“No, I saw you.” My face contorted, I leaned so far off the couch I was nearly standing.
“We’re complicit, don’t get me wrong. But not in a physical manner. Honestly.” He held his hands up like a nabbed bandit. “Honestly.”
Vladimir looked from me to John and back. “I thought you saw them ‘in flagrante delicto.’？”
“I don’t know,” I said, shrinking back in the couch, my bottom lip heavy.
“We write together,” John said.
“You’re writing?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said, snapping. “You’re not the only one who writes.”
“Writing what?” I was being cruel but I didn’t care, for once I didn’t feel an obligation to protect him.
“I don’t like your tone.”
“I don’t like you.” He was infuriating, talking to me like I was his child.
John stood and lurched from the room. “Where are you going?” I called after him.
“I have to piss,” he said over his shoulder, and slammed the door to the bathroom.
Vladimir watched him go, then turned toward me. “I thought you caught them in something.”
I assured him that I thought that I had. I explained to him what I had seen, and how surely he would have come to the same conclusion.
“You lied to me.” He looked wounded, like a little boy who had been left out of a game.
“I thought it didn’t matter to you, whether it was true or not.” I was shivering. Ever since childhood, whenever I “got in trouble,” my body would respond by dropping in temperature. I moved from the couch, turned on both space heaters, faced them toward each other, and crouched between them. Vladimir rose and stood over me.
“But I believed you. I wouldn’t have—”
“How do you know that he’s not lying?” I was vibrating with cold, my teeth were chattering. I turned both heaters up to full blast, they roared.
“I’m not lying,” John said, emerging from the bathroom, wiping his wet hands on his pants. “I’m writing an epic poem and Cynthia’s working on her memoir. We have a writing club. We do drugs, then we write. It’s fun.”
I think I looked to Vladimir to try and offer some words of peacekeeping or explanation, but before anyone could say anything, he lunged at John, tackling him to the ground, my husband falling like a scarecrow stuffed with wet sand. It was unfortunate, really, how mismatched they were. John barely struggled; he simply attempted to pull himself into the fetal position, trying to cover his face with his hands. My eyes rested on a scratched message on the medieval chair: “Death to Yuppies,” written in script decorated with thorns. I found myself thinking about a time when yuppies were a thing we despised. What was a yuppie other than a young professional? What made them so objectionable? They were selfish, they had money, they were blind to societal ills. They liked nouveau cuisine and fitness. Was that it?
“You fuck,” Vlad kept repeating, until he had John flattened out on the ground with two shins on his upper thighs and his hands pressed on John’s biceps. I couldn’t help but feel slightly stirred at the sight of Vlad on top of my husband, his knees spread wide, the fabric of his pants stretched against his rear.
“Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” Vlad said, seething and trembling. “You give her drugs? Do you have any idea how fucked-up she could get? She’s a mother. I have a kid. You might as well give her gasoline to light herself on fire.”
He pounded on John’s chest with his hands, more a shove than a blow, then rolled off and lay on the ground, staring at the ceiling.
“I don’t give her drugs, son,” John said in a weary voice. “She gives them to me.” And he glanced at me to let me know this was true.
Vladimir sat up from the floor and twisted in my direction. “You have to take me home,” he told me. “Right now.”
Once again I felt annoyed at his paternalism. The whiff of the New England preacher that I had sensed early on in our acquaintance returned. His wife was a writer, entitled to her own process and troubles. If she wanted to do drugs （I assumed an amphetamine, possibly Adderall, though I wasn’t sure）， didn’t that simply place her in the ranks of so many other writers, with complicated relationships to substances and work? Even if she was at risk, she was her own person, not his child. Didn’t Sontag write all her books on speed, and Kerouac, and so many others? Coleridge? Sartre? Graham Greene? Just like a man to believe a woman had to keep her behavior in line while also churning out a work of genius.
“I’ve been drinking,” I told him. “I can’t drive you. We’ll have to wait for the morning.”
“She’s probably on a bender right now,” he said, rising to stand. “My child is not safe.”
“She’s not on a bender,” John said. “I keep the drugs locked in my safe. She does a very little. She doesn’t trust herself with more.
“She’s trying,” John added, and I saw that he cared for her, and was touched.
“She’s an addict,” Vlad said. He was now pacing back and forth. “You don’t know. You said she gives you the drugs.”
“She gets them from a student.”
“So how do you know she doesn’t have more?”
John rolled onto all fours, then used the arm of the couch to help himself upright, one heavy, trembling leg after another. “Because we talk. Because I know that all she wants is to get this book done so you can move out of that fucking condo and it can stop being about you all the time.”
Vladimir stopped pacing, inhaled, and shook his head. John must have channeled something about Cynthia that he recognized, because the tension wilted from his body.
“When in my life has it ever been about me,” he said softly. He looked away from us and mouthed something, some retort to Cynthia, I imagined. Then, head down, he held out his hand. “Gimme a cigarette.”
“They’re there,” I told him, and pointed to the windowsill. He walked to them, looking hunched and beaten, put one between his lips and another behind his ear, and stood still, staring at the window for a long time. Eventually I realized he was looking at John and me, reflected in the glass. He lifted the lighter to the cigarette in his mouth.
“You can’t smoke in here,” I said quickly, and without acknowledging me he put the lighter in his pocket.
He moved toward the sliding door that led to the porch. Facing away from us, he said, “What is wrong with you guys,” and shook his head. He struggled to pull the door open, then yanked it clear off the track so that it hung from the frame on a diagonal. John and I exchanged a look, and I put my hand up to stop him from saying anything, like Vlad was an angry teenager whose behavior we were trying to ignore.
We watched his back on the deck, his arm lifting and lowering the cigarette. When he finished he put it out in the coffee can full of water we’d been using as an ashtray （plip, in the silence） and walked to the lake. We heard the scraping of the gravel beach against the bottom of the kayak, then the splash and give of the water as he launched the boat.
“Wear a life jacket,” John shouted toward his direction.