Her strategy had always been sex first.. Try to entice, try to please, try to beguile.  

He was telling jokes to try and make her laugh while she slid up and down under him on the carpet. Stretched out above her, eyes closed, mouth gasping for air, his forehead humid with perspiration, limbs sweating into his tuxedo.  

He was tall and perhaps slightly overweight for her liking, with a head of thick curly black hair which Luba wanted to touch.  She resisted the impulse as she saw it as too intimate, reserved for those who had shared more than a few moments of...what should she call it? Passion? No. He did not particularly excite her...It was curiosity more than anything.  Or perhaps it was...what was expected. 

At eighteen Luba understood that certain things were inexplicably the rule. 

“A woman must get married while her youth and beauty permitted her to choose.” her mother would say.  Even if it was the man who always did the choosing, as it was in her case. 

“ He is such a virtuoso, such a talented young man” her aunt had told her. 

“He travels all over the world” she added. “So much culture.” 

But he grunted just like all the other men she had ever been with.   

Luba spent her time trying to live up to her name, to flirt with its broad definition and the weight that it carried. Luba was short for Lubov, that could be transformed into Liubochka Liubchik, Lubanka, all expounding on the Russian word for love.   

She slowly turned her head to their reflection in the full-length mirror incased in the sliding closet door.  She liked the way her blond hair looked spilled on to the carpet against its rich burgundy and white hues. It was an image that belonged in a movie or a fashion magazine rather than in real life. 

His jokes weren’t funny but she smiled anyway though she knew he couldn’t see her. 

“His pants must be terribly wrinkled by now, she thought.  He should have just taken them off instead of letting them fall down to his ankles like a child.” 

She heard voices coming from the adjacent room.  A small gathering in his honor. 

Just moments earlier she had been sitting on a wide leather couch surrounded by people who had fervent opinions about everything from politics to the arts.  They discussed and defended their points of view with ardor. They cursed and insulted one another in the name of cultural purity, tripping on their English and reverting back to their native tongue like a falling man grasping for stability.  They were all desperately trying to be understood, with their tongues feverishly slapping their pallets as if in reprimand for the delayed transcription of ideas that came too quickly.  To Luba this room filled with bickering immigrants was no different that her mother’s kitchen where everyone gathered to recount the day’s events and was constantly interrupted, and in the end gave up trying to get their point across because in truth, nobody was really listening. 

That’s when she looked up and saw him smiling at her. Bingo. 

She crossed and uncrossed her legs, letting the smooth fabric of her dress fall between her thighs . “He has beautiful hands, long fingers...like all piano players” she mused.  

Or was this just another myth, a seed planted, a romantic notion? Once at a private gallery opening she met a famous Russian actor who had asked for political asylum in the United States. In Moscow he had been honored with the title of  National Artistic Treasure, but in Hollywood was reduced to playing B movie roles because of the language barrier. Upon being introduced he had taken her hand in his and asked if she played the piano because he said, she had such long, streamline fingers. To her disappointment she did not play any musical instruments. She only knew how to sew and crochet.  Not long after that encounter she learned that he drank himself to death, alone in a hotel room on the Sunset Strip. 

“Such an intellectual, and so good looking.  And so well-known at such a young age. They say he’s booked to do a tour of Europe this year and he’s not even thirty...” Luba could hear her aunt’s encouragement kneading its way to the forefront of her brain. 

His were not like the hands of the boy who came around to distract Luba from her daily routine, a makeshift mechanic who spent his days frisking about in a body shop, his Civil Engineering degree from the University of Moscow hidden away in a suitcase, waiting for better days. He had the hands of someone who made an honest living, pipes and bolts, and those pungent fumes that permeated his hair...they made him all the more endearing.  

“Make an effort, make an effort like I know you can when you want to. You are such a beauty, Kraccavitsa maya” Her aunt purred. Unlike Luba’s mother, she was ruthless in her convictions. 

Luba had been in the audience, sitting in the dark as this pianist performed, listening to the applause, pretending that she too was familiar with his repertoire, nodding her head, making eye contact now and then with the strangers sitting to her right and left in the orchestra seats procured through her aunt’s connections with the Philharmonic’s First Violin.  Luba had never heard of him or his talent though they both came from the same place and spoke the same language, a language that grounded her when all she wanted to do was take flight.  

She wondered if he felt as trapped in his role of protégée as she did in hers as the dutiful daughter. 

 Would he invite her into his life just for a glimpse, or would they get dressed and go their separate ways?   

Her arms slid silently to her sides, her fingers blindly caressing the shaggy strands of carpeting beneath them. She thought of her meek mother and the intrusiveness with which her aunt would surely ask how the evening had progressed. They would be waiting impatiently, seated on the hard kitchen stools as if in punishment, having tea with strawberry jam in a permanent state of anxiety.  Years of Communist Soviet rule had shattered their trust even in their own daughters. There was always an element of suspicion, the habit of being caught in a lie.  

They would wait dutifully until they heard her key turning in the door no matter the hour, their faces contorting into half smiles in the semi darkness.    

Without a word they will follow her into her bedroom like a pair of geese waddling through the countryside. It was a well-rehearsed routine.  They were eager for tales of conquest.  They wanted to watch her moving through her life with the precision of a fine-tuned clock.   

Luba heard laughter and the clanging of glasses. She craved the duck mousse pate’ she had tasted earlier in the evening and the champagne being served in her absence.  

“Who invited you anyway?” he asked as he rolled over on his back, breathless.  

“A friend brought me” She said propping herself up on one elbow.  

“You look like Michelle Pfeiffer you know that?” he was staring at the ceiling. 

“You think so?”  She wasn’t sure who Michelle Pfeiffer was, but she knew she appealed to men.  

He straightened himself up and,  jerking his body from the floor in one thrust, brushed the carpet hairs and specs of lint from his tuxedo with the back of his hand.  With his thumb and index finger he began methodically plucking at the fabric.  

All of a sudden from Luba’s vantage point on the floor, he looked awkward, his fingers arthritic, the knuckles bony. Everything about him was elongated, as though he were being stretched before her eyes, like a giant tulip with a bobbing head. 

Visibly irritated, he said “I need to get back to my guests. I had a nice time. I hope you didn’t misunderstand. I’m just not in the boyfriend business. Enjoy yourself, it’s quite nice out there. Have something to drink. It’s’s free.” 

He exited the room, leaving her sitting on the floor half naked. 

Luba waited a few minutes before getting to her feet. She paused in front of the mirror, standing barefoot, the sheer fabric of her dress loosely draped around her hips.  

With a flushed face, she examined herself and observed that her elbows and back were irritated from rubbing against the carpet.  Strange how the polyester fibers felt so soft under her feet, yet managed to be rough against her bare skin.  She pulled the top of her dress around her shoulders regretting not having warn a bra.   Picking up her gilded heels, she  clasped them around her ankles, and running her fingers through her hair she opened the door and made her way to the buffet .  

Rimma Kranet is a Ukrainian American writer with a Bachelor’s Degree in English from University of California Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in Across The Margin, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Construction Lit, EcoTheo Collective, Fence, The Common Breath, Door Is A Jar Magazine, and others. Featured in The Short Vigorous Roots: A Contemporary Flash Fiction Collection of Migrant Voices and the IHRAF Ukrainian
Voices Anthology. She resides between Florence, Italy and Los Angeles, California.