Russian Lessons

2

From my table by the window of the East Village diner, where I’ve agreed to meet him, I watch the Russian cross the street. He’s wearing a pair of jeans, a big black leather coat and a Kangol cap. The leather coat makes me think: mafia. A frisson of excitement runs up and down my spine. When he called me in the morning, a few days after the party, his voice was deep, softer than in person, the long Russian vowels caressing, as if we were already intimate. He was in New York for the day, he said, he had a present for me. Could we get together? A present? Really? I was intrigued.

He pushes the door open and towers over me, apologizing for being late - he has taken the wrong subway line or gotten off at the wrong stop. Under his arm he is carrying a package wrapped in newspaper, which he carefully sets down on the table.

“What is it?”

“Open.”

The newspaper is written in Cyrillic characters. I decipher the headline, something about Gazprom, the Russian oil giant, and unpack two bottles, tall and narrow, their excessively long necks giving them a swan-like grace.

“Is very good wine from Moldavia. Sweet. For dessert.” He watches me expectantly. “You drink wine?”

“Yes, of course. French people drink wine.”

He explains he had to run all over Brighton Beach looking for a bottle, because he only had one at home and he thought one wasn’t enough.

“You’ll think of me when you drink it.”

“It’s very sweet of you.”

He puts his cap on the table and calls the waitress to place our orders: Rolling Rock for me, coffee for him. When my beer comes he picks up the bottle and studies it with a comical frown as if it was a Molotov cocktail about to explode.

“Try it.”

He twists his lips in disgust. “Too light. I prefer Guinness.” He pulls out a pack of Parliament from his pocket, lights up, and pushes the pack toward me. It was before the turn of the century, when you could smoke in public places, before a lot of things happened, when life was still wild and carefree in New York, when America was jubilant about having won the cold war, before we impaled ourselves into the new Millenium. Underneath his coat that he’s just removed, a loose grayish-green long-sleeved T-shirt in a silky material, drapes around his wide shoulders and clings to his powerful chest. Averting my eyes, I slip a cigarette out of his pack, and he leans forward to light it. And then he tells me his story.

Five years ago he met an American woman in the streets of Moscow and impulsively followed her to New York on a tourist visa. He only had five dollars in his pocket and spoke just a few words of English. He had done two years in the Soviet Army and finished a couple of years of college, after competing nationally as a swimming champion. But economically things were just too harsh in Russia in the 90’s, there was only the chaos of Yeltsin’s Perestroika, and America was looming, finally within reach. He jumped at the opportunity.

I watch him, mesmerized, as he upends four packets of sugar into his coffee, asks the waitress for three more and stirs them vigorously. Of course things went South with the woman. “She played games with me. Always push-pull. American women, they boss everybody around. They act like men.” Anyway, he ended up in a North Carolina farm, milking cows for $3.50 an hour. “Coming from Moscow, I thought it was good money. Imagine that!” Farming was a disaster in other ways too. He couldn’t get laid. Even the local “water buffaloes” wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot stick.

He looks at me over his cup of coffee to see my reaction to his attack on American women, and perhaps to gauge if I, too, play games with men. His eyes are shrewd, like those of a salesman who insists he’s got nothing up his sleeve.

“I don’t play games. I’m honest.” Hooonest with a long ‘o’.

His own game is so obvious I burst into laughter. I glimpse at his shoulders, sculpted under the T-shirt the color of his eyes. His sheer physical presence and provocative vulgarity are dangerously sexy, as if we had been transported in a dive bar in Odessa, the kind where drunk sailors grope cheap girls with meaty hands and topple them in the back room. Except we are in the East Village, a block away from my home, and I can walk away any time I want.

“What? You don’t believe me?”

I take my time puffing on my cigarette. “I don’t know. I don’t know you.”

“What do you think makes someone sexy?” he presses on.

His eyes are a bit too narrow, his forehead low and stubborn. His wide cheekbones are cut like blades. He can go from plain to strikingly handsome in a swift shift of expression. There’s something primitive and incandescent about him. Pure male power. With my eyes I follow the volute of smoke curling above my nose and pretend to ponder his question.

“Sexual confidence,” I say.

He looks impressed.

“You’re smart.”

A wave swells in my stomach, threatening to crash and engulf me. I haven’t felt such powerful, raw, sexual attraction since Hank, a German artist I had met when I first came to New York. He had a similar insolent gaze that possessed me before he even laid a hand on me. I was twenty-one then. He was twenty years older than me. Now the age difference was the reverse.

“What?”

“Nothing. It’s getting late. I have to go get my daughter at gymnastics practice.” I push my chair back and slip on my coat. “Thanks for the wine.”

He stands up and nods with polite deference. “Children always come first.”

I cringe at the cliché.

Outside, a fine drizzle has started, a mist so vaporous it feels like a gauze caress. I kiss him on both cheeks, like we do in Paris. His skin is damp. He holds me against him for a beat. A rush of electricity pulses between us, but the bottles clutched under my elbow hamper me, and I quickly pull away.

“I call you in few days,” he says.

Night has fallen. Puddles reflect the street lamps in a kaleidoscope of red and yellow, the pavement shines. I run to catch the light.

In the evening, after dinner, my friend Alba stops by to pick up her daughter, Corina, a teammate of Ludivine’s, who came over after practice. I offer to open one of Yuri’s bottles. The deep purple wine, almost the color of grape juice, flows thick into our glasses, so sugary that when a drop spills along the neck of the bottle, it coagulates like syrup. The taste is so sweet and at the same time so surprisingly sharp we can only take a few sips before declaring the wine undrinkable. I stick the cork into the bottle and put it away at the back of the liquor cabinet, as if I was banishing Yuri to Siberia, never to hear from him again.

Russian Lessons

1

It was the way he looked at me. It had to be.

His pale, gray gaze burnt with an intensity, a naked knowingness, that you wouldn’t expect from this hunk of a guy who had the air of a marine, or an ex-convict – a bit louche. He was standing by the buffet table, towering a head above everyone else. It was in February, one year after my divorce from David. Lulu had just turned eight. And me, I was still in the blur and craze of post-divorce mania, let loose after a nineteen-year marriage, and trying to write a novel that constantly eluded me. I had come to the party on impulse, after Jack, the Columbia University student I had been having an affair with, had cancelled our plans for the evening at the last moment. It was a Carnival party in a French photographer’s loft. There was a wall of windows overlooking the Empire State Building in tight close-up. All you had to do was to screw your neck up and there it was, the needle piercing the yellow sky, so close you could almost stretch your arm and touch it. A Manhattan postcard. Everybody was turned out in silly get-ups – Roman toga, Marie-Antoinette, Tarzan - except him and me. I was in neck to toe black, my downtown uniform. He was all in white, loose cotton pants and T-shirt, as if he had come straight out of a yoga class – unless it was his idea of a disguise.

Or else it was his Russian accent. Those rolled “r”s, those “w”s that slip into “v”s are unmistakable.

“From Moscow.” His pale eyes coolly ran up and down my low cut, black silk top and high-heeled boots. With his blond buzz cut, his massive shoulders, his long, callous fingers that brushed against mine when he brought me a glass of wine – “sorry, no vodka left” – he stood out in this artsy crowd. I asked him how he knew the photographer.

“At Chelsea Flea Market. Right below, 26^th Street. Many Russians. Ever been there?” He picked up a handful of peanuts and spilled them all at once in his mouth, looking me in the eyes.

“Yes.”

“And you, how you know him?”

“Actually, I hardly know him. We have mutual friends. I am French too.”

The hard mask of his face melted, making him look very young. His eyes lit up with glee.

“You are! Did you see that French movie about young barman and older woman?”

That was too uncanny! I knew exactly what movie he was talking about. L’Ecole de la Chair. The School of Flesh. I had seen it the week before at the Quad on East 13^th Street with Jack. It was about an attractive, successful fashion designer in her forties who picks up a twenty-year old, penniless barman/hustler. She relishes her sense of power and control as she pays him for his services. But when she falls in love with him and invites him to move in with her, the balance of power between them shifts, and he turns the tables on her.

The Russian shifted his weight from one leg to the other and looked at me with an amused expression, as though challenging me. I took a sip of wine and held his gaze.

“You often go to the movies?”

“No. But I like French movies. And I liked that it was about older woman and younger guy.” He drained his glass and set it down, adding: “You’re not twenty.”

I repressed a smile at his bluntness. This was going to be fun. Certainly a lot more than with Jack, who kept breaking off our dates. “No. You’re right. And you, how old are you?”

“Thirty.” He shot me another naked look. “I like older women.”

“Why?”

“Because they are deeper, more interesting.”

I couldn’t tell whether it was a line or if he meant it. Both maybe. It was obvious I was older than him, although he may not have known by how much because people usually thought I was younger than my age, fifty-two. But he wanted to make sure I knew that he knew. His wide-set, pale eyes looked at me calmly, not giving anything away.

Or maybe it was the way we danced.

It was one of those classic, fast-paced rock n’ rolls, a Chuck Berry or a Fats Domino. I was surprised how good a dancer he was. Hadn’t rock n’ roll been forbidden in the Soviet Union? But of course he was young enough to have been a teenager under Perestroika. For all I knew Moscow had been flooded with American music after the Berlin wall came down. I knew so little about where he came from, and all of it from the Western press, which, presumably, wasn’t to be trusted. He guided me so confidently my body just fell into step with him. Each time he slid his arms along mine his muscles brushed against my skin like steel ropes. During the next dance, which was a slow, I laced my hands around his neck and in response his sex pushed against my stomach, as stiff and unyielding as the muscles in his arms. He reminded me of those men who would press themselves against us, the girls on summer vacation from Paris, in the darkness of the Côte d’Azur nightclubs. We let them come close the time of a dance, like you bring a flame to the tip of your finger, then fled. This guy had trouble written all over him.

After the slow, I noticed the Russian by the wall of windows in heated discussion with a dark-haired woman, or perhaps it wasn’t so heated, it was hard to tell from a distance. I lost sight of the woman and he returned to the edge of the dance floor. Without looking at him I went to get my coat and my bag. He waited for me by the door.

“Can I take you home?” he asked. I said no, my car was parked at the curb. But when he handed me his cellphone, I punched in my number, and he gave me his card, which was engraved in red, with a view of the Red Square and a silhouette of St-Basil’s Church, with all its cupolas. Printed below were the words From Russia with Love, a phone number in Connecticut, a P.O. Box number, and his name, Yuri P. He was not an ex-marine, after all, he sold Russian souvenirs at crafts fairs and flea markets.

When I got home I tossed his card in the box where I kept the phone numbers of all the men I had dated or slept with since the divorce – the tangible accumulation of cards and torn pieces of paper or scribbled napkins slowly filling up the hole left by David’s absence – and went straight to sleep. Lulu was coming back the next day from David’s and I had to be rested to absorb the onslaught of her fiery energy, tossing about her backpack and weekend bag, her shoes and jacket, and ravenously demanding dinner. But I when I woke up the next morning, it was the image of the Russian that flickered at the edge of my mind, his smoky voice and his pale eyes peering into mine.