“In one of my magazines. Ladies Home Journal. There’s a test. ‘How Well Do You Know Your Husband?’”
“One of your magazines?” His mouth was full. “I didn’t know you read any magazines.”
“Well, perhaps it would behoove you to take that test, too, then.”
He was twinkling at her from across the table, buttering another roll. “So how did you do?”
“I failed, that’s how I did,” Tatiana said. “Apparently I don’t know you at all.”
“Really?” Alexander’s face was mock-serious.
Tatiana flung the magazine open to the test page. “Look at these questions. What is your husband’s favorite color? I don’t know. What is his favorite food? I don’t know. What sports does he like best? I don’t know. What is his favorite book? His favorite movie? His favorite song? What’s his favorite flavor ice cream? Does he like to sleep on his back or his side? What was the name of the school he graduated from? I don’t know anything!”
Alexander grinned. “Come on. Not even the back or side question?”
“No!”
Continuing to eat his roll, he got up, took the magazine out of her hands and threw it in the trash. “You’re right.” He nodded. “There is nothing to be done. My wife doesn’t know my favorite ice cream flavor. I demand a divorce.” He raised his eyebrows. “Do you think a priest will give us an annulment?” He came up to her, sitting dejectedly in the chair.
“You’re making fun,” Tatiana said, “but this is serious.”
“You don’t know me because you don’t know what my favorite color is?” Alexander sounded disbelieving. “Ask me anything. I’ll tell you.”
“You won’t tell me anything! You don’t talk to me at all!” She started to cry.
Wide-eyed, flummoxed, stopped in mid-laugh, Alexander speechlessly opened his hands. “A second ago, this was all kind of funny,” he said slowly.
“If I don’t even know a simple thing like your favorite color,” Tatiana said, “can you imagine what else I don’t know?”
“I don’t know my own favorite color! Or movie, or book, or song. I don’t know, I don’t care, I never thought about it. Good God, is this what people are thinking about after the war?”
“Yes!”
“Is this what you want to be thinking about?”
“Better than what we’ve been thinking about!”
Anthony, bless his small ways, came out of his bedroom, and, as always, prevented them from ever finishing any discussion until he was well asleep. All the things they talked about had to involve him, be compelling to him. As soon as he heard his mother and father talking in animated tones, he would come and take one of them away.
But later, in their bed, in the dark, Tatiana, who still had on her glum face, said to Alexander, “We don’t know each other. It occurs to me now—perhaps a little belatedly—that we never did.”
“Speak for yourself,” he said. “I know how you’ve lived and I know how you like to be touched. You know how I’ve lived and you know how I like to be touched.”
Oh. Alexander may have known theoretically, intellectually, how Tatiana liked to be touched, but he certainly never touched her that way anymore. She didn’t know why he didn’t, he just didn’t, and she didn’t know how to ask.
“Now, can I make love to you once without you crying?”
Certainly she didn’t want to make him touch her.
“Just once, and please—don’t tell me you’re crying from happiness.”
She tried not to cry when he made love to her. But it was impossible.
The goal was to find a way to live and touch where everything that had happened to them to bring them here could be put away somewhere safe, from where they could retrieve it, instead of it retrieving them any time it felt like it.
In the bedroom they were night animals; the lights were always off. Tatiana had to do something.
“What is that god-awful smell?” Alexander said when he came home from the marina.
“Mommy put mayonnaise in her hair,” said Anthony with a face that said, Mommy washed her face with duck poop.
“She did what?”
“Yes. This afternoon she put a whole jar of mayonnaise in her hair! Dad, she sat with it for hours, and now she can’t get the water hot enough to rinse it out.”
Alexander knocked on the bathroom door.
“Go away,” her voice said.
“It’s me.”
“I was talking to you.”
Opening the door, he came in. She was sitting bedraggled in the bath with her hair wet and slick. She covered her breasts from him.
“Um—what are you doing?” he said, with an impassive face.
“Nothing. What are you doing? How was your afternoon?” She saw his expression. “One wrong word from you, Alexander …” she warned.
“I said nothing,” he said. “Are you going to … come out soon? Make dinner, maybe?”
“The water is lukewarm, and I just can’t get this stuff out. I’m waiting for the tank to reheat.”
“It takes hours.”
“I got time,” she said. “You’re not hungry, are you?”
“Can I help?” Alexander asked, working very, very hard at a straight face. “How about I boil some water on the stove and wash it out?”
Mixing boiling water with the cold, Alexander sat shirtless at the edge of the tub and scrubbed Tatiana’s head with shampoo. Later they had cheese sandwiches and Campbell’s tomato soup. The tank reheated; Tatiana washed the hair again. The smell seemed to come out, but when the hair dried, it still smelled like mayonnaise. After they put Anthony to bed, Alexander ran the bath for her and washed her hair once more. They ran out of shampoo. They used heavy duty soap. The hair still smelled.
“It’s like your lobsters,” she said.
“Come on, the fish weren’t this bad.”
“Mom almost smells like herself again,” said Anthony when Alexander came home the next day. “Go ahead, Dad, smell her.”
Dad leaned down and smelled her. “Mmm, quite like herself,” he agreed, placing his hand on her hair.
Tatiana knew that today her hair, down to her lower back, glowed gold and was silken and shiny and exceedingly soft. She had bought strawberry shampoo that was berry fresh and washed her coconut-suntan-lotioned body with vanilla scented soap. Tatiana sidled against Alexander, gazing up up up at him. “Do you like it?” she asked, her breath catching.
“As you know.” But he took his hand away and only glanced down down down at her.
She got busy with steak and plantains and tomato roulade.
Later, out on the deck, he said quietly, “Tania, go get your brush.”
She ran to get the brush. Standing behind her—as if in another life—Alexander slowly, carefully, gently brushed out her hair, running his palm down after each stroke of the brush. “It’s very soft,” he whispered. “What in the world did you put mayonnaise in it for?”
“The hair was dry from the coloring, the leaching and then the