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16





Humiliation One


Amélia sat slumped back, caved in, all but submerged in the pillowy billows of the only easy chair in their apartment… with her legs crossed, forcing her skirt… which was about this long to begin with… up so far that when Magdalena came in, she wondered, at first, if it were a skirt or a shirt… She was disappointed to find Amélia in such a dejected state… disappointed to the edge of resentful. ::::::What have you got to be acting so self-absorbed about?:::::: Magdalena was counting on Amélia’s ever-cheerful, ever-clearheaded self to listen to her problems. She assumed a pose of her own. She perched herself in shorts and a T-shirt on the seat of a dinner table chair with a straight back. She unconsciously dramatized her superior claim to sympathy by jackknifing one leg and lifting it high enough to put the heel on the edge of the seat and hugging the knee with both arms as if it were the only friend she had left.

“No, that’s not true,” said Amélia. “We’re not in the same boat. You left him. He left me. You’re happy. I’m not.”

“I’m not happy!” said Magdalena. “I’m scared to death! If you had seen his face—I mean, mygod!”

Amélia shrugged with her eyebrows in a way that as much as said, “You’re trying to blow nothing up into something.”

“But his face—it was like some kind of—of—of—some kind of fiend’s! The way he started calling me ‘Bitch!—you bitch!’—to say that’s what he said doesn’t begin to—”

Amélia broke in, “And you’re so devastated, I guess you’re not going out with your ‘oligarch’ friend tonight?… Give me a break… Reggie didn’t even care enough to raise his voice with me. He was more like some boss calling in an employee and saying, ‘I’m sorry, but you’re just not the right fit for our organization. It’s not your fault, but we’re going to have to let you go.’ That’s the way Reggie put it. ‘I’m going to have to let you go. This just isn’t working out.’ Those were his actual words, ‘This just isn’t working out.’ After almost two years ‘this just isn’t working out.’ What the hell is ‘this,’ I’d like to know, and what is ‘working out’ supposed to mean? He also said, ‘It’s not your fault.’ Awww… geeee… that made me feel so much better. You know? After two years he comes to the conclusion that ‘this is not working out’ and it’s ‘not my fault.’ ”

::::::Damn it! The whole world doesn’t revolve around you, Amélia.::::::

Magdalena tried to put it back into orbit around herself. “And another thing, Amélia, I’m broke! He’s got my credit cards, my checkbook, my cash, my driver’s license—everything! I was lucky to have enough cash tucked away here to pay the locksmith. Cost a fortune!”

“What do you think he’s going to do—buy thousands of dollars’ worth of stuff with your credit card? Take the keys and steal your car? Break in here in the middle of the night? You already changed the lock. You think he’s so wild about you he’ll ruin his career just to get revenge? You’re pretty hot, but I haven’t noticed—” She dropped her thought. “So, anyway, who’s your oligarch friend tonight?”

“His name is Sergei Korolyov.”

“What’s he do?”

“I think he… ‘invests’? Is that the word? I don’t really know. But I know he collects art. He gave the Miami Museum of Art seventy million dollars’ worth of paintings and they changed its name to the Korolyov Museum of Art. Do you remember that? There was a lot about it on TV.”

She regretted laying it on that thick. Here’s Amélia in a state of shock about Reggie—and she has to tell her about what a star she has a date with in a couple of hours.

“I think I remember something about it,” said Amélia.

Silence… then Magdalena couldn’t resist, and so she went ahead and said, “Do you remember the night I was going to Chez Toi, and you lent me your bustier? Well, that was the night I met Sergei—or that was the night he asked me for my phone number. I met him once before… you know, along with all these other people… I guess that bustier wasn’t a bad idea! Don’t worry. I’m not going to ask you for it again. I mean, I don’t want him to think that’s what I wear every night, a bustier. But I could use your advice again.”

Amélia looked off in a distracted way. Obviously, she wasn’t going to jump at the idea of playing couturiere for Magdalena for some dazzling date again. Finally, without looking squarely at Magdalena, she said, “Where’s he taking you?”

“It’s a big party on—I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never seen it—you know Star Island? At somebody’s house.”

Amélia smiled… sardonically… “You’re too much, Magdalena. You just happen to go to dinner at a restaurant you never heard of called Chez Toi. Then you just happen to go to a big party at some place called Star Island at somebody’s big house. That’s only the most expensive real estate in Miami. Maybe Fisher Island—but there’s not much difference.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Magdalena.

Amélia stared at her for a moment. It was the sort of look Magdalena couldn’t interpret one way or the other. It was just a… steady stare. Finally Amélia spoke:

“Do you plan to give him some papaya tonight?”

This gave Magdalena such a jolt, she let go of her loving knee and put the foot on the floor just like the other one, as if preparing for fight or flight.

“Amélia!” she said. “What kind of question is that?!”

“It’s a practical question,” said Amélia. “Past a certain—when guys reach a certain age they just assume that’s part of a pleasant first date. ‘Aflojate, baby! Give it up!’ When I think of all the times I just did things because that was what Reggie expected… That’s what’s called a ‘relationship.’ When I hear that stupid word, I want to stick my fingers down my throat.”

“I’ve never seen you… so down like this before, Amélia.”

“I don’t know,” said Amélia. “I’ve never had anything like this happen before. That bastard!—but no, he’s not a bastard. Reggie, I would have gladly married him. I hope it never happens to you.”

By now, tears were beginning to roll down her cheeks, and her lips were trembling. Amélia—who had always been the strong and steady one around here! Magdalena was beginning to find the whole thing embarrassing. Sure, Amélia had been hurt ::::::I wonder what actually happened with her and Reggie?:::::: but she had always had too much going for her to cave in and pity herself like this. If she started actually crying, blubbering, boo-hooing, Magdalena wasn’t going to be able to take it. To just sit here and watch Amélia come to pieces—she had always admired Amélia too much for that. She was older, and better educated and more sophisticated.

Amélia snuffled back a lot of tears and pulled herself together. Her eyes were still leaking a bit, but she smiled in a perfectly natural way and said, “I’m sorry, Magdalena.” Tears welled up in her eyes again. ::::::Please hold on to yourself, Amélia!:::::: which she did, thank God. She smiled an only slightly teary smile and said, “This hasn’t been my best day, for some reason.” She gave a little laugh. “Listen, of course I’ll help you… if I can… In fact, why don’t you go look in my closet. I have this new black dress with a neckline like—” With her hands she pantomimed a V that began on either side of her neck and plunged to her waist. “It’s a little too tight for me, but it’ll fit you perfectly.”

Such weightlessness! Such extra-environmental vision! Such astral projection! Such bliss!

Not that Magdalena knew the terms extra-environmental vision and astral projection, but these were the two main components of the otherworldly exhilaration she felt. She had the feeling—but it was more than a feeling to her, it was very real—that she was sitting here in the creamy tan leather passenger seat of this glamorous sports car… and at the same time she was floating above the scene… having been astrally projected up here this high… and observing the incredible turn of Fate that now had Magdalena Otero, formerly of Hialeah, sitting this close to a man too dashing, too handsome, too rich, too much of a celebrity to have called her up and asked her out—but he had! He, Sergei Korolyov, the Russian oligarch who had given seventy million dollars’ worth of paintings to the Miami Museum of Art, he who had given the swellest dinner party she had ever been to, at the socially swellest restaurant in all of Miami, Chez Toi… he who was driving this car, which looked so expensive, and no doubt was so expensive—he was right next to her, at the wheel! She could see him and herself both from up here. She could see right through the roof. She looked all around… how many people were watching this, watching Magdalena Otero sitting in this hot car that looked like it was going eighty miles an hour just parked at the curb?

Well… not many, unfortunately. Nobody knew who she was. Here, Drexel Avenue, was her official address, but how many times had she actually slept here?

Whooooooosh—back she came from her astral cosmos just as quickly as she had beamed up to it.

And, of course, Sergei looked perfect in this setting. Quite in addition to his profile, his strong chin, the firm jawline without so much as a semblance of surplus flesh… there was also his hair. It was thick and deep brown with streaks of sun-bleached blond and swept back on the sides as if by an airstream… although in fact the two of them were inside the air-conditioned cocoon every sane driver in South Florida turned his automobile interior into. Blip—what about Norman and his open convertible? But Norman was insane!

Sergei glanced toward her—those eyes of his!—those gleaming mischievous blue eyes! A slight smile… Since neither of them had brought up an amusing subject, a tourist from Cincinnati might have called that little smile smug. That was by no means the word that occurred to Magdalena. Oh, no. Debonair, suave, sophisticated… those were more like it. And his clothes… so rich-looking… his jacket—cashmere?—so soft, she felt like burying her head in it… a lustrous white shirt—silk?—with a high, open collar made to be worn open… Of course, she was a number herself. Amélia’s dress with its plunging neckline… Now and again she caught Sergei stealing a peek at the inner curves of her breasts. She felt… hot.

When Sergei pulled away from the curb, the car’s engine barely made a sound. By now they were going north on Collins Avenue… not a lot of traffic… Condominium towers whipped past… on and on, a wall that kept any random passerby from being aware there was an ocean about two hundred yards to the east.

Magdalena kept racking her brain to come up with something… anything… interesting to talk to Sergei about. Thank God! Part of his sophistication was his ability to pull small talk out of thin air… no anxious silences…

Magdalena couldn’t remember going this far north on Miami Beach before. They must be getting close to where Miami Beach became part of the mainland.

Sergei slowed down and gave Magdalena the merriest of smiles. “Ahhh… we’ve just entered Russia. This is Sunny Isles.”

From what she could make out from the streetlights and the moonlight and the big plate glass windows lit up here and there in the tall buildings, it looked like standard Miami Beach to Magdalena… the same wall of towers east of Collins Avenue that monopolized the views of the ocean… and on the other side, west of Collins, old buildings, small buildings, huddled together for God knows how many miles.

Sergei slowed down even more and pointed toward that huddled mass and picked out a Low-Rent side street. “See that shopping strip?” he said. It wasn’t very imposing, not to anybody who had ever been in Bal Harbour or Aventura. “If you cannot speak Russian, you cannot buy anyzing in zose shops. Oh, I suppose you can point at zomzing and take out zome dollars to show zat you mean, ‘I buy?’ Zey are real Russians. Zey speak no Engleesh, and zey haf no desire to be American! It ees like being on Calle Ocho in Miami and valking into a shop, and you cannot speak Spanish. Zey haf abzolutely no eenterest to be ze ‘Americans,’ eizer…”

“But what’s that?” said Magdalena.

“What ees what?”

“That big sign. It looks like it’s up in the air floating by itself.”

Just beyond the shabby little shopping strip, a lurid sign blazed away in red, yellow, and orange neon: THE HONEY POT. In the darkness it didn’t seem to be connected to anything below. Sergei dismissed it with a shrug. “Oh, zat. I dohn’t knohw. I zink eet ees wonna zoze streep clubs.”

“For Russians?”

“No, no, no, no—for zese Americans. Russians dohn’t go to streep clubs. We like guuurls. Ze Americans get crazy over zeeze pornography. Nobody else goes zat crazy.”

“It’s all over the internet,” said Magdalena. “It’s something like sixty percent of all hits are for pornography. You’d be surprised how many prominent men become addicted to it. They’ll spend five, six hours a day watching it on the internet; they do a lot of it at work, in their offices. It’s sad! They ruin their careers.”

“Een ze office? How een ze office?”

“Because at home his wife and children are there.”

“How you knohw all zees?”

“I’m a nurse. I once worked for a psychiatrist.” Magdalena studied Sergei’s face for signs that he knew about Norman… Not even a hint, thank God. This little discourse on pornography—a triumph at last! She had proved it again… she wasn’t just a little number with a beautiful face and a hot body… he would have no choice, would he… he would have to take her seriously… and Amélia’s voice whispered into her inner ear, down the auditory canal, and set her tympanic membrane to vibrating: “Do you plan to give him some papaya tonight?”

It depended! It depended! Such decisions always depended!

Once they left Sunny Isles, heading farther north, the scenery became less and less like Miami Beach… Hollywood… Hallandale… “Now we enter the Russian heartland.” He chuckled, to show Magdalena he found that pretty amusing.

He turned off Collins Avenue onto a smaller highway that ran west. Magdalena had no idea where they were now.

“Tell me again,” she said. “The restaurant we’re going to is called…?”

“Gogol’s.”

“And it’s Russian?”

“Eet eez ferry Russian,” he said… with his suave smug or smug suave smile.

They headed west in the darkness… then came around a curve—and there it was, in a blazing backlit sign as lurid as the Honey Pot’s: GOGOL’S!… a porte cochere out front framed by a vast riot of nude nymphs rendered in a bas-relief deep to the point of hallucinatory: GOGOL’S!

Beneath it was a regular hive of valets, young, fair-skinned. Cars were pulling in and going out at a terrific rate… a regular throng of men and women going inside…

Sergei was joking with the valets in Russian. They knew Gospodin Korolyov very well. As soon as he and Magdalena walked in, a tall, hefty man—he must have been six-feet-five or -six—in a dark suit, a white shirt, and a navy tie, his remaining black hair combed straight back over his pate—rushed up and gushed with great enthusiasm, “Sergei Andreivich!” The rest was in Russian. The man seemed to be the owner or manager at the very least. Sergei said to him in English, “This is my friend Magdalena,” Thee sees my freend… The big man bowed slightly in a fashion Magdalena took to be “European.” The place was vast… Every square inch of wall space was covered in a deep-mauve (synthetic) velvet lit only by battalions of small downlights in an otherwise black ceiling. The deep mauve was a backdrop for every form of glitter a team of Russian decorators could get their hands on. A pair of staircases leading to a second level, no more than five feet above the first, had more extravagant curves than the ones at the Paris Opera. The banisters were inlaid with striations of polished brass. Gogol’s white tablecloths—a great flashing sea, thanks to the minute sequins somehow woven in… The small lamps on all the tables had mauve shades supported by flashing faux-crystal stems… At Gogol’s, wherever it was possible to attach glitter rims and fringes and trims and brims—they were attached. All these things were meant to create a flashing glamour within a rich but sedate mauve gloom… but they didn’t. They weren’t even gaudy. They looked prissy, dinky, finicky, fussy, and gussied up. The whole cavernous dining hall looked as though it had come out of Grandmother’s jewelry box.

A regular swarm of men, his age or older, gathered about Sergei. Were they loud! Were they drunk? Well, maybe it was just their way of saluting their beloved comrade, but they sure seemed drunk to Magdalena. They gave him big bear hugs. They cracked up, disintegrated, dissolved over every sentence that came out of his mouth, as if he were the greatest wit they had ever encountered in their lives. Magdalena would have given anything to have known Russian at that moment.

Sergei was no longer even trying to introduce her to these men as they came up. It was hard to introduce anybody who had you in a bear hug and was bellowing loud nothings into your ear. The only attention she got were lascivious looks of men lifting the lust in their loins all the way to their faces.

From all over the place came the deep manly laughter and the manly baritone cries of men… drunk. At the nearest table a big man, about fifty, if Magdalena was any judge, reared back into the middle of a banquette with a great grin and proceeded to down one, two, three, four shot glasses of something—vodka?—and then let out a great ahhhhh! His face was a blazing red, and his grin was as self-satisfied as any Magdalena had ever seen. He ground out a guttural roar of a laugh from somewhere deep in his gullet. He handed a shot glass full of whatever it was to the woman next to him… young or young-ish… it was hard to tell when a woman had her hair done up in a big bun in back, like Grandmother’s… she stared at the shot glass as if it were a bomb… Guttural roars all around…

Sergei managed to disengage himself from his admirers and motioned to Magdalena. The towering house hefty led them to a table. ¡Dios mío! It was a table for ten… and Magdalena could see what was coming. Eight men and women were already seated, and two empty seats remained… for Sergei and herself. As soon as they saw Sergei, they all rose to their feet with huzzahs and God only knows what else. Just as Magdalena feared, Sergei was not hereby escaping his noisy worshipful cluster… He was merely substituting a new one. She was not happy. She began wondering if Sergei had brought her here to show what a hotshot he was on his home grounds. Or maybe it was worse than that. Maybe he didn’t care if she was impressed or not. He just liked a nightly bath in all this adulation.

At least this time he introduced her to each Russian, Russian, Russian… a great clutter of consonants… She didn’t catch a single name. She felt like she was being buried in all the z’s and y’s and k’s and g’s and b’s. Eight Russian strangers… all looking at her, men and women, as if she were some alien curiosity. What do we have here? Do something… Say something… Entertain us… They were all yammering away in Russian. Directly across the table sat a blocky-faced man with a bald dome and veritable thickets of black hair, obviously dyed, sticking out wildly on each side below the dome line, culminating in muttonchops growing gloriously unkempt down to his jawbones. He seemed to be studying her face with a pathological intensity. Then he turned to a man two seats away and said something that left them both chuckling… in a way that indicated they were trying their best not to erupt into guffaws… over what?

On the menu the dishes were printed first in English, with curly Russian letters immediately below. Even in English, Magdalena scarcely recognized a single one.

A waiter materialized silently beside Sergei and handed him a folded piece of paper. Sergei read it and turned to her and said, “I must say hello to my friend Dimitri. Please excuse me. I’ll be right back.”

He said something to the others in Russian and rose and left the table with the waiter, who would lead him to “Dimitri.” Now Magdalena found herself with eight Russians she didn’t know, four men—in their forties?—and four women—in their thirties?—with fussy hot-roller-curled hairdos and “dress-up” dresses from some era gone by.

But mainly… there sat the man with all the sub-dome hair and the skin-crawling stare. Sergei had introduced him as some great chess champion. “Number five in the world back in the time of Mikhail Tal,” Sergei had confided behind his hand. None of it, including the great Mikhail Tal, meant anything to Magdalena—only the man with the explosive rim of infra-cranial hair. His name, if Magdalena had caught it correctly, was Something-or-other Zhytin. The way he stared at her unnerved her. She couldn’t take her eyes—or, rather, her peripheral vision—off him. She avoided looking right at his face. He was creepy and crude to the point of sinister. ::::::Sergei, hurry up! Come back! You’ve left me alone with these horrible creeps—or with one, at least. He looks creepy enough to fill a whole room full of creeps.:::::: He had his elbows on the table and his forearms wrapped around either side of his plate and his back hunched over so far his head was not even six inches above his enormous cache of food. He ate everything with a spoon, which he held like a shovel. He was cramming gobs of potatoes and some sort of stringy beef into that voracious maw at a spectacular rate. Hunks of meat the spoon couldn’t deal with he picked up with his fingers and gnawed at, glancing to this side and that side. He looked as if he were intent upon safeguarding his food from buzzards and dogs and thieves. Occasionally he lifted his head and flashed a knowing smile and dumped unsolicited comments—in Russian—upon the conversations around him. Dumped was the word. In Russian his voice sounded like a dump truck dumping a load of gravel.

Magdalena was fascinated… all too fascinated. The World’s Number Five chess player lifted his head to straighten out a conversation nearby and caught her staring at him. He stopped, his head still down low over his food—a mountainous hunk of stringy beef still on his spoon—and brought her up short with a big mocking smile and said in English, with an accent but fluently, “Can I assist you in some way?” Can I asseest you in zom vay?

“No,” said Magdalena. She was blushing terribly. “I was only—”

“What do you do?” The you do got buried beneath the two fingers he was sticking into his mouth in a game try to pull beef strings out from between his teeth.

“Do?”

“Do,” he said, flinging a string from his mug to the rug. “What do you do to get food, to get clothes, to get someplace to sleep at night? What do you do?”

In some way she couldn’t figure out, he was mocking her… or being just plain rude… or something. She hesitated… and finally said, “I’m a nurse.”

“What kind of nurse?” said the former Number Five.

Magdalena noticed that several people at the table were motionless. They had their eyes fixed upon her… the man there with the shaved head sitting next to a woman so obese that her huge costume jewelry necklace lay flat upon her bodice as if it were a tray… and the two women there with pillbox hats and hair netting from way back in the last century. They wanted to hear this, too.

“A psychiatric nurse,” said Magdalena. “I worked for a psychiatrist.”

“What kind of psychiatrist, a logotherapist or a pill therapist?” Magdalena had no idea what he meant, but his sly little twist of the lips and the way he narrowed one eye made her feel like he was merely trying to establish how ignorant she was about her own field. She looked about quickly. If only Sergei were back! With a wary voice she said, “What is a logotherapist? I don’t know that word.”

“You don’t know what a logotherapist is.” He said it not as a question but as a statement of fact. Now his tone was like a grade school teacher’s. It as much as said, “You’re a psychiatric nurse—who doesn’t know the most basic things about psychiatry. I guess we’d better start at the bottom.”

“A logotherapist ‘treats’ his patients”—treats was soaked in irony—“with talk… the ego, the id, the superego, the Oedipal complex, and all that… mainly the patient’s talk, not his. The logotherapist mainly listens… unless the patient is so boring his mind wanders, which I imagine must be very, very often. The pill psychiatrist gives his patients pills to increase the flow of dopamine and inhibit the reuptake and give them a synthetic peace of mind. Logos is Greek for ‘word.’ So which is the psychiatrist you work for?”

“Worked for.”

“Okay, worked for. Which was he?”

These questions were making Magdalena anxious. She couldn’t figure out why. The former Number Five wasn’t saying anything insulting or out of bounds. So why did she feel so insulted? She just wanted to pull out of it. She wanted to say, “Look, let’s talk about something else, okay?” But she didn’t have the nerve. She didn’t want to sound cranky in front of Sergei’s friends. Once more she swept Gogol’s glittering interior… begging Sergei to reappear. But there was no sign of him—and somehow she had to respond to the champion.

“Well, he did prescribe some drugs, but I suppose he was mostly the other… what you said.” The what you said was like flinching before the blow she knew was bound to come next.

“Good for him!” said the great chess player. He said it without any trace of a smile, as if he really meant it. Magdalena’s hopes rose—not her spirits, just her hopes. “A wise man! Logo is the way to go!” he continued. “I’m sure you’ll agree—right?—the talk therapists are the slickest extortionists that ever existed.” He drilled his eyebeams into her eyes and held her in place. There was no way she could get free.

“I don’t know what you mean…” ::::::Please! Somebody! Get me out of this! Get him off me!:::::: “Extortionist… ¡Dios mío! I can’t really see that…”

Now it dawned on her: The entire table had stopped talking and stopped eating and even stopped drinking vodka… in order to watch the champion torment her.

“You can’t really see that?” said the champion, as if that were a pathetic way to try to get out from under this. “All right, then, let’s start with… tell me what an extortionist is.” His eyes bored into hers more intently than ever. His voice insinuated that if she didn’t know the answer to that, then she had no education whatsoever.

Magdalena gave up. She folded completely. “I don’t know. I don’t even know how to say it. You tell me.”

This time he cocked his head and twisted his lips in a way that struck Magdalena and her sinking heart as openly contemptuous. “You don’t know.” Once more, not a question but a sad declaration of the obvious. “An extortionist is someone who says, ‘You do what I say, or I will see to it that you suffer in a way you cannot stand.”… I vill zee to eet zat you zuffer in a vay… “Your logotherapist spends the first few sessions making you believe that only he can save you from your depression or your fear or overwhelming guilt or compulsions or self-destructive impulses or paralyzing catatonia or whatever. Once he convinces you of that, then you’re his. You’re one of his assets. He’ll keep you coming until the day you’re cured… a day that never comes, of course… or you run out of money… or one day you die. That’s the psychiatrist you worked for, isn’t it. I don’t know how old your employer was, but if he’s old enough to have two generations of these poor people on his hook, he’ll be a very rich man for life. Of course, he’ll have to sit still for a lot of whining and utterly pointless cerebration—the patients all love to go on about the meaning of their dreams and all that… but I’m sure your employer thought about other things while they driveled on—his investment portfolio, a new car, a girl with no clothes on, a delivery boy who petrifies him—anything’s better than actually listening to these idiots’ logorrhea. Just keeping them in his pen, that’s all he has to worry about, turning them into lifers, making sure they don’t start thinking for themselves and getting… ideas. That pretty well describes your employer, right? Maybe you were and maybe you weren’t aware you were working for a learn-ed, genteel extortionist. But you were—am I not right?”

That got under Magdalena’s skin! He could have been talking about Norman and his star patient, Maurice! For an instant she was tempted to mention it—but she was damned if she was going to give him the satisfaction, this horrible chess champion. ::::::What does he think he’s doing? Playing with my head? He’s so horribly vile! vile! vile! vile!:::::: She was on the verge of tears, but she fought them back. She mustn’t give him the satisfaction of her tears, either.

“Right?” he said once more, this time in a warm, sympathetic tone.

Magdalena compressed her lips to keep them, this bunch of horrible Russians at the table, who were now all eyes, from seeing that her lips were trembling. Feebly, feebly, she managed to say in a low, beaten-down, vanquished voice, “I never saw anything like that… I don’t know what you’re talking about…” Feebler and feebler… overcome by defeat… and she couldn’t figure out why he had attacked, why he could have wanted to subject her to something like this… or how he had done it… or if he had done it… since she knew she couldn’t possibly have described it to another person. The great chess player never had an angry look on his face. He never expressed hostility… there was nothing other than the small, smug smile on his face… and a commanding air of intellectual superiority… and condescension as he tried to explain the things she didn’t know in words of one syllable. How could she make somebody else understand what he was doing to her?

“Now, is it ‘don’t know’ or ‘just as soon not know’?” he was saying. “Which do you honestly think it is?” He said it with the kindliest tone imaginable… with the most sympathetic and understanding of looks on his face… with the softest little smile… with the slightest of avuncular tilts of the head—

—and Magdalena was paralyzed. She lacked the power to say a word. She could reply to this vile man only by breaking into tears… but she managed to hold it down to silent convulsions… her neck, her stooped shoulders, her chest, her abdomen… convulsing. She doesn’t dare try to speak. What are they thinking? Here is a ditzy, clueless little Cuban cutie-pie… and she calls herself a “psychiatric nurse”! All eight of them have their little smirks on. It isn’t as if they are laughing at her exactly… one doesn’t laugh at a helpless child… No, indeed, they wouldn’t do that. They’re just eager to see what her brainless response will be.

::::::I must not! I will not give them the satisfaction!::::::

She clenched her teeth; really clenched them. ::::::Not a single sob shall make it past my lips!—not in the presence of these blood-sucking voy—::::::

“What is going on?” Loudly—his voice!—but with good humor. He was coming up so directly behind her, she couldn’t even see him by twisting her head about. The next moment—pressure of his hands and his weight on the frame of the back of her chair. His voice! came from directly above her head… but now lower, and with the faintest tinge of menace, he said in English, “Having your fun… Zhytin? I could see you playing your greasy game again from twenty feet away, and I could smell it. Quite the piece of shit, aren’t you.”

Then he put his hands on her shoulders and began massaging, ever so gently, the muscles between her shoulders and her neck.

She was in his very hands! With that, she gave way. Her eyes flooded with tears. They spilled down over her cheeks…

Zhytin was looking up at Sergei. He tried to cover up a sickly, guilty expression with a smile of goodwill. He said in Russian, “Sergei Andreivich, Miss Otero and I were just having an interesting discussion about psychi—”

“Molchi!” Like a fierce bark it was. Whatever it meant, Sergei had cut off Zhytin so sharply, he didn’t try to utter another word. His mouth fell open in bewilderment. Sergei barks again—and the color drains out of Zhytin’s blocky face. He turns white with fear. He looks at Magdalena… now he has the earnest voice of the peacemaker: “I’m very sorry… I assumed you knew we were only playing the little game of the wits.”

Sergei leapt out from behind Magdalena, palms on the table, and leaned as far as he could toward the frightened face of Champion Zhytin and said something to him in Russian in a low, seething voice.

Zhytin looked at her again, this time even more frightened than before. “Miss Otero, I sincerely regret my rude behavior. I now realize that—” He halted and looked at Sergei. Sergei seethed out a few more words, and Zhytin looked at Magdalena once more and said, “I now realize that I was acting like an impudent child—” He looked at Sergei once more. Sergei said something to him brusquely in Russian… and Zhytin said to Magdalena, “I beg your forgiveness.”

For an instant Magdalena was relieved by her tormentor’s sudden—and total—abasement. But in the next heartbeat she began to feel uneasy. Something strange and unhealthy had been set in motion. Sergei barks out a few words, and Zhytin, the great champion, is all but prostrate before her in abject supplication. It was so strange, she felt even more deeply humiliated… to have to count on a third party to subdue her tormentor.

Sergei said to Magdalena, right in front of Zhytin, “I must apologize for our ‘champion’s’ behavior.”

These apologies were too much for Zhytin’s wife, a dark-haired woman, about his age… and getting thick as a man through the shoulders and upper back. She got up from her chair as noisily as she could, stood up straight… or straight for someone with a shell back like hers… flashed a malevolent glance at Sergei, and spoke sharply to her husband, in Russian. Zhytin was the very picture of fear. He didn’t look at his wife. His eyes were pinned on Sergei.

Sergei said to Zhytin in English, “It’s okay. Olga is right. You should leave. In fact, I make the suggestion you do that very soon.” He flicked the back of his hand within inches of Zhytin’s face several times and said, “Vaks! Vaks, vaks,” apparently Russian for “scat.”

Zhytin rose, trembling visibly. With a bent posture he took his wife’s arm and skulked hurriedly toward the entrance. He was leaning on her, not the other way around.

Sergei turned back toward the other six who remained, the goon with the shaved head, the obese woman whose bosom stuck out like a table, the two women wearing pillbox hats… a very tall dour man with a too-narrow skull, sunken cheeks, and too-short shirtsleeves revealing a pair of outsized bony wrists and hands bigger than his head, and a little bull of a man whose eyes were sunk so deeply within the crevice between his overhanging brow and outcropped cheekbones, you couldn’t see them. Very eerie-looking… Sergei panned a cheerful smile across all six faces, as if nothing whatsoever had just taken place. He proffered various lighthearted subjects, but they all seemed too frightened to pick up a thread of any of them.

Magdalena was mortified. She was the alien who had triggered the scene. If she had come up with something witty or smart enough—as she had at Chez Toi—the whole thing would never have developed. She wanted nothing more than to get away from this restaurant and its load of Russians. Sergei couldn’t coax anything out of her, either. She was too dispirited.

After a few minutes of getting nowhere, Sergei called over the big hefty maître d’ or whatever he was and had a little conversation with him in Russian. Then he smiled again at the six misshapen goons and goonygirls before him and said in Russian and then in English: “You’re very lucky. Marko has a nice table for six for you. You will be very comfortable.”

Sheepishly, warily, without a single word, the six got the message and got up and followed Marko, who led them to a distant destination in a far corner of Gogol’s capacious floor. Sergei leaned toward Magdalena and put an arm around her shoulders. “Now, this is more like it… a nice table for two.” He laughed out loud in the spirit of “Oh, what fun we’re having!”

::::::Well… no and no, my dear Sergei. There are not two of us, there are three: you, me… and Humiliation, who occupies the other eight seats. And no, I wouldn’t call this fun, particularly. All these roaring animals in this place haw-haw-haw-haw-hawing, these louts and their girlfriends, dressed, overdressed, over-the-top-dressed in musty styles and hairdos, these drunken louts with their rude animal vitality only too eager to seize the weak or unwary and have fun pulling her wings off, laughing all the while at the way she struggles… Oh, Zhytin the great Number Five—he’s brilliant at it! Brilliant! A past master! What? Didn’t you see it? My God, you missed a classic demonstration! But you can see the remains of her right over there… she’s the little Cuban papaya at that table for ten that’s nearly empty—empty in an otherwise jam-packed place like this! At a prime hour like this! Empty! She’s a shamed and empty shell. Nobody wants any part of her except for our renowned papaya collector, Korolyov… He’ll take her papaya and do whatever he wants with it and then throw it out like roadkill… Just feast your eyes! You can’t miss her! She’s alone at that huge table, except for our papaya connoisseur, and he doesn’t count, of course… Yes! Take a look! What’s worse than death?… Humiliation!… whereas her tablemate, Mr. Sergei Korolyov—he’s feeling so good about himself. He thinks he can jolly her up, and why not? He’s on top of the world! His spirits could hardly be higher! That’s how a man feels when all he has to do is make an appearance… and todo el mundo jumps up from its chairs and comes rushing over to pour warm grins all over him and attend to his every whim. Even better, no doubt, is to see the fear on other men’s faces when they cross him in any way… they’re terrified, as if they fear for their lives—they actually cringe… the way that vile vile vile vile vile man cringed the moment Czar Sergei barked in a certain way—

—oh, Sergei is in Seventh Heaven right now… He’s content to stay at this table all night… at this huge table for ten, just him and his little chocha with a vast white flashing sequined sea before them. You can’t miss him! There he is! The mightiest man in the hall!… He can’t even begin to understand her misery, can he… Please, my handsome savior, please get me out of here… out of the sight of a thousand shaming, pitying, shunning eyes… but no-o-o-o-o-o, he has to put himself on maximum display, doesn’t he… Behold the Czar!… of Russia’s Hallandale, Florida, heartland.::::::

Finally finally finally finally—and this finally felt like finally, after five years of sheer torture—finally Sergei suggested leaving and heading off to the big party on Star Island. His departure was like his arrival… the fawning, the bear hugs, the loud nothings in the ear, and Sergei standing up seven feet tall and expanding his chest as he watched them jump… Magdalena? She no longer existed. They looked right through her. Only the big side of beef who ran the place even said so much as goodbye… and that much, no doubt, only because he thought it might ingratiate him with the Czar, who had brought the little slice of papaya with him.