The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

got it. Blowing sunshine all over and up whose ass? You want a medal or something? What the fuck? You forty-year-old bird, compulsive valedictorian, peddler of eye candy and book smarts, you doll, you stupid, stupid doll.
    ***
    Vlada, Vladusya, so small and so indomitable, as if held up by an iron rod—once I caught her working in her studio, her hair tied back with a bandana, in threadbare overalls crusty with paint and chalk, and felt stunned: where was my grand dame, the star of fashionable salons and glamorous receptions? She looked like a teen at a construction site, the flunky sent down the scaffoldingto fetch buckets of drywall mud; the studio stank ferociously of varnish (I was instantly lightheaded); Vlada was even paler than usual—her lips bluish-lilac as if with cold, and she gulped milk straight from the torn corner of the carton that stood open on a table, breathing and snorting like a sweaty peasant; her brow and nose were speckled with gold dust—and it was a strange realization that this backstage, dirty, and calloused proletarian existence was her real life.
    Later, after she was gone, and the stirred-up viper’s nest of the Kyiv bohemia couldn’t get enough of the event (not without the schadenfreude at the comforting prospect of things returning to their natural order in which all Ukrainian artists, without exception, are starving and unknown), it became intolerably painful to accept that realization about Vlada’s life, especially after the cost of her lavish funeral became the subject of greedy, whispered calculations—“a fortune for the coffin alone!” (The first time I heard this, I wholeheartedly wished, on a swell of pure molten hatred, that the appraiser get one of those coffins for his own use, and wished I could take my imagined curse back when I remembered that the moron had thyroid cancer, and that Vlada herself had bought him some rare drugs from Switzerland, out of her own pocket, of course, because he had no money, and she’d always paid for everything out of her own pocket, the invincible iron girl, except, as it turns out, not invincible, and not made of iron at all.)
    Where did she get it—this unwomanlike certainty of hers, the rock-solid confidence in her chosen path? I, who was conditioned to hone in, like a radar, on applause, who withered like a flower in stale water without a regular dose of male admiration (what an idiot!), in the course of our friendship gradually learned to take a mental tally of my actions—for her, first and foremost, and tried my hardest to earn her praise, made only more reliable by the fact that, unlike the approval of men, it had nothing to do with the length of my legs or the size of my rack—to the point where the smallest vexations sent me scrambling for the phone,to cry on Vlada’s firm shoulder, and she never once told me to get lost and get a life, as I, undoubtedly, deserved. She seemed so unflappable and solid: her career grew like a cottonwood sap—up, up; her boyfriend shot straight from the launchpad of his shadowy business (I still don’t really know what it was that he did exactly, but the money must have come from the kind of sources our nouveau riche prefer not to advertise and only mention in passing, as a joke) into elected office, and just kept going, and Vlada said he was almost done with the mind-blowing mansion he’d been building for the three of them somewhere in Roslavychi, the exurb dubbed “a slice of Switzerland,” among pristine meadows and ponds; her Katrusya went to the British Council School, with the children of foreign diplomats, to the tune of ten thousand bucks in tuition per year (Vlada paid). Her life was wonderful and would only keep getting better—and this also gave me security, a firm foundation for the confidence I needed so much, as if Vlada’s success promised, by some primitive, inaccessible logic of association, that everything would be similarly wonderful in my life as well, if not today, then tomorrow for sure. What else feeds female friendship if not this associative twinship, this reciprocal mirroring and intertwining, and don’t friendships die precisely and only when they run out of such associations?
    That’s why, when a month or so after our interview she complained to me of not being able to sleep—and she so rarely complained about anything, and always only in the past tense, after whatever difficulty had vexed her had been overcome, the barrier cleared, and the effort