Flirting with Danger (12 page)

So when Trevor came along, he looked pretty good. He was handsome, albeit in a Ken-doll way. He had dark features, piercing, thick-lashed eyes, and his most striking feature was a perennially deep tan he nurtured, even in Moscow’s winter. I should have known when his own sister warned me off him that there would be trouble. But he was dashing and clever. He was also enthralled with Russia, and a relentless action junkie. On one date, we went on a ride in a MiG fighter plane. Another time it was a tour of a nuclear silo. Instead of a holiday snorkeling in the Virgin Islands, he wanted
to take an icebreaker to one of the poles or visit bombed-out Beirut. Instead of being intimidated by my job, like most men I encountered, he thrived on it. He was always a willing participant and wanted to come along to whatever I was sent to cover. On our first date I invited him to the Pavletsky railway station. We were shooting a story on a group of French doctors who had set up shop in the squalid station to treat the homeless at night.

As Hugh, the cameraman, and I descended into the bowels of the station late that night, it was teeming with misery. Children tugged at us, begging for gum, money, a pen, anything. Mothers were camped out with hungry-looking toddlers and screaming babies, staring vacantly at us, not even bothering to ask for help. I was immersed in this kind of scene so often, I did not let myself feel the human misery that surrounded me: I kept focused on a task, taking notes. Trevor followed us around as we filmed old men with gaping wounds and Azerbaijani children with open sores being tended by the French doctors. The homeless lined up with gangrene and lice. With the Soviet Union unraveling, Moscow’s train station was overflowing with the unwanted, the underbelly of Soviet society, swept out of sight for so long by the authorities. Now they were pouring into Moscow, often fleeing the former Soviet republics, many of which were now independent and mired in civil war. It was all in a day’s work for me, and I was impressed to see Trevor, the devout capitalist, still tagging along.

“Dinner?” I asked.

“Just let me go home and throw up first,” he answered.

A few nights later, Trevor called when I was getting ready to leave the office to cover a victory party for Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the rabid nationalist and anti-Semite who had unexpectedly won big in parliamentary elections. Trevor, always interested in meeting new people, asked to come. I gave him the address in a hurry
assuming that he would never find his way there, especially as he didn’t speak Russian. But when my crew and I arrived, Trevor was already inside drinking vodka and making toasts with the Zhirinovsky clan. He knew how to have a good time. He once described himself to me as a soulless jumble of neurological impulses, but I thought he was the best pursuer of adventure I had ever met.

At one point, Trevor made a deal with Russia’s Space Agency to take tourists for rides in their weightlessness-training plane. After collecting a few thousand dollars each from a group of thrill-seekers, we headed off to Star City, Russia’s main space center. There are only five planes in the world that can simulate zero gravity in order to train astronauts for space, one in the United States, one in Europe, and three in Russia. Trevor rented one for the day. We were shepherded past statues of Yuri Gagarin and other Soviet space heroes into a classroom to watch a video explaining what we were about to experience. It was basically twenty minutes of people throwing up from the effects of weightlessness. Trevor had a word with our hosts about perhaps developing a better videotape. We were then given a five-minute instruction on how to use a parachute before being herded off for our adventure. The giant cargo plane, which we dubbed the “Vomitron” after the video, looks like a converted gym with padded walls and ceiling. We took off and flew to a high altitude at which the plane dipped, flying straight down, then pulled back up quickly in a parabola, creating zero gravity for about thirty seconds. It was the most disorienting and liberating sensation I’ve ever had. Like many people, I have flown in my dreams for years, gliding over meadows and trees, but now I was doing it awake, flying from one end of the plane to the other, spinning around in midair curled up in a ball. I felt giddy and thrilled and free.

Maybe the thing Trevor and I liked most about each other was
our joint eagerness to try anything in Russia, this giant playground devoid of rules where we could feel like children. We relished the absurdities of daily existence in the new Russia. There were new adventures every day. My eternal hunt for a good story for CNN gave me license to seek out some of the wackier sides of what was going on. One day I visited the Lenin Brain Institute, where scientists had cut Lenin’s brain into thirty thousand slices and for more than a century looked for evidence of his brilliance, only to discover that its capacity was no better than the average bus driver’s brain. On another day I covered the Red Army Choir as they expanded their repertoire past the old limits of military tunes to include Frank Sinatra and Rolling Stones songs. Their brass version of “It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll” in full military garb epitomized the often ridiculous results of Russia’s efforts to transform itself. Russia’s first gay bar opened up, with a giant fish tank where naked ballet dancers from the Bolshoi swam and performed an underwater dance. We also visited a new sex club catering to the gangster class that was located inside the foreign ministry’s press center, where press briefings were held by day, and more nefarious activities occurred at night. As part of Russia’s giant identity crisis, Moscow had become the capital of incongruous pairings, and Trevor and I explored it together.

Not long after we started dating, Trevor informed me that his ex-girlfriend back in Florida, a blond aerobics instructor, wasn’t really all that ex. Trying to justify his sexual dalliances, he compared himself to a sports car.

“If you want to drive a Ferrari, with all the excitement and speed and craftsmanship, you have to put up with some quirks,” Trevor said. “If you want reliability and comfort, get a Volvo.”

Rather than realizing that Trevor was not the man for me, I blamed myself, looking for my own faults, as women often do.
Maybe I was too fat, I thought, so I dieted. Maybe I was too flabby, I thought, so I hired an ex–Olympic wrestling champion as my personal trainer. I got blonder. But nothing seemed to divert Trevor’s attention away from my brain to my body. In my smarter moments, I thought about shopping for a Volvo. Unfortunately, those moments passed. I slipped back into accepting an unsatisfactory reality.

Then Trevor told me the “ex-girlfriend” was coming to visit him for Christmas. The trip had been planned before we had met, he explained, and he promised to use this occasion to break up with her for good.

I was accustomed to bad Christmas holidays. Christmas was always hard when I was growing up. A feeling of dread creeps into me around mid-December each year. We never had a tree, but not because my father was Jewish; my Protestant mother objected because it was a German tradition, and she would have nothing German around because of the fierce prejudice she had adopted during the war. No Krups appliances, no Volkswagens, and no Christmas trees. “They built the gas chambers,” she often reminded us. With money short, we often received our presents a few days late. Christmas was put on hold till after the post-Christmas sales. I was full of expectations, pumped up by the endless commercialization of Christmas on television and by the excitement of other families I knew, but almost every year I felt let down. The disappointment felt painfully familiar when Trevor told me he would be unavailable during Christmas.

I didn’t get much of a chance to worry about it. On Christmas Eve, thirty schoolchildren were taken hostage by a gang of Chechens who demanded a million-dollar ransom. I was soon on an Aeroflot
flight south toward Chechnya, a mountainous region known for its black-market trading. We arrived at Rostov-on-Don, a southern Russian town near Chechnya, where the kidnapping had taken place. Armed with submachine guns and hand grenades, the gunmen had burst into a school and grabbed the children. They bundled them into a helicopter, and police gave chase through the Caucasus Mountains. We arrived at the school, where the parents had been waiting for twenty-four hours for news about their abducted children. They were distraught and terrified. After interviewing them, I sat outside the room to write my story. But every time I looked up at the worried, tearstained faces of these parents, I wanted to cry.

The kidnapping was over quickly. Russia’s alpha forces, a special crack military unit, cornered the gunmen in the hills and retrieved the children safely: they were home in plenty of time for Russian Orthodox Christmas, celebrated in January. My crew and I were ready to fly back to Moscow, but all flights were canceled due to heavy snow. I wasn’t sure when I’d be home. Then I spotted some of the tough-looking alpha soldiers hanging around the Rostov-on-Don departure lounge. Clearly their plane was going to take off. I found the commander and begged and pleaded to hitch a ride with the only plane dumb enough to fly anywhere in such conditions. I was told I would be allowed on as long as I swore not to talk to anyone. I agreed. But after a little vodka, the reserve of the gentle brute seated next to me, with hands the size of suitcases, broke down enough for us to discuss Tolstoy.

While I was pursuing Chechen hostage-takers through the Caucasus Mountains, Trevor was still entertaining his female visitor. My kitchen cabinet of personal advisers—my two sisters and my friend Lori—were soon united against Trevor. Alexandra, the first one to actually meet him during a visit to Moscow, formed a “Hate
Trevor” committee and took every opportunity to tell me how wrong for me he was. When I wouldn’t listen, she would get Lori on my case. They were appalled at the depths to which I was sinking in order to please him. “Where’s your self-esteem?” Lori asked during one of our many late-night transatlantic calls. Low self-esteem is an underestimated human affliction. It clogs emotional arteries, constantly nagging and belittling and dragging you down, no matter how accomplished the rest of the world thinks you are.

“Why do you give him so much power over you?” Lori prodded as I defended him. “If he hasn’t come around in three months, you’ve got to purge him. Slash and burn. You are thirty-three and don’t have time to waste on guys who can’t go the distance.” Lori was being practical. I wanted some sympathy. I dialed Francesca in Delaware.

“Why is it all the creeps are attracted to me?” I asked my younger sister.

“Because you’ll actually talk to them,” she said. “Most women wouldn’t give them the time of day.”

“I’m going to end up like Uncle Leon,” I groaned. “Will you visit me when I’m living alone in a Jewish old-age home in Philadelphia?”

“Only if you serve me cherry Manischewitz wine like Uncle Leon always does,” Francesca said. She had made the trek to visit Uncle Leon several times; I had yet to summon up the courage. Maybe it was because I feared I would end up alone too. Judging from his letters reminding me that a woman’s life is not complete without a man, the same thought must have haunted him.

When I eventually visited Uncle Leon I saw that his main wall decoration is a minishrine to me, with newspaper clippings about CNN and a photo I once sent him of Boris Yeltsin and me. There is another in which I was interviewing King Hussein. He even has a
picture of me with Richard Nixon in Moscow, although he is a devout Democrat. I always know he will be home when I call because he leaves only to mail his letters or to go to Tiffany’s, a diner down the street. His weekly treat is having his favorite dish, chicken cacciatore, at the same time, five forty-five, every Sunday evening.

Uncle Leon has worn the same felt hat and tattered overcoat since I was a child. They are both relics of the 1950s. Whenever I picture him in this outfit he reminds me of Gogol’s character Akaky Akakievich, who is so attached to his threadbare overcoat he comes back to haunt St. Petersburg in it. Uncle Leon always turned up at my mother’s house in New Jersey with a brown leather overnight bag clutched in both hands. It was full of pertinent documents he had collected for me, some newspaper clippings about Ted Turner and CNN or a carefully written index card with his address in case I’d lost it, plus an empty one for whatever my new address might be. Uncle Leon is obsessed with address changes. He wrote to warn me two years ahead of my mother’s scheduled New Jersey zip code change, then sent letters every six months in advance of the change to remind me.

His connections to others are few, so he holds on to them tenaciously, fearing those he loves might disappear out of his life if he isn’t diligent enough to keep track of them. He always found me and kept those letters of encouragement coming to whatever corner of the earth I happened to be in.

So, because I did not want to fulfill my own prophecy or disappoint Uncle Leon in his main message to me,
find a man
, I soldiered on, and decided to give Trevor one more chance. Moscow can be a very lonely place for a single woman, and the selection of men was not much better than the food. After long enough in Moscow, turnips looked tempting. It’s all about perspective. I made excuses and stayed with Trevor for another year. It took another war to knock some sense into me.