T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

Albert hovered over her. Outside it had begun to rain. He could hear it sizzling like grease in the alley. “Try this,” he said, setting a plate of spiedino before her.

She was warm. He was warm. The oven glowed, the grill hissed, the scents of his creations rose about them, ambrosia and manna. “Um, good,” she said, unconsciously nibbling at prosciutto and mozzarella. “I don’t know,” she said after a moment, her fingers dark with anchovy sauce, “I guess that’s why I like fugu.”

“Fugu?” Albert had heard of it somewhere. “Japanese, isn’t it?”

She nodded. “It’s a blowfish. They do it sushi or in little fried strips. But it’s the liver you want. It’s illegal here, did you know that?”

Albert didn’t know.

“It can kill you. Paralyze you. But if you just nibble, just a little bit, it numbs your lips, your teeth, your whole mouth.”

“What do you mean — like at the dentist’s?” Albert was horrified. Numbs your lips, your mouth? It was sacrilege. “That’s awful,” he said.

She looked sheepish, looked chastised.

He swung to the stove and then back again, yet another pan in his hand. “Just a bite more,” he coaxed.

She patted her stomach and gave him a great, wide, blooming smile. “Oh, no, no, Albert — can I call you Albert? — no, no, I couldn’t.”

“Here,” he said, “here,” his voice soft as a lover’s. “Open up.”

(1986)

In the end, through luck and perseverance and an unwavering commitment to the spirit of glasnost, she did finally manage to get what she wanted. It was amazing. With two weeks to go on her six-month visa, she fell head-over-heels in love, got swept up in a whirlwind romance and found herself married — and to an American, no less. His name was Yusef Ozizmir, he was a naturalized citizen from a small town outside of Ankara, and he was production manager for a prosthetics firm based in Culver City. She called me late one night to give me the news and gloat a bit over her honeymoon in Las Vegas and her new apartment in Manhattan Beach that featured three bedrooms, vast closets and a sweet clean smell of the sea. Her voice was just as I’d remembered it: tiny, heavily accented and with the throaty arrhythmic scratch of sensuality that had awakened me in every fiber when I first heard it — the way she said “wodka” still aroused me even after all that had happened.

“I’m happy for you, Irina,” I said.

“Oh,” she gasped in her tiny voice that was made tinier by the uncertain connection, “that is very kind of you; I am very grateful. Yusef has made me very happy too, yes? He has given me a ring of twenty-four karats gold and a Lincoln automobile.”

There was a pause. I glanced across my apartment at the sagging bookshelves, the TV tuned to a dim romantic comedy from the black-and-white era, the darkened window beyond. Her voice became tinier still, contracting till it was barely audible, a hesitant little squeak of passion. “You know … I miss you, Casey,” she breathed. “I will always miss you too much.”

“Listen, Irina, I have to go …” I was trying to think of an excuse — the kitchen was on fire, my mother had been stricken with ptomaine and rushed to the hospital, my knives needed sharpening — but she cut me off.

“Yes, Casey, I know. You have to go. You must go. Always you go.”

“Listen,” I began, and then I caught myself. “See you,” I said.

“For a moment there was nothing. I listened to the cracks and pops of static. Finally her voice came back at me, the smallest voice in the world. “Yes,” she said. “See you.”

When I first saw her — when I laid eyes on her for the first time, that is — it was by prearrangement. She was in the baggage-claim area of the Tom Bradley International Terminal at LAX, and I was there to pick her up. I was late — a failing of mine, I admit it — and anxious on several counts: about meeting her, missing her, about sleeping arrangements and dinner and a hundred other things, ranging from my total deficiency in Russian to my passing acquaintance with the greats of Russian literature and the fear that she would offer to buy my jeans with a fistful of rubles. I was jogging through the corridors, dodging bleary-eyed Sikhs, hearty Brits and circumspect salesmen from Japan and Korea, the big names — Solzhenitsyn, Chekhov, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy — running through my head like an incantation, when I spotted her.

There was no mistaking her. I had Rob Peterman’s description to go by — twenty-eight, blond, with a figure right out of the Bolshoi and a face that could kill — but I didn’t need it. She was the center of a vortex of activity, a cigarette in one hand, a plastic cup of vodka in the other, her things scattered about her in cyclonic disarray — newspapers, luggage, makeup, paper towels and tissues, a sweater, several purses, half-a-dozen stuffed animals and a Dodgers cap occupying the two rows of seats behind her. She was engaged in an animated discussion of perestroika, Lithuanian independence, the threat of nuclear war and the relative merits of the Jaguar XJS as opposed to the Mercedes 560 SEC with three well-lubricated businessmen in rumpled suits. The cigarette—“A Gauloise, of course; what else is there?”—described an arc in the air, the hopelessly out-of-date go-go boots did a mazurka on the carpet, the fringe of the baby-blue patent-leather jacket trembled and shook. I didn’t know what to do. I was sweating from my dash through the airport and I must have had that crazed, trapped-in-a-burning-barn look in my eyes.

“And do you know what I give you for that Mercedes?” she demanded of the shortest and most rumpled of the businessmen. “Eh?”

No response. All three men just stared at her, their mouths slightly agape, as if she’d just touched down from the far reaches of space.

“Nichevo.” A little laugh escaped her. “This is what means ‘nothing’ in Russia. Nichevo.”

I edged into her line of sight and made an extenuating gesture, describing a little circle of apology and lament with my hands and shirtsleeve arms. “Irina?” I asked.

She looked at me then, stopped dead in the middle of her next phrase and focused her milky blue — and ever so slightly exophthalmic — eyes on me. And then she smiled, allowing me my first take of her slim, sharp-toothed grin, and I felt a rush of warmth as the blood shot through me — a Russian smile, I thought, my first Russian smile. “Casey,” she said, and there was no interrogatory lift to it, no doubt. “Casey.” And then she turned away from her three interlocutors, dismissing them as if they’d never existed, and fell into my arms.

There was no shame in wanting things, and Irina wanted plenty. “Where I come from,” she would say in her tiny halting breathy voice, “we do not have.”

She revealed this to me for the first time in the car on the way back from the airport. Her eyes were shining, the Dodgers cap (a gift from one of the businessmen) rode the crown of her head like a victory wreath, and she gaily sang out the names and citations of the cars we passed on the freeway: “Corvette! Z-car! BMW 750!” I tried to keep my eyes on the road, but couldn’t help stealing a glance at her from time to time.

Rob Peterman had been generous in his description, I could see that now. In the rush of excitement at the airport I saw only the exotic Irina, Rob Peterman’s ideal made flesh, but as I began to study her I saw that she was no beauty — interesting, certainly, and pretty to a degree, but a far cry from the hyperborean goddess I’d been led to expect. But isn’t that the way it always is?

“Is that not I. Magnin?” she cried as we pulled off the freeway. And then she turned to me and gave me that smile again, purring, cooing. “Oh, Casey, this is so — how do I say it? — so very much exciting to me.”