Babayaga

sense of where he had been, and thanks to her whispering spell, now he would never recall it. So, yes, she thought, I can owe him, for he was not one who would hold her to any obligation. She knew he was happy simply to have been there for her in a time of need. She smiled to herself, recalling how relieved she had felt as they made their getaway, wrapped up in his arms, safe in the taxi, driving off from the chaos of the fight, the world around her seeming to close down into warmth and darkness. She realized that the sense of comforting protection he had given her, held there in his reassuring embrace, was an almost exclusively feminine feeling, one that most men only experienced as babes in their mothers’ arms.
    On the bedside table she found a note Will had left: Out on a long errand, be here by dinner, rest, kiss, Will . Putting on her clothes, she went out to the kitchen. She was startled to find Gwen sitting by the stove, wearing one of Oliver’s oversized shirts and reading a slender novel. “Oh, good day, lazybones. Oliver left a note saying you’d be here. He wants to take us all out for dinner in a bit.” She looked up with a pleasant smile. “There’s a pot of Earl Grey there if you want a cup.”
    Zoya gave her a polite smile in return. “Thank you.” She poured herself some tea. She looked out the window and saw that it was dark. “What time is it?”
    “Nearly eight, you two must have had quite the boozy night.”
    “Mmmn.” Zoya nodded to herself. So much sleep and she still felt weak. She knew it would be a day or two before she was fully recovered. “So, you are with Oliver now?”
    The British girl smiled. “I never like to say I’m with a man. It sounds too much like I’m sick with the sniffles or down with the plague.”
    “Yes,” Zoya said. “I suppose I should have asked, ‘Are you having sex with Oliver?’”
    Gwen gave a forced laugh. “Yes, but only occasionally, here and there. He asked me over last night to review some galleys, and then, well, you know, he’s such a chatty flibbertigibbet. It took nearly two bottles of wine until I could finally shut him up.”
    Zoya looked at Gwen. She had known many women who actually were what Gwen pretended to be, and she respected those genuinely independent and capable women, the ones with great confidence, intelligence, and self-reliance. Zoya could never call these women “friends”—for almost all were so sharp and intuitive that Zoya had to steer clear to avoid being too closely observed—but she liked the ones she had known in passing, all too aware of the fact that making one’s way as a smart, fair creature in a patriarchal culture took some deft choreography. The men would not let you fight them on their terms, for if you were as strong as them then they painted you as ugly or called you cold, while if you tried to succeed by promoting your merits they labeled you as vain. Some of these remarkable women did find men who could live with them as equals, and sometimes they found partners who even accepted them as superior, but even then, too often, those men fell victim to that darkest of instincts, pride. Then Zoya watched as these “gentle” men wore their women down with those soft and cruel weapons—jealousy, mockery, absence, neglect—often with lethal results. Men might be apelike and plodding, Zoya thought, but they were not entirely stupid beasts, they knew how to climb back on top.
    “Of course, a real relationship with a man like Oliver would be impossible,” Gwen went on. “He jokes about making an honest woman out of me, but I know he won’t. You know, he had his heart horribly broken some time back and I think it’s limited his ability to feel any deep emotion, really. It’s fine, though, it’s not like I’m in any rush to create some pathetic simulacrum of a happy marriage like my poor mother suffered.”
    Zoya nodded politely and sipped her tea. Many marriages she had observed seemed to her awkward, strained arrangements, often painful to be near. But she was not entirely cynical and had seen, too, a rich variety of marital bonds that worked well. One extreme was where the man rose to his slippers late, almost at noon, and stayed busy nearly to dawn, while his bride awoke earlier than the birds and retired to sleep only a little after sunset, their lives thusly arranged so as to barely touch, and when they did it was warm and affectionate, like running across an old friend while traveling