Earnings Season #2
drifting aftermath she’s never felt before. She only wants to linger in this unexpected, hidden calm as long as she can, this
morning of rain, with him. “Let’s figure out breakfast, yeah? I’m good, I promise. Just hungry.”
Not now, she thinks. Please, don’t make me look at that now.
He holds her gaze for a long moment. She holds her breath, before: “Alright, breakfast, I suppose.” Relief washes through
her. “What would you like?” he asks, a small smile. “The staff have the day off, I can order something—”
“Absolutely not!” Lili protests. “You’re not making someone deliver food to us in this weather.”
Aleksandr frowns, as if confused. “Alright, I can go get food, then—”
Her hands around his forearm tighten. “Don't you have any food here?”
“I don’t know; apparently, you’ve been turning away housekeeping,” he teases.
“Well, let’s cook something.”
It’s cold, storm in summer. Before Lili can find her own clothes, he gives her a sweater: dark green, worn knit. In the kitchen,
she hops onto the counter, while Aleksandr opens the fridge. “Do you have flour?” she asks. “I have strawberries, there’s
oat milk—we could make pancakes?”
“Sure,” he says. He flicks on the espresso machine, the click of the ridiculous Lacanche oven. Comfortable in his own home,
and Lili frowns. She’d never have thought he spent time in his kitchen.
Aleksandr stares at the oat milk suspiciously, before pouring it into a mixing bowl. Lili laughs, a small sound. “You know how to cook?”
“I would have died an early death otherwise. My mother was never home.”
“What would the markets think?” she teases, swinging her feet.
He smirks. “Well, don’t tell, Lili.”
The espresso machine finishes pulling a shot, and he hands her the first coffee. Lili takes it gratefully, shaking back the
long sleeves of her borrowed sweater.
It’s a comforting, familiar feeling: this spacious loft on a gray morning, city quiet under difficult weather, her books on
the dining room table. Like a held breath, serene and lovely. A suspension, a moment of fantasy.
“If you own the building, what’s on all the other floors?”
“Just raw floors, original warehouse.”
Lili frowns. “Why so much space? Do you plan for, like—a family?”
Aleksandr makes a face, turning to the stove. “Jesus, no. I dislike children.”
She nods, taking a sip of coffee. “You do realize we’re in a housing crisis?”
He shrugs. The pan hisses as the pancakes sear. “I like space.”
“Were you always this spoiled?” she asks.
“I grew up in kommunalka.”
“And yet you aren’t enamored of the great socialist vision?”
Aleksandr rolls his eyes, setting a cutting board on the counter next to her. As he slices strawberries, Lili drinks her coffee,
listening to the sizzle of pancakes. She rests her head against his shoulder, watching him work. She wants the physical comfort
of him, close to her.
“The painting in your closet, what is it?” she asks.
“Ah. Rublev.”
“And the cigarettes? What’s with them?”
He grimaces. “Michael doesn’t let me smoke anymore.”
Lili is delighted. “And you let him make your decisions for you?”
But Aleksandr doesn’t take the bait, transferring pancakes onto waiting plates. “He gets this sad, disapproving look that’s
somehow much worse than if he was angry. Cancer, Sasha”—and Aleksandr’s voice runs rigid, clipped for a moment—“is a horrible way to die.”
Lili chokes on her coffee at the imitation. Aleksandr grins. “But what he doesn’t know won’t kill him. Come on, let’s eat.”
He inclines his head towards the open living room, helping her off the counter. He sets their plates on the coffee table,
and Lili follows with coffee. She sits on the floor, folding her legs under the table, while he settles on the couch.
Rain streams down the huge windows, cocooning. “Why did you pick Solzhenitsyn?” Aleksandr asks, cutting his food in sharp,
crisp motions.
“I thought maybe I should expand beyond Marxists,” Lili quips, taking a bite of her pancakes, doused in maple syrup. Intellectual
sparring feels familiar, and safe; a place to continue to gather herself, in the aftermath of what shifted inside her last
night.
“How fickle is youth.”
She rolls her eyes, resting her head against his knee. “I was curious about his perspective. He’s supposed to be a genius.”
“And what have you found?” Aleksandr strokes her hair, gentle.
“Well, I’m not done yet, but there’s this sense of searching for meaning in suffering? This question of what life is worth,
what’s worth enduring—like, what amount of suffering?”
“Meaning in suffering, or acceptance of suffering?”
“I’d say acceptance of suffering necessitates having found some meaning in it.”
“Not necessarily.”
“That’s a little nihilistic.”
“I’d make the case he thinks we need suffering to give our lives meaning, but suffering itself doesn’t have any real meaning.
It’s not the suffering that’s bad or good, it’s our acceptance—or resistance—that makes it so.”
Lili frowns. “That presupposes suffering is inevitable.”
“Suffering is inevitable.”
“No, it’s not,” she protests. “Maybe some pain, sure, but not suffering. Obviously, he’s speaking from a specific historical
moment—a horrific one—but that doesn’t mean suffering is inevitable. We can minimize it.”
“Has your own life proven that out for you?”
It’s instinctive: the jump to push him away, assert that he knows nothing about her life.
But—the sound of his Russian earlier, a rasp at the back of his throat, both foreign and familiar; the quiet way he’d answered her questions, the scar on his face and the ring on his finger and the painting in his closet; the way he wasn’t touching her when she woke, only watching her; the kiss against her shoulder, skin against skin; the reassuring weight of his hand on her hip while he read.
Lili takes a little breath.
“No, but that’s . . . that’s the whole point,” she says, quiet. “Try and make it easier for others. So they don’t have to
go through what you went through, you know?”
His fingers in her hair are soft, slowly working out a tangle. “Do you really think it’ll work?” he asks, looking down at
her. “Trusting a state to do that, to protect us?”
“Well, yes. I do.”
He grins, affectionate. “How Hobbesian.”
“You know, Hobbes favored security over liberty,” Lili points out as she clambers onto the couch beside him. “That’s completely
antithetical to what you believe.”
“And you think you have a firm grasp on my beliefs?” he teases, letting her swing her legs over his lap. His hand, warm and
broad, settles on her knee.
Lili rolls her eyes. “I think it’s safe to say you abhor big government.”
“True. Obviously, I don’t agree with Hobbes in his entirety. But his view of human nature is realistic.”
She frowns. “You can’t just pick and choose what you agree with from different thinkers.”
Aleksandr raises an eyebrow. “That’s the entire point of thought. Otherwise, it’s just blind ideology.”
“Not all ideology is blind.”
“Subscribing to anything, wholesale, is problematic.”
“There’s a purpose to ideology,” she counters. “It coheres a system of ideas, lets you see the end we’re working towards,
a fairer world.”
Aleksandr shakes his head. “Historical inevitability is a delusion.”
“It is not! There’s something to it, the idea that we’re striving towards something better, that history is cumulative.”
“History isn’t some singular force, Lili. It’s chaos, there is no sum to its parts.”
“We should just accept suffering then?”
“It blinds us, historical materialism. It obfuscates the natural absurdity, tragedy, choice in history. Reduces it to inevitability for the sake of cohered ideology. Nothing is inevitable, no matter what Marx alleges.”
“You can’t just discount Marxism entirely,” she protests. “Sure, he tends grandiose, but he has value.”
Aleksandr inclines his head, a conciliatory gesture. “I agree.” His hand runs up and down her bare leg. “Marxism offers a
compelling worldview, I understand that’s alluring when you’re young.”
“Don’t patronize me,” she snaps.
“I’m serious,” he insists. “He answered a real need. He gave people language through which they could represent and recognize
a story they’d been telling for a long time. I understand the charms of the dialectic, truly—and he was a genius, too, in
how he observed political reality. But he falters when he posits these grand ideological schemes, thrusts into the future.”
She sighs. “I don’t understand you,” she says simply. “One minute, you drag Marx as the devil, the next you say he has good
points.”
“It’s not as black-and-white as that.”
“Some things are.”
“I didn’t take you as the religious type.”
She snorts. “I’m not.”
“Ideology can become a religion.”
“And capitalism isn’t?”
“I think of it more as the most perfect embodiment of both negative and positive freedoms.” He grins. “A worldview of freedoms.”
“Yes, well, you can take anything to an extreme.”
“And that’s both the appeal and danger of Marxism, how it offers what religion once did. There’s an absolutism to it—answers
to all your questions, direction for the rage, purpose to your suffering. Even the narrative progression he uses—there’s a
reason Koestler called Marxism the god that failed, a reason it’s had more resonance in Catholic and Orthodox countries than
Protestant ones,” he says, reaching across her legs for his coffee from the table.
“That’s—” Lili frowns, pausing. “That’s actually an insightful point.”
Aleksandr smirks, squeezing her thigh as he leans back against the couch.
“But,” she says, reaching for his coffee, “Marx is in no way the entirety of socialist thought.”
Aleksandr groans. “Socialism has moved beyond Marx!” she insists.
“Socialism, in whatever form, necessitates blind faith in the planner.”
“I’m not arguing for a dictatorship here!” she exclaims, her throat hurting a little with the strain; shadows of last night.
“No democratic socialist is.”
He looks unimpressed. “It’s a fact, Lili. Socialism tends towards totalitarianism.”
“And capitalism tends towards rampant inequality and misery!”