Chapter II

items of Boris’s) before walking up brazenly to the counter to buy bread and milk and other items too big to steal.

Back in New York, when I was eleven or so, my mother had signed me up for a Kids in the Kitchen class at my day camp, where I’d learned to cook a few simple meals: hamburgers, gril ed cheese (which I’d sometimes made for my mother on nights she worked late), and what Boris cal ed “egg and toasts.” Boris, who sat on the countertop kicking the cabinets with his heels and talking to me while I cooked, did the washing-up. In the Ukraine, he told me, he’d sometimes picked pockets for money to eat. “Got chased, once or twice,” he said. “Never caught, though.”

“Maybe we should go down to the Strip sometime,” I said. We were standing at the kitchen counter at my house with knives and forks, eating our steaks straight from the frying pan. “If we were going to do it, that’d be the place. I never saw so many drunk people and they’re al from out of town.”

He stopped chewing; he looked shocked. “And why should we?

When so easy to steal here, from so big stores!”

“Just saying.” My money from the doormen—which Boris and I spent a few dol ars at a time, in vending machines and at the 7-Eleven near school that Boris cal ed “the magazine”—would hold out a while, but not forever.

“Ha! And what wil I do if you are arrested, Potter?” he said, dropping a fat piece of steak down to the dog, whom he had taught to dance on his hind legs. “Who wil cook the dinner? And who wil look after Snaps here?” Xandra’s dog Popper he’d taken to cal ing

‘Amyl’ and ‘Nitrate’ and ‘Popchik’ and ‘Snaps’—anything but his real name. I’d started bringing him in even though I wasn’t supposed to because I was so tired of him always straining at the end of his chain trying to look in at the glass door and yapping his head off. But inside he was surprisingly quiet; starved for attention, he stuck close to us wherever we went, trotting anxiously at our heels, upstairs and down, curling up to sleep on the rug while Boris and I read and quarrel ed and listened to music up in my room.

“Seriously, Boris,” I said, pushing the hair from my eyes (I was badly in need of a haircut, but didn’t want to spend the money), “I don’t see much difference in stealing wal ets and stealing steaks.”

“Big difference, Potter.” He held his hands apart to show me just how big. “Stealing from working person? And stealing from big rich company that robs the people?”

“Costco doesn’t rob the people. It’s a discount supermarket.”

“Fine then. Steal essentials of life from private citizen. This is your so-smart plan. Hush,” he said to the dog, who’d barked sharply for more steak.

“I wouldn’t steal from some poor working person,” I said, tossing Popper a piece of steak myself. “There are plenty of sleazy people walking around Vegas with wads of cash.”

“Sleazy?”

“Dodgy. Dishonest.”

“Ah.” The pointed dark eyebrow went up. “Fair enough. But if you steal money from sleazy person, like gangster, they are likely to hurt you, nie? ”

“You weren’t scared of getting hurt in Ukraine?”

He shrugged. “Beaten up, maybe. Not shot.”

“Shot?”

“Yes, shot. Don’t look surprised. This cowboy country, who knows? Everyone has guns.”

“I’m not saying a cop. I’m saying drunk tourists. The place is crawling with them Saturday night.”

“Ha!” He put the pan down on the floor for the dog to finish off.

“Likely you wil end up in jail, Potter. Loose morals, slave to the economy. Very bad citizen, you.”

xi i.

BY THIS TIME—OCTOBER or so—we were eating together almost every night. Boris, who’d often had three or four beers before dinner, switched over at mealtimes to hot tea. Then, after a post-dinner shot of vodka, a habit I soon picked up from him (“It helps you digest the food,” Boris explained), we lol ed around reading, doing homework,

and sometimes arguing, and often drank ourselves to sleep in front of the television.

“Don’t go!” said Boris, one night at his house when I stood up toward the end of The Magnificent Seven—the final gunfight, Yul Brynner rounding up his men. “You’l miss the best part.”

“Yeah, but it’s almost eleven.”

Boris—lying on the floor—raised himself on an elbow. Long-haired, narrow-chested, weedy and thin, he was Yul Brynner’s exact opposite in most respects and yet there was also an odd familial resemblance: they had the same sly, watchful quality, amused and a bit cruel, something Mongol or Tatar in the slant of the eyes.

“Cal Xandra to come col ect you,” he said with a yawn. “What time does she get off work?”

“Xandra? Forget it.”

Again Boris yawned, eyes heavy-lidded with vodka. “Sleep here, then,” he said, rol ing over and scrubbing his face with one hand.

“Wil they miss you?”

Were they even coming home? Some nights they didn’t.

“Doubtful,” I said.

“Hush,” said Boris—reaching for his cigarettes, sitting up. “Watch now. Here come the bad guys.”

“You saw this movie before?”

“Dubbed into Russian, if you can believe it. But very weak Russian. Sissy. Is sissy the word I want? More like schoolteachers than gunfighters, is what I’m trying to say.”

xiv.

THOUGH I’D BEEN MISERABLE with grief at the Barbours’, I now thought longingly of the apartment on Park Avenue as a lost Eden. And though I had access to email on the computer at school, Andy wasn’t much of a writer, and the messages I got in reply were frustratingly impersonal. ( Hi, Theo. Hope you enjoyed your summer. Daddy got a new boat [ the Absalom]. Mother wil not set foot upon it but

unfortunately I was compel ed. Japanese II is giving me some headaches but everything else is fine. ) Mrs. Barbour dutiful y answered the paper letters I sent—a line or two on her monogrammed correspondence cards from Dempsey and Carrol —

but there was never anything personal. She always asked how are you? and closed with thinking about you, but there was never any we miss you or we wish we could see you.

I wrote to Pippa, in Texas, though she was too il to answer—

which was just as wel , since most of the letters I never sent.

Dear Pippa,

How are you? How do you like Texas? I’ve thought about you a lot. Have you been riding that horse you like? Things are great here. I wonder if it’s hot there, since it’s so hot here.

That was boring; I threw it away, and started again.

Dear Pippa,

How are you? I’ve been thinking about you and hoping you are okay. I hope that things are going okay wonderful for you in Texas. I have to say, I sort of hate it here, but I’ve made some friends and am getting used to it a bit, I guess.

I wonder if you get homesick? I do. I miss New York a lot. I wish we lived closer together. How is your head now? Better, I hope. I’m sorry that

“Is that your girlfriend?” said Boris—crunching an apple, reading over my shoulder.

“Shove off.”

“What happened to her?” he said and then, when I didn’t reply:

“Did you hit her?”

“What?” I said, only half listening.

“Her head? That’s why you’re apologizing? You hit her or something?”

“Yeah, right,” I said—and then, from his earnest, intent expression, realized he was perfectly serious.

“You think I beat girls up?” I said.

He shrugged. “She might have deserved it.”

“Um, we don’t hit women in America.”

He scowled, and spit out an apple seed. “No. Americans just persecute smal er countries that believe different from them.”

“Boris, shut up and leave me alone.”

But he had rattled me with his comment and rather than start a new letter to Pippa, I began one to Hobie.

Dear Mr. Hobart,

Hel o, how are you? Wel , I hope. I have never written to thank you for your kindness during my last weeks in New York. I hope that you and Cosmo are okay, though I know you both miss Pippa. How is she? I hope she’s been able to go back to her music. I hope too

But I didn’t send that one either. Hence I was delighted when a letter arrived—a long letter, on real paper—from none other than Hobie.

“What’ve you got there?” said my father suspiciously—spotting the New York postmark, snatching the letter from my hand.

“What?”

But my dad had already torn the envelope open. He scanned it, quickly, and then lost interest. “Here,” he said, handing it back to me.

“Sorry, kiddo. My mistake.”

The letter itself was beautiful, as a physical artifact: rich paper, careful penmanship, a whisper of quiet rooms and money.

Dear Theo,

I’ve wanted to hear how you are and yet I’m glad I haven’t, as I hope this means you are happy and busy. Here, the leaves have turned, Washington Square is sodden and yel ow, and it’s getting cold. On Saturday mornings, Cosmo and I mooch around the Vil age—I pick him up and carry him into the cheese shop—not sure that’s entirely legal but the girls behind the counter save him bits and bobs of cheese. He misses Pippa as much as I do but—like me—stil enjoys his meals.

Sometimes we eat by the fireplace now that Jack Frost is on us.

I hope that you’re settling in there a bit and have made some friends. When I talk to Pippa on the telephone she doesn’t seem very happy where she is, though her health is certainly better. I am going to fly down there for Thanksgiving. I don’t know how pleased Margaret wil be to have me, but Pippa wants me so I’l go. If they al ow me to carry Cosmo on the plane I might bring him, too.

I’m enclosing a photo that I thought you might enjoy—of a Chippendale bureau that has just arrived, very bad repair, I was told it was stored in an unheated shed up around Watervliet, New York. Very scarred, very nicked, and the top’s in two pieces—but—look at those swept-back, weight-bearing talons on that bal -and-claw! the feet don’t come out wel in the photo, but you can real y see the pressure of the claws digging in. It’s a masterpiece, and I only wish it had been better looked after. I don’t know if you can see the remarkable graining on the top—extraordinary.

As for the shop: I open it a few times a week by appointment, but mostly I keep myself busy below stairs with things sent to me by private clients. Mrs. Skolnik and several people in the neighborhood have asked about you—

everything’s much the same here, except Mrs. Cho at the Korean market had a little stroke ( very little, she’s back at work now). Also that coffee shop on Hudson that I liked so much has gone out of business—very sad. I walked by this morning and it looks as if they’re turning it into a—wel , I don’t know what you’d cal it. Some sort of Japanese novelty store.

I see that as usual I’ve gone on too long and that I’m running out of room, but I do hope that you are happy and wel , and it’s al a little less lonely out there than you may have feared. If there’s anything I can do for you back here, or if I can help you in any way, please know that I wil .

xv.

THAT NIGHT, AT BORIS’S—lying drunk on my half of the batik-draped mattress—I tried to remember what Pippa had looked like. But the moon was so large and clear through the uncurtained window that it made me think instead of a story my mother had told me, about driving to horse shows with her mother and father in the back seat of their old Buick when she was little. “It was a lot of travel ing—ten hours sometimes through hard country. Ferris wheels, rodeo rings with sawdust, everything smel ed like popcorn and horse manure.

One night we were in San Antonio, and I was having a bit of a melt-down—wanting my own room, you know, my dog, my own bed—and Daddy lifted me up on the fairgrounds and told me to look at the moon. ‘When you feel homesick,’ he said, ‘just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.’ So after he died, and I had to go to Aunt Bess—I mean, even now, in the city, when I see a ful moon, it’s like he’s tel ing me not to look back or feel sad about things, that home is wherever I am.” She kissed me on the nose. “Or where you are, puppy. The center of my earth is you.”

A rustle, next to me. “Potter?” said Boris. “You awake?”

“Can I ask you something?” I said. “What does the moon look like in Indonesia?”

“What are you on about?”

“Or, I don’t know, Russia? Is it just the same as here?”

He rapped me lightly on the side of the head with his knuckles—a gesture of his that I had come to know, meaning idiot. “Same everywhere,” he said, yawning, propping himself up on his scrawny braceleted wrist. “And why?”

“Dunno,” I said, and then, after a tense pause: “Do you hear that?”

A door had slammed. “What’s that?” I said, rol ing to face him. We looked at each other, listening. Voices downstairs—laughter, people knocking around, a crash like something had been knocked over.

“Is that your dad?” I said, sitting up—and then I heard a woman’s voice, drunken and shril .

Boris sat up too, bony and sickly-pale in the light through the window. Downstairs, it sounded like they were throwing things and pushing furniture around.

“What are they saying?” I whispered.

Boris listened. I could see al the bolts and hol ows in his neck.

“Bul shit,” he said. “They’re drunk.”

The two of us sat there, listening—Boris more intently than me.

“Who’s that with him then?” I said.

“Some whore.” He listened for a moment, brow furrowed, his profile sharp in the moonlight, and then lay back down. “Two of them.”

I rol ed over, and checked my iPod. It was 3:17 in the morning.

“Fuck,” groaned Boris, scratching his stomach. “Why don’t they shut up?”

“I’m thirsty,” I said, after a timid pause.

He snorted. “Ha! You don’t want to go out there now, trust me.”

“What are they doing?” I asked. One of the women had just screamed—whether in laughter or fright, I couldn’t tel .

We lay there, stiff as boards, staring at the ceiling, listening to the ominous crashing and bumping-around.

“Ukrainian?” I said, after a bit. Though I couldn’t understand a word of what they were saying, I’d been around Boris enough that I was beginning to differentiate the intonations of spoken Ukrainian from Russian.

“Top marks, Potter.” Then: “Light me a cigarette.”

We passed it back and forth, in the dark, until another door slammed somewhere and the voices died down. At last, Boris exhaled, a final smoky sigh, and rol ed over to stub it out in the overflowing ashtray beside the bed. “Good night,” he whispered.

“Good night.”

He fel asleep almost immediately—I could tel from his breathing

—but I lay awake a lot longer, with a scratchy throat, feeling lightheaded and sick from the cigarette. How had I fetched up into this strange new life, where drunk foreigners shouted around me in the night, and al my clothes were dirty, and nobody loved me? Boris—

oblivious—snored beside me. At last, towards dawn, when I final y fel asleep, I dreamed of my mother: sitting across from me on the 6

train, swaying slightly, her face calm in the flickering artificial lights.

What are you doing here? she said. Go home! Right now! I’l meet you at the apartment. Only the voice wasn’t quite right; and when I looked more closely I saw it wasn’t her at al , only someone pretending to be her. And with a gasp and a start, I woke up.

xvi.

BORIS’S FATHER WAS A mysterious figure. As Boris explained it: he was often on site in the middle of nowhere, at his mine, where he stayed with his crew for weeks at a time. “Doesn’t wash,” said Boris austerely. “Stays filthy drunk.” The beaten-up short wave radio in the kitchen belonged to him (“From Brezhnev era,” said Boris; “he won’t throw it away”), and so were the Russian-language newspapers and USA Today s I sometimes found around. One day I’d walked into one of the bathrooms at Boris’s house (which were fairly grim—no shower curtain or toilet seat, upstairs or down, and black stuff growing in the tub) and got a bad start from one of his dad’s suits, soaking wet and smel y, dangling like a dead thing from the shower rod: scratchy, misshapen, of lumpy brown wool the color of dug roots, it dripped horribly on the floor like some moist-breathing golem from the old country or maybe a garment dredged up in a police net.

“What?” said Boris, when I emerged.

“Your dad washes his own suits?” I said. “In the sink in there?”

Boris—leaning against the frame of the door, gnawing the side of his thumb nail—shrugged evasively.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said, and then, when he kept on looking at me: “What? They don’t have dry cleaning in Russia?”

“He has plenty of jewelry and posh,” growled Boris around the side of his thumb. “Rolex watch, Ferragamo shoes. He can clean his suit however he wants.”

“Right,” I said, and changed the subject. Several weeks passed with no thought of Boris’s dad at al . But then came the day when Boris slid in late to Honors English with a wine colored bruise under his eye.

“Ah, got it in the face with a footbal ,” he said in a cheery voice when Mrs. Spear (‘Spirsetskaya,’ as he cal ed her) asked him, suspiciously, what had happened.

This, I knew, was a lie. Glancing over at him, across the aisle, I wondered throughout our listless class discussion of Ralph Waldo Emerson how he’d managed to black his eye after I’d left him the previous night to go home and walk Popper—Xandra left him tied up outside so much that I was starting to feel responsible for him.

“What’d you do?” I said when I caught up with him after class.

“Eh?”

“How’d you get that?”

He winked. “Oh, come on,” he said, bumping his shoulder against mine.

“What? Were you drunk?”

“My dad came home,” he said, and then, when I didn’t answer:

“What else, Potter? What did you think?”

“Jesus, why?”

He shrugged. “Glad you’d gone,” he said, rubbing his good eye.

“Couldn’t believe when he showed up. Was sleeping on the couch downstairs. At first I thought it was you.”

“What happened?”

“Ah,” said Boris, sighing extravagantly; he’d been smoking on the way to school, I could smel it on his breath. “He saw the beer bottles on the floor.”

“He hit you because you were drinking?”

“Because he was fucking plastered, is why. He was drunk as a log—I don’t think he knew it was me he was hitting. This morning—

he saw my face, he cried and was sorry. Anyway, he won’t be back for a while.”

“Why not?”

“He’s got a lot going on out there, he said. Won’t be back for three weeks. The mine is close to one of those places where they have the state-run brothels, you know?”

“They aren’t state-run,” I said—and then found myself wondering if they were.

“Wel , you know what I mean. One good thing though—he left me moneys.”

“How much?”

“Four thousand.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, no—” he slapped his forehead—“thinking in roubles, sorry!

About two hundred dol ars, but stil . Should have asked for more but I didn’t have the nerve.”

We’d reached the juncture of the hal way where I had to turn for algebra and Boris had to turn for American Government: the bane of his existence. It was a required course—easy even by the desultory standards of our school—but trying to get Boris to understand about the Bil of Rights, and the enumerated versus implied powers of the U.S. Congress, reminded me of the time I’d tried to explain to Mrs.

Barbour what an Internet server was.

“Wel , see you after class,” said Boris. “Explain again, before I go, what’s the difference between Federal Bank and Federal Reserve?”

“Did you tel anybody?”

“Tel what?”

“You know.”

“What, you want to report me?” said Boris, laughing.

“Not you. Him.”

“And why? Why is that a good idea? Tel me. So I can get deported?”

“Right,” I said, after an uncomfortable pause.

“So—we should eat out tonight!” said Boris. “In a restaurant!

Maybe the Mexican.” Boris, after initial suspicion and complaint, had grown to like Mexican food—unknown in Russia, he said, not bad

when you got used to it, though if it was too spicy he wouldn’t touch it. “We can take the bus.”

“The Chinese is closer. And the food is better.”

“Yah, but—remember?”

“Oh, yeah, right,” I said. The last time we’d eaten there we’d slipped out without paying. “Forget that.”

xvi .

BORIS LIKED XANDRA A lot better than I did: leaping forward to open doors for her, saying he liked her new haircut, offering to carry things. I’d teased him about her ever since I’d caught him looking down her top when she leaned to reach her cel phone on the kitchen counter.

“God, she’s hot,” said Boris, once we were up in my room. “Think your dad would mind?”

“Probably wouldn’t notice.”

“No, serious, what do you think your dad would do to me?”

“If what?”

“If me and Xandra.”

“I dunno, probably cal the police.”

He snorted, derisively. “What for?”

“Not you. Her. Statutory rape.”

“I wish.”

“Go on and fuck her if you want,” I said. “I don’t care if she goes to jail.”

Boris rol ed over on his stomach and looked at me slyly. “She takes cocaine, do you know that?”

“What?”

“Cocaine.” He mimed sniffing.

“You’re kidding,” I said, and then, when he smirked at me: “How can you tel ?”

“I just know. From the way she talks. Also she’s grinding her teeth. Watch her sometime.”

I didn’t know what to watch for. But then one afternoon we came in when my dad wasn’t home and saw her straightening up from the coffee table with a sniff, holding her hair behind her neck with one hand. When she threw her head back, and her eyes landed on us, there was a moment where nobody said anything and then she turned away as if we weren’t there.

We kept walking, up the stairs to my room. Though I’d never seen anybody snorting drugs before, it was clear even to me what she was doing.

“God, sexy,” said Boris, after I shut the door. “Wonder where she keeps it?”

“Dunno,” I said, flopping down on my bed. Xandra was just leaving; I could hear her car in the driveway.

“Think she’l give us some?”

“She might give you some.”

Boris sank down to sit on the floor by the bed, with his knee up and his back against the wal . “Do you think she’s sel ing it?”

“No way,” I said, after a slight, disbelieving pause. “You think?”

“Ha! Good for you, if she is.”

“How’s that?”

“Cash around the house!”

“Fat lot of good that does me.”

He swung his shrewd, appraising gaze over to me. “Who pays the bil s here, Potter?” he said.

“Huh.” It was the first time that this question, which I immediately recognized as of great practical importance, had even occurred to me. “I don’t know. My dad, I think. Though Xandra puts in some too.”

“And where does he get it? His moneys?”

“No clue,” I said. “He talks to people on the telephone and then he leaves the house.”

“Any checkbooks lying around? Any cash?”

“No. Never. Chips, sometimes.”

“As good as cash,” Boris said swiftly, spitting a bitten-off thumbnail on the floor.

“Right. Except you can’t cash them in the casino if you’re under eighteen.”

Boris chortled. “Come on. We figure out something, if we have to.

We dress you up in that poncy school jacket with the coat of arms, send you to the window, ‘ Excuse me, miss—’ ”

I rol ed over and punched him hard, in the arm. “Fuck you,” I said, stung by his drawling, snobbish rendering of my voice.

“Can’t be talking like that, Potter,” said Boris gleeful y, rubbing his arm. “They won’t give you a fucking cent. Al I’m saying is, I know where my dad’s checkbook is, and if there’s an emergency—” he held out his open palms—“right?”

“Right.”

“I mean, if I have to write bad check, I write bad check,” said Boris philosophical y. “Good to know I can. I’m not saying, break in their room and go through their things, but stil , good idea to keep your eye open, yes?”

xvi i.

BORIS AND HIS FATHER didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving, and Xandra and my dad had reservations for a Romantic Holiday Extravaganza at a French restaurant in the MGM Grand. “Do you want to come?” said my father when he saw me looking at the brochure on the kitchen counter: hearts and fireworks, tricolor bunting over a plate of roast turkey. “Or do you have something of your own to do?”

“No thanks.” He was being nice, but the thought of being with Dad and Xandra on their Romantic Holiday Whatever made me uneasy.

“I’ve got plans.”

“What are you doing then?”

“I’m having Thanksgiving with somebody else.”

“Who with?” said my dad, in a rare burst of parental solicitude. “A friend?”

“Let me guess,” said Xandra—barefoot, in the Miami Dolphins jersey she slept in, staring into the fridge. “The same person who keeps eating these oranges and apples I bring home.”

“Oh, come on,” said my dad sleepily, coming up behind her and putting his arms around her, “you like the little Russki—what’s his name—Boris.”

“Sure I like him. Which is good, I guess, since he’s here pretty much al the time. Shit,” she said—twisting away from him, slapping her bare thigh—“who let this mosquito inside? Theo, I don’t know why you can’t remember to keep that door to the pool shut. I’ve told you and told you.”

“Wel , you know, I could always have Thanksgiving with you guys, if you’d rather,” I said blandly, leaning back against the kitchen counter. “Why don’t I.”

I had intended this to annoy Xandra, and with pleasure I saw that it did. “But the reservation’s for two,” said Xandra, flicking her hair back and looking at my dad.

“Wel , I’m sure they can work something out.”

“We’l need to cal ahead.”

“Fine then, cal ,” said my dad, giving her a slightly stoned pat on the back and ambling on in to the living room to check on his footbal scores.

Xandra and I stood looking at each other for a moment, and then she looked away, as if into some bleak and untenable vision of the future. “I need coffee,” she said listlessly.

“It wasn’t me who left that door open.”

“I don’t know who keeps doing it. Al I know is, those weird Amway-sel ing people over there didn’t drain their fountain before they moved and now there’s a jil ion mosquitoes everywhere I look—

I mean, there goes another one, shit.”

“Look, don’t be mad. I don’t have to come with you guys.”

She put down the box of coffee filters. “So, what are you saying?”

she said. “Should I change the reservation or not?”

“What are you two going on about?” cal ed my father faintly from the next room, from his nest of beringed coasters, old cigarette packs, and marked-up baccarat sheets.

“Nothing,” cal ed Xandra. Then, a few minutes later, as the coffee maker began to hiss and pop, she rubbed her eye and said in a sleep-roughened voice: “I never said I didn’t want you to come.”

“I know. I never said you did.” Then: “Also, just so you know, it’s not me that leaves the door open. It’s Dad, when he goes out there to talk on the phone.”

Xandra—reaching in the cabinet for her Planet Hol ywood coffee mug—looked back at me over her shoulder. “You’re not real y having dinner at his house?” she said. “The little Russki or whatever?”

“Nah. We’l just be here watching television.”

“Do you want me to bring you something?”

“Boris likes those cocktail sausages you bring home. And I like the wings. The hot ones.”

“Anything else? What about those mini taquito things? You like those too, don’t you?”

“That would be great.”

“Fine. I’l hook you guys up. Just stay out of my cigarettes, that’s al I ask. I don’t care if you smoke,” she said, raising a hand to hush me, “it’s not like I’m busting you, but somebody’s been stealing packs out of the carton in here and it’s costing me like twenty-five bucks a week.”

xix.

EVER SINCE BORIS HAD shown up with the bruised eye, I had built Boris’s father up in my mind to be some thick-necked Soviet with pig eyes and a buzz haircut. In fact—as I was surprised to see, when I did final y meet him—he was as thin and pale as a starved poet.

Chlorotic, with a sunken chest, he smoked incessantly, wore cheap shirts that had grayed in the wash, drank endless cups of sugary tea.

But when you looked him in the eye you realized that his frailty was deceptive. He was wiry, intense, bad temper shimmering off him—

smal -boned and sharp-faced, like Boris, but with an evil red-rimmed gaze and tiny, brownish sawteeth. He made me think of a rabid fox.

Though I’d glimpsed him in passing, and heard him (or a person I presumed was him) bumping around Boris’s house at night, I didn’t actual y meet him face-to-face until a few days before Thanksgiving.

Then we walked into Boris’s house one day after school, laughing and talking, to find him hunched at the kitchen table with a bottle and a glass. Despite his shabby clothes, he was wearing expensive shoes and lots of gold jewelry; and when he looked up at us with reddened eyes we shut up talking immediately. Though he was a smal , slightly built man, there was something in his face that made you not want to get too close to him.

“Hi,” I said tentatively.

“Hel o,” he said—stony-faced, in a much thicker accent than Boris

—and then turned to Boris and said something in Ukrainian. A brief conversation fol owed, which I observed with interest. It was interesting to see the change that came over Boris when he was speaking another language—a sort of livening, or alertness, a sense of a different and more efficient person occupying his body.

Then—unexpectedly—Mr. Pavlikovsky held out both hands to me.

“Thank you,” he said thickly.

Though I was afraid to approach him—it felt like approaching a wild animal—I stepped forward anyway and held out both my hands, awkwardly. He took them in his own, which were hard-skinned and cold.

“You are good person,” he said. His gaze was bloodshot and way too intense. I wanted to look away, and was ashamed of myself.

“God be with you and bless you always,” he said. “You are like a son to me. For letting my son come into your family.”

My family? In confusion, I glanced over at Boris.

Mr. Pavlikovsky’s eyes went to him. “You told him what I said?”

“He said you are part of our family here,” said Boris, in a bored voice, “and if there is anything ever he can do for you…”

To my great surprise, Mr. Pavlikovsky pul ed me close and caught me in a solid embrace, while I closed my eyes and tried hard to ignore his smel : hair cream, body odor, alcohol, and some sort of sharp, disagreeably pungent cologne.

“What was that about?” I said quietly when we were up in Boris’s room with the door shut.

Boris rol ed his eyes. “Believe me. You don’t want to know.”

“Is he that loaded al the time? How does he keep his job?”

Boris cackled. “High official in the company,” he said. “Or something.”

We stayed up in Boris’s murky, batik-draped room until we heard his dad’s truck start up in the driveway. “He won’t be back for a while,” Boris said, as I let the curtain fal back over the window. “He feels bad for leaving me so much alone. He knows is a holiday coming up, and he asked if I could stay at your house.”

“Wel , you do al the time anyway.”

“He knows that,” said Boris, scraping the hair out of his eyes.

“That’s why he thanked you. But—I hope you don’t mind—I gave him your wrong address.”

“Why?”

“Because—” he moved his legs to make room for me to sit by him, without my having to ask—“I think maybe you don’t want him rol ing up drunk at your house in the middle of the night. Waking your father and Xandra up out of bed. Also—if he ever asks—he thinks your last name is Potter.”

“Why?”

“Is better this way,” said Boris calmly. “Trust me.”

xx.

BORIS AND I LAY on the floor in front of the television at my house, eating potato chips and drinking vodka, watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. It was snowing in New York. A number of bal oons had just passed—Snoopy, Ronald McDonald, SpongeBob, Mr. Peanut—and a troupe of Hawai an dancers in loincloths and grass skirts was performing a number in Herald Square.

“Glad that’s not me,” said Boris. “Bet they’re freezing their arses off.”

“Yeah,” I said, though I had no eyes for the bal oons or the dancers or any of it. To see Herald Square on television made me feel as if I were stranded mil ions of light-years from Earth and

picking up signals from the early days of radio, announcer voices and audience applause from a vanished civilization.

“Idiots. Can’t believe they dress like that. They’l end up in hospital, those girls.” As fiercely as Boris complained about the heat in Las Vegas, he also had an unshakable belief that anything “cold”

made people il : unheated swimming pools, the air-conditioning at my house, and even ice in drinks.

He rol ed over on his back and passed me the bottle. “You and your mother, you went to this parade?”

“Nah.”

“Why not?” said Boris, feeding Popper a potato chip.

“Nekulturny, ” I said, a word I’d picked up from him. “And too many tourists.”

He lit a cigarette, and offered me one. “Are you sad?”

“A little,” I said, leaning in to light it from his match. I couldn’t stop thinking about the Thanksgiving before; it kept playing and re-playing like a movie I couldn’t stop: my mother padding around barefoot in old jeans with the knees sprung out, opening a bottle of wine, pouring me some ginger ale in a champagne glass, setting out some olives, turning up the stereo, putting on her holiday joke apron, and unwrapping the turkey breast she’d bought us in Chinatown, only to wrinkle her nose and start back at the smel —“Oh God, Theo, this thing’s gone off, open the door for me”—eyewatering ammonia reek, holding it out before her like an undetonated grenade as she ran with it down the fire stairs and out to the garbage can on the street while I

—leaning out from the window—made gleeful retching noises from on high. We’d eaten an austere meal of canned green beans, canned cranberries, and brown rice with toasted almonds: “Our Vegetarian Socialist Thanksgiving,” she’d cal ed it. We’d planned carelessly because she had a project due at work; next year, she promised (both of us tired from laughing; the spoiled turkey had for some reason put us in an hilarious mood), we were renting a car and driving to her friend Jed’s in Vermont, or else making reservations someplace great like Gramercy Tavern. Only that future had not happened; and I was celebrating my alcoholic potato-chip Thanksgiving with Boris in front of the television.

“What are we going to eat, Potter?” said Boris, scratching his stomach.

“What? Are you hungry?”

He waggled his hand sideways: comme ci, comme ça. “You?”

“Not especial y.” The roof of my mouth was scraped raw from eating so many chips, and the cigarettes had begun to make me feel il .

Suddenly Boris howled with laughter; he sat up. “Listen,” he said

—kicking me, pointing to the television. “Did you hear that?”

“What?”

“The news man. He just wished happy holiday to his kids.

‘Bastard and Casey.’ ”

“Oh, come on.” Boris was always mis-hearing English words like this, aural malaprops, sometimes amusing but often just irritating.

“ ‘Bastard and Casey!’ That’s hard, eh? Casey, al right, but cal his own kid ‘Bastard’ on holiday television?”

“That’s not what he said.”

“Fine, then, you know everything, what did he say?”

“How should I know what the fuck?”

“Then why do you argue with me? Why do you think you always know better? What is the problem with this country? How did so stupid nation get to be so arrogant and rich? Americans… movie stars… TV people… they name their kids like Apple and Blanket and Blue and Bastard and al kind of crazy things.”

“And your point is—?”

“My point is like, democracy is excuse for any fucking thing.

Violence… greed… stupidity… anything is ok if Americans do it.

Right? Am I right?”

“You real y can’t shut up, can you?”

“I know what I heard, ha! Bastard! Tel you what. If I thought my kid was a bastard I would sure the fuck name him something else.”

In the fridge, there were wings and taquitos and cocktail sausages that Xandra had brought home, as wel as dumplings from the strip-mal Chinese where my father liked to eat, but by the time we actual y got around to eating, the bottle of vodka (Boris’s contribution to Thanksgiving) was already half gone and we were wel on our way to being sick. Boris—who sometimes had a serious

streak when he was drunk, a Russianate bent for heavy topics and unanswerable questions—was sitting on the marble countertop waving around a fork with a cocktail sausage speared on it and talking a bit wildly about poverty and capitalism and climate change and how fucked up the world was.

At some disoriented point, I said: “Boris, shut up. I don’t want to hear this.” He’d gone back to my room for my school copy of Walden and was reading aloud a lengthy passage that bolstered some point he was trying to make.

The thrown book—luckily a paperback—clipped me in the cheekbone. “Ischézni! Get out!”

“This is my house, you ignorant fuck.”

The cocktail sausage—stil impaled on the fork—sailed past my head, missing me narrowly. But we were laughing. By mid-afternoon we were completely wrecked: rol ing around on the carpet, tripping each other, laughing and swearing, crawling on hands and knees. A footbal game was on, and though it was an annoyance to both of us it was too much trouble to find the remote and change the channel.

Boris was so hammered he kept trying to talk to me in Russian.

“Speak English or shut up,” I said, trying to catch myself on the banister, and ducking his swing so clumsily I crashed and fel into the coffee table.

“Ty menjá dostál!! Poshël ty!”

“Gobble gobble gobble,” I replied in a whiny girl voice, face down in the carpet. The floor was rocking and bucking like the deck of a ship. “Balalaika pattycake.”

“Fucking télik, ” said Boris, col apsing on the floor beside me, kicking out ridiculously at the television. “Don’t want to watch this shite.”

“Wel I mean, fuck”—rol ing over, clutching my stomach—“I don’t either.” My eyes weren’t tracking right, objects had halos that shimmered out beyond their normal boundaries.

“Let’s watch weathers,” said Boris, wading on his knees across the living room. “Want to see the weathers in New Guinea.”

“You’l have to find it, I don’t know what channel.”

“Dubai!” exclaimed Boris, col apsing forward on al fours—and then, a mushy flow of Russian in which I caught a swear word or

two.

“Angliyski! Speak English.”

“Is snowing there?” Shaking my shoulder. “Man says is snowing, crazy man, ty videsh? ! Snowing in Dubai! A miracle, Potter! Look!”

“That’s Dublin you ass. Not Dubai.”

“Valí otsyúda! Fuck off!”

Then I must have blacked out (an al -too-typical occurrence when Boris brought a bottle over) because the next I knew, the light was completely different and I was kneeling by the sliding doors with a puddle of puke on the carpet beside me and my forehead pressed to the glass. Boris was fast asleep, face down and snoring happily, one arm dangling off the sofa. Popchik was sleeping too, chin resting contentedly on the back of Boris’s head. I felt rotten. Dead butterfly floating on the surface of the pool. Audible machine hum. Drowned crickets and beetles swirling in the plastic filter baskets. Above, the setting sun flared gaudy and inhuman, blood-red shelves of cloud that suggested end-times footage of catastrophe and ruin: detonations on Pacific atol s, wildlife running before sheets of flame.

I might have cried, if Boris wasn’t there. Instead, I went in the bathroom and vomited again and then after drinking some water from the tap came back with paper towels and cleaned up the mess I’d made even though my head hurt so much I could barely see. The vomit was an awful orange color from the barbecue chicken wings and hard to get up, it had left a stain, and while I scrubbed at it with dish detergent I tried hard to fasten on comforting thoughts of New York—the Barbours’ apartment with its Chinese porcelains and its friendly doormen, and also the timeless backwater of Hobie’s house, old books and loudly-ticking clocks, old furniture, velvet curtains, everywhere the sediment of the past, quiet rooms where things were calm and made sense. Often at night, when I was overwhelmed with the strangeness of where I was, I lul ed myself to sleep by thinking of his workshop, rich smel s of beeswax and rosewood shavings, and then the narrow stairs up to the parlor, where dusty sunbeams shone on oriental carpets.

I’l cal , I thought. Why not? I was stil just drunk enough to think it was a good idea. But the telephone rang and rang. Final y—after two or three tries, and then a bleak half hour or so in front of the

television—sick and sweating, my stomach kil ing me, staring at the Weather Channel, icy road conditions, cold fronts sweeping in over Montana—I decided to cal Andy, going into the kitchen so I wouldn’t wake Boris. It was Kitsey who picked up the phone.

“We can’t talk,” she said in a rush when she realized it was me.

“We’re late. We’re on the way out to dinner.”

“Where?” I said, blinking. My head stil hurt so much I could hardly stand up.

“With the Van Nesses over on Fifth. Friends of Mum’s.”

In the background, I heard indistinct wails from Toddy, Platt roaring: “Get off me!”

“Can I say hi to Andy?” I said, staring fixedly at the kitchen floor.

“No, real y, we’re—Mum, I’m coming!” I heard her yel . To me, she said, “Happy Thanksgiving.”

“You too,” I said, “tel everybody I said hi,” but she’d already hung up.

xxi.

MY APPREHENSIONS ABOUT BORIS’S father had been eased somewhat since he’d taken my hands and thanked me for looking after Boris.

Though Mr. Pavlikovsky (“Mister!” cackled Boris) was a scary-looking guy, al right, I’d come to think he wasn’t quite as awful as he’d seemed. Twice the week after Thanksgiving, we came in after school to find him in the kitchen—mumbled pleasantries, nothing more, as he sat at the table throwing back vodka and blotting his damp forehead with a paper napkin, his fairish hair darkened with some sort of oily hair cream, listening to loud Russian news on his beat-up radio. But then one night we were downstairs with Popper (who I’d walked over from my house) and watching an old Peter Lorre movie cal ed The Beast with Five Fingers when the front door slammed, hard.