salmon in his shallot-and-white-wine sauce (all one meal). “Why didn’t you say anything?” she said. “For a reading?”

  I hadn’t planned on lying, but a reading from one of my novels—that would’ve made a good excuse. Some years before, I had concealed from them a trip to Iraq by saying I was going to Turkey. When I was there, I happened to exchange e-mails with a reporter for a Russian-language newspaper in New York, who proposed an interview about what had brought me to Iraqi Kurdistan six months after the American invasion. Emerging into the terminal after landing at JFK from Istanbul—I was kind of telling the truth; the Kurdish airports were closed; you had to fly in and out of Turkey—I saw a woman who looked remarkably like my mother brandishing a copy of a Russian newspaper above her head like John Cusack with that radio in Say Anything. Only the cold steel of a security barrier kept her from charging me to refit those hands around my neck.

  “Denver,” I said now. “Not a reading. Denver, and then I’m going to drive to South Dakota. I’ve—I’ve met someone,” I said.

  Instant sobriety.

  “I know you’re worried,” I said. “She’s written you a
letter.” I passed over my phone. I had told Jessica about Amy, and she had volunteered to write a letter to try to put my parents’ minds at ease. I couldn’t sit there while they read it, so I pretended I needed the bathroom. Risky move—my mother could end up scrolling through my photos, “just to see what you’ve been up to.” My father had opened my mail until I was in my early twenties and I demanded he stop. But I couldn’t sit there.

  When I returned, they were staring at each other, the food untouched. That never happened.

  “Did you write the letter?” my mother said.

  “What? No.”

  “What are you going to do there?” My father crossed his arms and inverted his mouth, the way he did when he couldn’t understand.

  “Help?” I said. “It’s a camp. I don’t know.”

  “She lives in South Dakota? Where is that?”

  “Out west. No, she lives in New York.”

  “You can’t wait till she comes home?”

  “I didn’t want to lie to you,” I said. “I want you to understand.”

  “If you want us to understand, don’t tell us after it’s set.”

  They had a point. I saw myself through their eyes. I was the most embarrassing kind of fool—the kind who deserved it this time. Why couldn’t I wait till she came home? This option hadn’t even occurred to me. All the progress I’d made, all the restraints I’d worked to erect—all blown away. Either I had met someone who made all that unnecessary, or I was making the same old mistake.

  “If I have to pick you up off the floor again,” my mother said, “first I will kill her and then I will kill you.” She popped food into her mouth, drained her wine, and held out the glass like someone who was ready to have quite a bit more.

  “This one isn’t married, I hope,” my father said.

  “Oh, God,” I said. “No.”

  “But what are you going to do there?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Cook?”