Red Hook (34 page)

In the vast stainless steel kitchen, Val made coffee in a red espresso machine. She moved slowly, and waited silently until the coffee was ready and then she poured it into green cups with gold rims and served me. She sat down at the table. I sat opposite her.

“I thought you'd be away already. I was even surprised to see you Saturday night,” Val said.

“I had some things to do.”

“But, oh, it was your honeymoon.”

“I know. I'll try to go tonight.”

“I liked Maxine so much. I thought she was wonderful. Is wonderful.”

“Me too. Are you OK?” I said. “About Jack?”

“Sure,” she said. “You think that's cold? You didn't like him anyhow, did you? I could see that the other night.”

A faint edge of anxiety inserted itself, I felt my pulse speed up and I was sweating. Val didn't seem to care about Jack being dead. If she had anything to do with it, I didn't want to know, but she was going to tell me. Don't tell me, I thought. Keep it to yourself.

I said, “You feel how you feel, you don't have to borrow your feelings from anyone, you know, you can feel something and not show it. It doesn't matter what I felt about Jack,” I said and I thought she knew I was lying.

“It's not that.”

“I don't understand.” I drank down the coffee and got myself another cup.

“It was me,” she said. “It was my fault. I'm twenty years old, I'll be twenty next week, Artie, and I don't know, it must be genetic, you see.” She put out her hand towards me and I took it. Her skin was soft, unwrinkled, perfect. “I feel like an ordinary American kid,” Val said. “I'm the Echo generation, the team player, the desired child, I'm the kid who grew up in a suburb, in Florida, in Miami, with all the stuff, I had music lessons and ballet lessons and soccer and I wanted to be a soccer superstar, you know, like Mia Hamm, and I was editor of the school newspaper and I started a Spanish lit club, not Russian, of course, just to be cool, and I started a garage band, and I was a fucking cheerleader, can you believe it? I was going to be an American. Shit, Artie, I even tried out for some junior Miss America thing, but that was too much even for me. I was only eleven when we came from Moscow.” She held up her hand. “You know about this.” She nodded at the missing finger. “You know about it? My dad told you? The kidnapping thing? He blames himself. He thinks he did it.”

“Yes.”

“I went to shrinks. Russian shrinks, you can imagine, American shrinks who had no idea what I was talking
about. Dad wanted me to have plastic surgery, but I said no. My sister doesn't get it because she's so guilty that it happened to me and not her. My mother has turned into an American so completely that she supports Jeb Bush, can you imagine? She likes him. She likes the Bush family.” She laughed. “I'm so sorry to unload on you Artie.”

“It's alright, honey.” She held on to my hand like a lifeline.

“He needs you, Artie.”

“Who?”

“My dad.”

I said, “Tell me what you mean, genetic.”

“I think that somewhere deep down, no matter how much I pretend to be American, no matter how good I am at it, I'm kind of Russian, kind of complicated in that way, I mean I made myself over. I was still really young so it was easy but it was conscious. I really worked on it, I made sure I didn't have a trace of an accent, not a single trace or a phrase, nothing, I wouldn't even play tennis, you know, once those little tennis girls started coming over, all those sad little girls from the Russian provinces turning up in Florida, seven, eight, nine years old, with their parents, or even alone, trying to make it, trying to be the next Anna Kournikova. But I couldn't get rid of some of the ways I thought. When I came up here to New York and I started hanging out with people who were Russian, who were closer to it than me, it was, I don't know.”

I knew. “It gets to you,” I said.

“Yes. I think I'm more devious than a real American.
I think I'm able to like betray people in a way. I don't know. I'd like a cigarette, is that OK?” She pulled her hand out of mine.

I got a pack out of my pocket and opened the kitchen door that led on to the terrace. Outside there was noise from the river, the cop cars below, the crowds. I started to shut the door.

“It's OK,” she said, got up, went out and leaned her long arms on the railing and her head on her hands. I stood next to her. She smoked awkwardly. “What about you and Lily?” she said. “Was that hard, I mean, losing her?”

“You knew about us?”

“My dad always talked about it,” she said. “He talked to me about stuff. My mom is an idiot. I mean she's a nice lady but she's heavily into her plastic surgeon and her TV reality shows and stuff and my sister is a complete geek, which is fine, she's a huge success at Harvard and Daddy will love that, but he can sort of talk to me. I'm the grown up, he says. I'm the old one. He was like, not jealous or envious or anything, not like he wanted Lily at all. He just thought you had something with her he could never have with anyone.”

“What was that?”

Val leaned her head on my shoulder. “Friendship,” she said. “That you were friends. He'd like that, but he doesn't know how.”

“I thought he had a new girlfriend, a Russian woman?”

She turned to me, a knowing smile on her mouth, and said, “He dreams about it, but it's make-believe. He
meets someone, he meets a Russian writer, very elegant, very warm and cultured, and she likes him, you can see, I saw that with this woman, and then he starts buying things. She thinks, who is this asshole who buys me stuff I would never wear? He's like a child.”

For a few minutes we smoked and she talked. I tried to look at my watch without her noticing.

“I know,” she said. “You have to go. I just have one other thing I have to tell you, had to, without Daddy around, OK?”

Don't!

Don't tell me!

“Let's go back inside,” I said, and we went into the kitchen and I shut the door.

We sat at the table again. The motor in the huge refrigerator vibrated. Val picked up her coffee cup and drained it.

“I like cold coffee,” she said. “Weird that I got together with Jack at your wedding. Didn't you know that?” She looked at me. “Yeah. Anyhow. So. Me and Jack. We met at your wedding.”

All I remembered was the electricity between them, a kind of comic book electricity, as if you could see the jagged line of sparks.

“I thought you invited him,” I said. “I thought you came with him. You looked like the two of you were already pretty much an item. I didn't know Jack well enough to invite him.”

“It was a big party,” she said. “Maybe he just showed up. Maybe someone else brought him. I don't remember.”

“You'd never met him?”

“Yeah, I'd seen him around. Clubs, that kind of stuff. I thought he was kind of old for me. He was always hitting on me. It was a game. I liked him, but I wasn't sure I wanted to do anything. He knew a lot of the Russian girls, he said he was half Russian, yeah, like which half, Jack? You couldn't tell what he made up, you know?” she said. “He was obsessed with being cool and young, which was why he moved to horrible old Red Hook, stuff like that. It doesn't matter, does it? Not anymore. So, like, yeah, so there he was and it was kind of fun in a stupid way having this famous forty-year-old guy who everyone knew was hitting on me, I don't know, maybe I was a little bit drunk, and he was very sexy. I mean, like you would do it right there with him.” She looked at me, and bit her lip and said, “Oh, God, I'm sorry, I shouldn't be saying this to you.”

“Don't worry.”

“He was in love with me, he said. We went out that night after your wedding and the next couple of nights, and my friends were impressed and I was an idiot, and all of a sudden, he says, let's get married, and I'm like Jack, I'm nineteen, and he says, you're an old soul. He was always going, you're the one. He'd look in your eyes, you know how he had those hot little coal eyes, and he could talk about everything, he'd been everywhere.” Val paused. “Daddy thought Jack was using me to get to him, get stuff on his, Daddy's, background or the Russian mob, something. It made him a little crazy. Anyway, I tried to blow Jack off, but he wouldn't go away.”

I thought back to the night in the Meat District when I had seen them together. I thought about the tender way Val put her arms around Jack when I told him Sid was dead.

I said, “You seemed pretty intense with him Saturday night.”

“I get like that, you know. I'm a kid, after all. I want something really bad at first, and then they come on too strong, and I'm out of it. For like five minutes. It didn't last. Call me superficial. I liked him. I just didn't want so much.”

“Why don't we go out and take a walk or something?”

“There's more.”

“I don't need to hear it.”

“I need to tell you.”

“What about?”

“My dad. I think he's way out on a limb,” she said. “I need you to know because I'm going home, Artie.”

“To Florida?”

“To Russia, I mean. I can't do all this stuff. I mean the Russian princess thing, the nightclubs, the restaurants, the money, the hanging out with girls who live in ten-million-dollar apartments, it was fun, and I tried, and I don't despise it, I just don't want it. I think being with Jack that week taught me that. I didn't like myself. I didn't want to be in one more club or drink one more cocktail or wear one more stupid outfit. So I'm going.” Her voice was calm.

“Where in Russia?”

“We have an apartment in Moscow. I'll go there first.
Then, I don't know exactly but I have friends who can help, you won't think this is stupid?”

“No.”

Unbuttoning the top button of her yellow shirt, Val pulled a little gold chain from between her tan breasts. A small cross hung from it. She held it out. “I think I want to work with kids. The school thing in Beslan. I don't know. Or AIDS kids. Something. Better than this. I don't want to come on all Mother Theresa, but I have to do it. I told you it was genetic. You think I'm going to come on all religious, you think I'm going to end up some kind of Russian religious nutbag?”

“I don't think so.”

She looked at her watch.

“Does Tolya know you're going?” I said.

Val got up and started for the living room and I followed her. We stood near the front door.

“Daddy will just get crazy and say she's going to work with kids, with AIDS, she'll get sick, she'll get offed by terrorists, you know, he's a dad, right?”

“Did you know that you wanted all this before Jack?”

“It's been coming.”

“And Jack?”

“He was fun, like I said.” She shrugged. “He was great for a week,” she added. “I have to get ready now. I have to get going.”

“Where to?”

“To the airport. Please don't tell Daddy, Artie. Please let me have this.”

I held out my phone. “At least call him,” I said. “At least tell him you're going.”

“He'll stop me. You know that. He'll call some creepy guy to meet me at the airport. I'll be OK. Please. Just wait for me a minute, OK? I have to change. Will you wait for me, Artie?”

Val went into her bedroom. I took the cigarettes back out of my pocket and picked off the remaining cellophane and the crackle of it seemed unnaturally loud.

A few minutes later, Val reappeared wearing black jeans, black T-shirt, sneakers and a white denim jacket. She had a bag over her shoulder and a baseball cap on her head and she was dragging a red suitcase on wheels.

“Did you know that Jack wasn't in Russia, that he never went?” I said, asking the thing I had not wanted her to tell me.

She hesitated. “Yes.”

“When did you know?”

“I knew all the time,” she said softly. “He asked me not to say that he wanted to take a couple of days off to do some writing before he left, he said he had stuff to tie up. After we left you at the restaurant Saturday night, I dropped him off at his place in Red Hook before I drove out to East Hampton. He said he wasn't going to stay at his place, just wanted to pick stuff up. He was going over to stay at a friend's apartment, some guy who was away, so he wouldn't get interrupted and stuff. So I went to Long Island and I talked to him again from out there a bunch of times. He said, so don't tell anyone I'm still in the city. I just don't want anyone to bug me.”

“But you saw him? He couldn't have been calling you from somewhere else?” I said.

“I called him on a landline so that's how I know, and he was like I miss you, blah blah, kiss kiss, let's meet tomorrow, and we made a date. We talked a lot, and then I said I had to go.”

“When?”

“Late yesterday. I think it was late.”

“You told someone. You told someone that Jack didn't go to Russia, Val?” I took her hand.

“Yeah. I did. I don't know why. Just careless I guess, or because it's genetic, this betrayal thing. I don't know why. He kept asking and asking, so I told.”

“Who kept asking you? You want to tell me who you told?”

Nervously, she picked at her short hair. “I should probably go now,” she said.

“Who was it?”

She hugged me. “I told my dad, Artie, OK? Please take care of him,” she said and went out and closed the door behind her.

I stayed, waiting for Tolya; for an hour, then two, I waited. I called him. I wandered around the huge apartment that covered the whole top floor of the building.

In his bedroom, I opened the closets and stared at the rows of custom-made suits, dozens of them, over-scale suits made out of cashmere and alpaca and fabrics I had never heard of. He liked showing me. He liked taking me shopping. Brioni, he would sigh, like it was a girl's name.