Still Here (6 page)

Rachel took another sip of her cider and asked, “Do you know the song ‘Waiting for the Miracle'?”

“Of course, it's my favorite!” Vadik said.

“Well, I find the lyrics offensive.”

Rachel looked at Vadik intently. “See what's going on here? We have a man up there, having these existential thoughts, talking to God, expecting to experience divine grace, and the woman is down below. Literally beneath him! Waiting stupidly. And for what? For him to marry her?”

Vadik shook his head.

Rachel was about to say something else, but she stopped herself. She looked embarrassed.

“So what are you studying in your graduate school?” Vadik asked. “North American misogynists?”

“No, actually, English romantics.”

What luck! Vadik thought. He had been given the perfect opportunity to steer the conversation away from tricky Cohen and toward something that would allow him to shine. He said that he knew the entire “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by heart. In Russian. Rachel smiled and asked him to recite it. He did. Rachel loved it. She said that it sounded amazing in Russian, even though she couldn't help but laugh a couple of times.

The waiter came up to them just as Vadik belted out the last line. He asked if they wanted anything else. Vadik realized that this was the fourth or fifth time the waiter had asked them that. It was time to leave.

“I'll walk you home,” Vadik said, and Rachel nodded and smiled.

The color of the sky had changed to gloomy indigo, and it had gotten really cold. The slush on the sidewalks had turned into cakey ice. Vadik offered Rachel his hand, and they started to walk like that: holding hands, but at a distance from each other. It was only outside that Vadik noticed that he was much taller than Rachel. Her head was level with his shoulders.

She asked him where he was staying. He told her Staten Island. The answer seemed to horrify her.

“Staten Island?” she said. “But it's so late! How are you going to get there?”

And then she cleared her throat and offered him the option to stay at her place. Vadik squeezed her hand tighter.

It's New York, he thought. It's New York that makes everything so easy.

They walked down a large avenue, then turned onto some smaller street, then onto another small street. Vadik loved Rachel's street. The dark trees. And the cheerful details on the stone facades. And the piles of hardened snow gleaming under the streetlamps. They entered one of the buildings and walked up the creaky stairs to Rachel's fifth-floor one-bedroom. Rachel walked ahead of him. The stairs were carpeted. The railings were carved. Vadik's heart was beating like crazy.

But once they were inside the apartment, the easy feeling was gone. Rachel took her boots and coat off but kept the scarf on. And she moved nervously around the apartment as if she were the one who was there for the first time. Vadik felt that he needed to do or say something that would make her relax, but he had no idea what.

“Do you want some tea?” Rachel asked, rebraiding her hair. She seemed grateful when he agreed. She disappeared into the kitchen, still in her scarf. Her apartment was small and dark, with art posters on the walls. Vadik recognized only one painting, Memling's
Portrait of a Young Woman.
He had never liked it that much. Since this was the first real American home Vadik had seen, he couldn't tell how much of the decor was typical and how much of it revealed Rachel's personality.

He sat down on her small couch and took off his shoes.

His socks were soaking wet. These were the socks that he had put on yesterday morning in Regina's Moscow apartment, where Vadik had to spend a week between Istanbul and New York. He stared at his feet for a while, stunned by this realization, then he removed the socks and stuffed them in the pockets of his jacket. He heard a clatter of dishes in the kitchen and the occasional traffic sounds outside, but other than that it was stiflingly silent in the apartment. There was a small CD rack by the couch, but Vadik didn't recognize any of the albums. It occurred to him that Sergey and Vica would worry if he didn't come home. He asked Rachel if he could make a call. “Of course!” she said from the kitchen. Vadik dialed the number, praying that it would be Sergey who answered. It was. Vadik said in Russian that he was spending the night in the city. With a girl. An American girl. He had to listen to Sergey's stunned silence for what seemed like an eternity. “Okay, see you tomorrow,” Sergey finally said.

Rachel emerged from the kitchen at last, carrying a tray with two mugs on it, some packages of very bad tea, and a little plate with strange grayish cookies. She sat down across from Vadik on a footstool and put one of the tea bags into her mug.

She glanced at Vadik's bare feet and they seemed to embarrass her.

Vadik took her hand in his. Her fingers were thin and startlingly warm.

“More English poetry in Russian?” he asked.

She smiled and nodded.

Vadik recited a strange medley of Shakespeare, Keats, and Ezra Pound, finishing with “The King's Breakfast” by A. A. Milne. Rachel was especially delighted with Milne.

He asked her to recite some of her favorites. She said that she couldn't. That there were two things she simply couldn't do in the presence of somebody else: recite poetry and dance. Her confession touched Vadik so much that he wanted to squeeze her in a mad hug. He reached and pulled on one of her braids instead.

She was shy in bed, shy and a little awkward. She squirmed when he attempted to go down on her. “It might take a while,” she warned him. “I'm difficult that way.”

But Rachel wasn't difficult. She was the opposite of difficult. This was the simplest, purest, and happiest sexual encounter he had ever had. And most likely would ever have, as Vadik tended to think of it now.

Memories of that night kept haunting him for months, for years afterward. At first, they were purely sexual—he would remember Rachel's smell and feel this jolt of desire that made him light-headed. She smelled of something fresh and green, like a slice of cucumber or some really good lettuce. But as the weeks passed, his memories turned more and more nostalgic. He would evoke a certain thing that Rachel said, her facial expression, her tone of voice. The image that Vadik loved the most was of her braids flying up and down when she delivered her ridiculous critique of “I'm Your Man.”

He'd been trying to find her. He came to the city and tried to retrace his steps from Central Park. He searched online forums for scholars of English romantic poetry. He browsed through dating profiles. Once he discovered Missed Connections on Craigslist he started posting ads about Rachel. In fact, it became a habit of his. Every time he met a new woman, he would post a new Missed Connections ad about Rachel.

“Isn't that unfair to the new girl? Doesn't that make your new relationship doomed from the start?” Regina wondered.

“I think you simply invented your great love for Rachel to justify your failures with other women,” Sergey said.

“Forget about Rachel!” Vica insisted. “There is a good chance that she would have turned out anorexic, or bipolar, or just plain boring!”

All of them could've been right in a way. And yet Vadik couldn't stop longing for Rachel. He could barely remember what she looked like anymore, but in the compact reality of his memory, Rachel remained perfect. There were times when Vadik tried to banish those memories because they were too painful. And there were times when Vadik felt numb and he would desperately try to conjure Rachel because pain was better than numbness. Once, in Avenel, as he sat perched on his exercise bike, in his empty white room, pushing and pushing on those dusty pedals, he said Rachel's name out loud and felt nothing. Or rather he felt a palpable nothing, weightless and glutinous at the same time. He felt as if he were about to simultaneously float away and drown. He had never felt worse. It was then that he got off his bike and went to take the Tazepam.

That morning at Rachel's apartment, Vadik woke at dawn. Rachel was still asleep, lying on her stomach, her face buried in the pillow, her mouth half-open. Vadik felt rested—he was still on Moscow time. He got up, pulled on his underpants, his sweater and jeans, and went to the bathroom. Everything in the apartment seemed smaller and shabbier in the morning. So much clutter in the bathroom. So many unnecessary things. Two blow dryers. Six different shampoo bottles. More clutter in the kitchen. Pots and pans peeking from the tops of the cabinets. Three ceramic cats. A ceramic dog. A ceramic chicken! Vadik went into the kitchen and looked out the long narrow window, but the view of the city was blocked by the stained brown wall of an apartment building across the street. He considered putting the kettle on and making some tea. He thought he would just sit there with his tea and read one of Rachel's books until she woke up. But he suddenly found himself dreading that moment. Eventually he would have to leave. He would explain that he was going to live in Avenel. She would want to exchange numbers. He didn't have a phone yet. Would he have to give her his e-mail? He had such a stupid e-mail address. [email protected] (with an extra “g” between big and guy). Rachel would hate how misogynistic that sounded. She hated Leonard Cohen! How could anybody hate Cohen? Anyway, she would ask when they would see each other again. He would have to promise to see her when? Next Friday? And then what? They would have to see each other every weekend? Vadik found the idea oppressive. This was only his second morning in the Land of the Free and he was about to be bound by some weekly routine. His new life was about to begin. He needed to be unbound.

He walked back into the living room and surveyed the scene. There was a notebook and a pen on the mantel. He tore out a page and pondered what to write. English poetry would have been great, but he didn't know any poetry in English. And Cohen clearly was a bad idea. “You're beautiful,” he finally wrote and put the paper in the middle of the table. Then he picked up his jacket and sat down on the sofa to put on his socks. They were still wet. He squirmed at the touch of damp cloth against his feet. Then he put on his shoes.

It was so cold outside that it seemed like his damp feet were turning to ice. Vadik knew—Sergey had explained it to him—that the X1 bus to Staten Island stopped every few blocks on Broadway. He had no idea how to get to Broadway though, and he had no idea where he was. He waved down a taxi and asked the driver to drop him off at the closest point on Broadway. It took them five minutes or so. He got out of the cab, bought himself a cup of coffee in a deli, and walked down Broadway until he saw an X1 stop. He wasn't sure if the buses even ran that early. But the bus came within five minutes. Vadik was two quarters short of the exact fare, but the driver let him ride anyway. The bus was well heated and empty, and for some time Vadik just sat slumped in his seat enjoying the warmth. It was only on some overpass over Brooklyn that Vadik remembered that he had left
Hell Is Other People
at the diner. He had no idea where that diner was. He would never be able to find it again. He would never be able to go back there. Vadik felt a surge of panic and regret, so bad that it made his heart ache.

More often than not Regina woke up to the sound of Bob's alarm.

This morning the sound was sharper than usual. Bob must have changed it the night before.

Regina moved closer to him and squeezed her fingers over his stiff dick without opening her eyes. There was nothing sexual about that move. Neither of them was aroused. Bob's stiff dick in the morning was a simple fact of married life. Regina was thirty-nine, but before marrying Bob two years ago she had never lived with a man for longer than a month. And here was her man, a man of the house, a large and strong human being in possession of a penis.

Regina buried her face into Bob's armpit. Bob smelled especially nice in the mornings. Less like a squeaky-clean American, more like a man.

Regina enjoyed the simple facts of married life more than anything else. She couldn't have children. Bob didn't need children (he had a grown daughter from his first marriage). They would have to just enjoy each other for the rest of their lives. That is, if they stayed together for the rest of their lives. But so far it looked like they would.

Their bedroom was huge, square, and perfectly dark. (“Wow, those are some blinds!” their friends said.) There was no light even on the brightest mornings except for the soft glow of Bob's iPad screen. That was the first thing that Bob did every morning—checked his messages and the news.

“Did you sleep well?” Bob asked.

“Yes, Bobik, pretty well.”

She called him Bobik, and Bobs, and Bobcat, Bobbety Bob, and Bobbety Cat. This was another thing that she loved about her marriage—to be so close to someone that even his name felt like it belonged to her.

“Did you sleep well?”

“More or less. My shoulder's acting up again.”

“Do you want me to put the ointment on?”

“Yes, please.”

Regina took her hand off Bob's dick, which had become significantly softer, and groped for the ointment on the nightstand.

She squeezed out a cold slippery dollop and began to smear it a little above Bob's right shoulder. His shoulder was freckled and substantial like the rest of him. The sharp sweetish smell of the alcohol in the ointment made her gag, but she continued to rub it in with tender force. This was her husband and she was eager to take care of him. Sometimes Regina wondered if it would feel any different if she actually loved Bob. She doubted that it would.

“Thank you, sweetie,” Bob said and climbed out of the bed. Regina wiped her hand with a tissue and stared at him as he did his morning stretches. All that square bulk. All those muscles gained on exercise machines. Even on his butt. She hadn't known people had muscles in their butts. Her own butt was all skin and bones with some lumpy fat, as was the rest of her body. She didn't like to be seen naked. She slept in her old gym shorts and a stretched-out tank top. Regina looked in the wall mirror and winced at her reflection. She wondered if her new hairdo with the part in the middle made her look like an Afghan hound. It did, didn't it?

She was tall and long-limbed though. Bob got a kick out of how tall she was. Tall, long-legged, imperfect, and Russian. Ph.D. in linguistics, fluent in four languages, but missing two teeth. (The missing teeth were in the back of her mouth. This was not a big deal.) Regina suspected that Bob got a kick out of the strangeness of his choice as well.

Regina sat up in bed to watch Bob doing push-ups, her favorite part of his routine. Five, six, seven. Muscles bulge, relax, bulge. Then he went to take a shower and Regina lay back down and closed her eyes.

She remembered the thrill of meeting Bob for the first time. At the doors of a theater on Forty-third Street. She stood leaning against the door, squeezing that extra ticket in her hand. “Make sure you sell that ticket,” Vica had said. But nobody was asking for tickets, and Regina couldn't just assault strangers and offer it to them. She hadn't wanted to see that show in the first place. She'd always hated musicals. She was sad. She was hungry and cold. But it was Vica's firm belief that no visit to New York City could be considered a success if a visitor didn't get to see a Broadway show. It was a great show too, she insisted,
Billy Elliot.
Vica had procured the tickets using her boss's member discount. They were forty dollars each. Regina felt guilty—Vadik had paid for her plane ticket, but it was Vica and Sergey who housed and fed her and spent a lot of money to entertain her, even though it didn't look like they were very well off themselves.

The show was about to begin. Nobody wanted her ticket. Regina was cold and tired and filled with mixed feelings toward Vica. She had twenty dollars in her purse. She decided to just tell Vica that she sold the ticket for twenty dollars instead of forty and go in alone. Vica would be angry, but there was no way Regina could sell that ticket. She was about to enter the theater when a bulky bald man tapped her on the arm.

“Are you selling that ticket?” he asked. She nodded. He paid for the ticket and led her in.

He said that he'd seen
Billy Elliot
before, with his clients, but he liked it so much that he was excited to see it again. He seemed genuinely moved when Billy sang that ridiculous song about how it was “inner electricity” or something that made him dance. There were tears in Bob's eyes. Normally, a song like that would have made Regina gag, but she found Bob's emotional reaction to it exotic and wonderful and intensely American. All through their after-theater dinner, Regina tried to decipher Bob. He seemed to be stranger to her than all those foreign writers and artists she'd met at the translator residencies that she used to attend. Writers and artists belonged to a unified, easy-to-understand social group. They'd read the same books, were familiar with more or less the same art and music, had similar personality traits. Bob was different. Bob was unlike anybody she'd met. Regina didn't have any choice but to try to understand him through the classic American novels she'd read. His father's family came from the South. Faulkner? He was a self-made man. Gatsby? He dabbled in politics. Willie Stark? He had a tumultuous relationship with his ex-wife. Philip Roth? Then, by the time they ordered dessert, Bob said that Regina reminded him of Lara from
Doctor Zhivago
. And Regina realized that Bob was doing the same thing—trying to decipher her through the Russian novels he knew. Well, maybe Bob was referring to the American movie rather than the Russian novel, but Regina was delighted anyway. She said that her grandfather used to be friends with Pasternak and was impressed by how impressed Bob was. They spent the remainder of her visit together, and at the end of it, as they were saying good-bye to each other at the airport, Bob told Regina that she was precisely the kind of woman he'd always hoped to meet. And it was smooth sailing ever since. The initial sexual enthusiasm might have waned, but respect and affection were still there.

Bob was back in the room, but Regina was reluctant to open her eyes. She just lay there taking in the sounds of Bob dressing: opening and closing the drawers, rustling his clothes, grunting a little as he put on his socks. Then he leaned in to kiss her; even the smell of him was clean and energetic.

“Bye, honey,” Regina said, opening her eyes a little.

“Aren't you going to get up?” Bob asked.

“Soon,” she said.

Regina heard the resolute bang of the door and closed her eyes again.

Actually, there were a couple of annoying things about Bob. For example, he couldn't help but flirt with other women when he was drunk. “Please don't take it seriously!” Bob's daughter, Becky, said to Regina once, noticing her discomfort. “Dad's embarrassing, but he means well. He flirts with women out of politeness rather than anything else. My uncles are like that too. Even Grandpa used to be the same way.”

Well, she could live with that. Another surprising problem was Bob's jealousy. Completely unfounded! She would occasionally catch him browsing through her e-mails and text messages, but every time he would apologize so profusely that she couldn't help but forgive him. There was the mitigating fact of Bob's ex-wife's betrayal. Apparently, she had been cheating on him with his various colleagues for years. Another reason why Regina was so quick to forgive him for snooping was that she secretly found his jealousy flattering. Nobody had ever been jealous of her before!

But what upset her the most was Bob's need to do the “right thing” no matter what or, rather, his belief that there was one single “right thing” to do in every situation. Vadik, who considered himself the expert in all things American, told her that this was a common belief here.

Vadik told her that the major difference between Russians and Americans was that Americans believed that they were in charge of their lives, that they could control them. Not just that but that it was their responsibility to control their lives as much as they could. They would try to fight to the very end against all sense, because they considered letting go irresponsible.

Another thing was that Americans didn't believe in luck as much as Russians did. They believed in hard work and fair play. They believed in rules. That life had certain rules, and if you followed them and did everything right, you were protected. They said things like “life ain't fair,” but they secretly believed that people brought the unfairness of life on themselves.

Vadik had told her that Bob once asked him why some very stupid apps succeeded and others didn't. “Pure luck?” Vadik asked.

“No, my friend, no way!” Bob said. “The success comes from a combination of hard work and smart strategy.”

When genetic testing for all kinds of diseases became all the rage, Bob put a lot of pressure on Regina to take the test. “Why do I need the test?” Regina protested. “I can't have children, remember?”

“But what if you carry a gene for a disease that needs to be found and treated early?” he said. “Getting tested is the right thing to do, Regina.”

Well, Bob's obsession with genetics was really annoying too.

He and Becky had recently ordered an online test from this hot new genomics company, Dancing Drosophilae, to look for their distant relatives and found thousands of them. Queen Elizabeth I was listed as one of their ancestors. Becky thought it was hilarious and she even started referring to Queen Elizabeth as Grandma Liz, but Bob was secretly proud of this fact. He ordered two very thick biographies on Amazon—Henry's and Grandma Liz's—and spent a lot of time reading them and looking at the pictures. Regina once caught him staring at himself in the mirror while studying Holbein's portrait of Henry VIII. She found it silly but endearing.

Most of Bob's extended family thought that his lifestyle in New York was too frivolous and his business too silly, so they kept offering him idiotic app ideas to mock him. Last Thanksgiving Bob's brother, Chuck, had suggested that Bob create an app for people who were bored on the toilet and wanted to chat or play chess with somebody who was also on the toilet and bored. Little did Chuck know that a company called Brainstorm Commandos already had an app like that in development and was calling it Can Companion. Regina had been terrified of meeting Bob's extended family, but it turned out to be okay. Since Bob's parents were dead, everybody gathered at the huge house of Bob's older sister Brenda in Fort Collins, Colorado. Everyone was very welcoming to Regina, and none of them seemed put off by her quietness. Cousin Willie had a foreign wife too—Thai in his case—and she didn't talk much either. Nor were they particularly curious about Russia save for an occasional drunken question about politics: “Now, how about that Putin? Flying with cranes, poisoning his enemies! Some guy, huh?” Some of the men made occasional drunken attempts to flirt with her: “You're a very special woman, Regina! Very special, very delicate.” Other than that, Bob's family mostly left Regina in peace. She would sit there at the table enjoying exotic American food like mashed yams with marshmallows and studying Bob's relatives in search of common genetic traits. All those prominent cheekbones, all those heavy jaws. Bob always said how much he hated Thanksgivings with his family. Still, Regina thought, it must be reassuring to be surrounded by people who shared so much of your genetic makeup. And he had a daughter, who looked just like him and who was the closest person in the world to him. Closer than Regina could ever hope to be.