It seems that everyone has something to hide in Three Easy Lessons.  "How did I get drawn into all this secrecy, into this deadly underground world of hide and seek in which every relationship is corrupt and treacherous?” complains Maria.  Maria has dedicated her life to music, but now she’s thirty years old, broke, lonely, and struggling to care for a sickly mother in Brooklyn.  On the verge of despair, she forms liaisons with two men who are willing to help but have problems of their own.  One is a Brighton Beach gangster seeking to leave behind his crime family.  The other is an Afghan war vet with a drug habit and a shaky marriage.  Instead of extricating her from her difficult circumstances, they draw her into a deadly web of intrigue, and her search for a satisfying relationship turns into a struggle for survival.  Pursued by the NYPD and the Russian mafia, the choices she makes become a matter of life and death.

SOMEONE IS WATCHING

I felt as if I had entered a mausoleum.  Or perhaps a museum.  Because beauty is to be found in the most surprising places.  I remember, when I was about nine years old, my mother was helping a friend to redesign her kitchen.  They invited me along with them to Coney Island.  It was the middle of summer, sweltering hot, but to my considerable dismay we drove right past the bustling boardwalk, without even stopping for an ice cream, to a huge warehouse in an ugly, poverty stricken neighborhood on a deserted and dangerous looking street.  I was reluctant to get out of the car.  But inside the sprawling warehouse, which was filled with enormous slabs of granite, quartz, and marble, was another world.  Another microenvironment: when you entered that semi-enclosed space, the temperature dropped twenty degrees.  And as we shopped for the material that would grace the woman’s kitchen counters, I was awestruck by the spectacular colors and patterns, the whorls, swirls, bubbles, veins, and speckles embedded and engraved in these gigantic slices of rock culled from distant mountainsides.  The smooth, polished surfaces of the slabs, in a rainbow of iridescent hues, contrasted strikingly with their irregular, rough hewn edges.  On those rock faces I saw galaxies of stars, lunar landscapes, spider webs, cloud formations, raging fires, river deltas, cappuccino foam, molten flowers, and dancing ghosts.  For those who would have it that there is Someone or Something watching over us, the expressive imagination immanent in these inanimate pieces of stone would surely be construed as strong evidence that the universe was created by a sentient being.