Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 129, No. 6. Whole No. 790, June 2007

An Internal Complaint by Art Taylor

A writer who was first published in our Department of First Stories, Art Taylor has gone on to sell fiction to the North Carolina Literary Review, and the North American Review (where he was a finalist for the Kurt Vonnegut Fiction Prize). He’s an assistant professor of English at George Mason University and an occasional reviewer for the Washington Post.

And Anna Sergeyevna began coming to see Gurov in Moscow. Once in two or three months she left S—, telling her husband that she was going to consult a doctor about an internal complaint — and her husband believed her, and didn’t believe her. In Moscow she stayed at the Slaviansky Bazaar hotel, and at once sent a man in a red cap to Gurov. Gurov went to see her, and no one in Moscow knew of it.

— Anton Chekhov, “The Lady With the Dog”

Philip turned tired eyes once more to his notebook: passages from Chekhov’s story copied verbatim in his own handwriting, notes penned in red ink all around the margins. What had begun as an exercise (hone craft by analyzing the master, reading is writing) had gradually sparked a passion in him, something he hadn’t quite felt with the stories he’d tried to write before, had never felt in front of a classroom of dull gazes. In only one sentence Chekhov hints at husband’s point of view, Philip had written early on, “believed her, didn’t believe her,” and then the words that had set the whole process in motion: A story of its own there? Throughout, the red ink threatened to overwhelm the black, staining his skin when the pen had bled on his fingers.

An entire page of clues and conjectures about the husband: Surname p. 574 is Von Diderits... First name not given: perhaps Aloysha, Evgeniy (nickname Zhenya), Gavril, Piotr... Crown Department or Provincial Government? Anna does not know. Check Britannica for background... How large is their house? How many servants? Elsewhere he’d jotted, Anna’s “internal complaint” intended as double entendre? And on another page, a chronology of the story’s scenes: Yalta where Anna and Gurov meet; the city of S — where The Geisha premieres; Moscow where the affair continues...

As he stared at the words and figures, Philip’s mind raced to pull the pieces, the possibilities, together. He could write this. This was the one, he knew it.

“So, how are things with the Russians?”

Catherine’s voice, behind him. How long had she been in the room? Philip detected a floral scent and hints of fruit — pears, perhaps? Grapes? She couldn’t have been standing there long, or he would have noticed it — unlike his wife to wear perfume. She usually smelled of finger paints and crayons, carried home from the art classes she taught at Ligon. He hooked his pen through the top of the clipboard, closed his eyes, and inhaled slowly. Grapes, definitely.

“It’s so dark in here,” she said, and he felt her hands on his shoulders. “But I’ll bet you haven’t even noticed.”

“I hadn’t really.” He opened his eyes again. Except for the glow of the computer screen — Britannica.com — the only light came from the mica-shade lamp on the desk, shining down on the open copy of Chekhov. Through the window, he saw that the sun had gone down and the night was pitch black, and he was reminded of Chekhov’s counsel: Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on the broken glass. The window sill was steeped in shadows from the streetlight. A blur of buds bloomed on the bush beyond. Still, no moon. The CD had run out as well — how long before, he didn’t know. Monk, he’d been listening to. “In Walked Bud,” “ ’Round Midnight,” “Evidence.”

“But the Russians are good.” He leaned his head forward as she kneaded his shoulders. “Or at least the one I’m working with. It’ll be a good story when I’m done, I just feel it. But I’m really still just making notes. Looking for the key into the whole thing.”

“But you’ve been in here for hours.”

“Oh, it couldn’t have been that long,” he said. “After all, what time did we have dinner?”

She laughed. “I ate some leftover pizza about a half-hour ago,” she said. “But unless you have a stash of food in here...” And she was right. He couldn’t remember having eaten.

“Oh, well,” he shrugged. She stopped touching him.

“Well, try to eat something. I’m going out for a while.”

“Anyplace special?” he asked, turning in his chair to see her. She wore a bandana print skirt, sleeveless denim top. Black hair pulled back in a ponytail. Scant light came from elsewhere in the house through the open doorway behind her, falling lightly on the edge of the bookcase, a pile of mail, the guest bed that shared this room. Catherine herself was caught half-in, half-out of the mica-tinted glow, and he tried to think what word she might be: not luminous, not scintillant ... evanescent?

“I don’t know,” she said. “Target, maybe? We don’t really need anything, but I’m just feeling a little restless tonight. Just want to get out.” The top edge of her face was shadowed (he knew this word: chiaroscuro; she had been captured in chiaroscuro), but from the turn of her chin, he imagined that her brow must have furrowed. “I may stop by Borders afterwards, flip through some magazines, get a cup of coffee. Maybe pick up a new book for the kids at school. They stay open pretty late, right?”

He nodded. “New perfume?”

“It’s French,” she said. “Annick Goutal. It’s called ‘Ce Soir Ou Jamais.’ The woman at Belk’s described it as Turkish rose gardens, wildflowers, and black currants. You like?”

Black currants. He hadn’t been far off with grapes.

“I feel... enthralled,” he said, grinning. “Fragrance is a seductive thing.”

She leaned over to kiss his forehead. “I left a couple of pieces of that pizza for you in the microwave,” she whispered. “Don’t forget them.” And then she was gone.

Her scent lingered in the air as he picked up his pen, and for a moment he was unable to remember where he had been in his notes. Then, turning a new thought over in his mind, turning the key he had found, he once more began to write: Fragrance is a significant thing.

Evgeniy von Diderits enjoyed his breakfasts with enthusiasm. He savored the smell of frying dough almost as much as the vareniki themselves, plump with eggs and cheese or tucked tight with minced mutton — the latter his own twist on tradition. He liked dipping his curly sausages in black currant jam, and after he finished his meal, he liked to swirl a dollop of that same jam into his tea as well. As the cup cooled, he stroked his small side-whiskers or caressed the tips of his nostril hair, reading yesterday’s edition of the Kiev Telegraph and thinking eagerly about the meetings scheduled for the day ahead. In the shadow of a good breakfast, with his wife seated just across the table and the servants bustling through their morning duties, Evgeniy believed briefly, firmly, that little could disturb the world he had created for himself and his wife — indeed, for the entire village of S—.

“I am going to Moscow today,” said Anna Sergeyevna. “I think I told you. For a few days. I will be taking the morning train at eleven.”

Von Diderits looked up from his paper. His wife stared dully out the window, her fair hair pinned against her head, her breakfast plate nearly untouched. He did not speak, waiting for her to turn her gray eyes back his way.

“Your food has gotten cold,” he said finally, when she failed to look at him.

“I’m not hungry,” she replied. “I don’t feel well.”

“Is it your... Is it the ‘internal complaint’ again?” he asked, and the phrase became bitter in his mouth, tainting the sweet aftertaste of his meal.

Anna Sergeyevna gave a slow nod.

“You know,” he continued, his voice even, unperturbed, “we have very good doctors here as well. That is part of my responsibility, the responsibility of my committee on the zemstvo, to ensure the presence of excellent doctors here. Perhaps they are not as plentiful as they are in Moscow, but they are well trained and eager to help.” They had traveled this path before — as many times now as the number of trips she had made to Moscow — and both of them knew the way. “I am happy to arrange an appointment for you.”

“Zhenya,” she said, his nickname a plaintive sigh, and Evgeniy at once resented her pleading, pitying tone. But before he could speak, one of the servants came in to clear more plates. The couple remained silent while the young scullion tidied the table, and after the girl left, Anna Sergeyevna once more assumed a firmer tone. “I have already made an appointment in Moscow,” she said, “with the doctor I have consulted there. He already knows my situation. I trust him.”

“And yet despite your trust in him, your many visits have not alleviated this internal distress, am I correct?” He smiled broadly. “Perhaps you should trust me instead this time?”

“I have already made the appointment,” she explained again, not raising her voice. “I have already purchased my ticket. I have telegraphed Petersburg as well. My sister is meeting me in Moscow. We have made plans to attend the theater.”

“Your sister...” began Von Diderits, thinking of the questions he could ask next — What time will your sister’s train be arriving? What play will you be seeing? Which day? — and of the requests that he would make upon her return: I have read about that play; remind me about the story. And: Where did you dine in Moscow? I have eaten there myself; did you speak with Taraykin? She always had the correct answers, delivered without hesitation. When he checked the timetables later, he would find that the Petersburg train was in fact scheduled to arrive at the time she had said. There had indeed been a performance of La Corsaire at the Bolshoi or Dyadya Vanya at the Art Theatre. No, she had not seen Taraykin at the Prague (so there was no way for him to confirm who had accompanied her), but she had ridden the new electric tram from Strastnaya Square to Petrovsky Park — an unverifiable, and therefore useless, detail.

Evgeniy closed his paper, rose from his seat. Walking around the table, he stood over her. “Very well,” he said, believing, not believing. “You may go.”

He leaned down to kiss her cheek, and past the dense smell of sausage still permeating the room, he discovered, as he had dreaded, the odor of jasmine and bergamot behind her ears and around her neck. Novaya Zarya, he knew, the scent that he’d bought her at the parfumerie on Nevsky Street during one of his own trips to Moscow — and he despaired to think that she now wore it only when she was making the same contemptible journey herself...

The scene had taken Philip days to write, drafting, revising, erasing completely — more nights spent working at the computer, as furiously as ever, his “key” into the story only unlocking more questions. Now another sunset approached, Catherine out yet another evening, dinner with friends this time, a long evening ahead.

Philip penned a question mark over the word contemptible. Would Chekhov really have used the word in such a context? Or anything so bald as despaired, except in dialogue? And the problem wasn’t just the individual words but the whole approach. The details smacked of too much research. Chekhov himself would have called it “the newspaper,” not the Kiev Telegraph. He would not have bothered with the names of restaurants or the brand name of the perfume. The reference to Dyadya Vanya was too self-consciously clever. And Chekhov would have crafted the entire exchange with more subtlety, kept the emotions even more restrained. “When you want to touch a reader’s heart, try to be colder,” Chekhov had written in one of his letters. “It gives their grief, as it were, a background against which it stands out in greater relief.”

Evgeniy leaned down to kiss his wife’s cheek, and discovered the odor of jasmine and bergamot behind her ears and around her neck. He recognized it as the perfume that he’d bought her on one of his trips to Moscow, and he knew that she wore it now only when making the same journey herself.

The doorbell rang — just past seven P.M. One of the neighbors? A door-to-door salesman perhaps? Their friends rarely dropped by unannounced.

Philip leaned over to glance out the window. A green Land Rover sat by the front curb — not a vehicle he recognized. He turned back to his notes, waiting for the person to go away.

The doorbell rang again, the person pressing longer on the button. Insistent, thought Philip. Or is it persistent? Persistently? He laid down his pen and got up, then grabbed his copy of Chekhov and stuck his finger between the pages as he stepped into the living room. The detail would let his visitor know that he’d been interrupted. Through the window inset into the front door, he saw a man’s head in profile, cocked back at the neck. The stranger’s lips were pursed as he blew a stream of smoke into the air.

“Can I help you?” Philip asked, opening the door only enough to lean out.

“Hi,” said the man on the porch. He shifted his cigarette to his left hand and held out the right. “You must be Philip.”

The man stood slightly taller than Philip, trim and athletic. Tanned or, rather, ruddy — his red hair made him ruddy. One too many buttons loosened on the front of his Oxford, the hair thick on his chest. With the Land Rover framed above his shoulder, he looked like a commercial, but for what, Philip wasn’t sure.

“Do we know each other?” Philip asked, opening the door wider and reaching his free hand out.

“No, I don’t think we’ve met,” the man said. Shake, release. “I’m a friend of Catherine’s. Buddy Shelton — well, Robert, really, I’m trying to get back to Robert, but back in college it was Buddy, so...” He laughed lightly. “Didn’t Catherine mention I was coming by?”

“Catherine’s not here. She’s gone out to dinner with some friends.”

Buddy smiled. “Well, I guess that would be me.” Cigarette to the mouth. A deep drag. He shook his head slightly, blew the smoke out of the corner of his mouth. “I’m sorry to have bothered you. I must have misunderstood about where we were going to meet. I thought we were all getting together here first.”

They were meeting several classmates from school, Buddy explained. He had just moved back to Raleigh recently, rented a house over in Vanguard Park. He was in pharmaceutical sales, and the Triangle “...well, it’s about the capital of the world for that, you know. You’re teaching at State, right?”

“Close,” Philip said. “Wake Tech.”

“Gotta start somewhere.” Buddy shrugged. “And I guess it gives you plenty of time to write, huh?” It was nice to be back in the area in general, he went on. It hadn’t taken him long to run into some friends from school, and the next thing you know plans were being made. “Of course, it’s just like me to get the plans wrong somehow.” Buddy laughed, but Philip detected no real lapse of confidence. What was the connection between self-effacing and self-assured? Philip assumed it just depended on the self involved.

“Well, nice meeting you,” Buddy said, stepping off the porch. “Guess I’ll just try to catch up with everyone.” Then halfway across the yard, with a quick turn, walking backward for a moment: “Hey, wanna join us?”

“No, I’ve—” Philip started to hold up his book and explain that he was working, or protest that he was only wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and sandals, but then realized that he wasn’t expected to say yes. Buddy had never even stopped walking. “No,” Philip called after him. “You all have a good time.”

“Oh, I’m sure we will,” said Buddy, and he thumbed the cigarette butt into the street as he climbed in the truck. A wave from the window as he rounded the curve.

Philip started to turn back inside, but instead walked out and sat for a while on the porch swing he and Catherine had only recently found time to install. Soon the sun would go down, and even now there were few people on the street — a pair of joggers, a couple pushing a stroller, a bicyclist in Spandex shorts. The chains supporting the swing creaked, the grass in the yard had begun to wither, paint peeled on the perimeter of the porch — little chores neglected. From somewhere in the neighborhood came the dull, distant roar of a lawnmower, or perhaps a hedge trimmer. Philip’s thoughts wandered back over the conversation with Buddy, and he found himself troubled by the cigarette butt in the middle of the street. The joggers, the couple with the stroller, the cyclist — none of them seemed to notice it. Finally, he walked out to pick it up, deposited it in the trashcan on the side of the house, and then came back to the porch. He opened up the Chekhov collection.

The theater scene in S— Gurov and Anna rushing away from the crowds at intermission. They walked senselessly along passages, and up and down stairs, came to rest on a narrow, gloomy staircase.

“I am so unhappy,” she went on, not heeding him. “I have thought of nothing but you all the time; I live only in the thought of you. And I wanted to forget, to forget you, but why, oh, why have you come?”

On the landing above them two schoolboys were smoking and looking down... Gurov drew Anna Sergeyevna to him, and began kissing her face, her cheeks, and her hands.

“What are you doing, what are you doing?... I beseech you by all that is sacred, I implore you... There are people coming this way!”

Someone was coming up the stairs...

Philip closed the book in mid scene, bothered as always that the “someone” never arrived. Who was that someone? And why had he or she stopped? A similar event in Yalta — Anna and Gurov sitting at breakfast: A man walked up to them... looked at them and walked away.And this detail seemed mysterious and beautiful, too. But what more did the detail signify? What did Chekhov intend? Simply some reminder of the outside world barging in, ever-threatening to discover the affair? And how early would Von Diderits himself have known that his marriage had gone terribly wrong?

Evgeniy shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Anna Sergeyevna glanced toward him, away from the stage, her furrowed brow asking, Is there something wrong? He smiled and shook his head, patted her knee. His wife smiled in response before turning her attention back to the scene before them — the Tea House of Ten Thousand Joys. A parade of kimonoed figures with thickly powdered faces danced in unison, strummed lutes, poured tea for lounging British sailors. Evgeniy’s wife tapped the tip of her fan against the bridge of her lorgnette, the latter a trifle he had bought her — unnecessary since their regular stall was on the third row, but she was always pleased by such precious accessories. “Men make love the same in all countries,” the Frenchwoman on stage had said. “There is only one language for love.” And when the wizened Wun-Hi replied, with those troubled r’s, “Yes, me know — good language before malliage, after malliage, bad language,” everyone laughed.

Evgeniy had paid little mind to the plot — a stew of misguided passions, flirtations, jealousy... a song about a goldfish. It was easy enough to let one’s attention wander.

Evgeniy turned his eyes once more toward the governor’s box, but still saw no one but the governor’s daughter seated in front, leaning forward, her elbows on the coping. He had nodded in the direction of the box during the bustle before the start of the play, aware from the parting of the curtains behind her and the partially glimpsed hand on the sash that the governor himself stood back there watching — that perhaps the governor had in turn seen him. Evgeniy hoped that at the interval between acts he would have the opportunity to speak with the man. There seemed little harm in reminding a superior that you were there, that you existed at all.

At last the first act ended. The curtain fell.

“Excuse me, my darling,” Evgeniy said, standing. “There are several people I must speak with.” And he stooped over quickly to kiss his wife’s cheek before leaving her in the stall, proud that everyone could see what a model marriage they had. She was indeed his darling, his plum, his precious baby bird. In the aisle, he encountered Pyotr Alexeitch, and the two men began speaking as they walked toward the door outside, where several other gentlemen had already gathered to smoke.

But he had barely caught the smell of tobacco drifting through the door when a brisk movement across the room seized his attention — a woman rushing hurriedly through the crowd. A mere flash of a moment, but enough for him to recognize his wife’s gown, the particular way she pinned her hair back, and that familiar, though now hurried, gait. Had a problem arisen? Perhaps she had suddenly taken ill. Was she searching for him?

“I beg your pardon, Pyotr,” he said, with a slight bow. “I fear there is something I must attend to.” It was, he considered, no breach of manners to look to your wife in her time of need.

He walked through the laughing, chattering crowd, heard a person humming one of the refrains from the play, saw another stifling a giggle as she stiffly mimicked the bow of one of the geisha girls.

His wife had gone through this door, surely, he thought, and it opened up onto a busy passageway leading around the auditorium. A glimpse of her gown to the right, and as Evgeniy moved in that direction, he saw that another man was following closely on his wife’s heels.

“Excuse me,” he said to each person whose elbow he jostled, “pardon me.” He eased as swiftly as he could through the crowd without disrupting them too terribly, without drawing too much attention — casting a quick smile or a friendly nod to those he knew, striving at the same time to keep his eyes on the figures ahead. They seemed to move endlessly along passageways, and up and down stairs. At times Evgeniy gained on them, at others he fell behind, until at a last turn he reached the base of a narrow, gloomy staircase, hidden from the crowd. The sounds of his wife’s voice echoed down the stairs — “I beseech you by all that is sacred, I implore you” — and Evgeniy mounted the first step hastily, primed to defend his wife’s virtue, his own honor, until he heard an unexpected tenor in her next words: “There are people coming this way!”

He stopped in mid step. There was an urgency in her tone that had struck him strangely, a desperation, a passion, a—

“You must go away... I will come and see you in Moscow. I have never been happy; I am miserable now... I swear I’ll come to Moscow. But now let us part. My precious, good, dear one, we must part!”

A moment passed in silence, an emptiness in which Evgeniy’s imagination trembled. Then he heard them coming down the stairs rapidly, and he slunk back along the passageways ahead of them, once more fighting the throng as he struggled toward the security of their accustomed stall.

Near midnight, Philip sat alone in the living room, his gaze wandering from one object to another. The weave of the fabric on the couch, marred by a stain whose origin he couldn’t remember. The air-conditioning vent in the corner, rattling intermittently as the system switched on and off. Over the mantel hung an abstract painting that Catherine had completed in college: two broad, bold, S-shaped swaths of color, red and purple. Divergent at each extreme, they curved closer together in the middle and touched lightly at various points. What was the name of it? Duet something? Romance? Romantic Red Pairs Passionate Purple? There was a precious cleverness to the title, Philip recalled, but his mind was too muddled to remember it clearly. Densely chaotic jazz murmured from the stereo’s speakers, the volume turned low so as not to disturb Catherine’s sleep.

They had kissed soon before he left their bed a half-hour before, and her lips had tingled at the time with the mint of her toothpaste, masking the faint aftertaste of her evening out. But now it was the undertones of those tastes that lingered in his memory. The briny lure of tequila, the tang of limes. Residues, castoffs. Like the bracelet she had discarded on the end table when she walked through the door, or the pocketbook standing like a challenge on the other chair.

“Did your friend Robert find you?” he had asked her after she came home.

“Robert?” she said. “Oh, you mean Buddy. Why? Did he call here?”

“He stopped by looking for you. He assumed you were meeting here first before dinner.”

“I wonder why he would have thought that,” she said, and he thought she seemed genuinely puzzled. No, he hadn’t mentioned stopping by, she went on to explain, had just apologized for being late when he got there and joined them at the table. How many others? Oh, five or six — let’s see... Miriam and Alex, Ken, Alice, Lucy... Buddy, of course. So how many is that? Six? Seven, including Catherine. Lucky number seven. “You know, just a bunch of us who’d been together back in school.”

“Sounds like fun,” Philip had said, and in his mind now he emptied out the pocketbook sitting across from him: lipstick and powder, several Kleenex, her wallet, a tampon, her cell phone, her Palm Pilot.

“Excuse me,” Evgeniy said to each person whose elbow he jostled, “pardon me.” He moved as swiftly as he could through the crowd without disrupting them too terribly, without drawing too much attention — struggling to cast a quick smile or a friendly nod to those he knew, to maintain some equilibrium.

“Well, it’s great that you got the chance to catch up with him,” Philip had gone on. “Good that Buddy’s turned up here in town.”

“It really is nice,” Catherine said. “I’d forgotten how much I missed him.”

“How long has it been since you last saw him?”

Years and years ago, she replied. They had been such good friends when they were in school — had taken several classes together, gone out to the same clubs. But once graduation came, so many people headed their separate ways. Buddy had moved out to the West Coast, to Sacramento — a job he couldn’t refuse. Catherine had promised to come out and visit, had really meant to. She hadn’t been particularly pleased with her own job then. She’d felt aimless, unambitious... unhappy, really.

I will come and see you in Sacramento. I have never been happy; I am miserable now. I have thought of nothing but you all the time; I live only in the thought of you...

“But I never went out to see him,” she said. “Eventually, each of us got so busy. I got the job at Ligon. We stopped calling each other as often as we had... You know how easy it is to lose touch.”

Soon, Catherine had prepared to go to sleep — removed her makeup, brushed her teeth, pulled on a pair of his boxers. By the time Philip joined her, she had already settled between the sheets, was nearly asleep. He turned out the light and felt his way into the bed, recognizing in the darkness the scent of the new perfume he’d first noticed several nights before. She leaned over. A kiss. Lips redolent with mint, the taste lingering as she pulled away. They lay for a while in the half-darkness together, in the glow of the streetlight through the window, under the faint outline of the ceiling fan overhead. Philip tried to catch the dim sound of its motor spinning amidst the silence.

“Did you ever...” he finally asked her, “...you know. I mean, with your friend Buddy?”

A long pause. His imagination trembled. “You men,” she said after a few seconds, “the way you...” and he heard the hint of a low chuckle. A long sigh followed. “Once or twice,” she said finally. “It was back in college. It was years ago.”

“Excuse me,” Evgeniy said to each person whose elbow he jostled, “pardon me.” He moved as swiftly as he could through the crowd without disrupting them too terribly, without drawing too much attention. Surely what he’d seen wasn’t what it seemed. Surely the man following his wife wasn’t... Surely the man from Yalta wouldn’t dare to... Evgeniy had been able to excuse that indiscretion, an isolated mistake, but he could not condone this, not abide such, not here in his own town. No, this was untenable, this was...

They didn’t speak after that, and soon Catherine’s breathing settled into a regular pattern. He listened to her for a few minutes, then realized he would be unable to sleep himself. He went downstairs, put on the Ornette Coleman CD, and sat down on the sofa to stare at the air-conditioning vent and the painting over the mantel and the pocketbook on the chair with her Palm Pilot within.

What was the name of that painting? he asked himself again, and this time it came to him, a conversation years ago, emerging from some tucked-away place in his memory. Twin Passions Twined, she’d called it, remarking to Philip that it was like them, wasn’t it? like love should be? She wrapped her arms around him in the memory, they kissed, they... but no comfort in remembering that embrace tonight. Other thoughts intruded. She’d actually painted it in college, hadn’t she? And who had the purple swath represented for her then? What had she written down in her Palm Pilot for tonight — “Dinner w/friends”? “Dinner w/Miriam, Alex, etc.”? “Dinner with Buddy”? What was listed for the evening a few nights back when she had claimed she was going to Target and Borders?

It was at the theater that Evgeniy first saw Gurov with his own eyes, but this was not his first awareness of the other man, despite his many attempts to suppress that knowledge. Looking back over all that had happened, Evgeniy realized that he had likely already lost Anna in Yalta, or even before, and he was ashamed to have arranged a witness to his own humiliation.

Yalta was his wife’s first holiday in the two years since they had been married. She had grown up in Petersburg, and he knew that moving to the provinces had been an adjustment for her. He had sensed that she was sometimes restless with their surroundings, restless with the days that he spent away from her while at council and the evenings he spent building relationships to ensure a successful career. He imagined her staring all day at the gray fence opposite the house, or chasing idly after that pesky little dog she loved so, and he felt responsible for the drabness he had begun to see in her eyes.

“Why don’t you take a trip, my darling?” he had asked her one evening when she complained of not feeling well. “A change of scenery will invigorate your spirits. You could travel to Moscow, maybe, or to Petersburg to see your sister. Or someplace new. To Yalta, perhaps. You might enjoy some time at the coast. You can stay for two weeks or a month or even more.” And though she had been hesitant at first, she had eventually acquiesced. A trip was planned for late summer. She bought some clothes for her journey, a new beret, a new parasol as well. Even the preparations seemed to return some glimmer of light to her soft gray eyes, and Evgeniy felt his own spirits relieved as well. At the end of her stay at the coast, he might come down personally to fetch her. They could spend a few days together. It would be a second honeymoon.

The week before her trip, he had summoned Zhmuhin, the hotel porter, to his office. Evgeniy found Zhmuhin a despicable person in many ways. The man was gaunt and angular, with a bent nose, and Evgeniy had often sensed something smug and sneering beneath his show of truckling diffidence. Plus, Zhmuhin perennially mispronounced Evgeniy’s surname as “Dridirit” — intentionally, Evgeniy believed. But Zhmuhin also possessed the keen eye and discretion necessary for his post. He was precise in his tallying of new arrivals to and departures from the town, encompassing in his recognition of small details. It had even been rumored years before that Zhmuhin was an outside agent for the Okhrana, the imperial police, and though the idea had quickly been dismissed, Evgeniy had often wondered at the possibility and as a result continued to cultivate some familiarity with the other man. As if recognizing this, Zhmuhin sometimes dropped his pretensions around Evgeniy, and too often took advantage of being treated as an equal.

After the porter had settled into one of the wing chairs opposite the mahogany desk, Evgeniy offered him a glass of cognac, asked him about who had checked in most recently at the hotel, laughed that Zhmuhin was always at the hotel, always so much work, and didn’t he ever need a holiday? And when Zhmuhin replied that he arranged to go to Petersburg each May and November, the former in honor of the emperor’s birthday and the latter to commemorate the dowager empress, Evgeniy commented that such respect was very noble, wondering beneath his words if the man’s trips to the capital might have more to do with some duties for the secret police.

“But perhaps you would also like to take another type of holiday, and sooner,” continued Evgeniy. “Perhaps somewhere warmer, perhaps to a coastal climate? Perhaps to Yalta?”

A sly smile emerged at one corner of Zhmuhin’s lips. “And why would I choose to go to Yalta?” he asked, tugging at the lapels of his gray porter’s uniform. “Is there some specific reason for such a trip?”

“I have always said that you are a clever man,” replied Evgeniy. “That you are intelligent beyond your position, and such you are.” He gestured as if doffing a hat to the porter, though he wore no hat at the time. “You are correct. It is my wife. I have decided to send her to Yalta for a holiday herself, and I would like for you to go as well.”

Zhmuhin’s smile vanished. “That sounds little like a holiday, Mr. Dridirit,” he replied, enunciating the last word. “To carry bags and open doors. I can do these things here. And you yourself have servants for such tasks. Send them along instead.” He started to rise.

“You misunderstand. Please sit, please,” said Evgeniy, careful to maintain his cheer, lacing his fingers together. “That is not at all what I’m asking. Even here you are too wise for such duties, I have always thought you so. No, I do not wish you to accompany my wife but to attend to her at a distance. You have a watchful nature, everyone knows this. I simply want you to keep such a watch over my wife while she is away.”

Zhmuhin’s eyes narrowed. He returned to his seat.

“What need is there to keep a watch over your wife?” he asked. “When I look at your wife, I see a grown woman who does not need a guardian. Don’t you agree, Mr. Dridirit?” That sly smile had returned, and Evgeniy detected some hint of salacity behind the porter’s comments. He chose to ignore the man’s studied insolence.

“Before our marriage, my wife was surrounded by her family in Petersburg,” Evgeniy replied instead, “and here she enjoys my guardianship, of course. Certainly she is a grown woman, but I have discovered that she is so young still in many ways, simple in her thoughts and her amusements, a naïf. Often I have called her my baby bird, merely a term of endearment, you see, and yet it is appropriate in so many ways that I had not intended... “He stared down at the blotter on his desk, at the inkwell and the calligraphy pen, the papers, his political responsibilities — another world in which his wife would surely be lost, and he treasured her all the more for that. “This is her first time away on her own, you see, and perhaps I fret over her well-being too much.”

They had completed their deal after that. Zhmuhin was merely to watch from a distance, not to intercede unless he found Anna Sergeyevna to be in some danger. Evgeniy in turn paid for Zhmuhin’s transportation, his lodging and meals, and a remuneration of 100 rubles for the six weeks’ work — more than half again his salary at the hotel for the same period, but the extra would ensure his attention and discretion.

During the first fortnight that his wife was away, Evgeniy began to receive short letters from her. She wrote of her walks in Verney’s pavilion and in the public gardens, of the roughness of the seas in the days and the strange light upon it in the evenings, of how everyone gathered in the harbor for the arrival of the steamer. Evgeniy smiled over her letters, envying such simple pleasures, the easy amusements that he had never been the type to enjoy. He was grateful for a wife who could appreciate them so.

Then one morning, a messenger delivered a telegram to his office. The message itself was unsigned, but in some manner the block type itself bore a familiar insolence, and despite his incomprehension of the telegram’s meaning, the words at once sent the blood rushing to Evgeniy’s face.

“Baby bird has found her wings.”

Two nights later, Philip sat in a rented Buick half a block from his own home, staring at the Land Rover that had just pulled to a stop at the curb, watching his wife escorted by another man across the lawn and into their front door. As he had throughout the evening, he struggled with the word stalker and its connotations. But he hadn’t been stalking. He had no intention to do anything. He had merely been surveying. He was simply watching the story unfold.

He should have been in Charlottesville at this point — the lie he’d told Catherine, the one he’d had to tell her. Research for his story, a quick trip to the Center for Russian Studies at UVA, dinner with a friend from college who lived there, someone he hadn’t seen in a couple of years. “So I’ll have a place to stay for free,” he had explained, plausibly enough. “And it’ll give the two of us a chance to catch up.” He’d used the last phrase deliberately — the same that he’d used when talking to Catherine about Buddy — but she hadn’t seemed to notice, and he alone had been left with a sour taste in his mouth.

So far, he’d put only a dozen miles on the rental, only a few miles between each stop: Buddy’s neighborhood first, a series of squat bungalows half a century old, freshly painted, freshly landscaped, oversized SUVs out front. A pot of begonias had already bloomed on Buddy’s own stoop; his porch swing slowly swayed nearby. Then to the restaurant, following the Land Rover across town to Glenwood Avenue and to the parking lot at 518 — a couple of extra miles crisscrossing the streets near the restaurant, Jones to West, Lane to Boylan, the parking lots adjacent to 42nd Street Oyster Bar, Southend, and Ri Ra, couples leaning toward one another, groups talking and laughing, until he found Catherine’s beige Camry on Harrington.

It was still back there now, he knew, abandoned for the evening, and he wondered once more what had been running through her head as she made that decision — him watching from just down the street as the two of them exited the restaurant together, the rest of the evening determined, she must have known, by whatever happened in that moment. She’d held her head low, looking down at the sidewalk; Buddy had leaned his face down to meet her eyes better, gestured for her to stay there, walked around into the parking lot. Catherine alone in front of the restaurant. Her head held low with regrets? with shame? lost in her thoughts? lost in anticipation? Philip imagined for a moment that she had been drinking, that she was drunk, that Buddy was taking advantage of her condition. Didn’t it seem she was struggling to maintain her equilibrium? But no, her balance had been complete, her stance never swayed. He could almost smell the scent of her new perfume behind her ears, along her neck. She had looked up the moment he thought that. In the direction of Philip and the rented car? No, toward the tip of the Land Rover, waiting to turn out of the parking lot.

And now they had entered the house together, the story unfolding not as Philip would have chosen but, unfortunately, as he expected. He tapped his fingers against the steering wheel, its surface sticky with the sweat of someone else’s hands.

A song ended on the radio and the announcer came on. Bob Rogers. WSHA. “The blues is the blues is the blues,” Rogers said, his tone folksy, soothing. Philip thought of evening deejays in empty studios, alone with their passions. He thought of the people who listened to those deejays and about the shape of such a shared solitude. He had always felt apart from people — shy and self-aware — but Catherine had been patient with him, indulged his eccentricities. And what had he given her in return? What had he failed to give her that had sent her away?

He picked up the cell phone and dialed their home number.

“Hello, beautiful,” he said when Catherine answered, careful to keep his tone light, determined not to betray his emotions.

“Hey,” she said. “Are you almost to Charlottesville?”

“Almost,” he said, pulling up the car a few feet, watching which lights went on in which rooms. “I’m driving into the city limits now. What have you been up to this evening?”

“I’ve been out, just got back in,” she said. “I got a call soon after you left and ended up meeting some people down at 518. But about halfway through the meal, I felt sick to my stomach and ended up just coming home.”

An internal complaint, Philip thought. How ironic. How fitting.

“Well, I hate that I’m so far away,” he said. He searched for the shadows of movement between the half-closed blinds. “I hate for you to be sick and all alone like that.”

“Yeah, I really do feel awful,” she said. “But I’ll be all right. Buddy ended up driving me back here, and Miriam said she’d come over and stay the night if I wanted her to.”

“Buddy’s there?”

“Yeah, he said he’d stay with me for a few minutes to make sure I’m okay.” A light went on in the room where Philip worked. “And he hadn’t seen the house yet, so this gives him a chance to see our place.” The light went off again.

“Do you want me to come back?”

“You’re hours away, hon,” she said, her silhouette appearing at the living room window. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’ll be fine.”

“Well, do you want me to call you back in a little while?”

“I’ll be fine,” she repeated, and he watched as she shut the blinds tightly. “Don’t worry. It was just something I ate. You’re almost there and I know you want to catch up with Mike. I’m just going to turn down the ringer and go to bed in a few minutes, just as soon as Buddy leaves.”

Turn down the ringer. Go to bed. Catch up. Half-truths easier to tell than lies.

“So.” His mind scrambled in vain for a new strategy. “I guess I’ll just talk to you tomorrow, then.”

“All right, hon. I’ll give you a call on the cell when I get up, okay?”

“Okay,” he said. And he saw the light in their bedroom come on. “Well, good night.”

“Hey!” she said then. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

“What?” he asked.

“How about ‘I love you’?”

“I love you too,” he replied, relieved that she had said this in front of Buddy. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Feel better. Good night.”

But his hopes gradually faded as the minutes stretched on. And it was more than an hour before the other man left the house. When the Land Rover pulled away from the street, Philip followed, dutifully.

Zhmuhin began to send letters after that, penned in his own awkward hand, bearing information about Anna Sergeyevna’s indiscretions: how she had retired with the stranger to the sanctity of her hotel room; how the couple had shared a cab to Oreanda, where they had sat near a church and held hands as they stared at the sea; how they now took their meals together regularly; how they stole kisses in the square.

Zhmuhin was fastidious in his details: There was cream in the crab soup they shared at lunch on Tuesday; the wine they drank after dinner on Thursday was a Madeira, uncorked just for them. Zhmuhin had walked past them near the church in Oreanda, but had recognized no remorse in the man’s eyes; the couple’s kiss in the square was fleeting, the one in the garden approximately half a minute in duration. Gone was Zhmuhin’s insolence, but his cold precision and simple matter-of-factness were perhaps more brutal, giving Evgeniy’s grief little room for relief. Evgeniy wept like some sniveling child. His eyesight became bleary with tears and his face turned so red that he stayed home from the office. He caught the servants exchanging glances when he passed them in the house. What a poor excuse for a man he had become!

And what a poor choice he had made for handling this crisis. He should have traveled to Yalta at once, he would think later. He should have challenged the other man to a duel. He should have punished his wife for her indiscretion with the same firm justice with which he might forgive her for it afterwards. But instead he had written her a letter. There is something wrong with my eyes, he had explained. Please come home as quickly as possible. A weak lie to avoid a scandal. A coward’s choice. He had signed it Your husband as if he needed to remind her of the fact — a thought whose shame he would also long bear.

Even as he dripped the wax onto the envelope and reached for his seal, he knew that any choice he made was a mistake. If he didn’t confront the situation now, he would be unable to do so later. How could he admit to her in years to come that he had known all along, that he had borne her adultery in silence? And yet what ramifications would ensue if he acted rashly? His public might acquit him of any action he took now in defense of his home, but could they avoid looking upon him differently once they’d discovered him a cuckold? How would they ever trust him as a leader if they suspected that some mismanagement of domestic affairs had sent his wife into the arms of another man?

Such was simply not possible. He sealed the wax.

WSHA had gone off the air at midnight, and hours of cold, dry static had whispered from the speakers as Philip drove restlessly through the night, haunted by images, miles of worry accumulating. The Land Rover at the curb, the light in the bedroom window, the cigarette in the street... the stale aftertaste of tequila from Catherine’s kiss, the feel of her lips light on his forehead several nights before... the passions in her painting, the pizza in the microwave... her admission that Buddy was there when he called, her admission that she had slept with him before. Another man’s hand rested on her hip, caressed her breast. Her fingers wandered in the hair of his chest, their lips met, their bodies twined...

Chekhov had been right, he thought, still crafting the short story in his head, trying in vain still to distract himself from the other story, from all that had happened in recent hours. Each of us does have two lives, one open and the other running its course in secret. But Chekhov had missed the despair of never truly being able to know the other’s secret existence, always balancing trust against doubt. Gurov had found some prurient irony in the idea of secret lives, Anna Sergeyevna had been torn asunder by her two worlds, and Evgeniy von Diderits... But it wasn’t Evgeniy’s story, after all, Philip recognized, the simplest truth. Anna’s and Gurov’s was the grand, conflicted passion. Von Diderits’s life was static, negligible. Philip had simply chosen the wrong character. And while another man had been wooing and perhaps winning Catherine, Philip had stuck himself away in 1890s Russia, missing the chance to be of significance in his own story, precisely when he should have been strengthening his role.

But now he’d secured a place in both stories, had taken special pains to assure that his presence would be felt.

Dawn had broken by the time Philip drove the rented Buick back to his own house and parked it at the curb where the Land Rover had stood the night before. The neighborhood was now lit in soft tones. Sprinklers were rotating in a lawn down the street — set off by an automatic timer, as regular as clockwork, as if nothing had changed. In another yard, a cat stalked some animal unseen. As Philip walked toward his front porch, he heard the neighbor’s door open and then saw her step out to pick up her paper. She stopped when she spotted him, and even from a distance he could sense her hesitancy, her apprehension. Did she not recognize him? He saw that she didn’t have her glasses on. The Buick must have confused her too. Perhaps she suspected an early-morning burglar?

“Good morning, Mrs. Rosen,” he called out, with a nervous wave. “Just me. Philip.” Yes, just like the sprinklers, he told himself. Act asif nothing has changed. And then he thought, But maybe she hasseen me clearly, maybe it’s not that she doesn’t recognize me but that she’s sensed something better than she should. He quickly turned his key in the front door and pushed it inward, not waiting for a reply.

Once inside, however, he still felt himself an intruder, as if actually breaking into some strange house. He saw even the most familiar objects as if for the first time: a piece of pottery he and Catherine had picked up in Chatham County, a photograph of them on their honeymoon in London, Catherine’s purse on the chair. The painting over the mantel seemed darker than usual. The fabric of the couch didn’t quite match the floor. He noticed that a Mingus CD he had left in the player had been swapped out for Moby and that an empty bottle of Pinot Noir stood on the kitchen counter. Two glasses sat in the sink.

Had Buddy touched this newspaper on the counter? Which chair had he sat in? The carpet runner in the hallway had been kicked up at the corner. The hand towel in the bathroom had a streak of grime. Was that another man’s piss on the rim of the toilet? Under the fluorescent lights, he noticed that there were still traces of red on his hands — ink? No. Not ink. Not ink — not this time. He took a moment to wash them again and then waited to let them dry in the air, reluctant to share the hand towel that the other man had touched.

In their bedroom, the rising sun crept around the edges of the window, leaving the room in morning twilight, and Philip detected the thick scent of black currants again, wildflowers. Beneath the sheets wrapped around her, Catherine’s breasts rose and fell in easy rhythms. Her black hair strayed out across the pillow, and a mascara stain marked the case, almost in the shape of an eyelash itself. Someone had propped a condom against the edge of the alarm clock. Durex. Unopened.

Sitting down in the chair in the corner of the room, Philip twirled the condom in his hand, examined the edges of the wrapper, the expiration date, phrases from the package: “super thin for more feeling,” “nonoxynol-9,” “if erection is lost before withdrawal...” It was from a box of twelve in the bathroom, he knew, and he also knew that if he hadn’t come home before she awoke, if he’d really been in Virginia, then the condom would have been returned to its spot, the evidence vanished. But unopened? He started to go into the bathroom and count the ones that remained in the box, to see if others were missing, but he couldn’t remember with any certainty how many had been in there before he left. It had been awhile since they’d made love, he realized with regret, with shame.

Catherine shifted her weight, stretched an arm out to her side. Philip clasped the condom in his hand and moved up to the bed to sit beside her.

“Catherine,” he said, “are you awake?” He laid his free hand on her arm, resisted an unexpected urge to shake it. “It’s me. Philip.”

“Philip?” she mumbled, still half asleep, leaning into his touch. Her eyes parted just slightly. “It’s too early, Philip, it’s—” Her body tensed, her eyes opened wide, she looked up at him bewildered. “Philip?” she said again, sitting up sharply. The sheet fell away from her bare breasts, and it struck him that Buddy had seen her nakedness too, and probably not just long ago. He watched her glance toward the clock, saw her confusion deepen. “Where...? It’s seven in the morning. I thought you were—”

“You said you were sick,” he began, and despite himself he could hear the accusation seeping into his tone. “I came home because—” But even before he said them, he knew the words weren’t right, that disguising the truth would make him no better than her. The very next moment would determine everything that came after. “I never left,” he began, sternly, pridefully, measuring his anger. “No, I’ve been in Raleigh the whole time. I’ve used up a whole tank of gas, Catherine. I’ve been driving, I’ve been thinking... I saw him, and I don’t know what to make of it all, don’t know what to make of you.” He caught her glancing again at the clock, at the place where the condom no longer stood, and he felt his hand clenching tighter, the foil wrapper crinkling within. “Is this what you’re looking for?” he asked with a sneer, and he flicked the condom onto the bedspread with his freshly washed hands. The evidence was there. She would have to admit the truth, confirm that he’d been right. Unopened or not, it was still proof. Intentions were—

But as he watched her face, her expression betrayed little. She stared down at the condom for a moment and then pushed her hair behind her ears, lifted her head to meet his gaze. As with everything else in the house, Philip had the vague sensation of seeing Catherine now for the first time: the cleft dividing her chin; those faint clusters of freckles across her cheeks, usually masked by powder; the uncommon color of her eyes. Her irises were a deep, impenetrable green, her pupils unfathomably opaque. He thought of the painting above the mantel, those swaths of color brushing against one another, connecting, parting. “Oh, Philip,” she whispered, gently shaking her head, “why did you go away? Why did we need to do this?” and in her wry, pained smile he glimpsed the ragged edges of her secret life, forced open, unable to be hid. My God, he thought, did I make this? — his anger fleeing him now and some other dull feeling taking its place. The next step was inevitable, he saw then, already written, and he wanted desperately now to go back and mend things — everything that he’d opened up, to hide his own secret life, to leave everything hid.

“Philip,” she said again, reaching out to take his hand in hers, “I have something to tell you.” It was too late to stop it now, and he knew that whatever she said next he would try to believe, but he would never believe. And it was clear to him that no matter what happened, the most difficult and complicated part of it was likely just beginning.

©2007 by Art Taylor