Still Here (24 page)

Sergey stopped mixing the salad. He knew that one way or the other Vadik would get to the bottom of this. And the bottom of this—the fact that he had had an affair with his best friend's ex-girlfriend—suddenly seemed pretty horrible, pretty disgusting. He used to tell himself that this was not about Vadik, that this was about him and Sejun, and Vadik had nothing to do with it. Now, for the first time, he realized that in Vadik's eyes it would be very much about him.

He cleared his throat and said that Sejun and he talked.

“What did you talk about? Did you talk about me?” Vadik asked.

This suggestion offended Sergey. How typical of Vadik to think that they would have nothing to discuss except himself—such an endlessly fascinating topic.

“We talked about my app,” Sergey said.

Apparently this was a mistake.

“Oh, how nice! You talked about your fantastic, super-brilliant app! Your genius app! Sejun loved your idea, I remember that. She thought it was ‘brave and defiant.' ”

Vadik said the last three words in a high-pitched voice that was supposed to be an imitation of how Sejun talked, but in fact it didn't sound like her at all. He jumped off the stool and stood leaning on the kitchen counter, hovering over Sergey. He was seven inches taller than Sergey, but Sergey had never been so aware of it before.

“Well, I've always thought your idea was stupid,” he said. “Stupid and sick. Like freeze-drying your dead pet. No, worse than that, like freeze-drying your dead pet and making it talk.”

He paused and looked at Sergey, making sure that his words registered. They did.

“Nobody wants to hear from dead people, you hear me? Nobody! It's creepy, it's horrifying. It's unbearably painful, for godsakes! I mean, yes, it's true, we all talk to our loved ones in our minds. And, yes, we all wish that they would answer. A single word of affection, of acceptance. We all need that. But what you're trying to do is not that! What people will hear is not the voice of their loved one, but the bits and pieces of that voice, the heartless morsels, a cruel parody. Listening to that voice will only make their sense of loss more acute. The person that they loved is gone. Gone! Nothing will bring him back. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Not God, not Fyodorov, and certainly not your fucking app. I mean, how stupid must you be not to see that?”

Sergey looked away and tasted the salad. He'd put way too much oil in it. And what kind of food was salad anyway? It would only make them hungrier.

“The only app that could possibly make sense in the face of death would be one that would cancel your entire online presence. Cancel it! Erase all your messages, delete all your posts, get rid of every trace of you. Make sure nobody could revive you, or speak in your voice, or do any other shit. Now that's the app we need. Because that's the idea of death. Death brings an absolute end. And we all should just respect that.”

Sergey made a motion to go out of the kitchen, but Vadik was blocking the way.

“But you know all that, don't you?” Vadik said with a gloating expression, as if he had discovered Sergey's dirty secret.

“You don't really want to ‘revive' dead people à la Fyodorov—God, what a stupid fuck he was! You don't really want to reconstruct their speeches or their souls. You're just hanging on to the idea of this app because it's the last thing, the very last thing, that you believe can pull you out of the dump, right? Right? Because if not for this app, you're done. You're stuck with being a loser forever.”

And Sergey just stood there, listening to Vadik's diatribe, looking into his bowl, eating the salad, forkful after slippery forkful. He could hear and understand Vadik's words, he felt them almost like physical blows, and yet they weren't truly reaching him. He felt as if he were in the middle of a very wrong scene, a scene that wasn't supposed to be happening. He remembered feeling like this once before. He was only five or six and it was a snow day. He went out of his apartment building dressed in snow boots, a winter coat, and a thick knitted hat, mittens, and whatever, and there were older boys waiting in ambush behind a row of snowdrifts armed with snowballs. Their attack was immediate and merciless. Vicious wads of pain hitting him on the neck, on the face, on the eyes. He remembered thinking that this was not supposed to happen. These were his friends. He knew their names. They played in the sandbox together. This was wrong! So wrong that it couldn't be happening. He didn't even turn away or cover his face. He just stood there waiting until this frightening scene would disappear or be changed into something else.

“And Sejun was impressed with your idea, wasn't she,” Vadik said again. Sergey still didn't say anything, but Vadik continued.

“Of course she was. Did she tell you how brilliant you were? How she was smitten with your intellect? How she was in love with your brain? How arousing your brilliance was? How she was dying for this brilliant, brilliant man to fuck her? Skype-fuck if nothing else? Oh, Sejun used to love Skype-fucking! She even preferred it to the real thing.”

Sergey put the bowl on the counter and looked at Vadik. A muscle or something must have shifted in his face and Vadik caught it. His expression immediately changed from vicious and mocking to helpless and almost scared.

“Huh, so you did, didn't you?” Vadik said. There was a pleading note in his voice now. As if he were begging Sergey not to answer. “On Skype?”

Sergey pushed Vadik away and walked toward the bedroom.

“That's pathetic!” Vadik yelled at his back. “Do you know how pathetic that is?”

It didn't take him long to pack his things. Vadik had barely given him any space in the closet, so most of his clean clothes were still in his duffel bag, and he kept the dirty ones in the plastic HippoMart bags under the bed—the red fat hippo stretched even fatter by his socks and underwear. Vadik employed a complicated sorting system in his laundry hamper, so Sergey preferred not to mess with it. He zipped up his duffel bag. Put his old laptop in his sturdy backpack, pondered whether he should take the paperback of
Hamlet,
decided that he should—after all, Vadik had never returned his copy of
Hell Is Other People: The Anthology of 20th-Century French Philosophy.
He threw the book into the backpack, picked up the hippo bags, and headed to the door.

Vadik was in the living room pacing, in sync with all those passersby in the window, his facial expression a complex mix of hatred, remorse, and fear, as if he were debating whether to hit Sergey or beg him to stay.

“You don't have to go, man,” he said in a more or less controlled voice. “It's all perfectly understandable. I mean, who wouldn't try to fuck his best friend's woman, given the opportunity? We are not saints, neither of us.”

Vadik was about to say something else, but he stopped himself.

Sergey was standing with his back to Vadik, his right hand on the door handle. The image of a wild-eyed, disheveled Vica with that strange scratch across her cheek tramped through his mind. His heart was beating so fast that it was becoming less and less possible to breathe. He thought that if Vadik followed through and admitted that he had fucked Vica in their house on Staten Island, his heart would collapse, he would go into cardiac arrest and die.

“Oh, come on, man,” Vadik finally said, and Sergey opened the door and left.

He walked briskly down Bedford Avenue, away from Vadik, away from Vadik's words, toward the place where he parked his car. A few blocks away from there, he stopped and looked around. He had no idea where to go. Some tiny cold drops fell onto his face and hands. Sergey looked up and saw that it was either drizzling or snowing. He went into the coffee shop next door, ordered a large tea, pushed his bags under the table, and sat down.

He could go back to Staten Island. Vica would have no choice but to let him in. But that would be the Vica who had thrown him out, who wanted to “get it over with,” and who might have fucked Vadik. He couldn't bear to see her.

There was his mother, who would be overjoyed to let Sergey into her one-bedroom in the projects and have him stay on her “Italian” sofa. She would feed him the foods that he used to love when he was five, like rice meatballs called
ezhiki
and sweet farmer's cheese, and make him watch some endless movie on her Russian TV channel, and after the movie was over she would plague him with talk of his inevitable decline until he felt the decline in his bones.

And there was Regina, who had reacted to the news of his separation from Vica with shocking coldness. Didn't want to meet for a drink, didn't bother to answer his long letter. Still, it was impossible to imagine that she would refuse to let him stay at her place for a couple of days. He thought she should be back from Russia by now. He imagined entering her and Bob's sparkling lobby with his bulging HippoMart bags, then Bob looking at him with squeamish pity. No, that was out of the question.

His mother was the only acceptable option. Sergey braced himself. It looked like a night of Russian TV and
ezhiki.

“I'm fucking desperate, man!” cried out the man at the adjacent table. “I can't believe Natalie just bailed on me. Now I can't go.”

He had a long silky beard that probably required very expensive shampoos. His friend had no facial hair himself, but he wore an “I Love Castro” T-shirt as if to compensate.

“What about your neighbor? She could watch your cat.”

“My neighbor Helen? The one who called the police on me? Twice? My music was too loud? No, thank you! She would just poison the fuck out of him.”

“Why don't you leave him with a pet care service?”

“Hey, why don't you leave your child with a child care service?”

“I would. Absolutely!”

“Well, I happen to love my cat. And you know how Goebbels is crazy, he loves the apartment, he loves his fucking cat tree, he won't be happy anywhere else. And he's arthritic, poor thing. He needs his pills.”

So this man had to go on a trip, Sergey thought. But there was this arthritic cat, and he couldn't leave the cat anywhere else but in his apartment. And the catsitter had fallen through. This could be his chance!

“Hey,” Sergey said after he cleared his throat, “sorry, I couldn't help but overhear. I happen to be really good with cats.”

The bearded man turned to Sergey and looked him over, as if trying to determine his trustworthiness.

“I'm a financial analyst,” Sergey said as proof of his reliability. “I work at Langley Miles.”

The bearded man seemed duly impressed.

“My wife just threw me out and I need a place to stay.”

“Ouch!” the beardless man said.

The bearded man tapped his fingers on the table surface. “We're talking about six months here. I got this composers' fellowship in Rome. You can't bail on me, because I'll be in Europe.”

“Six months is perfect.”

They continued to discuss details and logistics, but it was clear that the thing was going to work out.

Okay, Sergey thought, a sick cat named Goebbels. This could be interpreted either as yet another unfortunate complication in his already terribly confusing life or as divine intervention—a cat savior, a redeemer cat, a knight cat on a white horse.

The flight back to New York took nine hours and fifty-five minutes, and that was exactly how long it took Regina to get her bearings. By the time the plane was approaching the fuzzy rabbit-shaped Newfoundland, she felt together enough to brush her teeth and comb her hair in the plane's lavatory. She even thought about applying some makeup. By the time they landed, she felt almost normal. She decided that she would write Aunt Masha a letter in which she would calmly explain why she couldn't possibly adopt a child, that while Aunt Masha had a right to suggest it, she certainly didn't have a right to demand it from her. Even if Regina eventually decided to adopt a child, it would have to be her own decision. She couldn't be either pressured or rushed into it. She mentally composed most of that letter while she stood in the long line at passport control. She was almost finished when the young officer stamped her papers and welcomed her back to New York. The last sentence came to her in the cab. “And even though adoption is out of the question, I want you to know that Nastya can count on our help.” Yep, that was the solution. Regina would send them money. She was sure that Bob wouldn't mind. That would certainly make her feel less shitty. Regina wanted to send the e-mail right away but decided that typing it all out on her phone would be bothersome. She'd send it as soon as she got home. So as soon as she got there, she dropped her bags at the front door and went straight to her computer. “Your message has been sent,” Gmail informed her, and Regina felt instant relief. She took off her clothes, went to shower, fell onto her bed all clean and wrapped in two large towels, and slept. She woke up just as Bob entered the apartment after work. They ordered a square gourmet pizza and had a quiet dinner together, or rather it was Bob who was having dinner, while Regina just nibbled on his uneaten crusts. She was still jet-lagged and deaf in one ear after the flight, so Bob's voice sounded as if it were coming from far away. He told her that she had towel marks all over her neck and the left side of her face. He said it was charming. She smiled. Then he asked her a question she couldn't hear. “What?” she asked.

“How was your trip?” Bob asked, shaking his head because it was a pretty obvious question.

She sighed. They had Skyped every day, so there wasn't much she could add to that except of course to tell him about Nastya.

“Exhausting,” she said. Bob saw that she was too tired to talk and started telling her about Dancing Drosophilae in more detail—they were definitely signing the deal with DigiSly. He thought of making his programmer Dev the head of the project. They would start with a very simple app. It would allow people to see how many “relatives” they had in various parts of the country, then they would expand it for different locations. It was going to be an amazing opportunity. Regina found it hard to concentrate on his words. “I'm sorry, honey,” she said, “I'm just still out of it.”

That night Regina woke up at 3:00 
A.M
.—10 
A.M
. Moscow time—nauseous with anxiety and went to check her e-mail right away. There was no reply from Aunt Masha. She checked her sent folder to confirm that e-mail was sent. It was. She wrote another e-mail to Aunt Masha asking her to confirm that she had received the first one. Regina spent the rest of the night pacing between the living room and the kitchen, switching between the sofa and their three armchairs, trying to relax. Aunt Masha was a compulsive e-mail checker and she usually answered right away. Regina must have offended her when she offered her money. Well, the hell with her, Regina thought, even as she was physically hurting with mortification. She understood now why she couldn't tell Bob about it last night. He would be ashamed for her if she told him. “What the hell is wrong with you, Regina?” he would say. “Masha asked you to take that child, to provide her with a family, with love, with protection, and you offered to send her a check instead? Offended her like that? Masha, the closest you yourself have to a family?”

No, no, she couldn't bear to tell Bob. In fact, Regina found that she could hardly look at him when he woke up that morning.

“Do you want to go to Becky's place with me?” he asked. “She wanted to show you how the renovations are going.”

Regina declined, saying that she wasn't feeling well, but the true reason was that she didn't think she could stomach a parent-child lovefest now.

Bob left around eleven and Regina went to check her e-mail again. Nothing. She was starting to worry that she would never hear from Aunt Masha again.

She took the suitcase with her mother's things, put it in the middle of the living room floor, and unclasped the lock. There was an old photo album on top. Regina had seen most of the pictures many times before, but there was a thin stack of photos that she didn't remember. Her mother was in her twenties in them. Lounging on the beach. Testing the water with her toes. Splashing. Posing with some mountains in the background. She looked like a prettier version of Regina. Actually, her mother looked like Virginia Woolf a lot. They had the same dark, deeply set eyes.

There was a photo of her mother and Masha together. They stood on the beach holding hands, laughing, waving to the camera. There was a big white ship in the background. The sign in the corner read:
YALTA, 1970
. It was strange that her mother never mentioned that trip. Regina picked up the photo, peered at it closer. Her mother was big, dwarfing Aunt Masha, but she looked so happy. Regina couldn't remember ever seeing her so happy. Were they lovers? Olga Zhilinskaya—straight as an arrow.

She remembered her photograph on Masha's bookshelf. Aunt Masha didn't just keep her mother's photos, she kept hers too. It suddenly occurred to her that Aunt Masha was actually doing this whole adoption thing for her, Regina, not just for Nastya. Aunt Masha cared about Regina, she wanted the best for her, and she believed that the best for her was to have a child. And in return Regina offered her money…Regina felt like writing to Aunt Masha and begging her for forgiveness, except that she didn't think she deserved it.

Regina put the album away and reached for the dresses. She recognized her mother's favorite: a simple silk frock with an open neck. Dark brown, almost black, with a pattern of tiny flowers. Her mother had had it for as long as Regina could remember. She had worn it at Regina's sixth birthday party. There were many guests, mostly her mother's friends. Regina thought that her mother was the most beautiful woman in the world. The tallest too. At one point Regina's mother took Aunt Masha's hand and whirled her in a waltz. The material of the dress seemed to move along with her mother's movements, making all those little flowers waltz too. Of course they were lovers. Regina couldn't understand how she hadn't seen it before.

She saw a vivid image of her mother as she stood in front of the mirror putting the dress on. She would always furrow her brow as she adjusted it so that it looked just right. Her mother was around forty in that memory. Strong, healthy. This was the first time since her mother died that Regina was able to conjure up her younger self. She was overcome with emotions that had eluded her during the cemetery visit. This was what people who had lost someone needed instead of stupid cemeteries. Virtual Suitcase. A little nook on the Web where you could store precious memorabilia: letters, photographs, videos, playlists, maps. Where you could visit and imagine the departed at their best.

Regina really needed to talk to someone. To someone who wouldn't be judgmental, who would understand and support her decision, who would be able to relieve her guilt. Who would agree with her that Aunt Masha's actions were crazy and that Regina's letter to her was the natural reaction of a sane person.

Vadik? No, not Vadik. Even if he did listen to her, he wouldn't understand. Sergey? She had been ignoring him for so long that she didn't feel that she had the right to involve him now. And then expecting a sane response from someone like Sergey was kind of crazy.

Her dad? Regina had been longing to talk to him ever since she got back from Russia. But in order to ask him anything, they would have to get reacquainted, really get to know each other. She would have to face some more unpleasant facts about her mother. Regina didn't feel that she had the strength for that.

What she really needed was to talk to a woman. Vica? Vica was a mother. Regina wasn't sure if that made her more or less capable of empathy. Would she take the child's side or Regina's? No, Vica wouldn't take Regina's side in any matter. And she was probably upset with Regina. Vica didn't have anyone in the United States and now she was going through a separation all alone. She should have called to ask her how she was, to offer her support. Several times Regina was about to dial Vica's number, but then changed her mind at the last moment. She was afraid that Vica might think that she was gloating, that their conversation would turn all awkward and wrong. Still she should've called her!

Her phone beeped. There was a message from Vadik. “Are you back? I've missed you like crazy!”

“Coffee?” she texted back.

They met at La Colombe on Lafayette.

“Finally!” Vadik said as soon as he walked into the place.

They settled at a tiny table, too tiny and too low for both of them, neither Vadik nor Regina could comfortably fold their legs. There was barely enough surface area for their coffee cups and their two chocolate croissants.

Vadik looked at her expectantly, obviously waiting for her to tell him about her trip.

What should I start with? Regina thought, pouring sugar into her cappuccino carefully so as not to disturb the beautiful foam heart. Russian politics? Russian TV? The dumb, angry madness that was catching on all over Russia like an infectious disease? But Vadik was so obsessed with trying to fit in as an American that he cared very little about Russia. She could just try to tell him about Nastya.

Vadik took a long sip of his cappuccino. Some foam got stuck in his beard. Regina reached over the table and wiped it off with her napkin. She was about to start talking when he said, “Some crazy shit has happened while you were gone.”

“What?” she asked.

“Sergey and I aren't speaking anymore. I threw our precious genius out!”

“You did what? Why?”

Vadik went on a long diatribe listing Sergey's offenses, from dirty milk glasses to toilet paper to butchered Cohen lyrics.

Regina smiled. “He did that when we were dating too.”

“Yes, but Sergey and I weren't dating!” Vadik said. “Sergey and I weren't having sex. I had to endure all that for nothing.”

Regina shook her head in mock compassion.

It was clear to her now that they would never get to talk about her. That was Vadik for you.

But Regina wasn't angry with him. She was rather relieved that she didn't have to talk about Nastya.

“Was that all?” she asked.

“Pretty much,” Vadik said. “And he was Skype-fucking Sejun.”

“What?” she asked. “Your Sejun?”

Vadik nodded. He embarked on a long and pretty boring story of how he found out. Regina had to eat her chocolate croissant to keep her focus. Actually, Sergey Skype-fucking Sejun wasn't all that shocking. She remembered how Sergey always said that he liked Sejun and how Sejun had been impressed with him and his vile Virtual Grave idea at Vadik's housewarming.

“I mean who does that? She's my girlfriend!”

Ex-girlfriend, Regina thought, but she hurried to agree with Vadik that there was no excuse. And it wasn't like it was the first time! Sergey had stolen Vadik's girlfriend before, of course: Vica. She remembered how it had taken Sergey three weeks to tell her about Vica. Three weeks! He was seeing Vica, fucking Vica, professing his love for her, while Regina, like an idiot, was making arrangements for their summer trip to Karelia!

“So you don't think I'm an asshole, do you?” Vadik asked.

He stared at Regina, expecting an answer. It was difficult for her to talk because her mouth was full of croissant—she had finished hers and had started on Vadik's.