His Odette
Even though Swan Lake was so long and let out very late, Pete always walked the forty-six minutes from the Bolshoi Theater back to his apartment near the US embassy. He enjoyed the sleep of the arrogant buildings, the brave sound of his footsteps, and above all, the sweet sense of longing. Three months before, the ambassador had bought tickets for all the staff who hadn’t been to see the ballet yet, kindling some warmth in the Kremlin. Pete had been eight times since, and would go again, although an old film of the ballet had been playing non-stop on the television for three days. He could have stayed home to watch, but of course it wasn’t the same. The Odette he bought ticket after ticket to see was more precise, and yet more passionate, than the televised Odette. His Odette was like ice. She was the strongest woman he’d ever seen. He wanted to be a soft blanket around her cold shoulders, and he wanted to keep his distance. He wanted to touch her, and he wanted to watch her forever.
He’d seen a crowd milling around where the road forked at Lubyanka Square when he’d turned left toward the theater. As the embassy’s dispatcher, he had a map of central Moscow and much of its sprawl in his head, and had wondered where they were heading, but hadn’t stopped to investigate. Back on the street after the performance he could hear more of a hubbub, and turned left toward Lubyanka rather than right toward his apartment, for which he felt nothing, in which he felt nothing. The crowd hadn’t flowed on while he’d been inside the theater, it had congealed, static, but electric, around the giant statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, creator of the secret police, who stared out fiercely above the throng, one hand in his greatcoat pocket as if keeping a secret, ignoring the noose of crane cables around his neck.
Pete inserted himself into the crowd. Shorter than your average American, or Russian, he apologized in his excellent accent and was allowed to slide forward between the hot bodies, enjoying the contact, the external squeeze that mirrored his internal one. The first row of spectators had linked arms to hold the space around the statue and the ready yellow crane. Pete imagined them preparing for the ‘Dance of the Little Swans,’ a celebration of unity, and safety in numbers. The dance would rotate around the statue as it came down. If it came down. Wasn’t it connected to its spot? Wouldn’t the crane rear back and grind and fail? Shouts went up as the cables began to retract and tighten and then murmurs encouraged the slight lift, then the tilt, and it seemed Dzerzhinsky wanted to rise. The crowd wanted him to hang, but in the end, it was enough to see him tilt, tilt, tilt, and then descend, impotent, to the ground.
Pete shifted his body left, right, left, right, to let the crowd flow around him again as he backed away from the event, retracing his steps through people who hadn’t yet received the full story. “Yes, he’s on the ground,” he repeated when he heard the question being asked around him on the edges of the throng. He thought about calling the TIME journalist he knew. The phone was tapped, but the listeners wouldn’t be surprised. He wondered where Gorbachev had really been that week, and recognized the potential in the moment for a kick-ass grad school application essay.
When he had finally left the crowds behind him it was as if he had emerged from the sea and was back on firm, familiar ground. He passed the Bolshoi again, picking up the scent of Odette, pure white feathers and a light blue sheen of sweat on the thin skin of her breastbone, entirely unlike the thick sweat of the men dismantling the glory of their oppressors.
There had been a blue sheen of sweat on an American girl in his bed, earlier in the summer. He’d found her on one of his aimless Saturday walks, standing on Gogolevsky Boulevard looking alert and undecided. She’d just come out of an underground beer hall, she told him; had been invited in by a pair of guys who’d seemed nice, she’d met them on the street after visiting the Pushkin Museum.
“And they weren’t nice?”
“No, they were. It was the other guys who joined us, guys they didn’t know. One who wanted to read me his poetry, another who accused the poet of being KGB, using poetry as a cover. It was like being trapped in an eternity of mirrors: ‘You’re KGB.’ ‘No, you’re KGB.’ It was never going to resolve.”
“So you bailed.”
“They think I’m in the toilet. Plus, everyone was smoking.”
“Where’re you from?”
“DC.”
“I’m from DC.”
He invited her to his apartment for dinner. He knew he had next to nothing in the fridge, but he’d come out without money. She looked so relieved to have found an escape route that he figured a poor dinner might not matter. And it hadn’t. She was great about the spaghetti with ketchup and cauliflower, and asked so many good questions about what she’d been seeing but hadn’t understood on the educational tour she was on, that he found himself telling her about Swan Lake. He’d seen it four times by then.
“I can’t get enough of it,” he told her. “The ballerina.” He crossed his forearms over his chest, mimicking the gesture that came back to him most frequently. “She’s like ice.”
The American girl’s face changed. It had been open as she listened to him talk about the city, the government, the embassy drivers he managed. Now her eyebrows came back down and she was not just listening, but assessing. Why had he trusted her? He changed the subject.
She was his height, and slim, and her hair was pulled into a ponytail behind her head, and having her there, even untrustworthy, was better than crawling the rest of the way through the evening, the night, the endless Sunday morning alone. He put his hand on her thigh, and she slid her narrow fingers between his, gripping surprisingly hard.
His sheets were light blue. Their bodies were light blue in the moonlight. He’d never seen so much moonlight in his bedroom before that night. It spotlit their muscles. He noticed his own as well as hers, and took her ankle to lift her leg, choreographing them. He had no condoms. She wasn’t on the pill. The experience was all hands. He held her ponytail, pulling it back so her features were stretched, giving her Odette’s cheekbones, and fountained straight up into the blue air.
In the bathroom, he turned the fluorescent light on and then immediately off, rinsing himself in the near-dark so as not to dispel the romance of the moon. When he returned to the bedroom she was pulling her t-shirt over her head.
“You’re dressing?”
“I need to get back.”
“Really? Can’t you–”
“They’ll wonder where I am. I have a roommate. She’ll be worried.”
“But staying together all night is the best part.”
There was that assessing look again. He couldn’t read it. He had surprised her, clearly, but was it in a good way? She pulled her ponytail out of the back of her t-shirt and asked him if he could help her get a cab.
Of course he could. Speaking Russian into the phone, he felt closer to the woman on the end of the line than he did to the girl on the edge of the bed. He and the dispatcher shared a joke. Down on the sidewalk, he and the American girl spent an awkward seven or eight minutes waiting for the cab. When it came around the corner, he didn’t know how to say goodbye, but she kissed him on the mouth and then on the cheek. One for the sex, and one for the – what? – pity? He hoped not. She stepped, unknowable, into the cab and he closed the door for her, one hand waving, one hand in the pocket of his old lacrosse shorts, empty of secrets. He watched her profile glide away.
Back in his apartment after seeing Swan Lake for the ninth time, after Dzerzhinsky was toppled, Pete undressed, brushed his teeth without turning on the bathroom light, and lay on his light blue sheets.
Still awake a few hours later he switched on the television. The Swan Lake loop had been cut. Now the only Odette was his Odette, and he slept.