“Oh. Yes. As it turns out, yes, yes, I do.”
He drank straight from the pitcher and didn’t stop until half the lemonade was gone. “It is hot out there. Well, nice to meet you, ladies.” He took his cigarettes from her, with a wink, and was gone. When the door had shut, a smiling Carolyn said, “Tania, where did you find him?”
“Loose on the street,” said Tatiana, starting to clear off the table.
“Was he loose for long? Where did his scars and tattoos come from?”
“Scars, where did those arms come from?” said Melissa.
“Scars and tattoos from war, arms from roofing.” She busied herself with cleaning up.
“He’s a roofer? He has a tattoo of a cross. Is he religious?”
“He has another one, of a hammer or something. Is that a roofing thing, too?”
Oh, bless them. It was as if the Iron Curtain had not descended all over Europe.
“When’d you get married?”
“In 1942.”
The girls fortunately did not pick up on 1942 being in the middle of some silly war somewhere. Time really did mute many things.
Amanda said, “He works for my fiancé, Steve, of Balkman Custom Homes. Steve and his dad own the business. Steve and I are getting married soon ourselves. He and Alex are best friends.”
Cindy, a pixie girl with short dark hair, said, “He works with my fiancé, Jeff, too. We’re getting married soon.”
The nurses listened politely and then turned to Tatiana. “So tell us, what kind of a husband is he?” Melissa asked. “Is he grumpy? Is he moody? Is he demanding?”
Tatiana tried hard not to compress her mouth. Her husband was all those things, and then some. “He’s the reason you punch the clock and pop the clutch as soon as your shift is over,” said Carolyn, pinching Tatiana.
“Doesn’t she just,” said Erin. She was the receptionist. “She won’t even wait for the next shift nurse to come in. Seven o’clock comes and she’s in her car at seven oh one.”
“Girls, are you quite done?” Tatiana said, and Carolyn and Erin laughed.
They wanted to know what he did for a living, how many hours he worked, whether he had to get dressed up to go to work, or if he looked like that all day long, whether he came home tired. He was a soldier, for how long? What was his rank? Was he still a captain? How long was he at the front? Did he bring some of the war home? Giggling accompanied that question.
“He brought all of the war home,” said Tatiana, not giggling.
Another thirty minutes of rampant and largely unanswered curiosity passed before she waved goodbye to the last of them and came around the house to the back deck, where she found Alexander sitting on the deck rail, smoking. He had taken off his T-shirt in the heat.
“What are you doing coming in, especially so messy?” Tatiana said, walking up the deck steps. “You promised to stay away. They talked about nothing else but you the rest of the party.”
“Oh?” he grinned. “What did they want to know?”
She shook her head and laughed.
“So what did you tell them?” His smile was from ear to ear. “Anything good?”
“Stop that. Go get clean. Ant will be home soon.”
“Did you tell them at least,” he asked, lowering his voice, “how much you like me messy?”
He was impossible. Yet seeing him sitting on top of the railing, his legs dangling in her favorite jeans of his, his happy crème brûlée eyes melting at her, the whites of his teeth beaming through the stubble, his spiky black hair, his gorgeous muscled arms and smooth bare chest glistening, Tatiana had to hold on to the deck chair because she didn’t want him to see her legs start to tremble. But Alexander was smiling at her so widely, he must have already known. He put down his lemonade, put out his cigarette, and jumped down.
She put up her hands. “Shura, please,” she said hoarsely.
“All right,” he purred. “Since you asked so nicely.”
Picking her up into his arms, he carried her to his work shed, kicking the door shut behind them and setting her down. It was scorching inside. The shed was organized, cleaned up, but it still smelled of saw and wood and metal and large power tools, oiled with grease. Reaching out, he moved one strap of her sundress down, then the other. He pulled the dress off, unhooked her bra, pulled off her underwear, and left her standing bare in front of him.
She tried to keep her breath from quickening, as she stood naked under his man’s gaze, her legs from trembling, her nipples from hardening. She failed on all counts.
Finally he spoke. “Tania,” he said calmly, his hands circling her waist, pulling her against his jeans and his belt buckle. “I’m not even going to get undressed. I’m going to leave my jeans on and my boots on, but you’re going to be naked like this”—he lifted her and set her down on his work counter—“on the potato counter I built for you.” Standing between her legs he rubbed his perspired chest against her impossible erect nipples. This time there was nothing suppressed about her moan. She leaned back on her unsteady arms. He scoured his stubble over her mouth, her neck, her breasts. “You like a bit of this,” Alexander whispered, less calm. “Did you tell that to your Tupperware friends?” He tugged her nipples. “Did you?”
She moaned into his mouth in response. They kissed hotly. Her arms wrapped around his neck. His arms wrapped around her back.
“Of course not,” he said, unbuckling his belt, unzipping his jeans. “You’re all prim and proper and buttoned up with them.” He laid her flat on his work surface, bringing her hips to the edge. Her hands grasped the counter.
“What do you want me to do next, Tatia?” he said, standing over her, his hands gripping her thighs. “Tell me.”
She couldn’t even mouth an oh Shura, crying out.
She came instantly upon his entering her.
Sunday by the Pool
The summers are broiling, no question about it.
But during winter in Scottsdale, as they try to live a regular life, they wear long sleeve shirts and light jackets and still sit outside and drink their tea and have a smoke, looking at the valley and the mountains and the sunset over the desert. After their first spring on the hill, Alexander says that perhaps Tatiana is right, perhaps there is nothing quite like the Sonoran Desert covered by brittlebush, like sunflowers in vivid bloom, with the red ocotillo and the white saguaro and the pale rose palo-de-fierro reflecting in the relentless sunglow.
It never rains except during the short monsoon season, every day is sunny, every night is warm and the stars are out. There is no snow. “It’s good there is no snow,” they say obliquely to each other. Aunt Esther caught a virulent cold in the blizzard of 1951, barely made it out alive. Tatiana wonders if there is snow in Korea where Vikki and Richter are. North Korea crossed the 38th parallel in June 1950, just as Richter had predicted, and surrounded Seoul in South Korea in weeks, and it was another two months before the United Nations finally got their act together and let MacArthur fight back.
Alexander and Tatiana drive 200 miles to Tucson and back at least one weekend a month for his intel work at Fort Huachuca. She and Ant sightsee while Alexander sifts through reams of classified, top secret, unanalyzed Russian data about weapons and satellites—space and European—and activities—space and worldwide. He also reads many of General Willoughby’s reports. Yuma Test Station is reopened during the course of the war and Alexander gets reassigned there, where to satisfy his additional seventeen days a year of active duty he tests and trains other young reservists on new ground-combat weapons—munitions, artillery, armored vehicles. Yuma is larger in size than Rhode Island. It tests weapons for all four branches of the U.S. military and Alexander’s assignment orders start coming only to Yuma. Tania is not as happy. Tucson is historical and beautiful and full of Catholic missions for her and Anthony to tour, while Yuma is in the middle of nowhere, and has nothing in it but Alexander. She grumbles only slightly. She always goes. Anthony never grumbles. It’s his favorite par
t of the month, because every once in a while, if his father is not preoccupied or busy, he takes Anthony for a ride in a WWII armored Jeep.
At home, Tatiana never stops cooking. Thanks to Francesca, she now knows how to make tacos and enchiladas, burritos and tostadas, fajitas and killer beergaritas. Infrequently she makes Russian food— pirozhki, blinchiki, chicken soup, salad Olivier. She wishes she could make borsht, but borsht has cabbage. All Russian food does something to them, like Russian language. They still speak Russian at the dinner table, so that Anthony will continue to know Russian, but they’re Americans now; they have gotten so used to speaking English in front of other people that sometimes even in bed, they speak it. After all, the things Alexander whispers to her in the swelter of night have always been in English.
But Tatiana hears Alexander humming Soviet war songs as he works around the house. He hums them quietly so she doesn’t hear, but she hears. The days she hears them, she speaks Russian to him, and as if understanding, he speaks Russian back. But Russian hurts them both. He tries to stop humming, they hang their heads and continue with their outer life, in English, except for the vestiges of the past they can’t burn down.
Tatiana makes bread dough on the days she doesn’t work, so that there is always enough; all Alexander has to do is put it in the oven. “Even you can turn an oven on, can’t you, commander of a battalion?” There is no talking her out of the bread-making and he has stopped trying and helps her now, seeing that with his help she gets done quicker. Kneading the dough, they chat quietly. They talk of work, his—not hers—she tells him jokes, they talk of Sundays—they are always together on Sundays—of Anthony’s school, of how he’s doing, what he’s doing, the friends he’s made. They talk of Alexander’s architecture courses, of his heavy workload, of whether he needs a degree, whether it’s worth it to continue—it seems too much, with work, college, reserve. He asks her once if she thinks he should resign the reserve when his commission is up, and she stares him down and replies that it’s not the commission he should resign. He does not bring it up again.
Sometimes they try to iron out their few small difficulties—him working too much and too late, him going out with Steve, which Tatiana never likes. Alexander doesn’t want to hear it. He says he accepts that there are some people she is just not going to like, and that’s fine with him. But because of her muted antipathy to the people Alexander works with, certain things that should be easy are made slightly more difficult: social gatherings, parties, days at carnival fairs, work dinners, encounters at construction sites. The undercurrent of her solemn, barely hidden disapproval is further sustained by their mutual inability to talk to his home building friends or to her hospital friends about the things that brought them here: courtships, engagements, families at weddings, things that for other people are fairly straightforward. They don’t admit even to each other they have a little trouble navigating the waters of the life of the magazine quizzes that everyone else around them seems to be sailing through. They do their best—they go to parties, they mingle—and then they come home and cook and clean and play with Anthony and build things, and make caramel (her burnt sugar, his condensed milk) and every once in a while even play war hide-and-seek in the saguaros.
Bill Balkman loves Alexander, and Alexander knows it and needs it, and Bill is the main reason why Tatiana says much less than she wants to about the cannibalistic lobsters her perfect husband is in a live tank with. Alexander is never home because of Bill’s love for him. He has been put in charge of nearly everything in the home building process, from the pouring of the foundation to the landscaping. He is so competent and swift that Balkman begins to give Alexander small bonuses for houses built ahead of schedule. While Alexander is thrilled at the bonus, Tatiana wants to emphasize the small—but of course doesn’t.
Alexander and Tatiana talk of Truman, of McCarthy, of Sam Gulotta thinking about premature retirement, of Korea and Richter, of the French fighting in Indochina against Stalin’s guerrillas, and how Southeast Asia will most likely be the next stop on Richter’s military train through life. They speak of many things.
What they never talk about in their Ladies Home Journal life: Mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers. The rivers in which they swam, the rivers they fought across, their blood trail that runs across continents. Sisters with warm hands. Grandfathers in hammocks. Bare linden trees in Germany. And frozen lakes with ice holes.
In the early spring of 1952, Alexander said to Tatiana, “Let’s build a swimming pool.”
She said no. “We can go to the public pools.”
“Like you’d let mothers and small children look at my body. I want a pool so I can swim any time I want. Naked with you.”
“How much?”
“Three thousand dollars.”
“Too much! Our whole trailer cost that much.”
“It’s not a trailer, it’s a mobile home. How many times do you have to be told?”
“But we’re saving for a house!”
It was time to light another cigarette and stare blinklessly at her for a second. “Tania,” he said, “let’s build a fucking pool.”
It was something else. At twelve feet wide and fifty feet long, the lap pool had a diving board and an outdoor hot tub on a raised platform. It took seven weeks to build, and there were one or two hidden costs: like the large intricate meandering stone deck, the wrought-iron fence, the desert landscaping and the decorative lighting. Also the heating equipment to keep it at eighty degrees all year round. The total came to over six thousand dollars. Alexander just paid the surplus out of his bonus account with Bill and didn’t tell Tatiana.
In early May, Bill Balkman, his girlfriend, Margaret, Steve and Amanda came over for a Sunday afternoon pool party. The sun was, as always, out; it was in the high eighties, a fine Sunday. Tatiana had bought a fashionable new yellow polka-dot bikini, but Alexander took one look at her and forbid her to wear it.
Steve didn’t look her way in any case. He had a gash on his cheek with three black stitches. He hadn’t come to Phoenix Memorial, and since it was the only hospital in the city, Tatiana had to wonder where Bill Balkman was now taking his son to get sewn up so that he wouldn’t come to a place where Tatiana would know what happened. Uncharacteristically silent, Steve didn’t explain and no one asked. He didn’t swim, hardly ate, cracked no jokes, barely talked to his father, and his father barely talked to him. His father did, however, talk to Alexander—non-stop. “Great place you got here, Alexander,” Balkman said as they sat out on the patio after swimming. “But I don’t understand, why don’t you build yourself a real house? I hear you know a good builder.” He chuckled. “Why live in a hut?”
Alexander avoided meeting Tatiana’s eye, for he hated other people to see what was inside him: a small hut in the pine woods on pine needle river banks where freshly spawned sturgeon swam past on their way to life in the Caspian Sea. Or—holes in the woods, his weapons around him, waiting at dawn for the enemy to come from below. All that was in his laconic reply to Bill: “It’s plenty for us right now.”
Sunbathing in a pleated satin and wired-bust maroon Marilyn Monroe one-piece, Amanda said, “Tania, the maillot you’re wearing is so forties. Alexander, you should buy your wife a nice new bikini to celebrate that pool of yours and to show off her little figure.”
“You think?” said Alexander, glancing at Tatiana.
“But you’re a very good diver,” Amanda continued, looking Tatiana over with a puzzled brow. “That back flip was hopping, and that cartwheel off the board! Where did you learn to dive like that? I thought you grew up in New York City.”
“Oh, you know, here and there, Mand.” Mostly there.
“Tania, can you go get us some more potato salad, please?” That was Alexander, running interference.
Balkman, when she returned, was saying, “Alexander, good boy you’ve got there.”
Anthony was showing off in the water.
“Thanks, Bill.”
Tat
iana found it fascinating the way Bill hardly ever addressed her.
“Anthony!” Balkman called. “Come here for a sec.”
Anthony came out of the pool, long, lean, dark, dripping, and stood shyly by Balkman.
“You’re a good swimmer,” Balkman said.
“Thank you. My dad taught me.”
“How old are you?”
“I’m nine on June 30.”
“You’re going to be tall like your father.”
Tatiana watched Alexander sitting smoking, his calm eyes appraising his son.
“So what do you want to be when you grow up?” Balkman asked. “My son, Stevie over here is a builder like me. What do you think? Are you going to come build houses with me and your dad?”
“Maybe,” said Anthony, deflecting with the best of them. Tatiana smiled at her son’s skills. “But my dad’s been lots of things. He was a lobster man. He made wine. And he drove boats. I drove a boat with him. He was a fisherman, too. He can make all kinds of furniture. What’s that called?”
“A furniture maker,” said Tatiana helpfully, her own eyes adoring her son.
“Yes. Oh, and he is also a captain in the United States Army, and was,” said Anthony, “a soldier in the Second World War. He went up the mountains carrying—how many pounds of gear, Mom? I forgot. Like a hundred and fifty.”
“Sixty, Ant,” said Tatiana, glancing at Alexander, shaking his head at her.
“Sixty,” said Anthony. “He was in a POW camp, and in a real castle, and he led battalions of men across—”
“Anthony!” That was both Tatiana and Alexander, who got up and took Anthony by the hand. “Come,” he said. “Show me that reverse pike dive your impossible mother’s been teaching you.” As they walked past, Tatiana heard Alexander quietly saying, “Ant, how many damn times do I have to tell you?” And Anthony in a distressed voice replying, “But, Dad, you said don’t speak about you to strangers!”
Brown-haired Margaret, tall and angular, in her forties but trying to look younger, was clearly trying to make up for Bill ignoring Tatiana. She said, “Tania, you do know that Bill loves Alexander? We both do.”