Vladimir(55)

I checked my phone. I had a missed call from John, but no voicemail. He’d texted a photo of attractively arranged wrap sandwiches on a platter with the message The execution will be catered. I searched the internet for the story about the iron bands and found that it was a small detail from Grimm’s The Frog Prince. In the story, when the prince is turned into a frog, his manservant is so grieved that he has three metal hoops soldered around his chest. When the prince is kissed and turned back to human form, and the manservant is driving the couple home to the kingdom, the manservant is so happy that the hoops snap off. Strange, the detail of a servant loving his master so dearly. Homoerotic, perhaps, which is fun to consider, or a teaching tool of oppression, most likely.

I’d paid the check by the time Vlad returned. He protested, but I waved him off, telling him I wasn’t the one saving up for a down payment on a house. As we were gathering our bags the owner turned on a Cuban dance song, and Vlad assumed a stiff upper carriage and gracefully cha-cha’d out the door.

“I was a salsa nerd in high school,” he said. “Florida in the nineties. I was this skinny, zitty kid but they liked me at this one place. I cleaned the floors and got to dance with all these thirty-year-old women in stretchy flare pants and belly chains. It was”—there was a dreamy, sexualized look on his face—“formative.”



* * *



My cabin was only a twenty-minute drive from the restaurant. When we arrived and Vlad exclaimed about what a perfect idyll it was, I fought the urge to tell him that he could have it. I wanted to. In the past, early on with friends, and later with boyfriends, I had always been overgenerous—giving away my doll if another child said she liked it, or spending an egregious amount of money on Christmas presents for girls I admired and receiving nothing in return, or giving men free use of my car or place, which often ended in disaster.

I told him to go look out at the lake—and while he walked ahead I opened the trunk and slipped my toiletry bag, the limes, and the cacha?a into my work tote, which was voluminous enough to conceal their contents. I yelled that I would be inside when he was done, and hurried into the kitchen. If I was to do what I had planned, I would have to do it now. I wasn’t sure how compulsive Vlad was—he was Russian, he probably had a high tolerance, he clearly liked to drink, but he was also ambitious and a father. I couldn’t tell if he would have more than one cocktail. I pulled out the pill box from my toiletries and rolled a Seconal between my fingers. Would it be possible to seduce him on my own? He seemed to be flirting with me, speaking about sex in indirect ways and suggesting that he and I had a special connection. But no—that was only my own projection, he behaved that way with everyone, I was sure, and besides, compared with Cynthia I was repulsive, an old woman. Real life did not work out like that, with surprise reciprocity—that was a juvenile fantasy, a foolish ideation. I resolved to stay steadfast to the plot. Pushing deliberate thinking from my mind, as though I were in an exercise class and someone was telling me to complete the motions, or, more, like those moments when I turned off my critical brain and forced myself to “just write,” I crushed the pill with the sugar for his drink, muddled the limes, and mixed them with ice and cacha?a. I’d started fixing another caipirinha for myself when he tapped at the glass doors that opened into the living area.

“Vat is zis?” he said in an over-the-top accent when I handed him the drink.

“Some renters left cacha?a.” I showed him the bottle. “And some limes. You were just talking about salsa—I figured, we had to.”

And it had been a sort of coincidence that I had brought that cacha?a (I had brought more options should the mood have been different). But caipirinhas were the drinks that John and I had fallen in love to. Near the university where we first met there was a tapas bar—we would go after classes and get deliriously drunk. First with groups of other academics, and then as friends, until one night I convinced him to take me home with him. I remember those nights as half-lit, sparkling and sultry, my body elated with the romance of romance. When I was packing up and came upon the bottle in my liquor cabinet, I remembered and longed to re-create that glorious, fizzing confidence I had felt in myself, in my appeal, on those nights. Also, caipirinhas were incredibly sweet; if there was a medicinal taste to the Seconal, the sugar would probably mask it.

Vlad drank fast. He sat in the medieval beer-hall chair with the carved initials—saying it made him feel like a lord. A chilling wind rattled through the uninsulated gaps in the wooden walls, so I pulled out and turned on the space heaters I had brought up when I was conferring with contractors about winterizing the place.

“This is my dream,” Vlad said. “Somewhere like this—not my home, somewhere else that was mine—where I could get away and write. Spend forty-eight hours in a fever—stay up all night, banging it out.”

That had been the intention, I told him. But when we realized, idiotically, as we were professors, how expensive college was, even for a double-income household, I knew that if we didn’t want to cripple Sid’s chances with debt, we needed a greater income stream. We got the most money from long-term renters—people who stayed for a month or longer—and there were summers when we didn’t even get a week up here. Then Sid had gone to law school at NYU, a perfect fortune even with loans, aid, and a small scholarship, and spent a miserable summer interning in a corporate office before she decided she simply couldn’t work in that environment, that she had to do something meaningful. Working for a nonprofit with her debt would have been utter drudgery—we ran the numbers together and we were shocked—and, well, I wanted to see her both happy and making a difference, of course I did. She wasn’t being selfish or lazy—and what else was my life for if not helping my one child do good for this world? As for winterizing the house—the expense could not be justified. I was so busy during the school year it would be nearly impossible for me to spend significant enough time up here, it would require so much work—the township didn’t even plow the road when it snowed.