Encore Page 56

  “I don’t know,” she answered, looking at him with her large brown eyes. “Maybe Serge Pavlovitch was right. Maybe a woman can’t handle this sort of thing—you tell me, Stu.”

  He started to laugh. “But I’m not an oracle,” he demurred. “Wrong profession. How can I help?”

  She held out her glass. “You can refill this and tell me all about your new book,” she said brightly. “I loved Night Before Sunburst. But your last one—Toys That Don’t Work—that was so sad, so terribly depressing, Stu. So much waste among the rich set in your country.”

  “For a Russian contessa without a country of your own, you are an arrogant one, aren’t you?”

  “But really now. Isn’t there any hope at all? Can’t there at least be one toy that functions properly?’.’

  He poured amber champagne into her raised coupe and met her intense brown eyes with playful green ones. “Oh, come on, Natalia,” he commented lightly, “this is a party, remember? And in any case, you know I’m not a prophet, as I said earlier. I just chronicle what I see. But here’s to us, and to the Ballet, and to your success! Drink up and be merry.”

  In the back of the room Galina saw Stuart tilt up Natalia’s chin and place one quick kiss on her lips. She shivered and walked away. She could not see the tears that glistened in Natalia’s eyes, could see nothing but what lay inside herself. Suddenly it had become imperative that she leave, that she take her bag and coat and go home. Here the world was askew, here she would find no questions answered. She opened the door into the hallway behind her, and walked with long, rapid strides to the room where she had seen the maid place the wraps.

  Galina stood alone in the dimly lit room and glanced at her reflection in the full-length mirror. She had designed this outfit herself and had it made by Natalia’s seamstress. It was a long tunic that billowed out over tight pants, all black silk. The dainty fashions do not fit me, I am too big, she had thought. This will be “me.” Now she admitted that this parody of the masculine tuxedo was exactly what she’d needed. It made her look distinctive, setting off her tall structure as proud rather than awkward. As usual, her blond mane flowed over shoulders and breasts; and she wore no makeup. The Americans, she knew, had found her odd.

  Ah well, she thought, suddenly amused. What difference can all this possibly make: who I am, what I look like? But the door was opening, and with quick embarrassment, she seized her black cape and her small bag. She moved into the shadows and watched to see who would emerge, hoping it would be a total stranger.

  But it was Pierre, still in his evening suit, his ruffled white shirt emphasizing his darkness, his broad, sharp maleness, his quickness of gesture. She felt her throat beginning to swell, her ears to hurt from the beating pulse. “I’m going home now,” she stammered. “I don’t know a soul here—”

  “You know me,” he retorted sharply, unkindly.

  “I can’t always stay with you and Natalia. I must get out on my own. You can see that, can’t you?” she asked. “In fact, I’ve been mulling over an idea. I’d like to find an apartment of my own, as well. I need the space.”

  “Need the space? God, Galina, Bugeaud has space enough for ten of us, plus servants! Don’t be ridiculous!”

  “I’m an artist just as much as you are, Pierre,” she said coldly. “I’d be more comfortable by myself, in an attic somewhere, overlooking Paris. Luxury isn’t everything, you know!”

  “No,” he repeated softly and looked at her. “It isn’t everything.”

  They remained standing apart, their eyes on each other. Then, his voice so low that she could hardly hear him over the strains of music from the party room, he asked: “What are we going to do, Galina? We have to do something.”

  “But there’s only one thing to do: I shall go and find another place to live,” she answered, suddenly relieved, calmed, now that it was out in the open.

  “That’s no solution. When the wound is bad, you amputate the limb, not bind it in gauze. Eventually, bandage or none, the limb falls off.”

  “But if I go, that’s exactly what will happen,” she countered. “The limb will have fallen off by itself and cause no more pain.”

  He came to her and tried to take her hands, but she motioned for him to back away from her. “Don’t,” she said in her clear, grave voice. “Don’t do this. Just say whatever it is you feel should be said, and then I’m going to leave.”

  “I can’t tell you strongly enough how sickened I am by your solution. It’s ghastly, Galina. And it’s childish. Just because you’ll sleep elsewhere isn’t going to remove the problem. She’ll still want to see you. If, that is, she ever lets you go in the first place. She loves you more than anyone on earth, more than Tamara, more than …me.”

  “Yes,” Galina murmured. “I know. And it hurts. The whole thing hurts, it hurts us all. At least if I go, you two will keep on, and then later, when I’ve married, I can come back to you—to both of you.”

  “When you’ve married? You can speak so blithely about this when you know how it is …between us?”

  She twisted her hands together and looked away. “Nothing lasts forever,” she said bitterly. “Life, love—you know that, too. You loved her all these years—all these years—and now suddenly you think you love me, and I don’t know if it’s true, I don’t know! The point is that one day I shall wake up free of you, as she did once also, and I shall be glad, and love another man who will be able to love me, with his whole heart. For as long as it lasts.”

  “But I can’t let that happen, Galina,” he said. He placed his hands on her shoulders and kept them there, looking into her face, so close to his, so pure and pink, the eyes so magnificently proud and azure, the eyes of a goddess. “I want to live with you, I want to be the one that loves you. You were a child when you came to us two years ago. And yet, not a child. You saw how things were—between her and me. How could you seek to preserve—that—to the detriment of—this, which is good, young, healthy? She never really loved me, or it wouldn’t have gone bad. It was always Boris! And for me—I can’t put it into words. It was a kind of possession. I wanted her and I couldn’t have her, and I wanted what the world had, I wanted to devour her talent and make it mine, too. Oh, I don’t justify any of this—or rather, of course, I do, but it’s so bloody complicated, and your handling it as if it were a simple case of jumbled ABC’s doesn’t help us at all, not at all!”

  Slowly he let his hands drop and sat down on an ottoman to the right of her. She watched him, motionless, as he pressed his fingers to his eyes. She watched him with a kind of eerie fascination, her emotions frozen inside her. “Do you know,” she finally said, “I understand her better than I do you. She and I are alike. We’ve lost so much, we’ve lost our very worlds, and yet, somehow, we managed to survive when others didn’t. But you—you don’t know what it’s like to lose anything!” Her blue eyes widened, the pupils dilated. “And yet you’re one of these people who shouldn’t suffer, who should always be protected. I wish ... I wish I could stay to protect you, Petya, but I can’t, I can’t. For you see, I must survive this, too, like the death of my mother, like my family being burned alive. I have to make this love die inside me, so that I can keep on.”

  He raised his head and saw that she had swung the cape around her like a cloak of gloom. Her blond hair cascaded over it, and she opened the door, a tall, black figure with yellow hair, leaving the small room. He wanted to rush up behind her, to crush her to him, to preserve her for himself forever—but he willed himself to sit still, to watch her depart. She had called him Petya, like Boris Kussov.

  “So,” Natalia said, massaging her ankles, “you pack the next day after my biggest success. Do you think Les Noces, and the silly reviews in the newspapers, will compensate me for the loss of you, my dear, sweet child?” There was a faint glimmer of amusement in the brown eyes, but also something else, more remote, more faint.

  “It isn’t as if we won’t see each other,” Galina said, sitting down. They were in Nata
lia’s Chinese boudoir, the scene of so many of their intimate talks, and this made the girl acutely uncomfortable, watching her aunt.

  “Stay, and then I’ll help you find that blessed artist’s garret,” Natalia suggested. “But this way—where are you going, Galina?”

  “To a friend’s, from the Beaux-Arts. I’ll be eighteen in two months, and at my age you’d been living on your own for a full year.”

  “Ah, yes. With Lydia ... I can’t deny you your independence, Galya. I was the same at your age, and I’m not so old now that I can’t remember that. It’s just that—well, this is so sudden. What’s really wrong, dear?”

  Galina shook her head and looked away. “Nothing. I don’t want to live in your shadow anymore. You’ve done so much for me, Natalia! You’ve been so dear to me, so generous, so loving! And all I’ve done is take! Now I’d like to see what life is really like, without help from anyone.”

  “You saw what it was like in Tbilis, and in Constantinople,” Natalia retorted dryly. “And it wasn’t very pleasant. We don’t spoil you unnecessarily, Galina. Pierre does that to Tamara, but then that’s a different story.” Her eyes fastened on the girl. She breathed in rapidly and said sharply: “It’s Pierre, isn’t it? Stuart Markham told me about a quarrel, some kind of problem. Did you quarrel with Pierre?”

  “Yes,” Galina answered, much too quickly. She held her hands immobile in her lap, like dead weights. “Ask him, you’ll see that it can’t be mended—”

  There was something in Galina’s eyes, in the eager expression on her face that Natalia recognized, that pulled at her with such sudden force that for a moment she could not breathe at all. “Galina,” she said. A vein was throbbing on her temple. “Galina, no!”

  The girl stood up, upsetting a book that her aunt had been reading. “I’ve got to leave now,” she stammered.

  Natalia’s eyes held her. “Not this,” she finally said. Tears came to her eyes, and she brushed them impatiently away. “Galina, sit down. Listen. You’re eighteen. Your father was far away from you, then he was dead—and so of course now there’s Pierre. It’s normal, all girls feel this way! We grow up loving our fathers because who else can a little girl love? It’s my fault for not giving you a proper début, for not introducing you to interesting young men! Pierre was all you had! For God’s sake, Galina!”

  Galina began to tremble. Natalia could see her whole body starting to shake, as though she had the palsy. “Darling, he doesn’t know this, does he—how you feel?” she asked the girl.

  Galina blinked, and tears fell on her cheeks. “He does know,” Natalia intoned, and all at once her limbs were cold, and her heart was numb. “He knows. So if he knows and hasn’t told me—then that means—” She fell silent, and now she too started to tremble uncontrollably. Galina continued to weep and Natalia turned on her, blood rushing to her cheeks. “Galina,” she said, and her voice cracked slightly. “Galina, don’t be a fool. He doesn’t love you, except as a child, his own child—or as a young sister whom he cherishes. You’ve grown up, you’re a woman now, at least physically—but you’re not ready for a serious involvement, least of all with a man like Pierre.”

  “Yet you were at my age!” Galina exclaimed suddenly. “You were even younger than I, weren’t you? Do you think you know him so much better, that you can make him so much happier than I could? What makes you believe that, Natalia? You’ve hurt him and slighted him and God knows what else, and now you want to tell me that he’s too much for me—but not for you?”

  Natalia hid her face in her hands, and Galina saw tears trickling through her fingers and waited. “Yes,” the older woman sighed, “he’s too much for you. Don’t avoid the obvious. When I was seventeen and fell in love with him, he was twenty-four years old! Now he’s a man of forty, Galina, a man with a lifetime of disillusionments, of despairs and glories. I can understand him because I’ve watched him grow, and because I’ve learned to be with him. I’ve earned that right!”

  “But now he doesn’t love you anymore,” Galina said quietly.

  The finality of her words, their gravity, slapped against Natalia like a corded whip. She blinked and wet her lips. It was all so simple for Galina, so irrevocable, so black and white. “No matter what he said to you,” Natalia said in a dead voice, “it isn’t you he loves. It’s himself. He loves himself, Galina. He hated Boris because he couldn’t control him, and he hates me for the same reasons. He wants to create his own universe, and if a woman fits into his picture, he seems pleased enough. But that’s not love! All these years, whenever there’s been another woman, I’ve known it wasn’t love, and I’ve stood by. Don’t let him make a fool of you, the way he did that nice little English girl, Vendanova, or the Swiss one, Fabiana. They meant nothing to him. I was always there since the beginning!”

  “But love is like life, it sometimes ends,” Galina declared. She spoke softly, almost gently, and yet resolution pierced through her blue eyes, beyond her tears. Then she added in the same tone: “And he can’t make a fool of me. You can’t turn someone into what she isn’t, and I’m no fool.”

  Natalia burst into the harshest laughter that Galina had ever heard.

  He did not knock on her door but opened it noiselessly and entered, with a care that was contrary to his habit. She was lying on the bed, fully clothed, her face buried in her arms, and when she looked up at him suddenly, he stepped back instinctively. Her small face stared at him with tears bathing the hollow cheeks, unashamed and haggard. He raised his hand to his mouth and nervously bit his forefinger.

  As he stood before her, she could not help seeing the broad shoulders slightly straining his jacket, the still slim waist, the strong legs beneath their broadcloth. His face had thickened slightly in recent months, from drinking a bit too much, she thought. But the eyes held her with the same magnetism as before, and if there was considerable gray among his tight curls, it was all the more becoming. “You haven’t changed,” she told him with a bitter smile.

  “In what way?” The comment had startled him, quickened his response.

  “In every way. What do you want now, Pierre? Haven’t you caused enough damage in this household?”

  He stiffened. “What I want is a divorce, Natalia.” He kept his face averted to the ground, counting the seconds as they ticked by.

  Finally she asked: “Just like this? No regrets, no apologies whatsoever? Just ‘I want a divorce, Natalia,’ as if you were saying, ‘I want roast pork for dinner?’ Isn’t that a bit crass, even for you, Pierre?”

  His black eyes flew to her face in a flare of emotion. “It was you who willed this,” he said tightly.

  “I? It was I who seduced a young girl in my own house, who turned her life into a positive hell? I who broke up a marriage of seven years? Who split apart a family, separating two women who loved each other?” Her tears were flowing again, and Natalia did not brush them away.

  “Nobody breaks up a marriage, you know that! Our marriage was ruined almost from the beginning because you didn’t want it, didn’t want our daughter, and didn’t love me! As for Galina’s being split from you—about that, of course, I’m sorry. You were really good with her, good for her. But she had nothing to do with this. She didn’t plan this. We didn’t deceive you, either one of us. I never once touched her, and she loves me. And I intend to marry her, as soon as you give me this divorce. I intend to marry her in the Orthodox Church, to be my wife forever under God—in whom you profess not to believe.”

  “No,” she cried, her voice rising with passion. “I do not believe in Him! How could a God, any deity, have allowed a man such as you to exist, breaking everything in your path, hurting others guiltlessly? There can be no God!”

  He took a deep breath, clenched and unclenched his fists. “Please,” he said. “We need to discuss Tamara. Of course you know I want her with me.”

  “A divorce takes a long time!” she cried, sitting up completely. “And while you wait for the final decree, do you plan to rear your daughter
all by yourself, or put her between you and your mistress? Did you suppose for a single minute that I would not fight for her?”

  The muscles in his jaw tensed. “Galina isn’t going to be my mistress,” he countered brusquely. “And I’m going to use every bit of influence I can get to speed up the divorce. One year! I promise you that in one year, we won’t be married even on paper! As for Tamara,” he continued, looking away from Natalia, “I can give her love, which is what she needs most of all.”

  “You know nothing of love,” she said, beginning to scream. “Tamara is one part of me you will never touch. Get out of here, Pierre! Get out of my room and get out of my house, and leave me and my daughter alone from now on!”

  He watched her for a moment, watched the fevered cheeks, the brown eyes flashing with hysteria, and then he turned his back to her. His hands were trembling. “Natalia,” he said quietly, “can’t we keep the hatred out of this? For Galina’s sake?”

  “For Galina’s sake. Oh, I don’t hate Galina, she’s only another one of your victims. I can see through you, Pierre, but she’s still young and immature, in spite of having had to grow up faster than most of us. You see her as the ultimate revenge on me—it all boils down to that. She is the last remaining Kussov, and you think that by taking her from me, you have evened the score with Boris for having taken me from you. All those years of courting patrons—even Marguerite—were your manner of showing me that you too could find one of them, a Kussov to protect you! And now you have this fine young girl, the last one of the lot, and she wants you and wants to make the world fit again for you, the way Boris started to do when he cared for you! Only this time there won’t be money involved, because

  Galina’s penniless! Nevertheless, she will protect you because you’re weaker than she is, despite her youth. Boris lives on through her, and now you have her and I don’t, and in this final competition you’ve come out the winner!” She thrust her face out at him, her eyes wild. “You see,” she said breathlessly, “our marriage was a ridiculous farce. You married me to prove that you could defeat Boris on his own ground. I was the pawn in your childish chess game with a dead man. But now you’ve found an even more clever gambit. Not content to have surpassed him once, you’ve found Galina, his own flesh and blood—a girl he helped to rear, whom he cherished. What irony! Pierre has finished with the Kussovs by marrying a Kussov.”