Pravda (3 page)

Unnecessary because of course Sasha never would touch her after an argument—his side of the bed was empty. He would be splayed out on the couch on the other side of the door. After an argument, he hadn't got the nerve even to sleep in the same room as she, never mind anything else. So why bother with the pajamas? Just in case he suddenly transformed his entire personality and popped his head in to say sorry for shouting and being so rude and then promised never to be such a selfish, self-centered, self-
obsessed
two-year-old again? She took another, deeper swig. Or because she wanted to walk past him thus armored in the morning? To make visual the rupture? Intimacy and its withdrawal as a weapon ... Not very subtle, Is, not very subtle.

She bit her lip.

So no, she would not go parading past in her bloody silly pajamas; she would not go banging into the bathroom; she would not make a sound. Lights would stay off. The kettle would not be boiled. There would be no statement, deliberate or otherwise, of her going to work—as I do every morning, by the way, Sasha, every single morning.

She looked across at the alarm clock again—a self-satisfied digital with lurid red numbers calling itself "The Executive." His clock. It was only quarter past six—normally too early to call on Molly, her downstairs neighbor, except that three days ago Molly badly twisted her ankle and so was not sleeping and there was every chance she would be awake, the same as on Sunday, when the emergency text had come in: "In agony and bored.RUAwake?" This time, Isabella thought, she would text Molly—on the way to Veselka's, just to check. Fetch the tea and whatever else Molly fancied and bring it back for her. A civilized breakfast before work, some lies about their boiler being broken, and then a bath (oh God, yes, a
bath
instead of that dribble of a shower) in Molly's glorious tub. And, oh shit, she'd better remember to call her mother from the office this morning, before Petersburg went to sleep.

Her eyes went back to the latest communiqué, set down askew on top of the books on her bedside table and energetically inhabiting the envelope on which her mother's calligraphic hand had rendered her own name in crimson ink. With deepening confusion, she had read it for a second time last night directly before going to sleep—a good way of distracting herself after the row with Sasha and his subsequent (rather protracted) storming out.

The new letter was a single page only, but far stranger than the previous one. Isabella crossed back to the bed and took it from the envelope. A Finnish stamp—like everyone else, her mother used one of the hotel mail services via Helsinki. Some stuff about the president, a disparaging mention of her brother's so-called career in contract publishing, news of a bomb in Moscow and ten more people "ripped limb from limb" by the "bastards" in Chechnya, and then this: "So, dear Is, be sure to visit me first, before you visit your father. It is better that you understand from me Oh, you know how scheming he is, and he'll be sure to distort everything. He will want to be certain that you love him, especially now he is getting older."

Leaving aside the lingering oddness of her mother's writing style—"I am a Russian never forget, Is, forced to slum it in second class with this fat little ruffian English, so full of himself and yet so empty and vague"—this new letter was seriously weird because Isabella had absolutely no intention of visiting her father, nor indeed of finding out where he was. Neither she nor her brother had spoken a single word to Nicholas Glover for more than ten years. Not since the death of Grandpa Max (when her father had turned up only to make sure he got all the money). And Isabella was certain that her mother knew this. So what the hell was she going on about? Seriously weird too because what was there to understand? What was there to distort? It was extremely difficult to tell what was real and what was fantasy, given the background level of histrionics and exaggeration that her mother liked to live with, and she was certainly not above coming on all portentous in order to secure a visit or whatever obscure point she had set herself to make.

For Christ's sake—Isabella collapsed onto her back again, holding the letter aloft—the very act of writing on paper, in crimson ink, and using the mail was theatrical these days. There were times when she marveled (as if she herself were not involved) at her mother's ability to target her sense of ... sense of what? Shame? Guilt? Loyalty? Indebtedness? Conspiracy?
Daughterliness?
It was as if her own
genes were coded to recognize and instantly respond to the parental call regardless of her private will as a separate thirty-two-year-old individual. All the same...

All the same, maybe this time it
was
something serious. And given that she had not written back after the two previous letters, she really had better call today. As soon as she got in.

She puffed out her cheeks, kicked herself up again, crossed the room, and locked the letter in her private drawer with the others. Then, without opening the blinds, though conscious that the light was already sharpening against the skyline, she slipped on her sweat pants and sneakers and an old top. Amazing, really, that the New York birds still bothered with a dawn chorus.

Now the task was to get out without waking Sasha.

She opened their little closet—too shallow to hang anything in—and unhooked her charcoal suit. She felt relieved that the day was under way. She could be honest about her motives, too. She was leaving without waking him not because she feared further fighting, nor reconciliation, nor a silent standoff. It was less personal than that. She was leaving surreptitiously because she did not want to have to respond to, or negotiate with, another consciousness. No; what she wanted, above all else, was to start this day without his hijacking her psyche and making her cross or remorseful or resentful or mawkish or forgiving or having any other response she didn't want to have to experience. For now, she wished only to be by herself in her own mind—a reasonable thing for a woman to wish for every so often. And when she was clear, when she was centered, then she would talk to Sasha. Really, it was just silly anyway.

She approached the door of the bedroom and inched it open. His head (at the end of the couch) would be just the other side. She stopped a millimeter before the point where she knew the creak would begin. And then she slipped through.

But all the long and narrow way past the sofa, taking care not to tread on the plate or the glass or knock over the bottle of armagnac that he had so affectedly taken to drinking, she knew that he was awake, pretending to be asleep. And after four years together, he knew that she knew. And she knew that he knew that she knew and so on and so on and so on and so
why the bloody sham?
And why, a second later, was she frowning with concentration as she tried to judge the exact force required to pull the front door of their apartment shut while making as little sound as possible?

Abruptly, and with a sickening feeling, she realized that her heart had a false floor and had been concealing its contraband throughout: she had been aware all along that he would be wide awake, and she had been aware that she would pretend he wasn't. Jesus, was there no subject on which heart and mind might be candid with each other?

She slammed the door.

And then none of it mattered because she was hurrying down the tight stairwell, down the narrow corridor, down the steep stoop, and onto the freedom and anonymity and endless possibility of the sidewalk. New York's forgiving embrace—inclusion in the shared idea of a city, however true or untrue. A union of states. The infinite context of America.

But just the same, she dared not allow her mind to look up, for she sensed that the tattered images of her dreams were still hung high on the masts of her consciousness like the ragged remainders of sails flapping after a storm.

Molly Weeks let her paper fall onto her lap, transferred her steaming takeout tea from left to right hand, and sucked her sensitive teeth, which, she occasionally reflected, were seven or so years younger than the rest of her and therefore still in their thirties. A conventional English girl from an actual convent school, Molly had married the American singer in a New Romantic band twenty-five years ago—the first of two feckless husbands—and she had since acquired that quick-switching manner wherein raw-hearted sensitivity vied with the don't-mess attitude of the serial survivor. She wore thick-framed wedge-shaped glasses, her hair was a perpetually self-contending frizz of red and blond, and these days she was sole owner, chief executive, and chairman of the ever more successful MagicalMusic.com.

She spoke now with mock exasperation: "The world is going to all kinds of hell and nobody seems to be able to do anything about it." She adjusted her leg, the ankle of which was propped up on a pillow. "How's the career, Is?"

The subject of Isabella's job was one of their private jokes. Though, like most private jokes, it was also a way of dealing with a private seriousness: an abiding desire to encourage (and to liberate) on the part of the older woman; an abiding desire to evade for the time being on the part of her younger neighbor.

"Heading the same way." Isabella, who was sitting on a dining
chair that she had dragged in from the other room, abandoned the lifestyle article she was (hating) reading. "My own fault, though." Isabella drew her finger quickly across her throat. "Last night."

"Bad?"

"Uh-hmm. Definitely should not have told them that I drink a bottle of vodka every morning before I come into work."

Molly chuckled and had to hold out her tea at arm's length to prevent herself from spilling it. "This was the client party you told me about, right? The chairman and all the cheeses present?"

"Yep." Isabella nodded. "All of them—Jerk, Snicker, Robe, and even the Smooth." Isabella's colleagues were well known by their various epithets.

"After everything we said about building mutually affirmative relationships in the workplace." Molly approximated the disappointed face of the daytime-TV life coach.

Isabella played along. "I feel as though I've let my whole family down."

Molly grinned. "I can't believe they took you seriously."

"They took me more than seriously. They looked at me like I'd just beheaded the secretary of state live on CBS." Without flinching, Isabella sipped her tea, which was still ferociously hot, and suddenly remembered what she had been meaning to tell her friend. "Hey, you know there's a new Russian restaurant opening up? Right around the corner from Veselka's."

"Another one? No way. You serious?" Molly was a champion of all things neighborhood.

"Really." Isabella nodded.

"How do you know?" Molly shifted her ankle again.

"The waitress told me."

"The waitress in Veselka's? Which one?"

"Don't know her name. The one with the suspicious expression that makes you think you must definitely be dining with terrorists or whatever."

Molly expressed puzzlement and shook her head, the highest out-reaches of her crazed hair seeming to follow a moment behind, as if uncertain whether to go their own way or not.

"You know, Mol—heavy floral-pattern dresses." Isabella laid her hand delicately over her chest. "Ruched."

"Oh, you mean Dora." Molly smiled her recognition.

"Yeah—Dora. She served me these 'Earl Jeelings,' as she calls
them." Isabella indicated her cup. "Then she came around the counter and sort of spat the news into my ear."

"She does that." Molly aborted an attempted sip. "Christ knows how they get this tea to stay so hot. What did she say?"

Isabella adopted a confidential air and mimicked the waitress's rat-a-tat voice: "New place opening. East eleven. Says it's Russian. But don't even go there. Totally fake. Totally disgusting. They pee in the
pelmeni.
Waitresses illegal. All sluts."

"But the new place is not actually open yet?"

"No."

"So how does Dora know?"

"She's seen 'definite sluts' going in for interviews, apparently. And she knows the chef. Famous for peeing in
pelmeni
the world over."

Molly drew a faux-macho breath. "What the hell is
pelmeni,
anyway?"

"Dumplings. Stuffed with cabbage, cheese, mushrooms. That kind of thing. Gogol's favorite."

"Did Dora tell you that?"

"No ... No, that was my mum."

"Useful."

"Very useful. Dietary preferences—I know 'em all, Turgenev to Tchaikovsky and back again. Just in case you ever need me to rustle up something for one of the great men of Russian culture." Isabella wrinkled her nose. "I'd better jump in the bath now, if that's okay. Wouldn't want to be late for the office. I've got opportunity matrices to evaluate."

"Sure. Go right ahead. Help yourself to one of those fizz-bomb things. They're glorious. Really ... fizzy."

"Thanks. Don't wait up. I may be a few days."

Molly took a tentative sip of her milkless Darjeeling. She had a shrewd enough idea of what lay behind Isabella's impromptu visit. For one thing, something was going on upstairs. She suspected that Isabella found Sasha unfulfilling—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. Indeed, she knew for certain that Isabella found the general obviousness of masculinity tedious, since a common theme of their concert nights out together was Isabella being amusingly caustic about the clumsy gambits of stupid men. She did a great impression of the coy-but-almost-immediate way that they peddled inventories of their "interests"—"the shit fiction, the shit films, the shit music, the clichés,
the clichés, Mol, the same old clichés." And yet Isabella also seemed to do down the smart ones—for their dishonest charm, their self-satisfied pride in playing the man-woman game, their "cultivated eccentricities," their "depth." All of which analysis Molly had much sympathy for. Sasha and men aside, though, it also occurred to Molly that Isabella's habitually sardonic chatter might be symptomatic of a deeper unease. The difficulty, however, was getting Isabella to open up. Evidently this stuff about broken boilers was total crap.