MOSCOW, Sept. 7, 2003 -- “I have a friend, a student, who wants to take English lessons from a native speaker,” Ivan. bubbled at the other end of the phone. “Are you interested?”
“Sure,” I replied. I’m always interested. It depends on the time, though. “I don’t have any evenings available. I’ve got the middle of most days and Saturdays.”
“I think he was thinking about Saturday. How much do you charge?”
“Fifteen bucks an hour,” I replied.
“I think that’s in his price range,” Andrei continued effusively.
I figured it would be, since 15 bucks is what both Andrei and I get for teaching part time at the Moscow Institute of Diplomacy two nights a week.
“His name’s Volodya. Can I give him your number?”
“Sure.”
Volodya didn’t call until late Friday evening while I was losing a game of cribbage to Sasha, a graduate student in chemistry who is also a former student of mine cum pal, lover, and best friend. I rather distractedly arranged to meet Volodya in the nearby Belarusskaya Metro Station at 12:45 the next day.
New unseen students always give me a little tingle of anticipation, like Christmas Eve or opening a penny “Guess-What” when I was a kid in Iowa. You never knew what you would get and sometimes it was really neat, like the miniature world atlas that fell out of one of them one day.
How old? That’s always the first question in a fantasy. Well, he sounded young and he is a friend of Andrei’s, who is barely 26. Fat? Ugly? Pimples? Or maybe tall, red-haired and bespectacled? Time will tell. “Roll with the punches” Andrei likes to say. “Take the good with the bad.” It pleases him immensely to find appropriate places to stick in a well-practiced idiomatic expression. He lives for those moments.
So at 12:40 on Saturday I put on my shoes (no one wears shoes in Russian homes. It simply isn’t done, dahling) and hustled out of the apartment, around the corner, past the Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop and across the never-ending traffic jam to the metro in the city center. 12:45. I’d be a couple of minutes late. How will I recognize him, I wondered.
But as I suspected, I had no trouble. It’s usually pretty easy, when someone is standing near the escalator defying, like a granite rock in a mountain stream, the relentless flood of grim-faced metro emigres – whether in New York or Moscow – to guess he just might be the one you’re looking for.
We caught sight of each other almost simultaneously. Fate was indeed kind today. The brilliant white smile he flashed beneath the tousled crown of blond curly hair that topped his 6 ft. 4 in. basketball player’s frame was about as awesome a Guess-What as a body could wish for.
“Have you been waiting long?” I smiled.
“No, maybe five minutes.”
“Sorry. We’re only a couple of minutes from here.”
We fell into easy chatter. He was charming and personable. With a slight wrench of wistfulness I noted the silver band on his finger.
“Are you married?”
“Sort of.” Actually it’s probably better, I thought. I’ll be less apt to make a fool of myself.
I had planned a one-hour lesson. After all, at my rates were ‘way below most native-speaking private teachers’, and I was offering a real hour at that, not one of those 45-min. academic jobs that are finished just about the time you get wound up good. So /hour would be more than fair.
But he was so bright, so engaging, and so mind-bogglingly beautiful that two hours had flashed by before I finally began sensing that decorum demanded calling a halt.
As he was gathering his papers and notebooks, he suddenly looked up:
“Have you ever been to Turkey?”
“Yes.”
“Antalya?”
“Yes.”
“I saw you!”
I stared:
“We were on the same bus going from the airport to the hotel. I got off at a hotel before yours.”
And then I began to recall the tall, lanky, strikingly beautiful kid who had gotten on the bus with his parents and little sister just after my 18-year-old boyfriend Max and I had climbed on and gotten seated.. I had stared at him across the aisle the entire time and had nodded and smiled a time or two. I had been sadly disappointed when I realized he was getting off and we weren’t.”
“And we met in a restaurant there, too.”
Yes, I recalled: the vine-shaded shaurma restaurant not far from our hotel. Again I had stared and tried to find some excuse to talk to him, which was not easy when his fortress was two stern parents and a little sister.
And here, four years later, we were sitting chatting and laughing like we had known each other forever.
The next day I called Andrei:
“Thanks for sending me that delightful student.” I wanted to say “drop-dead beautiful student,” but Andrei – despite his own closeted status -- is sometimes a bit indiscreet.
“Oh, did you like him? You know he said he had met you – in Turkey.”
“Yes, what an amazing coincidence. How did he remember me after four years?”
“You know,” Andrei replied in the flawless English he acquired as a top graduate of the Moscow University of Linguistics, “he said he remembered you because you were traveling with a very young guy.”
You mean somebody noticed!
It’s not really what I wanted to hear. I thought maybe it was my commanding presence; my charming, gracious smile; my statesman-like mien. But I suppose a 66-year-old gray-haired pensioner coupled with an 18-year-old Russian boy from Moscow to Turkey’s Mediterranean coast might tend to catch one’s eye – especially if one is a sexually curious 15-year-old.
“Then you think he’s figured out I’m gay?”
“Well, I think he’s put two and two together.”
“As long as it doesn’t scare him off.”
“No, no, you didn’t scare him off. He enjoyed the lesson. He’s looking forward to the next one.”
“Anyway, what’s new in your life?” Andrei changed the subject. “Are you keeping all your boyfriends straight?” He didn’t realize his play on words.
I didn’t really have time to go into the scandal that had erupted just after Volodya had parted the afternoon before when Misha, my ex-lover and companion of four years and still apartment mate had discovered that
Shurik, the 19 year old boy he had brought home three nights before was returning to spend the night again – this time with me. I didn’t have time to describe how Misha had thrown all my stuffed animal presents down the staircase, how he had cut up and thrown away the adorable picture of him and the goat that I liked so much, how he had broken the collie coffee cup I had bought him when we first started living together, or how I had had to commandeer a wide-eyed and trepidatious Boris, another former student cum friend and definite closet case to translate my warning to Misha that if he didn’t cool it and start acting like an adult human being, I was going to call the police and have him tossed out on the street, or how Misha had countered that he would tell the landlady I was running a queer bordello and get me thrown out in the street as well.
“Yes, everything’s fine for the moment.”
Well, they were – sort of. A blessed – though troubled – calm had settled over the two-room apartment in which the five of us live, love, and have our tumultuous being.
But the shit would hit the fan again a few days later when – whoops! My 45 minutes are up.
Your homework assignment is to figure out how I’m going to get Misha to accept reality, smooth the festering feud between Sasha and Anton, preserve the ecstatic, unbelievable, and rewarding three-way love affair between me, Shurik, and Yegor, and get Boris to finally accept the fact that he’s as queer as I am, while sedately teaching English to Russian businessmen and women all over Moscow and restoring peace and calm to the kitchen in time to give Volodya his next English lesson next Saturday.
This day years ago:
2003-9-22: Chapt. #1 - Peter Pan in the Clutches of the Evil Empire
