Moonlight in Odessa (9 page)

‘You have beautiful teeth,’ he said. ‘You should smile more often, so I get my money’s worth.’

I expected to see an ugly expression on his face, like he’d worn so often in the days after the incident, but he looked at me in an avuncular way. This pleased me. I didn’t want to be his enemy. He’d given me a job. Thanks to him, I could correspond with Will and Jane and save to buy a flat in the city center. Though there were still tense moments, our wary circling had become an awkward dance as we worked together to run the office. He saw himself as a kindly boss, who complimented my work and let me go home early on Fridays. He hadn’t spent a year pursuing me. He’d never been jealous of men who looked at me or – worse – talked to me. He’d never attacked me. He didn’t care that I was a procuress of flesh. He was not the first man to rewrite history. I liked this version much better and decided to believe it.

The chess game seemed to be over. A stalemate.

A relief is what it was.

He spent the morning taking down the photos of him and me at the bazaar, in front of the opera house, at the port. He whisked the pictures out of the frames and slid in prints of him with Olga. The poses remained the same, only his paws roamed her body instead of mine. He stood in front of my desk, staring at the photos of us in his hand, unsure what to do with them. Perhaps he considered tossing them into the bin. Suddenly, he extended the handful of memories and asked, ‘Do you want them?’

Had he finally forgiven me for turning him into the office joke, something that wasn’t my fault? It was unlucky to throw photos away, so I accepted them. When he left for lunch, I glanced at the photos and wanted to make a gesture towards peace. ‘Wait!’ I called after him. He turned around. ‘Wait.’ I wasn’t sure what to say. I stood. ‘Um, would you like to have coffee?’

He glanced at his watch. ‘Olga’s waiting. Later?’

‘Later,’ I echoed.

He left, and I felt that we could go on, not as friends, but as colleagues with peace between us. I was relieved that five months after the incident, the awkward moments were slowly disappearing. If only I could say the same about my relationship with Olga. Was she still angry with me? Did she really want my job?

I opened my briefcase and pulled out a salad that Boba had made for me, packed in a Tupperware container from Harmon. As I ate, alone at my desk as usual, I checked my inbox and found a letter from Will: ‘My darling girl, leaves swirl, trees dance, love’s delight, a moonlit night. When I think of you, I think of Pushkin and poetry. I think of
War and Peace
– only with a happy ending. I am so lonely lonely lonely but when I think of you, I am healed.’

Will was alone and lonely. I, too, felt lonely. Jane was in America, Olga was no longer speaking to me, and Florina had emigrated to Germany. My other friends were married and lived in another world as well. Of course, I had my Boba, but there are some feelings a girl can’t share with her grandmother. Sometimes I really missed having a mother.

I wondered what Mama would say about my Internet beau. Or any of the other boys I’d dated. I was not completely without experience. I’d had two boyfriends – both handsome snouts who felt that since they bought me dinner and took me to the opera I owed them sex. I dated them because everyone expects you to have a boyfriend and to marry by the time you’re twenty, twenty-two at the latest. A woman’s shelf life is extremely short in Ukraine. How many times had I been told that a ripe fruit like me is only hours away from rotting? If you don’t have a
cavalier
people think there is something wrong with you. Only my Boba told me that I shouldn’t marry the first man I slept with, that sex wasn’t love. But she also said that we didn’t need a man. She said looking for love was like looking for wind in a field. She never talked about her own husband. I didn’t even know if he deserted us or if he was dead. She never had kind words for my father, who’d disappeared long ago. Once, I heard her tell a friend that all my papa knew how to do was get women pregnant and lose money gambling. I didn’t even know what he looked like. Sometimes, I wished that I had a photo of him.

Although he wasn’t in the picture, I bore his first name and would for life. In Russian, adults use patronymics, a name derived from the father’s. Women add the suffix –ovna to their father’s name. Valentina’s father’s name was Boris, this was why we called her Valentina Borisovna. It was a relief to work in an office where we used only first and last names – I’m Daria or Miss Kirilenko – like they do in the West. Another reason I was grateful to Mr. Harmon: unknowingly, he saved me from this daily reminder of my father’s perfidy.

What would Jane think about Will? About meeting a man on the Internet? When I met her, she was twenty-three and had no interest in getting married. I was fascinated by this
Americanka
who was nearly a spinster and didn’t even care. When I asked her about it, she laughed and said no one in America gets married before they’re thirty. Boba was right – life was different elsewhere. And I wanted to go elsewhere, just to see. While with Jane, I’d stopped worrying about getting married, or not getting married, even though all my girlfriends were tying the knot. Of course, it was hard to not worry about them, when Boba told me that they had tied nothing but a hangman’s noose.

In the meantime, Soviet Unions earned less and less. We checked the mailbox several times a day, waiting, hoping for correspondence that didn’t come. No men, no money. If the situation didn’t change soon, I would be let go.

‘Those damned Americans changed the law,’ Valentina Borisovna lamented. ‘Now men must actually meet their brides before importing them. No more deliveries. They have to come here to pick up the merchandise, or at least to order it.’ In a flash of self-pity, she looked up at the ceiling, her bosoms heaving in her dove-gray knock-off jacket, and cried, ‘Why? Why are they doing this to me?’ as if the Americans had enacted new regulations to slow her profits.

To take her mind off this cruel blow from the American government, she took the train to Moscow to visit one of her former sisters-in-law for a week. She came back full of good food, good vodka, and with a good scheme. When she walked through the office door, the first words out of her mouth were English. ‘Soooo shall. Soooo shall. Soooo shall,’ she said.

‘So what shall we do?’ I replied in kind, surprised she was speaking English.

‘Darling!’ she said, back in Russian. ‘The future is in Moscow. But we can have it here, too. Soooo shall. I haven’t the slightest idea what it means. But it’s our salvation.’

She poured us both a
kognac
and described what she had seen, speaking so quickly the words bounced off my forehead. Men. Lots. Foreign. Rich. Women. Ours. Sexy. Young. Find mates. Expensive for men. Free for women. Music. Money. Alcohol. Sooo shall.

It all became clear. Never one to let the law get in her way, Valentina Borisovna had quickly found a new, more lucrative kind of traffic. We began organizing ‘socials’ which were advertised as a way for American men to meet one thousand beautiful Odessans in just five days. I looked up the word in my pocket dictionary and found, ‘having to do with the activities of society, specifically the more exclusive or fashionable of these.’ When I told Jane about my new job, she explained a social is what people used to call dances in the 1950s, when people used to dance with a partner and good grooming habits were in style. And there was nothing exclusive about them. She then muttered that socials were ‘the ultimate meat market.’ (Perhaps she meant ‘meet market.’) Her definition only made me more curious. Two days later, I received a dictionary that she sent by Federal Express and learned that a social was just a party with a pretty name.

Late Saturday afternoon, I helped Valentina Borisovna coordinate our very first social in the ballroom of the Literary Museum, home to Pushkin and Gogol and Tolstoy. The Grande Dame had bribed the curator to close the entire mansion to the public. She somehow procured frilly American wedding decorations for the pristine white walls topped by scalloped molding. She brought in a well-stocked metal bar and a CD player. After we covered the scarred tables with white tablecloths, we hung the disco ball from the crystal chandelier.

‘Daria,’ she said in her haughty voice, ‘make sure that we have enough punch. Spike it with a fair amount of vodka. We don’t want any awkward moments. Turn off most of the lights – we don’t want the girls to see how old some of the men are! You’ll have to check the bathrooms from time to time to make sure there’s no hanky panky going on. I want these girls to behave themselves!’ She pushed her pink spectacles back onto the bridge of her nose. ‘I just hope the Stanislavskis don’t learn about my socials. I can’t afford to pay protection money yet.’

Chapter 5

A darkened room in a former palace. A music box set to play. A strobe light sends flickers across the parquet. The Literary Museum was about to become the setting for a garish high-school prom for thirty- to sixty-five-year-old men. On the website, the Grande Dame had advertised these socials as five evenings, one thousand women. Of course, she didn’t mention that it was the same two hundred women five times. I wondered if the men would notice. Valentina Borisovna was wearing her very best – a pink, simulated Chanel suit garnished with a pink pearl necklace and pink pumps. Even I’d dressed up in a black cocktail dress.

When the girls arrived, I felt as if we were backstage at a Miss Universe pageant. Tummies tucked in. Bosoms thrust out. Hips swaying so hard, I was reminded of the back fin of a fish swishing by. There was more make-up on these faces than in an entire cosmetics factory. The smell of two hundred competing perfumes was overwhelming, so I opened a few windows. The women practiced pouts and sultry looks. Sitting around the tables, they joked and laughed, sized each other up and tore one another down.

‘Masha, you’ll get someone right away.’

‘With that hair and those turkey drumsticks for legs, Louisa will never find anyone, poor dear.’ Cackle, cackle.

‘Do you think American men are as well hung as ours?’ one asked.

‘I for one will find out tonight – a walrus dick or a tiny radish!’ another responded before taking a drag on her cigarette.

‘No smoking, girls! No smoking!’ Valentina Borisovna shouted. ‘Americans don’t smoke and they certainly don’t want smelly dates!’

Immediately, the girls threw down their cigarettes and ground them underneath their stiletto heels, except for one, who exclaimed, ‘Ahhh, Americans! They don’t know how to live!’

The Grande Dame glared; the girl put out her cigarette. The floor looked like an ashtray. Valentina Borisovna swung open the doors and fifty Americans entered. The room went silent. I peered at the men in the semi-darkness. Some looked confident. And rightly so. They were a rare commodity here. We looked at them and saw three-course meal tickets with cell phones and credit cards. A direct flight to the American Dream: money, beautiful homes, stability.

The men stood in huddles near the door, the women sat at the tables. Nervous anticipation surrounded us. We all want love. The men had flown thousands of miles for it. The Odessans had come to the table to place their bets on an American, ready to gamble everything for a better life elsewhere.

The women broke the silence. ‘They look as nervous as I feel,’ one whispered.

‘Who helped them dress?’ another asked, looking at the numerous flannel shirts and faded jeans.

‘Why whisper?’ a third asked. ‘They don’t speak Russian.’

We women laughed to cover up our nervousness.

‘They’re older than I thought.’

‘Girls, I’m here to tell you that older lovers are better – they last longer and think each time is the last, so they’re just thrilled and grateful!’

More laughter.

One of the youngest, in a miniskirt that barely covered her bottom, said to her friend, who wore a top that barely concealed her breasts, ‘I’ll need a few drinks before I find these guys attractive.’

They fled to the bar. Larissa, a stout, older woman, said, ‘Let them wait a year or two and see what life with an Odessan man is like!’

Her words underlined the women’s reason for being here. Galya, a nineteen-year-old with wide eyes and a nervous expression, asked, ‘Does that mean romance doesn’t exist?’

‘Of course it does, sunshine. In lovey-dovey American novels,’ Larissa replied.

Galya looked to me. ‘Have you never trembled under a man’s touch?’

‘Yes, the dentist’s.’

The women laughed at the old joke. I remembered how my teeth were ripped out by pliers, and my hand moved to my mouth.
You don’t have to do that anymore
. I put my hand on my lap.

Most men were still standing near the entryway. I gave them credit for this. It is proper to be reserved. They stared at the women, some of whom preened, some of whom struck a pose of nonchalance, some of whom danced with each other. The Grande Dame wanted me to create a website as well as a catalog, featuring a profile for each girl with a photo and her vital information – horoscope, height, weight, likes and dislikes (not unlike
Playboy
) – but I hadn’t yet entered all of the information into the computer. She would charge men $100 for the program, which they could buy before the evening of the social to narrow their list of 200 candidates to ten contenders to cross-examine.