An hour later we were still moaning.
At precisely five p.m. the doorman called and said that I had three visitors downstairs. The adult was waiting patiently, he said with a chuckle, but the children weren't. The boy had run past him and hit the elevator button, and he was still hitting it at this very moment. The girl, however, hadn't passed him; she was standing in front of him right now, and she was eyeing him suspiciously. From the sound of his voice, she seemed to make him nervous.
“Send them up,” I said happily, and I hung up the phone, grabbed KGB, and walked downstairs to the fifty-second floor and opened the front door. A few moments later I heard the elevator doors slide open. Then the familiar voice of a little girl: “Daddy! Where are you, Daddy?”
“I'm here! Follow my voice!” I said loudly, and a moment later they turned the corner and were running toward me.
“Daddy's home!” screamed Carter. “Daddy's home!”
I crouched down, and they ran full speed into my arms.
For what seemed like an eternity, none of us said a word. We just kissed and hugged and squeezed one another for all we were worth, while KGB and Gwynne looked on silently. “I missed you guys so much!” I finally said. “I can't believe how longit's been!” I started nuzzling my nose into their necks and taking tiny sniffs of them. “I need to smell you guys to make sure it's you. The nose never lies, you know.”
“It's us!” insisted Chandler.
“Yeah,” added Carter. “It's us!”
I held them at arms’ length. “Well, then, let me take a close look at you. You don't have anything to hide, right?”
I pretended to study them. Chandler was as beautiful as ever. Her hair had grown out quite a bit since the summer and went down past her shoulder blades now. She was wearing a fire-engine-red corduroy dress held up by two thin shoulder straps with tiny red bows on them. Beneath it she wore a white cotton turtleneck and white ballet tights. She was a perfect little lady. I shrugged and said, “Okay—I'm convinced. It's you!”
She rolled her eyes and shook her head. “I told you!”
“What about me?” snapped Carter. “Is it still me too?” With that he rolled his head from side to side, offering me both sides of his profile.
As always, he was all eyelashes. His hair was a luxuriance of platinum-blond waves. He was dressed in jeans and sneakers and a red flannel shirt. It was hard to imagine that we had almost lost him as an infant. He was the picture of health now, a son to be proud of.
“Is it him?” Chandler asked nervously. “Or is he a robot?”
“No, it's him, all right.” They ran back into my arms and started kissing me again. After a few seconds, I said, “Aren't you guys gonna give Yulia a kiss? She missed you guys too.”
“No!” they shot back in unison. “Just you!”
Well, that wasn't good! I knew KGB was sensitive to such things. It had something to do with the great Russian soul, although just how, I hadn't the slightest idea. “Oh, come on,” I said, in a leading tone. “Shedeserves a kiss too, no?”
“Nooooooo!” they sputtered. “Only Daddy!”
Now Gwynne chimed in: “They just miss you so much they can't ged enough a you!Ain't that sweet?”
I looked up at KGB. She seemed insulted. I wanted to mouth the words: It's only because they miss me!But I knew she couldn't lip-read English. (She barely spoke the fucking language, for Chrissake!)
“This is okay,” she said, with a bit of a chill. “I will take suitcases upstairs.”
Upstairs, we walked down a long narrow hallway, at the end of which were two small bedrooms. One had been converted into a library; the other had two twin beds in it. As Gwynne and KGB went about unpacking the kids’ suitcases, the three of us sat on the maroon carpet, making up for lost time. There were many hints of Meadow Lane in this room—dozens of Chandler's favorite dollies lined up along the windowsill, Carter's sprawling wooden train set snaking its way around the carpet, his blue Thomas the Tank Engine comforter on one bed, Chandler's $2,200 pink-and-white Laura Ashley comforter with its white lace trimming on the other. Chandler was already busy arranging her dollies into a perfect circle around us, while Carter inspected his trains for possible damage from the move. Every so often, KGB would look down at us and smile coldly.
“Okay,” I said, trying to break the ice, “here's what Yulia and I have in store for you this week. Since we missed a whole bunch of holidays together. I figured—I mean, wefigured—we should make up for lost time by celebrating them now!” I paused and cocked my head to the side in an attitude that implied logic. “Better late than never, right, guys?”
Carter said, “Does that mean we get more Christmas presents?”
I nodded. “It most certainly does,” I said quickly. “And since we also missed Halloween, we're gonna get dressed up tomorrow night and go trick-or-treating!” With the exception of me, I thought. I would be faking a backache tomorrow night, lest I step foot out of the apartment and find myself back in Pod 7N the next day.
Chandler said, “Will people still give us candy now?”
“Of course!” I said, and no way!I thought. In this building you would have a better chance of seeing God. The Galleria was the sort of ultrapretentious snobitoriumin which you could travel up and down in the elevator a thousand times and never see a child. In fact, in the entire history of the building, two young mothers had never bumped into each other and said, “Oh, my God! It's so good to see you! Let's arrange a play date for our kids!” Changing the subject, I said, “Anyway, we also missed Thanksgiving and Hanukkah and—”
Chandler cut me off. “We get more presents for Hanukkah, right?”
I shook my head and smiled. “Yes, wisenheimer, we get more presents for Hanukkah. And we also missed Christmas”—Carter shot me a suspicious look—”which, as Carter previously said, you will definitely get presents for”—Carter nodded once and then went back to his trains—”and then, last but not least, there's New Year's Eve. We're going to celebrate them all.”
On Tuesday night we all wore costumes—including KGB, who, to my complete shock, broke out her Miss USSR sash and rhinestone tiara, while Carter and Chandler looked on, astonished. My costume, a garden-variety Western cowboy with a hat, a holster, and a semirealistic pair of toy six-shooters, was far less inspiring and not nearly as sexy. The children did the usual: Carter dressed up as a blue Power Ranger, and Chandler dressed as Snow White. Thankfully, our downstairs neighbor was nice enough to play along and give the kids candy.
On Wednesday night I made turkey and stuffing; the former I proudly baked into shoe leather, and the latter was of the Stove Top variety. The rest of the spread—the cranberry sauce, the gravy, the sweet-potato pie, the pumpkin pie, as well as a Russkie touch in the form of two ounces of premium beluga caviar (at $150 an ounce, from my rapidly depleting checkbook)—came from a nearby gourmet supermarket that gave new meaning to the term price-gouging.
On Thursday night my parents came over. We lit a menorah for the benefit of my mother, and Chandler and Carter got their Hanukkah presents (more money out of the checkbook). On Friday we went—or, should I say, theywent—to Macy's and bought an artificial Christmas tree, and then we spent the rest of the day listening to Christmas carols and decorating the tree. And, of course, they got more presents.
On Saturday night, which was our last night together, we celebrated New Year's Eve—which turned out to be a realhoot, because I got to meet Igor for the first time. Magnum had been dead-on-balls accurate with his description, starting with his silver-colored hair, which looked like a thin layer of sizzling gunpowder, and even more so when it came to Igor's posture, which, to my way of thinking, could only be the result of one of two things—either he'd spent countless years standing at attention in a secret KGB training camp or someone had once shoved an electrical cattle prod up his ass.