“Nostrovia!” they said.
Each downed his glass in one long, luxuriating gulp, gesturing for Quentin to do the same. The bartender was already refilling his and Alex’s drinks as Quentin choked down his.
“Another,” said Alex. He affected his thickest Slavic accent. “Tonight, you drink like Russian.”
“I have to go to the bathroom,” said Quentin.
“Okay. Hurry, there is also a performance starting now.”
In the bathroom Quentin tapped the remainder of the vial onto the metal toilet paper dispenser, an object seemingly designed for this very activity, and slid out his credit card. There was enough for two short but decently plump lines, not ideal but enough to form a break in the clouds of vodka already overcasting his mind. He took a short straw out of his wallet and snorted the first line. Delicious. He briefly considered saving the second line for later, then immediately hoovered it up through the other nostril.
When he reappeared, the performance had started. On the stage, in a silver pool of light, a woman was singing. She was sinuously thin in a strappy gold dress plunging low between her small breasts. Her bony knees and ankles protruded from beneath a pair of fishnet stockings. Alex gestured for them to take a seat at one of the tables closest to the stage and brought a carafe of vodka and two tumblers from the bar. Spotting him, the singer blew a kiss in his direction. He nodded and covered his heart with his palm. She cast her long, dark eyelashes down and swayed slightly from side to side, singing in a low voice that sounded like a needle ripping through silk.
Alex poured each of them another glass and downed his in one smooth, practiced movement. Quentin drank his down too as Alex nodded approvingly. At this distance, Quentin could see that the singer’s complexion, despite the white powder she’d caked on, was the sour color of white wine. Along her chin the dark shadow of stubble was beginning to show, and Quentin felt, in spite of himself, a shiver of horror. Not being able to pass, that was his greatest fear.
They sat drinking without speaking as the singer performed. She swayed and the men swayed too, mirroring her, and soon the room was swaying, the walls and the floor and the little army of samovars, and Quentin had the sensation that they were all being pulled, back and forth, by that constant rocking motion of the singer’s hips. He wondered what Cleo would think if she could see him here. She would never find herself in a place like this with a person like Alex—itinerant, mysterious, perhaps a little dangerous. Or maybe at one point she would have, but not now, not after meeting Frank. Her marriage had given her access to a world he would never know. She would not admit it, perhaps would never consciously know it, but she had left him behind. She had become acceptable.
Finally the singer spoke softly into the microphone and pressed her palms together. Quentin understood that it was her final song. As the first notes played, a murmur of recognition rippled through the bar, and the men began to clap steadily in time.
“Ah!” Alex said, clapping too. “This is very famous Russian song. From the gypsies.”
“What’s she saying?” asked Quentin.
“Let me see.” Alex craned his neck forward to listen more carefully. “She sings now, ‘we were riding troika’—I don’t know how to translate that, a carriage maybe—‘with bells jingling. Far away were the’—how would you say—‘shining lights. How I wish that I could follow, to lift the sadness from my life’ … It doesn’t sound so good translated.”
“Sounds very Russian,” said Quentin.
“Yes, it is beautiful and sad like Russia,” said Alex, staring ahead at the shining figure on stage. “She sings well.”
“And her? Do you think she is beautiful and sad?” asked Quentin.
“Of course,” said Alex. “Don’t you?”
“You’re not some kind of tranny chaser, are you?”
Alex turned in his seat to face him.
“I’ve never heard that expression,” he said. “But no. When I first came here there was someone like her, not her but like her, who became like a mother to me. You don’t find her beautiful?”
“I have nicer dresses,” said Quentin.
Alex laughed and poured out the last of the vodka.
“Then maybe you should be up there,” Alex said.
Quentin tilted his head back to drain his glass. A cloud of red light spun around his head.
“I should have been a girl,” he said. “That’s what I should have been. I should have been born a girl.”