the russian house

Technically, she sent him away. In truth, though, he'd been gone for a while. She just did the dirty work of goodbye.

The limp sentiment of her desire had followed him around for years, hiding in shadows, scared to show itself. It took one casual caress, just a simple thoughtless kindness, to set it off. It became a monster, a glutton, a cancer. When that happened Marchette's life changed. Her adoration of him was her life.

That pretense was where she built the Russian house. In the Russian house, she pretended he loved her back.

The fruit was made of glass, like jewels from The Arabian Nights. The coffee and tea were excellent, but the water came in straight from a river of ice and was too cold to drink. There were cigarettes in dusty boxes on tables choked with ashtrays and teacups.

The house itself was windowless, like Chinese restaurants from the fifties. Inside it was a different world than out, you were boxed up like some delicate doll. The walls were covered with brocades, velvet curtains, sumptuous to conceal the evidence that the house was a prison. The rooms crawled with haphazard antiques, looking like they'd frozen in the midst of an evacuation. The only natural light was from the skylights in the ceiling, the silver glow of wet clouds or the occasional screaming of moonlight.

So picture Marchette laying against the threadbare velvet of some 200 year old wingback chair, her cigarette yellowing her pale fingers. Picture her wandering around the house in a slip and long socks, asphyxiating in the heat of the battalion of old radiators that could only be on or off. Picture her loving him hopelessly, even as he was fading, falling back alone onto a dusty bed and dreaming he fell with her.

The entire world outside whizzed and sighed and she forced herself to ignore it. She stayed in her Russian house and refused to hear it. She conjured up his presence from scraps of notebooks and radio static in empty speakers. She made herself feel him. And she begged him to join her there.

He didn't, though, he wouldn't. Maybe the structure flattered him, but he wouldn't go inside. He admired it and encouraged her, but never passed its threshold.

Finally she told him to take his drinking glass from the wall and leave. She was ashamed. She felt grotesque, so in love she'd been willing to be rejected over and over, despite the hole defeat carved out of her soul. She never blamed him. She'd toyed with men who set themselves up to be playthings, and it would have been hypocritical to begrudge him the same conceited entertainment.

She doesn't know whether he looks for her on the plain, dull streets of real life. She'd pretty sure he's stopped looking for her at all. But she still looks for him. When the emptiness of real life leaves her thinking she should end it, sometimes she goes back to the Russian house. She lights a cigarette and waits for him, even though she knows he isn't coming.