Vladimir(71)

“I don’t give her drugs, son,” John said in a weary voice. “She gives them to me.” And he glanced at me to let me know this was true.

Vladimir sat up from the floor and twisted in my direction. “You have to take me home,” he told me. “Right now.”

Once again I felt annoyed at his paternalism. The whiff of the New England preacher that I had sensed early on in our acquaintance returned. His wife was a writer, entitled to her own process and troubles. If she wanted to do drugs (I assumed an amphetamine, possibly Adderall, though I wasn’t sure), didn’t that simply place her in the ranks of so many other writers, with complicated relationships to substances and work? Even if she was at risk, she was her own person, not his child. Didn’t Sontag write all her books on speed, and Kerouac, and so many others? Coleridge? Sartre? Graham Greene? Just like a man to believe a woman had to keep her behavior in line while also churning out a work of genius.

“I’ve been drinking,” I told him. “I can’t drive you. We’ll have to wait for the morning.”

“She’s probably on a bender right now,” he said, rising to stand. “My child is not safe.”

“She’s not on a bender,” John said. “I keep the drugs locked in my safe. She does a very little. She doesn’t trust herself with more.

“She’s trying,” John added, and I saw that he cared for her, and was touched.

“She’s an addict,” Vlad said. He was now pacing back and forth. “You don’t know. You said she gives you the drugs.”

“She gets them from a student.”

“So how do you know she doesn’t have more?”

John rolled onto all fours, then used the arm of the couch to help himself upright, one heavy, trembling leg after another. “Because we talk. Because I know that all she wants is to get this book done so you can move out of that fucking condo and it can stop being about you all the time.”

Vladimir stopped pacing, inhaled, and shook his head. John must have channeled something about Cynthia that he recognized, because the tension wilted from his body.

“When in my life has it ever been about me,” he said softly. He looked away from us and mouthed something, some retort to Cynthia, I imagined. Then, head down, he held out his hand. “Gimme a cigarette.”

“They’re there,” I told him, and pointed to the windowsill. He walked to them, looking hunched and beaten, put one between his lips and another behind his ear, and stood still, staring at the window for a long time. Eventually I realized he was looking at John and me, reflected in the glass. He lifted the lighter to the cigarette in his mouth.

“You can’t smoke in here,” I said quickly, and without acknowledging me he put the lighter in his pocket.

He moved toward the sliding door that led to the porch. Facing away from us, he said, “What is wrong with you guys,” and shook his head. He struggled to pull the door open, then yanked it clear off the track so that it hung from the frame on a diagonal. John and I exchanged a look, and I put my hand up to stop him from saying anything, like Vlad was an angry teenager whose behavior we were trying to ignore.

We watched his back on the deck, his arm lifting and lowering the cigarette. When he finished he put it out in the coffee can full of water we’d been using as an ashtray (plip, in the silence) and walked to the lake. We heard the scraping of the gravel beach against the bottom of the kayak, then the splash and give of the water as he launched the boat.

“Wear a life jacket,” John shouted toward his direction.

“You should go out and stop him. He shouldn’t kayak at night.” I went to the door and peered out, but I couldn’t see past six feet in the dark.

“He’s fine. What could happen?” John waved my concern away, then raised his eyebrows for a joke. “Ominous, no?”

I batted at his chest, telling him to hush. He reached his arm around me and I folded my head like a swan against his chest. We stood there for a while. He brushed my hair with his large hand.

John tinkered with the radio dial until he found the jazz station, which played something light and melodic as I cleaned the plates from the living room and tidied some refuse from dinner that I had been too tired to deal with earlier that evening. I made us chamomile tea, which we drank at the kitchen table. A comfortable, melancholic fatigue washed over us both, and when, in a recognition of nodding off, I jerked my head awake, I saw John, cheek on the table, asleep.

I crept into the bedroom, pulled back the wool camp blankets and the comforter, and stripped the linens, cold and sodden from the evening’s earlier activities. I replaced them with an old set of flannel sheets printed with large sketched cats that Sid had loved when she was little. I remember walking into her room one night and finding her passionately wiping her face back and forth against one of the cat’s faces—a seven-year-old’s version of romance.

I woke John gently. “I can sleep out here,” he said, but I told him I was too tired to bother with the pullout sofa, and he should just come to bed with me.

It was freezing in the bedroom, and the only way we could get warm was to wrap ourselves in and around each other, limb intersecting with limb. He rested his chin on top of my head and I nestled mine in the soft part of his neck.

Entwined, I saw from the bedside clock that it was after four in the morning.