The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

masquerade, dressed as a shepherdess. Yes, boss, as you wish, boss—a wildly sexy game. I want you right here and right now. The silence of his driver who took us to the airport—a professional silence, impenetrable like the Mottled Hen’s golden egg that no one could break—you pay a premium for such silence, such folks don’t give interviews (and, oh, how I wish they did, and wished back then, too, the journalist in me never quit doing her job!).
    When the world takes you for a whore but keeps its mouth shut, or grins politely, like that hotel clerk who presented R. with the room keys (although it was I who did the talking, while R. just breathed noisily at my side because his English is nonexistent, and there’s one more category I could be placed into—an interpreter), it sort of gives you the social sanction to do exactly what, as they believe, this breathing character is paying you to do. Your sexual act, thus, begins, essentially, at the check-in desk, and by the time you reach your room in the impatient, pulsing-like-a-bulging-vein silence of the elevator (where a Russian or a Turk, infected with the atmosphere, nails you with a fiery look as he steps out on his floor, letting it be known that he could take care of you no worse than your companion—it spreads like electricity, men always flare up like lights on a string when they see a woman being led to a good fuck, and this erotic illumination is also part of the show), you quite simply must, as soon as the door closes, drop onto thebed and get to business. So, you’re an interpreter now, let’s see you interpret this.
    There’s something of an orgy in this almost-public sex that is being watched through the walls by dozens of eyes—the sex of the information age, sex without privacy, as if at a stadium with crowds of fans: floodlights on, olé-olé-olé-olé, go-go-go, and sco-o-ore! And the result: a couple of vacant, mechanical orgasms and the inevitable popping up of the same postcoital question in your mind. Why the hell am I doing this, exactly?
    And on the flight back—already knowing, after that morning with the hotel-window view of the wet roofs below, that I urgently need to break things off with R.—I just had to spot one of those tight Barbie dolls, not long out of the box but already not quite fresh, slightly spoiled by a touch of second-handedness, turned out as unambiguously as if she were wearing a uniform: loose, tar-black hair down to her buttocks, gold chains, silver stiletto heels that made her a head taller than her companion, who looked like he could be thrice her senior. They took the seats immediately behind us, and the man—also, I figured, a big wheel that flies everywhere with his own masseuse (the doll didn’t quite have the goods for an interpreter)—instantly dove into some Russian pulp, some Hitler-Stalin-Zhukov potboiler with a hot-red cover. (Bright, they like everything bright, pop-your-eyes-out bright; they are forever hungry for bling, these children of gray factory developments and mining towns.)
    He spoke to his companion exactly once during the entire flight, when the stewardess came by with the drinks. “You want a beer?” The way I talk to Barsik, “You want some scraps?” And it was as if I’d seen myself and R. in a distorting mirror—aped by this couple who embodied the essence of the rich-man-and-his-slut genre so much better than we; they were almost kitschy (for what is kitsch if not a genre’s essence stripped of any individuality?) and seated right behind us, as if to fulfill the express function of visual aid, illustrating the next step on the evolutionary ladder.
    Unlike myself and R. (whom I intentionally allowed to pay for that whole trip, so I could wallow in the feeling like the proverbial pig in mud), the kitschy couple was not playing a game, was not pretending to be a boss and his sex servant—that’s actually who they were, and no erotic sparks flew between them. Zilch, nada, you could see nothing, flying or otherwise, aside from vacant, self-congratulating vainglory: the boss took pride in his young mistress, decked out like a Christmas tree. She—in her gold chains, silver stilettos, with her shopping bags in her luggage, a whole trip she could boast about to her friends, eliciting their unending envy; the two had no other motivation for copulating. Sex, at their evolutionary station, was dead—as ours would have been, too, if I didn’t insist on playacting someone