Distressed Assets #3
“The more freedom we got, the faster food evaporated from the shelves. We had ration cards for everything. Empty shops, long lines, people waiting for hours. I was twelve. My mother would send me to wait in line. I had younger siblings, so she couldn’t spend hours away from home, and it was too cold in the winter for my grandmother.
But it got dangerous after dark, and it got dark fast and early.
The streets weren’t safe, walking back, and when Aleksandr found out I was the one waiting in line, he started coming with me—he was fifteen, people usually wouldn’t bother us if he was with me.
He lost hours studying like that. I can’t smell menthol now without wanting to cry.
Zolotaya Zvezda—Golden Star, but I think you call it Tiger Balm here?
He’d put that under his eyes to keep himself awake, to keep studying when we got back.
Past midnight, his mother still not home. ”
Michael pauses. She holds her breath, not wanting him to stop. The confusing noises of the playground, Brooklyn, rush into
the momentary silence. “I’m not sure how much you know about his mother,” he finally says. Lili relaxes with the promise of
a few moments more. “His father died when he was young, but his mother was a professor. Fairly outspoken, too. She distributed
samizdat as a teenager, criticized the regime. Protests, pamphlets, agitation, that sort of thing—and she could get away with it, too.
She knew how to ensure consequences never fell too heavy on her.”
Lili tilts her head. “What do you mean?”
He smiles, a little rueful. “She was beautiful. Stunning, really. She still is, she had him very young, barely twenty. She
was stunning, sharp, and she used that. Taught him how to use that, too, I suppose.
“I remember, when he knew she’d be home for dinner, these rare evenings, he’d read more, trying to find some opinion or idea
to interest her, to try and . . . I don’t know, make her stay longer? He stopped eventually, when he was eleven or so. By
then, he understood that she had priorities, and he wasn’t one of them.
“She’d take him to the Hermitage, though, maybe once a month—this, I remember. That was important to her. It’s a city of museums,
Saint Petersburg. She’d tell him history, show him art, walk the streets. I was jealous of it, but then he’d come home and
just collapse on the bed, exhausted. I’d try to get him to come play with us, come down to the courtyard. He’d tell me to
go away. I think she weighed him down with it all.
“It’s a glorious city, Saint Petersburg—Leningrad, then. It is a gray place, though. Maybe sixty days a year have sun, and
in the winter, we’d go weeks without it. That’s partly why he loves New York so much—even in winter, it’s a brilliant blue
sky. You can see the sun. You can breathe.
“Not there, not then. I think he was suffocating, hungry—no, not hungry. Starving, ruthlessly hungry. Growing up without a
father, in those years—in any years, but especially those? It was brutal. You had to fight with teeth.
“I think Elena laughed at him, when he finally admitted that he was trying to get out, that he’d applied to schools abroad.
As if she hadn’t made him the boy—the man, at that point—that would want to leave, that was capable of leaving, who had the languages, the intelligence, the drive and dissatisfaction, to get out.
“And I don’t think they often see how similar they are. Sharp in the same way, easily cruel in the same way—caring too viciously
about certain things, scorning others in their entirety. It was claustrophobic in that apartment—you always knew if Elena
and Aleksandr were home at the same time, that was the joke in the building when he was a teenager, because one of them would
inevitably storm out, seething, after the shouting. She thought Russia was stepping out of the grave, he thought the country
was decaying in the streets; she was in the classrooms and squares, and he was already thousands of miles away.
“So, yes, he got out, and there wasn’t any luck in that. He did it all himself, then helped me. The applications, the tests,
the studying, the fees—helped me through all of it, paid for it, too, with what money, I don’t know.”
Michael falls silent. In his steady breathing, she can hear calm resignation, slowly settling back into the present; reorienting
to the colors of now, the noises here, the insulation of memory fading. A history he’s come to terms with, these dead things
that still live for him—and the thought, a sickness in her stomach, of why he’s shared this with her.
Lili stays silent, too.
“I know he’s not . . . an easy man.” His words are more careful now. “Sometimes, it may seem like he cares about nothing,
and thinks the world is a game, some dark joke, like not much is sacred to him. There’s irony there, that I think he’s somewhat
aware of. How unbelievably Russian that is, even with decades between him and that country—and he doesn’t care, not really,
not truly, about most things.
“You, though.” Michael lets out a sigh. “He’s decided to care about you.” Her nails dig into her arms. She will not cry; she will not cry. “You can blame him for many things. But do not blame him for wanting to care for you. He’s let himself care for so little.
Let him—please.”
“I can’t,” she insists, hoarse.
“Try, God damn it.”
“He’ll be better without me,” she whispers.
“You don’t get to make those decisions for other people.”
A choke, heat of a sob, in her throat, desperate, and her arms tighten around her knees—
Her phone buzzes on the bench between them.
Michael sighs again, seeing the name.
Lili doesn’t look down at it. She just blinks back tears.
When it ends—he speaks. “Whatever happened, you two can discuss it,” he urges. “Talk about it, don’t just ruin things like this. I know how this can feel, I’ve been married for almost a decade—”
She flinches so hard it hurts.
I didn’t see myself marrying her.
And the idea that, eventually, in the end, she too will be a woman that he didn’t see himself marrying.
“Just tell me,” Michael entreats. “What happened? Truly, what could be so bad that you need to freeze him out like this? That
man moves heaven and earth for those he cares about—just talk to him.”
Lili tries to take a breath; it catches sticky in her lungs.
He deserves to let go of her.
“I cheated on him,” she whispers.
Looking straight ahead, she watches the ferries push through the river. Anywhere but the man beside her, as she feels him
stiffen, realizing what she’s said. It’s cowardice, she supposes, that she only hugs her legs tighter, gaze blurring from
the glare of the sun on the river, that she does not look at him.
Instead, she closes her eyes.
Takes a breath, and then another.
Inside her head, she hears the rush of water, and when she opens her eyes, Michael is gone.
An immeasurable weight settles on her.
Her actions, meeting consequences.
Her life, doors closed; paths changed. A bright space, gone.
And so, we move.
When she opens her apartment door, she hears her friends.
Warm chatter in the living room, discarded shoes cluttered in the hall: Jackie’s platform Tevas with snaggled Velcro straps; James’s cleats from his recreational soccer league; Amina’s well-worn Maryam Nassir Zadeh mules, faded electric lime green.
One of her rolled canvas painting tubes leans against the wall, beside a crumpled Blick Art Materials bag.
As the door shuts behind her, Lili’s tote slumps down her arm.
Her keys are loose in her hand. Her phone is silent.
“Hey!” It’s Amina, popping out into the hall. Behind her, Lili hears the others’ laughter. “We’re all going to go play volleyball
at the park, we were just waiting for you—”
Lili starts crying so hard it hurts her chest.
She is shaking, as her shoulders collapse, and she tries to hold herself together. There are arms around her, immediate and
warm, as the unbelievable, blistering heat of her tears burns her throat. Somewhere, she is babbling something—confession,
useless explanation—and immediate words of consolation fill the air around her, but none of it is any comfort.
And the truth, it’s there on the ground.
That was the before, and here is the after.
“—should you . . . speak to him, maybe? Just, talk it through—”
“He won’t want to speak to me,” Lili whispers against the pillow. Around her, Jackie holds her close. “He won’t.”
It was a blur in the hall earlier: Her sobs shook her body as she fell, her friends trying to hold her; Jackie grasping her
face, wide blue eyes, Oh, Lili, love; stronger arms pulling her into a warm chest when she couldn’t stop crying, the scent of Jamie’s laundry detergent, memories
of undergrad, shh, Li, it’s alright, the run of Amina’s hands over her back, trying to soothe; the sudden, collective intake of breath when Lili finally whispered,
I cheated on him; and the sense that they had been waiting for this—that they had all been waiting for this, not just for her breakdown, but
for her to ruin this—
Now, it’s just Jackie.
The others went home. Jackie quietly had them leave. Murmured goodbyes, the sound of the door closing, when her sobbing would
not calm, forehead pressed against her knees: too many people, touch that isn’t him.
“Who . . . who was it?” Jackie asks now, hesitant. “Who did you—I mean, with who—”
“No one important.” Her voice sounds hollow, even to herself.
A pause holds in the air between them, hushed with sadness. They’re in Jackie’s room, curled up in her bed. It’s dark, with the lights out in their apartment. Their street is calm outside. Just the occasional siren, the soft tinkling chime of mist from Jackie’s diffuser in the corner.
She knows what question is coming next.
“Why . . . ” Jackie trails off; tries again. “Why did you do it?”
“Before he did,” she whispers.
“What do you mean?”
“I got . . . scared,” she whispers against the pillow they’re sharing.
“Scared, love?”