Tonight, Nikolai laughed during sex. Tonight, the control produced a sound it has never produced. Tonight, the fortress had joy in it for the first time.
The lamp survived.
We survived better.
NIKOLAI
My mother calls at 6 AM because my mother operates on Moscow time regardless of the time zone she inhabits.
Irina Sokolova has lived in Detroit for eighteen years and has not adjusted her internal clock by a single hour. She wakes at what would be morning in Russia. She eats lunch at what would be afternoon in Russia. She calls her son at what would be a reasonable hour in Russia and what is, in Atlanta, the hour at which the alarm has not yet sounded and the apartment is dark and Eli is asleep on my chest.
The phone rings. The ringtone is the one I assigned to my mother three years ago: a specific, sharp chime that I chose because it is impossible to sleep through and because ignoring a call from Irina Sokolova is a decision that produces consequences of a severity I am not willing to risk.
I extract myself from Eli. The extracting requires care because Eli sleeps the way Eli does everything: totally, with full-body commitment, his limbs claiming territory in all directions. He has annexed the center of the bed. My portion is the margin, which is where I sleep now, and the margin is sufficient, andthe sufficiency is the compromise, and the compromise is the relationship.
I take the phone to the kitchen. The kitchen is dark. The city is pre-dawn through the windows.
"Kolya," my mother says. The name is the Russian diminutive. The name is the child-name, the name from the Moscow apartment, the name from the skating rink where she coached and where I sat in the stands at age six doing homework while my mother turned girls into technicians on ice.
"Mama. It is six in the morning."
"It is a perfectly reasonable hour."
"In Moscow."
"I am not calling about the time." A pause. Irina Sokolova's pauses are not Mik's pauses (structural, load-bearing) or Mars's pauses (data-processing). Irina's pauses are tactical. Irina pauses the way she coached: letting the silence do the work, waiting for the student to understand the correction before the correction is delivered.
"Your father tells me you are seeing someone," she says.
My father. Marcus Sokolov, who retired from the Detroit Fire Department four years ago and who spends his days woodworking in the garage and who communicates with his son through biweekly phone calls that are warm and brief and contain the understated love of a man from Detroit who considers verbal emotional expression a luxury available to people who did not spend thirty years running into burning buildings.
My father knows because I told my father. I told my father three weeks ago, on a Tuesday, in a phone call that lasted four minutes. I said: "I am seeing someone. His name is Eli. He is a rookie." My father said: "Is he good to you?" I said: "Yes." My father said: "Good. Your mother will have questions." Theconversation ended. Four minutes. The four minutes contained everything my father needed to say and nothing he didn't.
My mother has questions.
"Yes," I say. "I am seeing someone."
"Who?"
"Eli Mercer. He is a forward. Twenty-two. First-year player."
"Twenty-two." The number is repeated with the specific, evaluative tone of a woman who trained competitive athletes and who considers age a variable with implications. "He is young."
"He is twenty-two."
"That is what I said. He is young. You are thirty. The gap is not trivial."
"Mama."
"I am not criticizing. I am observing. The observation has a follow-up. Is he good?"
The question is Irina's version of my father's question, but my father asked "is he good to you" (the passive, the receiving, the question of a man who wants to know if his son is being treated well) and my mother asks "is he good" (the active, the assessment, the question of a woman who wants to know if the person her son has chosen is worthy of the choosing).
"He is chaos," I say.
The silence that follows is three seconds. Three seconds of Irina Sokolova silence is significant because Irina Sokolova does not waste time on silence. Silence from my mother is the opposite of silence from other people. Silence from other people is the absence of speech. Silence from my mother is the presence of thought.
"Good," she says.
