Chapter II

Boris slapped his forehead. “Fuck.” Before I realized what he was doing he’d shoved Popper in my arms, seized me by the col ar of the

shirt, hauled me up, and pushed me in the back.

“What—?”

He flung out a hand— just go. “Dog,” he hissed. “My dad wil kil him. Hurry.”

I ran through the kitchen, and—as quietly as I could—slipped out the back door. It was very dark outside. For once in his life, Popper didn’t make a sound. I put him down, knowing he would stick close, and circled around to the living room windows, which were uncurtained.

His dad was walking with a cane, something I hadn’t seen.

Leaning on it heavily, he limped into the bright room like a character in a stage play. Boris stood, arms crossed over his scrawny chest, hugging himself.

He and his father were arguing—or, rather, his father was talking to him angrily. Boris stared at the floor. His hair hung in his face, so al I could see of him was the tip of his nose.

Abruptly, tossing his head, Boris said something sharp and turned to leave. Then—so viciously I almost didn’t have time to register it—

Boris’s dad snapped out like a snake with the cane and whacked Boris across the back of the shoulders and knocked him to the ground. Before he could get up—he was on his hands and knees—

Mr. Pavlikovsky kicked him down, then caught him by the back of the shirt and pul ed him, stumbling, to his feet. Ranting and screaming in Russian, he slapped him across the face with his red, beringed hand, backwards and forwards. Then—throwing him staggering out into the middle of the room—he brought up the hooked end of the cane and cracked him square across the face.

Half in shock, I backed away from the window, so disoriented that I tripped and fel over a sack of garbage. Popper—alarmed at the noise—was running back and forth and crying in a high, keening tone. Just as I was clambering up again—panic-stricken, in a crash of cans and beer bottles—the door flew open and a square of yel ow light spil ed on the concrete. As quickly as I could I scrambled to my feet, snatched up Popper, and ran.

But it was only Boris. He caught up with me, grabbed me by the arm and dragged me down the street.

“Jesus,” I said—lagging a little, trying to look back. “What was that?”

Behind us, the front door of Boris’s house flew open. Mr.

Pavlikovsky stood silhouetted in the light from the doorway and bracing himself with one hand, shaking his fist and shouting in Russian.

Boris pul ed me along. “Come on. ” Down the dark street we ran, shoes slapping the asphalt, until at last his father’s voice died away.

“Fuck,” I said, slowing to a walk as we rounded the corner. My heart was pounding and my head swam; Popper was whining and struggling to get down, and I set him on the asphalt to dash in circles around us. “What happened?”

“Ah, nothing,” said Boris, sounding unaccountably cheerful, wiping his nose with a wet snuffling noise. “ ‘Storm in a glass of water’ is how we say it in Polish. He was just pissed.”

I bent over, hands on knees, to catch my breath. “Pissed angry or pissed drunk?”

“Both. Lucky he didn’t see Popchyk, though, or—don’t know what.

He thinks animals are for outside. Here,” he said, holding up the vodka bottle, “look what I got! Nicked it on the way out.”

I smel ed the blood on him before I saw it. There was a crescent moon—not much, but enough to see by—and when I stood and looked at him head-on, I realized that his nose was pouring and his shirt was dark with it.

“Gosh,” I said, stil breathing hard, “are you al right?”

“Let’s go to the playground, catch our breath,” said Boris. His face, I saw, was a mess: swol en eye, and an ugly hook-shaped cut on his forehead that was also pouring blood.

“Boris! We should go home.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Home?”

“My house. Whatever. You look bad.”

He grinned—exposing bloody teeth—and elbowed me in the ribs.

“Nyah, I need a drink before I face Xandra. Come on, Potter.

Couldn’t you use a wind-me-down? After al that?”

xxi .

AT THE ABANDONED COMMUNITY center, the playground slides gleamed silver in the moonlight. We sat on the side of the empty fountain, our feet dangling in the dry basin, and passed the bottle back and forth until we began to lose track of time.

“That was the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen,” I said, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. The stars were spinning a bit.

Boris—leaning back on his hands, face turned to the sky—was singing to himself in Polish.

Wszystkie dzieci, nawet ź le,

pogr ąż one s ą we ś nie, a Ty jedna tylko nie.

A-a-a, a-a-a…

“He’s fucking scary,” I said. “Your dad.”

“Yah,” said Boris cheerful y, wiping his mouth on the shoulder of his blood-stained shirt. “He’s kil ed people. He beat a man to death down the mine once.”

“Bul shit.”

“No, it’s true. In New Guinea it happened. He tried to make it look like loose rocks had fel and kil ed the man but stil we had to leave right after.”

I thought about this. “Your dad’s not, um, very sturdy,” I said. “I mean, I can’t real y see—”

“Nyah, not with his fists. With a, what do you cal it”—he mimed hitting a surface—“pipe wrench.”

I was silent. There was something in the gesture of Boris bringing down the imaginary wrench that had the ring of truth about it.

Boris—who’d been fumbling to get a cigarette lit—let out a smoky sigh. “Want one?” He passed it to me and lit another for himself, then brushed his jaw with his knuckles. “Ah,” he said, working it back and forth.

“Does it hurt?”

Sleepily he laughed, and punched me in the shoulder. “What do you think, idiot?”

Before long, we were staggering with laughter, blundering around on the gravel on hands and knees. Drunk as I was, my mind felt high and cold and strangely clear. Then at some point—dusty from rol ing and scuffling on the ground—we were reeling home in almost total blackness, rows of abandoned houses and the desert night gigantic al around us, bright crackle of stars high above and Popchik trotting along behind us as we weaved side to side, laughing so hard we were gagging and heaving and nearly sick by the side of the road.

He was singing at the top of his lungs, the same tune as before: A-a-a, a-a-a,

byly sobie kotki dwa.

A-a-a, kotki dwa,

szarobure—

I kicked him. “English!”

“Here, I’l teach you. A-a-a, a-a-a—”

“Tel me what it means.”

“Al right, I wil . ‘There once were two smal kittens,’ ” sang Boris: they both were grayish brown.

A-a-a—

“Two smal kittens? ”

He tried to hit me, and almost fel . “Fuck off! I haven’t got to the good part.” Wiping his mouth with his hand, he threw his head back, and sang:

Oh, sleep, my darling,

And I’l give you a star from the sky,

Al the children are fast asleep

Al others, even the bad ones,

Al children are sleeping but you.

A-a-a, a-a-a—

There once were two smal kittens—

When we got to my house—making way too much noise, shushing each other—the garage was empty: no one home. “Thank God, ” said Boris fervently, fal ing to the concrete to prostrate himself before the Lord.

I caught him by the col ar of his shirt. “Get up!”

Inside—under the lights—he was a mess: blood everywhere, eye swol en to a glossy slit. “Hang on,” I said, dropping him in the center of the living room carpet, and wobbled to the bathroom to get something for his cut. But there wasn’t anything except shampoo and a bottle of green perfume that Xandra had won at some giveaway at the Wynn. Drunkenly remembering something my mother had said, that perfume was antiseptic in a pinch, I went back to the living room where Boris was sprawled on the carpet with Popper sniffing anxiously at his bloodstained shirt.

“Here,” I said, pushing the dog aside, dabbing the bloody place on his forehead with a damp cloth. “Hold stil .”

Boris twitched away, and growled. “The fuck are you doing?”

“Shut up,” I said, holding the hair back from his eyes.

He muttered something in Russian. I was trying to be careful but I was as drunk as he was, and when I sprayed perfume on the cut, he shrieked and socked me on the mouth.

“What the fuck?” I said, touching my lip, my fingers coming away bloody. “Look what you did to me.”

“Blyad, ” he said, coughing and batting the air, “it stinks. What’d you put on me, you whore?”

I started laughing; I couldn’t help it.

“Bastard, ” he roared, shoving me so hard I fel . But he was laughing too. He held out a hand to help me up but I kicked it away.

“Fuck off!” I was laughing so hard I could barely get the words out. “You smel like Xandra.”

“Christ, I’m choking. I’ve got to get this off me.”

We stumbled outside—shedding our clothes, hopping one-legged out of our pants as we went—and jumped in the pool: bad idea, I realized in the too-late, toppling-over moment before I hit the water, blind drunk and too wrecked to walk. The cold water slammed into me so hard it almost knocked my breath out.

I clawed to the surface: eyes stinging, chlorine burning my nose.

A spray of water hit me in the eyes and I spit it back at him. He was a white blur in the dark, cheeks hol ow and black hair plastered on either side of his head. Laughing, we grappled and ducked each other, even though my teeth were chattering and I felt way too drunk and sick to be horsing around in eight feet of water.

Boris dove. A hand clamped my ankle and yanked me under, and I found myself staring into a dark wal of bubbles.

I wrenched; I struggled. It was like in the museum again, trapped in the dark space, no way up or out. I thrashed and twisted, as glubs of panicked breath floated before my eyes: underwater bel s, darkness. At last—just as I was about to gulp in a lungful of water—I twisted free and broke to the surface.

Choking for breath, I clung to the edge of the pool and gasped.

When my vision cleared, I saw Boris—coughing, cursing—plunging towards the steps. Breathless with anger, I half-swam, half hopped up behind him and hooked a foot around his ankle so that he fel face-forward with a smack.

“Asshole,” I sputtered, when he floundered to the surface. He was trying to talk but I struck a sheet of water in his face, and then another, and wound my fingers in his hair and pushed him under.

“You miserable shit,” I screamed when he surfaced, heaving, water streaming down his face. “Don’t ever do that to me again.” I had both hands on his shoulders and was about to dive on top of him—push him down, hold him for a good long time—when he reached around and clasped my arm, and I saw that he was white and trembling.

“Stop,” he said, gasping—and then I realized how unfocused and strange his eyes were.

“Hey,” I said, “are you okay?” But he was coughing too hard to answer. His nose was bleeding again, blood gushing dark between his fingers. I helped him up, and together we col apsed on the pool

steps—half in, half out of the water, too exhausted even to climb al the way out.

xxi i.

BRIGHT SUN WOKE ME. We were in my bed: wet hair, half-dressed and shivering in the air-conditioned cold, with Popper snoring between us. The sheets were damp and reeking of chlorine; I had a shattering headache and an ugly metal ic taste in my mouth like I’d been sucking on a handful of pocket change.

I lay very stil , feeling I might vomit if I moved my head even a quarter of an inch, then—very careful y—sat up.

“Boris?” I said, rubbing my cheek with the flat of my hand. Brown streaks of dried blood were smeared on the pil owcase. “You awake?”

“Oh God,” groaned Boris, dead-pale and sticky with sweat, rol ing on his stomach to clutch at the mattress. He was naked except for his Sid Vicious bracelets and what looked like a pair of my underwear. “I’m gonna be sick.”

“Not here.” I kicked him. “Up.”

Muttering, he stumbled off. I could hear him puking in my bathroom. The sound made me sick, but also a bit hysterical. I rol ed over and laughed into my pil ow. When he stumbled back in, clasping his head, I was shocked at his black eye, the blood caked at his nostrils and the scabbed cut on his forehead.

“Christ,” I said, “that looks bad. You need stitches.”

“You know what?” said Boris, throwing himself stomach-down on the mattress.

“What?”

“We’re late for fucking school!”

We rol ed on our backs and roared with laughter. As weak and nauseated as I felt, I thought I would never be able to stop.

Boris flopped over, groping with one arm for something on the floor. In an instant his head popped back up. “Ah! What’s this?”

I sat up and reached eagerly for the glass of water, or what I thought was water, and—when he shoved it under my nose—

gagged on the smel .

Boris howled. Quick as a flash he was on top of me: al sharp bones and clammy flesh, reeking of sweat and sick and something else, raw and dirty, like stagnant pond water. Sharply he pinched my cheek, tipping the glass of vodka over my face. “Time for your medicine! Now, now,” he said, as I knocked the glass flying and hit him in the mouth, a glancing blow that didn’t quite connect. Popper was barking with excitement. Boris got me in a chokehold, grabbed my dirty shirt from the day before, and tried to stuff it in my mouth, but I was too quick for him and flipped him off the bed so that his head knocked against the wal . “Ow, fuck,” he said, rubbing his face sleepily with his open palm and chuckling.

Uncertainly I stood, in a prickle of cold sweat, and made my way into the bathroom, where in a violent rush or two—hand braced against the wal —I emptied my stomach into the toilet bowl. From the next room I could hear him laughing.

“Two fingers down the pipe,” he cal ed in to me, and then something I missed, in a fresh shudder of nausea.

When it was over, I spat once or twice, then wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. The bathroom was a wreck: shower dripping, door hanging open, sopping towels and blood-stained wash cloths wadded on the floor. Stil shivering with sick, I drank from my hands at the sink and splashed some water on my face. My bare-chested reflection was hunched and pale, and I had a fat lip from where Boris had socked me the night before.

Boris was stil on the floor, lying bonelessly with his head propped against the wal . When I came back in, he cracked his good eye open and chortled at the sight of me. “Al better?”

“Fuck you! Don’t fucking talk to me.”

“Serves you right. Didn’t I tel you not to faff around with that glass?”

“Me?”

“You don’t remember, do you?” He touched his tongue to his upper lip to see if his mouth had started bleeding again. When his shirt was off you could see al the spaces between his ribs, marks

from old beatings and the heat flush high on his chest. “That glass on the floor, very bad idea. Unlucky! I told you not to leave it there!

Huge jinx on us!”

“You didn’t have to pour it on my head,” I said, fumbling for my specs and reaching for the first pair of pants I saw from the communal heap of dirty laundry on the floor.

Boris pinched the bridge of his nose, and laughed. “Was just trying to help you. A little booze wil make you feel better.”

“Yeah, thanks a lot.”

“It’s true. If you can keep it down. Wil make your headache go like magic. My dad is not helpful person but this is one very helpful thing he has told me. Nice cold beer is the best, if you have it.”

“Say, c’mere,” I said. I was standing by the window, looking down at the pool.

“Eh?”

“Come look. I want you to see this.”

“Just tel me,” muttered Boris, from the floor. “I don’t want to get up.”

“You’d better.” Downstairs it looked like a murder scene. A line of blood drips wound across the paving stones to the pool. Shoes, jeans, bloodsoaked shirt, were riotously flung and tossed. One of Boris’s busted-up boots lay at the bottom of the deep end. Worse: a greasy scum of vomit floated in the shal ow water by the steps.

xxiv.

LATER, AFTER A FEW half-hearted passes with the pool vacuum, we were sitting on the kitchen counter smoking my dad’s Viceroys and talking. It was almost noon—too late to even think about going to school. Boris—ragged and unhinged-looking, his shirt hanging off the shoulder on one side, slamming the cabinets, complaining bitterly because there was no tea—had made some hideous coffee in the Russian way, by boiling grounds in a pan on the stove.

“No, no,” he said, when he saw I’d poured myself a normal sized cup. “Very strong, very smal amount.”

I tasted it, made a face.

He dipped a finger in it, and licked it off. “Biscuit would be nice.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Bread and butter?” he said hopeful y.

I eased down from the counter—as gently as I could, because my head hurt—and searched around until I found a drawer with sugar envelopes and packaged tortil a chips that Xandra had brought home from the buffet at the bar.

“Crazy,” I said, looking at his face.

“What?”

“That your dad did that.”

“Is nothing,” mumbled Boris, turning his head sideways so he could wedge the whole corn chip in. “He broke one of my ribs once.”

After a long pause, and because I couldn’t think of anything else to say, I said: “A broken rib’s not that serious.”

“No, but it hurt. This one,” he said, pul ing up his shirt and pointing it out to me.

“I thought he was going to kil you.”

He bumped his shoulder against mine. “Ah, I provoked him on purpose. Answered back. So you could get Popchik out of there.

Look, is fine,” he said, condescendingly, when I kept on looking at him. “Last night he was frothing at mouth but he’l be sorry when he sees me.”

“Maybe you ought to stay here for a while.”

Boris leaned back on his hands and gave me a dismissive smile.

“Is nothing to be fussed about. He gets depressed sometimes, is al .”

“Hah.” In the old Johnnie Walker Black days—vomit on his dress shirts, angry co-workers cal ing our house—my dad (in tears sometimes) had blamed his rages on “depression.”

Boris laughed, with what seemed like genuine amusement. “And what? You don’t get sad yourself sometimes?”

“He should be in jail for doing that.”

“Oh, please.” Boris had gotten bored with his bad coffee and had ventured to the fridge for a beer. “My father—bad temper, sure, but he loves me. He could have left me with a neighbor when he left

Ukraine. That’s what happened to my friends Maks and Seryozha—

Maks ended up on the street. Besides, I should be in jail myself, if you want to think that way.”

“Sorry?”

“I tried to kil him one time. Serious!” he said, when he saw the way I was looking at him. “I did.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“No, is true,” he said resignedly. “I feel bad about it. Our last winter in Ukraine, I tricked him to walk outside—he was so drunk, he did it. Then I locked the door. Thought sure he would die in the snow.

Glad he didn’t, eh?” he said, with a shout of laughter. “Then I’d be stuck in Ukraine, my God. Eating from garbage cans. Sleeping in railway station.”

“What happened?”

“Dunno. It wasn’t late at night enough. Someone saw him and picked him up in a car—some woman, I’d guess, who knows?

Anyway he went out drinking more, made it home a few days later—

lucky for me, didn’t remember what happened! Instead he brought me a soccer bal and said he was drinking only beer from then on.

That lasted one month maybe.”

I rubbed my eye behind my glasses. “What are you going to tel them at school?”

He cracked the beer open. “Eh?”

“Wel , I mean.” The bruise on his face was the color of raw meat.

“People are going to ask.”

He grinned and elbowed me. “I’l tel ’em you did it,” he said.

“No, seriously.”

“I am serious.”

“Boris, it’s not funny.”

“Oh, come on. Footbal , skateboard.” His black hair fel in his face like a shadow and he tossed it back. “You don’t want them to take me away, do you?”

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

“Because Poland.” He passed me the beer. “I think is what it would be. For deportation. Although Poland—” he laughed, a startling bark—“better than Ukraine, my God!”

“They can’t send you back there, can they?”

He frowned at his hands, which were dirty, nails rimmed with dried blood. “No,” he said fiercely. “Because I’l kil myself first.”

“Oh, boo hoo hoo.” Boris was always threatening to kil himself for one reason and another.

“I mean it! I’l die first! I’d rather be dead.”

“No you wouldn’t.”

“Yes I would! The winter—you don’t know what it’s like. Even the air is bad. Al gray concrete, and the wind—”

“Wel , it must be summer there sometime.”

“Ah, God.” He reached for my cigarette, took a sharp drag, blew a stream of smoke up at the ceiling. “Mosquitoes. Stinking mud.

Everything smel s like mould. I was so starving-to-death and lonely—

I mean, sometimes I was so hungry, serious, I would walk on the river bank and think of drowning myself.”

My head hurt. Boris’s clothes (my clothes, actual y) tumbled in the dryer. Outside, the sun shone bright and mean.

“I don’t know about you,” I said, taking the cigarette back, “but I could use some real food.”

“What shal we do then?”

“We should have gone to school.”

“Hmpf.” Boris made it plain that he only went to school because I went, and because there was nothing else to do.

“No—I mean it. We should have gone. There’s pizza today.”

Boris winced, with genuine regret. “Fuck it.” That was the other thing about school; at least they fed us. “Too late now.”

xxv.

SOMETIMES, IN THE NIGHT, I woke up wailing. The worst thing about the explosion was how I carried it in my body—the heat, the bone-jar and slam of it. In my dreams, there was always a light way out and a dark way out. I had to go the dark way, because the bright way was hot and flickering with fire. But the dark way was where the bodies were.

Happily, Boris never seemed annoyed or even very startled when I woke him, as if he came from a world where there was nothing so unusual in a nocturnal howl of pain. Sometimes he’d gather up Popchik—snoring at the foot of our bed—and deposit him in a limp sleepy heap on my chest. And weighed down like that—the warmth of both of them around me—I lay counting to myself in Spanish or trying to remember al the words I knew in Russian (swear words, mostly) until I went back to sleep.

When I’d first come to Vegas, I’d tried to make myself feel better by imagining that my mother was stil alive and going about her routine back in New York—chatting with the doormen, picking up coffee and a muffin at the diner, waiting on the platform by the news stand for the 6 train. But that hadn’t worked for long. Now, when I buried my face in a strange pil ow that didn’t smel at al like her, or home, I thought of the Barbours’ apartment on Park Avenue, or, sometimes, Hobie’s townhouse in the Vil age.

I’m sorry your father sold your mother’s things. If you had told me, I might have bought some of them and kept them for you.

When we are sad—at least I am like this—it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to the things that don’t change.

Your descriptions of the desert—that oceanic, endless glare

—are terrible but also very beautiful. Maybe there’s something to be said for the rawness and emptiness of it al . The light of long ago is different from the light of today and yet here, in this house, I’m reminded of the past at every turn. But when I think of you, it’s as if you’ve gone away to sea on a ship—out in a foreign brightness where there are no paths, only stars and sky.

This letter arrived tucked in an old hardcover edition of Wind, Sand and Stars by Saint-Exupéry, which I read and re-read. I kept the letter in the book, where it became creased and dirty from repeated re-reading.

Boris was the only person I’d told, in Vegas, how my mother had died—information that to his credit he’d accepted with aplomb; his

own life had been so erratic and violent that he didn’t seem al that shocked by the story. He’d seen big explosions, out in his father’s mines around Batu Hijau and other places I’d never heard of, and—

without knowing the particulars—was able to venture a fairly accurate guess as to the type of explosives employed. As talkative as he was, he also had a secretive streak and I trusted him not to tel anyone without having to ask. Maybe because he himself was motherless and had formed close bonds to people like Bami, his father’s “lieutenant” Evgeny, and Judy the barkeep’s wife in Karmeywal ag—he didn’t seem to think my attachment to Hobie was peculiar at al . “People promise to write, and they don’t,” he said, when we were in the kitchen looking at Hobie’s latest letter. “But this fel ow writes you al the time.”

“Yeah, he’s nice.” I’d given up trying to explain Hobie to Boris: the house, the workshop, his thoughtful way of listening so different from my father’s, but more than anything a sort of pleasing atmosphere of mind: foggy, autumnal, a mild and welcoming micro-climate that made me feel safe and comfortable in his company.

Boris stuck his finger in the open jar of peanut butter on the table between us, and licked it off. He had grown to love peanut butter, which (like marshmal ow fluff, another favorite) was unavailable in Russia. “Old poofter?” he asked.

I was taken aback. “No,” I said swiftly; and then: “I don’t know.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Boris, offering me the jar. “I’ve known some sweet old poofters.”

“I don’t think he is,” I said, uncertainly.

Boris shrugged. “Who cares? If he is good to you? None of us ever find enough kindness in the world, do we?”

xxvi.

BORIS HAD GROWN TO like my father, and vice versa. He understood, better than I did, how my father made his living; and although he knew, without being told, to stay away from my dad when he was

losing, he also understood that my father was in need of something I was unwil ing to give: namely, an audience in the flush of winning, when he was pacing around jacked up and punchy in the kitchen and wanting someone to listen to his stories and praise him about how wel he’d done. When we heard him down there jumped-up and high on the downdraft of a win—bumping around jubilantly, making lots of noise—Boris would put down his book and head downstairs, where patiently he stood listening to my dad’s boring, card-by-card replay of his evening at the baccarat table, which often segued into excruciating (to me) stories of related triumphs, al the way back to my dad’s col ege days and blighted acting career.

“You didn’t tel me that your dad had been in movies!” said Boris, returning upstairs with a cup of now-cold tea.

“He wasn’t in many. Like, two.”

“But I mean. That one—that was a real y big movie—that police movie, you know, the one about policemen taking bribes. What was the name of it?”

“He didn’t have a very big part. He was in it for like one second.

He played a lawyer who got shot on the street.”

Boris shrugged. “Who cares? Stil is interesting. If he ever went to Ukraine people would treat him like a star.”

“He can go then, and take Xandra with him.”

Boris’s enthusiasm for what he cal ed “intel ectual talks” found an appreciative outlet in my father, as wel . Uninterested in politics myself, and even less interested in my father’s views on them, I was unwil ing to engage in the kind of pointless argument on world events that I knew my father enjoyed. But Boris—drunk or sober—was glad to oblige. Often, in these talks, my father would wave his arms around and mimic Boris’s accent for entire conversations, in a way that set my teeth on edge. But Boris himself didn’t appear to notice or mind. Sometimes, when he went down to put the kettle on, and didn’t return, I found them arguing happily in the kitchen like a pair of actors in a stage production, about the dissolution of the Soviet Union or whatever.

“Ah, Potter!” he said, coming upstairs. “Your dad. Such a nice guy!”

I removed the earbuds of my iPod. “If you say so.”

“I mean it,” said Boris, flopping down on the floor. “He’s so talkative and intel igent! And he loves you.”

“I don’t see where you get that.”

“Come on! He wants to make things right with you, but doesn’t know how. He wishes it was you down there having discussions with him and not me.”

“He said that to you?”

“No. Is true, though! I know it.”

“Could have fooled me.”

Boris looked at me shrewdly. “Why do you hate him so much?”

“I don’t hate him.”

“He broke your mother’s heart,” said Boris decisively. “When he left her. But you need to forgive him. Al that’s in the past now.”

I stared. Was this what my dad went around tel ing people?

“That’s bul shit,” I said, sitting up, throwing my comic book aside.

“My mother—” how could I explain it?—“you don’t understand, he was an asshole to us, we were glad when he left. I mean, I know you think he’s such a great guy and everything—”

“And why is he so terrible? Because he saw other women?” said Boris—holding out his hands, palms up. “It happens. He has his life.

What is that to do with you?”

I shook my head in disbelief. “Man,” I said, “he’s got you snowed.”

It never failed to amaze me how my dad could charm strangers and reel them in. They lent him money, recommended him for promotions, introduced him to important people, invited him to use their vacation homes, fel completely under his spel —and then it would al go to pieces somehow and he would move on to someone else.

Boris looped his arms around his knees and leaned his head back against the wal . “Al right, Potter,” he said agreeably. “Your enemy—

my enemy. If you hate him, I hate him too. But—” he put his head to the side—“here I am. Staying in his house. What should I do?

Should I talk, be friendly and nice? Or disrespect him?”

“I’m not saying that. I’m just saying, don’t believe everything he tel s you.”

Boris chuckled. “I don’t believe everything that any body tel s me,”

he said, kicking my foot companionably. “Not even you.”

xxvi .

AS FOND AS MY dad was of Boris, I was constantly trying to divert his attention from the fact that Boris had basical y moved into the house with us—which wasn’t that difficult, as between the gambling and the drugs my dad was so distracted that he might not have noticed if I’d brought a bobcat to live in the upstairs bedroom. Xandra was a bit tougher to negotiate, more prone to complain about the expense, despite the supply of stolen snack food Boris contributed to the household. When she was at home he stayed upstairs and out of the way, frowning over The Idiot in Russian and listening to music on my portable speakers. I brought him beers and food from downstairs and learned to make his tea the way he liked it: boiling hot, with three sugars.

By then it was almost Christmas though you wouldn’t have known it from the weather: cool at night, but bright and warm during the day.

When the wind blew, the umbrel a by the pool snapped with a gunshot sound. There were lightning flashes at night, but no rain; and sometimes the sand picked up and flew in little whirlwinds which spun this way and that in the street.

I was depressed about the holidays, although Boris took them in stride. “It’s for little children, al that,” he said scornful y, leaning back on his elbows on my bed. “Tree, toys. We’l have our own praznyky on Christmas Eve. What do you think?”

“Praznyky? ”

“You know. A sort of holiday party. Not a proper Holy Supper, just a nice dinner. Cook something special—maybe invite your father and Xandra. You think they might want to eat something with us?”

Much to my surprise, my father—and even Xandra—seemed delighted by the idea (my father, I think, mainly because he enjoyed the word praznyky, and enjoyed making Boris say it aloud). On the twenty-third, Boris and I went shopping, with actual money my father had given us (which was fortunate, since our usual supermarket was too crowded with holiday shoppers for carefree shoplifting) and came home with potatoes; a chicken; a series of unappetizing ingredients (sauerkraut, mushrooms, peas, sour cream) for some Polish holiday

dish that Boris claimed he knew how to make; pumpernickel rol s (Boris insisted on black bread; white was al wrong for the meal, he said); a pound of butter; pickles; and some Christmas candy.

Boris had said that we would eat with the appearance of the first star in the sky—the Bethlehem star. But we were not used to cooking for anybody but ourselves and as a consequence were running late.

On Christmas Eve, at about eight p.m., the sauerkraut dish was made and the chicken (which we’d figured how to cook from the package instructions) had about ten minutes before it came out of the oven when my dad—whistling “Deck the Hal s”—came up and rapped jauntily on a kitchen cabinet to get our attention.

“Come on, boys!” he said. His face was flushed and shiny and his voice very quick, with a strained, staccato quality I knew al too wel .

He had on one of his sharp old Dolce and Gabbana suits from New York but without a tie, the shirt loose and unbuttoned at the neck.

“Go comb your hair and spruce up a bit. I’m taking us al out. Do you have anything better to wear, Theo? Surely you must.”

“But—” I stared at him in frustration. This was just like my dad, breezing in and changing the plan at the last moment.

“Oh, come on. The chicken can wait. Can’t it? Sure it can.” He was talking a mile a minute. “You can put the other thing back in the fridge too. We’l have it tomorrow for Christmas lunch—wil it stil be praznyky? Is praznyky only on Christmas Eve? Am I confused about that? Wel , okay, that’s when we’l have ours—Christmas Day. New tradition. Leftovers are better anyway. Listen, this’l be fantastic.

Boris—” he was already shepherding Boris out of the kitchen—“what size shirt do you wear, comrade? You don’t know? Some of these old Brooks Brothers shirts of mine, I real y ought to give the whole lot to you, great shirts, don’t get me wrong, they’l probably come down to your knees but they’re a little too tight in the col ar for me and if you rol up the sleeves they’l look just fine.…”

xxvi i.

THOUGH I’D BEEN IN Las Vegas almost half a year it was only my fourth or fifth time on the Strip—and Boris (who was content enough in our little orbit between school, shopping plaza, and home) had scarcely been into Vegas proper at al . We stared in amazement at the waterfal s of neon, electricity blazing and pulsing and cascading down in bubbles al around us, Boris’s upturned face glowing red and then gold in the crazy drench of lights.

Inside the Venetian, gondoliers propel ed themselves down a real canal, with real, chemical-smel ing water, as costumed opera singers sang Stil e Nacht and Ave Maria under artificial skies. Boris and I trailed along uneasily, feeling shabby, scuffing our shoes, too stunned to take it al in. My dad had made reservations for us at a fancy, oak-panel ed Italian restaurant—the outpost of its more famous sister restaurant in New York. “Order what you like, everyone,” he said, pul ing out Xandra’s chair for her. “My treat. Go wild.”

We took him at his word. We ate asparagus flan with shal ot vinaigrette; smoked salmon; smoked sable carpaccio; perciatel i with cardoons and black truffles; crispy black bass with saffron and fava beans; barbecued skirt steak; braised short ribs; and panna cotta, pumpkin cake, and fig ice cream for dessert. It was by leaps and fathoms the best meal I’d eaten in months, or maybe ever; and Boris

—who’d eaten two orders of the sable al by himself—was ecstatic.

“Ah, marvelous, ” he said, for the fifteenth time, practical y purring, as the pretty young waitress brought out an extra plate of candies and biscotti with the coffee. “Thank you! Thank you Mr. Potter, Xandra,”

he said again. “Is delicious.”

My dad—who hadn’t eaten al that much compared to us (Xandra hadn’t either)—pushed his plate aside. The hair at his temples was damp and his face was so bright and red he was practical y glowing.

“Thank the little Chinese guy in the Cubs cap who kept betting the bank in the salon this afternoon,” he said. “My God. It was like we couldn’t lose.” In the car, he’d already shown us his windfal : the fat rol of hundreds, wrapped up with a rubber band. “The cards just kept coming and kept coming. Mercury in retrograde and the moon was high! I mean—it was magic. You know, sometimes there’s a light at the table, like a visible halo, and you’re it, you know? You’re the

light? There’s this fantastic dealer here, Diego, I love Diego—I mean, it’s crazy, he looks just like Diego Rivera the painter only in a sharp-ass fucking tuxedo. Did I tel you about Diego already? Been out here forty years, ever since the old Flamingo days. Big, stout, grand-looking guy. Mexican, you know. Fast slippery hands and big rings

—” he waggled his fingers—“ba-ca-RRRAT! God, I love these old-school Mexicans in the baccarat room, they’re so fucking stylish.

Musty old elegant fel ows, carry their weight wel , you know?

Anyway, we were at Diego’s table, me and the little Chinese guy, he was a trip too, horn-rimmed glasses and not a word of English, you know, just ‘San Bin! San Bin!’ drinking this crazy ginseng tea they al drink, tastes like dust but I love the smel , like the smel of luck, and it was incredible, we were on such a run, good God, al these Chinese women lined up behind us, we were hitting every hand—Do you think,” he said to Xandra, “it would be okay if I took them back into the baccarat salon to meet Diego? I’m sure they’d get a huge kick out of Diego. I wonder if he’s stil on shift. What do you think?”

“He won’t be there.” Xandra looked good—bright-eyed and sparkly—in a velvet minidress and jewel ed sandals, and redder lipstick than she usual y wore. “Not now.”

“Sometimes, holidays, he works a double shift.”

“Oh, they don’t want to go back there. It’s a hike. It’l take half an hour to get there through the casino floor and back.”

“Yeah, but I know he’d like to meet my kids.”

“Yeah, probably so,” Xandra said agreeably, running a finger around the rim of her wine glass. The tiny gold dove on her necklace glistened at the base of her throat. “He’s a nice guy. But Larry, I mean it, I know you don’t take me seriously but if you start getting too chummy with the dealers some day you’re going to go down there and have security on your ass.”

My father laughed. “God!” he said jubilantly, slapping the table, so loudly that I flinched. “If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought Diego real y was helping at the table today. I mean, maybe he was.

Telepathic baccarat! Get your Soviet researchers working on that, ”

he said to Boris. “That’l straighten out your economic system over there.”

Boris—mildly—cleared his throat and lifted his water glass. “Sorry, may I say something?”

“Is it speechmaking time? Were we meant to prepare toasts?”

“I thank you al for your company. And I wish us al health, and happiness, and that we al shal live until the next Christmas.”

In the surprised silence that fol owed, a champagne cork popped in the kitchen, a burst of laughter. It was just past midnight: two minutes into Christmas Day. Then my father leaned back in his chair, and laughed. “Merry Christmas!” he roared, producing from his pocket a jewelry box which he slid over to Xandra, and two stacks of twenties (Five hundred dol ars! Each!) which he tossed across the table to Boris and me. And though in the clockless, temperature-control ed casino night, words like day and Christmas were fairly meaningless constructs, happiness, amidst the loudly clinked glasses, didn’t seem quite such a doomed or fatal idea.