Deck the halls with boughs of holly…
She is so beautiful his heart hurts. Her skin is porcelain cream and to match it she is wearing an ivory pencil skirt, ivory stockings, and a tight ivory cashmere cropped sweater with a shelf top. She is a sweater girl bar none. Her gold hair is pinned but down, flaxen and soft. She must be the only woman in the United States whose hair remains long and unteased, uncurled and unsprayed. She smells like musk and cinnamon and burnt sugar—from the cookies she’s been making—and her lips have gloss.
’Tis the season to be jolly…
Alexander imagines the ivory cream skin above her lace stockings. Tonight, despite that they haven’t talked—despite everything—when stopped at a light, he slips his bandaged hand under her skirt and glides it up under her open girdle to touch the adored bare sliver of her thigh with the tips of his fingers. Her skin is cold. They’re in his truck. She and Anthony are sharing the passenger seat. Tatiana was going to get in after Ant, but the boy said, no, no, I don’t get into any vehicle before my mother, you first, Mom, like always. So now she is next to Alexander, motionless like a block of ice. There are so many things crashing against Alexander’s chest that he has to take his hand away.
He drives in silence.
“How do I look?” she asks. They are on their way to Shannon and Amanda’s party. The season is full of them, joyful parties, one after another. Alexander wonders if Johnny is going to be there; he needs him for perfidy. He wasn’t able to reach him by telephone during the day. He wonders if he would get some points for keeping his truck chaste. Look, I didn’t let a floozy sit in my truck in which I take my family out on nights like tonight, that’s good, right? Keeping a truck faithful? Because that’s what you want to keep faithful.
“Fine,” he manages to reply, his hands like clamps around the wheel.
“Don’t listen to Dad,” says Anthony. “He never knows the right thing to say. You’re going to be the prettiest mom at the party.”
“Thank you, son.”
Alexander speaks. “Anthony, I’m going to tell you something. In 1941, when I met your mother, she had turned seventeen and was working at the Kirov factory, the largest weapons production facility in the Soviet Union. Do you know what she wore? A ratty brown cardigan that belonged to her grandmother. It was tattered and patched and two sizes too big for her. Even though it was June, she wore her much larger sister’s black skirt that was scratchy wool. The skirt came down to her shins. Her too-big thick black cotton stockings bunched up around her brown work boots. Her hands were covered in black grime she couldn’t scrub off. She smelled of gasoline and nitrocellulose because she had been making bombs and flamethrowers all day. And still I came every day to walk her home.”
Anthony laughs. “Well, you were smitten with Mommy back then, and I don’t think you want her to wear black stockings bunched at her ankles and to smell of nitrocellulose now, do you, Dad?”
“I’m saying it doesn’t matter, son.”
Tatiana wrapped her arms around herself and stared straight ahead.
Anthony suddenly peered at his mother, glanced at his father—and turned his face away. They all fell quiet. Alexander laid a patch on the road. What choice did they have?
Tra-la-la-la-LAA-la-la-la-LAAAAA.
At Shannon and Amanda’s house Tatiana went straight to the kitchen to help the girls, carrying out food trays, wine glasses, finger foods. There was some general oohing and ahhing over a stoic wife pulling needles out of her husband’s palms. “Are they shredded?” asked Shannon. “Are they absolutely shredded? Johnny-boy, come here and see what our Alexander has done. Oh, man, he won’t be able to hold a glass of beer for weeks!”
“Oh, come on,” said Johnny, drinking and grinning. “Not even a glass of beer? What’s he going to do on Friday nights?”
Alexander, holding a glass of beer at that very moment, said nothing. Johnny turned to Tatiana. “Um—how are you, Mrs. Barrington?” he said with grave solemnity. “May I just say, you’re looking especially fine this evening.” Johnny was always insipidly stilted when he talked to Tatiana. He told Alexander once that he was terrified of her because despite all the charming, polite, nice things he tried to say, she seemed to somehow see right through to the bone, to the a*shole that was buried deep underneath.
Alexander had laughed. “She doesn’t think you’re an a*shole,” he said. “I couldn’t have hired you if she thought so. She just thinks you’re a bit wild.”
“Yes,” said Johnny. “Wild in that a*shole kind of way.”
And so, tonight after he paid her a compliment, she eyed him with spectacular detachment and said, “Thank you, Johnny-boy. Have a late night Friday night?”
“No, no, ma’am, it wasn’t too bad,” said Johnny, glancing frightened at Alexander as if already sensing that he was once again being set up and shown up for being exactly the a*shole that he was, not knowing that it wasn’t him who was being set up.
Well. That was that. And that was too bad, because the poker poetry was good poetry and would have gone over well. And she would have believed it. She would have believed it because she wanted to believe it.
Your move, Alexander.
His next move was Tyrone, Johnny-boy’s really wild friend. Alexander would say he went with Tyrone to a strip club downtown. Very very very sorry. No poetry this time. Strip club and Tyrone were bad enough.
Tatiana didn’t dance with Alexander, didn’t talk to him, didn’t look at him.
He watched her from afar. When she wasn’t putting on a smiling face for the mingling Christmas crowd, Anthony was right, there was something vanquished in her demeanor. She didn’t look quite herself.
The music was plenty loud, Elvis Presley gyrated on the radio, exhorting the partygoers to be true, to love him tender, be his teddy bear, to not be cruel to a heart that was true…
Nat King Cole sang some Christmas music, played “Unforgettable,” played “Auld Lang Syne.”
Nat King Cole played “Nature Boy.”
Alexander was standing in one cluster in the living room, talking to a group of friends. Tatiana, with Anthony by her side, was standing nearby. “Oh, listen, Dad,” Anthony called over grimly. “Your favorite song.” In front of them was a patch of floor where couples were dancing pressed together. The tree was twinkling, the Christmas candles burned. And Nat King Cole sang of loving and being loved in return.
Alexander made his way over to her and said, “Let’s go home.”
He held the coat for her in front of Shannon and Amanda, who asked if everything was all right, and Shannon gave Alexander a tense non-glance into the plants. “Everything is wonderful,” Tatiana said to her hosts without a glimmer of a smile.
On the way home, it was Anthony who broke the searing silence by starting to sing…it’s lovely weather/for a sleigh ride together with you…Alexander leaned forward and shot Anthony a side look that said you better stop this second. Anthony stopped that second but not before he whispered, it’ll be the perfect ending/to a perfect day…
Alexander stayed outside, read the paper and smoked, and sat so long, he fell asleep on the bench. Waking up freezing and cramped, he went to bed and lay down beside her. He remembered them in Lazarevo, lying clamped together near the fire under the stars, searching for Perseus up in the galaxy. Her family was gone. His was gone. And fifteen and a half years later, in a miracle, in a dream, with divine grace, they lay unclamped in a home they had made for themselves after all they had been through, while she was in a nightgown, possibly wore underwear and a bra, possibly even a steel helmet and flak jacket, and he couldn’t come near her to find out, thinking of all the possible lies for last Friday and all the possible lies for the coming Wednesday.
Poker with Johnny
Till six in the morning—
Stayed out too late
Didn’t want to tell you
When I was half dead
In bed
Upset you for nothing
I’m sorry, I’m sorry
Was going to come clean
Spilled beer on my jeans
The cholla knows nothing
I’m sorry I’m sorry
But Carmen is waiting
For me at the Westin
—Poker with Johnny
Till six in the morning.