The Best American Short Stories® 2011 (17 page)

This morning he'd simply said, "How many?"

Still looking at the dog (maybe if he set himself on fire...), she'd said, "How many what?"

"Days."

Then she did look, as if that fact, the number, and Sokolov's bringing it up, was tactless indeed, and made her unwillingly see him: gruff, bothered, indifferent. (Balding, gaunt, nearing toothlessness.) He was past caring what she thought. He'd been given numbers once, a lot of them, none good. He'd wanted to know, and now he assumed Lermontov wanted it also.

"I don't know exactly," the doctor said. "Let's say two."

"Two," Sokolov answered, barely noticing she ignored the witticism. He paid at the desk, stopped by the door to give the dog a couple of good whomping pats to the side, the way he liked it, then made the ten-block walk to their corner, where they, Sokolov looking one direction, the dog another, waited for what was next.

Time was, Sokolov wanted everything. Now he wanted less. Or, more precisely, this is what Sokolov wanted: to want less. Coming to this country with dreams not all that different from or more realistic than the conquistadors' visions of El Dorado, he'd thought that the combination of his past (Leningrad, gray), his education (doctoral thesis: "Response to the Pastoral in Theodore Dreiser," laughingly wrongheaded, unpublished), his genealogy (rabbis, radicals, a thunderous drunk or two), and his, by general report, Slavic handsomeness and insouciant Old World charm ensured he would be welcomed, transformed from the young man with an old man's maladies (melancholy, dyspepsia), free to wander in this big fat orchard America and pluck its ripest fruit.

Two unfinished novels and an incinerated memoir later, a dozen-odd ignored applications to schools out of the city, floored by the hoof of a Cossack horse-kick by cancer, left alive but with tingling blue-edged fingers, toes, riotous bowels, hair not only grayed and thinning but matted like a horsehair blanket, he was an old man with an old man's maladies. And alone. Kelly, after three years, was gone, and Sokolov still couldn't believe how quickly, how briskly, how efficiently this woman he'd lived with had disappeared from his life, leaving only her declining dog as remembrance.

How long would Lermontov take? As pathetic as his silent clenching was, he'd dutifully stand there and try for an hour if Sokolov didn't, with a flick of the leash, release him. Were it warmer, or Lermontov younger, maybe he'd leave him tied to the meter outside the coffee shop, continue his lacerating study of the waitress there, Amity. Chancing another bleak glance, he saw Lermontov motionless, maybe done, but then beginning again the stiffening hopeless crouch, the shakes working from the legs up that indicated he was still—who could blame him?—trying.

How had they met (he, Kelly, the dog)? It was, for once, something actually out of a book. Sokolov on his midafternoon stroll, after what was probably a fruitless morning laboring over an essay, banging his head against the lunacy of American academic prose (thicket of colons, slashed made-up new words, snide allusive jargon of a boys' club), lunch a quick sandwich and black, scalding coffee, he had come out to give his frustrations some air. There on a bench, Kelly reading a thick hardback, long-limbed in red pants, brown sweater, lissome even in silhouette, massed jet-black hair untidily stirruped over a shoulder; Lermontov, younger then, regally bored, looking straight ahead as if nothing he'd seen warranted a turn of the eye, immediately gaining Sokolov's admiration. Bored as the dog, Sokolov figured, What else do I have going today?, and after sitting on the bench's far edge, patting the dog once, twice, ventured, "You know, there's a famous Russian story about two people meeting over a dog."

Kelly took a moment, as if she needed first to finish a sentence in her book, then turned on Sokolov two astonishing brown eyes. "Yes," Kelly said. "But the dog was white, and small. And it didn't turn out too well for the lovers."

He'd not used the term, intentionally. "Didn't it?" Sokolov said, assuming his best devil-may-care, roguish grin.

And that was that. Kelly was finishing a doctoral course at the university, comp lit and women's studies. She was what Sokolov pretended to be but disagreeably knew he really wasn't—anarchic and determined and free of constraint. When they made love she entered into it with such vigorous abandon he wondered if she remembered he was there; the same night she cooked an enormous lamb stew he could still summon the taste of. She had drunk at least as much of three bottles of wine as Sokolov, and by the time she perused his heaped bookshelves and piles of untidy notes with a scholar's proprietary eye, wearing just panties and one of his button-downs, then settling into the easy chair (Sokolov's favorite) with a new translation of Turgenev he'd been meaning to get to, Sokolov was, as they liked to say here, head over heels. When he saw and commented on her studio apartment (shabby, unlit), it seemed only natural for her to pack up and move in with him. It was two months into their relationship, Kelly was already calling him Gurov (he superstitiously desisting from calling her Anna), Sokolov had found a true friend in Lermontov, another refugee cast below his station in life, also not a complainer, and they had lugged her boxes and plants and fancy Scandinavian mattress up in the cramped service elevator. Kelly bought new shower curtains and lined his dusty shelves with paper, a three-foot ficus that immediately began the business of dying in the thin airshaft light, and they started: three years of life, desultory happiness maybe, a restiveness almost welcome for the torrential manner in which Kelly would respond to it. Conferences (hers: San Francisco, Montreal; his: Camden, Baltimore), a wild trip through the Adirondacks (this was early) drinking chilled vodka from the bottle and listening to Chaliapin on Sokolov's old tapes, eight days in Key West unconvincingly joining the resident vacationers who gathered at the pier each night to pay homage to the sunset, drinking too much at Hemingway's bar, talking to everyone (this was later) but each other, waking with pounding headaches and the brittle realization they were sullen, disconsolate, exhausted.

So? Tolstoy had hated no one as much as his wife and they stayed together. Chekhov, based on geographical evidence, enjoyed his actress wife more through the mail than in the house. Who, in his right mind, expected everything?

Sokolov, apparently.

Then the illness, life slamming its lid on him, and Kelly, who had perhaps considered many experiences would come to her at twenty-eight, but caring for a terrified middle-aged Russian who clung to her harder the more his terror rose, was certainly not one of them. Yes, Sokolov was no model patient. Yes, he tolerated the sunny prattle of the nurses with ill-concealed impatience. Yes, he raged, yes, cursed and wept, yes when the drugs wrecked his stomach and the radiation stripped his mouth and tongue bare he allowed himself great waves of pity and remorse and yes yes yes he behaved nothing like what he would have written for himself (if he still wrote): not the moody doomed poetry of Pushkin but the frantic unmanned panic of the clerk in Gogol's story, which Sokolov had always dismissed as sentimental, a febrile hallucination until one day he found himself living it.

Kelly had stayed. He would not forget. Stayed through the treatments and the endless doctors' visits, the biopsies and tests, the nights on morphine when Sokolov dreamed a landscape of tiny men burrowing with axes in his brain, the fevers and chills, when, had he the strength, he would have wished to die. Kelly had stayed.

So then? When for the fourth six-month interval his biopsies were clear, when she had asked every possible responsible question of the doctors and nurses and pharmacists and social workers, after an uncharacteristically quiet (relaxed, Sokolov, idiot, had thought) dinner, she announced she had accepted a position at a women's college in Virginia, and would be leaving, now Sokolov was all right.

All right?

Floored, flummoxed (he had again drunk too much wine and his ruined innards were letting him know what they thought about it), Sokolov searched for his old poise like a man fumbling through a closet in the dark. What of the Chekhov story? Didn't she remember? Gurov, Anna, the hard part? What if they had survived that, the hard part? What if now would be easy?

But Kelly was a student of literature, a better one, Sokolov knew, than he, and she looked at him in pain and weary apology but unshaken in the knowledge of what he knew as well—Chekhov hadn't written this story—and when he had returned from answering his intestines' calamitous summons, she had a suitcase out and the ficus (grandson to the first, also deceased) was poking spindly branches at Sokolov from the trash bin where Kelly had tossed it.

A shift in the breeze scooped even colder air from the river as a rich man in a camelhair coat talked into a phone and followed two galumphing bassets across 108 th. They paused by Lermontov, who, after a halfhearted sniff, ignored them, and the man, who kept telling somebody on the phone, "That's not what I said. I never said anything like that," was hauled on his leashes past Sokolov up the drive. The crows, now as if struggling to stay awake, flapped a wing or shifted position in the branches. Lermontov and his owner regarded each other a wordless moment, then Sokolov, not bothering to examine his motives, turned himself and the dog toward Broadway and the odd pleasurable torment of contemplation and regret that awaited him daily at the coffee shop.

Amity was her name (it would have to be), she'd been there six weeks (four since Kelly had traveled south), midtwenties, briskly attractive, blond, toned (she rode a bike to work, even in this weather), with lit blue eyes that stopped Sokolov in his tracks every time. What would it be to have those eyes look at you?

A forensic sociologist, self-appointed, Sokolov (failed writer) had made a study of the issue. What alchemical burst in the cortex, what detonation of the synapses, what pheremonal heaving in every nerve and muscle, was set off by beauty? Made the male animal tense with opportunity, recognition before awareness, led just by instinct's unwavering dowser? What symmetry of feature or cadence of glance and response, what shimmer of illuminata in a passing eye, would become suddenly Beatrice, Helen, your Tatyana or Anna or Dolores Haze? What, in your hollow, dried-up receding, made you feel, suddenly, alive?

A turning point in his reckonings had come when he first saw the girl. She was on break, at the counter on the rotating stools, reading a paper. Sokolov was paying his bill—coffee, soup, a hard roll—when he saw her and something wheeling in him froze. Amity (he'd learn her name the next day), the loose disregarded hair, the perfect chin and shoulder, then the blue eyes suggesting behind them an empyrean, spring, eternity, joy. He stood there like a gawker at a country fair and she eventually looked up, took him in in a second, and returned to page six. Nothing had cut him so deeply in years: Sokolov, Old World conqueror, who had held the gaze of every woman in his novels class, who had wooed dozens just by a line from Herzen or a pose struck thoughtfully looking out a window, who had slept with half the humanities faculty at Lehman, knew all at once age, irrelevance, invisibility. And standing there with a five-dollar bill in his hand, for the first time since the terrifying clap of mortality when the doctor pronounced the diagnosis, felt the brush of the dark angel's wing on his neck.

And since, he had returned daily to verify the sensation, rage, and concede and quietly wonder at the many ways we pass into insubstantiality. An old fool in love.

Lermontov, who in his nimble youth would bound at traffic, particularly cabs, as if their presence in his street were outrageous, now stood on the west side of the avenue, looking back uncertainly at Sokolov. Just a quick cup of coffee, Sokolov assured him, then for you a big bowl of soup. North on the avenue the light was dimmer, a gray haze suggesting more snow. Not quite dragging the dog, Sokolov made it across the street, bent to tie the aggrieved animal to the parking meter in front of Tom's, assured him with a pat and a word or two, turned to go inside.

And there she was, Amity, talking with another waitress through the smeared half-steamed window, at the counter, maybe five feet from where Sokolov and his dog stood watching. It was like watching a scene from a movie, Lubitsch, maybe. She was crying, or had been, and the other waitress, a broad-backed matron who must have been here when La Guardia came looking for free pie, had her arm on Amity, gently rubbing the muscled back of her black leotard. And then it happened. Sokolov, who for weeks had been wanting nothing more than a look of interest, of open feeling, of vulnerability from this young woman, got it. Through the window she locked eyes with him, and the look she gave was of such fresh youthful misery that it was Sokolov, voyeur emeritus, who turned away.

As the movie shifted scenes, his visions, one by one, drifted toward him and disappeared: Amity turning her head when he finally found the right thing to say, about to laugh; Amity on his couch, cradling a big glass of wine; Amity in his bed, flushed, exhausted, satisfied, Borodin on the stereo, or, if she was another Kelly, Shostakovich. Amity. Such an odd enclosed crystalline word. He knew nothing about her.

It was much easier getting the dog back across Broadway. Maybe he had heard Sokolov's telepathic offer of soup. Maybe he just wanted to get out of the cold. Passing the bank and the falafel stand and the cut-rate sundries shop, Sokolov felt himself relent, slipped into a quiet sadness of relief and withdrawal, of repudiation. He remembered the moment in the Chekhov where Gurov, having gotten what he wanted from Anna, pauses to eat a watermelon on the table. "There followed at least a half-hour of silence," the story read.

Sokolov's teachers had seen this as further proof of Gurov's heartlessness: done with his conquest, why not a fortifying snack? But this reading never sat quite right with Sokolov, who was sounder in his doubts than in his disorganized assertions regarding them. Was it possible Gurov, knowing only the buoyant pulse of seduction, had here first actually seen the woman whose life he was about to change? And his own, internally shifting from snatched, temporary, disposable affection to something else—deeper, permanent, at so much greater cost?