Cease Fire
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I spill wine on the table and am forced to confess my clumsiness with tape recorders. My shortcomings amuse her. If I am not entirely in control, I cannot be entirely on attack; perhaps I am frivolous.
Metaksa relaxes so far as to acknowledge my question: "Am I carrying?" she says. "Of course not. It's not legal in New York City." Irrationally perhaps, I am convinced at that moment that if an armed assailant were to enter our elegant Italian restaurant, he would be blown away.
Under her chilliness there is an inclination toward warmth, and a soft darkness akin to melancholy. And (I think) the attractive and seductive wish to know and be known. When I ask her what her favorite movies and books are, she exclaims -- as if it were a cause for wonder -- "You're going to try to give me a well-rounded appearance!"
Metaksa has risen meteorically to her current position of power, certainly not without cunning. Her zeal for information is like that of a calculating child. So I tell her a story to reward her belief that absolutely everyone is fascinated by guns:
I had an uncle who was a cop. Once, sitting with him in a dark movie theater at a kiddies' matinee, I rested my hand unwittingly on the holster of his gun. For years thereafter I had to resist, whenever I saw a cop, the compulsion to touch and feel his gun. When a subway cop stood with his back turned toward me, I grew faint and had to cover my right hand with my left to stop from reaching for his gun, an object of black desire. Years later I told another cop this unsettling fact about myself. We were sitting in his living room, discussing the aftermath of the von Bulow trial, in which he had played a small part. He excused himself, walked into his bedroom, and came out uniformed, and armed. He turned his back toward me. I did what was expected of me -- I slipped his gun out of its holster. I held it for a moment and then hurled it across the room. "Was it loaded?" I asked him. "What good is a fantasy if you leave one of the elements out?" he replied. He disarmed my compulsion in that moment of mutual trust.
Tanya likes this story. Its erotic elements do not escape her. (Little does.) She rewards me with her own story:
Her American-born mother was a dancer; her father was a stage director who escaped from Russia after the revolution. While Tanya (birth-named Tatiana) was a child, her father's Russian friends, who had also escaped from the tyranny of the Bolsheviks, often came to visit her house in Darien, Connecticut. "One chilly fall evening," Tanya tells me, "two friends -- Madame and Mislov Dubrojinsky -- missed the last train back to New York and decided to stay. Madame sat in a very big room with very tall floor-to-ceiling windows -- a small lady, all dressed in black. She was terrified. We closed all the blinds and drew the curtains, and she was still terrified." Her father instructed 8-year-old Tanya to go outside and get the ladder. "And I had to go out there and unlatch these huge, heavy shutters that we never used and close those things."
Tanya never forgot this; she came away with the lesson that governments exist in order to oppress their subjects: "Here was a lady who had been persecuted in her home country and had come to this country, and yet she was so frightened of they, them, it, whatever it was." They. Her enemies.
Gun control advocates impute to Metaksa the use of deliberate deceptions, of tricking people into believing that what the government wants is to show up at your door and take away the nice deer-hunting rifle grandpa left you in his will. I think she really is frightened.
After graduating from Smith College in 1958, Metaksa was for a time a medical photographer at New York Hospital. ("I saw so many cleft palates I began to believe that all kids were born that way.") She met her husband, George, an engineer (and, like Metaksa, the child of Russian immigrants), at a camera club. He buys her guns, which he regards as works of art; Tanya can't tell one shotgun from another: "He's much more into the aesthetics of guns than I am. I go and look at a bunch of shotguns in a rack and try to figure out which one is mine. He just goes crazy." ("Look at the wood!" he says to her. "Look at the wood!")
Married, living in Connecticut, she "got into the whole mommyhood business. I baked bread, I made clothes, I had a garden -- I did all that stuff." In the late '60s, she became involved in the gun rights movement. For three years she worked as legislative director for New York Sen. Al D'Amato, about whom she will say little: "Let's say I know him." (Her eyes narrow and she peers at her artichoke with sudden distaste.)
Metaksa sees her life, as though from a distance, as a story with many stages. "I've had it all," she tells me.
She's had a lot, including the suffering that opens parts of the heart one didn't know one had. She is smart enough to know that her pain -- including the death of her beloved father about two years ago -- has changed her in ways she doesn't yet understand.
That we get along well is an accident of temperament and of vanity (mine): "This is like the place in the movie," she says, "where Patton is about to meet Rommel in North Africa. And there's Rommel coming after him. He says, 'Ha, ha, I read your book'.... Well, I read your book." Am I flattered? Of course. She has seized upon an essential fact of a writer's life -- the need to be praised -- and a peculiar facet of mine: I like too much to be liked. So does she. Each of us recognizes that quality in the other. Because we get along well, she holds out the true-believer hope that I will be converted to her way of thinking.
"Guns," Tanya says, are "99 and 44/100 percent pure."
To refute her opponents' arguments, she sometimes resorts to only one word -- a word along the lines of baloney, or pshaw. She stares accepted statistics in the eye, calls them the work of "our enemies," and (with that no-nonsense, righteous air of the Catholic school nun whom she resembles in appearance and manner) offers anecdotal evidence to refute them:
"There's a story of a lady named Rayna Ross who was a lance corporal -- a black woman -- in the Marine Corps. She had a boyfriend who was also in the Marine Corps. I believe he fathered a child with her. And then she decided to ditch him. He proceeded to stalk her. The little piece of paper called the court order didn't stop him. She was so terrified that she went out and bought a gun. Two days later, when she was asleep at night in her apartment, crashing through her door came this Marine with a bayonet, and he was over her bed before she shot him. She and the baby were in the bed, and she killed him.
"Now, in my way of thinking, that lady had the perfect right to save her life and that of her child. The local authorities decided she'd acted in self-defense; they didn't press charges. The military pressed charges. And, let me tell you, the only organization that came to her defense -- not the National Organization for Women -- was the NRA. We supplied an attorney who argued her case in the military court system, and she was found not guilty."
