Amanda came back to the table, without glancing at Alexander, who sat patiently, drank his wine, and finally asked Amanda where Tatiana was. Amanda said she didn’t know. Alexander waited a little longer and went to look for her. He walked the corridors and looked into every small room. He went outside to the back gardens where the photographers were setting up for the final photo of the bride and groom. Around the corner of the country club, he found her standing against the back wall, her arms by her side, her fists pressed into the stone behind her. Her eyes were closed, and she was hyperventilating.
“Tania?” he said with worry. She opened her eyes and stared cold and hard at him. She didn’t speak, not even when he touched her. “What happened?”
She said in a low dull voice, “What have you done to us, Alexander? What have you let into our house?” She couldn’t step away from the wall. Her knees were shaking. “I don’t know what to do anymore. How to help you, how to stop their subterfuge. I thought I gave you what you needed most from me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“But when are you going to give me what I need from you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“What I need from you,” she said, “is not to be blind. Can you do that?”
“Yes,” he said. “I can do that. What’s going on?”
Shaking her head, she took his arm and stepped away from the wall. “I can’t stay here another minute. Call me a cab and I’ll go home. You stay as long as you want.”
“You can’t leave in the middle of a wedding! What a scandal. We have to stay for the cake.”
“I can’t stay here another minute.” Tatiana put her face in her hands. She couldn’t look at him. “I need to go home. Tell them I wasn’t feeling well. It’s not a lie.”
She refused to go inside even to say good-bye. Alexander went back to make his apologies to Jeff, and they went home. What was happening?
She kept saying, I’m doing the best I can. She kept repeating it like a mantra. But she wouldn’t tell him anything. He felt things start to slip away from him, invisible things, threads unraveling on a blanket he didn’t know was covering him.
No, he knew.
The blanket of his new calling, his new father, his new friends, his new brother. He chose them. They chose him. He chose them despite her tight-lipped reservations, because he believed she was naïve and her worries were unfounded. He still believed that. Days now since the wedding, and she still wasn’t talking.
Eventually he asked her silent stoic back, “Who are you trying to protect?”
And she replied through her back: “You.” She was washing the dishes.
“Turn around.” She turned. “I need protecting?”
“I can’t believe I’m saying it, but yes, as much as ever.”
“Tania, do you think it’s possible for you not to speak in code? When you talk can you speak either Russian or English, but not gibberish?”
She said nothing, turning to the sink again.
“Okay, that’s it,” he said, striding to her. “Don’t you shake your plummy little tail at me.” Picking her up from the sink, he carried her over and dropped her on the couch, stomach down. Falling on top of her, he pinned her legs between his, and clasped her wrists over her head. Her face was in the couch pillow. “Are you going to tell me, or am I going to have to take the truth from you?”
“Shh!”
He stuck his chin into her neck, into her cheek, into her shoulder blades. He was tickling her and whispering to her as she kept laughing. “I’m trying to figure out if I should get it out of you by making love to you until you tell me, or by not making love to you until you tell me…”
“Tough one,” she said. “But if the choice is mine, I might as well have the former.”
“I think,” Alexander whispered into her ear, squeezing her wrists tighter, “the choice is mine, tadpole…”
There was coughing behind them. They turned their heads and Anthony was standing at the foot of the couch, looking puzzled. “What are you doing?” he asked quietly.
“Mommy won’t tell me something, and I’m trying to tickle it out of her.”
“Dad’s trying to stubble it out of me,” Tatiana said, her head out of the sofa pillow. Alexander got off her, pulled her up; they sat primly on the couch and looked at their son, who stared at them with solemnity and finally said, “Whatever it is you were doing, Dad, it wasn’t working.”
“Tell me about it.”
In the heat of the night, near the mountains, Alexander sat outside with a cigarette on the rocking bench he had built for them, and she came out and climbed into his lap. It was sunset over the saguaro desert valley, and he rocked them back and forth, while she nuzzled him and murmured love in his ear, cooing pidgin English into him, through his skin. But nothing she said or did could erase the image of her in a peach taffeta dress, standing against the wall, her fists to the stone, saying, “What have you let into our house, Alexander?”
What did that mean?
What had he let in?
But finally even the densest, most wrapped-up-in-himself husband in all of Scottsdale figured out that something wasn’t right when Tatiana brought him lunch, and Steve came by with inspection papers to sign, and Tatiana wouldn’t look at him. He said, “Hi, Tania,” and Tatiana didn’t even mutter a “Hey.” It was like Steve didn’t exist.
Even blind Alexander noticed.
Steve said, “Mand and I haven’t seen much of you guys lately. We should go out.”
“Been busy, Stevie,” Alexander said slowly, staring at Tatiana, whose head was down. “Been in Yuma four days in the last two weeks. That little Korean conflict.”
“Oh, yeah. Well, how about this Saturday?”
“We’re busy.” That was Tatiana, eyes to the ground.
“Next Saturday?”
“It’s our tenth anniversary,” she said.
“The following weekend?”
“Anthony’s birthday.”
“Well, we’re having a Fourth of July party—you guys are coming to that, right?”
“If it’s on a Friday, I have to work. In fact, I have to go now.” She never raised her eyes to him.
At the car, Alexander opened the door for her and she got in without looking at him either! “Whoa,” he said, reaching for her through the open window. His fingers under her chin lifted her face. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing. You have to get back to work. Look, the homeowners are here. Everything is fine.”
“Tania.”
“What do you want to do? Have it out on your construction site while a nice married couple waits for you to show them their plaster walls? You’ve got work to do. I’m going home to make dinner. What would you like? I was thinking of chili and corn bread.”
“Yes, fine,” he said. “Tania, did Steve say something to you at the wedding?”
“No,” she said.
“What then?”
“In the middle of the construction site?”
“When I get home.”
“Anthony and Sergio are having dinner with us.”
“Tonight in bed.”
“I’ve got to get up early for work tomorrow.”
He opened the car door and pulled her out. “Come on, babe. Don’t play f*cking games with me.”
“You don’t want to know, Alexander. Believe me, you haven’t wanted the truth for three years, you aren’t going to want it now.”
Frustrated, he let her go. Clearly now was not the time. And later at home was not the time—with Anthony and Sergio in the next room, and quiet music, and the sound of running water from the dishes and the laundry, and the laughter of two boys playing ball outside and Monopoly inside, there was no place for Sturm und Drang, which is why they both hated having any. Their quiet life worked in small decibels, or in higher decibels in their great bed behind locked doors, with Anthony long asleep or at his friend’s house. But not in bed, not together in a hot bath, not outside in the pool, or running around together, or watching the sunset and smoking, or during their divine Sundays, not during the most convivial moments, the most comfortable moments, the most conjugal moments was there a good time for these storms. Alexander realized unhappily that the only harsh words they’d had in the three years they’d lived in Phoenix had been over something to do with Steve or his father.
Turned out that after the chili and corn bread, and a game of basketball, Anthony walked Sergio back down the road and Alexander and Tatiana had thirty minutes to themselves. He took her by the hand outside to their deck, placed her in front of him, sat down on the bench, lit a cigarette, and said, “Let’s have it.”
She wasted no time. She had a lot to get out. “Alexander,” she said, “I’ve kept quiet for three years because I wanted to give you what you wanted. I know how you feel about Bill. You wanted to work with him, you wanted to be friends with Steve, you wanted me to keep quiet—so I did. After I have seen you be so unhappy, I wanted to do nothing to upset you. So I kept my mouth shut. But I can’t keep quiet any longer. Stevie—and his dad—they’re no good, Shura. They’re no good as friends, they’re no good as employers, and they’re no good as people. That’s the bad news. The good news is: the beautiful thing about living here, in Phoenix, is that they don’t matter. There’s somewhere else to go, something else to do, somewhere else to work. You are free, and you now have indispensable skills. Carolyn had her house built by a man named G.G. Cain, and she said he was the nicest man—”
“Tatiana, wait, what are you talking about? I know G.G. But I’m not going to work for someone else. I’m not leaving Bill.”
“Shura, you have to leave him. You do know that Stevie beat a man nearly to death?”
Alexander shrugged. “What’s that got to do with me? Or Bill?”
“Everything. How far do you think that fruit has fallen from the tree? Did you hear what I said? He beat a man nearly to death.”
“It was a long time ago. I did some things too, a long time ago.” His face darkened.
“You know what was a long time ago? Your birth,” Tatiana snapped. “As in, you weren’t born yesterday.”
“Yes, because you know the way of male drunken bar fights. The guy had been making awful remarks about Amanda.”
“Stevie says this to you and you believe him? Stevie, the man who tells anyone who will listen, including you, what Amanda does and does not do, is suddenly going to step up for her honor?” Tatiana laughed before turning grave. “Stevie, whose father buys his son’s freedom with the money he makes off your back?”
Alexander rubbed his eyes.
“Before he knew I was married to you, Steve was coming to the hospital pretending to be taken up with me. Would you like to know the kinds of things he said to me?”
“I can imagine. But he didn’t know me.”
“He knew Amanda, didn’t he? He knew he was engaged, didn’t he? He knew I was married!”
“All right, so he doesn’t treat his women very well.”
“I’m not his woman. I’m your woman. And I’m telling you loud and clear that you need to protect your family.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Alexander said, his voice rising. “Protect my family? What the f*ck does that mean? I work all day six days a week for my family.”
“I’m not impugning how hard you work. I’m impugning who you work for.”
“That’s it. I’ve heard enough.”
“No,” said Tatiana, shaking her head, “I don’t think you have.” She took a breath. “Do you know that to this day, Steve says suggestive things to me when I come to see you and you’re not there? ‘You must be used to men looking at you, Tania,’ he says in his smarmy voice. ‘Even Walter said you looked pretty the other day, Tania, and I always thought Walter was a pansy,’ he says. ‘I like that dress, it really shows off your figure.’ And, ‘Don’t wear that dress again in front of Dudley, Tania. He’s going to go crazy.’”
“Who the f*ck is Dudley?” said Alexander.
“How should I know?” replied Tatiana. “He says to Amanda, ‘How about a threeway, Amanda?’ instead of ‘Let’s get married in June, Amanda.’ And you, as they try to buy your land and take your wife, you don’t want to hear it so you can continue to pretend that the naked picture in Balkman’s office is just an anomaly, and that the wolf whistling, ogling, leering men building his houses are normal, too!”
“Take my wife? They’re just men on roofs! What, New York didn’t have wolf whistling?”
“Nothing like this. Never like this—so that I can’t come have lunch with my husband? Even a soldier, a warrior husband, is not enough anymore to make them stop? They ask you to go to Las Vegas, they invite you to strip clubs, and finally they get you out on a stag night.” Tatiana took a very deep breath. “To all this you keep shaking your blind head—”
“Look, I’m not blind! I know it all. Why do you think I don’t go to Vegas? I know exactly what’s going on, but it’s just bullshit,” he said. “I’m inured to bullshit. You should’ve heard how the men in my penal battalion talked. Steve is a monk compared to them.”
“Your men talked about me?”
“Steve doesn’t talk to me about you!”
“Not to you, but to others! Go ask Walter what Steve says about me. Recently Walter’s been so embarrassed, he won’t look at me anymore, not even to say hello.”
She saw Alexander taken aback by that. Finally. Something got in. He frowned. “That’s it, you’re not coming to the construction sites anymore,” he said.
Tatiana looked at him, opened her palms to him. When all she saw was his closed face, she crossed her arms on her chest. “That seems a normal way to live? Hiding your wife from the people you work with, as if you’re still with the soldiers who buy or take women when they pass through foreign towns? This is your solution? Live like we’re in a penal battalion? Live like we’re in the Gulag?”
“Stop your overreacting. Stevie’s all right. And he is my friend.”
“Like Dimitri was your friend? Like Ouspensky was your friend?”
“No! Are you really comparing Stevie with Dimitri?”
“Even here, this is not how people are, Shura. They weren’t like this at Ellis, at NYU. They’re not like this at my hospital, they’re not like this at the market, at the gas stations. Sure, some try to get friendly. But there is something else going on here. Can’t you see—Bill Balkman hires only these kinds of people. You don’t see something wrong with that?”
“No!”
“Everything is raunchy and grody. Nothing is sacred. Nothing. You don’t think it rubs off on you? Weren’t you the one who told me you breathe oxen, you live oxen?”
“Stop using my own words against me. This isn’t it.”
“Is that what you’re doing? Recreating the Red Army for yourself on your little construction sites?”
“Tania!” exclaimed Alexander. “You better stop right now. I’m not going to get into what you’re trying to recreate in your little emergency room, so don’t start a fight that you can’t finish and can’t win.” He raised his hand before she said another word. “Look, I don’t want to quit my job,” he said, “and I’m not going to. Bill treats me very well. I have seven houses I’m building, he gives me a three percent bonus for each one. Who else is going to do that for me?”
“He charges twice as much for his builder’s commission as G.G. Cain does, which is why all your houses are so expensive and many are built like cardboard boxes. That seems normal to you, a low-quality custom home and a thirty percent commission? Bill should give you twenty-five percent of his damn commission, not three, seeing he couldn’t finish one house on time if it weren’t for you.”
“Oh, now you’re a regular Milton Friedman, too?”
“Who?”
“Balkman is talking of making me partner soon. If I go somewhere else, I’d have to start at the bottom and make no money again. That’s your idea of a happy Alexander? Here, I do well, Bill trusts me, and no one bothers me.”
“They bother me.”
“Don’t come there!” Alexander broke off. Lowering his voice, breathing hard, he said, “I’m done—done—talking about this. Anything else?”
“There is.”
“If you don’t get to it in exactly one f*cking second—”
“Oh.” Tatiana clasped her hands together. “I see. Well, in that case, let me get to it in exactly one second. Steve is all right, you say. He’s your friend. Fine. So when your unassailable buddy Steve tells Amanda who tells me—at Cindy’s wedding—that at the Westward Ho, you”—She grasped the sides of the rail—“that you took one of the girls into one of the rooms—”
Alexander stood up abruptly. Tatiana stopped speaking. He didn’t blink, but something happened to his face—it fell and hardened at the same time. Something crumbled and cemented. He said nothing, just continued to stare at her.
“Shura…”
“Tania, I need a second.”
“You need a second? I’ve managed to live carrying those words inside me since last week.”
“You know how you did it. You did it because you know they’re not true.” He lit another cigarette. His fingers were stiff.
“It’s your word against his, husband,” Tatiana whispered. “That’s all I got. Your word against his. And you just spent fifteen minutes telling me that his word is good. You’re working with a man who says these things so that your wife hears, so that your wife believes they could be true. You’re good friends with someone who wants your wife to think those words are true.”
“Leave me alone.” He backed away from her. “I need to—just leave me alone.”
He spent the rest of the evening outside, in his shed and swimming. Tatiana put Anthony to bed, made bread, looked at a coffee table book of the Grand Canyon. She made him tea and brought it out to him with a fresh sweet bun with blackberry jam, but didn’t speak. There was nothing to say. She had told him—the days of ignorance, of innocence, as always, were so short-lived, which is why she cherished and relished them.
Tatiana couldn’t fall asleep in their bed without him. She fell asleep on the couch and woke up, naked and under the covers, feeling his hands on her, Alexander leaning over her, whispering comfort—and then it was five thirty in the morning, and she had to go to work. He got up with her, made coffee while she got herself ready, and brought her a cup in the bedroom. They touched lightly. They kissed lightly. As she was leaving, he said, sitting on the bed, “What am I supposed to do now?”
“You leave them behind, darling,” she said. “All of them. You are not going to change them. Leave them behind and never look back.”
Alexander worked that Friday and Saturday, and on Sunday they went to a Catholic Mass and took a long drive with Anthony up to Sedona to walk amid the Red Rock hills. They had lunch at their favorite Mexican restaurant, they talked about the Grand Canyon, they bought a Spanish vase. At night when they came home and put Ant to sleep, they swam in their pool and made love in the heated whirlpool tub. In bed, Alexander told her there was no way he could be without work for their anniversary, and Tatiana turned away and didn’t say anything, and Monday came and she went to the hospital and he went to work, just as if nothing had changed.
But Alexander found himself like Tatiana—unable to look Steve in the eye. All communication between them ceased except for the professional kind. What’s the status of the Schreiner house? What’s the status of the Kilmer house? What’s the status of…
He didn’t know what to do. Their tenth anniversary weekend was in four days! He bought Tatiana a very expensive ring, though he had just spent all of his bonus account and some of their savings on the extravagant pool. He couldn’t be without work. He decided that he would figure out a way to part company with Stevie while still continuing to work for his father. He also decided not to share his plan with Tania. For some odd reason, he didn’t think she’d agree.
The day before they left for the Grand Canyon, Alexander met Dudley.
Walter, the framer, had told Alexander a little about Dudley, the itinerant worker Stevie had hired a few weeks ago. He was a johnny-come-lately, Walter said, a jack of all trades. Walter said he was a wastrel, that something was not right with him. “Rumor is he’s on the run.” The framer lowered his voice. “Rumor is he’s wanted for murder in Montana.”
Really, Alexander said. For murder in Montana.
“Yeah. But Stevie says that on the plus side, he works cheap, does everything, doesn’t complain.” Walter laughed.
Dudley was a tall man, as tall as Alexander. He was wearing cowboy boots and a cowboy hat, which he took off for a mock bow, and underneath it he had messy light ash hair pulled back in a stringy ponytail. His scraggly beard covered most of his face. He was chewing tobacco and then obnoxiously spitting it on the ground too close to everyone’s feet.
Steve said, “You two should have a lot to talk about. Dudley served in Europe, too, on the Eastern front, right, Dud?”
He was unkempt, which was a peculiar thing for a soldier, as Alexander knew, but soldiers came in all kinds and some could not be retrained. Dudley’s handshake was strong and he didn’t look away. He said, “F*ckin’a. Two hundred and eightieth division. We crossed the Oder in April ’45." He spat.
“Alexander was there, on the Oder. He was south in Poland, though, POW camp there, Catowice, isn’t that right, Alex?”
“Catowice? How the hell did you get so far out east?” Dudley asked.
“I don’t ask questions when I’m in German hands,” said Alexander. “I’ve got to get going. I’ll see you.”
“Hey, you want to come out for a drink with us tonight?” Steve asked.
“Can’t. We’re going away tomorrow.”
Dudley said with an insinuating smile, “You and the little lady?”
Alexander’s hands fisted up involuntarily. That was just a little too much insolence thrown down as a gauntlet in front of him in the middle of a sunny working afternoon. “What’s the smirk for, Dudley?” said Alexander in a voice that was so quiet, he could barely hear it himself.
“It’s ten years for you, isn’t it, Alex?” Steve interjected.
“Ten, huh?” said Dudley. “You know if this was a prison sentence, you’d be out by now.” He and Steve laughed. Then Dudley said, “How’d you get spliced in ’42, stuck in Catowice and all?”
“I wasn’t in Catowice in ’42,” Alexander said. “But two eightieth, that was an infantry unit, wasn’t it?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You were what, a corporal?”
“Sergeant first grade.”
“Sergeant. I see.”
“Alexander here was a captain,” Steve said.
Alexander smiled coldly. “Still am a captain, even as we speak,” he said. “Officer Reserve Corps, combat support services in Yuma.” Dudley didn’t smile even coldly. With the ranking order thus clearly established, now Alexander could unclench. “See you Tuesday. Steve, Dudley.” He started to walk away.
“You two have fun now,” said Dudley.
Alexander stopped walking and slowly turned around. Steve elbowed Dudley.
Alexander knew that in one moment everything he had worked for could be gone. In one moment, Tatiana and Alexander wouldn’t be going anywhere for their anniversary because Alexander would be talking to the police. It was only for her that he gritted his teeth and took control of himself but still couldn’t let it go completely.
“Dudley,” he said, stepping back to the two men, “I never met you before two minutes ago, but I’m going to give you a friendly word of advice. Don’t have that tone in your voice when you talk about my wife. In fact, better for you not to speak of her at all. Understood?”
Dudley laughed, chewing his tobacco with an open mouth. “Hey, man, I said nothing, why is your cage rattled?”
“As long as we’re clear, my cage is not rattled.”
But the cage was clattering.
The Germans in the Grand Canyon
Early Friday morning, they left Anthony with Francesca and drove two hundred and forty miles to the Grand Canyon, where they trekked in the blinding heat six winding hours down the Bright Angel Trail, down the Redwall and the Tonto, to the Archean granite, to the boiling Colorado. They set up their tent and stayed the weekend on the desert shores of another thousand-mile river, this one carving its way through two-billion-year-old igneous rock. Their three days was an oasis in the middle of their life. Alexander himself tried very hard to forget what was outside their tent.
They weren’t allowed to build a fire, but they swam and ate Tatiana’s bread, and Spam out of cans, and drank vodka straight from the bottle and had chocolate out of tinfoil. He gave her a white gold one-carat diamond ring, and she gave him a U.S. Army military watch, because his Red Army one had broken, and new leather boots before they had left home, because his had gotten worn. They played railroad tracks, railroad tracks (Russian-style and American-style), strip poker and even dominos. He lay in her lap and she told him jokes. (“A very sick man comes down from his deathbed, smelling something delicious in the kitchen, where he finds that his wife has baked him a batch of his favorite cookies. Gratefully he reaches for one, and she slaps his hand away and says, ‘They’re not for you! They’re for the funeral.’”) She read to him—as if in a Shakespearean soliloquy—the entire manual for a prototype of a color television, and in a much more Gracie Allen tone an article from Ladies Home Journal: “Are You a Match Made in Heaven, Crabby Cancer Girl and Chatty Gemini Guy?” (“They got us all wrong, Shura, didn’t they? It’s so the other way around.”); she explained to him what an algorithm was (a precise set of logical rules for solving a problem), asked him if he wanted to know what a divide-and-conquer algorithm was and when he groaned and said, God no, she bent and kissed him as if she were raising the dead.
She asked him to tell her one non-bedroom thing about her he loved, and he pretended he couldn’t think of one. He asked her to tell him one bedroom thing about him she loved and she pretended she couldn’t think of one.
Touché indeed.
He liked the way she laughed, he said, like choral music.
She liked the way he moved, she purred, like poetry, in song and sonnetry—in major scales and intervals and sympathetic strings, in undiminished chords and canons and compound meter rhythms, in passion rhyme, in tango time, in great ionic verse, in pyrrhics and dispondees when he was not so lyrical, in anapests and dactyls when he was.
Alexander, ever the poet and a scientist, immediately tested the law of gravitational physics: The force of attraction between two bodies being directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. And then lying in pitch black, at the end of radioactive choriambic love, Tatiana in her first soprano murmured, “I really don’t know what you think the classical sciences will teach you.”
He laughed and said, “That you are the funniest girl a man could marry.”
Very nearly asleep, they were lying quietly bare against each other.
“Shura,” she whispered, “please don’t worry. We’ll get pregnant. We haven’t been lucky, that’s all. We’ll get there.” She cleared her throat. “Though…don’t you wonder sometimes if maybe we’re meant to have just our one Antman?”
“He’s enough boy for anyone,” said Alexander. “But why do you want him to remain an only child? I was an only child.”
“Yes, and you’re enough boy for anyone.” She squeezed him.
“No, no, I’m tapped. Closed for the evening. Please come again tomorrow.”
Choral laughter. “I do nothing to stop us from having a baby, darling. I know my husband thinks I occasionally have divine powers, but he is not right in this case.”
And all Alexander said by way of drowsy reply was “Occasionally?”
She fell silent.
“Remember Luga?” he whispered. “Before I ever kissed you, remember lying naked in my arms?”
Tatiana started to cry.
“Did you ever imagine then, on the verge of our Armageddon, that we would be eleven years down the pike, across the million mystic miles, lying here in the Grand Canyon where the winter never comes, and you’re still naked in my arms, and I’m still rubbing my lips across your hair?”
“No.” She was kissing his bare clavicles. “The Germans aren’t across the river, Shura.”
“That’s true. Many things are forever behind us.” Alexander closed his eyes in the blackness.
“Yes. There’s plenty around us, too,” she said. “We must be strong.” She shimmered and whispered. “When I left you for dead, I thought nothing would ever touch me again. But you’re with me now. Nothing can touch us, my husband.”
For three days they remained in the eternal space where there was nothing else in the world but them.
And then they came home.
The rock Alexander bought her was a one-carat VVS diamond set in four smaller diamonds in beveled white gold. It was a remarkable ring, and she showed it off to everyone in the hospital until Carolyn said, “Do you have any idea how much he must have spent on that?”
The military watch and the new boots Tatiana had bought him cost her fifty-one dollars. She thought she was a bit reckless and had spent too much. When she got the ring appraised during lunch, she found out it was valued at twenty-two hundred dollars. She burst into tears right at the jeweler’s.
Back home she begged Alexander to take it back. “We’re saving for a house,” Tatiana said. “We lived through Leningrad. You may be leaving your job. We can’t spend twenty-two hundred dollars on a ring!”
“It’s a diamond for you, for our tenth wedding anniversary. And I’m not leaving my job.”
“I don’t need diamonds, Shura, you know that. But you have to leave Balkman.”
“We’re not talking about this! I don’t understand—did I actually marry a woman who thinks the ice her husband bought for her is too big? It’s a gift, Tatiana. I will remind you again, eleven years later, that in this country, when you get a gift, you open it and say thank you. Take the f*cking thing back if you want, but don’t speak about it again to me.”
“Don’t be upset with me. Don’t take your stress out on me!”
“Too late.”
The oasis was gone, the life was back.
Dudley of Montana
On Wednesday, the day after they returned, Alexander was nailing down the subflooring in the Schreiner house. The boards were warped and had come loose. His mouth was full of nails, and the hammer was in his hands. He needed to get new floor guys. This subflooring was so subpar. It would usually warp right before the final inspection. Where did Balkman get these crews from?
Steve came to see the progress of the house with Dudley by his side. “How was your time off?” he asked. “Where did you go?”
Alexander glanced back, his mouth full of nails.
Dudley was scrutinizing his bare arms. It was over a hundred degrees and Alexander was wearing only a sleeveless football tank; all the people he worked with had long seen and gotten used to his scars and his tattoos. Alexander spit the nails out of his mouth, right next to Dudley’s feet. He stood up, his hand gripping the hammer. “Grand Canyon,” he said. He certainly wasn’t going to tell them he spent three days in a tent with her. Silently he raised his eyes to Dudley, who raised his eyes to Alexander.
“Nice tattoos you got there, Captain,” Dudley said quietly.
“Steve,” Alexander said, “did you bring the glass for the window like I asked?”
After lunch Steve came by with the glass for the window. Dudley wasn’t with him.
“Are you coming to our Fourth of July party?”
“I don’t know. Tania is working.” He was eating his sandwich and trying to read the paper.
“What’s wrong, man?”
But Alexander knew what Tatiana had known: once said, things could not be unsaid. “Nothing.”
Steve persisted. “What’s up? You’ve been acting very odd these last few weeks. What did I do?”
“You know what, I’m having my lunch. I don’t want to talk about it now.”
“Is there anything to talk about?”
“Yes.”
“Well, come on then, let’s clear the air.”
Alexander threw out the rest of his sandwich. “Steve, did you tell Amanda I had it off with one of the flossies you invited to the Ho?”
Steve laughed. “No, no, she misunderstood. Is that what this is all about?”
“She misunderstood?”
“Yeah, it was just a joke. Manda has no sense of humor.”
“Amanda thought it was pretty serious when she told a pretty serious Tatiana.”
“Sorry about that. It was a joke. I didn’t mean to upset Tania.” He shrugged. “But I know she saw right through it, she couldn’t have been upset for long.”
“What kind of f*cking joke is that?”
“Remember that tootsy? She told you for twenty bucks she would go into the room with you? And I told you for twenty more she’d take it up the—”
“Stevie, we were drunk, but that’s no misunderstanding. Amanda told Tania I went into that room.”
“I must have not made myself clear.”
“You think?”
Steve laughed. “What are you getting in a twist about? You want me to talk to Tania? Bring her by. I’ll tell her it was just a gag.”
“No.” Alexander threw the newspaper in the trash, and stood up from the wooden plank. “And you know what else, Steve-o—I don’t give a shit about the friends you make with out-of-state prison freaks, but I better never find out you’re talking to one of them about my wife. If you want to talk to them about available women, talk about your girlfriend.”
“What did you just say?” said Steve, squinting. “I think I must have misheard.”
Alexander stepped closer. “Don’t ever speak to him—or anyone—about my wife. Do you understand what I’m telling you? Am I making myself clear now?”
“Oh, come on, Dudley’s a good guy.”
Obviously still not clear.
“He’s a soldier like us,” Steve went on. “He fought in a war, just like you, used to plenty of women—just like you. He doesn’t know Tania from Eve, or care. Come for a drink with us, get to know him. He’s a lot of fun.”
Alexander was walking away when he said, “No.” And never again, he wanted to add. It might take a while for Steve to get it, but finally he’d get it. And then he’d leave Alexander alone and Alexander could keep his job. That’s what he kept hoping for.