Babayaga

Gwen gave a forced laugh. “Yes, but only occasionally, here and there. He asked me over last night to review some galleys, and then, well, you know, he’s such a chatty flibbertigibbet. It took nearly two bottles of wine until I could finally shut him up.”

Zoya looked at Gwen. She had known many women who actually were what Gwen pretended to be, and she respected those genuinely independent and capable women, the ones with great confidence, intelligence, and self-reliance. Zoya could never call these women “friends”—for almost all were so sharp and intuitive that Zoya had to steer clear to avoid being too closely observed—but she liked the ones she had known in passing, all too aware of the fact that making one’s way as a smart, fair creature in a patriarchal culture took some deft choreography. The men would not let you fight them on their terms, for if you were as strong as them then they painted you as ugly or called you cold, while if you tried to succeed by promoting your merits they labeled you as vain. Some of these remarkable women did find men who could live with them as equals, and sometimes they found partners who even accepted them as superior, but even then, too often, those men fell victim to that darkest of instincts, pride. Then Zoya watched as these “gentle” men wore their women down with those soft and cruel weapons—jealousy, mockery, absence, neglect—often with lethal results. Men might be apelike and plodding, Zoya thought, but they were not entirely stupid beasts, they knew how to climb back on top.

“Of course, a real relationship with a man like Oliver would be impossible,” Gwen went on. “He jokes about making an honest woman out of me, but I know he won’t. You know, he had his heart horribly broken some time back and I think it’s limited his ability to feel any deep emotion, really. It’s fine, though, it’s not like I’m in any rush to create some pathetic simulacrum of a happy marriage like my poor mother suffered.”

Zoya nodded politely and sipped her tea. Many marriages she had observed seemed to her awkward, strained arrangements, often painful to be near. But she was not entirely cynical and had seen, too, a rich variety of marital bonds that worked well. One extreme was where the man rose to his slippers late, almost at noon, and stayed busy nearly to dawn, while his bride awoke earlier than the birds and retired to sleep only a little after sunset, their lives thusly arranged so as to barely touch, and when they did it was warm and affectionate, like running across an old friend while traveling through the station. At the other extreme were the partnerships where every engagement with the outside world was a blending of one another’s thoughts and words as they harmoniously, almost clairvoyantly, completed one another’s sentences, wishes, desires, writing in one another’s diaries and signing each other’s letters. There was a spectrum of working, functioning examples lying between these two extremes as vast in its richness as the many species of butterflies in the wilderness.

Zoya had to agree that Gwen and Oliver had no chance of that. For starters, Gwen was slightly false-faced, the tone of her pronouncements came off as a pretender’s, finely schooled and well-read but a long day’s journey from wise. Zoya had not heard of any broken heart in Oliver’s past, but in her brief experience with him, his actions focused more on conquest than chemistry. She recalled how, in the throes of the sexual moment, his face held almost a boyish pride, as if the final act of consummation was equivalent to planting a flag on a snowy mountain peak.

Looking at the shirt Gwen had on, she realized it was the same one of Oliver’s that she herself had worn the morning after she slept over, the very day, in fact, when she had first met Gwen. She was wondering if the girl had put it on as some sort of statement when the phone’s ringing startled both of them. Gwen jumped up to answer it. “Hello?… Oh, hi … Yes, she’s up, we’re chatting now … Where?… Of course, darling, of course.” Gwen hung up the phone and sat down again. “That was Oliver. He wants us to meet him over in the park. Not exactly clear what he’s up to, but I told him we’d be there. A rendezvous in the woods,” she giggled. “How exciting.”

Zoya tensed slightly. Gwen’s casual and happy tone held a nuance that worried her, and her voice on the phone had seemed wrong. One of the things Zoya had grown very good at over the years was spotting deception, and Gwen was a liar. She could not tell what precisely this lie involved, but she knew it was not an innocent one. There was danger in the room now, it was moving in Gwen’s distracted eyes and dancing in her nervous fingertips as she snapped her cigarette case shut. Had that really been Oliver on the phone? Zoya doubted it. Was it a trap? Probably. Why? And who would care that Zoya was there? Who even knew who she was?

Zoya tried to stall. “Perhaps I should wait for Will here.”