A Replacement Life (22 page)

Slava looked up at the trunk of a nearby streetlight: There it was, in laminate. Following impulse—he wanted to do something heroic for her—he sprinted toward the light and wedged the map out of the holder.

“Slava!” she yelled. “Put it back.” He knew the expression—an awkward surprise—even at a distance, and wedged the map back. They walked in silence the rest of the way. Finally, Arianna paused at the edge of a stand of oaks, the closest light three hundred yards behind them. “This is good as it’s going to get,” she said. “I haven’t done this in a while.”

“Could I be allowed in on the plan now?” he said.

She faced him. “Another thing about the park—the homeless have the best view in New York.” She pointed at Central Park West, whose peaks glowed dimly beyond the perimeter. “And us,” she added.

They walked through the oaks into a clearing, concealed from a bike path by a series of boulders. The grass sloped gently. Slava looked around uneasily.

“No, up,” she said.

He followed her eyes. It took him a moment to understand what she wanted him to see, but there they were, as nowhere else in the city: stars. Not many, and the ones you could make out were feeble, occasionally erased by a passing wisp of cloud, but then they emerged once more,
charming in their earnest junior performance, like children playing at adulthood. Arianna was beaming—they were her children.

“You come here by yourself at night?” Slava said, incredulous.

“When I was young and stupid enough to walk in Central Park alone at night,” she said. “I haven’t done this in years. Come on the grass with me.”

Slava looked around. They hadn’t seen a soul since entering the park. His eyes were adjusting, the darkness turning from black to blue. Nervously, he settled next to her. The grass was careful, the mowers of the Parks Department reaching even this far.

“When I was little,” she said, “my father would take me in the backyard, we would lie down just like this, and he would make me find shapes in the clouds. A dinosaur, a briefcase, an apology. Or we would go to the beach and I would tell stories about the waves. The sea is a tongue spitting out seeds. The sea is a head rushing with thoughts. The first time I wrote a poem, it was from one of those days.”

“What does an apology look like?”

“Gnarled over. Hunched.”

“You miss him,” he said.

“He’s different now. He would be embarrassed to go look at waves with his daughter.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. They don’t tell you why they change.”

They listened to the city hum somewhere out there, past the line of light that waited beyond the edge of the park. Waited like a bad thought, Slava thought, remembering Oleg, and smiled. In his sci-fi story, Oleg had unconsciously melded the Odysseus story and the failed 1991 anti-Gorbachev putsch, in which the leader of the unfree world learned, upon reaching his vacation site in the Crimea, that power had been seized in the capital. By the time Oleg’s hero, sleekly but rustically named John Strong in concert with the technological but agrarian future, had reached his mind destination of Usuria (a bizarre blend of “usury” and Illyria—Slava was getting an analyst’s glimpse into the writerly mind), the codes had been rewritten wherever they were written, temporarily suspending all mind travel and stranding in-transit “expeditioners” like John Strong. Slava had sent Oleg edits and, as promised, one of the false letters. Oleg sent back a revision, a second story about the manager of a Japanese café franchise on the moon, and an unshy suggestion on how to improve the Holocaust letter, amusing Slava. Fifteen miles south of Central Park, there labored newfound kin to Slava, a secret operative.

“They say that if you can make out the Seventh Sister, the tiniest one,” she said, “you have twenty-twenty vision. Up there.” Arianna extended a finger, but his vision was not twenty-twenty. “After Atlas had to carry the world, Zeus turned his seven daughters into stars so they could keep him company.”

Slava propped himself on an elbow, as if to get a better look, but really he was studying her. In sneakers, gray tights, and a hoodie, somehow cold even in this heat, she was more beautiful
than a woman dressed up. Despite the confusing tenseness between them, this fact presented itself without reservations. He wished to embrace her, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. If he kept his distance, at least he was being true to the fact of his betrayal, not pretending to give while he withheld so much.

He flopped back onto the grass and glared at the stars—where else to look? They would disappear as soon as he and Arianna reentered the light, though they would remain up there, something you had to believe without evidence.

“Saltshaker,” he said.

“Hm?” She looked over at him.

“The stars, like somebody shook out a saltshaker.” He looked back. “Your turn.”

She laughed through her nose, shy and grateful. She took his arm, and he let it be held. “A necklace,” she said. “A necklace of stars.”

“White cherries.”

“Rice grains.”

“Rice grains in ink.”

“Tonight we are pleased to offer rice grains in squid ink.”

“Only the night sky has freckles.”

“The biopsy showed a profusion of light.”

“A celestial rash—heavenly spores.”

“Ew.”

“A placenta.”

“Who’s the father?”

“Only Jerry Springer can say.”

“And the children? The Seven Sisters?”

“No, the children are us.”

They kissed.

T
he Rudinskys’ two-story brick slab squatted next to a disheveled pillbox belonging to Orthodox Jews. Half a dozen side-locked children in matching gabardine outfits spun around the singed grass on their side of the lawn. The Rudinskys’ half was treacherous with lawn product. To the shrieking children, the young man wending his way through their game was as invisible as a spirit.

Slava’s knock was answered with thundering feet, and then Vera swung open the door. He wore a miserable expression in deference to the awkwardness of their last encounter, but she issued a broad, bland smile. She wore a pair of velour shorts stamped with Hello Kitty characters. In the distance, past an ornate Persian-style runner and a lacquered flamingo sprouting a spume of pink tendrils, a large television jumped with Russian pop stars.

“Ver-ka!” boomed from upstairs. “Who is it?”

“Sla-va!” she shouted back.

Slava squeezed out a smile and stepped inside, Vera’s bare soles slapping the tile, tiny prints from the television remote on her thigh. Her legs had yet to slough off their adolescent plumpness. He felt a momentary sting—she hadn’t bothered to dress up. They stood in clumsy silence at the foot of the stairs. In the living room, chartreuse and puce vases of Bohemian crystal trembled in tune to the permed crooners thrusting on television. Finally, the upstairs voice made its heavy way down: Aunt Lyuba. Slava felt a second sting at being handed off to the adult. After all, it was Vera who had called and asked him to come, not that he hadn’t thought about picking up the phone himself many times.

“Slava!” Aunt Lyuba reached the first-floor landing and embraced Slava with soft, bunching arms. He answered, his arms reaching around the puckered bun of her. They stood grasping each other as if he’d just come home from the war. From Aunt Lyuba’s grip, Slava watched Vera steal off to the living room.

“Did you see my God-fearers next door?” Lyuba said, releasing him. “One year and three months since we bought this house, do you think that woman—Malka, Schmalka—has come by to say ‘Hello, welcome to the neighborhood’? I made the mistake of going over there once—I needed flour! Her face turned the color of snow. She just ferries that army of believers day and night, till Moshe comes home. Then you don’t see her. I’ve been asking Garik to please go over there; those children trample my lawn every day. But I have to do everything myself.”

Aunt Lyuba took Slava by the hand and strode into the kitchen. “You saw our Vera?” she said. “Darling?” she called out brutally into the living room. Vera peeked out. “
There
she is.” Lyuba’s voice became tender again. “Not the girl you remember, eh?” Vera blushed.

Lyuba instructed Slava to sit down at the rose-colored banquette around the kitchen table and went shoulder-deep into the refrigerator, her rump struck outward. Vacuum-sealed ham emerged, smoked chicken thighs, a bowl of beet-colored vegetable vinaigrette. “Slava, you are half a meter taller than I saw you last,” she said from inside. “Tell me how things are. I haven’t seen you in years.”

“Nothing, Aunt Lyuba,” he said. “I work at a magazine—”

“Well, we’re making do,” she interrupted him. “Garik’s driving the cab. He wanted to start a limousine company”—she quit shuffling in the fridge to calibrate how much Slava knew about the argument, though only her rear end could judge—“but it didn’t work out. He’s a geologist by training, you know. Used to these large open spaces, rocks bigger than a house. Now he’s twelve hours a day in that box of a taxi. You should see his eyes when he comes home.” She closed the fridge and turned around. “You know what my husband the geologist does now? He sings for his fares. For extra tips. Russian war songs. He was chief geologist, State Institute of Earth Materials, Minsk.” She pointed to the cramped square of the backyard, where stones with pretty striations loomed in various sizes like bird droppings. “One day he got a ticket because he was lugging home that chunk of obsidian. God knows where he got it. Isn’t that a beautiful name, obsidian? It’s like an Armenian name. Vera!”

Vera reappeared in the doorway. “Yes, sweet Mother.”

“You have to get dressed,” Lyuba said. Then, to Slava: “Go up with her, Slavchik.”

“Up with her where?” he said.

“Well, don’t go
in
the room, Slava, you seducer,” Aunt Lyuba laughed, baring her teeth in satisfaction. “Stand outside the door and talk to her while she’s changing. You young people have a lot of catching up to do.”

“Leopard-print or the jean skirt with the blouse with the ruffles?” Vera said from the doorway.

“Let Slava decide,” Lyuba said.

He followed Vera up the stairs, the skin of her thighs near his nose. “It’s nice to see you again,” he said, to say something.

“You, too,” she said absentmindedly.

“I should let you get dressed,” he said. “We’ll talk downstairs.”

“No, it’s okay,” she insisted. “Talk to me.” She walked into a room decorated with a girl’s hearts and pinks. She jumped onto the bed, one leg folded under the other, and shelved her chin on her knee. In front of her was a binder filled with costume-party outfits: sailors, maids, prisoners. She motioned him inside. “Talk to me for two minutes, and then I’ll get dressed.”

He asked about the binder.

“Work.” She swatted the air. “Big event on Monday. So, leopard-print or jean skirt?” She leaped off the bed and rifled through a hundred hangers. A mound of shoes collapsed around her ankles. Kitten heels, stilettos, flats, pumps, platforms, sandals, boots, knee-high and ankle.

“But you don’t live with them,” he croaked, thinking of the place where Vova the Cruiserweight had dropped her off.

“What? Speak up.” The mass of clothes was like an enchanted wood: It killed sound.

“You live here?” he yelled.

“No, I got that place,” she said.

“Why did you call?” Slava shouted. The closet was as large as the rest of the room.

Her round face peeked out of the wardrobe. “What do you mean? We needed your help.” Slava saw tiny Vera’s eyebrows sitting together as she peered at Slava tracing out prices for the paper scallions and plums of their childhood supermarket. How odd that her parents recommended him—in his memory, she was the serious one. His hands were always clammy when she gave him an assignment. But she could be playful as well. One day on their way to the market, she found an opera record, a plump, heavily rouged sufferer weeping on the cover. Vera played it over and over, vocalizing soundlessly into his ear as the singers roared on their thirdhand stereo. Himself, he wasn’t enchanted by the music, but he loved watching her.

After coercing an opinion from Slava, Vera settled on the leopard-print dress. She squeezed into it while he stood outside her door. Her heels sank into the furry carpet as she made her way downstairs ahead of Slava, his eyes fixed on the geometrically essential sphere of her ass. Like a gentleman, he had insisted that she take the stairs first.

As they made their way down, two male voices entered the house. Garik, Lyuba’s husband, clutched a singing cabdriver’s materials: a two-liter Pepsi bottle half filled with water, a seat cushion, and several slovenly sections of
Novoye Russkoe Slovo
. With his free hand, he pushed Lazar, Vera’s grandfather. The older man seemed not to recognize Slava even though they had seen each other at Grandmother’s funeral dinner only weeks before, but Uncle Garik brightened.

“Slava, you’re an oak! Look at him.” He came close and hugged. “What’s more historic, the Germans giving us money or Slava Gelman showing up in this house? This is an occasion for a glass. Come, let’s eat. Lyuba, why isn’t the table set? Papa, let’s eat. Papa, it’s Slava!”

While everyone was trooping to the table, Slava’s cell phone rang. He excused himself into
the hallway.

“I called the big one, but no one picked up,” Grandfather said.

“What big one?” Slava said.

“The earth line. You said I can try you on the little one if no one answers the big one. What are you, sleeping?”

“I’m not at home,” Slava said.

“Did I ever tell you about Misha Grandé?”

“Who? No.”

“There was a guy in my barbershop back home—Misha Grandé. They’d given him a real shoe box of an apartment, and he had to live there with his wife and his mother. He had begged them for something bigger, he even tried to bribe a guy. Of course, he found the one guy in Minsk who wouldn’t take bribes. Then the shah of Iran comes for a visit.”

“Is this a joke?” Slava said.

“No, it’s a real story, listen to me. The shah of Iran comes to Minsk. And Misha knows the motorcade has to pass by his house, because it’s the one road in from the airport. So in the middle of the night, Misha drags his bed into the street. And when the shah rides by in the morning, they all see Misha Grandé snoozing. Naturally, the shah wants to know why there’s a man sleeping outside.”