“At least they’d get picked up once in a while.”
Whenever they got together like this, Florence had noticed, Essie got into the habit of ebullient complaining, speaking in helpless response to whatever happened to pop into her head. Outside this room there would be a dangerous edge to such innocence. And yet, in a peculiar way, Essie’s glib deprecations of their Soviet reality were the only appropriate response to Florence’s sharing the magazines with her. It was a kind of routine they had perfected: spurred on by Florence’s feeble defenses of their quotidian lives, Essie would go on to issue ever more mounting grievances. Sure, on New Year’s they got subsidized caviar and champagne. But who needed cheap aristocratic delicacies one day a year when they couldn’t reliably obtain fresh meat or cheese the other 364? Or fish that didn’t smell like it had been thawed and refrozen half a dozen times? Or when they couldn’t see the nose-and-throat doctor without bribing the nurse first? And Florence let her go on, let Essie’s mouth run with all the things she too was thinking but wouldn’t say.
If Florence had still been in communication with Captain Subotin, she might have begrudged her friend for exposing her ears to such damning anti-Soviet talk. After all, this was the very sort of colloquy the secret police would be keen to know about and surely punish her for withholding. And if she withheld it, who could say that Essie herself would not someday be hauled in and forced to describe it? Such were the perils that adhered to any group of more than one. But Essie herself surely was aware of these dangers. It occurred to Florence that her friend’s candor was served up as a sort of collateral of trust in compensation for the risk Florence herself was undertaking in smuggling forbidden loot out of SovInformBuro’s quarantined offices. Likewise, Florence was aware that there would be little pleasure for her in perusing these magazines alone. Essie was all that stood between her and the bitter despair that seized her whenever she opened their pages by herself. The diabolical paradox of her life was that her escape from America had been fueled by an ambition to flee the servitude of domesticity. And yet, at thirty-eight, after a day of working as an equal alongside men, her liberation took the form of evenings spent elbowing in lines for food, arguing with her neighbors over every square centimeter of ledge space and scrubbing her child’s linens on an old washboard in the common tub. Come morning, there was more waiting, this time outside the common toilet to flush the chamber pot from the night before. Her crockery and plates were all chipped. She felt deserted by America, and enraged with herself for the nostalgia that gripped her heart; and, still, she could not stop looking at the pictures.
She was glad when Essie changed the subject.
“You think Seldon might notice if I wore a dress like that, with a cut up the leg?”
Seldon again. It amused her how much Essie despaired of getting his attention.
“Honey, I don’t think he’d notice if that slit went up to the waist.”
Essie’s eyes met Florence’s in the mirror on the vanity table. “What makes you say that? It’s a rather mean thing to say.”
Florence glanced down, back at the magazine. “Essie, don’t fish for compliments. You know you’re perfectly cute without any fancy frocks.”
“Then what were you trying to say?”
“Oh, I don’t know. He’s an odd duck, Seldon. How about some more tea?”
“Sometimes I get a feeling he has a wrong impression of me.”
“What’s that?”
“That I’m a silly or a trifling sort of person. It’s only because I’m a little nervous around him. And he always seems to be testing me to see if I get the joke.”
“Well, I’ve never heard him say anything of the sort about you.”
“And, see, that’s the trouble. Most of the time he doesn’t notice me at all. You could help change that.”
“How?”
Essie smiled. “By inviting me in more often when he comes over.”
“It’s Leon he comes to see, not me.”
“Still, considering everything,” Essie said, modestly glancing away, “it would be a nice thing to do.”
Considering everything Essie did for little Yulik was what she meant. Watching him and warming up meals when Florence was out. Essie adjusted her glasses and turned the page to a silverware advertisement that read “The happiest brides have Community.”
“All right.”
“Thank you,” said Essie without looking up.
—
LATER, FLORENCE WOULD WONDER if everything might have turned out differently if she’d only made more of an effort to keep her promise to Essie. The image of the two of them turning the pages of Newsweek would come back to her vividly, like the last clear memory before the onset of a savage illness that turned everything into a malarial hallucination. Only then would Florence recognize Essie’s wish to be invited into their company less as an expression of lust for Seldon Parker than as a longing to embed herself once more into the warm crucible of Florence’s own intimacy, to be welcomed in as a fourth into their tight little trio.
When she remembered the weeks of that summer and fall—weeks that raced by so quickly they seemed to her like slippery leaves falling and skidding underfoot—the only part of the story she would recall with clarity was the beginning, which was also the story of the radio, the real and secret fourth member of their quartet.