“I think, what do I care about? And for a moment I’ll convince myself that I care about veterans from Afghanistan, or drone operators, or Russian political hackers, or sex slavery, or cults, or the friendship between Babel and Gorky. And I’ll do all this research—this will be it, this will be my big novel. And then I’ll start to write and it will feel so dead and so false that I can’t go on. I think, genre twist, I think personal, and then I’ll think, why am I trying so desperately to find what to write? Doesn’t the world have enough books in it? I should just give up.”
The waiter approached and inquired about dessert. Vlad asked for a cappuccino, but at the risk of appearing domineering, I told him to hold off and asked for the check. “Their coffee is terrible,” I said after the waiter had left. “Not worth it. And also—” I hesitated. The lunch had gone better than I could have dreamed. My dining companion, I could tell, was in an agreeable emotional state and a high level of intoxication. If I were to enact the next steps in my plan they would most probably succeed. And would I want them to? I pictured the alternative—driving him home, dropping him off at the front door of his condo, watching him walk inside, a bomb of hollow sadness falling upon my breast, knowing we would most probably never engage like this again. He would find appropriate friends, other parents his age, “that sexy playground,” as Grace Paley named it. I would get older, we would become familiar with each other, in faculty meetings we would get on each other’s nerves, our interactions would be reduced to mostly brief, pained, “so busy” smiles as we passed each other in the hallways, as it was now between David and me.
No, I couldn’t bear that. I let myself look at him, fully in the face, nurturing a feeling of warm affection: loving the puffy bags beneath his eyes, the large pores on his chin, his spiky nostril hairs, his self-doubt, his neediness…
“I want to show you something,” I said, as though confessing an intimate secret. “May I take you somewhere?”
He said I sounded mysterious and that he was intrigued. And that yes, he would go with me anywhere I wanted. He breathed heavy sighs—“I haven’t felt this kind of release in a long time,” he said. “Do you remember that fairy tale, where the soldier or the prince or the pauper—I forget who—puts the bands around his chest to keep his heart from breaking?”
“You stop that,” I said. “I was just thinking of that story recently.”
“I feel like that, sometimes. Like I need to keep myself held together with bands of iron. For my daughter, for my wife. I have to use the bathroom.”
He stumbled away from the table. I’d had one glass of wine, he’d had the rest, and our harvest salads and minestrone soups—no breadsticks for low-carb Vlad—couldn’t effectually sop up the wine, which came in at an astonishing 15.5 percent alcohol level. （Not too many years ago, you were unlikely to encounter a wine greater than 11 percent; somehow in the past decade we had internationally agreed we needed to get drunker faster and for less.） He had mentioned his “wife” again. “My wife.” “Mine.”
I checked my phone. I had a missed call from John, but no voicemail. He’d texted a photo of attractively arranged wrap sandwiches on a platter with the message The execution will be catered. I searched the internet for the story about the iron bands and found that it was a small detail from Grimm’s The Frog Prince. In the story, when the prince is turned into a frog, his manservant is so grieved that he has three metal hoops soldered around his chest. When the prince is kissed and turned back to human form, and the manservant is driving the couple home to the kingdom, the manservant is so happy that the hoops snap off. Strange, the detail of a servant loving his master so dearly. Homoerotic, perhaps, which is fun to consider, or a teaching tool of oppression, most likely.
I’d paid the check by the time Vlad returned. He protested, but I waved him off, telling him I wasn’t the one saving up for a down payment on a house. As we were gathering our bags the owner turned on a Cuban dance song, and Vlad assumed a stiff upper carriage and gracefully cha-cha’d out the door.
“I was a salsa nerd in high school,” he said. “Florida in the nineties. I was this skinny, zitty kid but they liked me at this one place. I cleaned the floors and got to dance with all these thirty-year-old women in stretchy flare pants and belly chains. It was”—there was a dreamy, sexualized look on his face—“formative.”
* * *
My cabin was only a twenty-minute drive from the restaurant. When we arrived and Vlad exclaimed about what a perfect idyll it was, I fought the urge to tell him that he could have it. I wanted to. In the past, early on with friends, and later with boyfriends, I had always been overgenerous—giving away my doll if another child said she liked it, or spending an egregious amount of money on Christmas presents for girls I admired and receiving nothing in return, or giving men free use of my car or place, which often ended in disaster.
I told him to go look out at the lake—and while he walked ahead I opened the trunk and slipped my toiletry bag, the limes, and the cacha?a into my work tote, which was voluminous enough to conceal their contents. I yelled that I would be inside when he was done, and hurried into the kitchen. If I was to do what I had planned, I would have to do it now. I wasn’t sure how compulsive Vlad was—he was Russian, he probably had a high tolerance, he clearly liked to drink, but he was also ambitious and a father. I couldn’t tell if he would have more than one cocktail. I pulled out the pill box from my toiletries and rolled a Seconal between my fingers. Would it be possible to seduce him on my own? He seemed to be flirting with me, speaking about sex in indirect ways and suggesting that he and I had a special connection. But no—that was only my own projection, he behaved that way with everyone, I was sure, and besides, compared with Cynthia I was repulsive, an old woman. Real life did not work out like that, with surprise reciprocity—that was a juvenile fantasy, a foolish ideation. I resolved to stay steadfast to the plot. Pushing deliberate thinking from my mind, as though I were in an exercise class and someone was telling me to complete the motions, or, more, like those moments when I turned off my critical brain and forced myself to “just write,” I crushed the pill with the sugar for his drink, muddled the limes, and mixed them with ice and cacha?a. I’d started fixing another caipirinha for myself when he tapped at the glass doors that opened into the living area.
“Vat is zis?” he said in an over-the-top accent when I handed him the drink.
“Some renters left cacha?a.” I showed him the bottle. “And some limes. You were just talking about salsa—I figured, we had to.”
And it had been a sort of coincidence that I had brought that cacha?a （I had brought more options should the mood have been different）。 But caipirinhas were the drinks that John and I had fallen in love to. Near the university where we first met there was a tapas bar—we would go after classes and get deliriously drunk. First with groups of other academics, and then as friends, until one night I convinced him to take me home with him. I remember those nights as half-lit, sparkling and sultry, my body elated with the romance of romance. When I was packing up and came upon the bottle in my liquor cabinet, I remembered and longed to re-create that glorious, fizzing confidence I had felt in myself, in my appeal, on those nights. Also, caipirinhas were incredibly sweet; if there was a medicinal taste to the Seconal, the sugar would probably mask it.