Or Just a Little Regret

In a moment of intimacy in a downtown hotel, lying on a bed with covers pushed to the floor, Vadim said to Tara, “Do you swim?” He lifted his hand from her belly as he spoke, feeling his shoulder ache slightly. Why should a man who was only thirty-seven have shoulder pain?

“A little,” she said, taking his hand and laying it back on her belly. “But I’m afraid of the water.” She liked Vadim, with his thick wild hair and his thick wild accent, and she wanted him to continue lying beside her, softly stroking her body as he murmured in Russian. Milochka he said. Whatever that meant, it sounded nice.

After making love twice, they sat nude by the huge window on the twentieth floor, with glasses of wine, looking down at the lights of Atlanta scattered across the dark sea of night. They had met the day before at a computer software conference. Tara had never been with a Russian man. Vadim had never been with a black woman. Their connection was not simply the exotic appeal, however. They also enjoyed talking and felt comfortable together, but in the end, it was a one-night thing, and the next day Vadim was on a plane back to New York. There was no regret.

Some Bullshit About Happiness

Two months later, Vadim returned to Atlanta on business. He knew fleeting pleasures cannot be recaptured, but he also knew where Tara worked. In an empty moment, he called. When Tara heard his voice, she did not intend to get together, knowing you cannot go back, but she went forward instead and agreed to see him.

They sat on the balcony of an Italian restaurant, talking about their lives, a conversation they had not pursued the first time they met. “Happy families don’t mind to add someone,” Vadim said. “But families like mine, only pretending to be happy, do not want new people. My mother’s greatest fairy tale was idea that we were close, loving family.” He stopped talking, his gaze beyond the table, across the balcony, and toward the gray snow of his little town of Pugachov in Siberia. He pulled out a cigarette, lit it, then blew the smoke hard off the balcony.

“What new people came into your family?” Tara took a sip of wine and looked at him intently.

“My brother’s wife.” He shrugged. “My wife.” Mentioning his wife made him feel uncomfortable, and he wanted to shift the subject. “Did I tell you last time you have beautiful eyes?”

“You might have mentioned something like that,” she said. “Tell me about your family.”

“Huh,” he said, then continued. “We never had serious conversations. To have serious conversation, you have to disagree sometimes.” He gave a small harsh laugh. “We never even argued, just talking about weather and what store got shoes. But here is strangest part. Only my mother really talked in our family. There was rule—a rule nobody said out loud—for no talking unless talking to her. No other conversations allowed.” He took another drag of his cigarette. “I cannot understand it myself, why we allowed this. Now I almost never talk to my brother.” Feeling again that he had talked too much about himself, Vadim said, “Have you been to other country?”

“Just New York.” Tara laid her napkin on the table. “But I would love to go to Rome. I want to see the Pope.”

“You are Catholic?”

She smiled, and Vadim wondered how a smile could be so attractive. He wanted to lean across the table and kiss her. “My father was a Baptist preacher,” she said. “He would come back from the dead and drag me into the grave if I became a Catholic. In any case, I’m not interested. I just want to see the Pope.”

Vadim started to reach for another cigarette, but decided against it. “So you are religious?”

“Me? Oh no!” Tara blinked and vaguely shook her head. “Mama still reads the Bible like it comes with oxygen.” She looked around. “There’s our waitress. Let’s try the tiramisu.”

Saving Lives With Saxophones

With jazz music, if you feel like crying from being told how useless you are, you can let the tears pour out in brass drops until they shine the room. With jazz, if you feel like breaking things because you are always wrong no matter what, you can rip the air into red shreds and fling them in blue directions. With jazz, if you feel happy and full of dancing but don’t want to look ridiculous, you can make a walrus waltz and butterflies flutter. With jazz, if you can’t breathe from the stones lying on you, you can turn those stones into helium balloons that float away.

And you never have to use words.

When Vadim was thirteen, he started learning to play a saxophone that belonged to a friend, although his father thought it was a decadent capitalist instrument. Often after school Vadim would escape to his friend’s apartment, where he would practice the saxophone, until his friend finally gave him the instrument in return for an American football jersey. All through the broken glass of his youth, Vadim made that saxophone speak with many voices, and when he became good enough, he tried to imitate the jazz musicians on tapes brought in to the Soviet Union from the west. When he went to prison for breaking into a school, his friend held the saxophone for him, and as soon as Vadim was out of captivity, he immediately went back to breathing through the brass. Occasionally, after he left Russia, he played in a friend’s band in clubs around New York.

Counting the Unreasonable World

With math, there’s always a right answer, and if you know that answer, it isn’t true that you never know what you’re talking about. With math, there’s a reasonable world bigger than the unreasonable one you live in. With math, there is no need for anyone to interpret what is good or bad and then explain to you how bad you are. With math, the behavior of numbers is predictable and they don’t do things that confuse you or hurt your feelings, so you never have to wonder how you should behave.

And you never have to use words.

When Tara was twelve, she won a math contest at school, although her astonished father said she couldn’t possibly have studied enough to be able to win. Math was the logic of the world to Tara. The Biblical rantings of her father about people who lived in a desert thousands of years ago seemed as lifeless as the Sahara itself. But when she thought about mathematical relationships, as opposed to the bizarre uncertainty of human relationships, she felt like she was looking at God, at the force that held everything together and made it continue to work. Math was jewels made out of ideas.

We Love You, Loser

The following week, a card arrived at Vadim’s workplace. This card looks like it has a Russian design, and since I only know one Russian, I bought it for you. I hope you’re doing well and that you get the card. Tara. That evening he also received a phone call from his mother. “We haven’t heard from you in a long time,” she said. “We don’t know what you’re doing, and wondered if you might have moved and not told us.”

“No, Mamochka, I haven’t moved. I’d probably tell you if I did.” As always, as he knew he would, by the time the conversation was over, he felt tense. His parents had never seen him as a bored adolescent with nothing to do in a small town, but as a smartmouth kid with a bad attitude, not as a bright teenager who needed somebody with a brain to talk to, but as a hooligan getting in trouble and going to prison for stealing. It never occurred to them that he was marrying Oksana partly because she already had an apartment and he could move away.

“Do you think about moving back to Russia?” his mother asked.

The Brandy Is Waiting

If you start on a cool morning in New York City at Battery Park, you can watch the Staten Island Ferry come in to pour out office workers rushing to the subway. If you’re in the mood for a long walk, you can stroll up Fifth Avenue past the Empire State Building, and at 42nd Street, if you turn right, you’ll pass Grand Central Station, where commuters are coming in from Westchester. Outside the station you might see a black man with dreadlocks cracking long leather whips, shouting, “Buy it here, before you get on the subway!” Walking past him without the slightest glance may be a pale white man, muscular, head shaved, dressed only in orange shorts and high brown leather boots, with a silver ring hanging prominently from each nipple. Head to the Upper East Side, then walk a few blocks through elegant streets toward Central Park and go into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and when you leave, catch a cab across Central Park, turning north to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where you can buy a gargoyle head in the gift shop to remind you that Satan is with us always. Finally, take Satan with you down to the subway, careful not to look directly into the eyes of his minions riding the train with you, and ride to 70th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, then walk up three flights to Vadim’s apartment.

“I’m exhausted,” Tara said, falling onto the couch. She was visiting Vadim in New Yorrk for the first time. Although they had exchanged emails and phone calls, they hadn’t seen one another since he had come back to Atlanta.

She slipped off her shoes and sighed with relief. “I can’t even move.”

He looked at her and smiled, happy to see her in his apartment. “We can have dinner across the street at a Thai restaurant. We don’t have to walk any more.”

“Thai? I don’t think I’ve ever had it.”

After dinner they returned to the apartment, and he poured glasses of brandy. As he sat down on the couch beside her, she said, “I’ve heard brandy needs to breathe. Let’s give it a minute to sit.” She turned to kiss him. The kiss grew longer, more passionate, until she said, “On the floor or in the bedroom?”

Memories of a Stranger

In a New York bar a month later, Vadim sat alone in a booth with a beer and a serious, sad expression. He had fallen back through a hole in time to a spring evening eleven years earlier, where he was slumped on a couch in the growing twilight listening to his wife sob in their small, cheap apartment in Pugachov. He had been drunk at the time, had come home hours later than expected. “Do you think I have the strength for this?” Oksana cried. “I don’t care if you go drinking with friends, but what am I here for?” He was woozy with vodka, and in the increasing darkness could not see the tears running down her face. “I want a divorce,” he said, and the crying grew louder. Maybe because he was drunk, or maybe from callousness, he had felt nothing listening to her cry. Now, however, sitting in a bar with a baseball game in the background, he felt it like a fist. For a moment he closed his eyes from the pain of the memory, hating himself. He took a deep breath and opened his eyes. To think of those days now was like carrying the memories of another person in his head, the memories of a stranger who he didn’t even like. He looked around the bar and thought of going home, but didn’t move, wondering if he wanted to order another beer. He didn’t want to be in his apartment alone anymore. He felt so different with Tara than he had with Oksana.

Sailing Different Boats

“Look at that sailboat,” Tara said. “With those blue sails.” She and Vadim were standing at the Battery, looking out at Charleston harbor, in South Carolina, where they had met for the weekend. “If I was rich, I’d have a sailboat like that.”

“A blue sailboat,” Vadim said. “Can you sail? I learn new things about you.”

“No,” she said, turning to look at him. “I can’t sail. I don’t have the slightest idea, but if I was rich, I’d hire somebody to sail my blue boat.”

They stood silently several minutes, smelling the cool salty breeze. He put his arm around her waist, and she reached her own arm around him as well.

A moment later, he took his arm down and turned to face her. “I have to tell you something which is not easy for me. Maybe you know already. That I love you. So I think I should marry you.”

When Tara heard “marry you” her breath rushed to get away from her, and inside a box locked deep in her unconscious, her father sneered. No she thought, echoing her father. She looked at Vadim. “I enjoy being with you…”

He stared at her for several seconds. “Enjoy?” he said.

She turned back to the water, her mouth dry. “I—” She swallowed and turned to him again. “I didn’t expect that. I, uh…I thought we just enjoyed being together.”

“Tara?”
“I don’t know if I’m ready to be so serious.” She almost whispered. “Married.”

The Guards Take Him Away

He turns frequently toward the still phone. She doesn’t call. The air fills with blue, and a darkness grows inside Vadim, calling to the darkness out in the city. Many blocks away, he can hear the distant wails of monsters, prowling the city, heads thrown back, yellow teeth bared, howling. Each day the monsters come closer, the howls grow louder. During the day, he can see their furry shapes, only a block away. During the night, they are gathering outside his apartment building, running in the street. Finally their claws begin to click up the steps to his building. He wants them to come, knows he is calling them, but he is also afraid. To deal with the fear, he lifts his saxophone shining from the case, runs his fingers over the worn keys that feel like his own body when he touches them, then opens the window to the cold winter air, and he begins to pour music down the side of his building into the street below. Passersby stop and look up. As Vadim plays, he remembers being in prison back in Russia. Sometimes a prisoner would go crazy, begin screaming and wouldn’t stop. Then the guards would take him away. All of the prisoners knew that they have places for people who scream.

Dark Meditation

Tara walked across the room, feeling anger and despair and sadness, various shades of black poured onto the same canvas. Seeing Vadim in Charleston had been so great until… Why did he drop that bomb without any hint? Just suddenly I want to marry you, rushing into that like she wasn’t even involved. She sat down on the couch, anger crumbling to expose the bleak bones beneath. Evening came on as she sat with eyes closed, wishing they could go back to how it had been. Her cat came and lay on the couch beside her. “Why?” Tara said softly to the cat. Through the twilight out the window city lights were appearing.

She should feed the cat, but continued to sit in dark meditation. She remembered the second time with Vadim, when things had felt so light at the Italian restaurant. The cat made a sound, and Tara glanced down, sighed, and stood. Walking into the kitchen, she continued thinking about the restaurant with Vadim, saw him across from her as they had talked about families. She picked up a can of cat food, looking for the opener, as she recalled him shaking his head, saying To have a serious conversation, you have to disagree sometimes. She stood motionless a few seconds, the can in her hand, then set it back on the counter, took a deep breath, and looked around for her phone.

– David Hutto