Notes from the Nemenator

I’m still trying to figure out my life on a daily basis, but in the meantime, I’ve been working up a couple of essays. They’re all kind of sad, very honest, and vaguely reminiscent of Joan Didion, but I like the direction they are going. Here’s the most recent:

The Tolstoy Scholar and I

The Tolstoy scholar and I started fighting at the Bolshoi, walking counterclockwise on seagreen carpet. I wore shoes inappropriate for the ballet but good for traveling, and I watched them pass over a carpet tramped down and down again. I imagined it springing up during the second act, only to be defeated by crowds pushing towards the exits to frozen Petersburg after the finale. Then the yarn would rise again over night and through the next day, steeling itself for another night of mercilessly punctuated heels and the heavy, plodding footsteps of thick Russian men in top coats. It was intermission, and she defended the ballet as beautiful. I confirmed as much, but could not agree to satiation, my rebuttal tongue-tied to new new new. I wanted more, an innovation, variation, something challenging beyond the physicality of spinning on one’s blocked-off toe. I am no good at arguing, inexperienced in English wordplay and Russian ballet. It is an insecurity that my family never argued over Nebraska chicken dinners, instead nibbling on corn and conversing about baseball. Circling the carpet my frustration doubled because I came late to dance, my introduction a forgettable Nutcracker at twelve and a hand-sewn tutu at twenty. With my new skirt, I pranced around our tilted house for three weeks of winter before packing the tulle into a cardboard box. It was a gesture more steeped in Cindi Lauper than Anna Pavlova, but that was my ballet, and this hers. The chimes of the second act coming chirped through the hall, and we went silent. Turning up and up to our third balcony seats, our box finally came, and in it relief. I enjoyed the second half well enough, thin Russian women dancing like Spanish whores, leaping from toe to toe in stiff red skirts.

The Tolstoy scholar and I went running. The first green of spring emerged from Saint Petersburg’s soil in tiny crocuses, finally peaking on a bright day well past the vernal equinox. She excitedly pointed at each new bed as we looped around the park, a flexed index finger identifying many of the flora from just their day-glo tips. In truth, she remembered them from blooming the summer prior. She had stayed true to the route every day since, even through the dark, snowy winter. In the snow? Yes, she confirmed. We talked more about that, huffing and puffing down the muddy path. I straddle, right leg standing in impressed and left in embarrassment because I run, but when it is cold or I am tired I do not do her three miles, and I can rarely match the diligence of her two hundred sit ups a night. I sometimes go to the expensive gym close to my house, where I read great literature on the recumbent bicycle, certain that I am killing two birds with one sweating stone. In reality, I am just stunting them, bruising them thoroughly enough that the fowl plays dead until the situation improves and it see opportunity to flutter away. This is how it happens, I know, because once a crow got stuck in our fireplace, and my mother, on halfway-accident, and trying to forget Alfred Hitchcock slammed the fireplace’s glass door on the bird. It flopped down on the ashen floor, and thinking it dead, she opened the door again to retrieve it with a large, garbage bag. Bird in hand, as she transferred it into the black plastic the feathered creature came back to life, squawking and flapping against the opaque black. She screamed, I screamed, we all screamed. Another instance, as I walked out of my studio and onto the sidewalk I saw a sparrow meet the grill of a Towncar. It sputtered and flapped, flapped and sputtered, then lay still in the street a few feet away. I was sure I’d seen death, sure enough to retrieve my pencil and sketchbook from my studio, begin drawing something I hoped would be a fresh combination of morbid and lovely. With just a rough sketch down, the still bird bolted and flew away. We kept running, twice around the park and then up the street the Soviet-era administration buildings. A sight of the Neva through almost empty trees, then we turned towards home.

Giddy with the new warmth, Tolstoy scholar took me to a summer palace an hour outside St Petersburg. The forest surrounding was green-gray, greener than the city with its sooty snow-lines—markings that stained the buildings along each avenue—but more gray than forests I knew in America. There, the forests grew thick with underbrush, ferns and moss and banana slugs, while this one was made of stick-straight pines, paths wide enough for carriages looping through at curves of an aesthetically pleasing degree. She loves the summer palace because the place, she tells me, reminded her of Tolstoy, and perhaps also of her own childhood home. I have been there, the little wood frame on the last road ringing a small Massachusetts town. There were cows across the street, a farm stand on the far-away closest corner, a small mountain in her backyard. It had been another cold spring, one before Russia, and we were climbing up the slope behind her house. Near the top we sunk into wet snow, the prior season’s last shudder of cold hiding high up the hill. It got dark while we were up there, and we scrambled down the hillside in time for dinner and tea.

The Tolstoy scholar and I lived together for a year, her half the room a well organized system of potted plants and quilts, books on literature and spiral bound notes. Mine was of more chaos, piles of poems and sweaters, a scattering of handmade books, their crinkling spines set out to dry. From there, she went to Russia, I into the sea of New York. Over the next years her accomplishments felt quantitative, a recognizable fellowship and the romance of an intercontinental courtship netting a devoted boyfriend and graduate admissions. I landed on the eastern shore of the East River, and my two years of encampment took the form of a manuscript, a series of romantic failures-turned-anecdotes, biweekly paychecks that could not keep up with the clip of a New York minute. Last April we had a reunion in front of an abandoned lot on North Sixth Street, her visiting my Brooklyn over a spring break that still felt like winter. The moment was caught by a camera, she and I, and three others that once knew us well, leaning into a photo’s tight frame, smiling with coat collars up to our ears. To my left is a former roommate bound for medical school, to my right, the Tolstoy scholar, a lawyer and a MFA candidate. Dinner, taken down the street, was of noodles and graduate school applications. I sat on my manuscript with tight lips, waiting for the opportunity to speak of the other, anything other than their recently well-laid plans. It did not arrive, I ate my sautéed chicken then had the girls over for ice cream.

A few months ago the Tolstoy scholar came back from Russia for good, entering into a doctoral program in New Jersey. Before Christmas she came to visit again, this time for four days of she and I on my frozen turf. I took her to the Drawing Center, an exhibition by a Soho artist that drew with fists full of colored pencils, his rainbowed panoply making tiny, robust shapes on big sheets of stark white. Her lip curled at the work, and it was not my favorite, but I tried to justify the gestural forms and variance of marks, the importance of this particular footnote in the discourse’s recent past. She listened but was not convinced of its merit, so we agreed to disagree and left the gallery for Soho’s cobbled streets. Other things filled our time, Indian food and the Metropolitan, a visit spent in the nineteenth century galleries and with baroque wall hangings; breakfast with friends; lunch with others; a ill-fated bus ride cross Brooklyn. We even had drawing party—she worked on a calligraphic poem by Wordsworth for her grandmother, I drew a landscape of interlacing, transparent circles that made me appreciate the washes of Klee’s watercolors all over again. We talked and talked, smiled and laughed, watched a funny movie about communism on the television at the foot of my bed. It was her last night and after it was over, close to midnight, she said I did not seem happy. My defenses, my defenses went up quickly and with a tight throat. I bumbled around some justification, a sort of optimism in my uncertainty. Staring at my black and white checkered floor, I tried to convince us both of my convictions. I looked up, and she was crying. Graduate school, she confided, often makes her cry. Her shoulders shook. My apartment is not big; I crossed it and returned with a box of Kleenex. She accepted and blew and then we sat there, my hand on her shoulder. In that moment I realized that I am jealous of her, as she is of me.