“Excuse me,” he said, and walked very quickly to the bathroom, where he stayed for twenty minutes.
While he was engaged, I checked his phone, soaking in the rice, and confirmed that the screen was still warped and nonresponsive. Then I checked my own—another text from John came through, a picture of a platter of cherry tomatoes, basil, and fresh mozzarella on skewers. His message read, The sovereign is called a tyrant who knows no laws but his own caprese. Pedant that he was, he followed it up with another text, Voltaire, get it? Then another: This thing is a farce. I could resign now and end it. We’d save a fortune.
I texted him back, Why don’t you?
Civil suits. We didn’t get all the evidence until the hearing started, Alexis and Sid are looking it over today.
Ok
Where are you? I’m worried. I miss you.
I missed him too, in a way. The thought of he and Sid and Alexis all working together, drinking beers and going over his evidence seemed fun and familial. I started and erased several messages to him, but then I heard the door handle of the bathroom turn and I clicked off my phone.
“Jesus,” Vladimir said, “I feel like I was hit by a truck.”
I asked him if he wanted some painkiller, but he said no, only water. I pointed him to the glasses. He asked if I had apple cider vinegar. I had bought some the day before, in fact, and he mixed in a tablespoon. “For belly bloat,” he said, like a joke, though he meant it. As he was drinking, I pushed the bowl that contained his phone toward him.
“I found it in the toilet,” I said. “I think it might have fallen out of your pocket.”
“Nice one, Vlad,” he said. “Thanks for rescuing it.”
“Do you—want to see if it works?”
He shook his head. His lips were puffed with bitterness. “No.”
“Do you want to—use mine?” His lassitude was confusing me.
“I want to take out a boat,” he said. “Do you have boats?”
I pulled a kayak from the storage shed and brushed spiderwebs from the oar and the life jacket. I pushed him off, and he waved goodbye. Only when he was at a good distance out on the lake did I feel an erotic throb return, as I watched his shoulders undulate with the paddle, far from me. I went back inside the house and pulled the file of my book up on my laptop, hoping I had time to add an extra five hundred words before he returned. But instead I stared at the cursor blinking and wrote nothing.
What was he playing at? I couldn’t understand. I understood that during the night, still under the effects of the sedative, he had only wanted to sleep, he couldn’t think about the outside world, his wife, his daughter. But come this morning （or afternoon—I realized it was now after 2 p.m.）， I had expected him to want to get back to that home and daughter as soon as possible. If he believed me about John and Cynthia, I would have expected him to be in more of a rage—ranting at me about my husband or fuming about his wife’s betrayal. But never mind him, I also didn’t understand my own mind. Did I wish to keep him here with me, in his docile, agreeable state? If he stayed, and we drank a bottle of wine or two, would it lead to our coupling? Last night, again, probably still under the influence, he had made it seem like that was a possibility. But I couldn’t believe that was true. And besides, when he caught sight of my low breasts, my rumpled thighs, the loose skin of my stomach—
I thought of lying in the graveyard on the day David didn’t come, the day we didn’t run off together to Berlin. I thought of looking into the eyes of the cat who stepped over my body. At the time, I remembered, I had been hit with a deep, heartbreaking depression. There are no happy endings, I had thought. I was too old to be having the revelation at the time, but it pounded in my chest nonetheless, the dramatic words bringing dramatic tears to my eyes. I wondered though, now, what I would have done if David had come. Would we have even gotten to the airport before I myself turned back? Surely I would not have left my daughter, my shining pride, even if the gesture was supposed to be modeling a kind of female independence and pursuit of happiness I believed would serve her in the future.
Unable to withstand it any longer, I took a brisk two-mile walk to the gas station at the top of the road and bought myself a pack of cigarettes. As I returned, turning the corner toward the house, I once again expected to see my car gone, Vladimir fled. But the car was still parked where I left it, and when I entered the living room Vlad was sitting on the couch, wearing nothing but a towel, the space heater blasting his bare skin, reading an old lake house copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He rose when he saw me, gripping his meager covering.
“Sorry,” he said. “I fell in the water. Then I came back and showered, then I picked this up, then I lost track of time.”
“Let me get you some clothes.”
“Thanks.” He relaxed back on the couch and held up the book. “I forgot how good a writer Lawrence can be,” he added.
“The beginning is very good,” I said, my eyes locked on his face, trying not to notice that the towel had slipped quite low, so the V of his lower abdominals was visible. “But once the caretaker and Lady Chatterley actually get together it’s nearly unreadable.”
“The first paragraph—”
I made a sound of assent and interrupted, “？‘Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.’？”
“Novels don’t do that anymore,” he said. “Big pronouncements about the way of life.”
“He undercuts it though, doesn’t he,” I said. “He says something like, ‘Or so Lady Chatterley thought.’？”
“Good memory,” he said.
“I don’t know why I remember it,” I said. “It struck me at the time, maybe.”
I was backing out of the room as we spoke, wanting to get away from Vlad’s aggressive state of undress as quickly as possible.
I came back with a pair of sweats and a shirt, put them on a chair （I found I could not hand them to him）， told him to dress, and excused myself to the bathroom. In it I found his soaked and discarded clothes balled up in the tub, except for John’s sweater, which hung over the shower bar. It would ruin the shape of the garment to dry like that. I put the clothes in the washing machine, avoiding crossing paths with Vladimir, then brought the sweater out to the deck, where I laid it flat on a cushion in the sun and did my best to reshape it.
Then I sat on the deck chair and lit a cigarette. I was smoking for less than a minute when Vladimir joined me. He was clothed, to my great relief.
“You bad girl. Can I have one?” he asked. “That looks divine.” Something about the way he spoke—he could say the silliest word, divine, and make it sound like an artful, funny choice.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” I said, handing him one.
“Every once in a while,” he said. “I quit when Phee was born, but I sneak one when I can.”
And the tiniest pang of something passed over his face, the thought of his daughter, most probably.
But then he rolled his head, laid it on his shoulder, and raised his eyebrows at me. “I didn’t know you smoked,” he countered.
“I don’t,” I said, taking a drag.