Still Here, page 18
“There are excellent hospice programs; they take care of emotional issues as well as physical ones,” she said weakly.
Ethan looked stricken with disappointment. He must have expected something honest, crazy, Russian from her, but what he’d gotten was a generic reply à la Bing Ruskin.
She looked at his “FYI” tweet again and her eyes filled with tears. She had to tip her face up not to let them escape.
“Hi!” Somebody interrupted her thoughts.
Vica raised her eyes and saw that there was a smiling man sitting across from her.
“You were in that line at the Castle school, weren’t you?”
Vica nodded. The man was white, wearing a puffy coat, jeans, and working boots. Speaking with a slight Eastern European accent. Polish? Serbian? In other words, he was a typical Outer Borough.
“I heard the questions are even tougher than usual this year,” he said. “My Ginnie nearly had a panic attack this morning. And I told her, ‘Honey, no school is worth whipping yourself into a frenzy like this.’ ”
Except for this school, Vica thought. This school was worth it. She wondered if Eric had been whipped into enough of a frenzy.
“Listen,” the man said, “can I buy you another coffee or a pastry?”
He was nice-looking. In his forties. Probably divorced. Broad shoulders. Attractive crinkles around his blue eyes.
“I have an appointment,” Vica said with an apologetic smile and got up to leave. She had no desire to have a conversation with an Outer Borough.
As she walked toward the park, she wondered if she had been too curt with the man. And no, she hadn’t left because she was a snob and felt that she deserved better, or not only because of that, but mainly because she couldn’t help but see all Outer Borough men as variations of Sergey. Or just variations on the type of Husband. A Husband knew her the way she didn’t want to be known, at her worst, her ugliest, her most embarrassing. He had heard how she lied, and he had heard how she screamed in rage. He had seen her throw up, seen her with cracked nipples, seen her pick an uneaten sandwich from the garbage bin in his mother’s kitchen—she swore that she put the sandwich right back, but he didn’t see that. A Husband knew her and he didn’t want her. He didn’t even fight for her. This was definitely one of the reasons Vica didn’t want to date Vadik. She couldn’t be with another man who knew her well. She had been attracted to Vadik for such a long time, but now that she was actually free, the mere thought of dating him made her squirm.
What she needed was a Lover. A man who came from another world. A man who didn’t know her. A man who would take her for somebody good, and bright, and exciting. Special. Delicate.
The thought of such a man made Vica giddy with desire. Ever since Sergey left, she was plagued by these random bouts of desire, unwelcome and unexpected. Her recurrent fantasy was of a man throwing her onto a bed, spreading her legs, and greedily licking her, lapping her up as a cat would a bowl of milk.
The last time she felt like that was when she first went to Moscow for the medical school entrance exams. She was seventeen. The heated subway car smelled of old leather and sweat. Some of that sweat was her own. Vica was wearing a short cotton dress. She was holding her large backpack on her lap, and there were imprints of the bag’s buckles on her bare legs. She felt damp all over, and messy and disgusting. But still men looked at her. She couldn’t help but feel their gazes running through her body like electrical currents. It was exhilarating.
And then, when she was accepted to the best medical school in the country (the only one from her hometown!) and went to Moscow to live, she felt overwhelmed with the buzz of a sexual current all over the city. She would walk down a Moscow street or stand in a crowded subway car and catch somebody’s stare and her knees would grow weak. But she was a good girl, brought up by her strict mother, by all the books about great romantic love she had consumed while growing up, and so sex for the sake of sex was out of the question. She would only have sex for the sake of great love. Or, rather, she would have a great love for the sake of great sex.
Lovelovelove/sex/love/sex/love/sexsexsex was all she could think about, so it was surprising that she found a way to study and earn good grades. Vica did go out with a couple of guys, but she wouldn’t let them go all the way, because she was sure that what she felt for them wasn’t great love. Great love was supposed to make you crazy, set your world on fire, move the earth—all those clichés, though Vica didn’t know they were clichés back then. She refused to go to all those empty dachas with these guys, and their parents’ apartments, and their friends’ dorm rooms, so instead, they ended their dates on the dark staircase of some building close to her dorm that smelled of cats and rotten potato peels. She let the guy press her against the mailboxes, or the staircase railing, or the garbage chute, or the warm spines of the radiator, and they kissed until it hurt. She would try to stop and remind herself that she wasn’t supposed to have sex without love, and that love was nowhere near, but her will would fail her and she wouldn’t be able to stop. So she let the guy sneak his hand under her sweater, and his finger inside her panties, and his dick pressed to the damp skin of her upper thigh, and she moaned and wriggled and sometimes even came—when it happened, she tried her best to conceal it from the guy. Then Vica said good-bye, walked up the stairs to her dorm room, and wiped the semen off her thighs, crying from shame but wanting more.
One of these guys was Vadik. They met at her classmate’s party—Vadik was the classmate’s older brother’s friend. He was twenty-two, in grad school in the department of applied mathematics at the university. He was tall and handsome, smart and funny, and liked to recite poetry. He boasted that he knew Moscow better than anybody else, and he was eager to impress Vica by being a connoisseur of all the finer things the city could offer. He took her for walks along the little-known “secret” nooks like Kuskovo park or Simonov Monastery, he treated her to the best hot chocolate ever, he took her to see a double feature at a Truffaut retrospective. Then he took her back to her dorm and kissed her at the entrance. Vica tried very hard to will herself into falling in love with him. “I’m crazy about him, I’m crazy about him, I’m crazy about him,” she kept repeating in her mind as if trying to hypnotize herself. She enjoyed kissing him, but the craziness wouldn’t come.
On their sixth date, they had a fight. Vadik was from a small town too, but his attitude toward Moscow was startlingly different from Vica’s. Vica thought that the city was exciting and tough and strange, very strange, and it was pointless to try to fit in or even understand it, but that eventually she would conquer it (she didn’t know how—she had no idea what conquering the city even meant—she just knew that she had to do it). Vadik grew up thinking he didn’t belong in his dumb hometown, but in sparklingly cultural Moscow he would fit right in. He said that his father was dead, his mother was sleeping around, and his older brother was a drug addict (“he sniffs glue and other shit”), and that he hated them and had nothing in common with them and nothing in common with his hometown. He was a true Muscovite at heart. Vica said that she got it how you could hate your parents and your hometown, but that wasn’t enough to make anybody a real Muscovite. He was just fooling himself that he could fit in. To prove that Vica was wrong, Vadik took her to meet his “true Muscovite” friends, Sergey and Regina.
Vica’s first reaction on entering Regina’s apartment and meeting Regina and Sergey was that, yes, they were true Muscovites. She immediately grasped the vast difference between Vadik and them. Sergey and Regina didn’t have to work at being Muscovites, didn’t have to prove that to anybody, they just were. They were born into the world of privilege and they took it for granted. That was precisely what made them true Muscovites—the fact that they took it for granted! Vadik couldn’t see it. He was proud to be a Muscovite, and that pride betrayed the fact that he wasn’t. But while Regina with her forlorn gaze and sallow complexion didn’t interest Vica in the least (“a fish asleep,” she thought), she couldn’t take her eyes off Sergey. She didn’t think he was handsome, not at first. He was short, thin, with a head too big for his body and a nose too big for his face. But then she noticed that Sergey resembled that actor in Truffaut’s films she and Vadik had just seen (Jean-Jacques? Jean-Pierre something?) and saw what she initially perceived as flaws in a completely new light. Sergey was graceful, both his movements and his manner of talking were. Vica had never observed this quality in a man before, so she didn’t recognize it right away, but once she did she found it deeply attractive. He was graceful and passionate. He said that he was spending most of the time at the Lenin library doing research for an article about the concept of singularity applied to linguistics. He talked about the idea of singularity at length, and he would close his eyes for a moment or two as if overwhelmed by the intensity of his insights. Vadik liked to talk about scientific concepts too, but he wasn’t really passionate about them, he didn’t have the ability to get consumed by them the way Sergey did. He couldn’t possibly generate as much heat as Sergey did. She thought of the scientific fact that impressed her most when she was a child. “Inside the Earth, there is a hot glowing core,” their teacher said, “and if not for that core, life on Earth wouldn’t be possible.” Vica kept thinking about that for a long time, kept touching the ground to check if it was even a little bit hot. That’s what Sergey had, she thought that day at Regina’s place, a hot glowing core.
But he was taken, Sergey was. By this slovenly boring Regina, who obviously took him for granted, the way she took everything in her life for granted. Her beautiful old apartment, her paintings, her famous mother. Vica was sure that it was Regina’s mother who ensured her daughter’s acceptance to the most prestigious university in Russia, while Vica had to claw her way to medical school. Did Regina even love Sergey? Did she even want him? Was she even capable of wanting something or somebody with the same passion as Vica? How was it fair that Regina had Sergey?
They had to leave early, because Vadik had to go to work (he worked nights at a programming center). Back at her dorm, Vica couldn’t fall asleep for a very long time. She would get up and pace around the room, then go back to bed, then get up and pace around the room again, thinking and thinking and thinking about Sergey. She finally fell asleep, praying that the next day she would feel calmer and would be able to go on with her life undisturbed. But when she woke up, she felt lovesick, angry, and determined to act. She had a quick breakfast, took the subway to the Lenin library, and got a temporary pass to the collections. She spent the entire day there, just walking around, hoping to see Sergey. He wasn’t there. He wasn’t there the next day either. When she finally saw him on her fourth day at the library, by the bookshelves at the far corner of the reading room, she was so nervous that she wanted to hide.
“Vica!” he shouted from across the room, making the other library patrons frown and shush him.
Vica dumped Vadik the very next day, but it took the “supersensitive” Sergey another three weeks to break up with Regina.
It was then that Vica understood that you couldn’t will or force love. Love was all about surrendering her will to a force that was larger than anything she had encountered. A point of no return just like the singularity. How impatient she and Sergey were to take possession of each other, to penetrate each other as deeply and absolutely as they could. How greedily they listened to each other’s childhood stories, how greedily they studied each other’s peculiarities, as greedily as they made love. How eager they were to take that journey to the United States, to explore another country, to embark on a never-ending adventure together.
And what a crushing disappointment it turned out to be. Their disgusting apartment in Brooklyn, Vica’s surprise pregnancy, the botched delivery by an exhausted intern that resulted in a horrible infection for her. (Thank God the baby was okay!) Sergey’s losing interest in sex with her. There were times when he couldn’t even get it up for her. The boredom, the hopeless, bottomless boredom of their daily routine. At night, as Vica lay in bed alone (Sergey was studying) with a heat pack attached to her aching back, facing away from sleeping Eric in his crib and his stinky overflowing diaper pail, she began to fantasize about her former boyfriends and how she would be so much better off with any of them. Especially Vadik. He had large hands. Rough fingers. Large dick too. She didn’t get to see it, but she imagined it as large. Way larger than Sergey’s. It was such a mistake to leave Vadik for Sergey. If only she was granted a chance to fix that horrible mistake. When Vadik announced that he had found a job in New Jersey and was coming here to live, Vica thought she would go crazy with anticipation.
Then Vadik arrived, only to fall in love with somebody else on his very first day here. But still, Vica kept chasing him, up until they finally got their sick, stupid, embarrassing two hours on the couch.
Vadik, Vica thought. He’s been acting strange lately. He seemed tense when they had that dinner at Whole Foods. Reluctant to discuss either Sergey or Virtual Grave. Was it because of his sense of loyalty to Sergey? Ugh, what a mess.
Vica needed to pee. Her first thought was to go back to the deli on Madison, but she didn’t want to bump into that Outer Borough man again. The Met was right there. She decided to pay a dollar for a ticket and go look at the collections after she used their restroom.
She hadn’t been to the Met in ages. You couldn’t consider yourself a refined and cultured person if you hadn’t been to the Met in ages, could you? But then did New Yorkers even go there? Tourists and art students went there, yes, but what about regular New Yorkers? Vica tried to think of the most cultured New Yorker she knew. Regina? Regina wasn’t a real New Yorker. Eden? No, Eden never went there. Both Eden and her husband had graduated from Harvard, so they didn’t have to go to the Met because they didn’t need to prove they were cultured.
Well, screw Eden and her husband. Vica would go to the Met, not because she needed to prove that she was cultured, but because she truly enjoyed art.
She bought her ticket for a pay-what-you-wish dollar and asked the guard about the restrooms. He pointed to the Egyptian wing. Vica walked briskly past all those mummies and gravestones. She always hated the Egyptian wing, because it reminded her of a cemetery, which it essentially was. These people seemed to have devoted their entire lives to preparing for death. Such a waste. Such a stupid horrible waste, Vica thought as she peed and then washed her hands in the tomblike bathroom. But then weren’t modern people even more stupid when they chose to simply ignore death? Ethan was right. Death was inevitable, enormous, and terrifying. Wouldn’t it be wiser to make at least some effort to be prepared?
She proceeded to examine several mummies. It was hard to believe that all of them used to be real people. Thousands of years ago, but still. They ate, they slept, they peed. She tried to imagine herself as an Egyptian woman, caring for her child, pining for her husband, all the while wearing that interesting headdress and jewelry. That jade snake must have felt deliciously cold against the skin. Vica moved to look at a photo essay documenting the embalming process.
She read the caption. “Then the embalmers would turn the body facedown to allow the brain to ooze out through the nostrils.”
The image of her own brain oozing through her nostrils made her feel suddenly sick. She rushed through all the rooms toward the exit, then ran down the steps and stopped to take a deep breath. Vica didn’t know where to go; she just wanted to get away, away from the mass grave of the Egyptian wing, away from the museum.
She started to walk down the park’s East Drive. Usually crowded, in this weather the drive was practically deserted. There were no bikers and just a couple of joggers. A thin man in a blue jogging suit and a white knitted hat passed Vica. Sergey! was Vica’s ridiculous first thought. What is this white hat—I’ve never seen it before.
Then she took another look and saw that the man didn’t resemble Sergey at all. This was the second time today she’d made that mistake. Vica wondered how much longer it would take to free her mind from Sergey.
She swerved in the direction of the boathouse and started to walk along the lake toward the Bethesda Fountain. The cold now flapped around her in waves, hitting her on the legs and the shoulders.
The clearing by the fountain was mostly deserted as well. Vica walked right up to the statue and peered into the angel’s face. The expression was cold and strict rather than ethereal.
The last time they were here Sergey told Eric the story of the Angel of the Waters. How there was a fountain like this in Jerusalem and all the sick, blind, and crippled people were lying by the edge waiting for the angel. Every once in a while the angel would come and disturb the waters, and then the first person who got in would be cured.
“What do you mean ‘the first one’?” Eric asked. “Only the first one?”
“That’s how it worked. The person who got into the disturbed water first was cured.”
“But that’s so unfair! That means only the fastest and strongest could be cured.”
“That’s the whole point,” Sergey said. He tried to tell Eric about this one paralyzed man who could never get to the water in time, so Jesus performed a miracle and cured him himself, but Eric wouldn’t listen.
“Still unfair! The whole thing with the angel is a miracle, right? I don’t get what’s the point of a miracle if it’s so unfair!”
Sergey tried to explain that the term miracle used to have a completely different meaning, then he got really annoyed and gave up.
Eric was a strange boy. The girls thought he was ugly and the boys thought he was a geek. Vica wouldn’t have minded his being a geek, if he was a determined one, if he was reading a lot. He wasn’t. He hardly read at all. But he was smart. He was! He liked to think things through. “I want to know exactly what I will feel when I die, that way I won’t be that scared,” he’d said to her once. And he was kind. He was. He was capable of empathy in a way few people were.
