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Two weeks after the annulment, as though Ani doesn’t have enough shit going on, her mom calls.
“How are you doing, sweetie?” her mom asks, her voice crackling through the phone in a tone that anyone who hasn’t known her for twenty-three years would mistake for warmth.
It’s starting to snow again in New York. Ani’s sitting on the front stoop with a cigarette pinched between her fingers, watching the smoke curl up into the air. When she and Vera were kids they’d chase each other up and down the stairs from the sidewalk to the porch and back again, until one day Vera took a tumble and lost a tooth. Their grandma forbade them from playing on the stoop after that.
Ani doesn’t like the house very much. It’s creaky, and loud, and worst of all, it’s where she grew up. But her grandma left it to her, and besides, it’s not like she and Vera can afford to live anywhere else. Even with her newfound wealth. What does $10,000 get you these days, anyway? Like, six months of groceries?
Thinking about the cash in her nightstand puts a bitter taste in her mouth. She swallows it down.
“I’m doing okay, mom,” she says, dutifully giving the answer that she knows her mom wants most to hear. I’m okay means I don’t need you. I’m okay means keep living your life, mom — no need to think about me any more than you’d like to.
And the amount her mom would like to think about her is approximately “not at all”. Ani’s got that pretty well figured out by now.
“That’s good,” her mom says. Her voice is already drifting, her interest having begun to wane the moment she completed her maternal duty of inquiring about her child’s wellbeing. “What have you been up to lately?”
“Not much,” Ani says.
“That’s a shame,” her mom says. “You should come down and visit sometime, Anora. Max and I would love to see you.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Ani mutters, and takes a drag of her cigarette.
So, she’s an out-of-work stripper. At least she’s got some money to get by with for now, thanks to the generosity of the Zakharov family. Most of the $15,000 from that first week with Ivan is already in her savings account, and she portions out the remaining cash to help with bills, groceries, and anything else for the foreseeable future. The ring gets stuffed under a pile of shirts in her dresser.
After a while Vera, though initially sympathetic, begins to unsubtly hint that she should find a new job. Ani contemplates going back to HQ — she has enough friends and loyal clients there that she’s sure Jimmy will re-hire her — but showing her face there again so soon feels insurmountable, no matter how much Lulu reassures her that nobody except Diamond feels anything but sorry for her, and nobody likes Diamond anyway, so who the fuck cares?
Ani doesn’t tell her that sometimes being pitied is worse than being jeered at. She can handle being ridiculed and insulted. But the very thought of being looked at by someone who feels bad for her, who wishes they could have saved her, makes her skin feel hot and itchy.
The first and last person she dated after starting at HQ had wanted very badly to save her, although it turned out it was less about her and more about his own feelings. He’d been totally cool with her job until he wasn’t. It’s been two years since she broke up with him; she hasn’t dated since.
Lulu checks in with her whenever she gets the time. It helps to have someone to talk to and a reason to leave the house. Without Lulu, Ani’s pretty sure she’d be rotting in bed and letting the empty takeout boxes pile up until the stench got to be too much.
They meet up at a bar that both of them love, because it’s open in the afternoon and it’s a fifteen minute subway ride away from HQ. In the light of day, the only other people there are either working on their laptops or reading a book. The two of them sit at a table in the back. Ani orders her favorite mocktail.
Lulu fills her in on everything going on at work — the weirdest new clients, who’s beefing with who, the hot butch janitor who just started working Thursdays. It’s a nice distraction, and the familiarity is comforting, even if Ani still can’t stomach the idea of going back there just yet. Lulu, very kindly, doesn’t mention Ivan, though she must be bursting with questions. She seems to get that if Ani wants to talk about it, Ani will bring it up.
For her part, Ani isn’t sure how to even begin with talking about it to someone else. Every time she even thinks about it the shame and anger and sadness crash over her like a wave all at once. She can’t bring herself to see the girls at the club again because she knows all of them, even the ones who love her, will be looking at her and wondering, how did she let that happen to her?
Night after night Ani sits by the window and asks herself that same question. As the train trundles by she asks, and asks, and never has the answer.
Ani is twenty years old the first time she gets hired as an escort. The guy is fifty-something, well-mannered, soft-spoken. His name is Jacob. He’s a professor at Brooklyn College, and he’s newly divorced. These are all things that she learns about him in the club and repeats to herself in the car ride over to his place, her hands fidgeting with the hem of her dress.
It’s easy to be self-possessed in HQ. This, though — her first house call, as he put it, even though his current residence is a motel room — is different. She’s never done anything like this before. Not all the other girls do full service, but the ones who do have given her some tips about what men are usually looking for and what to expect. She makes eye contact with her driver in the rearview mirror, and maybe he can sense that she’s anxious, because he smiles at her encouragingly.
When Jacob hands her the cash, she can see the tan line still on his ring finger. He seems nervous too, which helps to calm her own nerves somewhat as she counts the money, exhales, then smiles at him sweetly.
“I love your place,” she says, which makes him laugh. A wave of relief rushes through Ani, followed by a rising satisfaction in her stomach. She puts the money in her purse and slips past him to move to the bed, making sure to brush his chest meaningfully as she does. This is just her making a guy feel good. This, she can do.
He’s booked her for an hour, so they spend the first fifteen minutes sitting on his bed and getting to know each other (he teaches accounting, she dropped out of college a couple months ago, they both like Anita Baker, they both hate drivers who rev their engines way too loud). Then he indicates that he’d like to get down to business, so they get down to business.
The sex is okay. He goes down on her for a little bit, perhaps to be polite, then gets on top and thrusts into her with his eyes screwed shut. If this were an ordinary encounter, Ani thinks, she’d let him know it wasn’t working for her — but he’s paying her, so she moans and writhes obligingly because he strikes her as the kind of man who gets an ego boost off his partner having a good time. It seems to work; he comes after five minutes of thrusting and rolls over to the other side of the bed, looking sated.
In the moments after, Ani lies there quietly and listens — to the gentle whir of the ceiling fan, to the ragged sounds of Jacob’s breathing, to the beating of her own heart, in her chest and in her ears. It would be an exaggeration to say she feels like a new person now, but something in her has definitely changed. Whatever it is, she hopes it’s good.
“Hey,” Vera says, right as Ani gets to the front door. “Where are you going?”
Ani huffs out an annoyed breath, the kind that only her sister can get out of her.
“The beach,” she replies, snippy.
Vera laughs.
“It’s freezing,” she says. “Are you insane?”
“Maybe!” Ani says, already eager to be done with the conversation, and slams the door behind her.
It is freezing. She pulls her scarf up over the bottom half of her face and shoves her hands into her pockets as she stomps through the muddy snow caking the sidewalk. Her grandma used to tell her that this was nothing compared to the winters back in Russia.
“You’re very lucky, Anora,” her grandma would say, squinting down at Ani against the winter wind. “To grow up somewhere with such a forgiving climate.”
Her grandma was always comparing things to Russia. Her whole life in the United States, she barely ever left Brighton Beach, and she never learned English. When Ani was a kid that would upset her, the idea that there was a whole world out there, beyond Brighton Beach and even beyond Brooklyn, that her grandma refused to be a part of. But now she thinks that maybe her grandma already knew what her world was, and didn’t feel the need to be part of another.
As she begins to pick up the first whiffs of sea air, Ani thinks about the old album filled with photos of her grandma over the years. She’s looked through that album a couple times, but there’s one photo in particular that she remembers with perfect clarity. It’s of her grandma at age twenty, standing in front of her family’s house in Saint Petersburg, caught mid-laugh. The first time Ani saw that photo, she was captivated by it — the twinkling eyes, the dimple in her cheek. Whenever Ani remembers her grandma now, the image of that young woman is always there, too, vibrant and alive.
After fifteen minutes of walking she makes it to the beach, which is, predictably, pretty much empty. Nobody goes to the beach in February. Shivering in the cold, she manages to light a cigarette and hold it between her teeth as she trudges through the sand towards the sea. If she kept going west from here, she’d hit Coney Island.
Fucking Coney Island. She never liked it much before, and she certainly doesn’t like it now. Ivan had yelped like a dog when he saw the Ferris wheel, then groaned in bitter disappointment once he found out that it was closed over the winter.
“It’s okay,” he’d said cheerfully, his arm slung around her shoulders. “We come back in springtime, yes?”
Thinking about that moment — about all the moments the two of them shared on the Coney Island boardwalk — makes Ani feel like crying. Her hands clench into fists in her pockets; she swallows the tears. It doesn’t matter if he meant it or not. None of it matters anymore. That time is just a weight on her shoulders now, a memory of a memory that won’t leave her alone.
She stops walking right where the waves hit the shore, then ebb back into the sea. Her grandma, for all her complaints about America, used to love coming to the beach in warmer weather. Ani lets out a puff of cigarette smoke. Overhead, a lone seagull circles. She looks out at the horizon and thinks about how, across this big wide ocean, there’s a house in Saint Petersburg where a young woman lived and was happy, for a time.
When Toros told her in no uncertain terms that she didn’t love Ivan, Ani had known in her gut that he was right.
He’d been fed up and desperate, obviously, and using every tool at his disposal to fix the whole fucked up situation, but he was right. The part that Ani can’t figure out in retrospect is why she fought against that so hard, why she was so desperate to believe that there could still be a happy ending for the two of them. It can’t just have been to avoid the humiliation of being cast aside. She’s not stupid, especially not when it comes to her own feelings.
So she knows she didn’t really love Ivan. She thinks that, given time, she would have learned to love him. She’d liked him very much. Cared for him. They’d had a good time together. And for a moment there, Ivan had really loved her. Or, at least, he’d believed he really loved her, which felt like much the same thing when you were on the receiving end of it. Something about that had cracked open a part of her that had been closed off for a long time.
Ani has never thought of herself as a particularly lonely person, but the idea of belonging somewhere, of being married to someone who seemed to understand her and would take care of her, had been such an intoxicating prospect that once she touched it, she never wanted to let it go. She feels like half a person now that she knows what it was like and doesn’t have it anymore.
Ivan had not understood her, in the end. And she hadn’t understood him. She couldn’t. He was the kind of person who could afford to give his love out freely, even to a random stripper from Brighton Beach, because in the end the worst thing that could ever happen to him was being taken home.
She checks Instagram one day to see that Ivan’s posted something for the first time in the three months since the annulment. He’s smiling goofily at the camera and surrounded by a cluster of young, attractive people that reminds Ani of the posse he ran with in New York. The post is geotagged Saint-Tropez, France. She stares for a second, then closes the app and tosses her phone aside.
It’s springtime in New York when Ani decides, finally, that she’s ready to go back.
Jimmy sounds surprised to hear from her when he answers her call, not least because she usually texts him. They meet in the alleyway behind HQ, which the girls like to joke is Jimmy’s preferred office. Someone from the salon next door tosses a garbage bag full of hair into the dumpster. Ani pulls her leather jacket tighter over her shoulders.
“Thought we’d never see you again,” Jimmy says.
“Yeah, well, here I am,” Ani says, having already spent weeks pushing past the embarrassment of crawling back to HQ after making such a big deal of leaving.
“You wanna come back?” Jimmy asks, which is very nice of him, because she wasn’t looking forward to saying it.
“Yeah,” Ani says. “Full-time.”
Jimmy sighs the way he always sighs whenever one of his employees makes a request that will slightly inconvenience him.
“I can only do part-time right now,” he says. “We got some new girls in while you were taking your… vacation.”
Ani purses her lips.
“Fine,” she says.
“Okay,” Jimmy says. “Y’know, some of the guys have been asking about you.”
“What’d you tell them?”
“That you were gone for good,” he says. “Boy, are they gonna be happy to hear I was wrong.”
Ani feels that old familiar pang in her chest, the one that makes her feel very hollow all of a sudden. She hopes that it doesn’t show on her face. If Jimmy notices, he doesn’t care.
“Text Dawn and tell her you’re doin’ part-time,” he says, turning around to head back into the club. “And welcome back.”
“Thanks,” Ani says, and watches him disappear through the back door.
When she gets on the subway heading home, one of the posters in the train catches her eye. It’s an advertisement for a local community college. She eyes it cautiously as she sits down, suddenly very aware of who else might be around. Something about reading this particular poster in public makes her feel self-conscious, like someone nearby might figure out what she does for a living and laugh at her. But nobody gives a shit, of course.
She spends the whole ride home staring at that poster. When the doors open at her stop, she snaps a picture of it before stepping out.
Ani is fifteen years old when she finds out that she’s hot.
Every one of the girls at HQ has a story about that moment — the moment when they discover that they’ve got it, that thing that men are willing to pay money to be close to. Usually people assume the it refers to their boobs. But physical attractiveness alone does not a stripper make; it takes courage and charisma to achieve true hotness. As Lulu likes to say, the difference between a stripper and a salesperson is that one of them takes their top off.
So Ani is fifteen years old when she notices that when she talks, people tend to listen. Boys, mostly, tend to listen. The girls aren’t as interested. Some of them seem to resent her for it. But Ani decided a long time ago that she wants to be a lawyer, ever since she saw one on TV as a kid, and the fact that people want to hear what she has to say means that she must be on the right track. It doesn’t matter if they only listen because she wears tight shirts — they’re listening anyway. (This becomes a fun anecdote to tell clients, in the future, when they ask her if she always wanted to be a stripper-slash-escort. No, sweetie, not always.)
One boy in particular, Tom Weisman, seems to really like listening to her. He listens to all the music she sends him, invites her to smoke with him and his friends behind the school at lunch, drives her home every day even though he lives twenty minutes in the opposite direction. He’s two years older than her, which makes her seem cool and important, and in high school, those two things are the beginning and the end.
Even back then, Ani doesn’t have any illusions about what he’s looking for out of her. But she goes along with it, plays the part he wants her to play, because being adored by someone, even conditionally, feels good. And she’s sure that given enough time, he’ll come to know her as a person, too. Maybe he’ll even like her. For four months Tom pays special attention to her, and then, the night before his high school graduation, he finally gets his reward.
After Tom finishes with a long groan and lets his head fall inelegantly onto Ani’s shoulder, the first thing she thinks is that he’s going to college out of state in the fall, which means they’ll have to do long distance, and she hopes he’s accounted for that.
Turns out she doesn’t have to worry about it at all, because after a summer of ice cream and beaches and mediocre sex, Tom breaks up with her the week before he heads off to college. People are already whispering about it when they go back in the fall. About how Ani whored herself out to Tom and then got dumped, like it’s her fault.
Later she discovers that the high school boys have been keeping a list of the hottest girls in school, and she’s in the top three. Tom was the first one to write her name in last year. Small consolation, she supposes. It doesn’t matter what boys say or think — at the end of the day, they still want to fuck her.
Dawn, ever the meticulous planner, figures out a way to get Ani back into the schedule. She gets Thursdays and weekends, which means she has to figure out what she’ll be doing with the rest of her week. She goes around different clubs to gauge their interest in her, and notes down the most promising ones. But that community college poster stays in the back of her mind.
The idea of putting herself out there and going back to school after nearly four years away makes her feel paralyzed with uncertainty. It hasn’t been that long since she last believed she could be something else, and was proven wrong. What’ll happen if she goes back to school? What if she’s not good at it? She already knows what she’s good at. She could just do that forever. Or, at least, until people stop thinking she’s hot. Which will hopefully be a very long time from now.
Her first week back at HQ is mercifully easy. The girls welcome her back with open arms, and if any of them feel sorry for her, they don’t let it show. Nobody asks any questions about Ivan. Ani’s so grateful for them that she could almost cry. A new girl’s taken over her old locker, so Jenny makes room in hers for Ani’s stuff. Even Diamond gives her a wide berth, though Ani’s sure it has something to do with the warning glares Lulu keeps sending her way.
It might just be the excitement of being back, but Ani manages to enjoy every shift she works that week, even when the guys at one of the bachelor parties are a little too drunk for her liking. When she heads home on Sunday night, she’s exhausted but satisfied. The sun’s just beginning to rise when she collapses on her bed and falls asleep before her head hits the pillow.
She’s up at noon, which is unusually early for her after a workday. Vera even makes a snarky comment about it, but Ani’s in such a good mood that she just smiles and says she’s going to the deli, and does she want her to pick anything up?
“Uh,” Vera says, perplexed by and suspicious of this sudden amicability. “Yeah, sure.”
Ani hasn’t been to the deli in a while. She used to go with her grandma all the time, and a lot of the old ladies there have been working there since she was a kid. When she arrives they greet her by name in Russian, their faces softening into welcoming smiles, and offer her free samples of homemade sourdough.
“No, thank you,” Ani replies in English, but she beams back at them gratefully. When she was younger her grandma would chat with the ladies while she and Vera ran up and down the aisles. They’d open up the ice cream fridge and pick out which ones they wanted, even though they both knew their grandma would never let them get it. Ani grabs the groceries Vera asked for, picks up whatever else catches her eye, then wanders over to the ice cream fridge and peers into it, just because.
She’s considering which flavor of sorbet she’d most like to try when suddenly she feels it. Ani’s very used to being looked at — because, duh — but it’s not often that she’s looked at by someone whose gaze lingers hot and heavy on the back of her neck, sending a shiver all up and down her spine. In fact there’s only one person she can recall looking at her like that. She pauses, her heart beating faster all of a sudden, and whips around.
“What are you doing here?”
Igor looks exactly the same as he did the last time she saw him. Black shirt, black hoodie. He’s lurking — it seems like he fucking loves to lurk, even when he doesn’t have to — around the sauce aisle. He looks startled when she turns around, like he didn’t expect her to notice him. Most people wouldn’t. But most people aren’t her.
“Well?” Ani demands, trying to cover up the fact that seeing him again is making her feel just as thrown as he looks. Most people aren’t him, either. “Are you stalking me or something?”
It’s an absurd thing to say; she hasn’t seen him in four months, and if he’s really been stalking her, she would’ve noticed by now. He’s not that good at what he does. But it puts him on the back foot here, either because he’s now fending off the accusation or because he doesn’t fully understand it.
“I’m doing shopping,” he says. “For my grandmother.”
Ani frowns at him.
“That the best you can come up with?”
“It’s true,” Igor insists, and holds up a package of cream cheese to illustrate his point.
Something loosens inside Ani’s chest, against her better judgment. When she’s not fighting for her life against him, he’s actually not that much of a threat, although it’s not nearly enough to lower her guard completely. She’s aware that people around them are starting to look, so she moves closer to him. He tenses up slightly when she does, a breath coming just slightly harsher than it should.
“Pretty creepy to just stare at a person without saying anything,” she says.
“I — I didn’t know what should I say,” Igor says. “I didn’t see you first, but then I heard them calling you by your name, so…”
Ani’s eyes flicker towards the nice ladies working the deli counter. He must have heard them say her real name. They call her that because that’s how her grandma always introduced her. It’s what she was called for most of her life, before she made the decision to separate her old self from her new self. Almost everyone who knows her now knows her as Ani, but Anora still hangs around here, scattered across Brighton Beach in delis and drugstores and market stalls.
Igor being here too all of a sudden, his life brushing up against hers, fills her with an emotion she can’t identify. After she’d finished crying, his arms cradling her to his chest in his grandmother’s car, it had all been a little too much. She’d drawn back from him slowly, unable to meet his gaze and vaguely, uncomfortably aware of the fact that his dick was still pressed up against her.
He’d been silent when she started to ride him and silent as she cried, so he was silent when she extricated herself from him and fell back into the passenger seat, feeling too miserable and tired to even think about where to go from here. They’d sat there for a few moments, not saying anything, before Ani finally turned her face away from him and opened the car door. She had not looked back.
She’s thought about him a few times since then, usually whenever she rifles through her dresser and catches a glimpse of the ring. She does regret not saying anything else to him, after he went to the trouble of getting the ring back, even though he can’t have known how much it meant to her. It was a kind thing to do.
And now he’s here. He knows where she lives, and she knows where he lives, so she knows there are places closer to him if he just wants to pick up groceries. But she doesn’t press that point; if she follows it to its conclusion she’s not sure what she’ll find.
“How are you?” Igor asks, awkwardly courteous.
“Fine,” Ani shoots back, crossing her arms. “And you? Still attacking young women in their own homes?”
Igor looks around to check if anyone’s listening.
“I did not attack you,” he says, then corrects himself: “I did not want to attack you. And it was not your home.”
“Right,” Ani says coldly. “Well, I thought you were gonna fuckin’ kill me, did you know that? Do you feel good about that?”
“I’m sorry,” Igor says, low. “And no, I don’t. Of course.”
Ani gives him her best steely glare. Igor studies her face in response.
“I, uh,” he says. “I’m glad you are fine.”
Ani scoffs.
“Why, were you worried about me?”
“Yes,” he says. He doesn’t appear to be lying. That infuriates her. She presses her lips together and looks away from him.
“I don’t wanna see you around here,” she says. “Or anywhere.”
“Okay,” Igor says, and for some reason, his easy acquiescence pisses her off even more. No matter how hard she pushes against him he just refuses to budge. The image of his face below hers, filled with hazy tenderness, enters her mind unbidden. She pushes it aside and turns around, hoping that now he’ll just leave.
His eyes are still plainly on her when she strides back to the ice cream fridge to grab a thing of strawberry sorbet. She dutifully ignores him as she checks out — the ladies do a bad job of hiding the fact that they’ve absolutely been gossiping about the two of them — and exits the deli with her bags in tow.
As soon as she’s back outside, she sees that Igor’s car is parked across the street. She must not have noticed it when she arrived. The sight of the car unearths her last memory of being inside it, which holds her in place for a few moments. That’s long enough for the door of the deli to open and close behind her, followed by a series of slow, heavy footsteps that stop at her shoulder.
“I can drive you home,” says Igor. “So you don’t have to walk with your shopping.”
It’s only a ten minute walk back. Ani frowns at him. She should just leave and not give him the satisfaction. She really should.
Five minutes later, his car pulls up in front of her house. For the second time in recent memory Ani stares out at her front door from the passenger seat of Igor’s car.
Well. Igor’s grandmother’s car. She realizes then that she’d assumed his grandmother was dead, and the apartment and car were both inheritances. The fact that he still lives with and goes to the deli for his grandmother, who is very much alive, is something she’s still figuring out how to feel about.
Maybe that’s why she doesn’t get out immediately like she told herself she would. Even with her face turned away she can feel that he’s looking over at her. As ever, waiting for her move.
“Thanks,” Ani says, and gets out of the car. She opens the back door to grab her bags from the backseat. Igor quietly watches her gather up her things.
Then: “Maybe I will go back to Russia.”
Ani looks up at him.
“What?”
“I,” Igor says, reconfiguring the sentence in his head, “I maybe will go back to Russia.”
“Why?” Ani asks, maybe a little too quickly.
“I was working for Zakharov family, but now…” He makes a vague gesture; they both know what he means. “So I maybe will go back to Russia.”
Ani holds his gaze. There’s something new in his face, like a door that’s been opened just a crack, like a question searching for an answer. She knows the question. She knows the answer. But all she can remember is the last time someone asked her for an answer, asked her like he meant it, and she gave him what he wanted.
Also, she doesn’t even fucking know this guy. And he definitely doesn’t know her.
“Well,” she says. “Good luck in Russia.”
She grabs her bags and turns away quickly, slamming the door behind her. She’s sure she wouldn’t be able to stomach the look on his face if she stayed even a moment longer.
Spring turns into summer. Ani starts waking up to the kind of sunlight that her grandma used to bask in on the back porch, always while puffing her pipe and contemplatively watching the trains go by. As a kid Ani would try to join her there, but on such days her grandma favored stillness, and Ani was always restless, so she never stayed for long. Sometimes when Ani looks over at that screen door she can almost see her grandma’s shadow moving through it.
She’s settled into the rhythm of working part-time at HQ, along with some shifts here and there at other clubs. The tips are still good, and she’s still good at what she does, and the money she came into at the start of the year is still there if she needs it. Some weeks are better than others, like always. Some clients are better than others, like always. So it’s much the same as before, which is all fine. It’s good, really.
Well, one thing is different. Two months into her return to the club, a guy who’s just bought three dances from her asks, the alcohol on his breath hot and sharp: “You ever do house calls?”
Ani’s glad her back is to him at that moment, because the panic that flickers through her shows all over her face. She manages to regain her composure quickly and shoots him a teasing smile over her shoulder.
“No, honey,” she says, grinding down a little harder to distract him. “But I can direct you to some of the girls here who do, would you like that?”
Afterwards, she retreats to the locker room to eat her dinner, the interaction weighing heavy on her mind. Lulu’s in a private, so she can’t talk it out with her right now, and she doesn’t really want to bring it up to any of the other girls. She doesn’t want to come off like she feels superior for declining full service — she’s dealt with her fair share of that before, on the other side — and she only trusts Lulu to understand.
Ani’s always been very good at separating her feelings from her work. She has to be, when her work is all about manufacturing feelings. She makes men feel wanted. That’s the job, whether she’s taking her top off in the club or taking it from behind in a hotel room. Before this year, she would have said there was no difference between the two. That letting someone fuck her for money existed in the exact same zone as gyrating on their lap for twenties, physically and emotionally. Ivan wasn’t the first guy to think he was in love with her — he was just the first guy she’d believed.
Now, though, the idea of pretending to be some guy’s sweet, amenable, ready-to-fuck girlfriend, even for an hour, makes her stomach turn. The threat of being looked at again by a man who thinks he knows her is just unconscionable. As soon as Lulu is on break Ani’s dragging her outside for a smoke and a debrief.
“Mm, I don’t blame you,” Lulu says after Ani explains the situation to her. “Honestly, I think you were brave as hell for even coming back here. So what if you don’t wanna do full service anymore? You’re allowed to tap out whenever you want.”
“But I used to be good at it,” Ani says, nails anxiously tapping on her vape pen. “I hate the idea that I’m, like… ruined now. Just because of one guy who screwed me over.”
“Sure, and he’s a fuckin’ piece of shit for that, we know this,” Lulu says. “But, honey, nobody can ruin you if you don’t want ‘em to.”
Ani takes a hit of her vape and exhales with force, blinking back the tears forming in her eyes.
“Then why do I feel like this?”
“Oh, Ani,” Lulu says, and pulls Ani in for a hug. “Maybe you’ve just changed.”
In July, Ani turns twenty-four.
“Happens to the best of us,” Lulu says, grinning widely as she hands Ani a cupcake with a candle in it. “You got one year left to get with DiCaprio, so you better hustle.”
Twenty-four is the age her grandma was when she got married. Twenty-four is the age her mom was when she had her second kid. Twenty-four is the age at which Ani, for the first time in a long time, doesn’t know what to do with her life.
When she’d dropped out of school to work at HQ full-time, it was because something inside her had told her that this was where she was meant to be. But since she left and came back, it no longer feels like it once did — like a space that could hold all of her, even the parts that the rest of the world would say she should be ashamed of. Its familiarity feels more like a site for stagnation than self-actualization. It used to be that she’d walk in and discover who she was, again and again, over the course of every new night. Now she knows who she is in HQ. She wants to know who she is outside of it, too.
She briefly considers moving to a different club. A fresh start. New coworkers, new rooms, new clientele. But it wouldn’t solve the problem; it would just put it off a little longer, until inevitably the same feelings cropped up again.
It’s summer, and Ani is spending her free time trying to figure out what the shape of her future might be. As a kid she’d wanted nothing more than to get out of Brighton Beach, to get out of Brooklyn, to go somewhere completely new and reinvent herself. Well, she did that. Five nights a week for three years, she did that. She made it all the way to Manhattan, an hour-long subway ride away. And then, at the end of every night, she came right back.
She goes to the places her grandma used to take her and buys all the things her grandma would buy, cured meats and flatbreads and flowers for the kitchen. The house will never really feel like anything but her grandma’s house, anyway, so the least she can do is keep her grandma’s spirit alive in it. How absurd it is to be trapped in a place that belongs to a dead woman who never wanted to be there in the first place.
Meeting Ivan had awakened her to a part of herself that had lain dormant for a long time — a part that yearned for love, for security, for belonging, for freedom. She’d buried it under layers of toughness and grit, because that was what kept her alive; he’d somehow managed to shake it free. But Ivan couldn’t have given her any of the things she wanted, much as she tried to believe he could. He was trapped too, in a way. And, frankly, his friends were assholes.
When Igor had told her it was a good thing she wasn’t part of that family, she hadn’t been ready to hear it, with the emotional fallout still so raw and near. Maybe he was right. Then again, maybe he wasn’t. She might have been miserable, in time, but at least she would be miserable in Saint-Tropez, or Ibiza, or Saint Petersburg. She would have liked to go to Saint Petersburg.
Ani’s coming back from the beach — under her right arm, her grandma’s old beach umbrella; in her left hand, a copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem — when she sees, at the opposite corner of an intersection, Igor standing on the street and smoking a cigarette. She stops dead in her tracks, but he hasn’t noticed her. For a moment Ani considers turning around and taking the long way home just to avoid being seen by him again.
But she doesn’t. Instead she ducks into the antiques store at the street corner and watches him through the window while pretending to peruse a shelf of old clocks. He’s wearing a white T-shirt and jeans. He’s got his face turned upwards and his eyes closed, like a cat basking in the sun. He takes a drag of his cigarette and exhales slowly, the smoke spiraling up into the clear blue sky. Ani soon abandons the clocks and just brazenly watches him, even though he’s being completely uninteresting at the moment.
She doesn’t even realize that there’s a strange feeling welling up inside her until it becomes impossible to ignore. Inexplicably, it feels a lot like relief. She’s relieved to be seeing him after assuming that she never would again. Which makes no sense — when he told her he might go back to Russia, she didn’t give a shit if he left or stayed. At least, she thought she didn’t give a shit. Maybe she was wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time in recent memory that her own feelings have taken her by surprise.
Still, it’s fucking Igor. The guy who assaulted her in her own home (yeah, yeah, not her home). Who just stood by and watched as Ivan’s family took the life she’d imagined for herself and tore it to pieces. A few moments of kindness can’t undo everything he let happen to her.
But as she watches him stand on that street corner, with a shamelessness that even the cashier is probably starting to notice, she finds that the things that stick in her mind are those moments of kindness. He’d been under no obligation to treat her kindly. In fact, it might have been easier for him — for everyone — if he hadn’t. Ivan had given her whatever she wanted, had put a ring on her finger and made her feel loved, but in the end he hadn’t been terribly kind to her.
When she’d climbed onto Igor’s lap, some part of her had wanted to prove to herself that he had an ulterior motive. That he was another person who just wanted to fuck her, whose gestures were purely transactional, and who would lose interest in being kind once they got what they wanted. And despite his initial hesitation, he’d eventually seemed quite happy to receive his reward. But then the way his hands touched her face had frightened her into forgetting all about the whole thing.
Igor drops his cigarette on the sidewalk and grinds it under his shoe. Shortly after, the door behind him swings open. Ani realizes that he’s been standing in front of a medical clinic, and that now he’s turning around to speak to the old woman who’s just walked out. She’s pretty sure she can guess who that is.
Ani watches as Igor offers his grandmother his arm and guides her over to his car, which is sitting — where else — just opposite the antiques store. It doesn’t hit her until it’s too late, until he’s gotten his grandmother in the car and is opening the driver side door, until his eyes lift up to catch hers through the window.
Ani’s breath stutters in her throat as they make eye contact across the street. She’s gotten very good at reading body language over the years — the tensing of a muscle, a dilation of the pupils — but from this distance, and with a car between them, she can’t tell what he might be thinking. After a few seconds Igor looks away and ducks down into his car. She thinks he might just be leaving, but soon his head re-appears. So does his body. He’s crossing the street and coming towards her.
If the cashier didn’t think she was weird before, they certainly do now. Ani jumps a little when the door opens and Igor steps in, looking to the uninformed outsider like he’s about to smash something up. Ani’s heart begins to pound as he moves closer to her and stops two feet away.
“Hello,” he says.
Ani finds her voice again.
“Hello to you, too,” she says, slipping quickly into combativeness as though she isn’t the one who’s been staring at him.
Igor holds something out to her. Ani looks down at it to see that it’s a scrap of newspaper with a phone number scrawled across it in marker. She looks back up at him, puzzled.
“I want to say if you need help for anything,” he says, “you can… ask. And I will come.”
“What?”
“It’s my phone number,” Igor says, as though that’s the thing she’s confused about. He pushes the piece of paper towards her again.
“Is this what you’re doing now?” Ani asks, instead of taking it. “Odd jobs?”
“Odd…?”
Ani huffs out an annoyed breath.
“Like if someone needs something done, you go and do it. You know, they do that kinda stuff on the internet now.”
“Oh,” Igor says. “Not ‘someone’. Just you.”
God, she cannot get a handle on him.
“There’s no way you got a real job.”
“I asked Toros again to help me,” he says. “Now I am doing… what is it?” He switches to Russian. “Maintenance.” Back to English. “At his church.”
Ani smiles sardonically.
“So not a real job, then,” she says.
“No,” says Igor. “Not a real job.”
So he’s gone running back to what he had before, too. Him, at Toros’ mercy. And her, back at HQ. Everything’s exactly like it was.
He’s still holding out the piece of paper, waiting to see if she’ll take it or tell him to fuck off. Ani looks at it again.
“Why are you doing this?” she asks.
“Doing what?” Igor says, a little confused.
“Like,” Ani starts, upset though she doesn’t know why. “Driving me home. Saying you’ll help me out. You don’t even know me.”
“I know you a little,” Igor says. “And… when I was going away from your house, before, I was thinking that I should have told you to call me if you need anything.”
Ani narrows her eyes.
“Why?”
“Because,” he says. “I want to help you.”
“Oh, sure,” Ani says. “Like I need your fuckin’ help.”
“Sometimes, maybe,” Igor says. “Maybe you will need.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then you don’t call me,” he says, like it’s simple.
Ani feels that twinge in her heart again.
The thing is, she’s pretty sure he wants her. This has, historically, been the case with the men in her life. They tend to want her, and they make that known eventually. She’s clear-eyed about that fact, not least because she’s felt Igor’s desire for her up close and personal, both in how quickly he got hard in her hand and in the look on his face as she straddled him. And in her experience, no matter how pure men think their intentions are, they’re still always just waiting for her to give them their reward.
Ivan had wanted her, but he was paying her, so he was allowed. Igor, on the other hand, is working awfully hard to convince her that he doesn’t expect anything, despite the fact that he definitely wants her. Maybe all he wants in return is her attention. Her forgiveness, even. Oh, that would make him feel good, she bets. Or maybe, like a lot of the guys she meets, he’s lonely and in search of connection. It’s all just a different kind of transaction.
A part of her wants to tell him to forget about her. Why should she give him one more second of her time, just because he treats her kindly? But another part of her wants very much to be treated kindly, so much so that it feels like she might break apart.
Before she can second-guess herself, she snatches the paper out of his hand. Igor’s face relaxes into something like gladness.
“I will go back to my grandmother now,” he says.
“Fine,” Ani replies, with as much cutting indifference as she can muster.
“Goodbye,” Igor says. Then he’s gone, out of the antiques shop and back across the street to where he’s left his grandmother in the car. Ani looks down at the piece of paper in her hand. His phone number stares back at her. He didn’t even ask for hers in return. It’s her move here — she could easily never call him at all.
She calls him that night while she’s lying in bed. It’s two in the morning. He picks up after four rings.
“Hello?”
His voice sounds heavy with sleep; she probably woke him up. She doesn’t care.
“This is my number,” Ani says, staring up at the ceiling.
“Oh,” Igor says, low and gravelly and more than a little disoriented. “Okay.”
“Okay,” Ani says, and hangs up.
It’s August, and the heat makes the trash on the sidewalk smell even worse than it usually does. Before her shift, Ani comes into the locker room to put her stuff away and finds some of the other girls all gathered around a dressing table.
“I was waiting tables,” Jenny is saying as she eats a granola bar. “I just wanted to make some extra cash on the side.”
“And then what?” Dawn asks with an amused smile on her face — she’s helping to set up the punchline.
“Found out this was way easier than waiting tables,” Jenny says, which makes the girls around her laugh. Then she notices Ani and calls out, “Ani, tell yours!”
“We doing origin stories?” Ani says, opening her locker. “Mine’s not that interesting.”
“The new girls haven’t heard it,” Jenny says.
“Hmm,” Ani says, pretending to think about it as though she hasn’t told it a million times in the last few years. “I was in school, and I just felt like I should be doing something else with my life, so I came in and asked Jimmy for a job.”
“I’m in school right now, too,” says Piper, a new girl who joined during the time Ani was away. “Did you end up finishing?”
“I dropped out, actually,” Ani replies, shoving her bag into the locker. “Didn’t feel like the right fit, you know?”
Piper nods thoughtfully.
“You think you’ll ever go back?”
For a moment, Ani isn’t sure how to answer. They’ve taken the community college poster down since she first saw it, but she still thinks about it whenever she gets on the subway and stares at the ad now in its place. This time last year, she would’ve said no without a second thought. She would’ve said that working at HQ is the only future she can envision for herself, and she’s happy with that. But now she doesn’t know.
In the weeks following the annulment, Ani spent countless hours mulling over Ivan’s careless treatment of her life. On the worst days, she could only ever sit and feel stupid. She’d had the gall to want something, and the world had retaliated by stripping her bare of her illusions and leaving her with some pity cash and a battered sense of self-worth. She’s not sure if it’s cowardice or shame that causes her to freeze up now, with all these girls’ eyes on her.
“No,” is the answer she finally gives. “No, I don’t think so.”
Nobody has a particular reaction to that — why would they — but her inability to voice even the possibility of wanting something makes Ani feel awfully pathetic. It takes bravery to change your own life, she thinks, as she turns away from the girls so they don’t see the look on her face. It had taken bravery for her to walk into HQ, ask for a job, and be working the floor three days later. She’s not sure where her bravery went. Maybe she’s all out.
Five months after Ani starts working at HQ, her grandma dies.
Her grandma’s always said that she wanted to die in the summer, so she can sit on the back porch one last time and go out with the warmth of the sun in her bones. It’s the end of August when it finally happens — just in time, Ani thinks, as she watches her grandma’s body be moved into the car that will take it to the funeral home.
Her grandma, ever the pragmatist, has set aside some money of her own to cover at least part of a traditional burial.
“When I die, your useless mother will not pay even one cent for it,” she’s told Ani, her old, knobbly fingers still working away at knitting a new scarf. “Count on that!”
Ani knows it’s true. Her mom has never felt a particularly strong allegiance to her own kids, so there’s no way she feels even a slight sense of obligation to her mother-in-law. After Ani’s father died and they all moved into her grandma’s house, it seemed like her mom was constantly looking for a way out. Then she finally found one, and never looked back.
At the funeral, Ani watches silently as the casket is lowered into the ground and the rabbi recites a prayer. She and Vera take handfuls of earth and place them in the grave, watched by all the people who knew and loved their grandma. Some of them helped to pay for the funeral service. Ani’s mom is not in attendance.
Afterwards, as she and Vera are driven home by Mr. Chernin from the pharmacy, Ani gazes out the window and thinks about how she never told her grandma about her new job. She’s told Vera, though not entirely by choice — Vera had gotten suspicious of the cash that Ani started carrying around and prodded Ani about it until she came clean. But her grandma never knew, and never asked, even when Ani was suddenly able to pay for a new range hood after months of complaints about the old one.
It’s probably for the best, anyway. Ani’s sure her grandma wouldn’t approve. She always wanted Ani to make something of herself, whatever that meant to her. What Ani would’ve wanted to explain to her grandma is that this is her making something of herself, using the only things in the world that are her own, and she’s good at it. She’s good at it, and she likes it, and isn’t that all that matters?
Well. That’s what she would’ve said. There’s no telling how that conversation would’ve gone, now.
Later that week her mom calls to ask about the funeral. Ani tells her that it was fine, and they haven’t heard any updates about the will yet, and oh, by the way, she’s a stripper at a club in Manhattan now.
“Really?” her mom asks, sounding marginally more interested than she normally does. “Well, as long as you’re staying safe, sweetie. Are you coming down to visit this winter?”
Ani screws her eyes shut to keep the tears from coming out. For a moment she wants her mom to be angry. She wants to argue, she wants to fight, she wants to feel like her mom gives a shit. Anything. But all she gets is crackling silence.
“Maybe,” she manages to say, her voice thick with the effort.
“Oh, Anora,” says her mom. “I hope you do.”
Ani is walking home from the deli one day when she gets a text from Vera.
I just bought a new TV stand off facebook marketplace
Ani frowns down at her phone and texts back: Why?
Her sister replies: For the TV
Ani replies: Yeah no shit lol
A few moments of silence, during which the three dots indicating her sister is typing something appear, then disappear. Ani supposes she’s crafted a mean retort, then deleted it, since she’s obviously trying to get Ani to do something right now.
Then the text comes in: Can you go pick it up this afternoon? Here’s the address.
Ani clicks on the address and watches it pop up in Google Maps.
“Fuckin’ Queens?” she says out loud, staring at her phone incredulously. Then she types that into the message bar, with four question marks, and sends it.
Vera replies: Please? It was only 20 bucks and we rly need a new one
That, Ani thinks, is not at all true. Nobody ever ‘really needs’ a new TV stand. But Vera has been complaining for a while about how they never get any new furniture, to which Ani always replies that it’s a waste of money. If a 20-dollar TV stand will placate her sister for a while, she supposes she’ll bite the bullet and go pick it up. The only issue is that they don’t have a car, and Ani isn’t too keen on the idea of calling a cab and probably having to pay extra to transport furniture.
She’s in the middle of typing all this out when the solution occurs to her, and after a few moments of deliberation, she deletes her message and sends back: Fine.
This time, Igor picks up on the second ring.
“Hello?”
He sounds muffled, like he’s in a noisy outdoor place.
“Are you busy right now?” Ani asks, crossing the street.
“Uhh,” Igor says. “A little bit busy, I think.”
“Are you gonna be busy in an hour?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I need you to drive me somewhere,” Ani says.
“Okay,” he says.
“And help me move some furniture.”
“Okay,” he says. “That’s all?”
“That’s all,” Ani says. “See you in an hour.”
“See you,” Igor says, and hangs up first.
He pulls up at her house an hour and seven minutes later, wearing a dark gray T-shirt and a pair of sunglasses. He takes his sunglasses off when she gets in the car, then unlocks his phone and hands it to her.
“I need the address.”
Ani takes his phone, looks down at the screen, and hesitates. Igor notices.
“What is the matter?”
“Nothing,” she says. “I’ve just never used the Russian keyboard before.”
“Oh,” he says. “You can switch English. Here.”
He leans over to switch the keyboard to English so she can type the address in. Igor looks at the screen contemplatively (“forty-seven minutes,” he informs her) and then they’re on their way, pulling onto the Belt Parkway and hitting traffic almost immediately.
Ani slumps into her seat, resigned to the fate of sitting in a car for the better part of two hours with a man who she thinks wants her but won’t do anything about it. Well, anything other than drive to Queens in the middle of a Tuesday. If he’s letting her take advantage of him, she thinks, she’s sure as shit going to take advantage of him. As the car inches forward, Igor clears his throat and speaks.
“How well do you know Russian?”
Ani frowns over at him.
“Why?”
“Because you never used Russian keyboard,” he says. “But I see you speak and listen in Russian, before.”
“I know Russian,” Ani says. “I just don’t like to speak it. And I can read it, but I don’t write it.”
“Ah,” Igor says. “That is usual for people here?”
“Um, I’m better with it than most,” Ani says. “I was raised by my grandma, and she never learned English.”
“Where in Russia your grandmother is from?”
“Saint Petersburg.”
“Oh,” Igor says. “I have cousin in Saint Petersburg.”
“Cool,” Ani says, idly picking at her nails. Silence settles over the car — he seems to have run out of questions to ask her for now — though it’s not the uncomfortable kind.
As the traffic clears up briefly and they begin to head towards what will no doubt be another bout of traffic further down the road, Ani casts a quick look over at Igor. They’ve just had a short but amicable conversation, where Igor wasn’t being cagey and Ani wasn’t being combative, which is a first for them. That’s progress, Ani thinks, though she’s not sure what they’re progressing towards.
After a few more minutes, Igor speaks again.
“What furniture are you moving?”
“My sister bought a TV stand,” Ani says, staring out the window. A plane bound for JFK flies overhead, making a loud whoosh. “She asked me to go pick it up this afternoon.”
“Oh, so you are living with your sister?”
“Yeah,” Ani says.
“Cool,” Igor says, mimicking the way Ani had said it earlier, which makes her smile. “Do you like to live with your sister?”
“I mean,” Ani says with a shrug. “She’s my sister. It’s our house. We both need someplace to live. It doesn’t matter if I like it or not.”
“I see,” Igor says. “I have one sister, too.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“My younger sister,” Igor says. “She is studying for becoming a doctor, in Russia.”
“Mine’s trying to be a hairdresser,” Ani says. “You see your sister often?”
“She call me sometimes,” Igor says. “I have not seen her for… three? Three years. Since I came to America.”
“You should’ve just stayed there,” Ani mutters, becoming her grandma for a second.
“I like America,” Igor says, glancing over briefly. “And anyway, I have to take care of my grandmother. She was living here with my uncle, but he went back.”
“What about your parents?”
“Still in Russia also,” he says. “They didn’t want to come.”
“They had the right idea,” says Ani.
Igor laughs.
“Why you are so negative?”
Ani looks over at him.
“Do you think your life is better here than it was there?”
Igor takes a moment to consider the question; Ani watches the thought move across his face, against the trees and houses and other cars. Her whole life, she’s only really known two kinds of Russians: the ones who are like her, born in America, and the ones like her grandma, who came to New York in the 70s and 80s. She remembers thinking about that during her week with Ivan, curled up on the couch as he showed her Russian videos that she’d never seen before and laughed through every one of them. America was just a passing craze, for him; he’d always known who he was and where he was from. Sort of like Ani’s grandma, except unlike her, he could always go back.
Sometimes Ani wonders what she would have been like if she’d been born and raised in Russia, too. Maybe she’d be more like Ivan, carefree and unthinking. But then again, very few people get to be like Ivan, Russian or otherwise. Case in point: Igor is nothing like Ivan. Not in any of the ways that matter.
“I think,” Igor says now, slowly, “that my life has changed very much since I came to America. Some good, some bad. So… not always ‘better’, like you say. But different. I like different.”
Ani studies his face. The slope of his nose, the firm set of his jaw. His bald-ass head. Thirty years old, he says. Some guys are just like that. One time a client who was in the process of balding had asked her to pull his hair during sex; she’d obliged, but been really worried the whole time that she might pull it all off. Afterwards she’d told Lulu about it and the two of them had laughed so hard they almost cried. She smiles to herself at the memory.
“What exactly do you do here that you don’t do back there?” she asks, leaning her face against the seat as she watches him, watches how his fingers grip the steering wheel. “You really like going to Six Flags or something?”
“Today I fix the church roof,” Igor says. “When you were calling me. I never do this in Russia.”
“You —” Ani starts, and cuts herself off with an incredulous laugh. “You were on the fuckin’ church roof, and you still answered the phone?”
“It was not that hard,” Igor says. “To answer the phone is just one button.”
Ani shakes her head in disbelief and turns back to the road as the car speeds up, finally leaving the worst of the traffic behind them. The atmosphere in the car has settled into something a little more comfortable, something vaguely resembling familiarity.
“Bet you never drive forty-seven minutes to pick up a glorified block of wood, either,” she says. Igor lets out a short laugh.
“No, never,” he says. “I will only do this for you.”
“Liar,” Ani says.
“Okay, fine, I will do it for Toros as well,” Igor agrees. “But for him, I will not like it.”
September in New York this year is hot and muggy. Ani’s been letting her hair grow out, but the sweat and the humidity get to be too much after a while, so she asks Vera to give her a haircut.
“You gotta pay for that,” Vera says, typing something on her phone.
Ani rolls her eyes.
“Don’t be an asshole.”
“Fine, fine,” says Vera, though she doesn’t make any move to get off the couch. “Get the stuff set up in the bathroom, I’ll be there in a sec.”
Their grandma was the one to cut their hair while they were growing up. Ani’s friends would go to real salons, real hairdressers, which seemed so chic and cosmopolitan, even if it was just a tiny local place that they were in and out of in twenty minutes. But every time she asked her grandma if they could go to one, the answer was always the same.
“Why would we do that?” her grandma would say dismissively, rummaging through drawers to find the scissors. “Waste of money.”
Vera has her own combs and scissors now, but their grandma’s old scissors are still somewhere in the kitchen. Grandma liked to cut their hair in the kitchen while listening to the radio, which Ani has always found kind of gross. She moves a chair into the bathroom and sits down facing the mirror though it’s too high up to be of much use. Vera comes in a few minutes later, tools in hand.
“How short do you want it?” she asks.
“Like…” Ani indicates a spot above her elbow. “Here.”
“Alright,” Vera says, smacking her gum. “What if I gave you, like, a bowl cut?”
“I’d fuckin’ kill you, probably,” Ani says, but she’s smiling. Vera snickers to herself as she starts combing Ani’s hair out.
It’s not the first haircut she’s ever gotten from her sister. The first one had been when they were both kids. Ani wanted to see what she would look like with bangs. Vera had sat her down in the kitchen, grabbed their grandma’s scissors, and given Ani a set of choppy, uneven, too-short bangs. When she saw herself in the mirror Ani had screamed out loud, and their grandma had returned from the grocery store to see the two of them red-faced and in tears — Ani because her hair was ruined, and Vera because Ani had slapped her over it.
Now, at least, Vera seems to know what she’s doing. Ani would hope so, anyway — otherwise all that tuition she helped pay has gone to waste. As her hair begins to fall to the floor, she watches her sister’s face in the mirror and wonders when she got to be a grown-up. Having a little sister is that sort of thing over and over again; every few months she’ll look at Vera and realize that she’s becoming a full, actual person, one that Ani has nothing to do with.
When Vera is done, Ani tosses her hair around to admire how it falls over her shoulders.
“You like it?” Vera asks. She sounds, shockingly, like she actually cares what Ani thinks. Ani looks back at her, struck with affection.
“Yeah, I love it,” she says. “Great job.”
Vera shrugs it off, like always, but Ani catches the pleased smile that crosses her face as she starts to clean up.
Igor is squinting against the sun. Ani watches as the ice cream in his hand slowly melts, dripping past the sides of the cone and getting dangerously close to falling on his fingers, and says nothing.
They’re standing on the boardwalk, which is less crowded than usual for noon on a Wednesday. She’d called him as she was drying her hair that morning, the bathroom mirror still fogged up, and asked if he wanted to come with her to the beach. He’d said yes without asking any questions and was in front of her house half an hour later. Then he spent the whole car ride seeming like he was about to say something, and just as Ani was starting to get worried, he finally said, “I like your hair.”
Ani’s not totally sure why she called him. She’s been going to the beach by herself all summer. She thinks she might be tired of being on her own all the time, and she doesn’t have a whole lot of friends around Brighton Beach. The girls from HQ live scattered all across New York, and other than Lulu, who lives in Astoria and is often busy with her online business, she seldom sees any of them on her off days. It’s nice to be able to call someone and know for sure that they’ll come.
So, she’s at the beach with Igor. It’s a bit weird, the way it’s always a bit weird with him, but she doesn’t mind it so much anymore. To anyone else, they probably look like a couple out on the boardwalk, rather than… whatever the hell they are. Friends, maybe, although even that feels wrong.
Igor swears in Russian when he feels the ice cream drip onto his hand. Ani stifles a laugh as he dabs ineffectively at it with a tissue, then just gives up and salvages what he can with his mouth, racing against the natural order of things to finish it off before the sun finishes it off for him.
“Told you you should’ve ate it immediately or not at all,” she says.
“I was — what is it? Taking the time,” Igor mutters through a mouthful of ice cream.
“Taking my time,” Ani corrects him.
“Taking your time?”
“No, I —” Ani starts, but then the look on his face makes her smile and shake her head. “Never mind.”
It’s a beautiful day. Sunny, but not overbearingly so; breezy, but not too cool. It’s so nice out, in fact, that Ani thinks her grandma would refuse to go to the beach on a day like this. Her grandma would be out to the market, or to the deli, or to Tatiana’s. Anywhere with people she knew.
“You should always be with other people on a nice day,” she would say. “What’s the point of spending a day like this on your own?”
Igor’s looking at her now, ice cream cone fully conquered, though his hand is still sticky. The clear sky makes his eyes look even bluer than usual.
Ani looks back at him, unflinching. During those three frenzied days when they’d first met, he’d look at her with such startling, striking clarity that she always had to turn away, before he could see what it did to her to be looked at like that, in the midst of such emotional turmoil. Now, though, she won’t turn away. She doesn’t want to. She wants him to feel it, too — like her gaze could pry him wide open.
“Do you, uh,” Igor says. “Do you like to come to the beach?”
He’s a little self-conscious. Ani feels a twinge of satisfaction. She is good at what she does, after all.
“I do,” she says. “I used to come here with my grandma a lot.”
“I like it, too,” Igor says. “When I came here for first time, I was very surprised. I never went to the beach before, back home. And now I can go all the time.”
“Hm,” Ani says, leaning on the railing and looking out at the ocean. “That’s what my grandma said, too.”
The sunlight makes the surface of the water sparkle. There are kids playing in the waves, laughing loudly and splashing each other with seawater. On the beach there’s a lady decked out in silks and gold jewelry, a glass of wine in her hand.
“Very nice,” Igor says.
“Yeah,” Ani says. “Ivan preferred Coney Island. Fuckin’ weirdo.”
In all the months since the annulment, she hasn’t said Ivan’s name out loud to someone else until now. She doesn’t even realize until she lets it slip, that name that her throat used to close up around. All this time she hasn’t been able to talk about him. The thing that nobody would understand, that nobody can understand, is how real it had felt to her back then. So real that she doesn’t want to risk changing those memories by talking about them.
Ani is surprised at how easily Ivan’s name comes now. It feels sort of like an exhalation, like finally letting go of something she’s been holding on to for a long time. Igor hesitates for a second, then moves closer to her so he can lean on the railing, too. His arm brushes up against hers briefly. She lets it.
“Ivan has a lot of money, but not good taste,” Igor says. Then he glances at her and adds, quickly: “Well, in some things, he has not good taste. In some other things, he…”
He trails off. Ani laughs at him, though not unkindly.
They spend the next two hours at the beach. Igor buys them both gyros; she finishes hers first, biting into it ravenously and getting sauce all over her hands. He watches her demolish it, looking impressed.
Neither of them is eager to do anything but sit on the sand and look out at the waves. And talk, sparsely. He tells her about the life he left behind in Moscow and asks about growing up in Brooklyn. And he asks about her grandma. Nobody ever asks about her grandma.
“She was a tough lady,” Ani says, absentmindedly picking up handfuls of sand and letting them sift through her fingers. “Always in other people’s business. Always knew everything that was going on. Right until the end.”
“Do you miss her?” Igor asks.
“Yeah,” Ani says, eyes fixed on the horizon. “Of course I miss her.”
“When did she die?”
“About four years ago now,” Ani says. “August 24th.”
There’s silence between them, and then Igor speaks again.
“My grandmother is sick,” he says. “So I don’t go back to Russia. I am staying here, with her, until…”
Ani’s stomach twists. Igor’s voice is still steady but it’s taken on a brittle quality now, like it could snap in half. She swallows the lump that suddenly forms in her throat.
“I’m sorry,” she says, and she means it, but she also finds herself hating him a little bit for telling her that. They’ve been having a good time together, the two of them finally on something approaching even footing, and now he’s gone and ruined it by bringing his own shit into it. It’s too honest, too real, too fast.
It’s her fault for calling him in the first place. She’s not the kind of person who should be doing things like this — like sitting on the beach with a man who wants to know her. He knows about her sister. He knows about her grandma. He knows her real name. And now she knows him, too. The thought makes her angle her face away from him as she hugs her knees closer to her chest.
Igor notices the sudden shift in her mood. Of course he does — he notices everything. For a moment it seems like he might say something, but he doesn’t. He just sits there and waits for her, until she’s ready to go.
The night of the wedding, after another bout of exuberant sex during which Ani has to remind Ivan several times to slow down, she lies in bed and looks up Ivan’s parents.
Nikolai and Galina Zakharov. There’s exactly one family portrait available online — outside of the Russian internet, anyway — and features Ivan as a teenager, his hair just as messy and overgrown as it is today. Ani glances fondly at Ivan, who’s fast asleep and snoring next to her. She’s still glowing with the wild, reckless exhilaration of becoming a wife all of a sudden. A wife to someone with a gigantic mansion, and a pair of parents who give a shit about him, and a lot of fucking money.
His parents are glowering sternly up at her through the phone screen. Ivan’s mom has got her hand on his shoulder. But Ani smiles down at them anyway, silently repeats their names over and over, then tries interchanging them with Mom and Dad. It sounds wrong, even in her head. Mr. and Mrs. Zakharov it is.
Even then, even with their marriage certificate within arm’s reach, Ani has to remind herself that this isn’t a dream. She hadn’t let herself think Ivan was being serious, until he had looked at her with those eyes, so sincere and entreating, and it had shattered something inside her that had been waiting to be broken. He’s the type to think that just because he really wants something to be true, it has to be. And maybe she is, too. She wants this to be real. She wants, she wants, she wants.
Ani’s sure Ivan doesn’t know even half of who she really is. She’s spent the last two weeks pretending, playing the part that he paid to see. She doesn’t know him, either. But now that they’re married, they have all the time in the world to get to know each other. She hopes he likes what he finds. Ani puts her phone down, settles into bed, and lets the rise and fall of Ivan’s chest lull her to sleep.
When September is over, the days start growing shorter and colder. Ani feels the chill in the air and thinks about last winter. Everything’s the same as it was then, and at the same time, everything’s worse. She used to be so open to everything, so ready to jump headfirst into any new experience, like she had nothing to lose. But now she feels stuck, unhappy with where she is, yet still too wracked with shame and embarrassment to actually do anything about it.
After that day at the beach, she doesn’t call Igor again. He doesn’t call her, either, even though sometimes she finds herself wishing he would, if only so she can let it ring and not answer. But he won’t. He’s not the kind to do that.
In the absence of a greater purpose, Ani does what she’s always done: she goes to work. Fall is when the big spenders usually start showing up again after the typical summer lull. Ani used to live for this time of year, when she could throw herself into the performance and luxuriate in the knowledge that she had found work worth doing. Every day would bring something new, every client an untapped well. Now it feels like she’s just going through the motions. She’s starting to feel hungry, ravenous for something she can sink her teeth into, heedless of the cost. But for a person like her, at least, there’s always a cost.
It’s the middle of October when Lulu tells Ani that she’s switching to part-time at HQ because her online business has, unexpectedly, taken off.
“Some chick made a TikTok about it, and now everyone wants a piece,” she says, laughing around her cigarette. “That’s the fuckin’ world we live in, I guess!”
Her joy is so infectious that Ani has to join in, taking Lulu by the hands and jumping up and down in celebration. They’re making so much noise that people on the street are looking at them, but she doesn’t care. For a moment her heart is full. For a moment she’s caught in the warm glow of possibility.
Then they go back inside, and Jimmy waves her over.
“Hey,” he says. “You want full-time hours again?”
Ani stares at him.
“Huh?”
“Not a complicated question,” Jimmy says, leaning on the doorframe. “You want ‘em or not?”
Ani’s brain stutters on the answer. She thinks about her finances — she’s been pretty disciplined with the money she budgeted out at the beginning of the year, and along with her and Vera’s current incomes, it’s been enough for the two of them to get along as usual. But getting back to the earnings of last year would be nice. It’s always nice to have more money.
And yet, something makes her say: “No. Not right now.”
Jimmy shrugs.
“Okay,” he says. “I’ll give ‘em to someone else.”
That night Ani doesn’t go to bed immediately. She opens her laptop and types in the name of the community college she saw that ad for back in the spring. She finds the website and navigates to the page about applications. The application deadline for the spring semester is in three weeks.
She stares at it for a few moments, then closes her laptop and turns off the light.
On a sunny November day, Ani visits the cemetery.
It’s unusually warm for November. She tries not to think about the troubling implications that that has for the planet and instead thinks about how this was the kind of day her grandma would have loved. For all her talk about missing home, Ani knows that her grandma liked living in Brighton Beach. The weather and the people both agreed with her.
How strange it must be, she thinks as she traipses down the trail through the cemetery, to live out your last days knowing that you’ll be laid to rest in a land so far from where you were born. When her grandma had gotten the diagnosis, they’d had to have an uncomfortable conversation about that. Her grandma had insisted that all that mattered was a traditional burial, regardless of where it was.
“America or Russia — doesn’t matter,” she’d said, settling into the big armchair. “As long as my soul ends up in the same place.”
Ani, staring down at the words Stage 4 on the paper, had blinked back tears and agreed.
She hasn’t been to see her grandma all year. She really should’ve gone on the anniversary, but the thought of what her grandma would say about all the choices she’s made as of late kept her from it. On a day like today, though, she feels determined not to let her own shame keep her from visiting. She loves her grandma more than she wants to preserve her own feelings.
Her grandma’s headstone sits at the top of a small hill. It’s plain and unfussy, bearing only her name in Russian and the length of her life. Ani rummages around in her purse for the stone she picked up at the beach. She’d searched around the shoreline and finally settled on this one, mostly smooth but still a little jagged. She crouches to put it on the headstone and lets her hand rest on the cool granite.
“Hi, grandma,” she says, in Russian. Her grandma used to tell her that the lilting American accent she spoke Russian with was cute, and not to listen to anyone who made fun of it. “Sorry I haven’t been around. I’ve had some things to deal with.”
She smiles to herself at that, even though her grandma wouldn’t get why that was funny.
“I miss you,” Ani says. It feels redundant, but sometimes it matters to say things out loud. “Um, Vera’s doing fine. She’s gonna be finishing her apprenticeship soon, so hopefully once she gets her license she’ll start getting paid more. And I still have my savings. So you don’t have to worry about that.”
In the distance, she can hear cars driving by. She wonders if there are other people coming to the cemetery to say hello to their loved ones. She inches closer and lowers her voice.
“I don’t know what to do,” she says. “I feel like I’m stuck. I don’t know if I don’t know what I want, or if I do, and I’m just scared to want it. Does that make any sense?”
She can hear her grandma’s voice in her head, blunt and no-nonsense, in a comforting sort of way: No, it does not make any sense. Why on earth would you be scared of that?
“Last time I went for something I wanted, it didn’t go too well, grandma,” Ani retorts, like it’s an actual back-and-forth. “What am I supposed to do if the next one doesn’t work out, either?”
There’s a gentle breeze. Ani stares at her grandma’s name, strokes her thumb across the headstone and pretends she’s stroking it across her grandma’s hand. She thinks about that photo of her grandma, standing in Saint Petersburg with laughter caught in her cheeks.
She must have left some dreams behind when she came to New York. She’d probably been scared, too. Maybe she’d even felt like her life was over. But she’d kept living, and found new dreams, and died knowing there were people who loved her. When measured against an entire life, two weeks seems like nothing at all. Ani resists the urge to plant a kiss on the headstone, the way she would kiss her grandma’s forehead in the evenings, before she says goodbye.
“Hello?”
The sound of Igor’s voice makes Ani’s mouth feel dry.
“Hi,” she says; she swears she can hear him hold his breath over the phone. “I need a favor.”
Igor, ever the obedient servant, doesn’t ask any questions. Ani briefly considers asking him how he is, how his grandmother is, but she doesn’t. Instead she tells him what she needs, and he says, “Okay.”
She hangs up and waits for his call back, pacing around her bedroom and biting her nails. She shouldn’t; her grandma always told her it was a bad habit. Well, her grandma never went through any of this. Maybe the whole ‘leaving your home behind’ thing might be comparable. Maybe.
Igor calls back eighteen minutes later. Ani picks up immediately, not even remotely interested in playing it cool.
“He says yes,” Igor says. Ani can hear in his voice that he’s just had a very long argument. “But you have to use his phone. And five minutes only.”
“His phone?” Ani says, clenching and unclenching her right hand. “Where the fuck am I supposed to do that?”
“Come to the church,” Igor says. “Nobody will bother you there.”
“Fine,” Ani says.
“I can pick you up,” Igor says.
“No, thanks,” Ani says, and hangs up.
Toros is waiting for her out front when she arrives, with Igor lurking behind him. He looks disgruntled, like he’s been strongarmed into doing this and would’ve preferred never to see her again. Ani doesn’t know what Igor must have said or done to get him to agree. She decides not to find out.
As soon as she gets in Toros is shepherding her away from the entrance and towards the parking lot out back. He keeps looking around suspiciously to make sure nobody is staring. Ironically, Ani wants to point out, him acting so shifty is probably more likely to draw attention to them — but she stays silent until they finally reach a semi-secluded corner and he pulls out his phone.
“You get five minutes,” Toros says, opening his contacts list. “Five minutes. Got it?”
“Got it,” Ani says coolly. She looks over at Igor, who seems to be actively trying not to watch her too closely, then back at Toros. “Thanks, by the way. For doing this.”
“You’re welcome,” Toros says grumpily, and hands her his phone with the contact pulled up: Ivan Zakharov.
Ani stares down at it for a second, then presses the Call button. As she lifts the phone to her ear, she has to try to keep her hands from shaking. Toros seems like he’d be content to hang around and monitor the call, but Igor grabs him by the elbow, mutters something, and forces him to step out of earshot.
Ani turns away from the two of them, her heart in her throat. She and Ivan never did get to have a proper talk, when all was said and done. She’s so tired of being held hostage by the memory of him. She wants to talk to the real thing, to know if he still thinks about her. She wants to know if he thought it was real. She wants to make him understand what it did to her, to be let down like that. She wants to make sure he never forgets.
And of course Ivan, in typical fashion, takes his sweet time picking up. She’s starting to think he might not at all when finally he does, sounding more than a little annoyed: “What?”
“Hi, Ivan,” Ani says, feeling all of a sudden like she might cry. She pushes it down. “It’s Ani.”
Silence, for a few agonizing seconds. Then:
“Ohhh,” Ivan says. “Ani. How are you?”
“I’m good,” Ani says. “And you? How’s… working at your dad’s company?”
“That? Ah,” Ivan says, and laughs the kind of laugh that you can only envision as being paired with a glass of champagne in the hand. “I am on — uhh, break, from work. So, it’s fine.”
His accent has gotten even thicker since he left New York. Ani presses her lips together.
“You gave that up already, huh?” she says.
“Eh, he will make me go back eventually,” Ivan says. “Are you still dancer?”
Ani closes her eyes for a second.
“Yes,” she says. “Yes, I am.”
“Well, good,” Ivan says. “You are very good dancer. 10 out of 10.”
“Thanks very much,” Ani says drily. “Listen, Ivan —”
“Why you call me from Toros’ phone?”
“Because I’m not allowed to talk to you.”
“O-kay,” Ivan says slowly. “So… why you want to talk to me?”
The question makes Ani hesitate. All the things she wanted out of this conversation run through her head at once, so many that she doesn’t even know where to start. She’s convinced herself that making sure he’s just as miserable as her will fix her. Now that she’s here, she’s not sure that’s true anymore.
“I just wanted to see how you were doing,” is what she finally says.
“Oh,” Ivan says. “Well, I am good. You are good, too. So it’s all goooood, man.”
Ani, despite herself, smiles at that. He’s still acting ridiculous and trying to make her laugh, even now. And in an instant she realizes that she doesn’t care if Ivan is still hurting over what happened or not. In fact, she doesn’t even care if he hasn’t thought much about her at all until right now. Which, knowing him, is not outside the realm of possibility. Hearing his voice again makes it all seem very far away now. Like they have nothing to do with each other anymore.
“I’m glad to hear that,” she says, and grips the phone a little tighter. “Ivan?”
“Yeah?”
“I just want to ask,” she says. “Back then… was it real? Did you mean it?”
There’s a long pause. Ani glances over her shoulder to see Toros lighting a cigarette with an impatient look on his face. She bets she has until the end of that cigarette to wrap up this call.
When Ivan finally answers, he does it in Russian.
“I think,” he says, as thoughtfully as he knows how, “that I felt it was real. But I also didn’t know what that meant because I had never felt anything like that before. I mean, you are very good at your job.”
Ani laughs, even as her heart starts to ache.
“It’s true!” Ivan says. “I knew it probably wasn’t going to last, but it was just too fun being with you, so I didn’t want to stop. You had fun too, didn’t you?”
Ani lets out a quiet breath. He makes it sound so simple. To him, now, it probably was. It was an adventure, a story that he’ll tell whenever it occurs to him to tell it. It didn’t change his life. It won’t change hers, either.
“I did, mostly,” she says. “Take care of yourself.”
“You, too,” he says cheerfully.
She ends the call, just in time for Toros to come stalking back over to snatch his phone out of her hand.
“Okay,” he says. “Not a word of this to anyone. Got it?”
“Yeah, I got it,” Ani says, rolling her eyes. There’s not a single person she’d even care to tell about this.
Well. There’s one person, maybe. He’s currently standing ten feet away and looking over at them, his hands stuffed into his jacket pockets. Ani looks at him and realizes that she’s glad to see him again.
“Igor,” Toros says, making a dismissive hand gesture that indicates he’s done with this. “Take her home.”
“Oh, uh,” Igor says. “I don’t know if…”
“It’s fine,” Ani says. “Let’s go.”
The ride back to her place is quiet. It often is, with him. Ani stares out the window as they drive. She feels different. Something in her is different. Normally, that would scare her. She’d try to tamp it down. But now she lets it move through her, this differentness, until it fills every part of her with a strange and frightening longing. Suddenly whatever suffocating weight has been keeping her frozen is starting to feel the tiniest bit more bearable.
They pull up outside her house. Ani turns to Igor and sees that he’s looking intently at his own hands on the steering wheel.
“Thanks,” she says.
“You’re welcome,” he says. Then: “I’m, uh… I’m sorry. That I made you uncomfortable last time, at the beach. I didn’t mean to.”
“That’s okay,” Ani says, eyes running up and down his side profile until she thinks she’s got it memorized. She’s a little disappointed. She wants him to look. She wants him to see her. “How’s your grandma doing?”
“She is… fine,” Igor says, in a way that Ani recognizes. It’s the tone you take when you know your grandma wouldn’t want people to worry, so you try to keep them from worrying. “And what about you?”
“I’ve been good,” Ani says. “Still at the club. But I’m thinking of also going back to school in the spring.”
It’s the first time she’s ever said it out loud. Saying it makes it feel so much realer, the possibility bursting into existence like technicolor. Igor finally looks over at her then, his eyes locking onto hers in that curious way of his.
“What you are studying?”
“I…” Ani starts, then pauses. “I don’t know yet. I guess I’ll figure it out.”
Igor nods, contemplative.
“Cool,” he says, again with the same kind of inflection that she uses. Ani huffs out a laugh.
“Are you making fun of me?”
“No,” Igor says. “I like the way you talk, so I copy you.”
“Oh, yeah?” Ani says, raising her eyebrows. “You gonna learn English from me?”
“If I can be good in English as you are in Russian, I will be very happy.”
“You’ve got a long way to go.”
“Well, I am only speaking English with you.”
“You don’t got any other friends?”
The corner of Igor’s mouth twitches.
“I didn’t know you are my friend.”
They’re flirting a little now, Ani realizes. She’s an expert at that — a professional, even — but flirting just for fun is something she hasn’t done in a while. With his eyes on her, that lovely feeling, giddy and shy and excited all at once, blooms in her chest. She shifts to angle her body towards him slightly — not so much as to be blatant, but enough that he’ll pick up on it. She likes the way his eyes flicker down for a second to register the motion before returning to her face.
“I dunno what else you’d call me,” she says. “Unless you’re just using me for your little English practice. Are you?”
Igor does smile then, for real, and the way the light falls on his face makes Ani notice the little scars etched into his skin. He’s handsome, in a weird way. In a way that she’d tell Lulu about, then refuse to show a photo of, because it’s the sort of thing you can only really appreciate when you’re face to face with him.
“No,” he says. “But if you will keep talking to me, I will keep listening.”
Ani smiles back, all warm inside.
“Maybe I will,” she says, and reaches out to open the car door.
Igor doesn’t say anything as she gets out of the car and heads up the stairs to her house, but she knows he’s watching her. This time she looks back. Just for a second, before she goes inside.
The community college application is easy. The tuition fee, not so much. Ani spends an hour alternating between staring at the cash in her lockbox and staring at the money in her bank account. She thinks briefly about asking Vera to help out, but decides against it in the end. She’s the older sister — it’s her responsibility. And besides, it’s not like Vera doesn’t have expenses of her own.
She adds up the total cost of each credit; triple checks it to be sure. She has the money, technically. Enough that she wouldn’t have to take out a loan. But she might have to take some of it out of her savings. Her grandma always told her to leave her savings untouched unless it was an absolute emergency. Ani isn’t sure if this counts.
For a moment she considers selling the ring. That’s a non-starter, though. The ring is hers, a symbol of something that meant something to her. In the end, she submits the application and pays the application fee, and resolves to work longer hours over the holidays so she doesn’t feel so bad about paying tuition when the time comes. It can never just be easy, she thinks. But still, when the acceptance email comes in a few days later, Ani can’t help but feel that breathless swoop in her stomach, like that moment when a roller coaster climbs up the track and then stops just before it plunges down again.
She’d started at HQ all those years ago because it had thrilled her, the idea of using her body and her charm to command attention. Feeling that thrill again makes everything in her life seem brighter. She’s still scared, still worried that she might be terrible at it or discover she hates it, but at least then she’ll know. And the world will keep spinning. She’ll dream a new dream.
The days get colder. Somewhere in the back of Ani’s mind, she’s aware that soon it’ll be a year since Ivan first walked into her life. It seems like a very long time ago. It seems like no time at all. She wonders if he’s thinking about that too, wherever he is.
She doesn’t go to the beach anymore, with winter right around the corner, but every time she looks out the window and misses the sea air, she takes her phone out and calls Igor. He always picks up, even when he’s supposed to be working. At first Ani makes up excuses, nonsense reasons for calling, which he indulges by pretending to believe her. Then, after a while, she just stops faking it.
“My sister is graduating soon,” Igor says. Ani can tell from the way he breathes that he’s smoking a cigarette. She wonders where he is. It’s dark out; she imagines him standing underneath his apartment building, his head tilted up slightly towards the sky, the column of his throat illuminated by the moonlight. For her part, she’s sitting on her bed and looking out the window.
“Congratulations to her.”
“In June,” Igor says. “Finally she is done with studying.”
“Are you going to see her?”
“I don’t think so,” he says. “I think… if I leave America, it will be hard for me to come back.”
“Oh,” Ani says. “Yeah. Shitty situation.”
“Yes,” Igor agrees. “But she understand.”
“Mm-hmm,” Ani says. She moves away from the window and lies back on her bed, listening to the ambient noise of the street outside. “You do have to stick around for your grandma.”
A moment; a breath.
“There are other things as well,” Igor says. “Other things I like about being here.”
Ani smiles to herself and crosses one ankle over the other. When she speaks again it’s lower, more deliberate.
“Like what?”
“Like…” Igor says, letting it trail off. “The beach.”
“Right.”
“The food.”
“Great food.”
“And maybe,” Igor says; she can hear a smile in his voice as he takes a long, slow drag of his cigarette — “Maybe also the people.”
Ani’s heart flutters, embarrassingly. She’s pretty sure they both know the deal here. She’s also pretty sure she can have him whenever she wants. But she’s enjoying this part. The lead-up. She wants to stay in it for a while.
“You got people in Russia, don’t you?” she says, teasing out his real meaning. She wants him to say it.
“True,” Igor says, obliging, his voice washing over her like a rush of heat that settles in her stomach. “But not like you.”
Lulu invites Ani to a New Year’s party at a rich client’s club in Manhattan.
“You don’t have to come,” Lulu adds hurriedly, clearly worried that Ani will suffer war flashbacks or something of the like.
Ani responds, “Bitch, of course I’m coming.”
It’s nice to have an excuse to get dressed up. She hasn’t been to many parties lately. She puts on her favorite party dress (mostly classy, but still sexy enough to get free drinks) and gets to the subway fifteen minutes earlier than she has to.
As she sits on the train to Manhattan, surrounded by people who are probably also headed to their own New Year’s plans, Ani thinks about Ivan’s party. She and Lulu had gotten ready together at her place, all the while laughing and throwing out increasingly outlandish guesses for what a Russian oligarch’s son might have at his New Year’s party. She’d already been giddy with excitement as they set off for Ivan’s house, even before Ivan officially made his big offer.
When she arrives at the Manhattan club, it’s still slowly filling up with guests. By midnight, it’s packed full of young professionals and socialites, a very different crowd than the one Ivan ran with.
Ani loops her arm through Lulu’s and shouts over the music: “Do you feel out of place here?”
“Yeah, a little, but fuck ‘em!” Lulu shouts back with a huge grin. “We’re professionals too, we just happen to take our tits out at work. Maybe if some of these guys did that too they’d be more fun.”
Ani laughs and envelops Lulu in her arms. When the countdown starts, the two of them are clasping each other’s hands, just like last year. As Ani counts down to the new year, beaming back at Lulu’s smiling face, she finds herself remembering how she felt last year. The world had seemed wide open and full of potential, the stars above her head brighter than they’d ever been.
Now, as the two of them are bathed in the pinks and purples of the club lights, the world is starting to look that way again. It had lost its luster for a while there. For a time she’d thought it might be gray for the rest of her life. But the stars are still in the sky. Maybe they never left.
She gets back to Brighton Beach at three in the morning, buzzed enough that she feels it running through her whole body but not drunk, which is the perfect sweet spot. As she’s walking back from the subway, she remembers about the one person she really wants to talk to right now.
She’s about to call when she realizes how late it is, and that Igor will be asleep by now, so she sends a text instead: Happy new year!!
She’s about to put her phone back into her purse when, unexpectedly, it buzzes. He’s replied to her already: You too
Ani smiles automatically at the sight of his message, and types back: Why are you still up?
The response comes in: At hospital
Ani stops walking. Her fingers are already numb, and the longer she stands still the colder she gets, but all she can do is stare at her phone. The implication behind those two words is so heavy that it cuts through the buzz and leaves her feeling very sober. She doesn’t know what to text back. She doesn’t know what to say.
In the end she doesn’t say anything. She pockets her phone, exhales out into the cold winter air, and keeps walking home.
Five days later, right as the sun is starting to go down, it’s Igor who calls her.
They’ve talked on the phone consistently for the last few weeks, but Ani’s still surprised to see his name pop up on the screen. He hasn’t ever been the one to reach out thus far. He’s always waited for her to call first. She’s been thinking about how he’s doing, ever since that last text. She never did respond to it. She couldn’t figure out how. But she answers the call now.
“Hello?”
“Hello,” Igor says, sounding the same as always, although Ani knows that’s not an indication of anything. “Are you at home?”
“Yeah,” Ani says. He knows her work schedule; he knows she’s off today.
“Do you want to go to the beach?”
Ani glances at the window.
“Not exactly beach weather,” she says.
“We can stay in the car,” he says, and something about the unusualness of this whole situation — Igor calling first, Igor making a request of her — makes her say yes. Twenty minutes later, he’s in front of her house.
He’s wearing a neutral expression as she gets in the car and they head off for the beach. That, in itself, is concerning. To anyone else, Igor might seem unexpressive. But Ani knows now how to read what’s going on below his still features, the way thoughts and feelings move through him just under the surface. He’s keeping it all carefully contained now, and he doesn’t look at her the whole time, even though she keeps glancing his way.
They stop in the parking lot by the boardwalk. At this time of day, and this time of year, it’s empty. As soon as Igor turns off the engine, Ani turns to him and asks, “What’s going on?”
Igor sits there silently, his fingers fidgeting with the corner of his jacket, his eyes downcast.
“My grandmother,” he says finally. “She, uh… pass away on New Year’s. Just after midnight.”
Ani’s stomach drops.
“I’m so sorry,” she says, instinctively reaching out to put a hand on his arm. Igor shakes his head.
“We expected it,” he says. “She said she didn’t want to die until next year, so… she made it.”
Ani thinks about how her grandma died right as summer was going out.
“That’s nice,” she says quietly, withdrawing her hand. “How are you feeling?”
“I am okay, I think,” Igor says. “I have many things to do. Paperwork, and…”
He’s looking at her now.
“I will go back to Russia,” he says. “In two weeks.”
It takes a second for Ani to process that.
“Oh,” is all she can say once she does.
“So,” Igor says, holding her gaze. “I wanted to see, while I still can… the beach.”
“Right,” Ani says, a strange ache welling up in her chest. “The beach.”
“I liked it very much,” Igor says, his voice soft in a way that she’s never heard before. “Especially in summer.”
Outside the car, Ani notices, it’s starting to snow. Igor’s face is bathed in the light of the setting sun. It’s been just under a year since the two of them met for the first time, under less than ideal circumstances. And for a few months after that, she’d been quite content never to think about or see him again. But she realizes now that she can’t imagine getting through the past year without him. And that she’s going to miss him something awful, once he goes.
Igor is looking at her. Waiting.
All of a sudden Ani thinks to herself, no more fucking waiting.
Before she knows it she’s leaning over the console and her hands are grasping at his collar to pull him in. Igor lets out a surprised breath when their lips meet; Ani takes the opportunity to press closer, to fist her hands in his jacket and delve deeper and greedier into his mouth. Every nerve in her body is alight and thrumming with want, with the desire to be close to him, and how good it feels — how good it feels to want something and not be ashamed of it. She’d almost forgotten, she thinks in amazement, as he slowly starts to kiss her back — she’d almost forgotten how it felt to be wholly, completely herself. She feels him tentatively touch her face. This time, she lets him.
He looks stunned when she finally pulls back and looks at him with wide open eyes. It occurs to her how totally insensitive it is to kiss someone when they’re in such an emotionally vulnerable state. But before the guilt and embarrassment can set in, Igor brushes her hair away from her cheek.
“Anora,” he murmurs into the space between their mouths, his low voice weeping with tenderness. Ani lets out a ragged breath at the sound of that and kisses him again to shut him up, overcome by some feeling too big for her body. This time, with Igor’s equal participation, the kiss quickly grows messier than she’d intended it to be. Her teeth catch on his bottom lip and he makes an involuntary noise that has Ani practically squirming to clamber into his lap. But he stops her before she can.
“Not here,” he says, his breath warm on her face. “I don’t want it to be here.”
Ani looks into his darkened eyes and, out of amazement at his self-control, lets out a breathless little laugh.
“Okay,” she says, drawing back. “Okay, not here.”
As Ani sits back in the passenger seat, she notices that Igor’s mouth is shiny with her chapstick. This observation makes her realize that she’s so turned on she feels a bit light-headed, so before he can make a suggestion or act a gentleman, she says: “My sister is at her boyfriend’s place tonight.”
Igor looks at her, dazed, and starts the car.
When they get back to her house, Ani’s heart is pounding as Igor follows her up the stairs. She realizes as they step in that it’s the first time he’s ever been inside, despite having sat outside the house so many times. She doesn’t have much time to dwell on the significance of this; as soon as the front door shuts behind them, Igor is right behind her and moving her hair to the side so he can kiss her on the neck. Desire flares up between her legs again, hotter even than it was in the car, as his mouth maps out the length of her jaw.
His hands slip down her sides, deliberate in a way that feels foreign to her. Eventually she can’t take it anymore and turns to catch his mouth with her own, wondering vaguely if it’s even possible to want someone more than she wants him right now. He smiles into the kiss (yes, it is) and lets her shove him against the wall, one of his hands coming up to run his fingers through her hair.
Eventually, and after much distraction, Ani manages to navigate the two of them back to her room. Just as she pushes Igor back towards her bed and goes to shut the door, the train rushes by, plunging them both into darkness for a few seconds. When it’s gone Igor is half-lying on her bed with a stupid grin on his face, like he’s about to laugh.
“That happens always?”
Ani bites back her answering smile.
“Every ten minutes,” she says.
“Doesn’t this make it hard to sleep?”
“You get used to it,” Ani says, and takes off her shirt. His eyes follow the movement of her arms, rake over her torso, then settle back on her face. She approaches him slowly, relishing the anticipation that crackles between them, and lets one of her bra straps slip off her shoulder.
Igor lifts himself up on his hands, looking restless and reverent, and says, in Russian: “Come here.”
Ani decides that anticipation is overrated.
He says her name again and again, and every time it’s like new. Anora, as her knees bracket his hips. Anora, as his mouth drags against the inside of her thigh. Anora, as she’s riding him and he surges up to kiss her, looking like he can’t help himself. Anora, Anora, Anora. Ani closes her eyes and lets herself feel it all.
Two weeks, as Ani learns for the second time, isn’t very long.
It’s more bearable this time because they’re both aware of the time limit. And they make the most of the days they have left together. Ani goes to Igor’s apartment to help him sort out the last of his things and ends up staying over for three nights, during which they talk and laugh and fuck in places that would probably appall his grandmother.
She brings that up to him as she’s lying on the couch and catching her breath, the back of her neck sticky with sweat.
“Are you sure this isn’t, like… disrespecting your grandma’s memory?”
Igor looks up at her from his vantage point between her legs.
“My grandmother always said I should bring a girl back,” he says. “Maybe she will be happy I finally listen to her.”
Ani throws her head back and laughs, and keeps laughing, even when he lowers his head and gets back to work.
Sex with Igor is different, in a good way — although she’d never tell him that, in the interest of keeping him humble. Even outside of her job, even with boyfriends and flings, Ani’s never been able to shake some awareness of how her face or body look whenever she’s in bed with someone. But with Igor, she finds she’s able to let all that go. He’d be able to tell if she was faking anything, anyway.
“You are sometimes closing your eyes and frowning, close to the end,” he says to her one time, after. “Like you are...” In Russian: “Concentrating.”
Ani scoffs at him, crossing her arms behind her head.
“What is this, a fuckin’ performance review?”
“What is... performance review?”
“Like,” Ani says, making a vague hand gesture. “You tryin’ to tell me how well I did?”
Igor cracks a smile. He’s stopped putting his shirt back on as soon as they’re done, which at first he did like a reflex, until she asked him about it. He’d seemed taken aback by the question, as though he himself had never thought about it. That had pleased her. She likes peeling back his layers, both literally and figuratively. It’s only fair that she’s as unafraid of looking at him as he is of looking at her.
“I think I don’t need to tell you that,” he says. “I am just noticing that, sometimes, you frown.”
“Maybe I frown ‘cause I’m not enjoying myself,” Ani says.
Igor hums, the back of his hand stroking across her arm softly.
“I don’t think so,” he says, which makes Ani roll her eyes, though in her current state, it’s hard to pretend to be annoyed.
During the rest of their time together, Ani takes him to her favorite spots, even the ones that are supposed to be just for her. Igor sticks out like a sore thumb in all of these places (she tells him as much; he asks if it’s a joke about his head). He starts showing up after work to drive her home, the two of them cruising through the empty streets as the sun starts to peek out over the houses and trees. For a while it’s almost like they’re an ordinary couple who aren’t both acutely aware of the possibility that soon, they won’t ever see each other again. Neither of them tries terribly hard to fight that fact — it’s just life, Ani supposes, as she watches Igor sleep. It’s one of those things that you can’t change. Which doesn’t make it less sad. It just means they both have to be okay with it.
She doesn’t think she loves him. But she cares about him, and she knows him, and he makes her feel good — those things tend to get you a lot of the way there. She’s sorry he won’t be around to see her go back to school. She’s sorry he won’t be around to spend another summer in Brighton Beach. She’s sorry she won’t get to find out if they had a future. If she could have loved him after all. She’s glad, in a way, that she’ll never know.
In the blink of an eye, it’s the night before his flight back to Moscow, and Ani is watching Igor shut her bedroom door and run his hand over the wood, like he’s trying to memorize how it feels. Sentimental freak, she thinks fondly, as he turns towards her.
It occurs to her that this is the moment, the moment she begs him not to go, or something of that kind. Funny enough, she could offer to marry him to keep him here. She almost laughs out loud at that thought. The look on his face has her tilting her head and saying, “Do you want to talk about it?”
She doesn’t need to specify what “it” is. They’ve discussed it a little, what this means to both of them, this thing that has an expiration date. He’s made it clear that he might still be able to come back, eventually, but right now he also can’t stay. Ani understands this — she won’t ask him to, not when he’s got a whole life to attend to somewhere else. And she won’t wait for him. He knows that, too.
Igor comes over to where she’s sitting on her bed and slowly gets to his knees in front of her. Ani leans forward so that they’re face to face.
“I will be honest,” Igor says.
“Aren’t you always?”
“Yes,” he says. “But I am being very honest now. I wish I did not have to go.”
Ani smiles, her heart so full of sadness and joy and everything in between.
“I’m glad I met you,” she says.
“You did not like me at all, before.”
“Nope,” Ani says, popping the 'p'. “Can you blame me?”
“Nope,” Igor says, the same way as her. Then, for no apparent reason: “I sold my grandmother’s car.”
Ani blinks.
“Okay,” she says.
“It was around 15,000,” he says. “I think it will be enough for your school. Right?”
There’s a jolt in Ani’s chest; she stares at him, disbelieving.
“What?”
“I want you to use it for your school,” Igor says. “Or… anything else. Anything you want.”
“What about you?” Ani asks, her voice sounding very faint all of a sudden. She knows that he isn’t exactly wealthy. “Your family?”
“They will not mind,” Igor says. “Well, I will not tell them. So they really will not mind.”
Laughter bubbles up in Ani’s throat, even as tears begin to prick at her eyes. She reaches out to hold Igor’s face with both hands. He lifts a hand to encircle her wrist. In that moment Ani feels like she doesn’t want to be anywhere else but here.
“Thank you,” she says, and hopes that he understands everything she means by that.
Igor responds to that by leaning up to kiss her deeply. Ani laughs into his mouth as he pushes her back onto the bed and presses her into the mattress. His fingers entangle with hers as he kisses her like he wants to know all of her, and for now, at least, he does.
Igor goes the next morning — first back to the apartment, to get his things, then to the airport.
They say goodbye on the front porch. Ani isn’t sure what to do; she worries that a parting kiss would feel too loving, too domestic, like a wartime wife sending her husband off to the front. Maybe it’s too much for what they had, which was two weeks of something very much like a relationship, only with a predestined breakup. She’s mulling it over right until they get outside and see the cab in the distance, turning into the street.
She turns to Igor, intending to say something, but the words get caught in her throat. He looks down at her and pulls her into a hug.
Ani forgets about all the overthinking and lets herself cling to him for a long moment, enveloped by his warmth. She buries her face in his shoulder and breathes him in. His arms tighten around her. It feels right. Then the cab pulls up, and it’s over.
Igor pulls back and looks at her intently.
“Goodbye, Anora,” he says.
“Bye,” she says, and off he goes, down the stairs to the sidewalk and then to the cab. He looks back at her one last time before he gets in. She pulls her coat tighter around herself as she watches the cab head down the street, away from her.
It takes her a second to realize that she’s crying. There are tears slipping down her face, leaving tracks that feel cold and sharp on her skin in the winter air.
She doesn’t try to stop herself. She doesn’t try to make sense of it. She just stands on the porch and weeps, feeling everything in the world, her whole body raw with emotion. The sun peeks out from behind a cluster of clouds. Through her tears, she looks up at the sky, and it’s like she’s seeing it for the first time.