Saving Anna Karenina
Part 42
Start with Part 1, and read a short synopsis of the original book.
At dinnertime, Anna fixed herself up in the bathroom and went to join the others. What she found in the front salon was different from the usual scene before breakfast or lunch. People were still sitting with their visitors, eating pizza and other things brought from outside. The old men with curly muttonchops and strings were solemnly drinking what looked like wine with Rachel and Avram while candles burned in a candelabra on their table. Kurt was sitting with Derek’s parents, telling a story that had them riveted. A mother and daughter were playing cards. One girl was asleep in her mother’s lap on a sofa. Anna felt lonesome. It would have been so lovely to see Seryozha, to give him a kiss and hear one of his heroic stories of adapting to the new world. But she wouldn’t want him to see her here; that was probably why children weren’t allowed.
Blair shouted across the room.
“Hey, sleepyhead, you’re up for dinner? Come over here.”
Anna joined Blair, Kathleen and several others at a table where some word game was taking place on a piece of cardboard. She wondered where Bernadette was.
“I can’t even think of this word. It’s the Haldol,” complained a morose patient whose turn it was in the game.
“Matyas is a drug dealer,” Blair said. “He makes a lot of money in South Africa.” Anna almost laughed. It reminded her of the boy she bought her pills from in Brooklyn. Matyas had his same solicitous manner.
“Oh, let’s order sushi, I’m tired of this,” said Kathleen, who passed her turn easily with the word JUXTAPOSITION. “And how about some caviar? I know a wonderful market that delivers. I bet the countess likes caviar.”
Kathleen looked at Anna with an indulgent smile. Anna coughed out of embarrassment, but she was thrilled inside.
“How do you know?” said Anna quietly.
“Of course I read the Post, everyone does.”
Anna looked puzzled.
“The New York Post. The interview with you in Brooklyn.”
“Oh.” She had forgotten. “Was it disgraceful?”
“Not at all. You haven’t read it? I have it in my room. Let me get it. Your story’s incredible! Truly incredible.” Kathleen shook her head. “He had no right to take your son away from you, that horrible ex-husband of yours.” Anna was surprised to hear this. Had she really told Peter about her troubles in Russia that day in the dark bar? She didn’t think so.
“Where’s your shadow tonight?” Kathleen said.
“Who?”
“Oh, that handsome young man you were with earlier.”
Anna shrugged, feeling herself blush. She was wondering the same thing. Was he still sleeping?
Kathleen went over to the payphones.
“Caviar for everyone!” she shouted.
People looked over at her and then continued on with their activities. A sweaty young woman in a dressing gown frantically cleaned trash left by visitors off the tables. She picked up a pizza box and started to throw it away until an elderly visitor stopped her.
“We haven’t finished the pie!” he said.
Kathleen returned, handing Anna a newspaper with her picture on the cover. Anna closed her eyes for a minute, feeling too much emotion. She breathed deeply, as Joan counseled her to do. When she opened her eyes the first thing she noticed were her shoulders. In the picture, Anna’s shoulders were hollow, a clothes hanger propping up the peacock dress, which looked horrid. Only a prostitute would wear such a dress. Her expression looked delirious. And then there was the headline: “RAMBLIN’ WOMAN: Time Traveling Princess Cracks Up.”
Anna didn’t have any feelings now; they had withdrawn like the tide into some void, so it was easy to open the newspaper and start reading. On the page with her article was another picture from that day with Pete, next to a picture of her in Ara Garabedian’s apartment wearing her Russian clothes and jewels, with the captions BEFORE and AFTER.
Her numb shock continued, allowing her to read through the article without weeping, vomiting, or fainting.
‘We’ve done our best for Mrs. Karenina, and we’ll continue to support her cause,’ said a spokesman for the mayor. ‘The mayor has terminated the time travel program.’
‘You can’t be their mother. You know the old Chinese proverb, teach a man to fish, he’ll eat for a year,’ Jean Arbis said.
Popping a mysterious pill after her third glass of champagne, former countess Anna Karenina compared her life in modern day New York to living in prison.
In the bygone days of czar Alexander II, Karenina’s husband got sole custody of her son on the grounds of her adultery.
Anna threw the paper down on the table.
“What kind of a newspaper is this?” she said.
“A rag,” said Blair, looking up from the space she was trying to fill on the cardboard game.
“Pretty much,” said another patient.
“The New York Post would defame Rupert Murdoch, and he’s the publisher,” said Kathleen, patting Anna’s back.
“You were in the Post! Oh my God I’ve got to see it!” Blair grabbed the paper off the table. “You’re famous! Oh my God aren’t you excited?”
“You said it wasn’t disgraceful,” Anna said to Kathleen.
“Well,” said Kathleen. “What’s disgraceful is the way you’ve been treated. I mean as if you didn’t suffer enough in the 19th century, they brought you here and dumped you in…Brooklyn. Those callous people you had to live with, and those evil women, what were their names, Margaret and Janet? It’s a total disgrace. Thank God Bloomberg isn’t bringing any more people into the future. They’re better off in whatever Draconian past they’re from.” Kathleen looked at Anna with kindness in her eyes. “Anna, really, it’s no wonder you ended up in an insane asylum.”
Anna’s stomach, which had been threatening to erupt with bile for the last minute, now settled. Kathleen stated all of her own thoughts about the situation. And really, how was the mayor supporting her cause? It was hogwash. She hadn’t seen hide nor hair of the mayor’s people since they dumped her with Margaret and Jean.
This is part 42 of a serialized novella being published each Thursday. It is a speculative sequel to Leo Tolstoy’s novel, Anna Karenina.
Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41
I’m the author of Oh, the Places Where You’ll Have a Nervous Breakdown.
