Cruisers Read online

  It was impossible to say how this was related to what Russell did for a living, but that didn’t mean there was nothing between the two. To explain the connection, Russell supposed it was like his appreciation of the scale of the stars and his delight in the sparkle of a single drop of water in a blade of grass after a rain: the two were completely separate, yet related. This relation between the enormous and the everyday, between the horrific and just living, had a moral quality, too, not a Bible-thumping rigidity, but Russell’s awareness of how human beings faced the scale of what surrounded them, as ominous and indifferent as the stars, and how people appeared as sparks against the darkness. And there was one final element here, which was like a spark, too, and that was how his sense of isolation vanished in Zofia’s touch, in her appearance in a room, with her sigh and yawn in the morning.

  When people asked him why he’d become a trooper, he thought of how accurate his grandfather had been about this other world, this sudden, nameless gloom that Russell hated. This horror was everything that beguiled and injured, that was tawdry and remorseless, without concern for consequences, as though the future had been banished by vanity and ill will.

  HE WAS LOOKING for his tuning fork, which he used to set the radar, when Zofia came in at four o’clock in the afternoon. They had a cup of coffee in the kitchen and he told her about the hunting camp, the words coming out in a slow, steady way, like a man driving nails, and when he was done, she sat there, blinking, one hand to her face.

  “I’ve got to get to work,” he said. He kissed her on the cheek. “I’ll wake you up in the morning, okay?”

  “I meant to get here earlier,” she said. “You know, to finish what we started this morning.”

  “It’ll keep,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

  She put her hand to her face again.

  He leaned close to her and told her that he loved her, that she had changed him, and that everything was better now.

  FRANK KOHLER

  FRANK KOHLER KNEW HE WAS RUNNING OUT OF time. He sat at his kitchen table with the newspaper spread out so that he could see the ad. He put his head in his hands and then he looked out the window, where he could see the Vermont hillside. It was spring. Everything was a lizardlike green, and the hillside opposite the field below his house resembled an enormous alligator. The ad said, “Russian, European and Asian Women Looking for Husbands.” Around the border of the ad were passport photos of women.

  Kohler stood up and walked out of the kitchen and into his shop, where he had his workbench, his manuals for computers, software CDs, many of them out of date, motherboards, chips, modems, computer tools, old computer cases, and some machines, dinosaurs, which he kept for no good reason. He had noticed, now that he was thirty, that he didn’t like to throw things away quite so much as he had a few years before. He opened the case of a machine and saw that it was filled with dust balls as thick as cotton candy. Often these machines weren’t working because they needed to be cleaned. They were just filled with dust, blown in by the computer’s fan: no one thought of how the need to keep the machine cool would lead naturally to this other problem. The sounds he made—the swish of canned air, a screwdriver against the head of a Phillips screw, the click of a keyboard, and the small, perfect sound of a cable going into a port—were reassuring, but even so he kept stopping. He looked at the kitchen. Finally he walked back and stood at the table again, where the advertisement lay in black and white, like danger and possibility perfectly mixed.

  He was tempted. He was willing to admit that. How could he try to do otherwise when he looked at the maddeningly suggestive passport photos? They had a quality that was at once clinical and yet sultry. But he was worried that one of these women, or all of them, might be up to something, and while he was uncertain what this might be precisely, he suspected that it would have something to do with trying to get money from him. He guessed that wasn’t so bad, really, in that he could just not send it. Of course, this was not much of a guarantee, since if someone was any good at being up to something, it would be more complicated than that. Say that he started to correspond with a woman who wrote back and said she liked animals and long walks in the country, and generally seemed to be sincere, and maybe she would even have problems, like an aunt or a sister, probably a sister, who had leukemia and was a financial drag on the entire family. But the way it would work was this: One day the phone would ring and it would be the woman, calling from Belgrade, and she would be in tears because she was being threatened by a gangster, and then the gangster would get on the phone and say that unless the woman got some money, and got it fast, why then ... well, it wouldn’t be too good for her. What then? Would Kohler be able to ignore such a threat? There was always the possibility that it could be true. Everyone heard the stories about Eastern European or Asian women, and what happened to them. One might take a job as a waitress, or that’s what it was supposed to be, and the next thing she knows, she’s working as a prostitute outside an army base in the Philippines.

  He crumpled the paper and threw in it the trash and went back to his workshop, and when he couldn’t stand the silence any longer, he turned on the radio and listened to NPR. There was a story about a blind Cuban musician who, now that he was dead, was finally getting recognition. Frank tried to do what was called an overlay with the machine he was working on, putting one operating system on top of another, but before he even knew what he was doing he had stood up, like an impulse incarnate, and went back to the kitchen. There he bent down and went through the coffee grinds and half-eaten toast in the trash can, the orange peels, canned spaghetti, and bacon grease until he found the paper. He spread it out on the table again, but now it was harder to read since the print on the back side of the sheet came through where the paper had gotten wet or greasy. But even this stink of garbage added to his sense of attraction, since somehow the smell of coffee grinds and bacon combined with the pictures of these women to suggest the domestic.

  The ad had been put in the paper by a company named Matchmakers International, and when Frank got out his map of Boston, which is where the place was, he saw that it was located off the Commons, on the edge of the Combat Zone. Nothing conclusive, really, aside from the fact that Matchmakers International existed in a transitional strip between the respectable and the tawdry. He decided that he’d have to go and take a look.

  HE DISLIKED his anonymous, two-year-old lime green Chevrolet with its plastic seats and the trunk filled with computer parts. Everything about it seemed out of date, and the dullness of it added to his uneasiness. Rather than increasing his sense of fitting in, being anonymous only made him feel more excluded. And while he drove to Boston, he watched the cars in the opposite lane, as though considering each one. A Porsche, an Infiniti, a two-seater BMW ...

  There was no place to park on the street near the Commons, so he went into the underground garage, getting a ticket at the entrance and then spiraling down into the depths, where the cars were parked. The echoes of the place, the squeal of tires as he made a turn, the hurried movements of people, all left him with the desire to get away, back up to the light. He climbed the concrete stairwells, where everything was covered with an oily patina from the exhaust of the cars.

  He emerged into the pale light of the afternoon in Boston. The warmth of the sun on his face reminded him of the time when he had been sixteen and had danced cheek to cheek with a young woman. Where they were pressed together he had felt the rising, seeping heat, which had bound them together like some maddeningly ephemeral substance. He opened his eyes now and regretted the disappearance of such innocent promise, but what good did thinking about it do? It just left him teary and angry. He looked around to get his bearings and started walking toward the Combat Zone.

  The building was on the edge of Chinatown. The sign above the glass-and-aluminum door was next to one in Chinese, but the script of Matchmakers International’s logo was like a wedding invitation, curly black lett
ers against a white background, although the background was as yellowed as a wedding dress that has been in a trunk for fifty years. Frank stood under the sign, thinking it over, and then went up to the Chinese grocery on the corner and bought a cup of coffee in a Styrofoam cup. It burned his lips.

  A bride in a white dress with a small bouquet in her hand went up to the front door of Matchmakers International. She had the high cheekbones of Eastern Europe—Poland or Yugoslavia, Kohler guessed. She was flushed with excitement and from the schnapps that the best man, who wore brown trousers and a green jacket, kept offering to her. The groom, in a black suit, smiled shyly, and from time to time the best man spoke Polish or Hungarian, and then all of them laughed, bound together by the old, incomprehensible words. They passed the bottle around again and went up the stairs.

  “Wait until they see!” said the bride.

  They disappeared inside and then Kohler walked up and down the block, looking at the pigeons which suddenly flew into the air, in a flock, at once forlorn and orderly. He went to an alley to wait until the wedding party left, and while he stood there two Chinese men in bloody aprons smoked cigarettes without saying a word. Finally, from the alley, Kohler saw that the couple and the best man had finished paying their respects to the place where the bride and groom must have met. The three of them started walking toward the subway.

  Perhaps, he thought, the matchmaker would offer him some method of sorting out people who were up to something from ordinary women who, like Kohler, just wanted to get married. He threw the empty cup into a Dumpster and went up to the door. The building smelled of bacon and grilled cheese sandwiches cooked on a hot plate. The stairs went straight up to the first landing and then straight up again, each step covered with a black plastic tread.

  Matchmakers International reminded Kohler of the front office of a discount dentist. A room about ten by fifteen, some chairs that looked like they came from a small airport, and a short Formica counter with a plastic flower in a cheap vase. Next to the counter there was an interior door. The receptionist wore a red jacket and a black skirt, and her lips were made up with bright lipstick. Kohler walked up to the counter with the advertisement in his hand, and when the receptionist asked him what he wanted, he pushed it forward.

  “This ...” he said. “I saw it in the paper.”

  “Well, sit down, Mr. ...” said the receptionist.

  “Kohler,” he said. “Frank Kohler.”

  “Well, sit down,” she said. “I’ll see if Mrs. Blanchett can see you.”

  Kohler sat down, ramrod-straight, his hands on his knees. On the walls were pictures of Rome, Paris, Tokyo, all evoking an air of romance, and while it was hard for Kohler to say where the romance came from, it was still there, as thick as perfume. He wished he had gotten his hair cut. But, he thought, at least no one is going to see the Chevy.

  The phone rang. In the hall he heard a heavy tread. Kohler put a hand up to a birthmark he had on his neck. At night, when he couldn’t sleep in his house in Vermont and he lay there, hearing the coyotes yapping, he imagined a woman, in new stockings and a nice dress, looking at this mark and kissing it, slowly and wetly, and then saying, “I want to kiss you where you have been hurt.” Then he would try to imagine the lingering dampness on it, the faint, almost imperceptible odor of lipstick and saliva. As he sat in the Matchmakers office, this memory and the desire of it made him realize how futile his attempts were. No one was ever going to do that. He looked around the room, and had begun to stand up and go for the door, when the receptionist came back and said, “Mrs. Blanchett will see you.”

  Kohler went in. The room was larger than the reception area, but not by much. It had a desk, which was covered with wood veneer. There was a bookshelf, and on the ceiling a large fluorescent light. Mrs. Blanchett was a woman in her early sixties, dressed in black, wearing pearls. She stood up and shook Frank’s hand. He looked around, as though to make sure he knew where the door was.

  She said that she had been a matchmaker for thirty years and that an arranged marriage could be better than any other kind, since often when people fell in love and decided to get married, they made bad decisions. She told him that people needed someone to look into practical matters such as the ability to care for someone or keep house or pay the bills, or plan for the future.

  “Don’t you agree?” she said.

  “Yes,” said Kohler. “I do.”

  “Well,” said Mrs. Blanchett. “I’m glad.” She stood up. “Come on.”

  She opened a door he had thought was a closet, and there, in a small room was a television and a VCR with a chair in front of them. She told Kohler to sit down, and then she put a tape into the machine. He guessed if the office had once been a cheap dentist’s office, this is where they must have kept the drugs.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said, giving him the remote control. “If you want to rewind the tape, use this. This is the stop button. And the play.” She left the room and Kohler saw his reflection in the screen of the television set.

  Frank had a couple of chocolate kisses in his pocket, and now he took them out and undid them slowly, balling up the silver paper and throwing these things, which weren’t too much bigger than BBs, into a wastebasket in the corner. He turned the VCR on and let the chocolate melt in his mouth. On the videotape, the women from Asia said they believed in families and wanted to have children, that they loved America and wanted to meet an American man. They all seemed to be reading from the same cue card.

  There was a jump cut and a new woman appeared. She had blue eyes and black hair, and she was tall, which seemed suited to her perfect posture and her obvious dignity. She said she was from Ukraine. She spoke directly to the camera. She had a lovely smile, beautiful white teeth, but Kohler kept thinking, Why is she sitting there in front of this cheap video camera? Why does she need to find someone this way? Then he thought that these judgments about how people met were impossibly provincial and what he was seeing in this dignified and beautiful woman was just how desperate things were in the former Soviet Union. It seemed to him that he changed a little bit when he was watching her, and that the small difference was at once pleasant and exciting. He stopped the tape so that it froze on the woman.

  Mrs. Blanchett came back and she said, “Well, I see you are interested in a Russian woman.”

  “She seems nice,” said Kohler.

  “Well, why don’t you find out?” said Mrs. Blanchett. “Why don’t you have her write you a letter? Would you like that?”

  They went back to her office, and Mrs. Blanchett asked him some questions: Where did he live? How much money did he make a year? Did he own his house? He answered as clearly as he could.

  “What kind of car do you drive?” she said.

  “A Chevrolet,” he said.

  “How many miles does it have on it?” she asked.

  He shrugged.

  “Seventy-five thousand,” he said.

  She nodded. Did this count for him or against him?

  “Are your parents living?” she asked.

  “No,” said Kohler.

  “What did your mother die of?” asked Mrs. Blanchett.

  “She was murdered,” said Kohler.

  Mrs. Blanchett glanced up. Kohler looked around the office, at the books on the shelf behind her, the light slanting in from the window, and in the staleness of the place and in that dusty light he thought, Why did she have to ask? Look how we feel now.

  “I’m so sorry to hear that,” she said. “Did they catch the man who did it?”

  “No,” said Kohler. “The police didn’t have much to go on.”

  “Where did it happen?” said Mrs. Blanchett.

  “Northampton. That’s where I grew up.”

  “In Massachusetts?” she said.

  “Yes,” said Kohler.

  “Well, I’m sorry,” said Mrs. Blanchett. “I really am.”

  Underneath her makeup and her theatricality, she seemed to have had her heart broken at one ti
me, and now, when she heard about his mother, she naturally spoke with a soft, empathetic voice. It reassured him. He got out his checkbook and wrote out the deposit that was needed before he could receive a letter from the woman in the tape. Her name was Katryna Kolymov.

  “You’ll be hearing from her soon,” said Mrs. Blanchett. “Katryna is a new listing. Just this week.” She put his check and the form she had filled out into a file, and let the cover of it fall shut. “If it doesn’t work out, there are other possibilities.”

  Outside, it was getting dark. He walked down to a church and went in. The overhead lights, which were bare bulbs in fixtures that must have come from a local hardware store, gave the place a functional air, like a machine shop. He took a pew near the rear of the church, and as he sat on the hard wood of the seat, he imagined Katryna, the Russian woman, in this light with the pews all around them, the shape of her lips, the color of them, too, if she was wearing the cherry-red lipstick she had on in the tape. He imagined the cool touch of her fingers, the smell of her hair, like incense from those Russian churches, the rustling and the definite sense of another human being right next to him. He prayed for her understanding, and for his ability to understand her. He trembled with the effort. He put his hands together to pray for her health and her happiness. Then he thought, You fool. You utter fool. Why are you doing this?

  He heard the cars in the street, the flapping of the wings of pigeons as they rose, and in the distance the yapping of dogs on the Commons.

  When he left the church, the signs in the Combat Zone had come on with a cheap promise. Frank walked along, going slowly, looking over his shoulder now and then, staggering a little as though he had had too much to drink. He didn’t know why he was looking for trouble, but he was. He passed alleys where young men smoked, their cigarettes showing as crimson points. Maybe, he thought, if he had a chance he’d let them see how things were.