I loved counting Sergey’s wives, because it made me feel less insecure about being Mark’s fourth wife.
Sergey’s sixth wife was Daria. She was an old friend of Mark’s, one in an endless cohort of friends and acquaintances who came into my life after Mark and I got married.
Daria stayed at Mark’s place for almost two months. He gave her the bedroom and slept on the living-room couch for the entire time. He did her laundry, got her groceries, cooked her food, and helped her with her schoolwork, all late at night after working long hours. Mark drove Daria to a ramshackle house in Sharon. A short, dishevelled woman surrounded by many children and barking dogs opened the door. It appeared that she didn’t know Daria very well. Daria stood there leaning against the porch column, pale and smiling, but the woman wasn’t smiling back. It occurred to Mark that tall people in distress looked more vulnerable, more exposed than people of average height.
Daria’s professional life seemed to follow the same pattern. She’d ace her interviews and get one great job after another, but soon she’d start insisting on her maximalist vision for whatever project she was working on, conflict would inevitably grow, and she would end up quitting or getting fired. After a few years, she’d acquired a reputation and accrued a lot of debt, so she had no choice but to leave the U.S. and look for a job in Europe.
Daria said that she and Sergey would get married in the U.S. They were moving here for good. She was sick of Russia anyway—it didn’t agree with her, what with Putin’s politics and the lack of quality vegetarian food. They would settle in New York City, because all the best landscape-design firms and museums were here, and she was sure that employers would be interested in a renowned arboriculturist and a renowned art historian.
Then she said that, though this would be her first marriage, for Sergey it would be the sixth. “Can you believe that he’s had five wives before me?” she asked. She said it with a laugh, but I could see that Sergey’s complicated past worried her. Sergey was an hour and a half late. As if to compensate for that, he flew up the stairs to our apartment and arrived breathless and flushed, firing off one excited rant after another. He was in awe of New York City—the streets, the buildings, the traffic, the people, the energy, the art! The Met was just stunning, especially the wooden sculptures made by the Asmat people.
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