“Yes,” Tatiana whispered back, her hands going around his neck, closing her eyes. “You said, I let you go once. This time we live together, or we die together.”
“That’s right,” said Alexander. “And this time, we live together.”
Tears rolled from her eyes.
He bent and kissed the sorrow from her face. Milaya, rodnaya moya, kolybel i mogila moya . . . zhena moya luybimaya, zhizn moya, lyubov moya ...prosti menya. Prosti menya, Tania ...prosti menya i pomilui . . . he whispered into her broken face, into her broken mouth.
What? I can’t hear, what are you saying?
In two languages, whispered Alexander, I am singing for my marriage.
Prostrate, he knelt between her legs. “Babe, Tatiasha, my whole life,” said Alexander, pressing his forehead into her heart. “My cradle and my grave, my wife, the only woman I have ever loved—I’m sorry. Please, Tania, help me. Have mercy on me. Please forgive me.”
He lay down next to her, his left hand threading under her head. His right hand caressed her. He kissed her body, from the top of her shorn hair to the tips of her feet, and all within her. His gentle fingers touched her. His big hands held her. And it was sometime when his warm, repentant mouth was on her without relief that Tatiana, desperately moaning, exquisitely aroused in all her sorrow, said, “I will forgive you.”
“You’ll say anything right now, won’t you?”
“Yes, right now, anything.” She lifted herself up, folded her body over him, took hold of his black sad head, and cried.
Alexander, you broke my heart. But for carrying me on your back, for pulling my dying sled, for giving me your last bread, for the body you destroyed for me, for the son you have given me, for the twenty-nine days we lived like Red Birds of Paradise, for all our Naples sands and Napa wines, for all the days you have been my first and last breath, for Orbeli—I will forgive you.
And then, at last, he was inside her. There was communion.
Oh, Shura.
Oh, Tania.
And so it was.
Afterward they lay nestled, tangled, breast to breast, belly to belly, still conjoined, welded, smelted, soldered to each other, their mouths barely touching, barely breathing, flush together, side by side, soul to soul. Her arms were around him. His arms were around her. Their eyes were closing. They hadn’t slept in three days and it was light on Sunday morning. She kissed his pulsing throat, touched his damp back. His scarred warm hands cupping her bruised face, he said, his voice breaking, “O merciful God, are we really going to have a... baby?”
“Yes, Shura, yes, my husband, yes. We are really going to have a baby.”
Tonight was a night of many firsts. Alexander did something he had not done since 1943 when he found out whose blood was coursing through his bloodless veins.
He wept.
Tatiana resigned from Phoenix Memorial Hospital.
Chapter Thirteen
The Summer Garden
Red Wings
Bobo was very happy to see Alexander. “Señor!” he exclaimed. “I haven’t seen you in so long! How have you been?” They shook hands.
“Busy, Bobo, very very busy.”
“Business is good then?”
“More business than I can handle. You heard we got that Parade of Homes slot? Very good indeed.”
“And your bellissima señora? Also good?”
“Splendidly good. Wait till you see her, Bobo.”
“I’m looking forward to it. She is working late again?”
“She is shopping late again. But look, it’s a special day. It’s our anniversary.”
Bobo beamed—as though it were his anniversary.
Alexander brought in from the truck two large bouquets of white roses and white lilies. “Bobo, I’m going to need your help. It’s also señora’s birthday today.”
“Anniversary and birthday on the same day?”
Alexander smiled. “I told her that way she’d never forget me.”
“Very good planning, señor. Leave it to me. Would you like some champagne?”
“The best. Cristal.”
“Of course. When will the señora be arriving?”
“Who can tell with her?” Alexander said. “She’ll be late for her own funeral.”
He had some bread, some water and a smoke. He was thinking of calling the house when he heard Bobo’s exultations from the host’s podium. As Alexander had expected, when Bobo saw Tatiana in a peach halter dress, fantastically pregnant, flamboyantly freckled, summery, shiny, smiling, resplendent, extending her hand to him, he cried. Literally cried. Tears dripped from his eyes onto her hands, and then with his arm around her, he walked her gingerly across the restaurant to a standing Alexander. “Señor! You told me nothing!” cried Bobo, his face wet. “Why, this is one of the happiest days of my life to finally see our señora so big with child.”
“Bobo,” said Alexander, kissing Tatiana’s hands, “your joy is of some concern to me.”
“Oh, no, why?”
“Fine, rejoice now, but I’m warning you, if, when the baby is born, he looks like you—bald and wrinkled and cries all the time—I’m coming for you, Bobo.” Alexander grinned, pointing a finger at him. “Coming for you.”
Just the implication of such delectable impropriety sent Bobo into peals of excruciating mortification. Finally he left to go get the menus.
Tatiana lifted her face to Alexander. “What are you doing to poor Bobo?” she murmured.
His hands fanning her pregnant belly, he leaned down to kiss her. “You’re only twenty minutes late,” he said, appraising her, patting the soft peach fabric. “And without a watch, too. Well done. The dress new?”
“For you.” Her round face was up. “You like?”
“I like.” He sat her down, adjusted her chair, sat across from her, and took in her golden freckles, her red lips, her sparkling eyes, her lavish glorious breasts. After a minute he got up and went around to sit in the chair next to her. “Are you hungry,” he said, “or would you like to go straight home?”
“Are you joking?” She giggled. “Oh. Because I am very hungry.”
“You’re very delicious-looking is what you are.”
“I am?” she said, beaming with pleasure. “Shura, I feel enormous.”
“Yes,” said Alexander. “Enormously delicious.”
“Shura!”
“What?” he said, blinking mischievously and not so innocently at her. He poured her a little champagne and they raised their glasses to their anniversary, to her birthday. Usually they went away just the two of them, but not with her being nearly eight months pregnant and the house so close to completion.
Alexander’s chair was pulled right next to hers. His suited-up shoulders were pressing against her alabaster bare skin, his arm was around the back of her chair as he fingered the looms of her slowly growing-out gold-silk hair. The champagne glass was in his other hand. She was talking, her lips were moving, her white teeth gleamed, but there was no sound coming from her mouth, just a slight whooshing in Alexander’s head, whoosh... whoosh...rustling leaves, and the lapping Neva waves against the granite carapace...
“You were so right, Shura,” Tatiana was saying, “I don’t know how I ever had time to work. I had a thousand things to do today. But honestly, how do you think our house is going to be finished next month?”
“What?” Alexander came out of his reverie. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It’ll be finished.”
“The baby is going to be finished in August whether or not the house is ready.” She grinned. “I’m doing my part.”
“Yes,” Alexander said. “And I’m doing mine. The house will be ready.” He leaned in. “You might have to sleep with the builder to get him to move a little faster.”
“Oh, well . . .” she said with a shrug. “Only if I absolutely have to.” Her beryl eyes squinted up cat-like. “So, do you know what I did today?”
“No, babe,” said Alexander, his hand on her bare shoulder blad
es. “What did you do today?”
“I spent nearly all day at the appliance store.”
“Ah,” he said. “You must have thought it was your birthday.”
“Well... yes.” She laughed. “It is my birthday.”
“I know. So, stressful... but perfect?”
“Yes! So many decisions. The sinks, the faucets, the refrigerators, the freezers, the breadwarmer—we’re going to have warm bread even when it’s stale—my two ovens, the bathtubs, wait till you see the bathtub I picked out for our master! It has the most wonderful whirlpool—” She suddenly stopped with a small puzzled furrow. “Shura, what are you doing? You haven’t listened to a word I said. Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Like what?” Alexander said softly, roaming all over her face for youth, for love, for beauty, for white nights in the Summer Garden. All was there, and all the Coconut Grove years in between, all the lupine lilac Deer Isle Napa years in between, fired up by the furnace inside her, warming her an extra two degrees and all his memories along with her. His heart was throbbing, doubling him over.
“Shura . . . are you listening to me? I was telling you about the ovens . . .”
“Go ahead. The ovens. Were they warm? Hot? Too hot? I’m listening.” He could smell the champagne on her breath as she spoke. He could smell her musk perfume, her strawberry shampoo, faint chocolate, coconut suntan lotion. She had new freckles, just above her eyelids. Must be spending a lot of time by the pool. Moving closer to her neck, he breathed in for the coconut again; the smell always took him to the summer ocean in Miami. He hoped she wasn’t doing any of her running jump reverse pike half-twist flips with that immense belly of hers. As she was speaking, his hand drifted down and rested on it.
The appetizers came.
“. . . And the cabinet man called today to say he could not do a distressed finish on the cabinets near the oven because the glaze would catch fire. What does that mean? I said to him, glaze them—and I’m not asking you. And the tile man told me this morning his entire shipment was cracked, cracked! And if we wanted delivery on new travertine tiles before August we would have to pay ten percent extra. I told him he would have to explain that one directly to you. I think he’s giving you the business. Shura? Are you listening?”
“I’m listening,” he said in a most unlistening tone. “Don’t worry about the travertine man. He is delivering all new tiles in ten days and giving us a discount on the price. Do you remember your seventeenth birthday?” Alexander asked, his body turned to her, champagne in his hands.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“We had eaten caviar and chocolates and drank vodka straight from the bottle because I had forgotten the glasses, and then went for a walk by the sunlit Neva. It was so late, yet so light. I spread out all my limbs on the bench, and still somehow you managed not to touch me or even glance at me. You were so breathtakingly shy. But river, no river, Pushkin’s lucent dusk, white nights, a city like we’ve never seen—I could not take my eyes off of you.” Alexander paused. “Why are you crying?”
“Why are you speaking of things that make me weep?”
“How desperately I wanted to kiss you.” Wiping her cheek, Alexander leaned to her, a breath away from her mouth, lowering his voice to a whisper. “To this day, when I think of it, I feel that ache—in my throat, in my stomach, in my heart. I don’t know how I kept myself from ravishing you.”
“Me neither,” Tatiana said. “Because nowadays”—she lowered her own voice—“you can’t keep from ravishing me any time you feel that ache.”
“How lucky for me that your day job finally consists of nothing more than being ravished by your husband.”
“Lucky indeed,” Tatiana whispered, “but for me, for me, my soldier Summer Garden lover.” Their tilted heads leaned in one more inch, their lips parted, touched softly. She moved decorously away. Alexander offered her one of his shrimp and then a sip of his champagne. “I don’t know why you order prosciutto,” he said. “All you eat is what’s on my plate.”
“Hey, don’t be greedy with your shrimp,” she said. “Do you want me to tell you the parable of the shrimp cocktail and marriage?”
“If you wish,” Alexander said. “Don’t expect me to listen. My mind is in Leningrad.”
“Please,” Tatiana whispered. “Don’t make me cry.”
“Tell me about the shrimp cocktail and marriage. Is it a joke?”
“You tell me. When a man is first courting a woman,” Tatiana began, “he orders a shrimp cocktail for himself and offers her one of the shrimp, but she is too shy and demure to accept—so she declines.” She smiled. “When they’re first married, he offers her the shrimp and she gladly gladly accepts.” She grinned. “When they’ve been married for five years, he doesn’t offer anymore, but when she asks for one, he graciously gives her one. After fifteen years, she doesn’t ask, she just takes one, and he resents her for taking it. Why doesn’t she just order her own damn shrimp cocktail if she likes his so much, he thinks.” She poked Alexander’s arm. “After twenty-five years of marriage, he still doesn’t offer, and she has stopped taking it. After fifty years, not only does he not offer her his shrimp, but even if he did, she would not accept.”
Alexander stared at her blankly.
Tatiana threw back her head and laughed, her happy eyes like slits.
“On our sixteenth wedding anniversary,” said Alexander, “and after seventeen years together, I tell you about your golden hair in Leningrad, and you tell me that?”
Her cream cleavage rising and falling with delight, Tatiana pulled him down to herself so she could rub her lips against his slightly stubbled face. Their dinner came, filet mignon, cooked medium-rare for him, filet mignon, cooked rare for her. “I’m going to tell you something more shocking,” Tatiana said as they ate. “Vikki is moving here.”
“Moving where?”
“Ha! Here. Phoenix.”
“Oh, thank goodness,” said Alexander. “I thought for a second you meant our house.”
“To make it like a communal apartment?” Tatiana grinned. “No, she is fed up with New York, fed up with that Tom Richter of yours, fed up. She says she’s going to get a job at Phoenix Memorial, that way I can live vicariously through her.”
“Do you... need to live vicariously through her?” asked Alexander.
“Nope. It’ll be nice to have my friend here, though.”
“Yes. But don’t tell Ant. He’ll leave us for good,” said Alexander. “You know how he gets when she’s around.” They drank, they ate, they listened to Bobo’s serenading big band music. Bobo always found good bands to play in his popular restaurant. “I’m glad for you your Vikki is moving here,” Alexander said, “but your flip mention of that bane of my existence place you worked in reminds me of something more important. You were supposed to talk to your doctor today. Did you?”
“Um, yes.” Tatiana put down her fork. “Shura, he knows how you feel,” she said, rubbing his suit sleeve. “But what is he supposed to do? He says it’s hospital policy. He can’t change it. Husbands are simply not allowed in the delivery room. It’s just not done.”
Alexander put down his fork. “Tania, did I not make myself clear last time we went to see him?”
“You did,” she said. “That’s why you are not allowed to come to the doctor with me anymore. You’re getting all upset with him, but it’s not his fault. It’s just policy.”
Having finished his food, Alexander filled his flute full, filled hers halfway. “Policy, fault, procedure, hospital rules, blah blah blah. I don’t care. Did you tell him that your husband doesn’t give a shit about his hospital policy?”
“Perhaps not in those exact words,” said Tatiana, “but I did tell him—”
“That either I’m going to be in the delivery room,” said Alexander, “at the birth of my own child, or you’re not having the baby in his fucking hospital.”
“Something along those lines, yes.”
“God, I wa
s right to hate that place. It’s still torturing me.”
“Shh.” Tatiana took a sip of champagne and turned to him. Her hand went over his. “The doctor is a civilian. He doesn’t understand the fire-fight in the woods mentality. He just knows the rules. Now shh,” she murmured, her elongated peach-polished nails lightly scratching the back of his hand. “Don’t worry. I’ll figure out something. I’m thinking of a plan.”
“Oh, no.” Alexander laughed. “Oh, no! Please, no, not another plan.”
“Shura!”
His shoulders heaved up and down. “Honestly, I don’t know if we can survive another one of your plans, Tatiasha,” he said. “We are just not the strength that we once were.”
Her shoulders heaved up and down as she laughed herself.
Alexander gazed down the plunging neckline of her halter dress. He didn’t understand how her always remarkable breasts could have gotten this mouth-wateringly enlarged, this milky, this creamy—her whole full-up, pulsing, pregnant body had gotten stunningly sexy. She was like extravagant Napa Valley Tania but squared. Maybe cubed. Alexander couldn’t think of her without embarrassing himself. The other day he drove by a fruit stand and found himself inexplicably thickening. A fruit stand! Turned out it was the word STRAWBERRIES on the sign. She washed her hair with strawberry shampoo. No, the things that roamed and rambled in his crazed head these last few months . . . “Stop laughing,” he said. “Stop, or I’m going to bend down in this restaurant, in front of everyone . . .” He couldn’t help himself. He lowered his head and put his mouth into her soft swelling cleavage.