Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307) by Rachel Kadish Page B

table, nonplused by my own blundering. Odds are, at this rate, that George will never know me well enough to understand that I have nothing on my stove, ever, except occasionally a teapot. I force myself into a full, slow exhale. I know how to talk to a fellow human being. I talk to humans all the time. Obviously it’s been too long since I had a conversation with a man capable of surprising me, even if all he did was throw his food.
    Seconds pass. I’m furious at myself. Then, as from a great distance, I hear George through the receiver, clearing his throat.
    â€œ
O Canada!
” he trolls.
    Even from this distance it’s apparent that this is a man who could not carry a tune in a Samsonite.
    â€œ
Our home and native land! True patriot love in all thy sons command.
”
    I can think of nothing to say to a banjo-playing Canadian named George. After fourteen years’ boot camp, I’m a literary Manhattanite. I don’t wear pastels. I no longer consider the word “earnest” a compliment. I know that patriotism is just another ethos that needs to be put up on a lift and checked for leaks. I cannot date this man.
    It’s only when he belts out
True North strong and free
that I start, despite myself, to laugh. As he continues, my laughter swells, grows giddy. I’m afraid he’ll hear. Can he? He draws a deep breath, and yodels. “
From far and wiiiide . . .
”
    I pick up the receiver gingerly, afraid I’ll guffaw. “Hello?”
    He keeps singing. Now he’s rolling his R’s, booming and operatic. “
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
” He finishes with a vibrato sufficiently grand to wilt maple leaves. The line goes silent.
    â€œEncore?” I suggest, more meekly than I intend.
    â€œNot a chance. You have to go on a date with me if you want the cabaret version.
Ms. New York Sophisticate.
” His voice turns gentle on these last words. I’ve been forgiven. I’m not sure I sinned—in Manhattan hard edges are a moral imperative. But after I say yes, my temples pounding, after we agree on a plan and I set down the receiver, relief floods my apartment so thoroughly I open a window and lean out onto the sill, sipping the air of the city that floats and shimmers to the horizon.
    Â 
    The office is in a brick building on Thirtieth Street, with grimy but dignified stonework and thick, scratched windows. I’m cleared for entry by a taciturn woman who finds my name on a clipboard and motions me to the end of the hall. George warned me over the phone of the irony: his education-policy group rents office space in a failed school, a building rezoned for business in the 1960s.
    The stairs are shallow, covered in speckled tile, wide and echoing. As I climb I bear to the right and hold the rail, cornering apprehensively as though a crush of oncoming student traffic might knock me backward at any moment. I mount three floors and find the door propped open.
    He sits at a large black desk. A single folder is spread before him, and he holds a capped pen. He’s looking at the folder’s contents, but from the set of his shoulders I guess he’s not reading. I step through the door, and stop. The room is large and otherwise deserted, with four cluttered desks arranged conversationally around the sparsely decorated room. Jazz plays from a small radio on George’s desk, and before greeting him I pause to listen. The music is a walking bass line, quiet and so low it hardly registers as sound but rather as a shift in the atmosphere—the change your skin or inner ear responds to before you take in its meaning: a rainstorm blowing in from over the next hill.
    He flexes his shoulders, stretching. Then, with those just right hands I remember from the reception, turns a page.
    The tingle that runs my spine is the stuff of centuries-old romantic literary cliché; it’s accompanied by a hit of pure sexual longing that would never