Loophole

When Nixon summed his daily calories, he did not include food he'd gotten for free.

Nixon in Manhattan

The most obscene gesture Nixon observed in Manhattan was that of hailing a cab. People did it by stepping into the street without bending their legs at the knee. They shot out an arm without regard for passersby. They peered into the distance with a peeved or sullen or blank face. What got Nixon most was how they dropped off the curb, as off a short pier. The pier was so short, thought Nixon, it would not reach the nearest subway entrance, that is, two blocks. He was amazed they were never hit.

Repertoire

Every morning, Nikolai seized Nixon's mug and took a sip of his coffee. The mug said, "It's not easy being me, but somebody's got to do it."

On those rare occasions when Nikolai was absent, Nixon poured a little coffee out on the ground, for Nikolai. "L'chaim," he muttered.

When Nixon imagined what the office would be like after he left, he actually imagined the office without Nikolai. Which did not make a lot of sense. Nikolai quizzed Nixon about this.

"The watertowers are imitating Monet's haystacks," said Nixon.

"Don't be specific with me," threatened Nikolai.

"The snow makes it look as if the city's lit from underneath," said Nixon.

"For love of Elijah," swore Nikolai.

Nixon's voice

Nixon did not have an inside voice. He did, however, have a voice inside him.

The voice was a stowaway. The stowaway was a bird - specifically, a nuthatch. It was a nut with it's hatch ajar.  "Крыша поехала," say the Russians. "There goes the roof," they say.

The voice was a bottle inside a ship. The ship was wrecked by the pointy elbows of homesickness.

When it came to logic, Nixon was a one-hit wonder, a nonsense-prince.

Morning

"The bus! The bus!" yelled Nikolai.

"Too soon! Too soon!" yelled Nixon.

They were, together, the kind of irreproducible error that drives the tech support people crazy.

Mrs. Taylor and she says...

"Have Spells? Can't Hold Money? Want Luck? Come to see Taylor as many others do from far and near. Don't tell her, let her tell you. See her in the morning. Be happy at night. This woman does what others claim to do."

--Excerpt from a flyer found on the seabound Q

Lady M., revisited

Elena Mikhailovna - not Pavlovna - was my first host mother. The day I arrived, she gave me a bowl and a mug, rimmed with painted bees, for which she designated a spot on the counter. She ladled oatmeal mush or buckwheat (or the mystery soup of the day) into my bowl. Her glasses slipped off her nose; she shoved them back like Sisyphus. When I had excused myself, she called her teenage son, Kiril, to the table, and served him. She herself never ate, as far as I could tell. She liked to stand with her hands on her hips and lecture me about the dangers of Paris, where, she said, men reached out of cars and snatched the pocketbooks of pedestrians. "Hold it close," she said. 

In the kitchen there stood a washing machine. Elena M. said it didn't work. At first I took her word for it, but I grew suspicious when I came home to find that all the sheets and towels had been washed and the machine still throbbed, its forehead streaked with condensation dew. But I didn't have the nerve to pursue the matter. Without complaining, I washed my clothes by hand and hung them on the clothesline strung across the kitchen between the two refrigerators.

Yes, there were two refrigerators. Elena M. only ever took food from the first. I opened it when I was home alone one day, and found it empty. She had inexplicably transferred the food to the second fridge. To further complicate the situation, there was only one bucket for the entire household, so often my laundry was held up for days while Kiril soaked his grimy clothes.