by Joel Deutsch
Out in the living room of Irina’s apartment, The midafternoon sun has edged too far past some window, and the kitchenette, with no aperture of its own to the outside world except for the baffled vent above the stove, has plunged into sudden twilight. Irina arises from her seat at the table to flip the wall switch. Then she’s at the sink, filling the sleekly plump black electric tea kettle with fresh tap water and setting it back onto its countertop base to boil.
Sasha, who until a moment ago was holding the others in thrall with his account of the previous night’s events, is talking now with his grandfather in Russian. Daniel, reasonably hopeful the two of them won’t notice, tracks Irina around the room with his eyes.
She bustles about in her baggy white slacks with a certain undeniable grace, her sandaled feet elegant right down to the toenails, which are manicured and polished with a red that matches her blouse. The blouse reminds Daniel again of his grandmother Golda, not because of its color– the woman, so far as Daniel can remember, never wore anything red, ever– but because its untucked square-cut, side-slit bottom flares out a little over Irina’s ass, which he has scarcely been aware of until now. It isn’t an egregiously prominent ass, like bubbe Golda’s, which he wouldn’t have been likely to admire. But it isn’t chopped liver, either, which was the impression he’s had until now from the way Irina has looked to him in her unisex running outfit , her no- nonsense walking shorts or the demure business skirt she wore to the police station in the morning.
The Russian conversation, somehow at once both guttural and musical to Daniel’s ear, drones on, Irina interjecting an occasional comment, also in Russian. Then she comes back to the table with the steaming tea kettle and a box of teabags covered with Cyrillic printing except for the words Earl Grey. Bending forward, she places a bag in every cup and pours on the hot water. Daniel, transfixed, watches Irina’s hands in motion, noting the fine dark hairs on her forearms. It’s only when, almost to herself, she says “There we are,” straightens up and takes away the kettle and the Earl Grey box, that Daniel notes a sudden silence, glances apprehensively at Grandpa Zalman and Sasha and sees that they’re both looking at him. Busted.
The older man’s eyebrows are knit, his expression bemused but not unkind. The kid’s face, however, is unreadable. Protectiveness, jealousy, and general mistrust is what occurs to him, and he dismisses in a quick calculation the possibility that he’s being paranoid to imagine such things. Of course he isn’t. Surely Sasha wonders what Daniel’s thinking about his mother, just as Daniel is wondering, himself. Whatever he’s feeling, it’s not quite like the simple erotic crush he developed on Jacqueline over the summer, complicated only by anxieties due to his having been so thoroughly coupled for so long. But what it is, exactly, is a question he’s barely ready to even formulate, let alone ponder.
Irina returns bearing a plate of some kind of pastries with flaky crusts, and sits down again, favoring Daniel as she does so with a quick smile. At which moment Daniel experiences another involuntary flash of his evaporated domesticity, like that moment when he had just turned the Camaro onto Wilcox Avenue after pulling out of the Hollywood Station parking lot.
It’s only a flash, but it’s an interesting flash, because it’s a new hypothetical constellation of family, because he’s thought of it at all: Instead of the flighty-minded , cranky Sheila turning their empty nest years into shit with her new Age psychological theories and her extramarital waywardness, there could be, stranger things could happen, this lovely, down-to-earth woman with her feet on the ground but her photographers’ eyes still clear and unclouded. Instead of the disappearing Melanie, de facto already disappeared if he were being honest with himself, there could be this obviously bright, okay, so far also stand-offish and surly boy nearly his erstwhile daughter’s same age to get to know, who knows, maybe to mentor in some way or other. And instead of his pugnacious, overbearing stocky little shtarker of a former father-in-law, the pushy electronics merchandizing king posturing as a retired middleweight, a thoughtful, refined former physicist or engineer, or whatever it was, whose every utterance doesn’t strike Daniel as gratingly as a south Central street gang challenge.
“Davai,” Zalman urges Sasha. Then to Daniel, helpfully, “I tell him go ahead.”
Sasha stabs a spoon into his cup and pushes his tea bag around a few times, the clink of spoon against cup the only sound in the kitchenette besides refrigerator hum, then lifts the sodden lump out and dumps it onto his saucer. He raises the cup, blows across the hot liquid’s surface, takes a sip, sets the cup back down and checks his audience. “Okay,” he says. “So these two guys are getting ready to make some kind of call on their cells, right?”
To be continued…