Greetings from the Vodka Sea Read online

  . . .

  On their wedding night they made love for the first time. David Shulman lost his virginity. Sarah Shulman did not.

  . . .

  By eight o’clock almost everyone at the encounter was drunk, including Shulman and his wife. The first of the clothes had come off, jackets mostly, but some sweaters, ties, scarves and cravats (it was an age when men still wore cravats with impunity), and here and there a shirt or blouse. Shulman removed his coat and carefully folded it. By now he’d cornered himself in a side room with Kitty, an actress from Syracuse. She’d unbuttoned her top completely, and he, holding the folded coat across his chest, pretended to be interested as she told him, for the third time, how she’d recently almost been mugged in the shadow of the World Trade towers. Nearby, Sarah was talking at close quarters to a man with longish hair and fashionably ridiculous sideburns. As Kitty re-related the part where she screamed and screamed — now adding slurred and drunken screams for effect — Shulman noticed the man playfully tugging at one of the buttons on his wife’s blouse. She pushed his hand away but let his fingers linger on her arm for a moment. Shulman’s natural impulse was to interpose. But he’d promised her her space. He concentrated on Kitty’s breasts instead.

  A measured roar came from across the hall, and Shulman turned his head to see two women dancing bare-breasted in the middle of the room (although Shulman suspected they might have been more than innocent revellers; he’d noticed them arrive together and saw them stand off to the side together a few times. They seemed a little too detached, by Shulman’s reckoning: professional dancers, probably, or prostitutes, hired to get the ball rolling). Everyone — men and women — strained to get a view of the dancers, and it wasn’t long before other women were pulling off their tops.

  “Dare I?” Kitty asked, her fingers on the front clasp of her bra.

  “I wish you would.” Shulman had hoped to sound less horny and more nonchalant.

  Kitty kept her fingers in place, waiting for him to egg her on, but by now Shulman’s concentration had returned to Sarah. She held her fingers on her top button for a very long time, five or six seconds, before finally pulling it open. She moved deliberately, almost mechanically, to the next button and repeated the process. Down and down she went, slowly, and so enraptured Shulman that he could almost hear her fingers scrape across the fabric, the buttons sigh as they slipped out of their holes. She was doing it for him. She was doing it to him. The tease. She knew it would upset him. She knew he would love it.

  The first exercise was designed, in Barrymore’s words, to “clear away the false images we project of ourselves.” Participants were called to the front of the room one at a time to, in the case of women, ritualistically wash their faces with a small cloth to clear away any makeup, and in the case of men, shave off beards and moustaches (sideburns running to the bottom of the earlobe were accepted and, judging by Barrymore’s mutton chops, encouraged); a couple of men were relieved of their toupees. Resentment was running high.

  At the same time, everyone had to face the crowd and tell the audience one thing about themselves they hoped the encounter would help them change. It couldn’t be anything superficial; Barrymore, with his studied badgering, made sure of that. One man, a real estate agent from Ajax, tried to turn the tables, asking Barrymore what he would like to change. The therapist, who’d been down the road a hundred times before, launched into a prolonged and rather graphic story about the sexual dysfunction he was currently experiencing, and how he hoped this challenging and loving group experience would help him overcoming the hidden hangups that were causing the dysfunction. The realtor from Ajax had to dig deeply indeed to top that.

  Shulman was one of the last people to go before the crowd and figured he’d have a relatively easy time of it. “I really just came because of my wife,” he explained. “We hoped it would help her painting.”

  “She’s a good painter, isn’t she, David?” Barrymore seemed genuinely interested.

  “I think so.”

  “But you, you don’t see any value in this experience for yourself?”

  Shulman shrugged. “I’m willing to give it a try.”

  Barrymore looked at him for several moments, a cold grin spreading across his face. “Anyone can try, David,” he said in perfect modulation. “But tonight we’re not rewarding effort. Tonight, David” — and as he spoke Shulman’s name he turned to the little mob — “tonight, we’re rewarding achievement.”

  The crowd responded, madly clapping and whooping. Sarah seemed to slip a little further into the background. Most likely the crowd had pushed her there.

  . . .

  The pawn is much maligned in the popular imagination. Philidor, in his seminal Analyse du jeu des échecs, called it “the soul of chess.” An overstatement perhaps, but he was urging us to recognize that pawns are more than expendable decorations. They are an integral part of any successful winning strategy. Their sacrifice should be contemplated as deeply as the loss of any queen or rook. It was the small game where Shulman excelled, the setting up of pawns to maximize the effectiveness of his strongest pieces. His father used to say that the greatest victories were the smallest, and every battle contained within it a thousand more, rules that applied as much to surgery — and marriage — as chess. Curiously, it was this advice that came into his head as he pushed his underwear to his feet and stepped out of it. He was not the last person to undress. An elderly couple who appeared somewhat Amish were still fully clothed (granted, they might have joined the group by mistake), while a terribly obese woman had stopped at her corset and was now broken down in the corner, having apparently regressed to childhood.

  Shulman needn’t have worried about the erection. Under the scrutiny of several dozen men and women, already waist-deep in the hot pool and anxious to move to the next phase of the therapeutic game, Shulman’s member had recoiled and actually seemed to be retreating within itself. In retrospect, he saw the strategic advantages to not being the last one naked.

  The game was simple. The men would stand in a line facing the women, all wearing blindfolds. When the music started, you let your hands explore the body of the person in front of you. You should touch everywhere — face, lips, breasts, genitals, feet — without disrupting the blindfolds. When the music stopped, you stopped and took two steps to the left. The music would start again. “It’s a kind of sensual musical chairs,” Barrymore explained, holding his own blindfold in front of his naked chest. The man was thirty years older than Shulman but in better physical condition than he could ever hope to attain. “But a word of caution. The point is not to arouse your partner or become aroused yourself. The point is to become more in tune with your tactile self — to literally get in touch with your feelings.” His gestures were emphatic, like a TV pitchman’s.

  Shulman put on his blindfold and waited for the music to start. He sensed the house lights dim, as the sound of loud, slow rock music rose from nearby speakers. The music was sexy — soft horns and lingering guitar solos. Shulman reached out.

  He intended only to touch his partner’s hand and work his way rather purposefully up the arms and to the face. But his fingers almost immediately lit on the woman’s breast, and in the moment between when he thought he should reposition his hand and the actual repositioning of that hand, the anonymous partner moved closer to him, encouraging him, and placed her fingers directly on his nipples. Perhaps it was the alcohol, but Shulman found himself instantly aroused, and more so by the second, as his partner’s obvious arousal (her nipples puffed, her genitals pressed against his, one hand quickly slid to his buttocks, massaging, tickling . . .) grew stronger. She had begun to slide her hand down his chest when the music stopped.

  Shulman took two steps to the left. As the music started, he wasted no time, moving his hands directly to his new partner’s breasts, cupping them, tracing the outline of her nipples. She was taller than the last woman and slighter, with strong stomach muscles and taut breasts. She’d wasted no time e
ither: both her hands went immediately to his genitals, running her fingers with glacial deliberation from the hard tip to the soft folds where his legs came together. She pulled him toward her, and he responded, grinding his hips into hers . . . just as the music stopped.

  He moved on again, and again picked up where he left off. But his newest partner seemed rigid in his hands. She moved his hands off her breasts and placed them on her hips, pushing her own coarse fingers up his arms to his neck, where they lingered, encircling, almost on the verge of gentle strangulation. By the time he moved on to the next woman, his arousal was almost extinguished. But the new partner quickly changed that. Her hands went right between his legs and agitated his softened piece. Their lips met a moment later, and she sucked his tongue into her mouth. There was a familiarity to all this, and by now he was certain he’d found Sarah. He pressed his hips against hers and she directed him inside. There it was, the old compatibility. They came together within seconds, careful not to make a noise. And as they rested in each other’s arms, he pushed his mask up with her cheek to see her face and find reassurance in it. All around them, other blind couples were in various advanced stages of intimacy, some having sex, some wildly groping, some resting in the afterglow. Only Barrymore and his partner were beyond arousal, or perhaps had reached a kind of hyper-arousal. His hands seemed to barely touch the woman, washing over her in the thin layer between the aura and the epidermis, while she stood, her head tilted, her arms out-stretched like some art-film homage to the crucifix, her face radiant with something between anguish and delight. Shulman had never seen that look before, but if he had to hazard a guess, he would have described it as rapture.

  He looked at his partner again. Kitty was still languishing. Not far off, he saw her husband vigorously mounting a women on the hot pool steps. And Sarah, standing two steps to his right, her arms outstretched, joy twisting off her face, as Barrymore — a naked, muscled sun — radiated around her.

  . . .

  There are men (and it’s mostly men; chess is a masculine displacement) who see the game twenty, thirty, forty moves ahead. The Dutch Master Max Euwe is said to have been able to accurately predict the winner of a game ninety-nine out of a hundred times, based solely on the first two moves. That’s because despite the outward appearance, chess isn’t a random encounter between free-floating intellects. Chess is an unfolding of inevitabilities, always an approximation of life, never life itself. Mathematically, there are only a finite number of ways the game can be played out (it’s an imponderably high number, but still finite), and as any mathematician will tell you, anything that is finite can be quantified and qualified. A chess player, therefore — and this may be the key to the attraction the game holds for some — is a kind of chess piece himself, an überpiece, whose function is to move, in some degree mechanically, the other pieces and pawns. And like any other piece, the Player (let’s call him) is severely limited in his range of movement (the finite versus the infinite). But it’s precisely these limitations — the ultimate predictability, or better, inevitability — of chess that appeals to the Player. The game is almost wholly objective and, despite appeals to the contrary, provides no quarter for such traditionally feminine values as creativity and intuition. There are, of course, Creative Players and Intuitive Players, but these are men who have committed a larger number of inevitabilities to memory and can work one off another. Chess tournaments, for example, regularly offer a brilliancy prize to the player who displays the most innovative moves in the course of his game, but this in fact rewards counter-intuitive behaviour, that is, play which rapidly shifts the game from one unfolding of the inevitable to another in a surprising but, ultimately, entirely predictable way. Shulman sometimes contemplated what the game of chess would have been like if it had been invented by women. It occurred to him that the finished product would no longer be an approximation of life but a game within which all the boundaries of life are contained.

  And were brilliancy prizes to be handed out at this organized orgy, Barrymore would be taking all of them home. He had been studying Shulman for several moments. In the post-coital wash of the game, the room had gone silent, the men and women, many of them already unwrapped from their towels, bundled in identical silk housecoats (the word, Shulman thought, was “unisex”), all looking at Shulman’s own little encounter group. He could smell Barrymore’s minty breath and heavy cologne. “I said” — the therapist was emphatic — “you can go home.”

  “But —” Shulman tried not to look at the others, tried to catch on to where this exercise was leading.

  The therapist continued. “You obviously don’t want to be here, and we can’t afford to have someone here who isn’t committed to the needs of the group.”

  “But . . . but I’ve already paid.”

  Before Shulman had finished speaking, Barrymore had produced a chequebook from his kimono pocket. “I’ll cut you a refund right now,” he said, already writing. “And I’ll tell you what, I’ll add a hundred bucks for your trouble.” The therapist handed the cheque to Shulman, then turned to the crowd again. “Now, is there anyone else here who isn’t personally committed to this encounter?”

  Shulman awkwardly shifted from one foot to the other. He held the cheque in one hand. Surely, he thought, Barrymore was joking. He’d merely suggested that perhaps the group could take a short break for coffee and maybe a visit to the bathrooms. Barrymore, who by now had taken to calling Shulman (with a curious biblical poignancy) the Uncommitted One, had barely been able to veil his contempt.

  “I’m sorry, David,” the therapist said, his voice rising slightly as he squared his shoulders. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave now.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Please, we need to move on.”

  “But —”

  “Don’t make me call security.”

  David hesitated, then took a step back.

  “We’ll get our clothes,” he said quietly. Instinctively, he looked at Sarah. She began to walk toward him.

  “Hang on, Sarah.” Dr. Barrymore raised his hand. “You don’t have to go. Clearly, you’re the one who’s committed to what we’re trying to do tonight. You’re certainly welcome to stay. In fact, I very much think you should.”

  . . .

  “You stay, no, really.”

  Sarah was in his arms by now. “I can’t stay without you.”

  “We came for your sake, honey. It’s better this way, it really is.”

  “Really? Should I stay?”

  “Really. Maybe that’s what you need. A little time away from me. A chance to grow on your own.”

  “This will only make your love stronger.”

  “It will make our love stronger than ever.”

  . . .

  Schulman waited until two o’clock in the morning for Sarah to come home. Finally, he fell asleep on the couch listening to classical music on the radio. Bartok. Music to not sleep by.

  . . .

  When he returned from work Monday evening, Sarah was in the bedroom packing her things. He did not enter the house immediately but stood in the driveway and waited. He knew she was in there, but he convinced himself that he needed to give her a little space. By the time he entered the front hall, she had stacked three suitcases by the doorway.

  Each waited for the other to speak.

  Shulman finally went to her. He wanted to hold her. He went to her with his arms open, and she accepted him in her arms. They embraced, and she held him very hard before letting go.

  “I’m —”

  “Don’t.”

  “Dr. Barrymore says I need to grow, on my own. I need to be my own person.”

  “Don’t go. Please.”

  “Maybe, in time —”

  “Don’t say it.”

  “He’s a wonderful man. Brilliant.”

  “Is he?”

  Sarah tried to pick up all three bags. The small one, the valise with the embroidered cover, kept falling. Shulman picked it up t
o hand to her; it was almost empty.

  “This is just a phase, right? You’re coming back, right?”

  Sarah did not respond. She walked toward the door. “Don’t worry about the car. I’ve called a cab.”

  Shulman grabbed her arm.

  “This is just a phase, right?” He was squeezing her tighter now, and she was shaking his arm to get out of his grip.

  “That’s hurting, David, please . . .”

  “You are coming back, right?”

  “I need some time. I need to sort some things out.”

  She leaned forward and kissed him on the lips. They stood at the doorway for a moment, watching each other. David thought about grabbing her hair, throwing her to the floor. Then maybe she’d stay.