“Once.”
“Was that the first time you were sitting there?”
She couldn’t lie to him. “No,” she admitted. “But it’s nothing. I just go and sit.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I just do, that’s all.”
“Tatiana, let me understand,” Alexander said, and his voice got hard. “You have the Barnacle House to visit, the Vizcaya Palace, the Italianate Gardens, there is shopping, and libraries, there’s the ocean, and swimming and sunbathing, and reading, but what you do with the only two hours you have to yourself all day is go and sit in a dust bowl, watching construction workers build a hospital?”
Tatiana didn’t say anything at first. “As you well know,” she said quietly, “the way you are toward me, I have much more than two hours to myself all day.”
Alexander didn’t say anything.
“So why don’t you call Vikki and ask her to come down and spend a few weeks with you?” he said at last.
“Oh, just stop forcing Vikki on me all the time!” Tatiana exclaimed in a voice so loud it surprised even her.
Alexander stood up from the table. “Don’t raise your fucking voice to me.”
Tatiana jumped up. “Well, stop talking nonsense then!”
His hands slammed the table. “What did I say?”
“You left me and were gone for three days in Deer Isle!” she yelled. “Three days! Did you ever explain to me where you were? Did you ever tell me? And do I bang the table? Meanwhile I sit for five minutes a block away from our house and suddenly you’re all up in arms! I mean, are you even serious?”
“TATIANA!” His fist crashed into the table and dishes rattled off to the floor.
Anthony burst into tears. Holding his hands over his ears, he was saying, “Mommy, Mommy, stop it.”
Tatiana threw up her hands and went to her son. Alexander stormed out.
Inside the bedroom Anthony said, “Mommy, don’t yell at Daddy or he’ll go away again.”
Tatiana wanted to explain that adults sometimes argued but knew Anthony wouldn’t understand. Bessie and Nick Moore argued. Anthony’s mom and dad didn’t argue. The child couldn’t see that they were getting less good at pretending they were both made of china and not flint. At least there was actual participation, though as with all things, one had to be careful what one wished for.
Many hours later Alexander came back and went straight out on the deck.
Tatiana had been lying in bed waiting for him. She put on her robe and went outside. The air smelled of salt and the ocean. It was after midnight, it was June, in the high seventies. She liked that about Coconut Grove. She’d never been in a place where the nighttime temperature remained so warm.
“I’m sorry I raised my voice,” she said.
“What you should be sorry about,” Alexander said, “is that you’re up to no good. That’s what you should be sorry about.”
“I’m just sitting and thinking,” she said.
“Oh, and I was born yesterday? Give me a fucking break.”
She went to sit on his lap. She was going to tell him what he needed to hear. She only wished that just once he would tell her what she needed to hear. “It’s nothing, Shura. Really. I’m just sitting. Mmm,” she murmured, rubbing her cheek against his. His cheek was stubbly. She loved that stubble. His breath smelled of alcohol. She breathed it in; she loved that beer breath. Then she sighed. “Where’ve you been?”
“I walked to one of the casinos. Played poker. See how easy that was? And if you wanted to know where I’d been back in Deer Isle, why didn’t you just ask me?”
Tatiana didn’t want to tell him she was afraid to know. She had gone missing for thirty minutes. He had been lost, gone, missing and presumed dead for years. She wished sometimes he would just think, think of the things she might feel. She didn’t want to be on his lap anymore. “Shura, come on, don’t be upset with me,” Tatiana said, getting off.
“You, too.” He threw down his cigarette as he stood up. “I’m doing my level best,” he said, heading inside.
“Me, too, Alexander,” she said, head down, following him. “Me, too.”
But in bed—she naked, holding him, he naked, holding her, nearly there, nearly at the very end for him—Tatiana clutched him as she used to, feverishly clutched his back and under her fingers, even at the moment of her own breaking abandon, felt his scars under her grasping fingers.
She could not continue. Could not, even at that moment. Especially at that moment. And so she found herself doing what she remembered him doing in Lazarevo when he couldn’t bear to touch her: Tatiana stopped him, pushed him away, and turned her back to him.
She put her face in the pillow, raised her hips and cried, hoping he wouldn’t notice, hoping that even if he did notice, he would be too far gone to care.
She was wrong on all counts. He noticed. And he wasn’t too far gone to care.
“So this is what your level best looks like, huh?” Alexander whispered, out of breath, bending over her, lifting her head off the pillow by her hair. “Presenting your cold back to me?”
“It’s not cold,” Tatiana said, not facing him. “It’s just the only part that’s taken leave of all its senses.”
Alexander jumped off the bed—shaking and unfinished. He turned on the lamp, the overhead light, he opened the shades. Unsteadily she sat up on the bed, covering herself with a sheet. He stood naked in front of her, glistening, unsubsided, his chest heaving. He was incredibly upset.
“How can I even try to find my way,” he said, his voice breaking, “if my own wife recoils from me? I know it isn’t what it used to be. I know it isn’t what we had. But it’s all we have now, and this body is all I’ve got.”
“Darling—please,” Tatiana whispered, stretching out her hands to him. “I’m not recoiling from you.” She couldn’t see him through the veil of her sorrow.
“You think I’m fucking blind?” he exclaimed. “Oh God! You think this is the first time I noticed? You think I’m an idiot? I notice every fucking time, Tatiana! I grit my teeth, I wear my clothes so you don’t see me, I take you from behind, so nothing of me touches you—just like you want.” He enunciated every syllable through his teeth. “You wear clothes in bed with me so I won’t accidentally rub my wounds on you. I pretend not to give a shit, but how long do you think I can keep doing this? How much longer do you think you’re going to be happier on the hard floor?”
She covered her face.
He swept his hand across and knocked her arms away. “You are my wife and you won’t touch me, Tania!”
“Darling, I do touch you …”
“Oh, yes,” he said cruelly. “Well, all I can say is, thank God, I guess, that my tackle is not maimed, or I’d never get any blow. But what about the rest of me?”
Tatiana lowered her weeping head. “Shura, please …”
He yanked her up and out of bed. The sheet fell away from her. “Look at me,” he said.
She was too ashamed of herself to lift her eyes to him. They were standing naked against each other. His angry fingers dug into her arms. “That’s right, you should be fucking ashamed,” he said through his teeth. “You don’t want to face me then, and you can’t