The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

of which her daughter, smart girl that she was, informed her only after she had the paperwork in hand, saving herself from several valium-mediated dramas—no sooner could Nina Ustýmivna begin one of her “cello solos,” as Vlada called them, than Vlada would raise her eyebrows and respond, very solemnly, in the same grave cello tones, “What husbands, Mommy? Please, we can’t be bothered, nous sommes les artistes!”—and for some impenetrable reason, the French exerted on N.U. had the same effect as a crack of a whip on an old lesson horse. Her whole affect would change into a collected, grandiose kind of posture, monumental in a vaguely imperious—imperial—way, as if the woman suddenly remembered that she was “an artist’s wife” and must bear this time-honored designation with the utmost dignity. And the funniest thing was that N.U.’s real name, the one on her passport, was not Nina, but Ninél, an anagram of Lenin, not something one acquired with a high-bred childhood and French governesses—and really, it’s not like there were any governesses left in the USSR in the 1930s—but proof, quite to the contrary, of the wild and raucous youth of Vlada’s Komsomol–activist grandma and her Bolshevik-minted (one of twenty-five thousand) Ag teacher grandpa, who, as Vlada sarcastically pointed out, had to have run roughshod on plenty a kolkhoz-resistant “location” before they decamped for Kyiv in 1933; so, she added, we’re lucky it’s Ninél and not Stalína, Octyabrína, or some other Zvezdéts you’d never shake off.
    I suspect that it was in Nina-Ninél Ustýmivna’s rigorous school of behavioral management that Vlada acquired her benevolent,gracious, ironically indulgent attitude toward the “professional wives”—that breed of belligerent females with the eyes of bored ewes who always lurk, like security guards, in close proximity to their husbands, aiming for a chance to grab, à la the unforgettable Raisa Gorbacheva, their own share of limelight when you are having a professional conversation with their husbands, all the while communicating to you with their every grimace and gesture exactly what a hopelessly inferior creature you are as you stand there all alone, with no man in sight whatsoever. I can’t help myself around them:
If not for your VIP beefcake, I’d pack you off where the sun don’t shine, bitch!
—but Vlada found them as entertaining as an exotic animal species, like the white rhinoceros, and she almost felt sorry for them somehow, just like for those poor rhinoceros that are so easy to spot and shoot in their bright white skins.)
    Phone, sweetie! Can you get it? Here—it’s your cell.... Yes, you left it in the bathroom—and tossed a towel on top of it, too.
    (What I really like is to listen to him talk on the phone—it’s just like watching him out the window, or in the street, in a crowd, when he doesn’t see me, smiling to myself on the sly. Once I eavesdropped on a parallel line for almost the entire conversation, listening to the two men’s voices like to a radio play—if the other voice had belonged to a woman I would’ve hung up of course, instantly and instinctively, otherwise it would’ve looked really bad, like I’m a jealous harpy or something, but with another man on the line it was really cool. I could listen, against the shadowy background of the other man’s low
boo-boo-boo
, for the eager sprout of his lithe, pleasant voice, growing like a beam of light, and for his laugh with that little snort, like a young horse, that always makes me want to stroke him...and it’s always fun to watch guys talk to each other when there is no woman around to constrain them or make them want to preen. Men’s conversation has a different rhythm: it’s faster, more aggressive; they throw lines like punches; they spar like schoolboys at recess; they don’t let their emotions crawl all over the place like we do—they keep them tight andfocused inside their sentences, like fists, which, when you listen in, does sound like they’re jousting a little.
    “I even went to Crimea once with that Kápytsya guy,” grumbled the base, a fellow physicist in his previous life, apparently. “Should’ve taken a woman instead,” retorted my mensch. “I would, but they all leave me in May,” the other explained, with a glee I thought unexpected. “Seasonal allergy!” diagnosed mine. “Yep, that’s what it is, and I can’t make it before July...”
    I put