The Binding Chair (11 page)

A W
EAKNESS FOR
R
USSIAN
O
FFICERS

N
INETEEN TWENTY-SIX
.

Thirteen years and three months after her journey across Siberia, in a cramped apartment over the fashionable Promenade des Anglais in Nice, France, once again in thrall to a Russian officer—his name was Michael Evlanoff—Alice Benjamin remembered the old captain’s paroxysm and its unanticipated result: her disembarking from the train with him into a dusk so blue and cold that their breath glittered. They exhaled and the moisture froze in the air before their eyes. He can’t still be living, she thought to herself. He must be dead by now.

(Yes, in fact, of influenza contracted while on holiday with his wife. They had taken a trip to Venice to celebrate their golden jubilee: fifty years of marriage. It was the epidemic of 1918, and the captain died in a pink palazzo with green shutters on the Grand Canal, just east of the Rialto Bridge. He dreamed, as he died, of drowning, a dream inspired—it must have been—by the sound of water lapping at the foundations of the building where he slept. And even as he struggled for breath, the trains of which he had been so proud, and so ashamed, the majestic blue cars of the Trans-Siberian Railway, were taken over by Bolsheviks, who confiscated all locomotives save those used to transport troops and the one to which they attached ten cars full of diplomats. From Manchuli to Vladivostok, the revolutionaries shipped the American and Japanese ambassadors from Petrograd, as well as the Siamese and the Brazilian ministers, along with all their suites, a total of 145 persons, each of whom, at some point during the journey east, stopped to consider the framed print of the icebreaker
Baikal
that hung in every compartment. “Ah, Olga!” the captain said to his wife before he died. He reached for her, and his wife drew his cold hand to her lips and kissed his fingers, which were slightly blue at the tips. “Olga!” he whispered. “There you are!”)

Not that Alice had forgotten Litovsky. She’d been thinking of the trip just that morning. Rummaging through lingerie, looking for what Evlanoff might admire, she’d held a white lace camisole up before her face. Light came through the fabric. Fantastic in its delicacy. Where have I seen this before? she thought. When?
A window with ice
. But where? And then she’d remembered Litovsky’s arm around her shoulder, the astringent smell of the 4711 cologne he poured onto his pink handkerchief. Waiting outside the station for a trap, their breath falling from their lips, a sparkling shower.

Now the camisole lay on the floor of Evlanoff’s room, a melting white puddle in the light cast by a candle on the nightstand. (Any stronger illumination would have revealed how shabby were the furnishings, how dingy the paint.) The flame made shadows of their heads on the wall opposite the bed, shadows as big as pumpkins.

“What’s funny?” Evlanoff asked. “Why are you laughing?” He touched her cheek, found it wet. “You’re not crying?”

“No,” she said. “Don’t stop.”

“Keep your left hand in your lap, dear,” her mother had said on the train. “And, Alice, not such big bites!” She must have said this at every meal—at least she had until the night of the séance, when the only spirit summoned was that of Alice’s defiance, a spirit that proved impossible to exorcise, and the responsibility for which was always given to her aunt. An imputation that May interpreted as credit, although eventually she, too, would curse Alice’s unashamed disregard for authority.

“He could be a Mohammedan!” May had said of the Russian in whose bed Alice lay, echoing Alice’s long-forgotten insult to the captain. It had been a common Shanghai prejudice, the assumption that displaced Russians, of which there were thousands, might espouse not only foreign religions but extra wives.

“You know nothing of this man!” she’d said. “Not his family.
Nothing
!”

“He’s a prince.” Alice was surprised by how small the word sounded, how suddenly unlikely.

“Goddess of Mercy! He
says
he’s a prince. Do you have any idea how many refugees calling themselves nobles there are in Nice? Men looking for a young woman like you?”

“What does that mean,
like me
?”

“With money! That’s what it means.” May set the teapot down so hard that its contents leapt up and sloshed out of the spout.

“He’s not like that,” Alice said. She considered saying
He loves me
but stopped herself. May was even more dismissive of love than of titles.

“He may be married. He may have a wife and children in Russia.”

“He does not.”

“How would you know?” May said the words slowly, as if speaking to an idiot. How. Would. You. Know. “You don’t think he’d tell
you
, do you?”

Alice opened her mouth to argue but couldn’t think of the words that might convince her aunt of Evlanoff’s sincerity. “Can I tell you something about Mohammedans?” May went on. “They marry as often as they please. A man of thirty-five, why he could have ten wives!”

“I won’t listen to this!”

“They don’t believe women have souls!” May cried. “Do you hear me! Do you hear what I’m saying!” She wiped up her spilled tea with the doily and then crumpled it, wet, and dropped it on the tray.

“How will a man treat you if he doesn’t believe in your soul!”

Alice left the room.

“Like a dog!” May cried after her. “That’s how!” But Alice was running down the stairs; she left the house without her wrap.

“Promenade des Anglais,” she said to the chauffeur.

“Yes, miss,” he said.

A
BREEZE DISTURBED
the hot night, and the candle went out. “Are you crying?” Evlanoff said. “Or laughing?”

“Both.” Alice used her hands, one on either side of his head, to guide him back between her legs. “Don’t stop.
Please.
” What did she know about him? The stories he told her. The body he gave her. He’d been a sickly child, he’d spent months confined to bed. But with barbells and spartan regimes, with military training, he’d remade himself. When she caught him in profile, his posture straight, his chest full, she ached, an actual ache, as with the onset of an illness, fever. Her wrists, her elbows, her neck. Her knees and feet and ankles and back—in such moments love made even her head throb, so that she had to shut her eyes. Was this because his shoulders appeared not so much square as squared? The first time she touched him, she found every muscle tensed, as if for a blow.

“You have a weakness for suffering,” May had said accusingly. “You appropriate tragedies. It isn’t a virtue.”

“What if I care for him?”

“What if you do! He has no money! Nothing!”

“His family was destroyed.”

“Does that make him more attractive?”

“No,” Alice lied.

“You’re lying,” May said. “A displaced, depressed Russian pretender. What could be worse?”

“He’s a
doctor.
” Alice pronounced the word with more force than she had said
prince
. “And who said he was depressed? You wouldn’t be so angry if …” She didn’t finish.

“If what?”

If I were still in love with your tragedies
, Alice was thinking. But in stead, “How can you judge a person you don’t know, a person who’s lost everything?” she asked.

“By having been one myself. People who have nothing—they’re …”

“What?”

“The ones who stop at nothing.”

“Does that include you?”

“Yes,” May said. “It does. And what kind of doctor is he! A charlatan!”

“You only say that because he told you to stop smoking opium.”

“No.” May crossed her legs, swung her foot angrily. Its pointed, silk-sheathed toe jabbed back and forth at Alice: a poison dart. “You meddle. You meddle in people’s affairs. It’s as with the shoes. All that orthopedic nonsense you’re trying to foist on me. You think you can fix things.”

“Perhaps I’m one, too,” Alice said.

“One what?”

“One of the people who stops at nothing.” May was looking at her silently. “Isn’t that what—isn’t that who you wanted me to be? A woman free of all the—”
Crippling rules
, Alice had been going to say, but as it turned out, neither of them finished the conversation. The argument.

“Saved by the bell,” May quipped, acidly, for someone was ringing at the front gate.

Alice smiled, an ironic little twist of her lips. “It must be your … swimming master.”

May uncrossed her arms and legs. “I wonder, was it I who instructed you so successfully in sarcasm?” She felt her hair, making sure it was smooth, used her cane to stand. “Or perhaps it’s organic. Perhaps, by chance, we share that … attribute.” The houseboy led the swimming teacher through the foyer. Alice gave him a cold look.

“How is your student progressing?” she asked disingenuously, her attention still fixed on May. Alice knew her aunt would refrain from continuing a dialogue that might appear contentious to someone she considered outside the family. A little test: just how friendly
was
May with this smugly tanned and muscular young man?

“I think,” he said, “that Mrs. Cohen has nearly outgrown me.” It was a long sentence for him, and he spoke his words carefully, as if he considered them fragile, easily broken.

May smiled a tiny and, Alice decided, purposefully enigmatic smile, before turning to ascend the stairs. The young man dipped his head in an abbreviated bow and excused himself to change for the lesson.

F
ROM THE FIRST
, Alice had known: here was the one she wanted. The men who’d come before, she didn’t regret them, not really. How could she, when she didn’t even remember their names? Not while in his arms.

They’d undressed in his room and looked at each other.
Stared
was a better word. “Turn around.” They said the words at the same time.

Evlanoff smiled. “I feel as I did when I gave my cousin all my Easter candy to take off her clothes.”

Self-conscious, Alice folded her arms over her chest. “Not worth it?” she asked, and he took her wrists, gently pulled them away from her body.

“Very worth it. You, I mean. My cousin was just a little girl, scraped knees and no front teeth. What I meant was that I felt foolish.”

He turned out the light, and they found their way to the bed, explored each line, curve and cranny by touch: his finger tracing the part in her hair, her tongue tasting his forehead and nose, a loitering kiss on the lips, lengthy detours around nipples and navels. Discovery and cataloging of moles, scars, those few divergences from the expected. He had well-formed, fleshy earlobes; she didn’t. “Not even enough for earrings,” he lamented, and Alice bit the examining hand. “You’ll think of other presents,” she predicted. She took the hand back, kissed its palm, put it back on her ear so he could feel her prowess at wiggling it. “The other as well?” he asked. She moved the hand to demonstrate. Also, she could roll her tongue, he could not. “What do they call the biscuits that come in that shape?” he asked.

“Profiteroles?” she suggested.

“No, those are round Italian cakes, not cookies. I mean the French ones.”

She couldn’t remember.

“
Tuiles
, that’s the name.”

She shrugged. “Quiz me on chocolates,” she said. “The rest I can’t be bothered with.”

His longest toe was the first one, the big toe; hers was the second. Both of them were ticklish; neither revealed exactly where. So much to do, and how long it took before he at last arrived at the destination of her, going to elaborate efforts to part the hair away from that wrinkled pink nub. She was eager, but didn’t want to hurry what felt like reverence. Then, when at last he’d settled in, it was as if he couldn’t end it. He was lost in the wet rhythm of her, Alice’s thighs tight on either side of his head, deafening him to her begging,
I want you inside me, I want you inside me
. She had to pull him up by the hair, drag his dripping face to her lips. Kissing the taste of herself on his mouth,
Please don’t make me come again without you inside me. Please oh please please
.

“I want. I want … 
Yes,
” she said.
Yes. Yesyesyes
. And as this was all the conversation she provided when he was in her, moving, it became a game with them: he set her the task of every time saying the word in another tongue.

“Surely not
every
time?”

“Well, there are five—or is it six?—thousand. Distinct languages, I mean. Not dialects. That should last us a while.”

“Not forever,” Alice said. “Not if you let me have my way with you.”

He laughed. “Are you the one who’s having your way?”

Alice, eyes closed, nodded yes into his beard. Funny, she’d never liked beards, not on other men, but his, neatly barbered, the way it framed his ruddy lips; and it smelled so good. Soap and cologne and under the gentlemanly hygiene, his own smell. Musky and hard, salty, that faint tang of metal—it made her want him, and this surprised her, too. She’d never before cared or even thought much about how a man smelled. Unobjectionable or not: until Evlanoff, these were the only criteria. But now Alice pushed her face into his chest, his beard, nuzzled her nose into his armpits, the nape of his neck, tasted his skin through the hair. If he rose early, she woke up embracing his empty pajamas, still inhaling what she could of him.

“At least I can say the one word,” she murmured. “You, you don’t even—” He smothered her sentence.

“Don’t even what?” he asked, but the kiss had been long enough to obliterate thought.

“Don’t even speak,” she answered when she remembered, at breakfast.

What he did do was howl, growl, yowl, groan. Arched his back, pointed his muzzle up like a wolf’s. “For what you do,” she said, “we need a new word entirely. Something like …”

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

He’d scared her the first time, the second as well. Was this rage? Could he be in pain? The expression on his face suggested otherwise. Now it would be silence that frightened her.