Undercarriage

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Wes soaked dried blood on my forehead and said I wanted to be Anna but I just ended up Vronsky. This may be funny someday. When I no longer have bandages around my wrists, my skin is wholly pale instead of polka-dotted with purples and blacks with edges of greens and yellows.

This may in fact never be funny.

I once heard a joke that Tolstoy told a joke. That was the joke. People laughed. And by people, I mean Wes and his fellow doctors of Russian literature. You and me, we did not laugh at the joke. You, as I, laughed at the tears running down Borisov’s face. And laughed wondering if Borisov was a real name, or if he’s actually a Smith from Detroit, his father a lawyer and his mother wearing pearls as she organized local charity events. He’s got a Midwestern accent and no one really knows anything about him other than his work in St. Petersburg and his fistfight with Erofeyev in a La Guardia terminal. I hope that story comes up soon. It is so unbelievable that sometimes I want to learn Russian to find out what untranslated scenes he stole the brawl from. Borisov and Erofeyev. In La Guardia. Apparently over a translation of “wish.”

“Wish” could be misinterpreted easily. Did Erofeyev mean desire? Want? A sexual context? I’ve never read Erofeyev or any -ev, but I imagine that such textual nuances are difficult to maintain even for Detroit’s own Smith-Borisov.

All is beside the point.

I was only Vronsky in so much as I survived what was meant to kill. I was only Anna in so much as I found myself between the tracks and the train. I did not jump; my volition was still on the platform, stuck on the left sole of a pair of black boots between two suitcases.

It is something to look into the eyes of the one you love best and think you know. One weekend in the country, then this can end. We will end it like the adults we’ve forgotten we are. I am married and you practice statistics. I’ve spent fifteen years with him qualifying my emotions by a language I do not speak; I cannot spend another quantified by a new language. Why will no American man speak to me in American terms? You understand, yes?

His eyes read yes, this is it. His eyes said yes, this is it. Get it Borisov?

When it is funny like Tolstoy, maybe I can ask Wes. If he is still, still here. Instead of thinking his changing the bandages is my punishment, look what you got yourself into, maybe he is saying I love you this much. Instead of silence as torture, it is silence as forgiveness.
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