Endless knows something is up the instant he steps in the door of Tatiana’s apartment on a grey day in February. Here on one of the highest floors in Westwood, with the huge plate glass windows facing west above the Veteran’s Administration complex, the sky is greyish and the air is thick. The green of the VA is indistinct; other lower buildings are just smudges; a mixture of smog and fog. When his cell phone tells him the air quality is moderate, he knows it means the air is shit. His eyes are red and he can’t breathe so well.
Was it his imagination or did the doorman downstairs give him a funny look a few minutes ago, as if he wasn’t welcome? Usually he waves him through but today he ostentatiously calls before Endless is allowed to ride up. When he tries the door it’s locked, usually it’s unlocked. He doesn’t like that feeling. Tatiana unsmilingly greets him, dressed very plainly in jeans and a white shirt. No lipstick, no rouge, and she’s sporting her unadorned dark glasses with the black plastic frames, which means she’s in a serious mood. With her black hair, her very white skin and pale lips, she looks like a vampire, another turn on. Everything about Tatiana turns him on. Obviously her assistant hasn’t come today to do her makeup. Lancelot, the poodle, with his bright black hair and jeweled collar looks more noticeably groomed than she is.
Photo: Joel Goodman
“Sit, Greg,” she tells him, as if he’s the dog. The poodle is sprawled luxuriously on the couch beside her. Endless reaches for Tatiana’s long pretty hand. She gently withdraws it, and moves away. She takes a little time before she says,
“I like you, I even trust you, and I was seriously considering marrying you, but I can’t.”
Endless isn’t surprised.
“Is it because of him—that yoga teacher?”
“Yes and no.”
“I knew you were in love with him. Even when you said yes to me, you were still thinking about him.”
Tatiana sits there, a blind statue. Endless sticks out his tongue at her and shoots her the bird with both hands, a minor release.
“Tatiana you’re one of the smartest women I’ve ever met, and yet you’re in love with a guy you pay to give you sex lessons?”
“I told you in the beginning about him. It was very helpful. And of course Nate refuses to take money from me now.”
Money won’t do that New Age twat any good where he’s going, Endless tells himself. Maybe Blue already did the job. If everything goes smoothly maybe he’ll also have Blue bump off Tatiana’s brother—then she’d have nobody. But himself, of course.
Although he will never mention Nate again once he’s dead, he can’t help saying now, “He took your money once. You’ll always have that between you.”
He watches Tatiana’s mouth grow hard. “In any event,” she continues, her slightly accented English growing more ESL by the moment, “Explain, please, why it is your business whom I pay? If we were to marry, do you think you could inflict this sort of monetary inquisition on me?”
“Tatiana, darling, I would never do that! You’re rich. I’m rich. That’s one of the great things about us. We don’t need each other’s money.”
A lie of course. Other than his share of the rents he collects for his father’s properties, he has nothing other than the apartment where he lives, and his father owns that too.
He sees Tatiana is thinking about this. Her head very still, her hand reaching for the dark glasses, and then the moment he waits for, when she draws them off and sets them down on the table in front of her, not feeling around, as though she could see exactly where she was putting them.
She turns to confront him with her indescribable face, the two dark gashes where the eyes had been, the prominent bones below them, the perfect eyebrows shaped and plucked. It is a face that could illicit horror and anxiety, but in his own case, lust.
He did not know it had a name until just a few years ago when he looked it up on the Internet. The gashes excite him. He loves her blank dead places; the helplessness that comes with it, the isolation she feels, the absolute darkness she lives in. For a while before he met her, he had a long affair with a woman in a wheelchair. She had turned him on too. But nothing close to what he feels for Tatiana. Her being beautiful and rich doesn’t hurt, but the eyes, as they say, have it. He had encouraged her since the beginning to feel free not to be covered up when he’s around. It was one of their early bonds.
“So you called me over to tell me it’s off? You don’t even want to be friends?”
“Why are you getting up, Greg? I’d like to talk to you about this so you understand.”
He heads toward the window to escape the keenness of her other senses, overcome with desire for her, he has to take care of it right now.
“What are you doing, I can hear you breathing!”
He pants loudly as he comes, and then quietly zips his fly, covering the noise by saying.
“It’s so polluted out, the damn air. I drove here with the top down. I forgot my asthma medication.”
“Poor Greg, come here, sit down. We can come to some sort of understanding.”
“Ok, I’m just going to get a kombucha from the kitchen.”
He returns and very softly moves the dark glasses from their accustomed spot, covering the sound by loudly putting his glass down. A line from a long ago Sunday school class enters his head. Thou shalt not curse the deaf nor put a stumbling block before the blind.
She’s fumbling now for her glasses, she likes to put them on and take them off. Her hands are sweeping the table; she’s beginning to panic.
“Tatiana, let me help you!”
“No! I want to help myself!”
Her hand knocks the glass over and she cries out.
“Don’t worry,” he says, “I’ll clean this up.”
She sinks back into the sofa and reaches for her poodle who begins to growl softly.
Tatiana sighs. “We can be friends. You can come here. We can go to the ocean and sit on the bench. We can drive with the top down and the wind in our faces. But I won’t marry you. And we’re not having sex anymore.”
That’s what you think…
The characters in Stumbling Block, appear and reappear in Blinded by the Light; New Year; A New Man, and A Meeting of Minds.
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