Vladimir(66)

“No, she does, well, basically she does.”

“How?” I was confused. I had checked his phone when I returned from the gas station and it was still on the fritz. We had no landline at the cabin—he couldn’t have called her.

“You told her.”

My throat tightened and my heart pounded so thunderously it reverberated in my armpits. I felt the need to keep the appearance of eye contact with him and felt myself putting on a face of false surprise, squinting at his forehead, as though I were trying very hard to understand what he was saying.

“You wrote her that text message from my phone. About needing time.”

“What?” My brow was still furrowed and my head was now shaking back and forth very quickly.

“I have my laptop in my bag. I can see my text messages on my computer.”

I pushed words out of my mouth. “Well—drunk—you must have…”

“No, you wrote it. I didn’t write that. I know that I didn’t. It’s okay,” he said, smiling warmly at me. “It’s interesting.”

“Did she write back?”

“She did. We went back and forth a bit.” He unfurled his legs from beneath him, lowered them to the deck, and used his heels to lift his buttocks up in a pelvic stretch. “She said I could have a few days.”

“But do you want to stay a few days?”

“I do,” he said, lifting his arms high and wide, his voice strangled from his stretch. “That is, if you’ll have me.”

“Did she—admit to—John?”

“No,” he said casually. “But she’d be the first one to tell you she’s a liar. So who knows.”

He clasped his hands behind his head, looked over at me, and flashed his matinee idol grin, his teeth and lower lip stained purple from the wine.

“C’ai bum another cigarette?”





XVIII.


We made thick coffee with cream and sugar to sober ourselves up and prepared dinner, listening to the cast album of Sweeney Todd with Patti LuPone and Michael Cerveris. I was Mrs. Lovett to his Sweeney. His easy acquiescence to the situation, and particularly to my deception, made me wary of him; every time our bodies were close I resisted the urge to spring away. Vlad made an herb frittata, I was assigned a salad, and together we assembled a plate of cheese and olives. He was a man who knew his way around the kitchen, slicing, peeling, chopping with alacrity. It was intimidating, after having mostly prepared food for my husband, whose only culinary contribution was the occasional placing of meat on top of fires. My hands felt clumsy as I dealt with the lettuce, and there wasn’t a salad spinner so I used what felt like a conspicuous amount of paper towels to blot moisture from the leaves. I became self-consciously stymied about what a surprising but good combination of salad ingredients might be and went to the bathroom to search the internet until I came upon a lettuce, grape, walnut, and blue cheese salad. I sliced the grapes the wrong way, over-toasted the walnuts, and overcrumbled the blue cheese. When I told Vladimir what I was making he said something about how much he loved the vintage flavor mixtures of the early aughts, which I took, like nearly everything Vlad had said this afternoon, as both a reassurance and a slight.

I felt more comfortable around a cocktail, and once we finished our coffees I mixed us some manhattans. (The main tricks of a manhattan are good-quality cherries and getting it as cold as possible, nearly slushy, so that the bourbon is thick on the tongue.) We drank them while waiting for the frittata to finish in the oven. Our chatter was light and slightly forced—Vladimir kept bringing up “topics.” At this moment, do you think the world is interested in the individual poetic voice? Which contemporary celebrated writers will be considered important fifty years from now? Is it possible to have literature that does not interface with identity without the presumption of a hegemony?

We set the table with cloth napkins, wineglasses, and a candle. Vlad told me that growing up and to this day, his mother exclusively uses disposable plastic dishes and cutlery that she throws out after each use. “She thinks she’s gaming the system,” he said. I was excited by the mention of his childhood: I wanted to know more, I wanted to picture his childhood bedroom, the posters he hung, the bedspread he chose. I wanted to know about his friends and influential teachers.

“I was a standard child of Russian immigrants,” he told me. “Both my parents are scientists. They wanted me to be an engineer. I kept my head down and didn’t tell anyone I wanted to be a writer. When I told my father I was majoring in comp lit at Yale he didn’t speak to me for a month. I don’t think they’ve read my book, but they keep it in a glass case inside of another glass case in a very peach room. The room would be good for a murder; everything is so puffy it would be soundproof. Floridian noir.”

I asked if his parents got along with Cynthia. “They like her body,” he replied, and the finality of his answer prevented me from asking anything more.

The magpies screamed outside the window as the light grayed. We opened a bottle of Sancerre for the meal. At the first taste of wine I knew that there was a strong current of intoxication already at work inside me, but I pushed through the glass, reckless, in search of a confidence that seemed elusive, no matter how much I drank. We ate sloppily and quickly. He held his fork with an overhand grip, which I couldn’t tell if I found off-putting or alluring in a lusty Tom Jones kind of way. When we finished, Vlad asked if I knew how the hearing was going with John, and I said, “Let’s text him and find out.” Like two girls with a scheme to contact a clueless and unattainable crush, we sat close on the couch and huddled around my phone.