Butterfly Skin (37 page)

Try to understand him. Try to imagine his life. Listen carefully. Grasp the meaning of every word. Try to prepare yourself to meet him. Understand what really interests him.

Try a pencil with a sharp point. Try the nipple clamps. Try to stand on one leg. Try to stretch your breasts so far it leaves bruises. Try to take the pain to the limit. Make it even stronger. Try to feel that this is your choice. Try the word
responsibility
to see what it tastes like. The word
suffering
. The word
voluntary
and the word
pain
. Find other words.

Imagine his life. Imagine that he’s never spoken to anyone about it before you. Imagine that the doors into his personal hell are firmly closed. Imagine his hell as a cupboard or a closet that he’s afraid to leave. Remember the expression
in the closet
.

Tell yourself:
every one of us lives in hell, but as long we hold out, we’re doing fine.
Remember that if you don’t hold out, then immediately the cuts start, the suicide attempts, the fits of feeling sorry for yourself and despising others. Repeat:
we’re doing fine, we’re holding out.
Imagine that there is a personal hell tightly constrained by the straitjacket of your body, feel it beating inside your ribcage. Listen to it pounding in your temples. Repeat:
I must hold out
. Tell yourself:
I must not allow all this to burst apart the cage of my ribs and break out
. Tell yourself:
so far I am managing
.

Think about him. Imagine his life. Say thank you to him.

Feel happy.

Try to love a man without flesh. Try to explain this. Try to find the words.
The most important man in my life.
Ignore Marina’s smiley. Repeat again.
My most important man – like Gleb is for you.
Admit this man is so very important, it doesn’t matter if he turns out to be a lesbian woman. And even if she’s not a lesbian – it doesn’t matter.

Remember this very well. Remember the pain. Remember the arousal. Remember the trembling. Remember. Know: someday all this will end. Look at the screen. Read the little black letters in the white rectangle. Masturbate if you like. It doesn’t matter. The most important thing is – remember.

Try to find the words. Don’t tell anyone, just find the words. The words will stay when it all ends. Say them to yourself – and try to remember them. What did you say?
The love of my life.
Like in a romantic novel, right?

Yes, exactly, like in a romantic novel.

RECENTLY IT SEEMS TO OLYA THAT EVERYTHING
around her is shedding leaves, as if it’s not winter outside, but fall, and she herself is a tree that is no longer very young, losing leaf after leaf. Two weeks ago, on the evening of that day when Grisha and Kostya shook hands with each other, she stood in her own bath, reflected in the mirror walls, and looked at the bloody clot in her hand. For some reason she thought it had two little tails because she had taken exactly two tablets, although what connection is there between tablets and an embryo’s tails? That is, of course, if that lump really was the embryo.

Olya turned her hand over and the unborn infant fell into the pink water, a reddish-brown blob. At that moment she felt very, very strong. For the first time in recent years she didn’t feel like a traitor. All my life I have behaved correctly, she whispered, I have always been right. I have nothing to reproach myself with.

She knew she wouldn’t call Oleg anymore, she would put his number on the blacklist in her cell phone. The old love had gushed out of her in streams of blood, leaving a resonant, joyful emptiness in its place.

This emptiness was the cold emptiness between the branches of the trees in fall when they have lost all their leaves, one after another. Grisha and Kostya had flown off to Thailand together, to cement their renewed friendship with a joint vacation. Vlad was still in Goa. Mom hadn’t called since the information about Ksenia’s site reached Peter. And Ksenia herself had become so deeply immersed in her virtual romance that Olya hadn’t seen her for ten days. And that was why today after work she was going to collect Ksenia from the office and then they would go off together somewhere for dinner. Afterward maybe they’d go to a movie, or maybe they’d stay on in the restaurant until late in the night.

All day long, in the gaps between business talks, Olya tries to reach Ksenia on her cell phone, but there’s no answer. Eventually she asks her secretary to find the number of Evening.ru and connect here with Ksenia Ionova.

“Hello,” Ksyusha says in a voice that immediately makes Olya’s branches drop a few more leaves, as lifeless and withered as Ksyusha’s voice.

“What’s wrong with your cell phone?” asks Olya, and Ksyusha answers like an echo.

“What’s wrong with my cell phone? I guess I forgot to pay.”

Of course, she could tell herself that it’s just February. That of all the months in the interminable Russian winter, February is the cruelest. Sometime, a long time ago, when all the leaves were still green, when you could drink coffee outside in the street, Ksyusha and Olya had agreed on that: yes, as Eliot says, “all the instruments agree,” there’s no month in the Russian calendar worse than February. Ever since we were kids we have the idea in our heads that we have three months of winter, February’s the last, then supposedly spring begins. But every year in the middle of February, you suddenly realize there’s still a very long way to go to the end of winter, and you feel like a tree that has been stripped of all its leaves, and the new buds have no intention of opening yet. This is a month when you don’t even want to live, and maybe Ksyusha is right to have invented a virtual love for herself and fled from the cold Moscow streets, where the snow has long ago turned into dirty frozen slush and the leaves that fell from the trees in the fall have rotted, and not even the trees can recognize them any longer when they bow their heads down to the chilly, hoary earth.

But no, Olya drives away her melancholy thoughts. You have to move, to keep holding out, like the enterprising frog in the old parable, you have to whisk up the unsavory milk of the Moscow slush and the February cold into sour cream. You have to move, take yourself in hand, remind your body that it exists. That’s why in the heart of February there are so many melancholy girls in the Moscow clubs, propped up against the bar with an air of anguish. In reality these are not girls, they are trees in an autumnal copse. They have lost their leaves and are waiting for spring to come back, or at least for the fine country folk to deck their broken branches with pennants and garlands. And that’s why the flags of the sheets in the men’s bachelor apartments flutter so alluringly, why the one-off wedding wreaths of the fluffed-up pillows beckon, blessing the heads of the bridal couple for a single night. At this time of year men don’t make love with these girls – murmuring sweet nothings in their ears and rocking the frail boats of the beds – they merely remind the trees broken by winter that they will live until the spring – if, of course, they are not killed before then by the woodman’s axe, the bitter frost, or some forest disease. But then, it’s best not to think about diseases, especially in February, when it’s already hard enough to remind your body that it exists.

And that’s why, thank God, apart from the dubious sexual acrobatics to which Ksyusha and Olya are both indifferent, there are other forms of physical activity, and let’s go to Fitness Planet, you can get a one-off ticket there, and I have a club membership card, and we can work out a bit on the exercise machines – of course, only if we feel like it! – and then have a swim and afterward we’ll definitely sit in the sauna and come out relaxed and refreshed, almost happy, reminding ourselves that February really is the last month of winter so spring isn’t far away. Well then, are we going?

Ksyusha’s objections rustle feebly in the phone – swimsuit, tracksuit, and what else? – no, no, today Olya’s in a determined mood, no, no, no, we’ll call round to your place for the swimsuit and the tracksuit, and if you say you haven’t got a good swimsuit, you’ve only yourself to blame, we’ll go and buy you a new one in next summer’s fashion. And if you try to say you haven’t got any money, I’ll have to give it to you as a present. All right, we’ll call round to your place for the old one.

They take little keys for adjacent lockers and get undressed, listening to the conversations of the other girls. Which is better – Pilates or yoga? Should women go to aikido, or is it just a sheer waste of time? Is it true that working on exercise machines without a personal trainer for ten dollars an hour is just throwing away your time and money? This is great, thinks Ksyusha, what nice girls they are here. No one’s talking about psychotic killers. No one’s aroused by the thought of being hung by their feet from a hook hammered into the ceiling. You feel like a normal human being. Almost wholesome and healthy.

Ksyusha and Olya run on adjacent running machines. Ksyusha runs easily, controlling her breath, only sometimes tossing the hair back off her face, although there isn’t really anything much to look at here. After three minutes Olya already starts sweating, she finds the smell of her own armpits unpleasant, and the thought hammers away in her head that she needs to lose an entire five kilos, not just two, and in general, maybe it’s still too soon for her to exercise so hard after recent events.

Ksyusha jumps down off the running machine flushed and happy. “Shit,” she says. “A pity it’s so expensive, or I’d come here every day!”

“Let’s go to the pool,” says Olya, but Ksyusha can’t stop now and she wants to press weights over there, and then check her muscle stretch and then there’s this, and that, and that too, and then:

“All right, let’s go to the pool.” So Olya stands and watches Ksyusha as she presses iron – up-and-down, up-and-down – like Sarah Connor in the old film, and her tousled hair sticks to her forehead, but now look at that, the old familiar gleam is appearing in her eyes and so Olya watches and thinks that Ksyusha isn’t really all that thin, she’s actually more trim, that’s what it is, Olya thinks and she feels a little bit proud of Ksyusha, and a little bit like a not very youthful mother keeping an eye on her child from the edge of the playground, not daring either to leave him alone or to climb up herself and slide down, without giving a damn for her fur coat, the way we did, remember, Ksyusha, at New Year, right? That was great, wasn’t it?