I

Years ago, I signed up for Dr. Stepanovich’s course on Chekhov. The class was an eclectic mix. There were undergraduate Russian lit and English majors, grad students like me from various departments, and even one precocious high school senior, who took the train down from Horace Mann. The course was straightforward. First we read the novellas, and then some of the longer stories. Finally, we started in on Chekhov’s greatest hits, among them “The Lady with the Little Dog,” “Gooseberries,” and “The House with the Mezzanine.” That last story is about a landscape painter who falls in love with two rich, beautiful sisters⁠—or he believes he’s in love with the younger, more impressionable sister, except maybe, like the plot to a screwball comedy, he’s actually in love with the older, angrier, more politically active sister. But it’s hard to tell. Does the landscape painter know which woman he loves? Do we?

“Yes!” a grad student named Staci said one afternoon. Staci had a head of thick, wavy auburn hair she liked to do up in a wild conflagration. She was powerful. I was attracted to her in the same way I’m attracted to most fierce, clever women.

“Of course he’s in love with the older sister,” Staci said. “That’s the point of the story. There’s the one sister who’s like, You’re so talented, Mr. Artist. I love your mountains. You make me want to die in childbirth. Then there’s the other sister, who’s trying to enact real political change.”

A girl up front raised her hand and asked what a zemstvo was.

“A provincial council with powers of local government,” Dr. Stepanovich said, reminding us she was in charge. Dr. Stepanovich wore long, flowy dresses and bright scarves. She wasn’t Russian⁠—her husband was Russian, a surgeon, she’d told us⁠—and yet she had built her entire life and career around that country’s art, literature, history, and politics.

“His revelation at the end is a delusion,” Staci said. She sat in the back. To look at her, I had to crane my neck. “What a tidy way of thinking. I love the little girl! She’s being kept from me! Oh, my heart! I guess I’ll go back to painting the countryside or whatever. It’s a living. He avoids any sort of confrontation with himself.”

That day, the whole time she spoke, Staci glared at me. I guessed I was supposed to be the landscape painter. Two weeks earlier, Staci had hovered near the exit and engaged me in a conversation about the graduate student union. She was big into it. At the end of our talk, she’d handed me a business card with a union rep’s name on it. Later that same day, I texted the rep. The next afternoon, I went over to his apartment on the East Side.

It was mid-October. Steven’s building was on a quiet street in the early days of the new Harlem. As I walked down the street, three men in crisp, tucked-in button-downs and hard hats came around the side of the building and slipped into a waiting black car. I buzzed Steven’s number, said my name into the box, and walked up the stairs. The door was open a quarter of an inch. I’m sure I announced myself. I pushed open the door and saw a man standing in the middle of the living room. He held a picture frame in his hand. He was average height, a little ruddy, and wore high on his head a dark blue baseball hat with a gentle curve to the brim.

“Oh. My. God,” he said.

“Steven?”

“Did you just walk into my apartment?”

“You buzzed me in. I’m Rob.”

“Oh, okay, Rob!” he said, suddenly very angry. “Just walk into a person’s house, Rob! Whatever, Rob! I need all the names and all the phone numbers. I need them now.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about. There was bubble wrap on the floor, and empty cardboard boxes, and a pet carrier with a traumatized ball of cat in it⁠—Steven was just moving in. On the low, expensive-looking coffee table in front of him were a pile of nails and a stack of more picture frames. There was also some paperwork with a red Post-it note attached that had my name on it.

“You scared me,” Steven said.

I apologized.

“This is supposed to be my home,” he said. “This is where I live. I need to feel safe here.”

I told him I understood.

“No, you don’t,” he said. “You have no idea.”

Difficult people are interesting. I’ve always wondered what it’s like to be one of them. I’m so polite. I ask questions, try to listen, and keep a lid on my boredom. Not the difficult. They impose. Hello, world! they say. Feel my pain. Console me. Who wouldn’t be drawn to them?

Steven went to the kitchen to put some water on for tea. When he came back into the living room, we both heard a thud in the apartment across the way. Steven went to the door to lock us in. After, he walked back across the living room, plopped onto the couch, and told me he was convalescing from a long, terrible ordeal. Like Staci, he was in philosophy. Steven said that a faculty member in that department⁠—or two faculty members⁠—had betrayed him. These faculty members were determined to ruin his life, but he wasn’t about to give them the satisfaction. Certain other, worse events had occurred. Upon his release from the medical center, Steven had decided to dedicate his life to the dismantling of the feudal capitalist order, which was the source of his problems. After that, he made any number of other leftist political statements that I also happened to agree with. At the same time, I was frightened. I had learned all these facts about Steven in the time it took for him to make and pour the tea.