Vladimir(32)

I lit a cigarette and drew hard into my chest, letting the smoke permeate all the little crooks and spaces of my lungs. Students were innocent to tobacco nowadays, they called smoking a death wish, considered it a suicidal tendency. Many of them had no idea what it felt like, they thought tobacco affected your mental state, like marijuana. October 20—why was that date so familiar? Sid, mercifully, hadn’t brought up that she saw me smoking. She said she remembered going into the pool, but besides that the whole encounter was blurred in her brain. To my knowledge, she never found out that I had smoked. I had kept it secret from her, because I didn’t want her, when she was fifteen or eighteen, to have some image of me, in the past, smoking mysteriously. Nothing is more alluring than a mother-before-she-was-a-mother, an unknowable and irresistible figure. My own mother smoked until I was ten. After she quit, she struggled with an excess forty pounds until she died. I started smoking at fourteen when her Australian colleague offered my best friend Alice and me a cigarette in the parking lot of a company picnic. I was crazy for his height and his sunburn and his accent and his white-blond hair. He taught us how to suck in, hold the smoke in our lungs, and release. I prided myself on not coughing. After a few drags, Alice stood up and passed out briefly from the head rush, and the man and I, I forget his name, carried her into the shade and pepped her back up with Hi-C and ice cubes. Once she revived, we chased and teased each other, dropping ice cubes down each other’s shirts. As the summer went on he hung around the two of us more and more, and we smoked and mixed the rum and vodka he brought us with pineapple juice and ice. One night when my mother was out with her boyfriend and my sisters were off on a beach trip with friends, he and Alice came over and we sat on the couch to watch the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal. He had both of his hands on our legs during the long jumps, and up our shorts during the sprints. By the time we were watching now–Caitlyn Jenner set the world record for the decathlon, we were squirming horizontal on the itchy woolen couch. I remember I had one breast exposed and another still in my white lace bra, and I didn’t know whether I should undo the whole thing—if I looked ridiculous or asymmetrically appealing. At a certain point, he guided my hand to his penis. Not knowing exactly what to do with it, I jerked it wildly until he took my hand off and pushed me away. I fell off the narrow couch onto the floor. I had the feeling of failing a test, and watched as he kissed and groped Alice, who, always more knowledgeable than I, held him expertly. Disgusted with myself, I retreated to my bedroom, leaving them entwined, and cried myself to sleep with self-pity. That was my last summer in Texas.

The moon reflected on the pool. I made a mental note to call the guy to come and cover it this week. Oh God, still so much self-hatred could ripple out from those adolescent memories. Always the shame, not of being too fast or engaging with a perverted Australian man who was at least thirty, but of being laughable—of being a slightly chubby girl of fourteen with one fat-nippled breast hanging out of a bad brassiere and not knowing how to give a hand job. Some of my students, when they read Victorian or Edwardian novels, would become so angry at all these heroes and heroines whose lives are ruined because they are afraid of embarrassment, but I did not know of any emotion more powerful, more permeating, more upending than that. You could die seemingly pointlessly or loveless to avoid shame, but shame could also make you feel as though you wanted to die, as I still felt, forty-four years later, when I pictured myself on the floor, looking at the beige strands of our wall-to-wall carpet as Alice and the Australian writhed above me. Then I remembered why October 20 was so familiar: it was, of course, the day of my lunch date with Vladimir.





IX.


Without any formal discussion or request, Sid stayed on with us the following week, mostly shut up in the guest room, emerging every once in a while to jog or to make food. She was considerate, overly so, her consideration a way to keep us at an arm’s length. She didn’t have a car but ordered groceries and beer to be delivered to the house and washed her dishes immediately after each use and did small chores like taking out the garbage and rotating the laundry. I say “us,” but I only knew for a fact that she kept her distance from me. She and John might have been having heart-to-heart discussions whenever they were alone, I didn’t know. Whether it was being back in her childhood bedroom, or because I had somehow failed to be the confidante she’d wished for, after that day at the diner she became as aloof as a teenager. In the unlikely occurrence that we were all home together, we moved around the house hushed and with care, like silent monks on balance beams. I had a futon in my office that I made up as a bed for myself. When Sid learned I wasn’t sleeping in the Big Bedroom she offered to switch with me, but I insisted that I preferred having unlimited access to the office, and as long as I had enough pillows the futon caused only minimal damage to my back.

I wasn’t being sacrificial. In fact, I was aflame with ardor and inspiration, and the only place that felt like real life was the seat at my desk, looking through the slats of the wooden blinds to the street outside, writing my story. I still refused to call it a book, because to call it a book might snuff its flame. It was like when I first met John. If I had met him a year or two earlier, it would have been impossible for me to believe that this tall and handsome lothario could seriously return my affections, and I would have somehow ruined it. If it had been a year or two earlier, our coupling would have been doomed. But as it happened, when we came together I was at the height of an upswing of good fortune. I was the most well-regarded student of my year, beloved by my teachers; I was passionate and interested in my subject matter. A beautiful future stretched out before me. My confidence calibration was such that the night after John and I first kissed, I acted with utmost restraint. Unlike every other romance I’d had, which I had either entered begrudgingly or ruined with anxiety and clinging, I could sense exactly the correct level of communication, the perfect blend of distance and attention needed to manage him. For the first and only time in my life, it was possible to act like those women who prided themselves on their success with men, the ones who preached ideas of manipulation, about letting a man think he was right while secretly getting what you wanted. Which is not to say I didn’t fall in love. I did. But somehow I intuitively understood exactly how to manage it—how to neither clamp down nor let go, but keep gently pulling the thread until I found myself unpacking boxes in his apartment.