for you. I’m sick with you. I told you that our first night together when I asked you to marry me, I’m telling you now. Everything that’s happened to us, everything, is because I crossed the street for you. I worship you. You know that through and through. The way I hold you, the way I touch you, my hands on you, God, me inside you, all the things I can’t say during daylight, Tatiana, Tania, Tatiasha, babe, do you feel me? Why are you crying?
Now that is what I call a whisper.
He whispers, she cries, she comes to him in unconditional surrender and cries and cries. Deliverance does not come cheap, not to her, not to him, but it does profoundly come at the price of night.
And in the gray-purple morning, Alexander finds Tatiana by the basin in the bedroom, washing her face and arms. He watches her and then comes to stand behind her. She tilts her head up to him. He kisses her. You’re going to be late, Tatiana says with a small smile. His chest is bursting with the night, aching for her. Saying nothing, he hugs her from behind and then slips her vest down from the shoulders, lathering up and running his wet soapy hands over and around her breasts, cupping them, fondling them. Shura, please, she whispers, quivering, her raw pink-red nipples standing straight out, piercing his palms.
Anthony’s awake. Alexander pulls the wet vest back over her, and she says, well, now that’s useless, isn’t it. Not completely useless, says Alexander, stepping away, watching her in the mirror as she finishes washing, the breasts full, the vest see-through, the nipples large and taut against it. She dances all day in his heart and in his drunken, unquenchable loins.
Something has awakened in him here in the wine valley of the moon. Something that he thought had died.
Perhaps a young woman who was being made love to so thoroughly in the night, who was lavished with such ardent caresses, could not walk around in daylight without all the pores of her skin glistening, exuding her nocturnal exuberance. Perhaps there was no hiding her small sensual self, because the clientele sure beat against her wine trays. They came from everywhere and sat outdoors at her little patio tables, and she, with Anthony by her side, would shimmy up to them, her perpetually pulpy, slightly bruised mouth smiling the words, “Hi. What can I get you?”
Alexander didn’t think it was his son that the city dwellers kept creeping back to in their gray flannel suits on weekdays. Alexander knew this because he himself crept up from the fields one day to have lunch at one of her tables. Actually what he did was sit down at one of her tables, and Anthony came running to him and sat on his lap, and they waited and waited and waited and waited, as their mother and wife flitted about, humming like a hummingbird, laughing, joking with the customers like a comedienne—particularly with two men in pressed suits who took off their trembling hats to speak to her, gawking open-mouthed into her bedroom lips as they ordered more wine. Their expressions made Alexander look down onto his son’s head and say carefully, “Is Mommy always this busy?”
“Oh, Dad, today is a slow day. But look how much I made!” He showed his father four nickels.
Alexander ruffled his hair. “That’s because you’re a good boy, bud, and they all see it.”
Anthony ran off and Alexander continued to watch her. She was wearing a white cotton sheath tank dress, straight, sleeveless and simple, empire-waisted and hemmed just below the knee. One of the men in the flannel suit looked down and said something, pointing to the pink bubble gum toes she had painted, naked for Alexander last Sunday afternoon while Anthony lay sleeping. Tatiana jingled out a little laugh. The flannel man reached up and brushed some strands of hair out of her face. She backed away, her smile fading, and turned to see if Alexander noticed. Oh, he noticed, all right. And so finally she made her way to his table. He sat cross-armed in the round metal chair with spindly legs that scraped across the stone tiles every time he moved.
“Sorry, I took so long,” Tatiana murmured sheepishly to him, with a smile now even for him, in his dungaree overalls, not in a suit. “See how busy I am?”
“I see everything,” Alexander said, studying her face a few moments before he took her hand, turning it palm up, and kissed it, circling her wrist with his fingers. Not letting go, he squeezed her wrist so hard that Tatiana let out a yelp but did not even try to pull away.
“Ouch,” she said. “What’s that for?”
“Only one bear eats from this honey pot, Tatia,” he said, still squeezing her.
Blushing, bending to him, she said in a low mimicking sing-song voice, “Oh, Captain, here’s your apple cobbler, Captain, and is my dress going to blow above my head because you’re going so fast, Captain, and have you noticed my bobbing boobs, Captain?”
Alexander laughed. “Bobbing boobs?” he said quietly, delightfully, kissing her hand again and releasing her. “Oh, I’ve noticed those, babe.”
“Shh!” She ran to bring him food and then perched down by his side, while Anthony climbed on his lap.
“You have time to sit with me?” he said, trying to eat with one hand.
“A little. How’s your morning been?” She brushed a grape twig out of Alexander’s hair. “Anthony, come here, sit on Mommy, let Daddy eat.”
Alexander shook his head, eating quickly. “He’s fine. But I’ve been better. We were getting a shipment of grapes from another vineyard, and half a ton of it fell off my truck.”
“Oh, no.”
“Ant, do you know how much half a ton of grapes is?” Alexander said to his son. “A thousand pounds. I went over a bump in the road.” He shrugged. “What can I tell you? If they don’t want the grapes to fall, they should rebuild the road.”
“Half a ton! What happened to the grapes?” Tatiana asked.
“I don’t know. By the time we noticed and came back for them, the road was picked clean, obviously by unemployed migrants looking for food. Though why anyone would be unemployed is beyond me, there’s so much work.”
“Did Sebastiani yell at you?” asked Anthony, turning around to look at Alexander.
“I don’t let anybody yell at me, bud,” replied Alexander, “but he wasn’t happy with me, no. Said he was going to dock my pay, and I said, you pay me nothing as it is, what’s to dock?” Alexander looked at Tatiana. “What?”
“Oh, nothing. Reminds me of that sack of sugar my grandmother found in Luga in the summer of 1938.”
“Ah, yes the famous sack of sugar.” Dipping a small piece of bread in olive oil, Alexander put it into Tatiana’s mouth. “Not very pleasant, what happened to your grandparents, but I’m suddenly more interested in the truck driver who dropped the sack of sugar in the first place.”
“He got five years in Astrakhan for being cavalier with government property and helping the bourgeoisie,” she said dryly, as he got up to go.
“Aren’t you going to kiss me?” she asked, lifting her face to him.
“In front of the flannel lepers so they can see your lips open? Never,” he replied, running his hand lightly down her braid. “Stay away from them, will you?”
As he was walking past the two men, he knocked into their table so hard their glasses of wine spilled.
“Hey, man, easy!” one of
