The Glass Mystery - Chapter 37: The Moscow Diary

Chapter 37

There are souls lost within themselves and so they wander the world, hoping to find their home, something outside themselves that will provide an answer to what they cannot find inside. Yet as they wander into these other cultures, they live outside their temporary home, laws unto themselves. They delve and dip at random and sometimes with purpose or intent. This is the world that I inhabit. I am wanderer, pursuer, and navigator of a ship without a course.

Every morning I take my coffee onto the balcony with my cigarettes. I sit there as long as I can bear the cold and I smoke and think about the meaning of life. I especially hate waking up when it’s still dark out. But if I have to be somewhere at a prescribed hour of the morning, then I will at least have this bit of freedom to myself beforehand. Why I choose to contemplate the meaning of life when I am in such a black mood is obviously not healthy. Though oddly, it starts my morning off on a better footing if I get the bleak view out of the way first thing. Generally this morning ritual takes the form of a conversation with God. I sit, staring at the sky, looking at the blackness, peering toward the horizon where the first foments of color will begin and I lay out my complaints and questions. What is the meaning of this daily routine, the march of weeks and then years, I ask. I fill my days with work and my nights with social outings with friends. We have the same conversations and I am aware that when I leave this country, those I leave behind will continue these same conversations with others. The content is the same. So perhaps it doesn’t matter who is the recipient, only that they are willing to participate.

We all drink too much. And smoke too much. Or if we don’t drink or smoke, we do other things in excess. Gossip. Work. Sleep with others who are not our partners. Shop for things we think will be important mementos of our time here, but won’t be. It might be argued that we would do the same in our home countries. But it’s more condensed here. It’s as if the rules of holiday travel apply though ostensibly this isn’t a holiday but our real lives.

That’s the question that keeps coming back to me on these mornings. Does it matter that we are here and not somewhere else? Like home? Are we running from something out here? Are we hiding from family relationships that have become so complicated and painful that the only solution seems to be complete removal geographically as well as emotionally? Or do we picture ourselves as adventuresome. Somehow more daring, more interesting than those who have the good sense to stay put where they were born. There are some that have come to a country and because of a failed marriage or a failed job, chosen to remain in the country many years after their expected departure. And you wonder if they’ve gone native. If they have become so comfortable living the life of the privileged expat that the thought of going back to their own country is now a terrifying impossibility. I’ve met some of those here and I hope that I will have the good sense to get out before it happens to me.

Then you have the serial roamers. They are the ones that wander from one country to another. Like holiday trippers on one really cruise, hitting the port until it’s time to disembark for the next destination. The one that they’re sure will be even more fun then this one was. On the surface it all looks well and good. Serving the country. Helping those less fortunate. The better salary to be had taking an overseas assignment for a corporation. The fun of living in a foreign land. But I wonder. What’s the point? Where does this fit into the larger question of what our lives mean. What does it mean to live one life? In these moments I wish I believed in reincarnation and had more than one life to live so that I could try out different possibilities and see which one was the right. But that’s not possible as far as a I know. So that leaves me with these innumerable and unending conversations in the dark with God. And He’s not talking right now. At least He hasn’t so far.

Some mornings I sit and imagine the other life I might have had: The house in the suburbs. Celebrating the holidays with family and neighbors that I had known for years and would hope to know for the rest of my life. Counting the year by the rhythm of the holidays and birthdays and the new season of shows on TV. Here there is no such regularity. An endless march of friends: You’ll know no one for more than two or three years. You’ll celebrate holidays here, your own holidays, but you will celebrate them among a handful of fellows who actually understand the significance of the day. Those are the trade-offs. Adventure for constancy. But what does nostalgia matter unless it has significance?

The Glass Mystery - Chapter 36: Lake Tahoe

Chapter 36

I am afraid of men.

No, that’s not right. I begin to scratch the statement from my journal and stop.

Ah, but it is. I am terrified of men.I’ve wanted to write that. To confess that out loud ever since the truth of that fact surfaced in my mind as I read the journal entry of the rabbit dinner. That evening signaled the beginning of the end for my stay in Moscow. I didn’t know it then, or perhaps I did on some unconscious level. More than the murder I’d witnessed, or the slow unraveling of my job at the Embassy, that relationship was a decisive thread in the fabric that held together my life in Moscow. I am afraid of men. Not physically. Not mentally, or intellectually. Emotionally. I hate that word. I hate spongy, Wooly-Mammoth killing, sludge-sucking, eye-filling, throat-constricting, strangulated whimper creating, lose control of your bodily functions inducing, emotions.Quivering bowl of flan.

That’s what certain men do to me.I’m afraid that it sounds much too playful, doesn’t quite convey the real loss of control I feel when my emotions hit the flood-gates like a two-year old’s tsunamic tantrum. I’m in love, it’s unrequieted. I am myopic to the point of being mole-like in my blindness. In fact, a two-year old and a mole have more emotional maturity and judgment than I do when I am in love, lust, infatuated, under the spell of pheromone bliss. Whatever it’s called. Because quite frankly I’m sure I don’t know the difference.

This still sounds humorous. In a superbly pathetic sort of way. And yet it is my Achilles heel. It is the sort of thing that creates bad behaviors and bouts of drinking and late night dialing. So I’m going to try again to describe this fear in a less entertaining light.

What is it that I am drawn to? What makes him so desirable?I’ve thought about this. And I am of two minds. In part, I believe I wish I were him. Wish I had the confidence, the success, the ease with which he maneuvers through the complications of life. On the other hand, if not able to be him, I wish I were the capable of being the type of woman he would love. When we are together I bask in his gaze. When we are apart I attempt to see myself through his eyes to imagine what he might find more appealing. Reality has never been a great challenge for me to circumvent, the obvious obstacle ever so easy for me to ignore. Ever the optimist I am sure that if I just try hard enough, simply throw enough thought, desire, and wishful thinking at a thing it will bend the laws of physics and make a thing so. I believe I have felt this way all my life.

Last night removed by thousands of miles and bundles of time, I opened the pages of the Moscow journal in my mind and before I could stop myself recalled every word and it all came back to me in a thunderclap. He was with me again in the room, with his hands, with our dinner preparations with all that happened later after the dinner when we sat in front of the fire. And the next morning when his maid came to clean the debris in the kitchen, prepare our breakfast, leave it on the little wood table before departing wordlessly before the bedroom door had been opened. And the memory followed me into my dreams and filled them with all the frustrated longing that sprang from that night that seeped over the edge of consciousness like a pot overflowing onto the stove, onto the floor and out the door.

“George, have you ever wondered why I came here?”

That was the start of our conversation yesterday after the first customer had left, when we had our first break of the day. It continued in fits and starts through the day, perhaps it was the conversation with George that led me to open the pages of the Moscow journal again and then to that page and to this through the looking glass fugue.

“You came for the skiing,” George offered.
“You know I don’t ski.”
“You came for the summer sailing on the lake.” He shrugged, “While I find you a delightful young lady, I’m sorry to say that I’m too old to really care where you came from or what you are doing here.”
“Even after you found out that I’d spent the last several years in Moscow?”
Again he shrugged, “People come move here from all over.”
“But I came from the Embassy, George, and it seems that you know lots of people from our Embassy. Didn’t that seem too much of a coincidence?”
“Not at all, I doubt that we have a higher proportion of former Embassy employees than anywhere else, you are simply hyper-aware of them because of your affiliation. I suppose I know them because they are good readers and therefore good customers,” he said. “Actually that you worked there makes it fairly easy to explain your arrival here. You probably heard someone who already lived here discussing its merits and decided to visit. After that the place sells itself.”
“How did you meet Mrs. Corman?” I asked.
“She was one of my customers,” he replied, turning from me to fill his mug with another cup of tea. “A dear lady who enjoyed books.”
“Did you know her husband as well?”
George stopped stirring the sugar into the tea, tapped the spoon on the side of the mug and gently placed it on the tray. “I don’t believe he enjoyed books as much as she did, so I wouldn’t have had cause to see here.”
“At one of the last book club meetings I met a woman, Maria, I believe, she said her husband used to work in Moscow before me. Do you know them?”
“You’ll have to give me more to go on than that,” George said, his shoulders relaxing as we moved away from the Cormans. “If she was a member of Mrs. Corman’s book club, I may have a record of her, I sometimes ordered books for the club, as a favor."
"What was interesting was that her husband went to Princeton, so did Mr. Corman, I believe."
"Again, you seem to be attempting to assign meaning to commonality, a dangerous habit," he said and carried his cup of tea toward the back of the store.

The Glass Mystery - Chapter 35: The Moscow Diary

His hands.

I stand next to him at the kitchen sink and watch him wash the rabbit’s carcass under the splashing water.

The veins beneath his skin rise and dive across the defined planes covering tendon and bone as his hands manipulate the animal’s glossy muscles. His fingernails are well tended, though his palms hide small patches of calluses that are the final remnants of a childhood spent in the villages, growing food that filled the larder from a small patch of mud in the front yard of the walled compound. It is the last trace of a tenuous life revealing what his implacable face does not. He has grown up under the uncompromising eye of the Soviet system, watched as the father of this best friend disappeared one night during those years when neighbors would turn in neighbors on spurious charges to save themselves or for a meager ration. He learned from his own father the need to hide intent and emotion as carefully as the meager family assets buried among the rows of potatoes. His hands are large and powerful from those years of turning dirt. I watch his hands move over the muscles and sinews of the rabbit, manipulating them, stroking the remnants of fur downward toward the drain. And I wish I were the rabbit.

His movements are proficient and sure. And I want to reach down and touch his hands.

But I do not. I know that if I did, he would take his hands from mine, make some excuse and then he would leave. I would cross a border that is unspoken, but unshakeable. Perversely, I understand. I have always admired self-discipline, clarity of vision and the strength of mind to stick to it in the face of confusion. I wish I had that talent. The strength of his mind has nearly the same effect on my body as the strength of his hands.

But this does not assuage the longing I feel. Sometimes the mind, for all its promise and beauty, is not enough. Sometimes the body longs to be touched.

What attracts us to another? What chemistry lays behind the first innocent glance that creates a spontaneous ‘ah’ and helpless slide into attraction? What happens in that first exchange, what is it we see in the other that ignites recognition, the pre-cursor to the longing for the feel of those hands along the contours of our skin? If the attraction is strong, simply watching those hands at work at some random task will be enough to raise little bumps of arousal down the course of my arms and the length of my spine.

There will be three or four other friends, employees from his office, arriving in an hour. He is in charge of the rabbit and I will make a potato gratin flavored with fresh goat cheese and gobs of sweet butter, then I will roast thick stalks of pale asparagus drizzled with a garlic and pepper infused olive oil. We’ve already begun to drink, white wine for me, short glasses of vodka for him. The alcohol sharpened the subtle frisson that ran between us. The alcohol allows us to laugh more easily, to make eye contact with a nod and a lingering glance held just a beat too long. We walk along the knife’s edge between the enjoyment of the attraction to out of bounds, one wrong step and the spell will be broken and détente the only thing that will get us through the evening. Held in balance, the promise of at least a comfortable façade would be stretched as tight as a skin over the evening’s atmosphere holding all in thrall.

Guests are coming but they will leave. Later.

For the first time in weeks, I have not given any thought to Katerina, or Tom, or the murder, or its affect on my slowly disintegrating life. For the past half hour I have been deeply involved in that most enjoyable alternate universe of proximity to an unattainable object. The gravitational pull of his attraction so compelling that for this brief and welcome respite I am swallowed completely. I become the rabbit who has been stripped and in death surrendered to the surfeit of loving caresses that come too late to appreciate. Floating fully in this moment I am happy to suspend past and future to dangle precariously in this void of longing.

My fingers walk to the edge of the sink and pause; I hold my breath for a moment and then retreat.