Yelena Moskovich - Virtuoso

Erki nodded and smiled.

“EB linguistics,” he added. “Let’s get you ladies a drink.”

After both Aimée and Jana got their plastic cups of red wine, Erki disappeared into the crowd of highly stylised friends, but kept looking over at Jana, sharing an estranged complicity across the room.

As more people squeezed by, Aimée and Jana found themselves in the hallway. Some people were waiting for the bathroom and some were smoking by the window. Aimée slid her hand around Jana’s waist, then drew her closer. Jana leaned over and kissed Aimée below her ear, feeling the thin golden earring touch the top of her lip.

“Thank you for coming here with me.”

Jana had gone to the bathroom when the doorbell rang once. Then it rang a succession of four times, as if someone was attempting to puncture the buzzer. Aimée was leaning against the wall in the doorway, sipping her wine, waiting for Jana to come back. She looked around and caught eyes with Olivier who smiled with a widening gratitude at her, a liquored curl to his lip.

The buzzer jabbed three more times.

“I’ll get it!” Aimée shouted into the crowd and went to open the door.

Just as she turned the handle, the door pushed open and the woman almost fell in, catching herself.

She flipped up her head, letting the crown of her lacquered platinum blonde hair catch the light. Her face was tan with soft freckles across her nose. She had purplish lipstick and her furry pale-pink coat was hanging amply open.

She looked up at Aimée and her smile slowly evened out.

“Oh,” Claire said at the door.

Claire took another step forward and Aimée took a hesitant one to the right. Behind Claire, another woman gave her a little shove and said, “Come on!” and jabbed Claire to step inside. The woman followed, long-legged in her thick-waisted loose combat trousers with two big pockets at the knees, and an oversized stone-coloured bomber jacket open, showing a skin-tight red mesh turtleneck tucked in, and beneath which one could see the folds and seams of her leather patchwork bra that pushed out angularly through the sheer top. Around her neck hung a gold necklace holding up what appeared to be a namesake in the middle, but instead of anyone’s name, the letters simply spelled out: SUCK IT. Her head was shaved, revealing an even dark stubble, her face pale, with dark eyes, dense pupils, jutted eyebrows and lipstick so red it looked neon.

The bathroom door opened and Jana stepped out. Across the crowd of people, she saw the two strokes of eyebrows and the hardened pupils. Both women stood still, clasped in their glance. Then the woman opened her blazing red mouth and yelled out in a rasped-edged voice, “Janinka!”

Zorka made her way through the crowd towards Jana, as Claire made her way behind Zorka, as Aimée made her way away from Claire, in a direction that would curve back to Jana.

“ Jste nezměnili…! ” Zorka said to Jana. You haven’t changed.

“You know her?” Claire said to Zorka, but Aimée took it as being addressed to her.

“Yes, she’s with me,” Aimée responded.

Zorka looked over at Aimée and gave her a squint. She opened her mouth and began speaking an accented French.

“It’s fucking crazy,” she said to Aimée, “we grew up together. In Prague. How do you know – what’s your name again?”

“I didn’t tell you the first time. It’s Aimée.”

“ Enchantée , Aimée,” Zorka gave a bow and oily smile, then turned to Claire, trying to read her expression.

“What? Is this your ex or something?”

Claire gave Zorka a pinched glare.

“I… used to… work with… her wife…” Claire replied warily.

“Wife?” Zorka exclaimed, “you shitting me? For real? Fuck! This is like twenty-first-century-lesbian-level-shit – dykes getting married! Could you have even imagined such a thing back in the day, Janka – Wait, hold on, wait that means – Janka, is this your girlfriend? You a dyke too??”

Aimée’s face flushed, but Jana somehow cooled very quickly and became focused, untouchable.

“Yeah, I am a dyke too, Zorka,” she said in an uninvolved tone.

Zorka flicked Jana on the shoulder, then gave her a meaty thumb’s up.

“Dyke-o-rama!” Zorka grinned at the women, then reached out her long arm and grabbed the bicep of a passing girl with two thick braids woven tightly down her scalp.

The girl turned around, and Zorka gazed at her bare lips and large eyes, the pupils a medallion and muddy-green, through her left nostril a thin golden hoop.

“Hey, you a dyke too?” Zorka blurted out.

“You’ll have to excuse my friend here, she’s got no manners,” Claire said politely as she traced her eyes over the girl’s tight green top.

The girl gave a faint shrug, then turned back and continued making her way through the crowd. At the other end of the room, she looked back again at Zorka, who pursed over a grin at her. The girl gave a toy-smile in return.

“Listen, honey, I’m so sorry, I didn’t think Claire would come!” Olivier stammered to Aimée in the hallway. “Honestly, I didn’t know!”

Jana could hear Zorka from across the room, surrounded by the crowd, with Erki at her side, telling a story about her Hungarian grandpa and how he used to exclaim Lo’fasz a seggedbe! A horse dick in your ass!

She was streaming in jokes about Catherine the Great and her supposed fetish for horses and how she had a contraption built for her wherein a horse could be lowered down into her.

“Zorka, I could see you as like this dark stallion,” a shorter American guy with a pudgy face and square glasses said.

“With a thick one…” Oleg, a tall ghoul-faced Russian in the group added, “just how you like it.”

“Yeah, then you could sit on my dick,” Zorka replied to Oleg. She glanced over at Jana, then quickly brought her eyes back to the group.

Whatever the others in Erki’s entourage thought of Zorka, everyone knew that this ragged Czech turned art-piece was his muse. Even Claire could feel that somehow Zorka was becoming sacrosanct, and when the heat of Zorka’s attention was on her, she felt the impulse for rudeness and brevity to protect herself, she even started seeing a friend of Erki’s, Céline, who sometimes brought a dildo or two in her backpack to clubs, just to have them on hand.

One time, the gang was hanging out in Olivier’s living room, early evening, Céline lying on the couch with her head of dark wavy hair in Claire’s lap. Claire stroking Céline’s scalp and glancing over at Zorka. Zorka picking something out of her teeth with her fingernail. Erki with his arm around Olivier, sharing a joint. The chubby American flipping through his Instagram on his phone. Then Oleg started talking about how fucked up it was that if you don’t use one black model in your show, everyone calls you a racist.

“Why don’t they,” Oleg continued, “drive through every village in Russia,” he looked over at Zorka, “…and put in one nigger a piece.”

Zorka flicked the gunk off her fingernail.

“I told you not to fucking say shit like that,” Zorka said.

“Baby got a sharp tooth growing…” Oleg tried to reach out and finger at Zorka’s cheek, but she whacked his hand away.

There was a moment of silence for someone to switch the conversation, but Oleg jumped in again, fretful at leaving things where they were left.

“You spent way too much time in the U S of A, Zorichka, got you bleeding your panties over every boo-hoo word.”