Has anybody
Seen my lady
This livin’ alone
Will drive me crazy
Oh, you don’t know
The shape I’m in
–The Band
by Joel Deutsch
Daniel, keys in hand, hooded sweatshirt draped over his shoulders with its arms knotted loosely around his chest, rode the elevator up from the below-street parking level to the building’s foyer. May as well stop and check the mail now instead of bothering to come back down later, he thought.
The foyer was a narrow vestibule with a locking steel-grillwork front door. Along the wall across from the elevator were three rows of mailboxes, one for each floor of the building. Against the other wall, between the elevator and the door, sat a padded bench on which the older tenants liked to relax and catch their breath after a salutary evening stroll, or just socialize with neighbors.
When Daniel emerged from the elevator, the foyer was empty except for two people standing beside the mailboxes in heated discussion. One of them was Irina, a nice-looking woman in her middle forties, Daniel guessed, who he was pretty sure lived on the floor beneath him, two or three doors down from the Karnovskys, the old couple who liked to bang on their ceiling with a broomstick or call the building manager when he played his surround sound audio/video system even a few decibels above background music volume.
Irina was medium height, 5-4 or 5-5, and slender. A discipline regime of morning exercise—Daniel had seen her doing her pre-run stretches outside the front door, caught sight of her loping down the sidewalk in nylon running shorts, tank top and headband– had spared her from thickening as she might have, otherwise.
Her brown hair was fashionably cut, shoulder-length, her nose gracefully Semitic (most of the recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union like the ones in this building, Daniel had learned, were Jewish, his distant ethnic cousins), intelligent hazel eyes and, the feature that made him take something more than passing notice, a lush-looking, full-lipped mouth. Daniel had felt a liking for the woman, had even entertained a few lascivious fantasies about that mouth, but had usually managed to set the fantasies aside almost as soon as they struck him, his libido still damped down by postmarital funk.
Today, Irina was wearing a pink short-sleeved cotton polo tucked into khaki walking shorts much like his, with a thin gold chain around her neck, small gold hoops in her pierced ears, and leather sandals on her feet. A pair of what Daniel supposed must be reading glasses hung in front of her from a black nylon lanyard, lending an incongruous librarian touch to her otherwise sporty look.
From time to time, he and Irina would encounter each other in the lobby like this, or in the elevator, or in the underground parking garage . She drove an old but apparently well cared-for Nissan Sentra four-door, faded blue. She spoke English with an unmistakable Russian accent, but her pronunciation was clear enough and her command of grammar sufficient for his easy comprehension, and the kind of little errors she still made— mostly an article occasionally missing or mistakenly inserted– Daniel found more charming than annoying.
The person with whom she was arguing was a tall, skinny, dark-haired and glum-faced young man Daniel had noticed around the place but never met. How not to have noticed him, at least a six footer, and with that multicolored skullcap, its cheerfulness such a contrast to the rest of his usual garb of dour-looking lack suit and white shirt, sans necktie, that the Orthodox wore. Like the men Daniel had seen at the kosher food grocery on Fairfax when he’d dropped by one day on the way home from work to pick up a chicken to roast himself for dinner, just for a break from the usual Thai or Szechwan takeout.
Daniel had patronized the old market that afternoon instead of the Whole Foods just a few blocks farther up the street out of curiosity to see if it still looked the same as it had when he and his best high school friend, chuckie Kravitz, had dared each other to enter one of the retail lairs of the backward fanatical meshugenas, , as his father called them.
He and Chuckie had stalked the aisles, one by one, amazed that so many shelves could be filled with nothing but brand names like Manischewitz, Rokeach, and the trademarks of other American and Israeli kosher food producers, all their labels printed with the certification symbol of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis, a letter u within a circle. They had dared each other to shoplift something for a trophy, but neither of them could spot anything small enough to slip into their jackets, chuckie’s a zippered nylon windbreaker with the name of the American Zionist Association chapter he belonged to across its back, Daniel’s a Dodgers baseball jacket. You couldn’t get a family size jar of bottled gefilte fish or much else they saw into pockets like those, and so they’d ambled empty-handed past the clerk at the cash register, each with a cheerful leave-taking of Shalom, peace be unto you, and back out onto the street, giddy as two junior high kids over having penetrated a den of the pious and survived, as if the big-bellied, wild-bearded owner who had kept an obvious eye on them from where he stood in the doorway to the back room was the scary villain of a James Bond movie.
The chicken hadn’t been bad, really, although it did have a vaguely saline flavor from having been subjected to its ritual brining, which had also left its skin as thinned out and fragile as the epidermis of someone who’d fallen asleep in the bathtub.
Daniel overheard a smattering of English as he’d stepped out of the elevator, but when the two noticed him, they switched completely to Russian. His own mailbox was uncomfortably close to Irina’s , so close that he could smell a trace of faded perfume coming from Irina, cutting through the more innocent fragrance of cocoanut-scented shampoo. He pulled everything from his box: the monthly cellular phone bill. A statement for one of his credit card accounts. a glossy brochure picturing items on sale in the nordstrom’s men’s department. a missing child bulletin printed on thin, recycled paper like a flimsy long postcard. He wondered if any of the disappeared kids whose elementary or middle school head shots illustrated these bulletins were ever located. The Russian voices beside him grew very agitated, and then the young man turned his back on Irina and barged out of the building, slapping a somber black fedora over the colorful skullcap as soon as he set foot outside the door, which locked itself behind him with a heavy metallic clang.
“Sorry,” Irina said, still watching the door, flinching at the sound of its closure. She Then, turning back to her open mailbox, she began extracting its contents just as Daniel was locking up his own.
“No problem,” he reassured her. “I didn’t understand a word of it. ” At this, Irina smiled, which was enough of an encouragement so that he felt like finding something more to say. I haven’t seen you around for a few days,” he ventured, slipping his key ring back into his pocket. “How’re things?”
Irina shut the door of her mailbox, locked it up and turned to face him. “Okay, thanks. I guess. Not bad. How are you?” She put on her reading glasses and flipped through her mail.
“It’s a three day weekend,” said Daniel. “Labor Day. I won’t have to see my office again till Tuesday. So I guess I’d have to say good. I feel good.”
Irina plucked off the reading glasses, let them drop onto her chest, and peered questioningly up at Daniel’s bandaged forehead. “what happened to you?” she inquired.
“Just a little accident. Fell down in a parking lot.”Under the circumstances, this seemed to him adequate disclosure. He touched a finger to Nora’s dressing. “It doesn’t really hurt too much anymore.”
“I’m glad,” she said. “It’s nice to see you, Daniel.” With that, she started toward the elevator.
“Hold on. I’ll ride up with you.”
In the elevator, the conversation resumed, and it seemed to Daniel the natural thing to do, getting off with Irina at her floor. The place was built like a motel around an open central area with a courtyard at ground level that included the mandatory undersized swimming pool surrounded by a scattering of round red steel tables with center-post umbrellas and mismatched patio furniture. The pool was empty.
They lingered beside the railing of the outdoor walkway across from Irina’s door, and talked. It was the first actual conversation they’d ever had. Irina was divorced and the mother of one child, she told him. That was the tall boy he’d seen her with downstairs. She’d grown up in Moscow , where she’d been an elementary schoolteacher with a part time career as a free lance photographer, selling her work to one of the independent newspapers that sprang to life in the first exuberant flush of post-Soviet journalism.
But when she and her husband Dmitri, their then-eight-year-old Sasha, and Irina’s widowed father Zalman had arrived in Los Angeles ten years ago, resuming her teaching without the California certification and good English was out of the question, unless she wanted to work at one of the several bilingual Russian and English transitional preschools, which she didn’t. but nothing could stop her from taking pictures again, so she used her camera as an excuse to explore her new city.
She sold some of the new photographs– an elderly Russian babushka riding the bus in a cloth coat surrounded by tennis-shoed, baseball-capped white men and boistrous African-American high school students, drunks passed out on subway station benches just like in the Moscow Metro, the incongruity of high-rise Venice apartment buildings looming over a background of sand and ocean sunset– to the local Russian weeklies, but the pittance they paid her, added to Dima’s minimum wage earnings as a night shift security guard at a Wal-Mart near the airport, scarcely helped make ends meet, even with the food stamps and the discount they got on their rent with a voucher from a county housing program.
“My father could not help us financially,” she explained. “He was over 60 already. In Russia, he was professor of metallurgical engineering. Here, of course, there was no work for him, unless he wanted to drive the taxi or deliver pizza like a lot of the Russian men do. But this kind of work wasn’t a good idea, because he has problem with his heart. Too much stress and no exercise. My father clearly saw this was a bad risk. So we lived on the air. Like little birds.”
But Dima, it turned out, had brought with him to America the best skills set that a young man in his position could have to offer in the last five years of the 20th century, Information Technology expertise in everything from high-level programming to network design and maintenance.
And so it came to pass that, after two semesters of more than slightly challenging community college English courses, which he attended in the daytime with fellow students as young as half his age, because of the night job, and an introduction to a Russian department manager, a Jewish man who had been permitted to emigrate during the Gorbachev era as the whole soviet structure was collapsing, he landed a good job as a systems analyst at a Westwood accounting firm and started bringing home a respectable middle class salary.
They upgraded (this was Dima’s expression, which he now used gleefully instead of “improve” or “improvement” every chance he got)from the one bedroom apartment where only husband and wife slept in privacy and the grandfather and his grandson, both, had slept on side-by-side sofa beds, to a two bedroom, leaving only the boy still out in the open without a door of his own. Someday, Dima promised them, they would find even a bigger place, in another building. He bought their first new car, the now-aging Sentra. And with his employer’s health plan, they no longer had to wait for hours in the emergency room at Cedars-Sinai or Midway Hospital anymore alongside the desperate, depressed poor, the screaming deranged, the pitiably and hideously injured, just because Sasha had an ordinary childhood ear infection or Dima needed something stronger than Tylenol or Motrin to quell the ferocious headaches that sometimes assaulted him at work.
Dima rose quickly to more and more responsible positions with commensurate increases in salary, so for the first few years Irina had been able to be a mother and housewife only. She’d taken some English classes, herself, and driving lessons, too, so she could get around on her own in the used car Dima had found for her on Craig’s List. She’d joined the PTA at Sasha’s elementary school and learned to get along, at least superficially, with Korean parents, African-Ameirican parents and Latino parents as well, whom she had to explain to Dima that he shouldn’t refer to out of hand as Mexican, because sometimes they were from Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras or El Salvador.
And she got into her photography more vigorously than ever. She convinced Dima to buy her a new enlarger, developing trays, paper and chemicals. Then she set up the darkroom equipment in the bathroom in such a way that the whole thing could be broken down and stored in a closet between uses.
So far, so good. But then Dima had deserted, run off with a younger woman, an amerikanka, accountant at his work, whom he apparently kept in thrall with his tales of exotic Mother Russia and his accent, which even Irina, embittered as she was to be so unceremoniously abandoned , had to admit probably sounded very seductive. When she, feeling bushwhack , had asked her husband what the matter was with their marriage, he had accused her of stealing his youth, of making him feel like a gulag slave laborer in his own home. “With some couples,” Dima had explained to her as if she were a child, “the man and the woman respect reality, and they are happy. But we are the kind of couple where the woman wants only to change the man, and the man wants the woman to stay just like she was when he married her. This is an impossible situation, of course, and for me there is nowhere left to go but out of the cage I have helped to build for myself.”
The whole time, Irina had been staring down at the empty pool, and Daniel had been looking in that direction too, just letting her talk. Now she turned to face him.
“Did I try to change him?” she asked. “Maybe a little. Why not? Did I change? I guess so. What kind of a person it is who doesn’t change?”
“The boy you were talking to downstairs,“ Daniel said. “that was your son?”
“Yes,” Irina nodded. “That’s my Sasha. He’s 18 years old. He graduated from the high school in June.”
Daniel wasn’t sure what to say. It was hard to reconcile the severe-looking adolescent in the ultra Orthodox getup with the modern, worldly woman before him.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she smiled. “We are a strange combination, this mother and this kind of son. Yes?”
“I guess,” Daniel allowed.
“You’re very polite,” she smiled. “I imagine how we look probably, fighting like two crazy people from different planets. ‘Sasha, I told him, ‘don’t talk so loud. People are hearing us.’ But he shouts anyway.”
“As I said, I didn’t understand a word. But the truth is, now I’m curious to know what you two were arguing about, if that’s not too personal.”
“He wants to go with the Orthodox. He wants to attend Yeshivah. I want him to be a student at university. UCLA accepted him. Maybe it would be good, someone to talk to about this. But not now. I have to cook dinner for my father, and then I have to get ready for work.”
“On Saturday night?”
“I’m professional photographer,” said Irina. “A professional photographer, I mean. At the Russian restaurant. Saturday night is the big night for me. Friday night is good, but Saturday night is better. I take pictures of the customers. For the wedding celebration, for the birthday, for the graduation from high school or university. All the special occasions. I make immortal their happiness, is what I like to tell myself.”
he tossed his sweatshirt at the living room’s solitary chair, dropped the mail onto the kitchen counter, and ducked into the bathroom for a long-awaited pit stop. As he washed his hands, he inspected himself in the mirror. What a sorry-looking mess. The exhausted eyes, the uncombed hair, the unshaven face, and that bandage. Like an insomniac boxer after a couple of punishing rounds.
Back in the kitchen, he grabbed a half-empty quart of low fat milk from the fridge,, closed the door and turned around to face the counter. The digital display on the base station of his cordless phone showed 5. He pushed the playback button, opened the milk carton’s waxy triangular spout, lifted it to his mouth, and drank.
“Daniel, Steve Katz. About the burial plots you and Sheila have at Mt. Sinai Memorial Park. I need to know what you want to do with them. We have a couple of options that seem equitable to me and that I’m pretty sure Sheila will agree to, but I’ve got to talk to you. Holly and I are taking off for the time share in Cabo now, but I’d appreciate your getting back to me by end of business Tuesday. Ciao.”
Daniel set down the milk and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Ciao? All of a sudden, Steve Katz was Italian?. Must be the influence of that new trattoria on the ground floor of his building, the one that had been opened to critical raves a few months ago by The New York celebrity chef Rodolfo something-or-other. And the burial plots. Yeah, right. What were they going to do with them?
The next three messages were silent. Not quick hang-ups, as when a caller doesn’t realize he’s dialed the wrong number until the outgoing message clicks on, but long beats of nothing, not even the sound of breathing, although Daniel could feel someone there, and finally disconnection. He wondered if the last message was going to be the same thing. That would be some homecoming. A call from your wife’s divorce lawyer and then four silent perv calls. He tipped the milk carton spout into his mouth again.
“Daniel, Jacqueline. I have two tickets to the Bowl for tonight and my date just cancelled. I know you like music, so I was wondering if you might want to go with me? Please get back to me on this as soon as you can, okay? Thanks.” She rattled off her number and hung up. Daniel put the milk carton on the counter again, tore off a few paper towels from the dispenser under the cabinet, and crumpled them up to pat dry the front of his t-shirt and mop up the whitish puddle that was spreading on the linoleum at his feet.
To be continued…