The Cosmopolitans (11 page)

“I’m sorry. I guess I’m not enough of a
sosh
for you,” Milla said
and surprised herself by beginning to cry. She felt like a character
in
The Outsiders
. Not like a specific character, but like all of them
combined:
The Outsider
.

“What’s all this?” he said, and it was hard for Milla not to
tell him. He was her
sami rodnoy
, her closest person. Instead, she
listened as he said, “What’s going on?” and, “Milla,” and then, as
she calmed down, “This is just wedding stuff, right?” and still later,
“You think I want a socialist?”

Katya

Katya was living with a guy named Matt, or maybe a couple of
guys, she wasn’t sure because his friends came over a lot. You have
to know what your energy is about. You have to know what your
energy is about. Say it fifty times as you breathe out. She breathed
out onto the half-open window. There was a time when she would
have drawn something in the condensation, an anarchy sign, the
mark of the beast, a tulip, but now she looked at it and knew there
was no way she could lift her hand and point a finger and make
anything recognizable.

Her energy was about the supermarket circular she’d found and
reading parts of it aloud to her mother over the phone to convince
her she was eating. Katya would have eaten for real, because Matt
didn’t like her skinny, but the combination of things she was taking
— the things it took — made her throw up too often for eating to be
worth her time.

A guy flip-flopped through the door. “Still here?” he said, tossing his backpack on the floor. Katya curled her legs up on the window sill. “You’re always sitting there, why?” he said with some kind of sensitive thing to his voice.

“I don’t know,” Katya said. She’d found you could get by with “I don’t know” and “Nothing much” and nothing much more. Why hadn’t Matt told his friends she didn’t like to talk?

“I could just push you out right now,” the boy said. Some stupid
instinct made Katya grab the frame, so that when he pushed her a
few seconds later, she did not fall.

She crossed her arms, stooped her head down so she’d clear the
glass. “Do it again,” she said.

He looked at her and raised his hand to her shoulder, then laughed
and backed away, taking out a cell phone. “Some crazy bitches.”

Katya felt a different person take temporary control of her,
not Brezhnev, someone else, a window-grabber, a confirmer. She
packed up her bridesmaid’s dress, called the airline from a pay phone
outside. When the feeling ran out half an hour later, she wanted to
cancel it all, but lacked the energy, which was how that other person
had planned it.

Osip

But they were supposed to be happy! A house before a wedding
should be full of giggling and photography. If only someone told him
the problem, then Osip, who at twenty-one had published a paper
about elevated rails, would find a solution. But in the United States,
even in his own family, apparently, his problem-solving abilities, of
which one professor, overjoyed to find a smart Jewish boy like Osip
at their fifth-rate provincial polytechnic, had called his “sublime
pragmatism,” counted for nothing.

He stood watering his big lawn like a big — or at least largish —
shot, wondering what could be the matter. Here Milla was marrying
a famous Strauss. (He’d asked Mrs. Strauss whether they were
descended from the jeans-maker, and she’d said yes, and he’d made
a funny joke.) Yes, Malcolm was a bit — uncertain, and made other
people uncertain as well. Malcolm seemed always to be worrying
a decision when he spoke to you, wondering, should he be more
friendly to you, or less? Or was there someone else he needed to be
friendly to — at that very moment? Osip told himself that he, too,
had been uncertain at Malcolm’s age. He just hadn’t let on: Stalina
had been pregnant and they had married. They were in America
now, and America was the freedom to admit you didn’t know what
you were doing.

The rest of the family was jealous of them. Stalina’s cousin
Valentina had been calling to inform them about the layabouts,
the failures, the suicides and homicides who’d graduated from Ivy
League colleges.

Stalina liked prestigious people. Stalina liked making others
jealous. Stalina liked weddings. What, then, was the matter?

Osip turned the hose on some bushes. It didn’t matter if the bench
got wet, because Katya was the only one who’d ever sat there.

What would his father have done in Osip’s place? He would
have waged a successful campaign. He would have been victorious
in battle. Osip sighed. Whenever he tried to imagine what his
father would do, he found himself, for lack of information, instead
imagining what the Commish would do. For the Commish, these
family matters would be a distraction from his real work of the week,
uncovering a drug ring, say. The Commish’s wife would have found
it charming that such a tough, streetwise man had no idea when it
came to women’s problems. She would have massaged his neck.

Katya had come outside, when Osip was watering, when she
was nine, ten, and talked to him about science fiction. Osip’s favorite
books were about feudal civilizations approaching utopia, a nuke
for every pod. Katya’s books were about psychic girls with silver
eyes, teenage clones, robots seeking soulmates. If she’d only stayed
for Pratik’s arrival, if she’d only learned calculus. Osip had been
looking forward to saying: Katyenok, calculus is nothing more than
the study of very small numbers.

Pratik

Pratik was a sissy sleeper, had been ever since he, at age six, had
shared his bedroom with his asthma-prone grandmother, under strict
instructions from his parents to wake them if her breathing changed.
Now, anything could wake him: a passing car with muffler trouble, a
squirrel in the tree outside his window, Yana, the family insomniac,
the family beauty, walking past his door.

He heard her and did what he had not been brave enough to
do before: he put on his pants and followed her to the kitchen. He
paused in the doorway, wondering whether he should knock, and
decided to say, “Oh, hello, Yana,” with an air of surprise.

Yana dropped the box of cereal she’d been holding, jumped in
the air, and screamed, “Ah,” a few times. Pratik closed the kitchen
door so they wouldn’t wake the rest of the family, hiding a smile
at how funny she looked, hopping on one leg like a cripple, her
forehead wrinkled like a monkey’s.

“Don’t do that again,” she said. “I’m easily scared, not scared,
startled.” She picked up the box of cereal from the floor and held it
out to him.

“No, thank you,” Pratik said. He poured himself a glass of water
and sat at the table, hoping Yana would join him.

“This fucking wedding,” she said, throwing herself into a chair.

“I wanted to ask you the question, why did you live in New York
last year, and not at home?”

“That’s an interesting way of putting it,” Yana said. “Most
people ask me why I moved back here.” He loved how her face
was always changing. It was comforting, after living with his polite,
fearful family, to almost always see what Yana was thinking, even
though she most often seemed to be thinking him an arse.

“Why did you move back here?” he said.

He listened to her eating her cereal, which she always had
dry. When she’d swallowed, she said, “I was sick of being poor in
the city. I’ll have plenty of time to be poor when I’m a teacher.”
She spoke those lines like she’d said them many times before.
Somehow, he knew there was another reason. Had a man hurt her,
broken promises? If only she’d tell Pratik, he’d have revenge on the
bandit.