21. The Final Account
Twenty One
The Final Account
Evelyn
The ring is on the kitchen table where it has been for four days, sitting in the exact center of the wood like a coin nobody wants to spend, and Andrei walks past it twice while he puts on his coat.
I count both times. I am not proud of that.
“You’re leaving before the eggs,” Misha says. He has the chessboard open next to his cereal bowl, which Mrs. Petrov has stopped fighting about. “That’s a resignation.”
“It is a postponement.”
“That’s what people say when they resign.”
Andrei stops at the end of the counter. He has his coat on and his phone in his hand and he looks at me across eleven feet of marble with the particular flat calm he uses when something is about to happen that he has already decided not to explain.
“Kostya is downstairs,” he says.
“I know. I heard the elevator.”
“I will be back before lunch.”
“That’s not a schedule. That’s a promise.” I dry my hands on the towel and hang it on the oven bar, very carefully, because if I do it any faster I am going to say something with my whole chest in front of a seven-year-old. “Which one is it?”
The pause is maybe a second and a half. In this apartment, that is a paragraph.
“Both,” he says.
Then he goes. The front door makes the heavier sound it has made since the codes were reissued, and Misha moves a bishop, and the coffee machine clicks and settles behind me, and I stand there with my hand on the towel bar like an idiot who has never waited for anything before.
I have waited for plenty. I waited for a father to send money twice and then stop. What I have not done is wait for someone to come back.
“Evie.”
“Yes.”
“You’re breathing weird.”
“I’m breathing exactly the correct amount.”
Misha considers this and clearly finds it unsatisfying, because he pushes the board an inch toward me and says, “The Sicilian is the best answer to e4 and I’m going to explain why, and you have to actually listen, not do the face.”
“What face.”
“The one where you nod and think about something else.”
So that is the morning. Misha draws diagrams on printer paper with a ruler he found in the converted study, labeling squares in a numbering system that is not the real one and which he refuses to abandon because, he explains, the real one was invented by someone who never had to learn it fast. He talks for forty minutes about the Najdorf.
I understand approximately one sixth of it.
He tells me my problem is that I play like someone who wants everybody at the table to be comfortable, which is, in his words, tactically catastrophic and also very like me.
“That’s a lot of psychology for a person who still needs help with the milk carton.”
“I need help with the milk carton because of physics.”
Somewhere around eleven the light shifts on the lake and goes flat and white, the way it does before the afternoon decides what it wants to be.
I make him a sandwich he does not ask for.
I check the hall twice. I hum the four notes without meaning to, and Misha, without looking up, says, “You’re doing the song,” and I say, “I know,” and he says, “It’s fine, I like it,” and goes back to the ruler.
The elevator opens at one minute past twelve.
I do not run. I want to be extremely clear that I do not run, I simply happen to be standing in the front room, on my feet, facing the hall, when Andrei comes through it with his coat over his arm and the February cold still coming off the wool.
He looks at me first. Then he crosses to the kitchen table, pulls out the chair beside Misha, and sits down like a man arriving at a scheduled meeting.
“The Vashenko matter is finished,” he says.
Misha moves a knight. “Good.”
“That’s it?” I ask. “That’s your whole reaction?”
“You said it was finished. I don’t have follow-up questions about things that are finished.” He writes something in his notebook, in the column he added for consequences. “Also I’m winning.”
“You’re playing yourself.”
“That’s why I’m winning.”
Andrei’s mouth does the thing it does, the one that isn’t a smile and would be insulted to be called one. And I am looking at his mouth and then I am not, because his hands are flat on the table, both of them, and the signet ring is on his finger.
The ring that has been sitting in the center of this table since the night he left it there and took the train to Lincoln Park with a transit card and no jacket. The ring I traced with my thumb four nights ago while he told me he hadn’t decided.
I do not say anything. He watches me see it. That is the entire exchange and it takes maybe three seconds.
“I stopped in the lobby before I came up,” he says, to me, in the same register he used for the Vashenko matter is finished. “I sat there for a while. Then I put it on.”
“Why.”
“Because it is mine.” He turns his hand a fraction, so the flat of the crest catches the overhead light, and there is nothing performative in it, which is somehow worse. “It has carried one meaning for twenty-six years. I decided it carries what I say it carries now.”
I have a whole reserve of things I keep on hand for moments like this. Deflection, mostly. A joke about the branding budget. What comes out instead is nothing at all, because he has been saying things plainly for four days and I still have not built the muscle for receiving it.
So I reach across the table and put my hand over his.
His fingers turn under mine. The metal is warm from his pocket, from the lobby, from the drive, and it presses into the inside of my palm, and neither of us says a word.
Misha writes something down, sets his pencil in the crease of the notebook, and looks up at both of us with the specific patience of a child who has been living in a house full of adults conducting a very slow negotiation for four months.
“Is the serious part over,” he says. “Because I need a second player.”
“It’s over,” Andrei says.
“Then you’re black. You always want white and it makes you predictable.”
“I want white because white moves first.”
“That’s exactly what I said.”
I go and make tea I don’t drink so I can stand at the counter with my back to them and get my face under control, and behind me the pieces click, and Misha explains the Sicilian to a man who has been playing chess since before either of Misha’s parents were born, and Andrei lets him.
The afternoon goes soft and ordinary. Mrs. Petrov comes and goes with a list. Kostya calls twice about paperwork and once, I am fairly certain, about nothing at all.
Misha wins one game legitimately and one on a technicality he invents on the spot involving a rule about knights and Tuesdays, and Andrei accepts the loss with the gravity of a man conceding a hostile takeover.
At seven-thirty Misha goes down for a bath. At eight I hear the door at the end of the hall.
I know that sound now. I have my own key to it in the pocket of every coat I own, and I know the particular sequence of it, the give of the lock, the change in air pressure when the roof takes the door back.
He does not ask me to come. I do not go.
I sit at the kitchen counter with the Akhmatova open to a page I am not reading and I let him have it, because I understand something about that room that I did not understand the first night I opened the wrong door in bare feet looking for linens.
It is not a hiding place. It is the room where he puts the parts of himself he has never had anywhere else to put, and tonight he closed a thirty-year account across a hotel lobby table, and a man does not come home from that and want an audience.
The heat comes on with two knocks in the pipes and stops. The refrigerator hums. Downstairs, twelve floors down, a car horn goes off and does not reach me.
He is up there for a long time.
I think about a woman with one bag and a wax seal on an envelope, riding the L downtown, who told herself the whole way that she would be professional and unimpressed and gone in a year.
I think about her opening the wrong door at eleven at night and seeing a man in shirtsleeves with his fingertip on a white petal, and retreating without a sound, and not telling anyone, not for weeks, and going to bed with it burning behind her eyes.
I never did stop thinking about it. Not once.
At nine-forty the door at the end of the hall opens and closes, and I hear him in the corridor, and I do not turn around, because I do not entirely trust my face at this hour.
He does not come to the kitchen.
I find him twenty minutes later when I go to my room, because he is already there, standing in my doorway with one shoulder against the frame and the smell of wet soil and green air still on him, orchid air, the humid sweet of that room clinging to his shirt.
His hands are in his pockets. The ring catches the lamp.
“You’re in my doorway,” I say.
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“Eleven minutes.” He says it like a fact he checked. “I have been standing here trying to decide whether to say this properly or to say it badly and immediately.”
I put the book down on the nightstand, cover open, spine flat, the way I never treat books, and I sit on the edge of the bed and look up at him, and my hands are not steady, and I let them not be steady.
“Say it badly,” I tell him. “You’ve been saying things properly all week and it’s very unsettling.”
He crosses the threshold.