Page 9

9

Her apartment was in the East Village, a fourth-floor walk-up in a rundown-looking redbrick building on East Seventh Street, off St. Mark’s Place. Kind of a funky neighborhood and perfect for an artist or photographer. It was between a vintage clothing shop and a smokes-and-beer convenience store.

As she unlocked the door, Paul heard a canine whining. When the door opened, a little dog came up to them, standing on two legs, pawing the air with the other two. A tiny, ugly dog that looked like a mix of bulldog and Chihuahua.

“This is Pushkin. He’s a rescue.” She picked the dog up and massaged his erect ears. “Oh, Aleksandr Sergeyevich! Pushok! You sweet beautiful thing,” she said. “He was in a kill shelter in Alabama, and nobody wanted him, and he was just days away from being killed.”

“You love dogs, huh?”

“I do. How about you?”

“For sure.”

“Do you have one?”

“I can’t. I’m always at work. It would be cruel.”

Her apartment wasn’t big—maybe eight hundred square feet—but comfortable and nicely decorated, with an artist’s touch. The walls were painted in an earth tone, the color of a clay pot. The furniture was a mix of rummage sale items, the kind of things you find discarded in alleys, that all seemed to work together. As for the utilities, there were old-fashioned radiators that had been painted over a thousand times and a window air-conditioning unit. The floor was that kind of parquet you see in lots of New York City apartments, quite scuffed. Tatyana switched on a series of lamps until the lighting was perfect.

“How long have you had Pushkin?”

“About two years, I think? I’ll get us some drinks. Scotch okay?”

“That’d be great.”

While she poured drinks, Paul looked at the black-framed photographs lining the walls in the living room and kitchen. Color photos of old ladies. When he looked closer, he saw that the women looked foreign, appeared to be Russian, because most of them wore headscarves, babushkas. He looked at one portrait of a very wrinkled woman with a sweet smile and light in her eyes. She was missing some front teeth, and some of them were gold. Some of the women had sunken mouths and stern or wary expressions. One of them was walking her dog in a park; another was cutting up beets. Another was sitting at a table outside a metro entrance selling cucumbers and parsley, smiling broadly with steel teeth.

“These are terrific,” Paul said.

“Oh, that’s my old stuff. My new stuff is totally different. You’ll see at the gallery. I mean, if you go.” She handed him a Scotch on the rocks, poured a white wine for herself.

“What makes these pictures so . . . painterly? Is that the word?”

“So many things. It’s the lens you choose, the focal distance. The time of day when you capture the picture. The light. And I spend a lot of time editing my pictures. And I have a great printing guy. He’s expensive, but really good.”

“They’re really intense. What makes them so intense?”

“Because I’m not staring at my subjects. I mean, I the photographer. I get to know them until I feel an intimacy with them, even though they’re strangers. I establish a connection, a—”

“Rapport.”

“Yeah. Like any good portrait painter would—like Francis Bacon or Lucian Freud. But painters have it easier. They can work for hours, days, weeks, to get under their subject’s skin. We have a split second.”

“Did you take these in Moscow?”

She nodded. “My dad goes back to Russia every once in a while, and sometimes I go with him. My mom lives there.”

He took a sip of Scotch, felt the pleasant burn. “Aren’t there tribes in Africa or wherever that think that if you take their picture, you’re stealing their soul, their spirit?”

The dog settled at Tatyana’s feet. “I think so. I mean, I’ve read some critics, like Susan Sontag, who say that photography is an aggressive act. You know, you take pictures. You’re exploiting your subjects. It’s voyeuristic. But I feel like I’m looking at them with compassion. With empathy. It’s like a caress. A way of touching someone. The best portraits come out of love. I mean, Walker Evans used to sneak pictures on the subway with his camera hidden in his coat. But I always ask permission. I talk to them first. I get to know them. I love these babushki , these grannies. I treasure them.”

He felt a swell of affection for her. They stepped toward each other at the same time. He closed his eyes and inhaled the lavender scent of her hair, then leaned in and kissed her, his arms sliding low around her narrow waist. She pressed against him, and he felt her heartbeat through her breasts. He was aware of the hard, quick thudding of his own heart. As he kissed her, he slid one hand down around the curve of her buttocks. She slipped her tongue into his mouth, gently first, then with a powerful urgency. She clearly didn’t abide by some antiquated three-date rule.

Then she pulled away, murmuring, “Let’s go to the bedroom.”

Light filtered in across the airshaft and into the darkened bedroom. Paul took her in his arms and whispered, “Tatyana,” just to hear the sound of her name. He loved that name. His arms around her waist, he slid his hands under her sweatshirt, felt her warm skin.

She helped him pull the sweatshirt over her head and unfastened her bra, stepping away briefly before pressing himself against her as the bra fell to the floor. She was perfect, silky and strong, and he actually shivered at how wondrous she felt to him now. He slipped his hand across the front of her lace panties, as her hips shifted to make room, heard her moan with pleasure as his fingers slipped inside her.

Outside the bedroom door, the dog whined.

*

They lay, afterward, on her bed. She didn’t pull a sheet up to cover herself. She traced a pattern in his chest hair with her index finger.

“What did you mean when you said you lost everything?” she said.

“My dad . . . Well, after Vietnam, he graduated from MIT, taught at Caltech—he was an early computer genius. The world could have been his oyster, you know? But he despised the culture of the modern university and inevitably picked fights with his department chairmen. Lost job after job that way. Eventually, he wound up at Western Washington University, in Bellingham, where he managed to get fired again—this was when I was little—and this time, something happened with him. Something snapped in his brain. He moved out of the house and into a hovel in the woods, the North Cascades. Leaving my mom and me without any income.”

“So how’d you guys survive?”

“Mom took a job as a receptionist in a dentist’s office, and we scraped by. Even working as hard as she did, she never stopped making art. Every spare minute she could find, she’d paint. She used to put things in her paintings, like burlap and string and flowers. Glitter.”

“So, like, collage? Mixed media?”

“Some of that, yeah. I don’t really know what ‘school’ her work might have been classified as—abstract and expressive, I guess? All I know is, she was really gifted.” He didn’t want to talk about his mother. Her long, slow death had overwritten his earlier memories of her. When he thought of her, he saw her in her terrible cancer-ridden last days, her scraggly white hair sticking up from her nearly bald head, her bruised eyes. “You told me you left Russia when you were six?”

He could see surprise, or maybe a little disappointment, that he was changing the subject so pointedly—but also an innate awareness not to crowd him if talking about his mother was too painful. She nodded gently. “Yes. We’d been in Moscow.”

“Do you remember what it was like?”

Now it was Paul who noticed a shift in her. Like a veil had come down over her face.

“Not really,” she said. “Little things, I guess. We had a dog, I remember that. Big white fluffy dog. A Samoyed named Zeus.”

“Always wanted a dog, but my dad was opposed.” Paul didn’t particularly want to think about his father, either.

“My papa used to tell me about how bad Moscow was before I was born. He’d go to banquets at work, and everyone was stealing bottles of wine and hunks of cheese. Famous people, powerful people—it made no difference. There wasn’t enough food. Like, it was a big deal when bananas suddenly showed up in the market one year. I remember hearing about that.”

He was looking at her face, wondering why, when he first met her, he’d thought she wasn’t “conventionally beautiful.” Deep blue eyes. Arched brows. Lying there immodestly, her breasts on display, she was gorgeous. A painting.

“And then we moved to America. And then I met you at a fund-raiser for liver cancer, and you stole three glasses of champagne from me. And here we are.” She leaned over, kissed his forehead. “You said you don’t have brothers and sisters?”

“Nope. Just me.”

“Was that lonely?”

“Sometimes.”

“You said your father lives in the woods somewhere. Like, in a tent?”

“No, a sort of lean-to. We used to visit Dad at this shack he lived in. Totally off the grid. He’d become a survivalist. No running water, no electricity, of course no telephone.”

“So was he really crazy?”

“Boy, that’s hard to say. It was like he was too brilliant to live in the world. He’d issue manifestos, just like—remember the Unabomber from a few decades ago, Ted Kaczynski? You’re too young. But like him. My dad is like the Unabomber without the bombs.”

She didn’t seem to remember the Unabomber.

“My father believed that privacy was disappearing. Thought technology was a more powerful force than our desire for freedom.”

“Huh.”

“Dad would say you can no longer remain anonymous unless you opt out of society altogether. You’re born, you get a Social Security number or an ID number, you carry around a tracking device called a cell phone, you leave an enormous digital footprint every day. Surveillance cameras record nearly our every movement, our faces in facial recognition software. We have little boxes in the home that are constantly listening to us. And there’s nothing to be done about it—the genie is out of the bottle. There’s no such thing as privacy anymore. All you can do is drop out. Opt out. So, that’s what he did. He dropped out.”

“He had a point, don’t you think?”

“Yeah. Maybe. But he wouldn’t listen to anyone else. And when my mom found a lump in her breast, she . . . Well, she died of cancer when I was a teenager.”

He looked up and was surprised to see that Tatyana had tears in her eyes.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

“So am I,” he said quietly. He found himself lost in thought for a moment, remembering his mother’s last days, in Bellingham, when her body was ravaged with cancer. He remembered her when his father left, after days of loud arguments. She sat on the landing of the staircase weeping inconsolably, though Paul tried to console her, putting his arms around her. He tried to think of happier images, remembered her making dinner, usually meatloaf or Shake ’N Bake chicken, with paint-spattered hands. His childhood was blotted out by his father’s rages and his mother’s meek attempts to mollify him.

They were both silent for a long time. “Would you mind,” she said, “if I took your picture?”

“Now?”

“If it’s okay.”

“Naked?”

“I like your body, but I don’t want to do Mapplethorpe.” She got out of bed and retrieved a camera from a side table, a serious-looking Canon digital with a big lens. “Can you turn to your side?”

“With or without the sheet?” Paul asked.

“The sheet over your lower half.”

He turned in the bed and pulled the sheet down to around his waist. “Like this?”

“Shh,” she said.

He heard the shutter click multiple times. She tugged at the sheet, pulled it down a little, but not all the way. The shutter clicked some more.

“There,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Is my butt going into your gallery show?” Paul asked.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” she said.