“Was that her last name? I didn’t even know. I knew she was Masha, I got that, I remember, but I hardly knew her at all,” said Val. “Some of my friends told me she was illegal and I tried to figure out what to do for her, but I couldn’t, so I would give her little presents, stupid shit that girls like, a little purse, some make-up, I don’t know, some money or something, and I asked my dad about her, but he didn’t like me going out to the clubs, and anyhow, I’m always shoving my giant feet into things, so I just let it be this time.” She waved at the waitress, called her by name, asked Tanya how the kids were, and asked for more coffee. “Maybe I should have stayed with it, I mean helped Masha out, but I didn’t. Also, I pretty much stopped going to clubs last winter, you know, I mean I’m too old.”
“You’re twenty-four,” I said
“Yeah, but old for my years.” She laughed and ate more fish, and more bread, and thought about cheesecake. Val leaned back and looked at people on the boardwalk. “You want to swim?”
“I’d sink if I swam after all this food,” I said.
“What are you doing for dinner tonight? You could buy me an early birthday dinner if you want. Weird that my pop and I have the same birthday, isn’t it?”
I was flustered. I tried my usual line of joking with her.
“You’re supposed to think of me as your uncle or something,” I said. “Anyway, your father would not just kill me but do it slowly in little pieces, like the worst stuff he ever learned from his not-so-nice-nik friends. You know how they killed people in old Russia? You want me to tell you how they did it, Val? You’re thinking Pugachev, the bandit outlaw, from old times, right? I read the Pushkin story. They really did nasty stuff.” Val picked up her fork. The middle finger on her left hand was missing. She saw me looking at it.
“I know, my dad worries because he thinks this is his fault.”
When she was ten, Val was snatched from the Sverdloffs’ apartment in Moscow. It was the 1990s, the gangster years in Russia, and Tolya was in real-estate deals with bad people.
Tolya had been at home when they took Val, but he was dead drunk, fast asleep. He never got over it. It was his fault and he knew it, that they took his little girl, kept her for three days, cut off her finger and sent it to him. He left Moscow after that, and took his family to Florida to live in a gated community.
He offered Val plastic surgery. The best, he said. He urged it on her. You’ll be like new, he said. She refused. She wore her stump like a badge of honor, the way she wore everything- her beauty, her height.
She was a passionate, funny girl, but there were times when her eyes turned inward and she seemed far away. Maybe it was to do with the kids she helped in Moscow, the things she had learned that made her want to cut out, to stop the world. There were times I thought of her as a girl in a garden, dreaming, planning, a book on her lap, her eyes shut, listening to the crickets and the wind.
“I’m a mutant, Artie, darling,” she said. “I’m too tall and too weird. I take pictures because I’m obsessed with looking at people. Sometimes I find myself staring at them in restaurants or on the train. I want to know everything. It’s just how I am. I once ate a little piece of film, a piece of the negative, to see what it was like, see if I could make it get inside of me-Jesus, Artie, why does my dad have to be in London?”
“He likes London.”
“I know, and I’m a grown woman and I should let him live his life.” She gulped her coffee and added, “I just like it better when he’s here.” She got up.
“Where are you going?”
“What, my dad put you on my tail? I have to go pick up some stuff so I can pack it up.”
“What stuff? Where are you going?”
“For the kids, clothes, meds, stuff. I send it ahead of me to Moscow. I’ll probably go over in a couple or three weeks, and then only for four, five days, it’s just I need to get things ready.” She sounded defensive.
“Tolya knows?”
“Maybe. Butt out, darling. Look, I’m just going to Moscow to do a few things and spend a few days with my mom who’s on vacation.”
“I thought she lived in Boca.”
“Yes, so what?” Val was exasperated by all my questions. “She does live in Florida, but she can afford to travel now, so she travels, my dad gives her whatever she wants, even though they’re divorced, he says, she is the mother of my children, you know? In that pompous voice he puts when he’s on a roll? My mom has a great big dacha near Barvika, outside Moscow, okay, everything she dreamed of when she was a girl and she married my dad, and they lived in a one-room apartment in Moscow, back in the day. But her tastes she developed in Boca, right?” Val smiled at the idea of her mother’s tastes. “So she has the condo in Boca, and a place in London, and a great big dacha in Barvika, I mean huge, with a fabulous pool with faux Impressionists painted on the bottom.
“She was just this provincial Russian girl when they got married, and he was like this big rock guru in Moscow, and he performs and she lies down on the stage one night and licks his boots. She was gorgeous. What a crazy time, I wish I was there, the 80s sound so fabulous in Moscow. Well, whatevs. Anyhow, my mom’s new dacha has marble and gold taps, and there’s a tennis court, and a pool, one indoors, one out.”
“What about her boyfriend?”
“He loves it. You remember him? The one who wears the yachting cap and the real gold buttons on his blazer? He has money, but now he feels he has class. I mean he’s global now. I think he comes from New Jersey. So, you see, I’ll be in safe hands. You should come visit. Moscow is wild. Daddy’s club is hot, he’s a star, he’ll be going on celebrity chef or something, or celebrity wine master, whatever.” She leaned over the table. “I love him a lot, Artie. I love my dad, you know, more than anyone? I won’t do anything to make him worry, I promise. Or you.”
“But you’re careful, right? I mean you don’t get crazy when you talk to officials over there, about the kids you help and stuff.”
“Of course not. But it’s fine, it’s all really official, we get help from NGOs, we get help from the US ambassador. You think I want to get involved with anything weird over there? Forget about it. I’m an American. I’m a perfect American girl, right?” She pursed her lips and made a rueful noise.
“You have a Russian passport?”
“Yes. Also.”
“You travel a lot, you, Tolya.”
“We like to travel,” she said, half sardonic. “Movement is everything. My mom remembers when she was my age, the only place she was ever allowed to go outside the Soviet Union was once to Bulgaria.” She put her hand up to her head. “God, my head hurts,” she said.
“You okay?”
“I’ve been feeling kind of weird lately, I don’t know, my stomach, my head. I’ve been using some new chemical in my darkroom, I think the smell makes me feel bad.”
“What kind of stuff?” Tell me, I wanted to say. Tell me and I’ll make you feel better whatever it is.
I wanted to put my arms around her, but I just drank my coffee.
“Oh, Artie, it’s nothing. Listen, did my dad ask you to work for him again?”
“Yeah, every other day. I think he feels sorry for me because I’m always broke.”
“Don’t go into business with my dad. You wouldn’t like it.”
“Why not?”
“That would mean the end of your love affair.”
For a moment I thought she meant us, her and me, and I was startled.
“What love affair?”
“You and my dad, of course,” said Val. “Not like that, you idiot, I mean, never mind. It’s about the best kind, about friendship. But if you went into business, you’d have to do things you wouldn’t like. It would offend your moral code,” said Valentina.
“I don’t have a moral code. You make me sound like some guy with a poker up his ass. What moral code?”
She sat down again, this time on the edge of a chair, put her elbows on the table and her face close to mine. “Well, not that kind,” she said and kissed me lightly on the lips. “For sure not that kind, Artie. We got past that last night, didn’t we? That kind of crap that says I’m too young for you, you hear me?”
I nodded.
