It came with a visit from Vikki.
Many people called with sympathy, with misgiving. Many people called with advice, with consolation. Francesca cooked dinner for Alexander and the children for weeks. Shannon, Phil, Skip, Linda all took care of Alexander’s business. After Amanda had left him, Shannon thought he would never rebuild his life, but soon he had found a woman named Sheila with two kids of her own, who’d been left by her husband. She moved in, they combined their families, were given a wholehearted seal of approval by Tatiana, who thought Sheila was almost the woman Francesca was, and now Sheila helped Tatiana by picking her kids up from school, driving them to dance, to baseball, taking them to her house to play. Everyone was solicitous; they all helped out.
Vikki didn’t do any of that.
Ordo Amoris
Vikki had been out of touch for months, traveling in Europe. She flew in from Leonardo DaVinci in Rome to Sky Harbor in Phoenix by way of JFK in New York. Vikki rented a car, and drove north on Pima and made a right on Jomax. Vikki stormed through the faux-gilded gates, through the large square stone courtyard with the paths and the trees and the fountains, sank down at their white kitchen table, threw her arms down, threw her head down, and wept.
Alexander, in his suit, having just come home from work, and Tatiana, in a short fashionable checkered silk dress—the modern fad having finally caught up with her clean look and long, unsprayed hair—both stood and watched Vikki’s inexplicable sorrow, staring first at her and then at each other in such troubled apprehension that Tatiana could not even go and put her arm around her closest friend. It was Alexander who patted Vikki’s back and got Vikki a cup of coffee and a smoke, and stood by her until the slow motion deafening moment ended. Vikki calmed down enough to speak. She said she had called Tom to wish him a happy birthday, and heard what happened. In a strident voice, over and over, she kept repeating that her husband would help Anthony, would find Anthony…
“He’s trying, Vikki,” said Alexander pacifically. “He’s doing all he can.”
“Tom is CCC, Alexander, he knows everything.”
“He doesn’t know this.”
“They have men crawling through that jungle. If anyone can find him, Tom can.”
“I suppose. He’s had men looking for him for four months.”
Four months!
It was dinner time. The children ran in, climbed all over Aunt Vikki, who calmed down, even smiled. Tatiana fed everyone, Alexander liberally poured the wine. After the children went to play, the adults discussed the possibilities.
A bald fact remained: Anthony wasn’t on assignment when he vanished. He was on leave. Unless foul play or AWOL was involved, men didn’t vanish while signed out on leave thirty miles away down a straight road in a safe town filled with U.S. servicemen.
Vikki looked like she had something to say about that.
She looked like she had something to say about a whole manner of things. But not looking at Tatiana, she said nothing, and they, not looking at her, asked her nothing.
They didn’t speak to each other as they got ready for bed. Tatiana read, Alexander went outside their patio for his last smoke of the night. In bed they stayed quiet. Her tight mouth told him more than he wanted to know. Sidling toward her, Alexander bumped his head against her arm.
“Shh. I’m trying to read.” She leaned over and kissed his hair. Didn’t look at him, though. Alexander thoughtfully rubbed his face, remaining at her shoulder. Vikki’s reaction to Anthony’s disappearance was not Francesca’s reaction to Anthony’s disappearance, and Francesca had spent fifteen years feeding Anthony and driving Anthony and watching Anthony play with Sergio—who had enlisted to fight in Southeast Asia himself, until he found out he was sick with lymphoma and couldn’t go. (Now he was in remission—and home.)
Alexander bumped his head against Tatiana’s arm again.
“I’m. Trying. To. Read.”
Pulling down the sheet covering her, Alexander gathered her nipple into his fingers, nuzzling his face against her breast.
Tatiana put down her book.
After he made love to her, after her last oh Shura, after turning off the lights, Tatiana said quietly into the hollow of his throat, “It’s because Vikki doesn’t have a child of her own. That’s why she’s so overwrought. Think how far back she and Ant go. She’s known him his whole life, from the moment he was born at Ellis.”
“I know that,” said Alexander, rubbing her back. He could not have this conversation with Tania. He didn’t know if he could have it with Vikki.
Alexander waited until he was sure Tatiana was asleep; she still fell asleep in the crook of his arm—either facing him like now as a vestige of their long-ago Luga tent, or spooned by him as a vestige of their long-ago Deer Isle twin bed—and then quietly disengaged, threw on his long johns and went outside.
Alexander found Vikki on the covered patio in the back, smoking.
Vikki Sabatella Richter, at nearly forty-seven, remained what she had always been—a remarkable, striking woman. Dark, tanned, lean, with long hair, long neck, long arms, long graceful coltish legs that tonight were crossed and bare. Her ankles were tapered, her toe-nails painted red like her fingernails. She wore lots of makeup, lots of jewelry, she smelled of heady perfume and operas and late nights out. She was the dramatic, full-breasted, dark-haired, dark-eyed friend that was too attractive for most girls to be friends with. Most girls were always in Vikki’s tall shadow.
Alexander had known Vikki for nearly a quarter-century. They were old friends. But now for the first time Alexander looked at Vikki as he had not looked at her before. He looked at her as a man might look at a woman. And this woman was sitting on his porch, sunken and shrunk into her drink and her cigarette, and her hair was unbrushed and her makeup smeared around her eyes. To the man in him this arresting woman looked as if she were fracturing from her broken heart.
“It’s so nice, here, Alexander,” she said in her smoky voice. Even the mournful voice was redolent of drink and too many late cigarettes. “I’ve always loved it here. It really is like magic.”
“Yes, it’s good.” He lit his own late cigarette. They smoked and listened to the wind. The lights were always on in the twinkling valley, as if it were Christmas every night. There was great comfort in the big house, in the taupe and azure desert, in the silence of the mystic mountains.
“Are you fretting?” Vikki asked. “Can’t sleep? I’m not surprised. I have something, if you want. I can’t go to sleep myself when I’m frantic. I took one earlier. I’ve got maybe thirty not so good minutes left.”
“No, I don’t need anything,” Alexander said. “It’s been months for us. This is fresh only for you.”
She was quiet, and then she was crying again, crying like her heart was being cut out. Alexander wanted to say shh but his throat failed him for a moment. “What’s going on, Vikki?” he whispered.
“Oh, Alexander,” she said.
Oh, Alexander?
Minutes passed.
With a great inhale of breath, he spoke. “Vikki,” he said. “I talk to your husband three times a week to find out if he has any news about Ant. I need you to tell me”—Alexander drew another breath—“is there anything Richter suspects that might prevent him from helping me fully and with his whole heart?”
Through her barest mouth, Vikki whispered, “No. Not a thing.”
“You said earlier, my husband knows everything.”
“Not this.”
Teary minutes dripped by. “I’m very sorry, Alexander. I can’t look at you in my shame. Please don’t hate me.”
“Vikki, the day I judge you will be a sorry day for me at the gates of hell.” He tried not to show his disapproval, his displeasure.
“Do you think Tania saw through me?”
“Now there’s a judge for you. But I think in this one instance, she didn’t.”
They sat.
Crying again, Vikki said, “For so many years I pretended so well.”
“You certainly did.” Alexander shook his head in dismay. “You both did. How in the world did you do it?”
When she was silent, Alexander, distressed by her non-answer, turned to her, only to be even more distressed by the sight of Vikki sitting with her long arms draped in a cross supporting her rocking body. Alexander knew something about this pose of anguish. He turned his whole chair to face her. “All right. Calm down.” He paused, lightly patting her. “Vikki, what were you thinking? I don’t understand how you of all people could have let it happen.”
Vikki collected herself, carefully chose her words. “I didn’t let it happen. I fought against him since he turned seventeen.”
“Seventeen? Oh my God, Vikki.”
“He simply wouldn’t take no for an answer. I said to him from the very beginning, Ant, what the hell are you thinking? Have you completely lost your mind? And he said—yes.”
Alexander closed his eyes. Seventeen! Vikki stopped speaking.
“Don’t be afraid of me,” Alexander said, with a miserable sigh, squeezing Vikki’s hands. “I’m not Tania. I was once a teenage boy myself, and I’m still a man. As a man, I understand. As a teenage boy, I understand. Just—tell me what happened.”
“For over a year I steadfastly fought against him, is what happened.” Vikki spoke in a voice so low as if the mountains should not hear. “At first I was shocked—like you; when I realized how serious he was, I tried to talk him out of it. I didn’t even know why I had to point out to him the reasons against it, they were so numerous and insurmountable. Certainly I don’t have to point them out to you or to the woman who is going to feel like I’ve committed an unspeakable sin. However, Anthony saw nothing, understood nothing, cared about nothing. To say that he was persistent and utterly indifferent to each and every one of my persuasive arguments would be a flagrant understatement. He was relentless.”
“Shh,” said Alexander. “Slow, and quieter, Vikki.”
“I surrendered right after his high school graduation, the summer before he left for West Point. You bought him his truck, and a brand new guitar that year, remember? Oh, he liked his truck and he played a fine guitar. Played the guitar like he was ringing a bell, as they say. He sang a fine tune—“Jailhouse Rock” performed Anthony style. He sang me songs in English, Russian, Spanish and even my Italian!” Tears falling down her face, Vikki sang for Alexander the way Anthony once sang for her. “‘O Sole Mio/sta ’nfronte a te/the Sun, my own sun/is in your face.’ He sang me, ‘I will give my very soul/just to kiss you.’ He sang me ‘Cupido, cupido prego’…and your very own ‘Dark Eyes’—yes, ‘Ochi Chernye’ was his specialty!” Vikki exclaimed. “‘Ochi chernye/ochi strastnye/ochi zhguchie/i prekrasnye…’” She faded off. “He was so multi-lingual.” She broke a piece off her smoky singing voice and choked on it. “Yes,” she said, nodding, “he had quite an arsenal, your son. And for a year he kept bringing all his weapons. No harm, he said. He was going away in a few months. He was not a child, he was almost eighteen—as if that were the only problem—and now we were two adults! We knew what we wanted—one long weekend at the Biltmore to sate his hunger and appease my curiosity. I said to him surely he didn’t need a whole weekend and he replied that yes—he did.” She shook her head. “On fire, I tell you,” she whispered. “He became impossible to refuse, to refute, to resist. And so…”
Alexander remembered Anthony from that summer before he left for West Point sitting alone outside on the moon deck, strumming his guitar, nearly naked in the Arizona 115-degree heat, singing “Ochi Chernye” over and over. Alexander and Tatiana had said quietly to each other that the girl must have been something else.
Tonight he shook his incredulous head. “You stopped resisting,” he said to Vikki, lighting another cigarette. “Feel free to move forward through this part.”
Vikki nodded. “I stopped resisting. Queen Victoria would have stopped resisting.” Seeking relief from visceral memory, her arms crossed over her torso, her body folded over her crossed legs. “Do you want to hear what happened with us after?”
Alexander shuddered. “No. The rest I know.”
“Do you?” But Vikki didn’t say it with surprise. She said it as in, no, you don’t.
Alexander said he did. “Many years ago,” he said, “when I was even younger than Ant, I found myself in a similar situation with one of my mother’s friends, who was about the same age as you had been—thirty-nine. I was barely sixteen. She was my first, and she was great, but once I got a taste of it, I wanted all the girls. Needless to say it lasted just one summer with her.”
Vikki studied her hands. “Well, I wasn’t Anthony’s first.” They both didn’t know what to say.
Alexander stared at her, realizing something. “Vik, you moved here in ’58 and then suddenly moved back to New York in ’61. That August, as I remember. When Ant went to West Point.”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t—you didn’t move back…for him, did you?”
“I thought you knew the rest?”
“Obviously—less well than I thought.”
“Alexander!” Vikki whispered. “No one could lay a hand on that boy without falling completely under his spell. Certainly not a thirty-eight-year-old woman who had traveled the world over, who had seen and loved and endured she thought everything. He made me lose all reason.” Vikki shuddered. “He didn’t win my heart. He took my heart.” She lowered her chin into her chest. “But he was eighteen.”
“Not answering my question, Vik.”
“I am,” she replied. “I am answering your question.”
Alexander shook his head. His own Svetlana had been heartbroken but not as brave. She had wanted something more from him that he did not have and could not give. When he moved on, she didn’t persist. He could only imagine how his own son treated the woman in front of him. He didn’t know what to ask next. “Did you…see him again?”
“Yes,” she replied. “When he had his weekend pass, he would come to New York and stay with me.”
“Until when?”
“Until he left for Vietnam,” said Vikki.
That was the jaw-dropping thing.
“You continued to see each other for four years?” Alexander said, astonished.
“Yes. Don’t know everything, do you? Our casual weekend at the Biltmore lasted a little longer than we expected. I don’t know how we kept it hidden from you, from Tania. From Tania particularly.”
Alexander asked (having to ask!), “Ant didn’t end it?”
“He didn’t end it,” said Vikki, her voice cracking, her demeanor crushed, “because I acted like there was nothing to end. I was just a freewheeling gal. Anytime he wanted to get together, we got together. When he didn’t, we didn’t. No pressure either way. No promises, not a single pledge for tomorrow. Just fun with us. From beginning to end, nothing else but fun.”
Alexander’s chair was no longer facing Vikki. He certainly wasn’t. His elbows were on his knees, his head was down. The cigarette dangled out of his mouth.
“I won’t lie to you,” Vikki said. “There was some fun. New York in the 1960s for a fledgling man and his tour guide. New York is a city for all seasons, for all lovers. Even dead end lovers like us. And, I didn’t fool myself for a second, Alexander,” she said. “No one knew better than I what a dead end we were. I’m 20 years older than him!” she cried. “When he would be 40, still a young man, I would be 60! When he would be your age now, still virile and strong, I would be 70! I’m older than his mother, for God’s sake! His mother and I—I can’t look her in the face. This is shameful. It’s degrading for me to explain to you.”
“No need to explain anymore.”
“I didn’t want him to think anything he could do would hurt me,” Vikki went on. “I know how frightening that is for a young boy just starting out. Last thing he needed. So I pretended I was casual toward him, to let him have his young life, the life he needed to have and deserved to have, knowing that eventually he would find someone to marry, someone to have children with. He could not have that with me.”
“After all,” said Alexander, “you are already married.”
“That’s right. To his commanding officer.” She didn’t look at Alexander when she spoke.
“What did Ant want, Vikki?” Alexander asked quietly.
“What do you think, Alexander?” said Vikki. “He wants what you have. What you’ve had your whole life.” She looked like she was in a suffering haze. “He could not have that with me. I am many things, but I know my limitations—and he knows them, too.” Her hands were trembling. “And—my sham marriage gives me a permanent air of respectability so I don’t have these complications in my life. It’s much simpler that way. Never any explanation for the lack of anything on my part. Life for weekends at the Biltmore is all Vikki is capable of.”
Alexander was listening and wished he weren’t. “Answer me,” he said. “What did Anthony want?”
“Oh, look,” Vikki said, with fake dismissiveness, “you know how the young are. He wanted his cake, he wanted his fun, his Biltmores, his strolls down the Hudson. Sure, he said he wanted me. He wanted all the girls. He wanted everything. And why not? He had everything.” She wept. “Everything.”
Every stone tile in the deck flooring was being examined by Alexander.
“I thought for sure he’d be finished with me after a month, after six months, a year. But, no, he kept coming back,” Vikki said, wiping her face. “Until he graduated—and then without a backward glance left for Vietnam. I said to him, it’s a good thing we were just having fun, Antman. Makes it easier for you to go. Thank you for having a good time with me. Thank you for the moonlight waltzes you and I have never had, thank you for the promises we never made, for the sun that didn’t shine above our heads. Aren’t you glad you’re not breaking my heart? Aren’t you glad now, when you are leaving, that you’re not in love with me?” Vikki’s face was in her hands.
Alexander sat with her a while. But there was really nothing more to say.
When he got up, he said, “Vikki, you might think this one over a little more carefully. The parents may be forgiven for being blind fools, but I’m telling you, this kind of thing is very difficult to hide from a husband.”
Vikki waved him off. “Alexander, you know better than anyone that, unlike you, Tom has been a terrible husband. A good man, a bad husband.”
“Even terrible husbands see things like this.”
“Yes, well, when the husband is in Vietnam since 1959, coming back stateside only twice a year, and bleeding U.S. Army since 1941, I know he can’t see anything. I haven’t seen Tom in two years. I hadn’t spoken to him in six months. Had it not been his birthday, I never would’ve called. Certainly he didn’t call me to tell me about Ant; and why would he? I wouldn’t worry about it. He knows nothing.” She paused. “Are you going to tell Tania?”
“I don’t know,” Alexander replied. “I don’t want to tell her. But for twenty-eight years I’ve had a hard time keeping anything from my wife.” Vikki looked away and Alexander looked away, collecting the glasses, throwing out their butts. “You think now is the time to improve my game?”
He said good night to her.
In stealth, with calm breath, he came back to bed, listening for Tatiana’s breathing.
“I’m awake,” she said.
He sighed. “Of course you are.”
She turned to him and they lay silently, their arms intermingling.
“You went to talk to her?”
He nodded, searching her face for a frame of mind.
“Does she know where Ant is?”
“No.” Alexander brought her closer. “I didn’t ask.”
Tatiana lay her ear on his chest, listening minutely to his heart. “Did you ask her…did she tell you things you didn’t want to hear?”
“She told me things I didn’t want to hear.”
Alexander told Tatiana about Vikki and Anthony.
After he was done, Tatiana was silent and when she spoke, she spoke very slowly. “Suddenly, Dasha not seeing what was right in front of her nose is easier to understand, isn’t it? And they didn’t hide it—like we didn’t. They left it everywhere for us to see—and I see it everywhere now.” She put her hands over her face for a moment. “My friend Vikki has always been a spirited gal,” she said then. “When I first met her she was crying because her first husband was coming back from war and she didn’t know how to tell her lover, whom she had not even told she had a husband. She was unfaithful to her first, she was unfaithful to her last, and to all the boyfriends in between. She fell for Richter—she always wanted to fall for a war hero—and married him despite all sense and reason. Certainly he has not done right by her in return, and I won’t speculate on the chicken or the egg question. My opinion is,” said Tatiana, “that she chose him to marry exactly because she knew she was always going to be the mistress and not the wife with him. The role suits her.” Tatiana paused. “And here’s my small solace to us: Vikki has had beaus in Africa, in Europe, in Asia, in Australia. She has traveled far and wide, having fun with the boys.” Tatiana blinked unhappily. “It wasn’t until she cried at my table today that I knew—of all the parasailing, passing fancies that have come and gone, Anthony is the one boy she cannot forget.”
Facing each other, they lay in their bed. Quietly nodding, Tatiana cupped her hand over Alexander’s face. “I know well the spell of those songs of love,” she whispered.
He moved closer to her, spooling his arm under her neck, so he could feel her large warm breasts press soft against his bare chest, for comfort, for compassion.
The next morning over breakfast, the first thing an ashen-faced, tear-streaked Vikki said to them, after the children had gone to school, was, “Alexander, did you tell her?”
Alexander and Tatiana exchanged a look. “I told her,” he said.
Vikki nodded. “Well, now, there is something I have to tell the two of you that I don’t know how to tell Tom. As you can imagine, there are a couple of reasons why he might not be as understanding as you, Alexander.”
“I’m not as understanding as Alexander,” Tatiana said grimly.
“I know you are not,” said Vikki. “Because you’re not a sinner. I’m sorry. It’s inexcusable and I don’t know what to say to you. We will spend the next decade fixing this and figuring it out, and I know we’ll be all right—because you have forgiven worse than this.” All three of them lowered their heads into their coffees. “But right now,” Vikki said, “we have to find our boy.”
They agreed. They had to find their boy.
From her pocket Vikki pulled out a letter. “I got this four months ago from Anthony. This is partly why I’ve been hiding out in Europe. I wasn’t about to share it with anyone, and I don’t want to share it with you now. This is going to be hard for you to hear, this is going to be hard for me to read. If Anthony is ever found, this is going to be hard for him to know you’ve heard. And it is absolutely impossible for my husband—who loves Ant—to ever see, to ever know about. Unfortunately, now that Anthony is missing, there are some things in this letter you must know.” With her shaking hands she unfolded it. “I’m going to cry. Can you take it?”
“We can’t take it,” said Tatiana, grasping Alexander’s forearm. “Read your letter, Vikki.”
Vikki flinched as she started to read, flinched as if she were being slapped—with the very first word.
Gelsomina!
In the hope of quieting your worries about me, worries I know you’ve carried for years, I’m writing you now. Vietnam is not the place to do much soul-searching (is Italy?), which is perfect for me since as you know I don’t like to trouble myself with that, and here, who’s got the time? I like to drink and smoke and party with the girls, as you say. No one was more surprised than me when north in Hué, near the Perfume River, I had unexpectedly found what I had been searching for. And now you’re the first and the only to know—I got married. My Vietnamese bride speaks a little English, which is good because I do not speak Vietnamese. She is young, she is a white swan on her bike and we are expecting a baby.
Vikki had to stop reading. Tatiana and Alexander had to stop listening. While Vikki tried to calm herself, Alexander scrutinized an intense and intently concentrating Tatiana. He saw by her motionless face, by her slightly parted, barely breathing mouth and her unblinking, completely transparent stare that she was not listening for heartbreak, or Grand Guignol, but for some other vapors to pass through.
Barely composed, her voice already breaking ahead of the remains of the letter she obviously knew by heart, Vikki resumed:
I thought you might like to know this—you were always so anxious about my life and my choices, where I was and wasn’t going, what I was and wasn’t doing. I kept telling you I already had a mother, but you just weren’t satisfied in the role you had. You wanted expanded duties. So in the interest of full disclosure, that’s why I’m telling you what’s happened to me here, so far away from you.
It’s been four years since I last played guitar for you, sang “Malaguena Salerosa” for you—“Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps” you sometimes think of me when the radio plays “The Rain, The Park & Other Things.”
“Traces.”
“Grazing in the Grass.”
And “Jean.”
We had our blissful years, you and I, but it’s all over now, Baby Blue. You were a “Spooky Wild Thing” and I’d been a fool—and so young—intoxicated with the Central Park troika rides under the big yellow moon and the palo verdes outside our fogged-up Biltmore windows. You kept telling me we never had a future—and you were right. I had been dreaming about “la luna ché non c’e.” Remember we talked about St. Augustine? About something he called “Ordo Amoris.” The “order of love,” or “just sentiment.” He said true virtue and true love for human beings were defined as every object being accorded the precise degree of love that was appropriate to it, that it deserved.
You and I were always out of balance on that one. I’m lucky to have found it with Moon Lai. I now have what you always wanted for me—what you kept saying I wanted for myself: to be married, to have a child, to have real love.
But I’m still in the heart of darkness, my time here is not over yet, and just in case this is the last letter I ever write you, know this: There was once a time I believed that what I felt for you was real, no matter how imperfect. There was once a time I believed what I felt for you was Love. “Vy sgubili menya/ochi chernye.” Now I find myself grateful that you always knew the difference, being so much wiser. Thanks for steering me clear of the lie of you and me that had felt so much like truth.
Ti amavo e tremo.
Anthony
Not Vikki, not Tatiana, not Alexander were able to lift their eyes. Vikki cried as she kissed Anthony’s letter and pressed it to her chest. Tatiana was so deeply chin down, she looked as if she could’ve fallen asleep. And Alexander, his eyes blackened with the impossible permutations of what he had just heard, was trying to make sense of the nonsensical. When Tatiana’s eyes looked up at him, they were no longer crystal, but chernye with stradania, occluded with suffering.
He had a day’s work and an evening full of his children to live through but at night in their garden, in the back, in private, Alexander and Tatiana both paced like caged tigers. Frantically they tried to piece together the fragments of a puzzle they could not understand.
Anthony had gotten married! Anthony married a Vietnamese girl who was pregnant. And then Anthony disappeared. Could he have gotten his head so crazed that he ran into the Ural Mountains with his pregnant wife and abandoned his men, his commander, his duty, his Military Code of honor, his country?
Could Anthony have betrayed the United States for a Vietnamese girl named Moon Lai?
“No,” said Anthony’s adamant feral mother, a vehement Panthera leo. “His whole life that child has had only one example of how to be a man, and that has been yours. He is your son, Alexander,” said Tatiana. “We did not stay in Lazarevo in 1942, we did not stay on Bethel Island in 1948, both times when we had everything to lose. Anthony did not run into the Ural Mountains with her. Something else happened to him.”
How deeply Alexander and Tatiana bowed their heads. That’s what he had been afraid of. Anthony was a West Point graduate. He was a captain in Special Forces, in MACV-SOG, the elite of the elite. SOG operated separately from regular operations and in secrecy, both commando and long-range recon, reporting straight to the top. SOG was the tip of the sword. There were 500,000 U.S. troops in Southeast Asia, of which 2000 were Special Ops soldiers, of which Ant was one of only 200 strike-force ground troops. This West Point man, this soldier, their son could not have gone AWOL. It was simply impossible.
“You sometimes call Vikki Gelsomina,” Alexander said, hoping she did not hear the resignation in his voice.
“Her sainted grandmother Isabella, who raised her, called her that. It means jasmine,” Tatiana said. “Only people who love her call her that. But what’s that in your voice?”
“Oh God.” Mystified, Alexander raised his eyes to her. “Well, why would Ant marry someone else then?”
“Because Vikki is married to Tom Richter,” Tatiana said. “And Anthony knows his place. But a long time ago, your one word to me was Orbeli. I had asked you not to leave me without a word, and you didn’t. You gave me Orbeli. Moon Lai is Anthony’s one word to us. Across the miles, to another woman, it’s as inscrutable as Orbeli, as infuriating, as meaningless—and as fraught with meaning as Orbeli. It’s unforgivable—just like what you had done to me, since you knew I didn’t know what Orbeli meant because I did not know the Hermitage director’s name. That cursed curator with his crates of art.”
“Yes,” said Alexander. “The art was Orbeli’s sole passion. He sent it away to save it.”
“All very well and good. It wasn’t exactly,” said Tatiana, “coordinates to your location in Special Camp Number 7 in Sachsenhausen.” She smiled lightly. “Well, Moon Lai is Anthony’s voice from the wilderness. Moon Lai is Anthony’s Orbeli.”
Alexander couldn’t smoke enough cigarettes in their stone garden. “And what are we going to do with this one cryptic word?” he asked. “The only person who can help us is the husband of a woman who got a letter from our son that the husband can never read.” He paused. “If I tell Richter what we know, he’s not going to help us, he’s going to find and kill Anthony himself.”
“Well, obviously, you don’t tell him everything you know,” said Tatiana. Then: “What are you looking all skeptical and forlorn for—now suddenly you’ve lost your ability to say whatever you have to? This is for your son. Call Richter, put on your brave and indifferent face and lie with all your heart.”
Alexander had stopped pacing and from afar was standing and staring at her.
She shook her head, looked away, fervently shook her head again, and said, “No. Absolutely not. Not under any circumstances. No.” She came to him, he came to her. Their arms wrapped around each other. She was still so small, so slender, pressed into his chest, under his chin, his arms still swallowed her.
“Oh, Tatia.”
“No, Shura.”
They were in their secluded nighttime garden. It was October 1969, it was cool. Alexander made a fire in a stone enclosure, and when it was blazing, they undressed and he laid her down in front of it on a thick quilted blanket. They were barricaded by flowers, the fire, a low adobe wall. This was their private Lazarevo place under the Perseus galaxy stars in Arizona. They made love; in tandem and in unison they used their lips on each other, and then Alexander sat against the low wall, his legs drawn up, and Tatiana poured herself into his lap, her legs drawn up, too, her arms around his neck, her bare navel against his bare navel, her heart against his heart, her mouth on his mouth. He held her flush to him, his hands on her hips, on her back, in her hair.
Afterward, he put on his army bottoms and she his army crew. She sat in front of the fire, and he lay down, his head in her lap. They sat without moving, without speaking while the fire burned down in the little garden.
“Babe, please,” Alexander said, “why are your tears falling on me?”
She stroked his forehead, his eyes, his stubble. “Oh my God,” said Tatiana. “Because I realize what you’ve been thinking. It’s not what I’m thinking. You want to go to Vietnam to find him. Please, no. No. I can’t make it, Shura. I can’t make it without you, too. I can’t.” A hollow cry followed her words. “I wish I had died in the Lake Ilmen woods! I should have died. No one could believe I had made it. Had I died, none of this would be happening!”
“Tania,” Alexander said, furling with unhappiness, “you’ve been telling your husband, your family, the Lake Ilmen story for thirty years—to give us strength, to give us hope, to give us faith. The two most important life lessons Anthony will ever learn are in that story. And now you’re telling me the life lesson in it was that you should have died?”
“Do you think Ant remembers the story of me in the Lake Ilmen woods?”
“How could he forget? He can’t forget.” He reached up to wipe her face. “Help me. Oh, give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish,” he whispered. “Tell me.”
Tatiana bent down, pressing her wet face to him, her wet lips to him, she kissed him, holding his head to her breasts. “The song of songs, which is ours,” she whispered. “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for his love is better than wine…” She straightened up. He lit a cigarette, not taking his eyes off her face, watching her lips move, her eyes glisten, inhaling nicotine, and through it her sweet breath, listening to her murmur to him about ravens and brothers.