Still Here, page 12
They must have made a very funny pair. Sergey, short, trim, and Jewish-looking, and Vadik, blond, burly, and big, humming Leonard Cohen songs, reciting Mandelstam and Sartre, strolling along the beach together, Vadik’s footprints noticeably larger than Sergey’s.
They solidified their friendship when Vadik came to Moscow to study mathematics at the same university where Sergey was studying linguistics, and sustained it through all the calamities of their lives. But it was there in the United States that they grew especially close, taking turns navigating each other through the intricacies of American life.
—
“Stay as long as you want,” Vadik had said to Sergey. “Make yourself at home.”
And Sergey did.
It was amazing how fast he recovered. He had been thoroughly miserable for the first couple of days, but then one morning he woke up, made some Intelligentsia coffee (overbrewing it and splashing it all over Vadik’s white counter), and announced that he felt much better. He actually felt better than he had in months, possibly in years. After Vadik left for work, Sergey took the car, drove to Staten Island, picked up his clothes, drove back to Williamsburg, and spent the day exploring the neighborhood. When Vadik came home, Sergey told him that he had walked all the way to the Brooklyn Bridge and crossed into Manhattan and back.
“Did you know that if you go to the top of the bridge and stick out your open hand, you can see the entire downtown fit onto your palm?”
Vadik did know that. That was exactly how he felt when he first came to New York. Gigantic, omnipotent, bursting with energy. That was so many years ago.
The next morning Sergey announced to Vadik that he simply wasn’t a corporate nine-to-five guy. It had been a huge mistake for him to have spent so much time trying to fit in when it was impossible. Vica was too narrow-minded to see that. Virtual Grave was a brilliant idea, but trying to approach a developer with the mere idea for an app was an idiotic move. What he need was a working prototype so that he could ask investors for money and oversee the development himself. And now he had all the time in the world to build the prototype!
He wanted to tell Vadik more about his plan, but Vadik, being a “corporate, nine-to-five guy,” had to leave for the office. Sergey’s words stung precisely because lately Vadik had begun to doubt that he had made the right choice of profession. Back in Russia he used to enjoy programming. It was cool, it was exciting, it gave him a small adrenaline rush whenever he came up with some clever solution to a problem or wrote especially elegant lines of code. But more important, the job gave him the freedom to look for a perfect lifestyle. Programmers were needed everywhere—he could change companies, locations, even countries. The work was hard, the hours were long, but the money was pretty good, really good, in fact. Especially the money he made at DigiSly. The money allowed him to travel, to dress well, and to try out expensive hobbies like tennis, skiing, skydiving, or molecular cooking. But lately the senselessness of working so much was starting to dawn on him. He had to work for eight to ten hours every weekday and often on weekends too. It took him a couple more hours simply to unwind after work. So what time did that leave him to actually enjoy his life? A few hours every day and a bit more on weekends? It was ridiculous that he had to work so hard for a mere couple of hours of enjoyment, yet he could have lived with that if enjoyment was still there. But there was less and less of it, and whatever pleasure he experienced was becoming increasingly meager and forced.
So yes, it was hard not to envy Sergey, who plunged into his new life with youthful abandon. The first thing he did was to sign up on Coursera for several classes on new discoveries in linguistic patterns, web design, and user experience. Then he created a detailed schedule for his work over the next few weeks. He would wake up at six, make his awful coffee—spilling it on the counter every single time—and go for a run. Then he would buy and eat a bagel, and study for exactly four hours. At twelve thirty he would put on Vadik’s gym shorts—which looked ridiculously big on him—and do a hundred jumping jacks and fifty push-ups. “Draw the blinds when you do it,” Vadik told him. “Why?” Sergey asked. “I like it when people watch me.” Then he would make himself a sandwich, consume it at the tiny side table by the window, and put in four more hours of work. Then he would wait for Vadik to come home and make dinner, after which he would sometimes persuade Vadik to go out with him. He spent most of his weekends on Staten Island with Eric. He arranged it with his mother so that he could pick Eric up and drop him off without having to see Vica. He didn’t talk about her either. He would tense if Vadik mentioned her, and he never ever mentioned her himself.
Vica talked about Sergey all the time.
The first time she called Vadik was five minutes after Sergey arrived at his place.
“Is he there?” she asked. Her voice was thick with snot and tears.
“Yes,” Vadik said.
“Is he okay?”
“More or less.”
“Okay,” she said and hung up.
She called Vadik often.
“I just want to make sure he is okay,” she always said.
But Vadik sensed that there was some other motivation behind those calls. He was expecting her to ask him out or something like that, and the prospect was both frightening and intensely unpleasant. He still remembered the stickiness of her hug, the hunger in her eyes, when he first arrived in the country. As if she had been waiting for him, as if she had been hoping that he could fix whatever was wrong with her life. And then those two stupid hours on her couch five years ago and the feeling of shame afterward. Now that Vica was practically single, there was no stopping her. He would have to reject her, but he had no idea how to do that without hurting her. He desperately needed to talk to Regina, but Regina was reluctant to discuss their friends with him. “I don’t think I should meddle,” she told him. “I used to be Sergey’s girlfriend, remember? All of this is really awkward.”
Still, it was unfair that the entire burden of dealing with Vica and Sergey fell to Vadik. It was Regina’s duty to share some of that!
“What’s for eats?” Sergey asked, not raising his eyes from the screen.
“Chicken and broccoli.”
“Broccoli again? I think we should vary our lunches a little. Well, it doesn’t really matter, I guess, as long as we’re eating healthy. Did you remember the toilet paper?”
“Yep.”
“Ultra-strength?”
“Yes, ultra-strength!”
Vadik added the need for ultra-strength toilet paper to his mental list of things he couldn’t stand about Sergey.
The list also included:
Sergey’s inability to close cabinets after he opened them.
Sergey’s socks strewn all over the apartment.
Sergey’s habit of wearing Vadik’s socks, because he could never find his own.
Sergey’s bite marks left on wedges of cheese in the fridge.
A collection of dirty glasses was building up by Sergey’s bed. Every night he would put a glass of milk by the bed to drink during the night, but he never put the empty glass into the dishwasher in the morning; he would just take another glass the next night. So dirty glasses accumulated by the bed, a few cloudy with a milky film, others boasting some thick yogurtlike substance at the bottom or dried-up mold on the sides.
But the worst was Sergey’s singing on the toilet:
“Dance me to your beauty with a flaming violin.”
Vadik would groan and think: Burning violin, you idiot! Burning! Not flaming.
And there was also the question of money. In the three weeks that Sergey had spent at Vadik’s, he had yet to offer to pay for rent or groceries. It seemed as if contributing money had simply never occurred to him.
Vadik turned on the immersion cooker to preheat, washed the broccoli, and broke through the wrapper on the ground chicken container. Shortly after his breakup with Sejun, he invented this dish that was delicious, soothing, and easy to make. “Soothing?” Regina had asked. “Why do you need soothing food?”
“For my broken heart,” Vadik said.
“Your heart is not broken!”
It was incredible how all his friends denied him the ability to experience genuine heartbreak. None of them cared about his breakup with Sejun. None of them took his suicide attempt seriously. None of them even pretended to believe that what he had had with Rachel I was love. There were times when he doubted it himself, yes, but he never let himself doubt it for long, because the loss of Rachel was the only thing that gave his life in America a hint of tragic beauty. Without it, all that had happened to him in all those years was a stupid farce. A ceaselessly spinning carousel of crazy women. He would hop on and hop off, hop on and hop off, and there was no end to it.
The immersion cooker announced its readiness with a series of happy beeps. Vadik mixed chopped broccoli florets with ground chicken, added minced garlic and ginger, poured over some soy sauce, and put the green-gray mass into the cooker.
“How much longer? I barely had any breakfast today,” Sergey yelled from the living room.
“Eight minutes, forty-three seconds,” Vadik said.
“Good!” Sergey said. “I think we should go out tonight.”
“Aren’t you going to Staten Island?”
“No. Eric’s on a school trip to Washington.”
The bathroom door opened and closed, and a few seconds afterward Vadik could hear Sergey’s flawed rendition of a Cohen song filter down the hallway.
Vadik went into the living room and sat down on Sejun’s squeaky loveseat. He had counted on Sergey’s being on Staten Island tonight because Vica had finally asked him out after all. She’d called and said that she really needed to talk to him, and suggested a nice place for dinner. Hole in the Woods. Right off Union Square, so it was convenient for both of them. She said that Saturday at six would work best for her, because she was doing a weekend shift until five thirty. Vadik had no interest in dating Vica, and he was fully prepared to turn her down, but he couldn’t possibly tell Sergey that he was meeting her. And if he just told him that he was going into Manhattan, Sergey would definitely want to go with him.
A series of loud beeps broke his reverie. There were two messages on his phone: “Your food is ready, dude” and “Seriously, dude.” Vadik made himself stand up and went into the kitchen. The chicken and broccoli looked gray and pathetic, and smelled like burned garlic.
They ate it anyway.
After lunch Sergey went back to work and Vadik tried to read some Sartre.
“If you are lonely when you’re alone, you are in bad company.” Vadik wondered if he should tweet it or post it on Tumblr. He decided to tweet it. And a few minutes later this: “Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.” #KnowThyselfie now seemed stupid, so Vadik changed it back to #KnowThyself.
Around five, Sergey knocked on his door. To be fair, he always knocked.
“I’m done for the day. What time are we going out?”
Vadik cleared his throat and looked away.
“I have a date tonight.”
“Nice! With who?”
“Just this girl I met online.”
Sergey shrugged. “I could never understand online dating.”
“And why is that?” Vadik asked.
“It’s just so rational, so unromantic.”
“And what is romantic in your opinion?”
“A sudden meeting, a thunderbolt kind of thing.”
“Like what you had with Vica?” Vadik didn’t want to be mean, but he couldn’t help it.
Sergey tensed. “Yes, or like what you had with Rachel,” he said and left the room.
But an hour later, they were fine again, and Sergey said that he’d walk Vadik to the subway and then go for a long stroll around the neighborhood.
And so they walked to the subway, a grumpy Vadik and Sergey, delighted with everything—strange angles of buildings, graffiti, window displays, girls with funny hair, girls with funny shoes on, girls in funny shorts over funny tights—“I don’t even want to talk to them. I’m just happy that they are in such near proximity.
“Would you look at that graffiti!” Sergey exclaimed, pointing to the crumbling wall of a building across the street.
Vadik squinted, but all he could see was the green and yellow muddle of lines. Looks like vomit, he thought.
“I think these are aliens invading the earth,” Sergey said. “Reminds me of Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death.”
It was probably Sergey’s enthusiasm that annoyed Vadik the most. His ability to enjoy the same things that depressed Vadik proved that there was nothing wrong with Vadik’s surroundings, but that, instead, there was something wrong with Vadik himself.
“Look at it, it’s really good!” Sergey insisted.
“I can’t see,” Vadik said.
“I’m worried about your eyesight. You should seriously check it out.”
Was it just Vadik, or was Sergey starting to sound like a wife?
It was such a relief to finally reach the subway and part ways.
He had to prepare himself to reject Vica though. He hadn’t heard about Hole in the Woods before, but the name sounded peculiar, and he imagined that it would be dark and romantic and they would be sitting in a booth, and at some point she would touch his hand. Would it be rude if he moved his hand away? Would she take the hint or continue with her advances? Wouldn’t it be better if he told her right away that they couldn’t possibly be a couple? He thought about it all the way to the Union Square stop.
He couldn’t find the damn place. He checked Fourteenth Street and Seventeenth Street, the east side and the west side. The restaurant wasn’t there. He even asked a few passersby—nobody had heard of it. He thought for a second that it was some stupid prank. He felt like a fool. Then he got a text from Vica. “Where are you? I’m already in.” “I can’t find it,” he texted back. “It’s right off the south side of the square.” He walked back to the south side. There wasn’t a single restaurant there. Just Burlington Coat Factory, Forever 21, and the huge Whole Foods.
Then it dawned on him. Whole Foods! That was what Vica had said. She didn’t mean to meet him in a dark romantic place. She meant the fucking salad bar at fucking Whole Foods.
He saw her right away, standing at the counter with a little paper container in her hand, dressed in a nondescript pantsuit and looking wan in the harsh fluorescent lights. She didn’t appear to be happy or excited to see Vadik. “Hi,” Vadik said, leaning in to hug her. She had the sad smell of a medical facility hanging about her, drowning out her perfume.
“Are you coming straight from work?”
“Yes, I signed up for a weekend shift since Eric’s not here. Grab some food. I’m starving.”
There was a pile of dry spinach leaves in her container and a large pile of shrimp that she must have picked out of the big vat of paella.
“Are you still eating according to your formula?” Vadik asked.
It took her a moment to understand what he meant. She forced a smile.
“Yes, kind of.”
Eight years before, when Vadik first arrived in the U.S., Vica shared a few personal survival rules with him, just as he did for Regina six years later. One of Vica’s tips was about choosing food in a salad bar.
“If you want to get the best value, pick the items that cost the most and weigh the least. Don’t pick a piece of meat that has a bone in it, like a chicken drumstick, bones give it extra weight. Don’t drown your salad in dressing, it’s both heavy and unhealthy; skip the gravy; pick the shrimp out of the pasta dish; pick the octopus out of the octopus and chickpea salad; leave the carrots and potatoes in the stew.”
Vadik quickly put some salad into his container and followed Vica to the cashier.
They picked a table by the window overlooking the square. It seemed squashed by the surrounding buildings.
“Don’t you just love Whole Foods?” Vica said. “So many choices and the best salad bar in the city!”
Vadik saw that she hadn’t intended to offer herself to him. In fact, it was clear that the thought of offering herself to him hadn’t even occurred to Vica. He felt relieved, but a little bit annoyed too. The idea of dating Vica suddenly seemed filled with irresistible narrative logic. A guy makes a clean break from his past, goes away, explores another country, has adventures, overcomes setbacks, only to make a full circle and return to the woman he loved in his previous life. He imagined telling all this to Regina and seeing her approving nods, her admiring smile. “Yes, Vadik, of course! That’s how it’s supposed to be.”
But the woman he loved in the past wasn’t even looking at him. Vica kept piercing spinach leaves with her fork as if she wanted to see how much she could pick up in one go.
“So tell me honestly now. How is he?” she asked.
Just last night Sergey had confided to Vadik that he was able to envision his future for the first time in years. Before, every time he tried to picture it, he felt as if he had opened a door and there was nothing but dark stinky smog outside. Now, he could see some vague but cheerful shapes.
Vadik couldn’t bring himself to tell this to Vica. He sighed and looked away.
“That bad, huh?” Vica said.
She put her fork on the table and ran her fingertips over the tines.
“It was the right thing to do, right?” she asked. “It’s been hell for the last few months. You have no idea. He would walk in the door and I would immediately start fuming, because he didn’t shut the door well enough, or he slammed it too hard, or he didn’t put his boots in the right place. Or, you know, I would look into his eyes, and his expression would be so harsh, as if he couldn’t stand the sight of me. And I would get so angry, so angry that I would try to do something to make him hate me even more.”
She kept talking, picking up her salad with her fork, putting it back, looking up at Vadik as if begging him for support. She seemed to want some reassurance that she hadn’t made a horrible mistake. She looked thinner and younger in her distress. Less like American Vica, more like the Vica he remembered from their days in Russia. He had never been nostalgic for the past before, but now he found himself missing not just that Vica but his college days, his time in Moscow.
