Babayaga

smell him now. “Go ahead, ask.”

“Okay,” said Will, thinking for a moment. “Why did you say I was lost?”

“Oh, when did I say that?” she said with a wry smile.

“At Oliver’s apartment, when he and I were leaving.”

“Yes, I remember. I didn’t think you heard me. I said it because in the times I’ve met you, you did seem lost, like the autumn leaves that float so uncertainly in the sky. Even when I first saw you on the metro, I noticed it. There was some confusion in your eyes, a need for answers. I don’t think it’s a feeling you’re used to.”

Will sat back in his chair and looked at her, wondering how she saw so much. Finally he said, “You’re right. I’m not used to it.”

She smiled. “Well, too much certainty is never wise. You must always be ready for the chaos, bend with it like a tree in the wind. That is how you survive.” She poured him another shot. “You know, in Russia if you open a bottle it’s bad luck not to drink it all.”

“The whole thing?” He took the shot and slammed the glass down, feeling light-headed.

“Come.” She refilled the glass. “Drink more.”

“Wait, wait, there’s also the other thing you said.”

“When was this?” she took the shot. Her eyes grew wide as the liquor went down, and then she smiled.

“Back at Oliver’s, you told me you had the answers. That’s what you said. What did you mean?”

She slid another shot toward him. “Drink again. Then we talk.”

So he drank. She had drawn him in with such simple tricks: the promise of easy conquest and the vague offer of solutions, these were the tides that always pulled men in, even simpler than the promise of flesh or money. Now all she needed to know was what troubles he was knotted in, for once she untied him from those, he would be as sealed to her as the silver rings that encircled her fingers.

He talked and as she listened, she was filled with delicious wonder. Whenever he slowed in his narrative she would pour him another shot while, at the same time, gently tapping out truth spells under the table. Over the next hour and a half, he revealed a lot. There were so many twists to his tale, even she was impressed: a knife, a dead Russian, a missing file, and too many other details for her to keep track of, light-headed as she was from drawing out spells and drinking down clear liquor. She had seen so much over the years that mankind’s mischief almost never amazed her. She had watched brilliant financial virtuosos ensnared in the intricate nets of their own weaving, and charismatic politicians impaled by the bloody revolutions their own rhetoric had sparked; there had been double spies shot at dawn and duplicitous dauphins poisoned at dinner, but she rarely came across anything as oddly convoluted as what this poor Will was enmeshed in. It amused her how, in an almost endearing fashion, he had fallen into it with a guileless innocence, reminding her again of a rabbit, dashing across a hunter’s field, bewildered by all the buckshot flying about. As he kept talking in their little drunken corner, the details continued to confuse her, but she knew she could sort them out once she had a clear head. There were other matters to attend to first. She pushed the bottle out of their way and leaned her dizzy forehead up against a wobbly Will’s. “I think we need a taxi now.”

She was upon him the minute they were in the back of the cab, barely pausing to let him tell the driver “numero vingt-quatre rue d’Artois.” Then her lips were on his. Immediately he surprised her, for she liked the way he kissed, like a man who wanted to swallow life. He pulled her tight in his arms, his hands grabbing up the length of her nylons. His desire was clear, but also his pressing need for some concrete thing to ground him amid all his current confusion. His left hand held her thigh, his right hand pulled her waist close against his. She smelled the soap in his hair as she bit at his ear while pushing hard against his body. He grabbed her face and pulled her lips against his mouth, the force of his action surprising her again, releasing an instinct in her that yearned for a kiss that could devour him too. It felt bestial, like the statues of the lions in the Tuileries gardens, attacking one another with a mutual muscular ferocity. She paused to catch her breath and pressed her palm against his chest. He was breathing hard too, his eyes wide, seemingly stunned and thrilled at this sudden encounter. You poor Americans, she thought, you will never learn to drink like Russians.

A little over an hour later she lay naked in Will’s bed. She felt a soreness on her shoulder where Will had gripped her hard and she was bruised on her hip from where their bodies had collided. Yes, she thought, this is one reason I always come back to these beds, because intimacy changes the scale of the universe, folding down the vast and overwhelming horizon until there is only the small world that is my body, upon which toothsome storms, sweating floods, and soulful earthquakes break their mighty forces, and I lie ravaged and raw and blissfully alive. She surveyed her landscape, running her tongue across her lip, still slightly numb from pressing so tightly against his, tracing with her finger the small blue bruise on her arm. I meet these men and we draw these maps together, over and again, roughly exploring and intimately claiming our bodies as some kind of shared territory and then naming these with terms of deep affection. But maybe, she thought warily, it really is here, now. Or maybe it’s that something worse. She turned on her side and lightly traced her finger down the bridge of a sleeping Will’s nose, thinking, I am going to have to be careful, for this is no happy folk song.

XVI