We Are Not Ourselves(162)

“You want?” he asked, extending the pack.

“No, thanks, I don’t smoke.”

“Try,” he said. “One time. Is very relaxing.”

She had never had a cigarette. Aside from the pure brain-dead imbecility of subjecting yourself willingly to an avoidable carcinogen, she had always found them vile, noxious, smelly things—except for a brief period in high school when she loved a boy who smoked and she was intoxicated by the aroma mixed with his cologne and sweat, and the taste of it in his mouth and the rush she got when she kissed him just after he’d had one. But the memory of watching her mother smoke had permanently soured her on them. Her stomach turned whenever she saw a full ashtray; she imagined being made to eat it, butt by butt, and gagging on the ashes.

“Fine,” she said, and she took a cigarette from him. Life, she thought, was like that sometimes; for years, things were a certain way, and then in an instant, almost without conscious thought, they weren’t that way any longer, as if all the hidden pressure on their having been the way they’d been had found release through a necessary valve. She reached her hand out for the lighter, but he just took his own cigarette out of his mouth, lit hers from the flaming tip of his own, and handed it to her.

“You have to light it right,” he said.

She took a few breaths without disturbance. Sergei told her to take a deeper puff, and she did so, looking at him for confirmation. He was smiling an amused smile. Her lungs filled with heat and she fell into a loud cough.

“Don’t laugh at me,” she said.

“This always happens,” he said.

“Usually to teenagers,” she said. “Not to fifty-four-year-old women.”

“It happened to me,” he said smoothly. “You are not fifty-four.”

“I am.”

“You may have fifty-four years”—he was gesturing in an inscrutable way that she assumed would have conveyed more to a Russian native—“but you are not fifty-four.”

She blushed. “I think I’m done with this,” she said, dropping it and stepping on it. It was nearly the whole cigarette, and her embarrassment made her kick it behind her toward the house.

“You work very hard,” Sergei said, continuing to smoke. “My wife has no job for thirty years.”

“Thank you,” she said, absurdly. Talking to Sergei made her uneasy. At first she thought it was the language barrier, but now she was beginning to think it was something else, a tension rooted in the strangeness of having a man living in her house.

“I didn’t want to have job past sixty,” he said, finishing his cigarette and stepping on the butt. They went back inside. Sergei sat at the table glancing at the newspaper while she put dishes away.

She didn’t hear him on the stairs, and her back was to him when he entered, but there was no mistaking that Ed had joined them, because her stomach seized in nervous anxiety. She heard the clicking sound he made when he was trying to get words out, like the distress call of a bird.

Sergei put down the paper and gave him a long-suffering look.

“Why don’t you sit and I’ll make you some tea,” she said.

“My,” Ed stammered, and the clicking became more desperate.

“Ed, honey. Please.”

Sergei held up a hand to silence her. He gestured for Ed to take his seat as he rose and passed out of the room. She heard his heavy footfalls on the stairs and unconsciously poured the water out of the kettle she’d been heating instead of filling the cup she’d set out. The steam rose from the sink. When she’d caught herself, there wasn’t enough left for a full cup.

“Look what you made me do,” she said.

Ed calmed down once Sergei had left the room. He sat where Sergei had been and shook his head, continuing to click, but in a softer way, like a cooing bird. “No,” he stammered, quietly.

“It’s okay,” Eileen stood behind him and rubbed his back. “It’s okay.”

“Mine,” he said.





81


The summer uniform had short sleeves and no jacket, but the pants were a thick wool-poly blend, and he wasn’t allowed to take off his hat. There was no air-conditioning in the atrium, so they opened all the doors to the enclosed quadrangle and hoped for a breeze.

The one benefit to the heat was that it kept many of the residents away from the city. He ushered their mounds of bags and cartloads of hanging clothes into Range Rovers and Jeeps, and they handed him ten bucks and headed for the Hamptons or Long Beach Island. Even Mr. Marku went out of town for the weekend. He came into the lobby with his golf clubs and polo shirts on Friday afternoons and said to get his car, his sweat fresh with aftershave. Connell loved when Mr. Marku was away, because it was safe to read in the open.

The shareholders who remained in town weren’t much trouble. There was the shipping magnate of Olympian means who spread the last scant lengths of hair across his glossy pate. He hustled through the lobby with his head down, polite and preoccupied, as though he were sorry for trespassing. Then there were the younger sharks who hadn’t yet acquired a house in the Hamptons. They talked sports with Connell, checked out women with him, and as long as he didn’t act as though they were equals, they didn’t pull rank. They hailed their own cabs, told him to stay in his chair when he rose at the sound of their approach, but if he took for granted that they would, they cracked him into action with a chilly look, all camaraderie forgotten.