Marry or Burn (12 page)

S
TARK BONNEY WAS listening to a patient's heart when the woman took his hand in hers and placed it, stethoscope still in the palm, on her breast. He would have said he drew back, as a doctor accustomed to the occasional inappropriate comment or gesture from a patient, though in fact his hand stayed where it was. She took the other hand, placed it.

“Three times I have come here.” The scope was still in his ears, the voice in it muffled and rather deep. The breasts seemed at the bursting point. “The orange aura that you have, I see it.” She had some kind of foreign accent with a relaxed, insolent sound in it. “From one time to the next I wonder if you recognize me? Why do you think I am here?” She let go of his hands.

Of course he recognized her. “We're looking into your heart block,” he said, holding her now by the waist. “By itself, it's nothing.”

“No, no. Because of you. I am not Mrs. So-and-so like you call me. My name is Katya. You said that you were going to take care of me. That is what I want you to do.”

A long stormy affair followed, interrupted by her death.

KATYA HAD BEEN a violinist. But she was not good enough, she said, to play with any of the ensembles for which she periodically auditioned, so she worked in a bank. She was good with numbers; numbers and music went together. “I play too much,” she said. “Not the violin. That, I do not.” And in truth he rarely heard her practice, though he had heard her cry in the locked bathroom after one of these auditions. “No, I play, you know, in life. I am not serious. Though I love most of all the serious musician. I am always dreaming about this one with the violin, this one with the cello.” From the start, she could hurt him. “Oh, you must not worry. A serious doctor—that is the same thing. I adore him, with his blue eyes”—she kissed his eyelids—“his clean skin.”

He went into the bank, not his own bank, to see her behind her window in her loud silk and tight leather, her streaked hair pulled back from the small, carved face. “What do you do all day when nobody comes in?” Because everybody used the ATMs now.

“I talk to the guard. This man is very sad. Not a good American. I gaze out to sea.”

In Russia she had been a child of promise, taken from her village to school in Moscow, set apart for the study of the violin. But the collapse of the Soviet Union left her with no sponsor, no clear course to follow. She had no parents. Her mother had died in her thirties of an undetermined ailment, her father, “my beloved,” in the war the Soviets waged in Afghanistan. At ten, she and a friend lived and worked with the cook at their school; after the cook caught them taking rubles from her tin they lived in a man's office, and in a downhill series of hideouts. The list shifted with each telling. “Don't ask me this! We fell through the cracks. As you say.” She laughed. “Cracks! You know nothing.” At sixteen, she came to the United States with a man three times
her age, and quite soon she had left him, but of course, she said with comic despair, he was still on her doorstep. Still plying his Katka with gifts. “Katka”: in Russian that meant someone more . . . more fun than “Katya.” The gifts she threw into a drawer, where even Stark could recognize the touch of a pawnbroker—engraved spoons, medals from the Napoleonic campaigns, lacquered brooches, old pendants of amber.

After two years of a dizzying rhythm of jealousy and reconciliation, Stark had arrived at a new stage with her, in which the baring of reasons for their trespasses against each other went on in a kind of calm. His, now, were merely rote flirtation, undertaken more to retaliate than for any interest another woman could have for him; hers had more weight: confessed cravings, late-night phone calls, disappearances. He was outdone in what his ex-wife had called his “ways.” Now he had no ways, only the relics of an old habit.

“I have good luck,” Katya would say, on a day when she was soothing him. “Women look at him, this doctor.” She had a rare smile, wide, with the mouth closed. He watched, with a dawning hopelessness, the slow elongation of the curved lips. It was a smile he thought of as Russian, the expression of a pleasure half savored, half scorned.

Gradually she came closer. The chases down the sidewalk—during which he gave thanks for his hours in the gym—the recriminations and avowals, the shouts and even slaps: all these, he told his partner Bernstein, had been leading somewhere.

“Right,” Bernstein said. “Go for it.”

Twice she had moved in with him and out again, but this third time her mood as she lugged in her houseplants was sober. She closed the door, leaned on it with her eyes closed, shutting out whatever had been going on with somebody he had not been able to identify, though he knew it was not the Russian or the
ex-husband. She threw armloads of clothing onto the couch. “I will stay, now.”

This final return came at the beginning of the second year, the brimming year when he told his friends, “Seriously, I know what they mean by ‘a new life.'” They walked holding hands, or even with arms around each other. They produced, she said, an energy field of their own. “I won't even ask what you're talking about,” he said. If his daughter Lynn had said such a thing in her New Age phase, he would have given an irritated chuckle. Katya said, “It is how we are, in my country. We are not closed to the great world, like you. We have souls. Look at you.
And
”—her homesickness, her simmering nationalism could surface at any time, out of the schoolbooks of the child she had been when she left—“if
we
fight a war in Afghanistan, everyone is thinking, talking about war. All the time. We do not let our little sons go to the war while we have a picnic. You don't know about this. You have only daughters.” He did not remind her that she had no children at all.

He was not going to pretend to perceive an energy field, but his senses had indeed unsealed themselves. Backing out of the garage, in his own alley he caught the smell of paint, roses, individual Dumpsters, lilac. “Louder!” She turned up the radio. “This doc-
tor
! He must have quiet, that is what he likes, so he can hear little sounds with his—what-is-it. Loud,
forte
, he does not know. Music! What is that, to him?”

He found her a ring with a chunk of emerald set in ruby chips. She said she would marry him at Christmas. Early in the New Year, at the latest. “Right now is early in the new year,” he said, for it was still April.

“Next year. But it will be a bad year. Another of your wars is coming.”

He caught himself; he had almost said, “What does that have to do with us?”

Then, impossibly, absurdly, he was in a cemetery, walking alone to his car. He was at his door, fitting his key in the lock. He was on the stairs, he was in the bedroom opening the double closet she had taken over. He was stepping inside, he was standing draped in silk sleeves.

Impossibly, he was once more a man with a good car and a gym locker. Messages on his voicemail from women. The packed referral list of which he had once been so proud. Yet he was not that man. It was as if he had gone up the Amazon, or to Borneo, or some unvisited place, where he had landed without the labor of travel, and once there found every tie cut but the one to Katya. He felt as if he had been taken inside a cave, one where an unknown organism lived that had not yet entered civilization, whether poison or cure. Because Katya was gone—one minute she had been with him and the next gone, with her death somehow part of the cave—he found himself alone with what had happened. No one could see the organism in him, the way you could see a tan or a loss of weight when someone went away and came back. Death—of course everyone around him in the hospital and the medical school was familiar with death. Nothing exotic there. Yes, his girlfriend, his fiancée, had died, and they were sorry. No one knew he had not come back.

A shame came over him. In her harshness, her casual insults, Katya had been right: to be an American was to be a fool. To hear no warning. To have no idea what was wrong with you. To be overtaken by events you had never foreseen, and to smile. Others in the world did not smile.

She didn't mean anything political; she had no politics.

He saw that the word
adore
could be used for something
unrelated to love. Could it really have been he, Stark, who had tried in his heedless contentment to convert another person to decent, domestic, reliable love? At night he sat up in bed and grasped his head.

In the daytime he was filled with a dull apprehension, as if something were on its way that he must avoid. He had to hunch his shoulders and wait, the way he had seen so many do after an MI, not filling their lungs.

He didn't postpone any appointments; he went in to work every day. His clinic manager Shawna looked away from his eyes.

At home he would be standing in the light of the giant refrigerator Katya had chosen, in her love of appliances, and it would dawn on him that there was no food in it and the house was pounding with her music—audible no doubt to the neighbors—to which he had forgotten to listen.

“He does not know Dvorak from Debussy, the foolish man. The jerk. The musical jerk.” She loved American slang. “It is all you have, in your language. I love this word you have,
jerk
! Of course we have such words! But we have so much more that you do not have because you have no souls. Oh, don't argue. You are nothing but—jerks! Listen, Doctor, what you call the bug, the ladybug, with your no imagination, we call
bozhya korovka
, little cow of god.”

He had opened the case and taken out her violin, and now it lay on the bedroom chair. Something held him there scraping a string vertically with his thumbnail to produce a thin squawk.

At the funeral he had met her ex-husband, the man she had stayed with in that year, twice that he knew of. His hand was shaken by a man with baggy eyes and a paunch, who had come to the service in an open-necked shirt. He looked like a drinker. What did he do? Stark could not remember, though he could remember tearing at the phone book looking for the man's
number, trembling with hatred. The man seemed to be sizing him up in turn, and finding satisfaction in what he saw.

After the funeral, Stark called his daughter Lynn. “You were talking to him. What did he say?”

“What do you care, Dad? He said she would have wanted to die while she was pretty.”

“Pretty! Jesus Christ she was never
pretty
.”

“He said
pretty
. Dad, I came to the funeral, OK? Katya was not my favorite person but I feel bad for you. But this is not what I want to be talking about. I do not appreciate—”

“Did he say she thought she was going to die?”

“No. God, Dad.”

“What else?”

“He said she was about to come back to him. The guy's a mess.”

“I guess she mowed him down,” Stark said with a kind of pride.

 

STARK HAD AN ex-wife, Rosalie, but the years of getting through medical school and a residency and raising two children were far behind them both. Nevertheless, when their younger daughter Kelly was in town, Lynn got them all together. On a Friday three weeks after the funeral, early in the afternoon he called Rosalie and asked her to meet him for a drink. “No, not after work,” he said. “I'm leaving now.” He saw his stiff face glaring at him in the window glass.

He told his clinic manager, “Shawna, I'm going to have to call it a day.”

“You should, you're getting that flu,” Shawna said obligingly. Long ago, before her marriage, he had had a weekend or two with Shawna. She had suffered, liking Rosalie. But later he had seen her through her first son's atrial septal defect, and she was
loyal. He tore off his white coat. He had never before left with patients in the waiting room.

Glimpsing the changes in Rosalie, he always felt a jab of protective dismay. Still, recently she had become involved with a fireman who, it turned out, was hardly any older than Katya. Rosalie had met him when, all alone in the old house, she had a chimney fire. Since taking up with the fireman she was using more makeup and her dark eyes had gone small and sparkling. When she leaned forward the skin at her low neckline formed crisscross lines. There was no way to warn her not to lean across a table when she was with the fireman. “She's talking about fires,” Lynn said. “She quotes him. She's a nutcase.”

Rosalie said, “What are you telling me? Is the family suing you?” From Lynn he had heard that when the fireman was around, Rosalie had a new, careless tone. She knew the pride he took in having had no lawsuits. Where was her soft heart? He felt tears come into his eyes.

“Good Lord, Stark. I know you didn't miss anything. I know you took care of her. I'm sorry, honey. Oh, dear.” Rosalie had always cried when someone else did, even the children at times. She wiped her eyes; she had one of those manicures with white at the tips. “OK, look. Here's what you do. Go to the cabin. Go, and take it easy for a few days. Just lie around. There's a TV now. I got a satellite dish.” The cabin was hers now; he hadn't been there since the divorce.