The Museum of Abandoned Secrets (27 page)

Could this be precisely what she loved about him—the cold-bloodedness of a professional player, the chess-master’s logic applied to human pieces, and the fierce, single-minded focus on the results, which artists so chronically lack? An artist is totally different; he or she is forever doomed to wandering, mind and body, in tangential details, sinking into obscure complexities, into colors and shades, patches of knitting and shards of porcelain, and put before people of action, with their unwavering pursuit of “Ready! Aim! Fire!” and the jackpots hit as a consequence, must inevitably feel like a teenager in adult company—and that’s exactly how I felt with Vadym that night.

Vlada had to have felt that way, too, and for a lot longer, only she thought it was really cool—we’re always attracted to those whose souls ooze vital enzymes we lack most desperately ourselves. Actually, I don’t even know why Vlada wanted to see me that time: something must have been grating on her, something she’d come to doubt already, but somehow we spent the whole five hours conscientiously discussing sociopolitical issues—Kuchma and Gongadze, the shake-ups at the top and the rein-tightening we felt in television, the Venice Biennale, and how profoundly Ukraine managed to fuck it up, and what a redneck pig-farm manager our deputy PM for humanitarian programs showed himself to be—all those things that Ukrainians always talk about, whether they’re friends or just met each other a minute ago, forever marveling at the breakneck speed with which their ne’er-do-well country hurtles off yet another cliff, like the farmers in the joke about the cart full of melons that breaks on their way to the market and they stand there, gaping at all their melons rolling down the hill, and one says to the other, “Hey, look, the striped one’s ahead.”

That’s how we spent that night—bemoaning whatever striped things were getting ahead—even though beyond all that usual nonsense, Vlada—and by extension, I—did sense something
unsettling, unsolved, something that must have been the reason for her bringing Vadym over. Something that made her seek out, hope secretly for a moment of truth, for that late-night hiccup in personal machinery when, warmed with alcohol and easy banter, one feels the need to call off one’s internal guards, loosen one’s tie for a moment, and become oneself—for the alchemic brew that induces confessions, unlocks closets, pulls out drawers, drags up long-buried secrets and extracts declarations of old, age-old love—or equally old envy—all those stunning stories you never even suspected to be hidden right under your nose, like lions sleeping in savannah grass; such séances don’t last long, a witch’s count—from the first roosters till the second—but they are the zenith of every party, its catharsis. A party without them is like sex without an orgasm; they are the living knots that make the threads of friendship stronger, and if someone only taught those poor Americans not to go home at ten, but to hang around for two or three hours longer and let things take their course, they’d save a fortune on therapy.

They left right after midnight that time because Vadym had to fly out, at some ungodly hour before dawn, into the boon-docks, to Dnipropetrovsk, or Odessa, to the nonexistent pipeline “Odessa-Brody.” So in the end, it was Vadym, again, who set the timer on our little soiree; he was the one who had constructed the whole evening and controlled it, from start to finish, making sure nothing got loose—all guards posted, all buttons buttoned, ties knotted, and nothing, nothing, about it gave him the least bit of bother, except maybe his bladder that had to hold five hours worth of cognac, but that was the price he was perfectly willing to pay for his victory, hands down, over us. When Vlada called me the next morning, ostensibly to share impressions, or, as we called it, to debrief, it was already a new day, with new troubles and concerns, and if she had ever intended to tell me anything that would’ve been, in Vadym’s opinion, undesirable, the moment for it was gone, lost forever. Flushed, you could say, down a pipe...)

I’m coming, Aidy, just a second...I’m trying to wash my mascara off, got a clump in my eye.

(...because how could anyone ever imagine that a man can replace a woman’s best friend—that’s just silly, and it shouldn’t ever work that way anyhow. And yet every man, in his heart of hearts, holds the opposite conviction most dear: they all believe that as soon as we got one of
them
, we no longer need anyone else in the great wide world. But even when he’s such a sweetheart, and really wants to understand you because he truly loves you, and you love him too—really love him, not just bang him—even then, you can never hope to fall into that perfect and complete sync that exists between two women; and he will always begrudge you that, albeit just a little and in secret even from himself, and that is why love is always and inevitably war. Love is War, how Orwellian—and it is war, a special kind of war, one in which the winner loses it all...I’d rather be dead before I win one of those, that’s what I’d tell you now, Vadym, Vaddy—now you actually use that name yourself; I’ve heard you do that, now that there isn’t anyone else to call you by that name—after you’ve seen your victory dead, quite literally, in an oak coffin with brass handles, so why are you still beating on a dead horse, Vaddy?)

Just...a...moment! Can’t you wait another second? I can’t hear anything in here, stop talking—you and your habit of hollering across the apartment like it’s the open range or something!

(That’s another one I can’t seem to cure him of—I’ve pointed it out so many times and all for nothing...Aidy’s just like his old man: when we took the crew to interview him, he didn’t hesitate to bellow at us, myself and the cameraman, from another room—never mind that we were perfect strangers to him. Every man turns into his own father, so does that mean that I—what?—am I turning into my mother, too? Ugh, that would not be good....

Now Vlada, she never resembled her mother in the least bit; it was more like Nina Ustýmivna was a sort of an aging child for her, an adopted and really obnoxious child—Vlada rarely even left Katrusya with her, only when she had no other choice—but
actually she managed her mother rather elegantly, unlike yours truly, she knew what buttons to push. Whenever Nina Ustýmivna took a deep breath to launch—with that heavy, theatrical sigh that instantly made my skin crawl all over—into her favorite oratory about what hard, sad, hopeless lots Vlada and I drew in this life—meaning the absence of certified-and-stamped husbands, because, of course, Nina Ustýmivna’s mantra, “a dead husband is better than no husband,” was her holy and regularly professed creed, and she never did really accept her daughter’s divorce, of which her daughter, smart girl that she was, informed her only after she had the paperwork in hand, saving herself from several valium-mediated dramas—no sooner could Nina Ustýmivna begin one of her “cello solos,” as Vlada called them, than Vlada would raise her eyebrows and respond, very solemnly, in the same grave cello tones, “What husbands, Mommy? Please, we can’t be bothered, nous sommes les artistes!”—and for some impenetrable reason, the French exerted on N.U. had the same effect as a crack of a whip on an old lesson horse. Her whole affect would change into a collected, grandiose kind of posture, monumental in a vaguely imperious—imperial—way, as if the woman suddenly remembered that she was “an artist’s wife” and must bear this time-honored designation with the utmost dignity. And the funniest thing was that N.U.’s real name, the one on her passport, was not Nina, but Ninél, an anagram of Lenin, not something one acquired with a high-bred childhood and French governesses—and really, it’s not like there were any governesses left in the USSR in the 1930s—but proof, quite to the contrary, of the wild and raucous youth of Vlada’s Komsomol–activist grandma and her Bolshevik-minted (one of twenty-five thousand) Ag teacher grandpa, who, as Vlada sarcastically pointed out, had to have run roughshod on plenty a kolkhoz-resistant “location” before they decamped for Kyiv in 1933; so, she added, we’re lucky it’s Ninél and not Stalína, Octyabrína, or some other Zvezdéts you’d never shake off.

I suspect that it was in Nina-Ninél Ustýmivna’s rigorous school of behavioral management that Vlada acquired her benevolent,
gracious, ironically indulgent attitude toward the “professional wives”—that breed of belligerent females with the eyes of bored ewes who always lurk, like security guards, in close proximity to their husbands, aiming for a chance to grab, à la the unforgettable Raisa Gorbacheva, their own share of limelight when you are having a professional conversation with their husbands, all the while communicating to you with their every grimace and gesture exactly what a hopelessly inferior creature you are as you stand there all alone, with no man in sight whatsoever. I can’t help myself around them:
If not for your VIP beefcake, I’d pack you off where the sun don’t shine, bitch!
—but Vlada found them as entertaining as an exotic animal species, like the white rhinoceros, and she almost felt sorry for them somehow, just like for those poor rhinoceros that are so easy to spot and shoot in their bright white skins.)

Phone, sweetie! Can you get it? Here—it’s your cell.... Yes, you left it in the bathroom—and tossed a towel on top of it, too.

(What I really like is to listen to him talk on the phone—it’s just like watching him out the window, or in the street, in a crowd, when he doesn’t see me, smiling to myself on the sly. Once I eavesdropped on a parallel line for almost the entire conversation, listening to the two men’s voices like to a radio play—if the other voice had belonged to a woman I would’ve hung up of course, instantly and instinctively, otherwise it would’ve looked really bad, like I’m a jealous harpy or something, but with another man on the line it was really cool. I could listen, against the shadowy background of the other man’s low
boo-boo-boo
, for the eager sprout of his lithe, pleasant voice, growing like a beam of light, and for his laugh with that little snort, like a young horse, that always makes me want to stroke him...and it’s always fun to watch guys talk to each other when there is no woman around to constrain them or make them want to preen. Men’s conversation has a different rhythm: it’s faster, more aggressive; they throw lines like punches; they spar like schoolboys at recess; they don’t let their emotions crawl all over the place like we do—they keep them tight and
focused inside their sentences, like fists, which, when you listen in, does sound like they’re jousting a little.

“I even went to Crimea once with that Kápytsya guy,” grumbled the base, a fellow physicist in his previous life, apparently. “Should’ve taken a woman instead,” retorted my mensch. “I would, but they all leave me in May,” the other explained, with a glee I thought unexpected. “Seasonal allergy!” diagnosed mine. “Yep, that’s what it is, and I can’t make it before July...”

I put the receiver down at that point, because they were making me laugh. Later, Adrian told me about the guy—they were in the same class at university, roomed together in the Lomonosov Street dorms in the late eighties, and the room was right across the communal kitchen where the Vietnamese students fried hot-cured herrings every day, so the boys knocked out their window to get some air, and then had to nail a padded quilt over it in winter. In his telling of it, this all sounded downright hilarious, like a well-pulled-off prank, and clearly that’s how they thought of it at the time. And now this buddy of his was out of work, his lab due to be shut down, separated from his wife, and out of luck with women in general—always had been, but I knew that much already.

He gives me full and very detailed reports about his friends, of whom there always seem to be more. I haven’t even made it through the whole list yet; it boggles the mind, really, how he managed to acquire so many. It’s like he hasn’t lost a single pal in his entire adult life—he’s still trailing people from all the way back in middle school—and somehow, incredibly, he manages to hold the whole mob in his mind, remembering all their domestic troubles, fights with parents, snafus at work, abortions, and divorces. Lets them all cry on his shoulder when they need to, listens to everyone, makes helpful phone calls, deals with funeral homes, hospitals, and car mechanics. I can’t even keep their names straight because once he’s introduced someone to me he refers to them as if they were our common friends and not someone only he knew, as in, “Igor called.”—“Which Igor is that, the one that’s losing his hair?” And every time I evince such considerable powers of retention it makes
him go all sunny—“Yep, that one!”—and of course it never once occurs to him that the shedding Igor may not at all appreciate having me, or any other sexually relevant woman, privy to the embarrassing details of his personal plight. But men have always delivered their brethren to women they love without so much as a blink—bald heads, binges, erectile dysfunctions, and marital affairs included—the way a woman would never hand over her friends—her self-preservation instinct wouldn’t let her, unless, of course, she’s a complete idiot. That, and that fundamental feline neatness of hers, the one that demands she hide her blood-soiled pad where he’ll never see it, that she pluck those naughty hairs from her chin, that she smarten up and wash between her toes. Anything so unseemly honest you might betray to your man about your friend today might come back to haunt you tomorrow, as if you’ve unwittingly opened his eyes to aspects of female nature he, with his manly shortsightedness, never noticed before, had no inkling existed at all. And that’s why, generally, women’s solidarity is much stronger than men’s—women guard what unites them far more jealously.

Whatever I tell him about my friends has already passed a kind of censorship, whose partial objective, let us be honest, is to dim the ladies’ stardom a bit, turn them into a courtly entourage befitting my own queenly persona, into a kind of an organically coordinated flowerbed, a magnificent backdrop against which I can cut an all-the-more-compelling figure. Any details that might claim a disproportionate share of his attention are in this process corrected and retouched, while the most flattering light is turned upon Me the Magnificent.

But this is different from what men do; this is women’s business as usual, the game we’ve always played, ever willing to change parts to help each other out—your turn to be the queen today, mine—tomorrow: around Vadym, I was Vlada’s lady-in-waiting, just like she was mine when I was seeing Ch., for instance, or D. before him. So when you think about it, this is just another manifestation of our feminine solidarity; guys wouldn’t know where to
start—they’re forever falling over each other to stomp one another out to impress you, like bucks or elephants or some other animal before a female, and without even a specific goal in mind, such as, for example, actually stealing you from the other guy, just for pure art’s sake.... Alright, sounds like he’s finished his conversation, and I think my eyes look almost normal again. You can’t tell I’ve been bawling...a little puffy, but I’ll tell him it’s because I had to rub the mascara off, with cold water, that’s it. Shit, I bet the food’s all gone cold in the kitchen by now!)