“Maybe you should tell him anyway,” Rae said. “You know? I mean, he’s your husband.”
I considered this in silence, staring down at the table.
“And speaking of Stas,” she said, “I still want to hear how you two got it on.”
Stas liked to say he fell in love with me the day I showed up at Kaiser Tech. And it was true that I’d been aware of a puppyish crush on his part, something I regarded with tender amusement when I considered it at all. He was nine years younger than me and spoke broken English. He lived in Inwood, with a roommate.
Still, he managed to conduct a steady and strenuous courtship within our working relationship. If I promised a client we could install their new network right away, Stas would stay up all night getting it done. When I dropped a gold earring down the drain of the bathroom sink, Stas took apart the pipes and recovered it for me. And he wouldn’t let me be alone in the office after dark. “This building is not safe,” he said. “And the neighborhood is not safe either.” On such evenings, he stayed at his own desk, entering data and adjusting spreadsheets until I was ready to go. Sometimes we had dinner delivered, and afterward he would walk me home.
One night everyone from the office went for drinks, and Marcus left after the second round. Bryce, Stas and I moved on to another bar, which was across from a midtown strip joint. “Ever been inside one of those places, Stas?” asked Bryce.
Stas said no.
“I’ll have to show you the ropes, then. Some other time. Not tonight,” he said. “Tonight I need to talk with Leda about our strategy for signing this hedge fund. We’re sitting down with them in the morning.”
It was a dismissal, but I could see that Stas did not want to go. He put on his jacket but remained at the table, nursing what was left of his drink.
“Seriously, Stas. It’s past your bedtime,” Bryce said. “Get out of here so Leda and I can review the battle plan.”
There was an awkward moment where Stas sat without moving. Then slowly he stood up, knocking back the dregs of the martini Bryce had ordered for him.
“We’ll see you tomorrow,” Bryce said.
Stas touched his brow in a drunken salute before making his way to the door. We watched him go.
“That poor son of a bitch is in love with you,” Bryce told me.
“He’s just a young pup,” I said. “He’ll get over it.”
“My favorite kind of woman,” Bryce said with appreciation. “Heartless.”
He nodded at the neon girlie palace framed by the bar’s front window. “So what do you say we have our next round across the street?”
“A little silicone with our strategy meeting?”
“Come on, you’ll love it, the girls are super fucking hot.”
As we stumbled across Ninth Avenue and made our way along the sidewalk, I caught sight of Stas half a block behind us, lingering outside a branch office of Off-Track Betting.
“Hey,” I said to Bryce. “Stas is following us.”
“He just wants to see where we’re going, I bet,” Bryce told me, pushing open the smoked-glass door of the club. “He won’t come in. He can’t afford even the cover at a place like this.”
Alcohol had left me careless, but some slight misgiving nagged at me as we climbed the stairs. I glanced back over my shoulder.
“Don’t worry,” Bryce added. “He’s not the type to talk. Besides, who’s he gonna tell? Marcus? Fuck that guy, I don’t care what he thinks.”
For the next couple of hours, I made out with Bryce and a girl who called herself Calypso. But afterward, even as drunk as I was, I wouldn’t let him get into the taxi he’d hailed for me. With Bryce, any long-term relationship—whatever its nature— was like a game of chess, and having sex with him would have been like sacrificing my queen.
“Leda,” he pleaded. “Just let me share the cab.”
“There are plenty of cabs. Get your own.”
“Come on. I’ll have the guy drop you off first. I swear I won’t try to come in.”
“You live uptown, and I’m on the lower east side,” I said. “It makes no sense.”
I got into the back of the taxi and tried to pull the door shut behind me. Bryce held it and clambered in after me. Hastily, I slid across the seat, opened the other door and let myself out. Bryce followed while the driver cursed in his native language.
Suddenly Stas materialized between us. “Enough,” he said to Bryce. His face was very pale and bathed in a light sweat. He was swaying on his feet, as if the past few hours hadn’t sobered him at all. “This is enough. Leave her alone.”
Bryce burst out laughing. “Stas, you madman, where the fuck did you come from? Where’s your white fucking horse? Take it from me, my young friend—this fair maiden doesn’t need your help.”
“Enough, sir,” Stas repeated. “This is not proper conduct for a man in your position.”
While Bryce bellowed with mirth, I got back into the cab. The driver muttered with relief as I told him my address. As we pulled away from the curb, I couldn’t resist a glance through the rear windshield. Bryce had thrown an arm around Stas and was jostling him toward yet another bar.
* * *
Had I been any younger, Bryce would have been a perfect candidate for my emotional investment: married (for the third time) with children, prone to cocaine and alcohol abuse, just this side of sociopathic. But as it was, I was making myself go out on dates with ostensibly reasonable prospects: men I met at parties or through friends or over the internet. The next morning, I’d entertain the office with the discouraging things they’d said or done. I’d tell everyone that this or that man hated cats, wore spiced cologne, was rude to the waitress. I’d report that he answered his cell phone during dinner, or that when we reached his car, he opened his own door first.
“Why don’t you just marry Stas?” Bryce would joke in front of everyone. “He’s crazy about you and he’s got a good job.”
Stas never reacted to these statements, never voiced agreement or denial or resentment or chagrin. His expression did not change as he studied his computer screen or stripped a modem for parts.
“Isn’t that right, Stas?” Bryce would press.
“Right,” he’d say absently, as if tossing a dog a bone so it would go away.
I’d been working at Kaiser Tech for nearly a year when my home computer crashed and Stas came over to fix it. This meant taking a series of trains and buses all the way from Inwood to the lower east side on his first day off in three weeks. Though he had walked me home from the office many times before, he’d never been inside my building. This was partly because I didn’t want to lead him on, and partly because I was pained by the state of my apartment.
I lived in a one-bedroom apartment, and everything in it was falling apart. The kitchen faucet sprayed rivulets in all directions. The bathroom door scraped hard against the floor and the lock refused to catch. The light fixture above my bed had a burned-out bulb that seemed welded into its socket. The built-in ladder to my loft bed had a broken bottom rung.
Stas installed a program that would defragment my hard drive and get rid of its viruses. “Just let it run,” he told me. “Don’t touch anything for half an hour. I have a few things to do but I will come back when it is finished.”
I promised not to touch the computer while he was gone. I was cleaning out the bedroom closet anyway, a project I’d started so I wouldn’t be in his way. For this reason, I heard but did not see him when he walked back in, and for the next hour or so I managed to be unaware that he was fixing everything in my apartment.
“Stas,” I said in amazement when, along with my restored computer, he showed me the working light and faucet and ladder and door. “Is everyone right? Should I stop dating these crazy men and marry you?”
It wasn’t a real question. But Stas looked back at me with a level intensity that bordered on reproach. “Yes,” he said, and there was nothing light or flippant in his voice. “Yes, you should.”
I knew it would be terrible to let myself laugh.
“Oh Stas. Honey. Listen to me. I wasn’t being serious. Look, you’re a very attractive young man. But I’m nine years older than you, and I want children. I mean, I want to get pregnant
soon.
You’re not ready for that, are you? And do you really think you’d be faithful to a middle-aged lady when you’re in your prime?”
My tone was light and tender, cajoling, consoling. But Stas stared straight into my eyes with an expression that made him look, for the first time, like a man instead of a boy. And when he spoke, his gaze did not waver. “Yes,” he said again. “Yes, I would.”
It was then that I felt it, the first twinge of attraction to him, like the flutter of a butterfly in a nearly airless jar. But it was only a twinge, and I dismissed it.
The next morning, he went to Chicago.
“I love this,” Rae said. “I love this story! Stas is the man!”
We were at the kitchen table with teacups and a pot of Darjeeling between us. I felt safe with Rae in the room. Still, when I caught sight of Jack through the window, hurling a paint-splattered tarp into the back of his truck, I felt myself cringing. Rae followed my gaze to the neighboring driveway. She nodded in his direction.
“That’s the guy?”
“Shh,” I cautioned.
“Leda,” she laughed. “He can’t hear me!”
I felt my face get hot. “I know. You’re right. Of course he can’t. I don’t know why I said that.”
“It’s okay,” she said, after a moment. She reached over and touched my hand. “You’re just spooked.”
Jack turned in my direction. He seemed to be looking straight at me, something that wasn’t lost on Rae. She held my eyes as she said, “Tell Stas that he’s bothering you. I trust Stas. Based on everything you just told me.” And then, as if to steady me, she asked, “Why did he go to Chicago?”
* * *
Stas went to Chicago on his first business trip to wire an important client’s satellite office. He was away for five days and it was a revelation. I was amazed that I missed him, that it felt as if a vital part of the work atmosphere was gone. Until then, I’d thought that Bryce alone created the frisson in the office, but now I understood that Stas supplied an essential part of it as well.
On the third day of his absence, I heard Bryce on the phone.
“Stas, man, you’re making me proud, these guys tell me you’ve been the consummate professional. How do you think it’s going?”
Then: “Good. Perfect. I’m sure you’re taking great care of these people. Now listen, did Lara’s friend call you...? She did? So you’re seeing her?”
Lara was Bryce’s wife. I put down the press kit I was assembling.
“Tomorrow night! All right, you lucky dog, you’re going to thank me for this,” Bryce was saying. “My young friend, let me tell you...that woman...is
smoking.
Hot as a fucking pistol. The type that’ll sing for her supper and get breakfast in the bargain, if you know what I mean. Take her somewhere nice, you can add it to your tab for doing such a kick-ass job out there.”
When Bryce hung up, I turned to the press kit once again. “So what was that all about?” I asked, trying for an offhand tone.
“What do you mean?”
“It sounds like you’re hooking Stas up with some kind of prostitute.”
“Prostitute? Come on. Not at all. She’s a friend of my wife’s.”
“Okay, but you were basically saying he could expect to get laid.”
“Look, she’s a fun-loving lady, what’s the harm in that? Plus, Stas is just her type. She likes them tall, young, foreign, boyish. What do you care, anyway?”
“It’s not that I
care.
I just think it’s a bit much. He’s only a kid, for Christ’s sake.”
Bryce broke into a sudden grin.
“Leda, listen to you!”
“What?”
“You’re jealous!”
“Oh,
come on.”
“Christ on a sidecar. I never thought I’d see the day. Marcus, would you get this? Leda’s jealous!”
“Bryce, shut up, you’re so ridiculous.”
A couple of hours later, unable to think of anything else, I typed the only question I could bring myself to ask—
How do you like Chicago?
—into a text message to Stas.
A moment later came the vibration of his reply and I clutched at the phone with both hands, as if the device itself were what I couldn’t afford to lose.
I like it very much,
he had written back.
It is a marvelous city.
Then a moment later, he added:
You sent me here, in a way.
I knew what he meant: that I’d signed the firm he was there to service. But I couldn’t help reading another meaning into his words: that I’d sent him away by rejecting his love. What was there to hold him in New York? A room in Inwood; slave wages for work that was never done; a woman who wouldn’t take him seriously. He was rootless, he could go anywhere.
The next night, the night I knew he was with Lara’s friend, I couldn’t eat dinner. I couldn’t eat at all, in fact, or do anything besides picture Stas in her bed. I saw him going home with her and never wanting to leave. I imagined him calling Bryce, saying he’d be staying in Chicago, thanks for everything, good luck and goodbye. It would be my fault for failing to value him, for not recognizing his worth while he was mine for the taking.
Before it was even fully dark, I climbed into my loft bed and wrapped both arms around my pillow. I was holding my phone and trying to decide whether to call Stas. I had never called him for reasons unrelated to work, never called him in the evening at all. He would be with her right now, in some loud, crowded place; even if he could hear his phone ring, he’d be surrounded by other people. There would be no way to have a real conversation. And anyway, what would I say?
Could this really be happening, could this be me? Smoldering, suffering, over
Stas?
I felt tears sliding out of my eyes, staining the pillow. I was still in my work clothes, a fitted blouse and houndstooth skirt suit. I was thirty-four and pathetic.
Finally, at half past midnight, I dialed his number in a kind of frenzy. It was eleven-thirty in Chicago, late enough for his sleeping arrangements to have been decided. Surely if he was with her, he just wouldn’t answer. I lay back against the bank of pillows with the phone held tight to my ear and one hand shielding my eyes.