because she envied Alice’s candour about personal matters, her apparent freedom – for a girlish chumminess that she had never really been that good at.
Nina had thought constantly about the pill since arriving in Moscow, wishing she had asked her doctor for a lifetime’s supply before she left Washington. But in Washington, she hadn’t foreseen not wanting a baby. And since arriving in Moscow, she hadn’t been able to bring herself to inquire about the pill with the embassy doctor. It wasn’t that she feared he might disapprove. Although that was part of it. It was also that she didn’t want to risk the disappointment if he told her he couldn’t supply it, couldn’t lay hands on it. And above all, she feared the further loss of her privacy: the doctor knowing, the doctor judging, the doctor reporting to someone else about her most intimate life. It was natural to feel embarrassed, but she felt more than that; she felt as if wanting birth control might cast doubt on her character, as if it revealed something overly sophisticated, libertine, decadent in her appetites – wanting sex but not wanting a baby. Pleasure for its own sake.
She had considered going out to Finland to a doctor, but she thought a medical visit abroad would alarm John. Anyway, it was melodramatic. Everyone would ask why she needed to see a Finnish doctor. Her minders wouldn’t ask her directly, but they would ask someone, and they would probably find out.
So she had become paralysed about birth control, about sex. She felt the world intruding, watching, conferring, as she had often felt in her girlhood, teachers at the Bolshoi discussing her physique, medical officers examining her, her own mother puritanically accusing her about boys, loudly consulting the Szabos after her father’s death, reviling Nina’s lack of self-control, her vulgar appetites. What was it they all needed to know about her – the spies, the eavesdroppers? And she was trying to clutch a veil around her person, around her body, to hide something precious, her shyness, a sense of delicacy. Lately it had felt almost as if her married state had been taken away from her, society’s permission to embark on an adult relationship, to feel and do anything, everything, in complete privacy, without hesitation, without guilt.
In the silence that fell between her and Alice now, Nina sensed there was a possibility of nearer friendship. She chewed her lower lip; Alice watched the dancers onstage, silently critiquing, memorizing. Nina began to want to reach for the possibility. Alice’s easy banter was seductive. Could I launch myself like that, copy her? Find out? Her lip curled with self-disdain. Posing. Faking. And she thought, I’m just a middle-class housewife. She’s a dancer, an artist. There’s an allowance for however it is that Alice might misstep, surprise, even shock, as long as she’s not onstage. She’s supposed to be – bohemian. I’m supposed to get it all perfect. I’m not a debutante in Russia. What she ended up telling herself was that Alice would be leaving Moscow in just a few weeks anyway, so what was the point of becoming friends? Although she knew full well that Alice’s certain departure was the very reason she felt safe with her.
Just then the stage manager came up to Nina, pulled her back into the wings, spoke jovially in Russian.
‘Everything is found,’ he said, ‘you will be glad to know. The men are bringing up the trunks now, to the wardrobe. Go look in the elevator. You’ll see it’s completely full with big metal boxes. But you should help direct – boys’ side, girls’ side – if you don’t want to waste any more time. The writing is all English. Only one of these guys from the USA speaks Russian. It’s laughable for us.’
Nina looked around for the costume mistress, saying, ‘I’ll get someone to come right away. Was it all at the Kremlin?’
‘Not at all. Don’t be silly. It came straight to the Bolshoi, just as it should. The drivers were held up at the Polish border and also at the Czech border. As if on purpose. How should I know why? Maybe the Poles and the Czechs want to wreck our relations. It wouldn’t surprise me. Anyway, the border guards look through everything for security. And these trucks are carrying a lot of things. Mountains.’
As Nina started through the door, he added smugly, with a broad smile, ‘By the way, I’ve requested extra ironers. More women are coming now. You Americans will be pleased how hard they work.’
By the time Nina arrived at the opening night party at the American ambassador’s residence, Spaso House, she felt winded with tiredness. She took John’s arm as they climbed the broad, shallow steps from the vestibule, and she leaned on it more and more heavily as people pressed and darted around them in the receiving line.
‘What did you think, dear?’ asked the ambassador’s wife, reaching for Nina’s hand, pulling her along with professional insistence to greet the ambassador, to keep the line moving through the soaring pillared entry into the main salon. ‘You’re our expert.’
Nina tried to smile. She ought to have a remark prepared; she was familiar with the instant of greeting at the second pillar. Ambassador Kohler and his wife, Phyllis, both small, unimposing, always received by the second pillar. And they were kind, these two childless Midwesterners, gentle and homey with the embassy staff.
Out tumbled, ‘Beautiful.’ That was all Nina could manage. She repeated it, hopelessly, ‘Beautiful.’ It didn’t begin to describe what she had seen that night at the Bolshoi, what she had felt, the tumult of awe, the ecstatic pleasure.
It didn’t even describe the ostentatious splendour of Spaso House on a night like tonight: the pre-revolutionary palace ablaze with light from countless sconces and hanging fixtures and from the stupendous crystal and gold chandelier festooned with gem-cut beads, orbited by candles, and suspended like a celestial apparition in the three-storey dome of the eighty-foot salon.
Nina let go of John’s arm to shake hands, and she drifted alone to the round, marble-topped table centred under the chandelier. She tried to collect herself. The carpet, with its rich circular pattern, red, black, blue, spun away on all sides towards the endless weave of the blond parquet, dizzying, and so she lifted her eyes to the turquoise-and-gold-embossed vault of the ceiling and the balconied loggia of the first floor beneath it. Still she felt bewildered, hurried. Her heart, or maybe it was her lungs, felt tight and dark, congested with a faint sense of alarm.
I’m just not used to so much company all day and so much talking and arguing, she told herself. Did I ever even sit down? Not until the performance; and by then I was so overexcited that it was more like anguish than joy. Tomorrow will be easier. Tomorrow I can relax a little.
I need something to eat, she thought, something to ballast myself. There was a bad taste in her mouth, nausea rising in her nose like a chemical odour.
On she floated to the dark-panelled state dining room. The light and the noise seemed to drop away in the distance. A little group strolled ahead of her, right through the dining room into the ballroom beyond as she came in, so that she was alone. The elaborate curtains hanging down around the open doors, the gleaming, wood-lined walls, the grandiose fireplace with its mantel upon mantel supported on great twisted columns of wood reaching higher than her head, seemed to hold the world at bay. She felt insulated, soothed.
The long dining table had been pulled to the end of the room in front of the fireplace and its flanking glass-doored display cabinets. There were three big vases of bronze chrysanthemums standing in a row on the table. Nina studied them ruefully. The good wives, the sociable ones, will have arranged those flowers, she thought. And I wasn’t here. Then she thought, But I was helping. Trying to help.
The chairs with their yellow satin seats and backs were lined up against the walls. Can I sit down now? she wondered, sinking wearily onto one.
A waiter rushed through with a tray of drinks, suddenly stopping when he saw her, bending to offer one.
‘By the way, madam,’ he said
