Greetings from the Vodka Sea Read Free

he was less inclined to be swayed by the forces of society and fraternity, and being grotesquely shy and (as Sondra surmised) ambivalent about his own sexuality, he was disinclined to follow the capering of his sex organ.
    â€œWhy don’t you take him to one of your little orgies?” Étienne suggested. He was teasing, of course. It was something she noticed that older men often did to younger women, tease them, a subtle way, she supposed, to reiterate their dominance.
    â€œThey’re not orgies, they’re encounter groups. And I’m afraid this boy’s ego isn’t ready for such an intense experience as that.”
    Sondra favoured the direct route. One morning, on the way from her car to her office, she stopped at the fountain and invited Avram to join her for coffee. That’s when he did it: he looked directly at her for the first time. That’s also when she realized how beautiful he was: brown-black hair which fell into his eyes and nearly reached his shoulders, black eyes, unblemished skin the colour of weak tea, lips as thick and tender as a young woman’s, and recognized too that his discomfort (he was visibly embarrassed; his face and ears flushed, his hands shook, his voice quavered as he almost whispered, “No”) enhanced his beauty for her. His vulnerability excited her, and her own aggressiveness in the face of this vulnerability increased. She noticed how her body language changed in response to Avram’s passivity. She stood more erect, her shoulders fully back, and her eyes were as unwavering as his were unfocused. And suddenly she understood why men didn’t need foreplay: the chase was stimulation enough.
    The next morning, he wasn’t waiting at the fountain and did not come to class. Sondra began to worry that she’d been too aggressive, too direct. She found herself passing the fountain five or six times that day and the next and had almost given up on seeing him again, perhaps ever, when, later that evening, as she was returning to her car to go home, there he was. Sitting at the fountain, desperately not looking at her. He was in his shirtsleeves and seemed even from a distance to be shivering in the descending cold. He coughed, and, picking up the cue, Sondra went to speak to him again. This time she was more tactful. She’d missed him in class, she said, and had worried that something had happened to him. She told him the class valued his input and managed to make a lot out of a trifling thing he’d once said during a discussion on manic-depressive illness. He coughed again, and Sondra offered him a ride home. Avram sat for a very long time, measuring his frozen breath, before he wordlessly assented. The car ride was predictably quiet. Sondra made an effort to start a conversation, then lapsed into a monologue, then simply turned up Stravinsky on the eight-track. He almost seemed relieved when she shut up. He relaxed in his seat.
    â€œDo you think they’ll kill him?” he asked, after a long, long silence.
    Sondra was taken aback. She had no idea what Avram was talking about, and she found the question and the way he framed it with silence almost a threat in itself.
    â€œKill who?”
    â€œJames Cross. Do you think the FLQ will kill him?”
    Illuminated, Sondra relaxed, but before she could respond (the simple answer was no, but Sondra was prepared to give a much more detailed analysis), Avram stopped her. “I like your car,” he said. “I want to get a car like this someday. I want to get a car exactly like this.”
    And that was it. She dropped him off a few minutes later by a rack of student apartments near the bus station. He thanked her very politely, exactly the way, Sondra thought, his mother had taught him. And he looked at her again as he shut the door and kept his eyes on her as she drove off. He stood on the corner and watched as she drove away and did not move until the car was out of