Roulette (12 page)

“You’re horrible. I’m not going to break up his relationship. His fiancée looks like a wonderful person. She’s a humanitarian, for goodness’ sake. And forgetting all that . . . Why am I even defending myself to you? Just because I fell for him . . .” I pause, and then I sigh.

“
Yeeeessss
. . .” My mom loves every minute of my ignominy and is encouraging my descent into blind passion.

“Well, just because I fell for him doesn’t mean he fell for me. It was probably just lots of rolling in the sack, as far as he was concerned.” And that is all I am going to say about that. My mother has never had a proper understanding of boundaries when it comes to my sexuality, or her own, for that matter. She was always asking me about my period and who I liked during high school and if he was a good kisser, despite my often-repeated opinion that it was gross—
gross!
—and she needed to cut it out. I think Vivian’s mom finally intervened and told her she was going to scar me if she didn’t back off. That put an end to it.

“Was he—”

I hold up my hand. “Don’t you dare ask me anything about his lovemaking. I swear, I will walk out of this room right this instant.”

She clenches her teeth. “Oh, fine! But you are such a spoilsport. He sounds dreamy.”

I am momentarily disgusted as I realize that Rome is probably around the same age as my mother’s latest boy toy and that if my mother ever met him, she would probably flirt with him. Hard.

“Seriously, Mom, this is getting into Freudian-wing-nut territory. Cut it out.”

“Oh, okay, okay. Sex. Off-limits.” She pretends to seal her lips and throw away the key.

I smile and I’m actually glad—for the first time in forever—that I have a crazy, loving mother. I know in that moment that whatever other goofy mayhem she might get up to, she really,
really
loves me in her wonderfully nonjudgmental way.

“So what will you do now?” she asks gently. “Are you going to move to Russia?” The way she asks makes it sound like maybe it wouldn’t be so horrible after all.

“I might. I haven’t decided yet. Everything’s been happening so fast. I want to go to France for a couple of weeks. The time zone is much better for my work in Russia—instead of waiting until late at night for their workday to start, like I do here, in Paris I’ll be only two hours earlier—and I can go to my friend Margot’s wedding and just sort of regroup for a while. Alexei will be thrilled to have me that much closer, and besides, I should get out of LA for a while.”

“Oh, that Alexei. He got his hooks into you after all, didn’t he?” The words are harsh, but she sounds almost sweet on him.

“He kind of did. It’s not all bad, you know, Saint Petersburg is—”

She swipes her hand to stop me from talking about Russia, as if the mere mention of it will put her over the edge.

“Enough about that. I have big news.” She looks excited; then her eyes cloud slightly. “Jamie and I broke up, by the way—”

“Oh, Mom. I really am sorry. I know I made fun of him forever, but I know you cared for him.”

She clenches her jaw for a few seconds, the way she does when she is changing scenes and needs to let go of whatever emotion it is that came before. Her face clears. “It’s over now. And that’s not my big news.”

“Okay. I won’t dwell on it.”

She plows ahead. “I’ve been offered a wonderful part. Filming begins next week. In Cairo.”

“Cairo?”

“I know! Isn’t it incredible?”

For a second, the child in me relives that hint of being abandoned; then I’m genuinely happy for her. “It’s wonderful, Mom. Congratulations.”

“Oh. We’ll be on location in Egypt for only a few months, but I just can’t wait. They’re finally going to make an English film based on one of Naguib Mahfouz’s books.”

“Will it be dangerous?”

“Oh, probably. Who cares? Like that ever stopped me from doing anything.” The sun is starting to set, and Simone turns to look behind her, toward the pool. “Do you want to go for a swim?”

“Sure.”

“Oh, good. Why don’t you stay for the night, and we can eat popcorn and watch movies in my bed?”

“Okay, Mom.”

“And we’ll buy tickets to Paris and spend a few days together there. Then I’ll go to Cairo and you can go to your friend’s wedding and everything will fall into place. You’ll see.”

I roll my eyes and follow her out to the pool. The odd thing is, she’s managed to live her entire life this way, hopping from one lily pad of excitement to the next. I realize I may not want to be a mousy academic married to a cardiologist, but I also know I don’t want what she has, either, living in a constant state of upheaval like this.

Despite everything, I have to hand it to her. She is in amazing shape. She slips out of her sheer whatever-it-is and dives into the pool. She does a few laps at a rapid clip while I change into my suit in the pool house.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

L
ater, we have a delicious dinner that her French chef has left on the counter and then eat microwave popcorn and watch old Cary Grant movies in her enormous bed with the pillows and all the scents and textures that remind me of my strange childhood. These wonderful times of maternal intimacy are so bittersweet, because they are always punctuated by such long separations.

When I wake up the next morning, my mom is already in a flurry of packing.

“Where’s the fire?” I ask with my throaty morning voice.

She turns to look at me. “Oh, good! You’re awake. Let’s go to Paris today! It will be so much fun. Tori was able to get us two seats in first class on the 9:35 p.m. flight. I thought you’d need the day to get everything in order.”

I sit up straighter and plump the pillows behind me. “A whole day?”

She has the good sense to laugh. “Well, she could have put us on the 3:45, but I figured that would be too hectic for you.”

“Mom, I can’t just up and fly to Paris tonight.”

“Why not? You’re such a fuddy-duddy. This is the perfect time to up and fly to Paris! You already said you wanted to go to your friend’s wedding . . .”

“But that’s not for another ten days. I was going to take some time to—”

“Oh, come on!” she interrupts excitedly. “We’ll go to your house and make sure everything is okay. You’ll get packed and everything. The whole point of having a small beach house is that it’s turnkey. Come on! Be spontaneous with me!”

I hesitate because it actually sounds like fun and I
can
mix a bit of fun into my life now if I feel like it. It’s my life! There’s no academic review board or stuffy doctor boyfriend making me worry about what kind of
impression
I’ll make. Voyanovski has offices in Paris, and I can easily have Alexei meet me there. He’ll probably be thrilled at the idea.

“You know what?”

She stops shoving a completely impractical taffeta ball gown into her huge bag and turns to face me. “What?”

“I think it sounds like fun. Let’s do it!”

“Oh, how wonderful!” She actually clasps her hands together and twirls around like a girl. “We are going to have so much fun! We’ll go shopping and dancing and—”

“Let’s just start with going to Paris on the spur of the moment and work our way up to shopping and dancing, okay?”

She comes over to the bed and hugs me when I stand up. “Okay! One spontaneous thing at a time.”

I go to the bathroom and brush my teeth. When I come back into her room, she’s sitting on the side of her bed, near her bedside table. “What are you doing? We need to hurry.”

She looks up quickly from a snapshot in her hand and then stares at me in that damnable gypsy way of hers. “Come here for a minute,
chérie
.”

When my mother
chérie
-s me, it’s usually bad. I cross the room slowly and sit beside her on the bed.

“There’s more to your father and me than either of us ever told you.”

The air stills around us.

She gets up nervously and tries to busy herself with more packing, attempting to shove some sunscreen into the side pocket of her suitcase.

I get up. “Mom. We are going to Paris, not the Riviera.” I take the sunscreen from her unsteady hand. “You don’t need sunscreen. Let’s deal with one thing at a time.” I take her shoulders in my hands and turn her to face me. “Tell me about you and Mikhail.”

She sits down on the edge of her bed again with a defeated sigh. “I never stopped loving him. I guess I hated him for making me move back to the United States, when I would have died to stay with him.”

I sit down with a thud on the bed next to her.

She continues slowly. “It was still Soviet Russia, Miki. You can’t imagine what it was like for us. We were simply mad for each other. I was willing to give up my career—what little it was at that point—for both of us to live in Russia, and he wouldn’t hear of it. But I was getting close to convincing him. I still had my French passport; I hadn’t received my American citizenship yet. I told him I wanted to be with him and that I didn’t care if we lived in some horrible Soviet shoebox. I’d almost convinced him . . .” She looks away for a couple of seconds, then continues. “He knew changes were afoot; he was probably the agent of a lot of that change, truth be told. But when I learned I was pregnant . . . it was misery.”

I put my face in my hands and shake my head.

“Oh, goodness!” she cries, reaching her arm around my hunched shoulders to pull me in close. “Not like that! We were both
so
happy. He was older and he never thought he’d have a family. He had devoted his life until then to his political work and his business ideals, building that damn company with Alexei. But when he realized there was now a new life to consider, he absolutely forbade me to return to Russia with him. He would not be swayed. He was so autocratic and . . .” I can practically feel her gritting her teeth and reliving all the anger she obviously still feels toward him beyond the grave.

Jesus. This is bittersweet news. My parents actually
loved
each other at one point? Yay.

My arrival was the wedge that drove them apart? Ugh.

I wipe away tears. “Oh, Mom.”

She is weeping quietly also. “He was too stubborn!” she says with angry vehemence. “Why didn’t he leave all those stupid Russian people to clean up their
own
messes? Well.” She clenches her jaw tighter and swipes at her tears as if they are making her cross. “No point in despising the very thing you adore about someone, eh?” She looks so young to me in that moment. So vulnerable.

I reach my arm around her waist and hug her close. “I’m so sorry, Mom.”

“Oh, honey. It all seemed to make sense at the time. He wanted to protect you from that world. It was so dangerous, and your father was right there in the thick of it, both at the KGB and with the paper company. I don’t think you can really even imagine it. After Brezhnev died, before Gorbachev, it was just a mess. And then after the wall came down and you were able to go visit him in the summers, and political tensions had eased, well, I just couldn’t forgive him, I suppose.”

“Oh, Mom.”

She stares into my eyes. “He loved you so much, Miki.”

“He loved you, too, Mom.” I get up and walk around the bed to pick up my handbag. I come back to where she’s sitting and riffle through the crowded bag to pull out the small red leather photo case from my father’s apartment in Saint Petersburg. “I found this in his bedside table. I have a feeling he was never with anyone else.”

She takes the leather and rubs her fingertips lightly across it, remembering the feel of it, before she opens it. She gasps and covers her mouth when she sees the picture of herself in his arms, laughing and free, in love.

It’s a bum deal. If I am really a love child, why wasn’t there more
love
to go around?

She hands back the photos, and I hold up my hand. “No, you keep it.”

She gives me a watery smile, then stands up and opens the drawer in her bedside table. She lifts a false drawer bottom, which I never discovered in all my years of snooping, and pulls out an identical red photo case.

“Oh,” I say. There isn’t really much else to say.

She opens it and shows me what’s inside. The one that I found in Russia has the hugging picture on the left and Simone on the right. In the one that she’s pulled from her bedside table, the left-hand photo is the same, but the right side has a picture of my father. It’s probably weird of me to think so, but he looks incredibly handsome. He is looking up from a sun lounger, probably in the South of France, and his face shows the delighted surprise of someone who is very happy to see the person taking the picture. His hand is partially covering his eyes, the shadow slanting across his face. But his smile is glorious—wide and adoring.

“Oh, Mom.”

She’s crying again. “I know. So silly of me, after all these years, to still pine for him. Isn’t it?”

“No, it isn’t. But . . . why all the foolish liaisons? Why Jamie? Why didn’t you settle down with another man after you and Dad split? Or why didn’t you reconcile with him?”

She shakes her head again to clear it. “I could never love another man the way I loved your father. I tried. And I could never forgive him.” She sounds bitter, as if it were my father’s fault she was never able to love anyone again with the same passion. In her mind, it probably
was
his fault.

I have a flash of myself blaming Rome in the same way. I am starting to feel like it
is
his fault that I fell for him so quickly and easily. He didn’t need to be
that
wonderful, after all. He shouldn’t have been so alluring if he didn’t want me to be lured in.

“So. In the absence of a good man,” she says, clearing her features again, “I settled for boys. Jamie was just the last in a string of . . . diversions.”

“Oh, dear.”

“Yes.” She smiles weakly. “I liked Jamie. Of course I liked him. But when we were in Acapulco and I learned that Mikhail had died and Jamie caught me sobbing in the bathroom . . . well, it turns out Jamie had actually fallen in love with me, and it didn’t sit well with him that I never really stopped loving your father.”

Here’s the thing: The whole illegitimacy issue never really mattered to me one way or another—I had a mother and a father, after all. I had two parents, and they each loved me in their way, and I never wanted for anything, so I knew I was far better off than many other kids out there. I forced myself to be grateful. But I grew up believing my parents hated each other and that I was the result of an ill-advised, short-lived affair; I didn’t realize until this moment how much I internalized all that strife.

They are both guilty of perpetuating that stupid story about how frivolous and foolish and deluded they were when they met in France, in the ’80s. What else was I supposed to think? When your parents tell you things about your childhood, you tend to believe them.

“I’m not going to make the same mistake,” I say.

Simone is instantly angry. She grabs back her photo case. “You would see it that way, Mikhaila. Here I am, trying to be honest with you at last, and you are as self-satisfied and arrogant as your father.”

I sit with my mouth open. “Mom.” I reach for her forearm and speak softly. “I didn’t mean it like that at all. I meant I don’t want to have the regret that you have right now because I didn’t try hard enough to be with Rome. I am agreeing with you.”

Her shoulders fall. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I’m terrible. You make me so nervous sometimes. You’re so much like him with that mechanical brain of yours; you terrify me.” She grips the photo case more tightly. “All that damned conviction.”

I know she is upset, because even after all the speech coaches and years of mastering every nuance of the English language, she still lapses and turns her
th
into a
z
—“all
zat
damned conviction”—when she is losing control of her emotions.

I laugh darkly. “I am so far from conviction, you have no idea.”

She calms and pats my leg. “All right. We both have a lot to learn about each other. For now, some of it is clearer, yes?”

I reach for her and pull her into a hug. “Yes.”

She pulls back and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear with rare maternal tenderness. “Paris, here we come.”

I smile in return and then help her finish packing.

Leaving my car in Bel Air will be safer, with my mom’s caretaker to look after it for me. He also drives us to my place in Venice, and he and my mother help me sort through everything that needs to be dealt with in my absence. In the end, just like it was at my office, it’s kind of unnerving how easy it is for me to close up my sweet house.

The gardener is happy to stop by more frequently to check on the plants and the yard; my mother’s caretaker is happy to drive over every day or two to pick up the mail and forward everything to Paris. I pack up two big bags with clothes and toiletries and all my electronics. My mom informs me that she will be throwing most of my mousy clothes into the incinerator when we arrive in Paris. I think her first glimpse of the new-and-improved, spontaneous Miki is like a maternal dam bursting for her. She is completely enamored with this idea of going on some wild Miki-makeover shopping spree when we arrive in France.