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.
