Lawrence Block - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 129, No. 6. Whole No. 790, June 2007

“You must go away... I will come and see you in Moscow. I have never been happy; I am miserable now... I swear I’ll come to Moscow. But now let us part. My precious, good, dear one, we must part!”

A moment passed in silence, an emptiness in which Evgeniy’s imagination trembled. Then he heard them coming down the stairs rapidly, and he slunk back along the passageways ahead of them, once more fighting the throng as he struggled toward the security of their accustomed stall.

Near midnight, Philip sat alone in the living room, his gaze wandering from one object to another. The weave of the fabric on the couch, marred by a stain whose origin he couldn’t remember. The air-conditioning vent in the corner, rattling intermittently as the system switched on and off. Over the mantel hung an abstract painting that Catherine had completed in college: two broad, bold, S-shaped swaths of color, red and purple. Divergent at each extreme, they curved closer together in the middle and touched lightly at various points. What was the name of it? Duet something? Romance? Romantic Red Pairs Passionate Purple? There was a precious cleverness to the title, Philip recalled, but his mind was too muddled to remember it clearly. Densely chaotic jazz murmured from the stereo’s speakers, the volume turned low so as not to disturb Catherine’s sleep.

They had kissed soon before he left their bed a half-hour before, and her lips had tingled at the time with the mint of her toothpaste, masking the faint aftertaste of her evening out. But now it was the undertones of those tastes that lingered in his memory. The briny lure of tequila, the tang of limes. Residues, castoffs. Like the bracelet she had discarded on the end table when she walked through the door, or the pocketbook standing like a challenge on the other chair.

“Did your friend Robert find you?” he had asked her after she came home.

“Robert?” she said. “Oh, you mean Buddy. Why? Did he call here?”

“He stopped by looking for you. He assumed you were meeting here first before dinner.”

“I wonder why he would have thought that,” she said, and he thought she seemed genuinely puzzled. No, he hadn’t mentioned stopping by, she went on to explain, had just apologized for being late when he got there and joined them at the table. How many others? Oh, five or six — let’s see... Miriam and Alex, Ken, Alice, Lucy... Buddy, of course. So how many is that? Six? Seven, including Catherine. Lucky number seven. “You know, just a bunch of us who’d been together back in school.”

“Sounds like fun,” Philip had said, and in his mind now he emptied out the pocketbook sitting across from him: lipstick and powder, several Kleenex, her wallet, a tampon, her cell phone, her Palm Pilot.

“Excuse me,” Evgeniy said to each person whose elbow he jostled, “pardon me.” He moved as swiftly as he could through the crowd without disrupting them too terribly, without drawing too much attention — struggling to cast a quick smile or a friendly nod to those he knew, to maintain some equilibrium.

“Well, it’s great that you got the chance to catch up with him,” Philip had gone on. “Good that Buddy’s turned up here in town.”

“It really is nice,” Catherine said. “I’d forgotten how much I missed him.”

“How long has it been since you last saw him?”

Years and years ago, she replied. They had been such good friends when they were in school — had taken several classes together, gone out to the same clubs. But once graduation came, so many people headed their separate ways. Buddy had moved out to the West Coast, to Sacramento — a job he couldn’t refuse. Catherine had promised to come out and visit, had really meant to. She hadn’t been particularly pleased with her own job then. She’d felt aimless, unambitious... unhappy, really.

I will come and see you in Sacramento. I have never been happy; I am miserable now. I have thought of nothing but you all the time; I live only in the thought of you...

“But I never went out to see him,” she said. “Eventually, each of us got so busy. I got the job at Ligon. We stopped calling each other as often as we had... You know how easy it is to lose touch.”

Soon, Catherine had prepared to go to sleep — removed her makeup, brushed her teeth, pulled on a pair of his boxers. By the time Philip joined her, she had already settled between the sheets, was nearly asleep. He turned out the light and felt his way into the bed, recognizing in the darkness the scent of the new perfume he’d first noticed several nights before. She leaned over. A kiss. Lips redolent with mint, the taste lingering as she pulled away. They lay for a while in the half-darkness together, in the glow of the streetlight through the window, under the faint outline of the ceiling fan overhead. Philip tried to catch the dim sound of its motor spinning amidst the silence.

“Did you ever...” he finally asked her, “...you know. I mean, with your friend Buddy?”

A long pause. His imagination trembled. “You men,” she said after a few seconds, “the way you...” and he heard the hint of a low chuckle. A long sigh followed. “Once or twice,” she said finally. “It was back in college. It was years ago.”

“Excuse me,” Evgeniy said to each person whose elbow he jostled, “pardon me.” He moved as swiftly as he could through the crowd without disrupting them too terribly, without drawing too much attention. Surely what he’d seen wasn’t what it seemed. Surely the man following his wife wasn’t... Surely the man from Yalta wouldn’t dare to... Evgeniy had been able to excuse that indiscretion, an isolated mistake, but he could not condone this, not abide such, not here in his own town. No, this was untenable, this was...

They didn’t speak after that, and soon Catherine’s breathing settled into a regular pattern. He listened to her for a few minutes, then realized he would be unable to sleep himself. He went downstairs, put on the Ornette Coleman CD, and sat down on the sofa to stare at the air-conditioning vent and the painting over the mantel and the pocketbook on the chair with her Palm Pilot within.

What was the name of that painting? he asked himself again, and this time it came to him, a conversation years ago, emerging from some tucked-away place in his memory. Twin Passions Twined, she’d called it, remarking to Philip that it was like them, wasn’t it? like love should be? She wrapped her arms around him in the memory, they kissed, they... but no comfort in remembering that embrace tonight. Other thoughts intruded. She’d actually painted it in college, hadn’t she? And who had the purple swath represented for her then? What had she written down in her Palm Pilot for tonight — “Dinner w/friends”? “Dinner w/Miriam, Alex, etc.”? “Dinner with Buddy”? What was listed for the evening a few nights back when she had claimed she was going to Target and Borders?

It was at the theater that Evgeniy first saw Gurov with his own eyes, but this was not his first awareness of the other man, despite his many attempts to suppress that knowledge. Looking back over all that had happened, Evgeniy realized that he had likely already lost Anna in Yalta, or even before, and he was ashamed to have arranged a witness to his own humiliation.

Yalta was his wife’s first holiday in the two years since they had been married. She had grown up in Petersburg, and he knew that moving to the provinces had been an adjustment for her. He had sensed that she was sometimes restless with their surroundings, restless with the days that he spent away from her while at council and the evenings he spent building relationships to ensure a successful career. He imagined her staring all day at the gray fence opposite the house, or chasing idly after that pesky little dog she loved so, and he felt responsible for the drabness he had begun to see in her eyes.