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It is without hesitation or embarrassment that I admit to being a great lover of beautiful objects. I suppose this is one of my most glaring flaws in a world so preoccupied with minimalism and the abolishing of 21st century capitalism. It is no surprise to many who know me – though perhaps it’s laughable for me to assume that anyone would actually claim to know me, let alone “many” – that I am a connoisseur of the lovely, the antique, the precious. Money is of no consequence to me, at least not in regards to the things that matter. I have always been of the mind that the value of an object, rather, lies in its innate worth and the profundity of its existence. However much it costs, then, is secondary.
In my youth, this love of the beautiful was often affixed to objects with purely superficial or sentimental value, objects that stirred in me some great emotion through their association to those I loved – my mother, for instance, and later Hobie and the Barbours as well. Very few things in life have ever captured my heart and soul because of some truly personalized sense of value. Even fewer have followed me for years and years and pseudo-lifetimes.
The most peculiar of these, hands down, is that of Boris’s father’s cigarette lighter. When I first laid eyes upon it, the thing couldn’t have been less than a hundred years old, an heirloom with more history than some entire towns in the United States. It was a clunky thing, a rectangular piece of metal small enough to hide inside one’s palm when the hand was curled into a fist. It was plated in tarnished gold that – even in my youth and naivety – I assumed must have been real. How else could the thing have stood the test of time?
I never actually saw Mr. Pavlikovsky use it (I rarely saw him at all). But it was always lying around the house somewhere, on the banged-up and rarely used kitchen table, forgotten between the couch cushions, scattered amidst the detritus on Boris’s dresser. Once, I remarked on it to Boris himself, pointing at the lighter where it lay across from us on the kitchen counter, glinting like some mysterious eye in the harsh fluorescence of the bare bulb above the sink.
“Your dad’s lighter is really cool.”
Boris laughed. “You and your antiques.” It was a running joke for him, Boris finding it immensely hilarious that I actually liked what he called “old man grandpa stuff.”
“Is it old?” I asked.
“Sure,” Boris said, shrugging his shoulders in a peculiarly jaunty little wave motion. “Passed down in my family for many years.”
I reiterated my original statement. “I think it’s beautiful.”
When the lighter showed up in the front flap of my backpack a few days later, I thought nothing of it. Well, that wouldn’t be quite honest. I actually thought quite a bit of it, but I held myself back from dwelling on those thoughts for very long. I meant to thank him for it, but life moved quickly and steadily on and I, truly, embarrassingly, forgot.
It stayed with me all the way to New York, quite by accident (though I like to imagine the hand of fate had some not-so-insignificant role as well). I couldn’t really smoke around Hobie, though he himself smoked his hand-rolled cigarettes constantly, so the lighter was indefinitely put out of commission.
I took to keeping it in the front pocket of whichever pair of pants I was wearing that day. It was the only thing of Boris’s I had, a fact that seemed unrealistic even to me, as the two of us had very little regard for ownership during our time together. What was mine was his and vice versa, and yet not a single one of his smoky-smelling t-shirts made it into my luggage. As time began to go by and texts from Boris dwindled from a trickle to a full stop, the importance of that lighter grew tenfold in my eyes. In the subdued grays and browns of New York City, it slowly became more and more difficult for me to believe that my time in Las Vegas was anything more than an extended fever dream. The lighter was my small touchpoint, my incontrovertible proof that, yes, that all really had happened.
As I said, I didn’t often use it to smoke. Hobie had never seen me with a cigarette (though I don’t doubt that he could smell it on me at all times), and I intended to keep it that way. For another thing, the lighter was very old and I had no idea how to go about refilling it if the butane should run out. Google informed me that a typical lighter could last for upwards of several thousand uses, but I was unsure how sound this statistic was and I was unwilling to test it for myself. I was terrified that one day it would just unexpectedly fail to light and I would be left without this very last thing to tie me to my old friend. This fear, more than anything, kept me from using it any more than absolutely necessary.
So in my pocket it stayed. On cold mornings, I would place it in my coat pocket instead and run my thumb along its smooth, cold surface until it warmed like blood under my touch. This little habit often brought to mind some old story of a genie in a bottle. I envisioned a ghostly figure appearing in front of me on the sidewalk. I will grant you three wishes, he would say. What will they be?
And what a question that was. I spent many a morning pondering it as I walked to school. Of course, my first wish would be to bring my mother back – assuming this was, of course, a case in which genies could resurrect people from the dead. My second wish was often for the painting to remain safe and hidden forever, or at least until I died and didn’t really need to worry about it anymore. After that, I suppose, it could magically be returned to its rightful place in the Mauristhuis.
But beyond that, my third wish? It was a complete mystery to me. Typically, as my school loomed into view, I would rush something trivial – a warm mug of tea, a new novel I had been eyeing, a line of coke and two or three hours to kill. Sometimes, though I didn’t often let myself think it, I would wish for Boris to be right there next to me, the two of us bumping shoulders in the cold, fragile morning.
-
Everything changes once you hit adulthood. I know this is a given for most people and, realistically, it should have been obvious to me as well. Regardless, it wasn’t until I was well into my first full year of being a legal adult that I really began to grasp the gravity of my new position in society. Even now, years on, I am often shocked by one thing or another. Frequently, I have to remind myself that nobody is going to look at me twice when I pick up a bottle of wine at the liquor store. That I won’t go to jail for trying to buy a pack of cigarettes. That I can drink and smoke and fuck and pay taxes and do pretty much whatever I want, so long as I don’t do something unthinkable like kill somebody or commit antiques fraud.
With adulthood, of course, came the resurgence of my previously-dormant smoking habit. With adulthood, too, came my engagement to Kitsey and my reintroduction into the Barbours’ social circle. I was still reluctant to use Mr. Pavlikovsky’s gold lighter very often. Enough years had gone by at this point that I was certain I would never cross paths with Boris again and thus my attachment to the one possession of his that I owned became impossibly stronger.
Kitsey’s friends, New York socialites that they were, were enamored by the lighter. Normally, I only used it when I was having a particularly awful day, the kind that drenches you in a dread that won’t let up no matter what you do, or when I was too high to tell up from down, let alone remember to use my dollar store Bic instead.
I made the mistake just once of using it to light a cigarette as we waited for a cab outside Kitsey and her roommates’ apartment building and before I knew it, they were chattering at me about what a lovely thing it was and where on earth could they buy something so chic? I told them it was an old heirloom of my mother’s and gazed off into the distance with the unfixed, vacant expression I tended to adopt when faced with questions I would rather not answer. That shut them up surprisingly quickly and the topic was never raised again. The truth, of course, might have been just as easily effective.
When Boris came back into my life, I became even more secretive about the thing. The stakes were much higher now. I wasn’t sure exactly why, but the thought of Boris discovering that I had kept his father’s lighter all these years, that I carried it on my person at all times, sent me into a cold sweat.
Of course I knew how I really felt about Boris, don’t get me wrong. I am only able to admit that now, years later, as I reflect on these events with all the wisdom and honesty of hindsight. But even then, I knew. I wouldn’t dare put a name on the thing, but I was well aware that my feelings for Boris, this flame I’d carried for him all these years, were something deeper than blood and deeper than brotherhood. With him around all the time, my paranoia only worsened and I knew I must keep the lighter secret, concealed, at all costs.
-
After Amsterdam, after Antwerp, after my self-imposed pilgrimage to reverse years of fraud and forgery, I returned to Hobie’s. Truthfully (and pitifully), I had nowhere else to go. I was, for lack of a better word, broke. Hobie was kind enough to take me in and kinder still to allow me to keep working in the shop, selling his changelings and antiques honestly this time.
Several months into this arrangement, and without fanfare or notice, Boris turned up on our doorstep with two small bags stuffed full of clothes and god-knows-what-else.
“Hello, Potter,” he said, the little bell above the door still jangling his arrival. “Know any good hotels?”
Hobie, of course, would hear nothing of Boris staying indefinitely in some lice-ridden motel or overpriced bed and breakfast and instead invited him to make himself at home in Pippa’s old bedroom, now that she lived permanently in her London flat with Everett. One can only imagine the distress this caused my poor overtaxed and newly-sober mind.
Boris, for his part, was a wonderful houseguest. He moved across the creaky old floorboards as silently as a cat and always washed his own breakfast dishes before embarking on the rest of his day. Though he had no interest in the inner workings of the store or Hobie’s workshop, he made a valiant effort to feign interest when Hobie and I engaged in animated discussion over dinner about wood stains and water damage and some-or-other new piece we’d just acquired.
He clearly respected Hobie and did his best to make it known. I never quite knew what Boris got up to during the day; he left early and got back late, still as mysteriously well-dressed at 7 p.m. as he had been that morning. I didn’t ask and he didn’t offer, and so we remained in a state of comfortable ignorance. And every now and then, he would bring home something old and obviously priceless – a gilded hand mirror, a spindly but authentic 18th century kitchen chair (perched precariously in the bed of a pickup truck belonging to a hulking, Slavic “friend”), a first-edition copy of some classic novel. Hobie would express his surprise and immense gratitude and Boris would incline his head slightly, a gesture that in our youth had meant No big deal, or something of the like.
Life was good, simple. I was content (or close enough) for perhaps the first time since my mother had died. Of course, it was then that everything once again was turned on its head.
-
The catalyst was so simple as to be laughable. To make a long story short, one of my clients – a dignified older woman in the Bronx to whom I’d sold an “authentic” Chippendale chest which was, of course, anything but – threatened to take me to court. She obviously had no case. I had made my profuse apologies to her and bought back the chest for twice what it was worth (and far more than I had sold it for) and the paper trail was immaculate. Still, just the fact that my nightmare of the past year and a half might not yet be over drove me to near-hysterics.
We went out for a drink, Boris and me, at one of the dim Polish bars he liked to frequent. We had a lively discussion of old times and old memories and I cut us both off after two pints each, and it was all well and good until we got back outside. There, on the sidewalk, as we waited for an Uber – Boris being a great lover of what he called “the cab driver app” – I unthinkingly lit up a cigarette with the only lighter I had in my pocket which was, of course, the little gold thing Boris had snuck into my backpack a decade or so ago.
I lit the cigarette and closed my eyes to take the first, luxurious inhale. When I opened them, Boris was staring at me curiously.
“Is that…?” he asked.
“Um,” I said, ineloquently.
Boris laughed. “It is? Potter, you really still have that old thing?”
I shrugged a little, hoping against hope that he would drop the subject, though I knew he wouldn’t. Adrenaline had washed over me in a warm rush when I first realized my mistake, and my stomach had dropped down to my knees.
“What else of mine have you kept all these years?” Boris asked, laughing again.
Unbidden, my mind sent up a brief series of images. Though I hadn’t brought any of his other possessions with me in my great migration from Las Vegas, there were parts of Boris that had nevertheless imprinted on me like a skin rash. The tendency to curse in Ukrainian rather than English when I was truly upset, for one. The way I would sometimes feed Popchik bits of steak from the pan, for another. The way he always drank his tea and the way I now did, too, boiling hot with three sugars.
I took another long drag on my cigarette and exhaled deeply to clear the smoke from my lungs. “It’s a nice lighter,” I said, probably too defensively to come off as nonchalant.
Boris nodded anyway and changed the subject in that easy way of his.
-
As I said, when Boris moved into Hobie’s house, he took Pippa’s old room. And, as I said, this caused some non-inconsiderable internal distress for me. The thought of him living in that room, sleeping in her old bed, gave me strange pains in the pit of my stomach, something like hunger pangs but not quite. When I had to walk past her – his – room in the middle of the night to get to the bathroom, I would squeeze my eyes shut until I was past the bedroom door.
Because of this strange aversion to his room – which Boris, nobly, understood as a manifestation of my “long-lost love” (like Pippa had died of the Spanish flu or something and wasn’t just living happily across the Atlantic), we often convened in my bedroom to smoke cigarettes and shoot the shit over a handle of vodka. It was on one of these nights that Boris finally broached the topic of my – or rather, his father’s – lighter.
“Light my cigarette for me,” he said, sprawled like the subject of some Renaissance painting across the foot of my bed.
“Fucking manners,” I muttered, digging in my pocket for the new cheap plastic lighter I’d bought at the corner store a few days ago.
“Please, Potter,” he said with a petulant little frown. “Light my cigarette please.”
“Oh, of course.” I reached out a hand for his cigarette as my other hand finally wrenched the lighter free from the confines of my work pants.
Boris frowned a little more extravagantly and clutched the cigarette back toward himself. “No, no,” he said. “The other one.”
“The fucking… what?”
“Other lighter,” Boris said slowly, like he was talking to an extraordinarily stupid person. “My father’s. One you kept since Vegas.”
I flinched and flushed, all at once, the adrenaline zinging around in my stomach once more. “Why?” I asked.
“Because I would prefer it,” Boris replied. Like it was just that easy.
He leaned forward with the cigarette between his teeth, head hanging off the end of the bed so I, sitting on the floor, could cup my hands around it and light it. Up close, the lamplight glinted off his strange, perfect teeth and the smooth gold surface of the lighter, sending reflections like sparks across his face. He was, I realized, very close to me. Almost uncomfortably so.
Once the light caught, he took a long inhale and then pulled the cigarette from his mouth with two fingers, exhaling languorously. I watched the movement with all the shrewd attention of college student trying to commit his notes to memory before a big exam.
“Give me lighter,” Boris said a few drags later, making grabby hands at me.
“Why?” I asked, already handing it over.
“Want to try a trick,” he said. “Saw this in a movie or something.”
Before I could process that statement or warn him against whatever it is he was about to do, Boris had handed me his cigarette to hold and flicked open his father’s old lighter, gazing a little cross-eyed at the little orange flame, and stuck out his tongue until it just grazed the light. I watched him, bewildered, for several seconds until he jumped back and yelped.
“Fuck!”
“You dumbass,” I said. “Why the hell did you do that?”
“Is not supposed to burn,” Boris said, the words coming out a little slurred as he kept his tongue poked out.
I stubbed out both of our cigarettes, hardly burned. “Do you want some ice for that?”
“Nah,” Boris said, though it came out more like nylegh.
“Well then what do you want me to do?” I asked.
Boris pulled his tongue back into his mouth and gave me a look that was both deadly serious and concerningly cunning. “Kiss it better?”
I stared at him, unable to process what he had just said, unable to tell whether I was awake or dreaming. “What,” I said, small and choked.
“Or not,” he said. Hands up, It’s okay, backtracking. “Was joke, haha.”
It was clear that neither of us was finding it very funny.
Even today, it is unbelievable to me that I did what I did next. I have no idea where the courage came from, nor do I think I could ever work up that kind of bravery again.
“Okay.”
And then it was Boris’ turn to freeze up. “Yes?”
I nodded. And then, with a mental dusting-off gesture like Come on, you’ve got this, I closed my eyes and kissed him.
It was short and sweet and marvelous. We kissed slowly and gently for a precious handful of seconds, and then Boris got the bright idea to stick his freshly-burned tongue into my mouth and jumped back with a hiss, almost biting my own tongue off in the process.
“Hurts,” he said.
“Yeah, I bet.”
“But trick was pretty cool, yes?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said, still a little kiss-dazed.
“Would you like to try?” Boris asked, brandishing the lighter he still had clenched in his fist, eyes bright enough with mischief to jolt me from my reverie.
“Fuck no!” I said.
He laughed. “But then, if you burn tongue, I can kiss it better.” Boris thumped his chest with the lighter.
I reached up to adjust my glasses. “You can do that anyway,” I said, shyness finally starting to creep into my voice and blur out the bravado I’d built up over the past few minutes. “No first-degree burns required.”
Boris was silent for a moment, eyes unreadable. I began to worry I had crossed some invisible line and was just working myself up into a nervous frenzy, but then he gave me a soft smile and I knew there was nothing to be afraid of anymore. When he leaned in to kiss me again, I met him halfway.