Part 8 (1/2)

”And now I have to go to Vermont. But no house-sitting.”

”Right.”

”And I'm not doing this here anymore, I repeat.”

”Right,” I also repeated. I would bluff my way through. I said, ”I'll get a hotel room when I come up.”

”And?”

”And-we can spend time there, when we're not out on the town having fun!”

”Hotels are slimy.”

”Not the clean ones!”

She turned her head to look at me, her big blue eyes and thin mouth turned down in an expression of fine sarcasm. We were lying on her bed in a state of partial undress. She was a thin girl, and pale, her jeans hung loosely on her like a boy's, and it was a source of endless amazement to me that I was so fixated on her-and yet I was, I was! We'd meet up, have a few drinks, then a few more, and then go home and wrestle. ”The rape game,” Arielle called it. ”I don't think that's funny,” I'd say, and she'd say, ”Yes you do.” I'd wrestle her out of some clothes, then myself, then she'd say ”Stop,” then we'd wrestle some more, then she'd say, ”Really, stop,” and then we'd negotiate. Right now we were in a negotiation. I had managed to get my s.h.i.+rt off but not hers. Then we'd had the fight about the hotels. She said: ”Please don't become hysterical.”

”I'm not becoming hysterical,” I said. ”What do you propose?”

”Don't you have an uncle in the city?”

”No. Not really. We're not on speaking terms.”

”You should get on speaking terms. And in the meantime get out.”

”What?”

”Out. Now. Have you put on weight? My bed's too small.”

”It's two in the morning. It's cold out.”

She was sitting up against two pillows, like a queen, miles away from me.

I said: ”I have a great parking s.p.a.ce, I have it until Tuesday.”

”That's all right, there's plenty of parking in Baltimore.”

”But it's dangerous!”

”I'm serious,” she said. ”Go.”

It was late by then, too late to ask someone if I could stay over, and anyway I didn't want to. Ferdinand lived with his girlfriend and now disapproved of anyone who didn't; Nick would start a long argument with me about the failures of the Left. I had momentarily lost my taste for New York. I walked, frozen and unhappy, to my car-so elegantly parked on 38th Street-and wondered at all the apartments that were not my apartment, and all the people living in them. Such warmth inside them! Such injustice! And there in the distance Grand Central Station looming like a cathedral. ”Back then,” someone had written of the old Penn Station, ”one entered New York like a G.o.d.” It was true now of Grand Central, and earlier in the evening I too had entered like a G.o.d (through the Holland Tunnel). Now I pulled out, defeated and still a little drunk, enough so that I didn't trust myself on scary, speedy 34th and crawled instead on side streets and marginal avenues until I reached the warmth of the tunnel again, almost empty at this hour, and went in.

Driving back through Pennsylvania on 78, nearly falling asleep, it was just too dangerous to fiddle with the CD player, the thing kept skipping and resetting, skipping and resetting, and before I pulled over at a truck stop near Harrisburg to finally change it I listened over and over to the first song of an alb.u.m called American Water. American Water. ”I asked the painter,” it went, ”why the roads are colored black. / He said, 'Man, it's because people leaving / know no highway will bring them back.'” My life, I thought then, as I briefly considered taking 496 down and reconnecting with 95 on the other side of Philadelphia, before reconsidering-”You don't know anything about 95! You don't know anything about anything!” my father had yelled at my uncle the time they'd had a blowup over the route-my life was not very rock and roll. In a rock and roll life, you forgot everything and just moved on. Whereas I, if you asked, could still list all the people I'd ever been friends with, and all the people I'd ever loved, and all the things we did, and what they'd said. What is more I had a fellows.h.i.+p at a Was.h.i.+ngton think tank to write a postmortem on the 2000 election-what had gone wrong? I was looking into it. I'm still looking into it. ”I asked the painter,” it went, ”why the roads are colored black. / He said, 'Man, it's because people leaving / know no highway will bring them back.'” My life, I thought then, as I briefly considered taking 496 down and reconnecting with 95 on the other side of Philadelphia, before reconsidering-”You don't know anything about 95! You don't know anything about anything!” my father had yelled at my uncle the time they'd had a blowup over the route-my life was not very rock and roll. In a rock and roll life, you forgot everything and just moved on. Whereas I, if you asked, could still list all the people I'd ever been friends with, and all the people I'd ever loved, and all the things we did, and what they'd said. What is more I had a fellows.h.i.+p at a Was.h.i.+ngton think tank to write a postmortem on the 2000 election-what had gone wrong? I was looking into it. I'm still looking into it.

Uncle Misha had an apartment in Was.h.i.+ngton Heights. I even happened to know that he was usually out of town on weekends. But things had been said by him, years ago, that could not be unsaid, and not just about highways.

He'd arrived in bucolic, isolated Clarksville when I was fifteen years old. My mother, whose brother he was, had recently been diagnosed with cancer, and for a long time I thought that Misha had come because he'd heard the news. Later on I realized that, as with certain hurried weddings, the dates did not add up. But how else to explain it? He had no business there. He was thirty-five, he had a degree in American literature from Moscow University, a fairly dubious degree even in Moscow, and a just plain ludicrous degree for a Russian immigrant in the States. Before emigrating he'd had an exciting, or anyway a reasonably interesting, life in Moscow. He had girlfriends, he had briefly been married: an educated nonalcoholic with most of his teeth intact, he was considered something of a prize. But he had accomplished little of actual substance, and perhaps he began to feel-I begin to feel it with him, or rather I begin to feel it too-that what he needed was a new place, a new city, he needed to see the world anew so that it could see him that way, too.

In the meantime my father was keeping up a steady campaign on behalf of the States. He was like Radio Free Europe, my father, except he wrote letters instead of producing radio broadcasts, and he wasn't directly funded by the CIA. We had a nice house by then, and two cars, in a prestigious town where there were almost no Russian immigrants, even if our part of it was not as prestigious as some others. So maybe it was just vanity on my father's part, the wish to make people see what he had done. Misha would later think so, certainly. But also it was just his belief-his beautiful belief. Halfway through life my father found himself in a place where he'd been spit on almost daily and insulted-and he left! He f.u.c.king left, and halfway through his life he went halfway across the world and found the capacity, inside himself, to believe that this new place was cardinally, was essentially and deeply different. This required courage as well as naivete; and it required strength, too.

But all beliefs have their victims, and Misha was my father's. He made some brave forays into the world upon arriving in America- he went to the libraries, the mall, he went to movies and even some bars, though he couldn't afford those, and then he stopped. Eventually he settled in, to the partial annoyance of my father, who thought he was turning down good job opportunities, in the room next to mine and at the dinner table, feeling trapped. He spent all his time feeling trapped and fooled, and he believed it was my father who had fooled him.

”You're like the Bolsheviks,” Misha said one day. It had come to him, he said, as he drove through the old Protestant section of Clarksville, past the big churches, the grand mansions set way back from the streets with lawns stretching to them like golf courses- all the places Misha knew by now he'd never be able to afford. ”You keep talking about this bright luminous future, meanwhile we're all living in s.h.i.+t and you don't care. You just keep talking about it and feeling great.”

”Are you talking about this house?” my mother said. She was going through chemo and had lost her hair and wore a little cloth on her head, to cover it up. ”You consider it s.h.i.+t?”

”It's a nice house. But you think that means the people around here like you. They hate you! Haven't you noticed? There are f.u.c.king swastikas at Pimple-Face's school!”

”Bozhe moi,” said my mother, at the vulgarity. said my mother, at the vulgarity.

”I'm sorry if I express myself too strongly.” Misha suddenly became poisonous. ”You used to be a believer in strong expression.”

”Misha, polno, polno,” my mother said. Enough.

”What do we care if some kid draws a swastika in the bathroom? ” my father thundered over them. ”GET A JOB!”

My mother had been offended by Misha, but it was the sound of my father's terrible voice that caused her to break down and weep-at the table, in her little do-rag, in her dentures, and all for nothing, as it turned out, all that medicine and all for nothing. It was she who had suffered in this place; it was she who abandoned her books to become a computer programmer, learn to drive, learn about American ma.s.s culture, and now she had a pimply jock son who was forgetting Russian . . . and attending a school where, in fact, there had been a couple of swastikas on the bathroom wall. They were innocent swastikas, at least as far as we were concerned-people were suspicious of us for being Russian, but no one knew or cared that we were also Jewish, and in any case the only ethnicity people in our part of Maryland could ever really hate was blacks-but that wasn't the point. Misha was right, is the point, and though my mother hated him for saying it, she hated my father for yelling, for she herself had thought all these things too-had thought them and stifled them, the way mothers during the war would stifle their little babies, strangle them to death if necessary, if a baby by its crying was going to reveal a hiding place and get everyone without exception killed.

Misha must have thought that our house, our life, our two cars would insulate us against the whining of a thirty-five-year-old man with no money, no prospect of earning any money, no social position, and with bad smoke-ruined teeth and skin. He had not yet moved to New York, reconstructed his life; for now, in Maryland, he was nothing, worse than nothing. And as my mother ran from the kitchen weeping, Misha sat there with a look of deep perplexity upon his face. He must have thought, I thought, that we wouldn't care.

Which is just to say that I drove and drove. My father's route added sixty miles; I don't think even he would have prescribed it at night. But it was a way of seeing the world, I suppose. At around four in the morning, as I was getting onto 83, my cell phone rang. It was Arielle.

”Where are you?” she said.

”I'm coming up on York, home of the forty-five-pound steel plate.”

”In Pennsylvania?”

”Yes. You can drive a lot faster on 78 than 95.”

”In the middle of the night?”

”Look, it's how we do things.”

”Why didn't you just call your uncle?”

”Because I didn't. And I won't. He-he didn't vote in the last election. He abstained.”

”He did?”

”Yup. He said it made no difference who was President.”

”He did?” Arielle was momentarily speechless. ”Well,” she recovered, ”we'll avenge ourselves by doing terrible things in his apartment he wouldn't approve of.”

”He's from the Soviet Union, Arielle. They were atheists. He doesn't disapprove of anything except money.”

”We'll order expensive takeout.”

”In Was.h.i.+ngton Heights?”