One Last Excerpt from Honeytrap
Dec. 24th, 2019 08:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerAs you’ve all been so good this year, I thought I’d post one last excerpt from Honeytrap for the holiday season. It’s a nice long one!
Daniel and Gennady have wrapped up their first case and reported back to their bosses, which they expected to be the end of their partnership, but to their surprise they’ve been ordered to continue working together.
***
“Oysters Rockefeller,” Daniel told the bartender, “and a steak for me, and – you want a steak for that eye, Gennady?”
Gennady looked up from the fancy bar’s menu, frowning. “For my eye?” he echoed, one hand stealing upward as if to cover the bruise.
“Classic cure for a black eye,” Daniel told him.
“Could just get you some ice for the eye,” the bartender put in. “Cheaper’n steak.”
Gennady shook his head. “A shot of vodka.” He closed the menu. “Two shots. And a hamburger.”
“Treat yourself, Gennady. Get something fancy,” Daniel told him.
“I like hamburger,” Gennady said, and there was enough of an edge to his voice that the bartender stepped away smartly. “A waste of a good steak – putting it on a black eye.”
“Probably,” Daniel conceded. “Ma never actually got me a steak for any of my black eyes, mind, it was always a chip of ice off the block in the icebox. There was one year I got in a fight with Jeremy Perezoso practically every week, it felt like, for no reason I could see, until I found out later he liked the girl I was taking out…”
The bartender delivered Gennady’s shots. Gennady kicked them both back, and held up a finger for another.
“You want to wait on the oysters Rockefeller maybe?” Daniel suggested, and fell silent at Gennady’s disdainful glance.
Daniel felt cold with a growing mortification. Gennady had seemed so sorry to leave that morning, the bear hug, that proshai, that Daniel had expected him to be as pleased as Daniel was that they could continue working together, but instead…
Well, of course Gennady didn’t really want to keep working with the sloppy drunk who had kissed him.
But then Gennady smiled. In combination with the black eye, it gave Gennady’s face a lopsided look that Daniel found strangely heart-breaking. “I’m being very rude,” Gennady said. “This is a celebration, you’re surprised I am not more happy; and I am happy, my friend. It’s only…” He gestured at the black eye. “I got mugged this afternoon.
“Mugged!” Daniel said.
The bartender delivered a third shot, and Gennady drained it and smacked it on the counter and signaled for another. “Anything for you, sir?” the bartender asked Daniel.
“No, I’m not drinking tonight,” Daniel told him, and then to Gennady: “Mugged?”
A shrug. “I was looking at the map, an easy mark, a tourist,” Gennady said, “or so he thought; he was surprised when I put up a fight, and ran when he could. But still, after all, to be interrupted by an attack, just when you are happy because of a promotion…”
“A promotion! I’d better have a beer after all,” Daniel said, and smacked Gennady’s back. Gennady looked startled, almost ill, and Daniel withdrew his hand hastily and said, “To toast, you know. Just one beer. Not enough to get drunk.”
Gennady smiled again. “Yes, of course, a toast,” he said.
But he drank his fourth shot as soon as the bartender delivered it; it was his fifth shot that he clinked against Daniel’s beer.
Gennady shot oysters and vodka one after another once the oysters Rockefeller arrived; he was in the double digits by the time their food arrived. “Don’t you think you’d better slow down a little?” Daniel said, with the forced jocularity he had once used to try to cajole his frat brothers out of drinking themselves sick.
It had rarely worked then and did not work now. “It’s hot,” Gennady said, and made to take off his suit jacket, a movement that exposed a cluster of rusty red dots on the side of his shirt.
“So,” Daniel said, trying to sound casual, “the fight with the mugger reopened your wound?”
Gennady froze. He pulled the suit jacket back on his shoulders, pulling the two sides together at the front and holding it shut with one hand. “It’s fine,” Gennady said.
It must have hurt like hell. That was probably why he was drinking so much. “You want me to look at it again?”
Gennady’s face took on a look of fury that nearly blasted Daniel from his barstool. “You Americans! You’re all such babies about injuries and pain. When I was eight I broke my arm. Do you think they had painkillers to waste on a child? It was all needed at the front. You just accept the pain and you live with it until it is over.”
Daniel, baffled, essayed a pacifying smile. “I’m sorry.”
“We’re the ones who did all the real fighting in the war anyway,” Gennady said, and his voice was far too loud. “Your troops didn’t even make landfall in France until 1944, and the war was practically over by then. And now you swan around like you own the whole world when you didn’t even conquer Berlin. We did! You didn’t drive Hitler to his death. He killed himself to escape our Red Army! Your troops didn’t even make it to Berlin until – ”
“We’re not going to discuss that here,” Daniel interrupted, and he got out his wallet and started counting twenties onto the bar.
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t want to get in a bar fight, you moron.”
Daniel was so intent on dragging Gennady off his barstool that he stepped on a man’s foot. “Sorry!” Daniel said, hopping away.
But the man didn’t even notice him. He was thin and wiry, with graying reddish hair and scars on his knuckles that stood out white against his strained fists. “Commie bastard,” he said to Gennady.
Gennady spun himself off the barstool so fast he nearly fell, pushing his momentum into one powerful poorly-aimed punch. Daniel threw his arms around his waist to drag him back, and got an elbow in the side for his pains, and might have gotten an accidental punch to the face if two man hadn’t leaped into action to hold back the red-haired man, too.
“Easy, Zeke. Easy,” one of them said.
“Easy!” Zeke said, and spit toward Gennady, who tried to spit back, but it landed mostly on Daniel’s hands as Daniel hauled him out of the bar.
“Get off,” Gennady snarled, but he didn’t manage to throw Daniel until they were outside in the cool night air. He made as if to go back inside, and Daniel flung himself in front of the door.
“If you want to get beaten up that badly, I’ll beat you up!” Daniel shouted.
Gennady’s face blazed again, and for a moment Daniel thought Gennady would take him up on the offer. But the fire blazed out as fast as it had come. Gennady sagged, and staggered, and vomited into the gutter.
Daniel managed to get him in the car afterward, and hoped that this was the end of it. But in the time it took Daniel to reach the drivers side door, Gennady gathered his pugnaciousness again, and greeted Daniel with the insistence, “I would have won if you hadn’t stopped me. I could have beaten him into the floor.”
“For God’s sake,” Daniel muttered. The reek of booze filled the close confines of the car. “What the hell is wrong with you? Why the hell did you have to let loose with a rant like that in an American bar?”
“You think too much of yourselves! You think you are so great, so amazing, you think everyone wants to be like you. And you have the audacity,” Gennady said, his voice rising, “to show off your beautiful roads and restaurants and big shiny department stores as if they prove your country is better than mine is, as if they are a result of capitalism, when really all they show is that you were never invaded. You were sitting pretty behind your two oceans while my country was burned and trampled to the ground by Nazi troops. We’ve had to rebuild from the ground up, and that’s why we’re behind you, but someday we will catch up, and then we’ll bury you just as Comrade Khrushchev said.”
Daniel was too furious to speak. He jerked the car into the road with a squeal of the tires. “That’s why you almost dragged us into a bar fight? You just can’t stand spending a few more months putting up with American smugness?”
“No.” Gennady’s voice was sullen.
“Then why – ” Daniel started, and couldn’t finish the sentence.
Because of course Daniel’s first guess had been right: the problem was that Gennady didn’t want to continue working with Daniel.
“Fine,” Daniel said, furious, mortified, and drove on in silence. They had covered perhaps ten miles before Gennady made another sound, and that was just a faint rattling wet breath.
Goddammit. Daniel wanted to stay angry, but he could feel it slipping. Gennady had taken a bullet without more than a few stray tears after the iodine – and Daniel thought, with sudden contrition, that his arm must have dragged right over the wound when he was dragging Gennady out of the bar.
Probably Gennady would’ve gotten hurt worse if Daniel had stepped aside and let him have his stupid bar fight, but still.
“Is the wound bleeding again?”
“No! You don’t need to look at it.”
Daniel blushed painfully. Probably Gennady thought Daniel had taken the opportunity to ogle him after he was wounded, when Gennady was half-naked and helpless – when really that had been the last thing on Daniel’s mind. Goddammit, people were so prejudiced, even Gennady, and Daniel had really almost believed that it didn’t bother Gennady at all – and for the next ten miles Daniel ranted away in his own head, about duplicitous lying stupid Russians who led you on, not just into kissing them when you knew you shouldn’t, but pretending to be friendly after, it wasn’t fair at all.
Then a movement at the corner of his eye interrupted his train of thought. Gennady was surreptitiously wiping his eyes.
Daniel’s anger and mortification melted away like the Wicked Witch of the West. Dammit. He’d always been soft on sad drunks.
It occurred to him suddenly that Gennady’s bad mood might have nothing to do with him, after all. Perhaps he had not been as successful fighting off the mugger as he said. Losing a fight could leave anyone with bruised pride and a chip on his shoulder.
It wouldn’t do any good to ask directly, so Daniel just said, “Bad day?”
Gennady drew in a gulping breath.
Daniel extended an olive branch. “We are damn smug. Americans, I mean. And we’ve got nothing to be smug about, really. Did you know Mr. Gilman told me specifically not to take you below the Mason-Dixon line? ‘Don’t give them more fuel for their propaganda,’” he said, in his best Mr. Gilman imitation. “But it’s not propaganda if it’s true, is it?”
“You shouldn’t say that to me.”
Daniel risked taking his eyes off the road to glance at him. Gennady’s head hung forward, almost parallel to his lap. “Why not? It doesn’t matter if you tell the KGB. Mr. Gilman already knows what I think.”
“I’m not a KGB agent.” Gennady sounded tired.
Suddenly Daniel felt exhausted too, and very lonely with the weight of the lies and the truths they couldn’t speak. “Yes, fine. Whatever. I’m stopping at the next motel, all right?”
The next motel was small and grungy, and the room itself tiny and grimly Spartan: a pair of twin beds with the blankets tucked in severely, a single low-watt lamp that flickered on when he turned the switch, broken slats in the venetian blinds. At least the ashtray had been cleaned.
Gennady kicked his shoes off and sat down between the beds.
“Gennady, what are you doing?”
“I thought the world would spin less down here.”
Classic drunk logic. Daniel stowed their suitcases in the entryway and opened his own to get out the essentials for the night.
Gennady’s voice floated up from between the beds. “If it were not so unpleasant to be drunk, no one would ever be sober.”
Daniel tossed a pair of pajamas on the bed. “You don’t usually drink that much,” he said. “Why tonight?”
Gennady shrugged. He sat down near the nightstand. Daniel sat too, at the other end of the aisle between the beds, down at the foot.
“Is it that bad having to keep working with me?” Daniel asked. He tried to smile as he said it, as if it was a joke, but his voice sounded wistful rather than jocular.
“No, no,” Gennady said, and he sounded so startled that Daniel believed him. “No. It was…”
But he didn’t finish the sentence, and eventually Daniel prompted him. “Did you lose the fight with the mugger?”
“What?” Gennady sounded astonished.
And then Daniel realized: “There never was a mugger.”
Gennady sighed. “No,” he agreed, and rubbed a hand over his face.
He looked at Daniel, a transparently calculating look, and Daniel said, “Oh, just tell me the truth, why don’t you? That’s less trouble in the end.”
And Gennady let out a breath, and said, “Arkady hit me.”
“Who is Arkady?”
Gennady glanced at him. “My boss – my old boss. I have been promoted out of his department now. The promotion made him angry, and he punched me.”
Daniel didn’t know what he’d expected, but that wasn’t it. “Is he allowed to do that?”
“No. I know you think we are barbarians, but no. It’s not allowed. But what is allowed in the rules and what a powerful person can do – these are two different things, you understand?”
“Yes,” Daniel said. “It’s like that here too.” He thought suddenly, almost irrelevantly, of John, who had been so popular, the treasurer of the frat; and he said, “I’m sorry that happened, Gennady. That’s awful.”
Gennady shrugged. “I went to gloat,” he said. “Naturally it made him angry.”
“Well, sure it would,” Daniel conceded. “But he still shouldn’t have hit you, Gennady. You deserve to be treated better than that.”
Gennady looked up at him briefly. His eyes were wet and bright, and he looked away almost at once. “I was so happy,” he said. “It was such a good day. I got a promotion, and my new boss was pleased with my work, and our road trip will continue. And then Arkady hit me, and then I felt…” He made a gesture with his hand, like a bomb falling, and a sound effect that must have been the Russian noise for an explosion. “And it was worse because I been so happy, before.” Another glance at Daniel, even briefer this time. “Are you angry with me?”
“No. Not anymore.”
Gennady’s face twisted up, like he really might cry. “I behaved so badly this evening…”
Daniel reached toward him, then drew his hand back. “It’s all right,” Daniel assured him. “I mean, you did behave badly, and for God’s sake don’t go getting us into any more barfights. But I’m not mad.”
Again Gennady glanced at him, a little bit longer this time. Then Gennady launched himself across the space between them.
For a startled moment, Daniel took it for an attack. But then he felt Gennady’s arms around him, Gennady’s face pressed into his shoulder, his cheek wet against Daniel’s neck, and before Daniel had quite understood what was happening, his arms were closing around Gennady, and he was holding him tight, and murmuring, “It’s okay,” into Gennady’s hair, as he must have done for a dozen drunken frat brothers over the course of his life. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”
Gennady was so close that Daniel could not only hear but actually feel his shaking breaths. He smelled like alcohol and faintly of vomit and it should have been repulsive, but Daniel just wanted to hold him tighter. Gennady held Daniel so tightly that his arms, no, his whole body trembled, and his breath shook. He tried to speak, and choked.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Daniel soothed, and stroked Gennady’s hair.
“It’s not the pain,” Gennady choked out. “The pain doesn’t hurt. It’s the indignity – the indignity – you understand?”
“Yes, of course,” Daniel said, rubbing his back, not really understanding but willing to sympathize anyway. “Of course.”
Gennady’s whole body tensed like a spring as he tried to get a hold of himself, and failed, and let out a sob that sounded like it had been ripped out of him with a hook. “I’m sorry,” he gasped.
“It’s all right, it’s all right,” Daniel assured him. “Half the brothers in my fraternity came to cry on my shoulder when they were drunk.”
A series of sobs shook Gennady’s body. Daniel rubbed his back.
At length Gennady slumped against Daniel, his wet face against Daniel’s shoulder.
Then his arms slid from around Daniel’s shoulders, and Daniel slackened his own grip just in time for Gennady to pull away. He scooted away from Daniel, almost down to the nightstand, and rubbed his face on his sleeve.
For a while they sat. Gennady’s breathing was still heavy and wet. Daniel waited.
Gennady’s voice was quiet when he spoke again. “You must think I’m pathetic,” he said, half-defiant.
“Gennady. Of course not.”
Gennady twisted the end of his tie between his fingers. “It must seem so stupid to you,” he insisted. “To be so upset over a single punch…”
“No, no. Even a single punch is terrible when it’s someone you can’t punch back.”
Gennady’s mouth dragged down at the corners, as if he might cry again. “What do you know about it? I bet your boss never hit you.”
“No,” Daniel admitted.
“Not even when he discovered you are a homosexual.”
Daniel flinched. “I’m not.”
“It is a little late in the day to be saying that, my friend.”
“No, no, I’m not saying… I mean, I’m not homosexual because I’m not attracted only to men. I’m attracted to women too. It’s called, um.” His face was flushing, dammit, his shoulders bracing as if in expectation of a blow. “Kinsey calls it bisexuality,” he said, as if Kinsey’s imprimatur made it a real and respectable thing, although that certainly hadn’t worked when he discussed it with Paul.
Of course, he brought it up at a bad time: Paul had already been angry, because he thought Daniel was flirting with the waitress. “Why do you do that?” he asked, voice clipped, once they were back in the car. “There’s no need for you to flirt with waitresses anymore.”
“I wasn’t flirting,” Daniel protested, although maybe he had been, a little, because he’d gotten so sick of being falsely accused of flirting that he’d decided he might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. “We were just talking. She was a pretty girl, that’s all.”
“So what? That doesn’t mean anything to you.”
“Kinsey says bisexuality – ”
“That’s not real,” Paul snapped, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. “There are gay men trying to deny their true nature, and oversexed straight men who will satisfy their base urges with a man if they can’t find a woman.”
“So which one am I?” Daniel shot back.
Paul’s jaw twitched. “Both.”
The memory flooded Daniel with adrenaline. Damn Gennady for bringing that up, for prying when he had no right to ask, anyway; and an equally prying question occurred to Daniel, and he cracked it out like a whip. “What about you?”
Gennady blinked at him. “What about me?”
“Well, they didn’t choose you to try to honeytrap me because you’re straight as an arrow, did they?” Daniel said. Gennady still looked puzzled, and Daniel snapped, “They must have had some reason to think you could seduce a man.”
Gennady flushed. “I wasn’t chosen for that,” he said stiffly. “It was after I received the assignment – then Arkady had the idea for the honeytrap. He was angry they were taking one of his agents away, he wanted to turn it to his advantage, to secure a source for himself. But he would have sent someone else if he could. It would have been better if I were younger and prettier…”
“So the honeytrap wasn’t part of your official mission? It was a favor that your boss asked of you.”
Gennady nodded.
In a way that was comforting. The whole KGB wasn’t gunning to blackmail Daniel, after all, just one venial intelligence officer who wanted to shore up his own position by snagging his own private turncoat.
And yet Daniel was disappointed, too, that Gennady had not been picked for the mission because he had some inclination for it. He had been so sure that Gennady liked men – or at least liked him.
But no. “You’ve never been interested in men at all.”
Gennady sighed. “So, so, so. I’ve fooled around when I’m drunk sometimes.”
For a moment, time seemed to stop. Daniel seemed suspended between heartbeats, remembering again Gennady’s lips under his, Gennady’s hands on his chest, the little noise that he made in his throat as Daniel kissed him.
And then time started again, and Daniel’s heartbeat pounded in his ears, and Gennady was saying, “But, after all, everyone does that.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” Daniel said.
“And how would you know?” Gennady was scornful. “You barely drink.”
“Yeah, but my frat brothers drank like gangbusters. Don’t you think I would’ve gotten in on the action if they were all fooling around? Kinsey says – ”
“And who is Kinsey?”
“A sexologist. He wrote a book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male…”
“A sexologist,” Gennady scoffed. “What does this Kinsey know, anyway? How does he study this?”
“Interviews…”
“With Americans? How can he say that this is the way that all people are if it’s only Americans he has spoken to? Do you believe your country represents the whole human race? Things are different everywhere. We drink so much more in Russia, of course things are different.”
Daniel wanted to argue: Kinsey’s samples might not be totally representative of the whole entire human race, but it wasn’t like there was any kind of scientific process behind Gennady’s belief at all.
Kinsey wrote that thirty-seven percent of men had some homosexual experience, a number so high it had shocked Daniel: he would have guessed one in a thousand, one in ten thousand even.
But thirty-seven percent was still a hell of a lot less than everybody.
Instead, Daniel bit his lip. What was the point? He wanted Gennady admit that yes, he was part of the thirty-seven percent that felt some attraction to men, that he was attracted to Daniel – and why?
To assuage his own vanity? That was a damn selfish reason to browbeat Gennady toward a realization that would only make his life more difficult.
Gennady’s mind seemed to be moving on an eerily parallel path. “Life is so hard,” he said, “there is no reason to make it even harder. Wouldn’t you be happier if you still thought you were normal?
It was as if a whisper in Daniel’s subconscious had raised its head and spoken. He stood up and walked away, not that there was much space to walk in that tiny room. He stopped at the window, peering through the broken blinds. Neon lights blinked above the Laundromat across the street. “I’d be lying if I said I haven’t asked myself that question. If I wouldn’t have been better off if I just married Helen right out of high school and settled down. Instead of going to college and falling for one of my frat brothers, and – ”
He had never told anyone this story, and he hadn’t planned to tell it now, but now that it was started he couldn’t stop. “We were drinking schnapps in his room,” he said, “sitting on the rug by his bed. Peppermint schnapps, festive, it was the last day before Christmas break. We were the only ones left in the house. I don’t think we were really drunk, I don’t know, I don’t remember. And then John kissed me, and I kissed him back, and then…”
Daniel laughed, and gave the Venetian blinds a push that sent them clacking against the window. “Then he rammed my head sideways against the bed frame.”
And punched him, and kept punching him. Daniel turned away from the window and smiled and shrugged, to show it was a long time ago and it didn’t matter anymore.
Gennady looked up at him from the space between the two beds. His drunken flush had faded, and he looked pale and stretched. “That’s terrible.”
Daniel laughed again and looked away. “Never would have happened if I’d stuck with making out with girls,” he said, and gave another shrug, and added, acid rising in his throat, “I never told anyone. He was so popular – not just in the frat. A big man on campus. No one would have believed me. Or if they had, they would have figured I deserved it.”
“Daniel…”
The sympathy in Gennady’s voice was unbearable. “I didn’t go back to college after Christmas break. I signed up to go fight in Korea instead, just so I wouldn’t have to go back. Everyone thought it was so brave and patriotic and really I was just running away.”
“It’s good to run away when you can.” The vehemence in Gennady’s voice startled Daniel. “When you are faced with a force so powerful that you can’t fight it, of course you should run. What else could you do? Sit and endure? Save that for when you have no other choice.”
“Do you really think so?” Daniel asked.
“Yes, of course. The only people who don’t think that are the ones who want you to stay so they can keep hurting you.”
This was so wildly divergent from everything Daniel had ever been taught – a real man should stand and fight! – that he didn’t know what to do with it. So he pushed it away, and he said, “Does that answer your question?”
“What?”
Naturally Gennady had forgotten his question. “About whether I would be happier if I still thought I was normal,” Daniel said, and then stopped, and said, “Christ, Gennady, I never thought I was normal. I always thought there was something wrong with me.”
The first time Paul had kissed him, when Paul rested his forehead against Daniel’s, both of them breathing shakily because that kiss was such a risk – when Paul lifted his hands to Daniel’s cheeks, and kissed him again, and said, “I knew it, I knew it, you’re queer like me” – it had felt like a welcome home.
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Gennady said.
“No, I don’t think so anymore,” Daniel agreed, and then stopped: Gennady had spoken so matter-of-factly that the generosity of his words almost hadn’t registered. “Do you really think so? Most people…”
“Most people thought Stalin was wonderful. They think whatever they are told to think. There’s nothing wrong with you - at least not in that way. In other ways, yes.”
He said this matter-of-factly, too, and Daniel had to laugh. “Oh really?” he said. “I’d ask, but I don’t think I want to know.” He smiled at Gennady, and Gennady leaned back his head to smile up at him, and again the black eye gave his smile that heart-breaking lopsided look. “You’re all right too, you know,” Daniel told Gennady.
Gennady turned his face away. “I feel terrible.”
“Of course you do. Let me get you a glass of water. Things will look better in the morning.”
Daniel and Gennady have wrapped up their first case and reported back to their bosses, which they expected to be the end of their partnership, but to their surprise they’ve been ordered to continue working together.
***
“Oysters Rockefeller,” Daniel told the bartender, “and a steak for me, and – you want a steak for that eye, Gennady?”
Gennady looked up from the fancy bar’s menu, frowning. “For my eye?” he echoed, one hand stealing upward as if to cover the bruise.
“Classic cure for a black eye,” Daniel told him.
“Could just get you some ice for the eye,” the bartender put in. “Cheaper’n steak.”
Gennady shook his head. “A shot of vodka.” He closed the menu. “Two shots. And a hamburger.”
“Treat yourself, Gennady. Get something fancy,” Daniel told him.
“I like hamburger,” Gennady said, and there was enough of an edge to his voice that the bartender stepped away smartly. “A waste of a good steak – putting it on a black eye.”
“Probably,” Daniel conceded. “Ma never actually got me a steak for any of my black eyes, mind, it was always a chip of ice off the block in the icebox. There was one year I got in a fight with Jeremy Perezoso practically every week, it felt like, for no reason I could see, until I found out later he liked the girl I was taking out…”
The bartender delivered Gennady’s shots. Gennady kicked them both back, and held up a finger for another.
“You want to wait on the oysters Rockefeller maybe?” Daniel suggested, and fell silent at Gennady’s disdainful glance.
Daniel felt cold with a growing mortification. Gennady had seemed so sorry to leave that morning, the bear hug, that proshai, that Daniel had expected him to be as pleased as Daniel was that they could continue working together, but instead…
Well, of course Gennady didn’t really want to keep working with the sloppy drunk who had kissed him.
But then Gennady smiled. In combination with the black eye, it gave Gennady’s face a lopsided look that Daniel found strangely heart-breaking. “I’m being very rude,” Gennady said. “This is a celebration, you’re surprised I am not more happy; and I am happy, my friend. It’s only…” He gestured at the black eye. “I got mugged this afternoon.
“Mugged!” Daniel said.
The bartender delivered a third shot, and Gennady drained it and smacked it on the counter and signaled for another. “Anything for you, sir?” the bartender asked Daniel.
“No, I’m not drinking tonight,” Daniel told him, and then to Gennady: “Mugged?”
A shrug. “I was looking at the map, an easy mark, a tourist,” Gennady said, “or so he thought; he was surprised when I put up a fight, and ran when he could. But still, after all, to be interrupted by an attack, just when you are happy because of a promotion…”
“A promotion! I’d better have a beer after all,” Daniel said, and smacked Gennady’s back. Gennady looked startled, almost ill, and Daniel withdrew his hand hastily and said, “To toast, you know. Just one beer. Not enough to get drunk.”
Gennady smiled again. “Yes, of course, a toast,” he said.
But he drank his fourth shot as soon as the bartender delivered it; it was his fifth shot that he clinked against Daniel’s beer.
Gennady shot oysters and vodka one after another once the oysters Rockefeller arrived; he was in the double digits by the time their food arrived. “Don’t you think you’d better slow down a little?” Daniel said, with the forced jocularity he had once used to try to cajole his frat brothers out of drinking themselves sick.
It had rarely worked then and did not work now. “It’s hot,” Gennady said, and made to take off his suit jacket, a movement that exposed a cluster of rusty red dots on the side of his shirt.
“So,” Daniel said, trying to sound casual, “the fight with the mugger reopened your wound?”
Gennady froze. He pulled the suit jacket back on his shoulders, pulling the two sides together at the front and holding it shut with one hand. “It’s fine,” Gennady said.
It must have hurt like hell. That was probably why he was drinking so much. “You want me to look at it again?”
Gennady’s face took on a look of fury that nearly blasted Daniel from his barstool. “You Americans! You’re all such babies about injuries and pain. When I was eight I broke my arm. Do you think they had painkillers to waste on a child? It was all needed at the front. You just accept the pain and you live with it until it is over.”
Daniel, baffled, essayed a pacifying smile. “I’m sorry.”
“We’re the ones who did all the real fighting in the war anyway,” Gennady said, and his voice was far too loud. “Your troops didn’t even make landfall in France until 1944, and the war was practically over by then. And now you swan around like you own the whole world when you didn’t even conquer Berlin. We did! You didn’t drive Hitler to his death. He killed himself to escape our Red Army! Your troops didn’t even make it to Berlin until – ”
“We’re not going to discuss that here,” Daniel interrupted, and he got out his wallet and started counting twenties onto the bar.
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t want to get in a bar fight, you moron.”
Daniel was so intent on dragging Gennady off his barstool that he stepped on a man’s foot. “Sorry!” Daniel said, hopping away.
But the man didn’t even notice him. He was thin and wiry, with graying reddish hair and scars on his knuckles that stood out white against his strained fists. “Commie bastard,” he said to Gennady.
Gennady spun himself off the barstool so fast he nearly fell, pushing his momentum into one powerful poorly-aimed punch. Daniel threw his arms around his waist to drag him back, and got an elbow in the side for his pains, and might have gotten an accidental punch to the face if two man hadn’t leaped into action to hold back the red-haired man, too.
“Easy, Zeke. Easy,” one of them said.
“Easy!” Zeke said, and spit toward Gennady, who tried to spit back, but it landed mostly on Daniel’s hands as Daniel hauled him out of the bar.
“Get off,” Gennady snarled, but he didn’t manage to throw Daniel until they were outside in the cool night air. He made as if to go back inside, and Daniel flung himself in front of the door.
“If you want to get beaten up that badly, I’ll beat you up!” Daniel shouted.
Gennady’s face blazed again, and for a moment Daniel thought Gennady would take him up on the offer. But the fire blazed out as fast as it had come. Gennady sagged, and staggered, and vomited into the gutter.
Daniel managed to get him in the car afterward, and hoped that this was the end of it. But in the time it took Daniel to reach the drivers side door, Gennady gathered his pugnaciousness again, and greeted Daniel with the insistence, “I would have won if you hadn’t stopped me. I could have beaten him into the floor.”
“For God’s sake,” Daniel muttered. The reek of booze filled the close confines of the car. “What the hell is wrong with you? Why the hell did you have to let loose with a rant like that in an American bar?”
“You think too much of yourselves! You think you are so great, so amazing, you think everyone wants to be like you. And you have the audacity,” Gennady said, his voice rising, “to show off your beautiful roads and restaurants and big shiny department stores as if they prove your country is better than mine is, as if they are a result of capitalism, when really all they show is that you were never invaded. You were sitting pretty behind your two oceans while my country was burned and trampled to the ground by Nazi troops. We’ve had to rebuild from the ground up, and that’s why we’re behind you, but someday we will catch up, and then we’ll bury you just as Comrade Khrushchev said.”
Daniel was too furious to speak. He jerked the car into the road with a squeal of the tires. “That’s why you almost dragged us into a bar fight? You just can’t stand spending a few more months putting up with American smugness?”
“No.” Gennady’s voice was sullen.
“Then why – ” Daniel started, and couldn’t finish the sentence.
Because of course Daniel’s first guess had been right: the problem was that Gennady didn’t want to continue working with Daniel.
“Fine,” Daniel said, furious, mortified, and drove on in silence. They had covered perhaps ten miles before Gennady made another sound, and that was just a faint rattling wet breath.
Goddammit. Daniel wanted to stay angry, but he could feel it slipping. Gennady had taken a bullet without more than a few stray tears after the iodine – and Daniel thought, with sudden contrition, that his arm must have dragged right over the wound when he was dragging Gennady out of the bar.
Probably Gennady would’ve gotten hurt worse if Daniel had stepped aside and let him have his stupid bar fight, but still.
“Is the wound bleeding again?”
“No! You don’t need to look at it.”
Daniel blushed painfully. Probably Gennady thought Daniel had taken the opportunity to ogle him after he was wounded, when Gennady was half-naked and helpless – when really that had been the last thing on Daniel’s mind. Goddammit, people were so prejudiced, even Gennady, and Daniel had really almost believed that it didn’t bother Gennady at all – and for the next ten miles Daniel ranted away in his own head, about duplicitous lying stupid Russians who led you on, not just into kissing them when you knew you shouldn’t, but pretending to be friendly after, it wasn’t fair at all.
Then a movement at the corner of his eye interrupted his train of thought. Gennady was surreptitiously wiping his eyes.
Daniel’s anger and mortification melted away like the Wicked Witch of the West. Dammit. He’d always been soft on sad drunks.
It occurred to him suddenly that Gennady’s bad mood might have nothing to do with him, after all. Perhaps he had not been as successful fighting off the mugger as he said. Losing a fight could leave anyone with bruised pride and a chip on his shoulder.
It wouldn’t do any good to ask directly, so Daniel just said, “Bad day?”
Gennady drew in a gulping breath.
Daniel extended an olive branch. “We are damn smug. Americans, I mean. And we’ve got nothing to be smug about, really. Did you know Mr. Gilman told me specifically not to take you below the Mason-Dixon line? ‘Don’t give them more fuel for their propaganda,’” he said, in his best Mr. Gilman imitation. “But it’s not propaganda if it’s true, is it?”
“You shouldn’t say that to me.”
Daniel risked taking his eyes off the road to glance at him. Gennady’s head hung forward, almost parallel to his lap. “Why not? It doesn’t matter if you tell the KGB. Mr. Gilman already knows what I think.”
“I’m not a KGB agent.” Gennady sounded tired.
Suddenly Daniel felt exhausted too, and very lonely with the weight of the lies and the truths they couldn’t speak. “Yes, fine. Whatever. I’m stopping at the next motel, all right?”
The next motel was small and grungy, and the room itself tiny and grimly Spartan: a pair of twin beds with the blankets tucked in severely, a single low-watt lamp that flickered on when he turned the switch, broken slats in the venetian blinds. At least the ashtray had been cleaned.
Gennady kicked his shoes off and sat down between the beds.
“Gennady, what are you doing?”
“I thought the world would spin less down here.”
Classic drunk logic. Daniel stowed their suitcases in the entryway and opened his own to get out the essentials for the night.
Gennady’s voice floated up from between the beds. “If it were not so unpleasant to be drunk, no one would ever be sober.”
Daniel tossed a pair of pajamas on the bed. “You don’t usually drink that much,” he said. “Why tonight?”
Gennady shrugged. He sat down near the nightstand. Daniel sat too, at the other end of the aisle between the beds, down at the foot.
“Is it that bad having to keep working with me?” Daniel asked. He tried to smile as he said it, as if it was a joke, but his voice sounded wistful rather than jocular.
“No, no,” Gennady said, and he sounded so startled that Daniel believed him. “No. It was…”
But he didn’t finish the sentence, and eventually Daniel prompted him. “Did you lose the fight with the mugger?”
“What?” Gennady sounded astonished.
And then Daniel realized: “There never was a mugger.”
Gennady sighed. “No,” he agreed, and rubbed a hand over his face.
He looked at Daniel, a transparently calculating look, and Daniel said, “Oh, just tell me the truth, why don’t you? That’s less trouble in the end.”
And Gennady let out a breath, and said, “Arkady hit me.”
“Who is Arkady?”
Gennady glanced at him. “My boss – my old boss. I have been promoted out of his department now. The promotion made him angry, and he punched me.”
Daniel didn’t know what he’d expected, but that wasn’t it. “Is he allowed to do that?”
“No. I know you think we are barbarians, but no. It’s not allowed. But what is allowed in the rules and what a powerful person can do – these are two different things, you understand?”
“Yes,” Daniel said. “It’s like that here too.” He thought suddenly, almost irrelevantly, of John, who had been so popular, the treasurer of the frat; and he said, “I’m sorry that happened, Gennady. That’s awful.”
Gennady shrugged. “I went to gloat,” he said. “Naturally it made him angry.”
“Well, sure it would,” Daniel conceded. “But he still shouldn’t have hit you, Gennady. You deserve to be treated better than that.”
Gennady looked up at him briefly. His eyes were wet and bright, and he looked away almost at once. “I was so happy,” he said. “It was such a good day. I got a promotion, and my new boss was pleased with my work, and our road trip will continue. And then Arkady hit me, and then I felt…” He made a gesture with his hand, like a bomb falling, and a sound effect that must have been the Russian noise for an explosion. “And it was worse because I been so happy, before.” Another glance at Daniel, even briefer this time. “Are you angry with me?”
“No. Not anymore.”
Gennady’s face twisted up, like he really might cry. “I behaved so badly this evening…”
Daniel reached toward him, then drew his hand back. “It’s all right,” Daniel assured him. “I mean, you did behave badly, and for God’s sake don’t go getting us into any more barfights. But I’m not mad.”
Again Gennady glanced at him, a little bit longer this time. Then Gennady launched himself across the space between them.
For a startled moment, Daniel took it for an attack. But then he felt Gennady’s arms around him, Gennady’s face pressed into his shoulder, his cheek wet against Daniel’s neck, and before Daniel had quite understood what was happening, his arms were closing around Gennady, and he was holding him tight, and murmuring, “It’s okay,” into Gennady’s hair, as he must have done for a dozen drunken frat brothers over the course of his life. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”
Gennady was so close that Daniel could not only hear but actually feel his shaking breaths. He smelled like alcohol and faintly of vomit and it should have been repulsive, but Daniel just wanted to hold him tighter. Gennady held Daniel so tightly that his arms, no, his whole body trembled, and his breath shook. He tried to speak, and choked.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Daniel soothed, and stroked Gennady’s hair.
“It’s not the pain,” Gennady choked out. “The pain doesn’t hurt. It’s the indignity – the indignity – you understand?”
“Yes, of course,” Daniel said, rubbing his back, not really understanding but willing to sympathize anyway. “Of course.”
Gennady’s whole body tensed like a spring as he tried to get a hold of himself, and failed, and let out a sob that sounded like it had been ripped out of him with a hook. “I’m sorry,” he gasped.
“It’s all right, it’s all right,” Daniel assured him. “Half the brothers in my fraternity came to cry on my shoulder when they were drunk.”
A series of sobs shook Gennady’s body. Daniel rubbed his back.
At length Gennady slumped against Daniel, his wet face against Daniel’s shoulder.
Then his arms slid from around Daniel’s shoulders, and Daniel slackened his own grip just in time for Gennady to pull away. He scooted away from Daniel, almost down to the nightstand, and rubbed his face on his sleeve.
For a while they sat. Gennady’s breathing was still heavy and wet. Daniel waited.
Gennady’s voice was quiet when he spoke again. “You must think I’m pathetic,” he said, half-defiant.
“Gennady. Of course not.”
Gennady twisted the end of his tie between his fingers. “It must seem so stupid to you,” he insisted. “To be so upset over a single punch…”
“No, no. Even a single punch is terrible when it’s someone you can’t punch back.”
Gennady’s mouth dragged down at the corners, as if he might cry again. “What do you know about it? I bet your boss never hit you.”
“No,” Daniel admitted.
“Not even when he discovered you are a homosexual.”
Daniel flinched. “I’m not.”
“It is a little late in the day to be saying that, my friend.”
“No, no, I’m not saying… I mean, I’m not homosexual because I’m not attracted only to men. I’m attracted to women too. It’s called, um.” His face was flushing, dammit, his shoulders bracing as if in expectation of a blow. “Kinsey calls it bisexuality,” he said, as if Kinsey’s imprimatur made it a real and respectable thing, although that certainly hadn’t worked when he discussed it with Paul.
Of course, he brought it up at a bad time: Paul had already been angry, because he thought Daniel was flirting with the waitress. “Why do you do that?” he asked, voice clipped, once they were back in the car. “There’s no need for you to flirt with waitresses anymore.”
“I wasn’t flirting,” Daniel protested, although maybe he had been, a little, because he’d gotten so sick of being falsely accused of flirting that he’d decided he might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. “We were just talking. She was a pretty girl, that’s all.”
“So what? That doesn’t mean anything to you.”
“Kinsey says bisexuality – ”
“That’s not real,” Paul snapped, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. “There are gay men trying to deny their true nature, and oversexed straight men who will satisfy their base urges with a man if they can’t find a woman.”
“So which one am I?” Daniel shot back.
Paul’s jaw twitched. “Both.”
The memory flooded Daniel with adrenaline. Damn Gennady for bringing that up, for prying when he had no right to ask, anyway; and an equally prying question occurred to Daniel, and he cracked it out like a whip. “What about you?”
Gennady blinked at him. “What about me?”
“Well, they didn’t choose you to try to honeytrap me because you’re straight as an arrow, did they?” Daniel said. Gennady still looked puzzled, and Daniel snapped, “They must have had some reason to think you could seduce a man.”
Gennady flushed. “I wasn’t chosen for that,” he said stiffly. “It was after I received the assignment – then Arkady had the idea for the honeytrap. He was angry they were taking one of his agents away, he wanted to turn it to his advantage, to secure a source for himself. But he would have sent someone else if he could. It would have been better if I were younger and prettier…”
“So the honeytrap wasn’t part of your official mission? It was a favor that your boss asked of you.”
Gennady nodded.
In a way that was comforting. The whole KGB wasn’t gunning to blackmail Daniel, after all, just one venial intelligence officer who wanted to shore up his own position by snagging his own private turncoat.
And yet Daniel was disappointed, too, that Gennady had not been picked for the mission because he had some inclination for it. He had been so sure that Gennady liked men – or at least liked him.
But no. “You’ve never been interested in men at all.”
Gennady sighed. “So, so, so. I’ve fooled around when I’m drunk sometimes.”
For a moment, time seemed to stop. Daniel seemed suspended between heartbeats, remembering again Gennady’s lips under his, Gennady’s hands on his chest, the little noise that he made in his throat as Daniel kissed him.
And then time started again, and Daniel’s heartbeat pounded in his ears, and Gennady was saying, “But, after all, everyone does that.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” Daniel said.
“And how would you know?” Gennady was scornful. “You barely drink.”
“Yeah, but my frat brothers drank like gangbusters. Don’t you think I would’ve gotten in on the action if they were all fooling around? Kinsey says – ”
“And who is Kinsey?”
“A sexologist. He wrote a book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male…”
“A sexologist,” Gennady scoffed. “What does this Kinsey know, anyway? How does he study this?”
“Interviews…”
“With Americans? How can he say that this is the way that all people are if it’s only Americans he has spoken to? Do you believe your country represents the whole human race? Things are different everywhere. We drink so much more in Russia, of course things are different.”
Daniel wanted to argue: Kinsey’s samples might not be totally representative of the whole entire human race, but it wasn’t like there was any kind of scientific process behind Gennady’s belief at all.
Kinsey wrote that thirty-seven percent of men had some homosexual experience, a number so high it had shocked Daniel: he would have guessed one in a thousand, one in ten thousand even.
But thirty-seven percent was still a hell of a lot less than everybody.
Instead, Daniel bit his lip. What was the point? He wanted Gennady admit that yes, he was part of the thirty-seven percent that felt some attraction to men, that he was attracted to Daniel – and why?
To assuage his own vanity? That was a damn selfish reason to browbeat Gennady toward a realization that would only make his life more difficult.
Gennady’s mind seemed to be moving on an eerily parallel path. “Life is so hard,” he said, “there is no reason to make it even harder. Wouldn’t you be happier if you still thought you were normal?
It was as if a whisper in Daniel’s subconscious had raised its head and spoken. He stood up and walked away, not that there was much space to walk in that tiny room. He stopped at the window, peering through the broken blinds. Neon lights blinked above the Laundromat across the street. “I’d be lying if I said I haven’t asked myself that question. If I wouldn’t have been better off if I just married Helen right out of high school and settled down. Instead of going to college and falling for one of my frat brothers, and – ”
He had never told anyone this story, and he hadn’t planned to tell it now, but now that it was started he couldn’t stop. “We were drinking schnapps in his room,” he said, “sitting on the rug by his bed. Peppermint schnapps, festive, it was the last day before Christmas break. We were the only ones left in the house. I don’t think we were really drunk, I don’t know, I don’t remember. And then John kissed me, and I kissed him back, and then…”
Daniel laughed, and gave the Venetian blinds a push that sent them clacking against the window. “Then he rammed my head sideways against the bed frame.”
And punched him, and kept punching him. Daniel turned away from the window and smiled and shrugged, to show it was a long time ago and it didn’t matter anymore.
Gennady looked up at him from the space between the two beds. His drunken flush had faded, and he looked pale and stretched. “That’s terrible.”
Daniel laughed again and looked away. “Never would have happened if I’d stuck with making out with girls,” he said, and gave another shrug, and added, acid rising in his throat, “I never told anyone. He was so popular – not just in the frat. A big man on campus. No one would have believed me. Or if they had, they would have figured I deserved it.”
“Daniel…”
The sympathy in Gennady’s voice was unbearable. “I didn’t go back to college after Christmas break. I signed up to go fight in Korea instead, just so I wouldn’t have to go back. Everyone thought it was so brave and patriotic and really I was just running away.”
“It’s good to run away when you can.” The vehemence in Gennady’s voice startled Daniel. “When you are faced with a force so powerful that you can’t fight it, of course you should run. What else could you do? Sit and endure? Save that for when you have no other choice.”
“Do you really think so?” Daniel asked.
“Yes, of course. The only people who don’t think that are the ones who want you to stay so they can keep hurting you.”
This was so wildly divergent from everything Daniel had ever been taught – a real man should stand and fight! – that he didn’t know what to do with it. So he pushed it away, and he said, “Does that answer your question?”
“What?”
Naturally Gennady had forgotten his question. “About whether I would be happier if I still thought I was normal,” Daniel said, and then stopped, and said, “Christ, Gennady, I never thought I was normal. I always thought there was something wrong with me.”
The first time Paul had kissed him, when Paul rested his forehead against Daniel’s, both of them breathing shakily because that kiss was such a risk – when Paul lifted his hands to Daniel’s cheeks, and kissed him again, and said, “I knew it, I knew it, you’re queer like me” – it had felt like a welcome home.
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Gennady said.
“No, I don’t think so anymore,” Daniel agreed, and then stopped: Gennady had spoken so matter-of-factly that the generosity of his words almost hadn’t registered. “Do you really think so? Most people…”
“Most people thought Stalin was wonderful. They think whatever they are told to think. There’s nothing wrong with you - at least not in that way. In other ways, yes.”
He said this matter-of-factly, too, and Daniel had to laugh. “Oh really?” he said. “I’d ask, but I don’t think I want to know.” He smiled at Gennady, and Gennady leaned back his head to smile up at him, and again the black eye gave his smile that heart-breaking lopsided look. “You’re all right too, you know,” Daniel told Gennady.
Gennady turned his face away. “I feel terrible.”
“Of course you do. Let me get you a glass of water. Things will look better in the morning.”
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Date: 2019-12-24 08:50 pm (UTC)(GENNADY <3)
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Date: 2019-12-25 03:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-26 07:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-25 05:00 am (UTC)But then, later:
Awwwwwww
I love that Daniel, upon discovering that he was bisexual, went and read the Kinsey Report like a goddamn nerd.
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Date: 2019-12-25 02:53 pm (UTC)It occurs to me that maybe he should reflect on this when he and Gennady are arguing about what exactly normal means. "If it took me years to come to grip with this question, then maybe I should not expect him to embrace it all in one night while exceedingly drunk."
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Date: 2019-12-25 03:02 pm (UTC)Either way, I still maintain that Daniel is a nerd for turning to Kinsey to help him with his sexuality crisis. And I am very fond of him on this account.
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Date: 2019-12-26 07:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-26 11:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-27 04:11 pm (UTC)You are such a fantastic writer--and you're a writer who has something to **say**. I just love it.
This is a perfect story in and of itself, and there's just so much to it. I just want to sit with it for a while.
(I loved Gennady's "behind your two oceans")
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Date: 2019-12-30 01:51 am (UTC)