Still Here, page 2
“Whoa!” Sergey said.
The kitchen was narrow and frightening, lined with gray floor-to-ceiling cabinets and chrome equipment. There was a huge marble counter with the stove in the middle of it that jutted right at them.
“What’s this about?” Sergey asked, tugging on Vadik’s apron and pointing at the gleaming collection of pots and pans.
“Exploring molecular cuisine,” Vadik said.
“Uh-huh,” Sergey said.
“I bought an immersion cooker and this amazing new app to go with it. It’s called KitchenDude. It tells me what to do. After I put the food in the cooker, I get texts that inform me about its progress. Like right now I have osso buco in there, and I’ll get a text when it’s ready.”
Vica sighed. Another maddeningly banal app.
“What did you call it? Bossa nova?” Sergey asked.
“Osso buco!” Vica corrected him. “I can’t believe you don’t know about this dish. It’s mentioned in every American TV series.”
Something buzzed with an alarming intensity.
“The bossa nova ringing you?” Sergey asked.
“Osso buco!” Vica hissed.
“No, our friends are ringing me,” Vadik said and rushed to open the door.
Regina raised both her arms to hug Vadik, a frosted bottle of champagne in each hand. Back in Russia, Regina had been a famous translator of North American literature. She’d even won a bunch of important prizes, as had her mother, who was even more famous. Both Sergey and Vadik mentioned the two women’s “magical touch.” Vica wasn’t persuaded. She had picked up Regina’s translation of The Handmaid’s Tale and wasn’t impressed at all. She then read Howards End in translation by Regina’s mother and didn’t love it either. The books were boring, but to be fair, perhaps that was Atwood’s and Forster’s fault, not Regina’s or her mother’s.
When Regina was younger, people had often commented that she was a dead ringer for Julia Roberts. Vica always found that ridiculous. Regina did have a long nose and a big mouth, that was true, but she had never been pretty. She had always been clumsy and unkempt, and not very hygienic. Now that she was a rich man’s wife, she had managed to clean up a bit, but she seemed to wear her newfound wealth like a thin layer over her former subpar self. Her monstrously crooked toes showed through her Manolo sandals and her long Nicole Miller dress clung to her deeply flawed body. Bad posture, pouches of fat. With all that money and free time, Vica thought, Regina had an obligation to take better care of her body.
Bob was different. Bob was so neatly packed into his clothes that they appeared to have been drawn on him. He had the solid frame of a former football player and a shaved head that gleamed under Vadik’s fluorescent lights. His face was impenetrable, like a marble egg. He was ten years older than Regina. Which would make him what? Fifty? Regina said that Bob wasn’t “really” rich. Not at all. What he had was moderate success, and he would never become a billionaire. He was too old—the field belonged to the young guys. In fact, Bob would have laughed if he knew that Vica considered him rich. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Vica thought.
Still, Regina fascinated Vica. She often wished that they could be closer. Back in Moscow, it was Vica who thwarted all of Regina’s attempts at friendship. Ever since Sergey had dumped Regina to be with Vica, Vica had been suspicious of her, had expected Regina to get back at her, to harm her in some way. If Vica was in her place, she wouldn’t have accepted defeat with such calm. “But she is not like you,” Sergey would tell her, “Regina is not like you at all.” Then when Regina came to stay with them after her mother died, Vica felt so sorry for her that she offered Regina all the warmth she could summon. But Regina appeared to be thoroughly indifferent. And when she married Bob and came to live in the United States, she was cold and standoffish to Vica. Vica started to suspect that Regina felt that being friends with Vica was beneath her. She must have felt that way. Vica worked as an ultrasound technician and struggled to keep her family afloat, while Regina had a Ph.D. and knew all those languages and lived in Tribeca.
Vica watched how Bob inched past them and planted himself on the couch. She couldn’t read his expression. Vica had lived in this country for many years now, but she still didn’t understand Americans. Especially American men. She had a vague understanding of women, because she’d watched every season of Sex and the City three times over. But a man like Bob—what made him tick?
“Young people,” Regina told her once. “He hates that they’re running the tech business.”
“What else?”
“What else? Death. Death makes him tick. He’s scared of death.”
“Isn’t that true of everybody?” Vica asked.
“No. When I think of death, I just get depressed. But Bob’s been gearing up to fight it.”
“How?” Vica asked.
“Well, for one thing, he’s obsessed with preventive measures.”
Vica had made a mental note to remember that.
“Vica!” Regina cooed, reluctantly making an attempt to hug Vica but not quite doing it. Regina’s eyes had recently developed a strange glazed look as if she had trouble focusing. People thought she was perpetually stoned, but Vica knew that the glaze came from watching TV shows for eight to twelve hours a day. Regina didn’t have children and she didn’t have to work for a living. She would wake up in her enormous Tribeca loft, make herself a pot of coffee, and spend the day on the couch watching Frasier, Seinfeld, and Cheers reruns plus all the new shows that popped up on the screen. Their apartment had one of the best views in the city, but Regina preferred to keep the blinds closed to avoid the glare on her TV screen.
“When I think about what it does to my brain,” Regina once said to Vica, “I imagine a melting ice cream cone, all gooey and dripping. It’s terrifying. The other night I struggled to read a Lydia Davis story. She used to be my favorite writer. There were just one hundred and sixteen words in the story. I spent two hours reading it and I couldn’t finish it!”
Vica often wondered if Regina remembered that she owed her good fortune to her. Regina met Bob two years ago when she came to spend a week with Vica and Sergey. Vica had designed a very tight cultural program for them to follow, but then one evening, when she and Regina were going to see a Broadway show, both Sergey and Eric came down with the flu, so Vica had to stay at home. She made Regina go alone. “Make sure you sell the extra ticket!” she told her again and again. Regina sold the extra ticket to Bob. Six months later he asked her to marry him. Asked Regina! Regina, with her crooked toes and her ill-fitting bras. Some people were just lucky like that.
Sergey sat down next to Bob.
“So, Bob,” he said. “How’s business?”
“Can’t complain. What about you?”
“Funny you should ask. I’ve been working on something really amazing.”
Vica tensed and frowned at Sergey. Now was not the time! He had no idea how to be subtle. Last year at Regina’s birthday, Sergey had cornered Bob in the kitchen and started whispering in his shaky drunken English, spitting into Bob’s ear and into the bowl of Regina’s homemade gazpacho that Bob was holding in his hands. “Bob, listen. Listen, Bob. Bob! We need an app that would provide immediate physical contact to people who need it. Like a touch or a hug. Real touch. The opposite of virtual! Like when you’re feeling lonely and you’re, let’s say, in Starbucks or at the mall, and you press a button and find somebody in the immediate vicinity—in the same Starbucks or in the same stupid Macy’s—who wouldn’t mind holding your hand or patting you on the shoulder. Do you get it, Bob? Bob?” And Bob had winced, then shrugged and tried to squeeze past Sergey or at least to move the bowl away from Sergey’s face.
Finally he had shaken his head and said, “You immigrants think of apps as this new gold rush.”
“Yes, we do,” Sergey had said. “What is so wrong about that?”
“Oh, my poor friend.” Bob had smirked.
The mere memory made Vica shudder. Now she grabbed Sergey by his sleeve and dragged him away.
They all drank champagne on the terrace.
The door to the terrace was in the bedroom, so they had to walk along the long hall and then through the bedroom past Vadik’s unmade bed. Vica found his crumpled mismatched sheets stirringly indecent.
Outside, they leaned over the railing and pretended to admire the view. Vadik’s apartment was on the fourth floor, so there wasn’t much to see. It was still very hot, but now there was a warm breeze that felt more like a jet coming out of a hair dryer than a refreshing one.
“Can I make a toast?” Bob asked.
“Sure, man,” Vadik said.
Look at him sucking up to his boss, Vica thought.
“So you’re all what, thirty-eight, thirty-nine now, right?” Bob asked them.
“Yep,” Vadik agreed.
“Hey, I’m thirty-five!” Vica said, but Bob ignored her.
“That’s a crazy age,” he continued with the hint of a smirk. “Kind of like puberty for adults. When you’re forty, you’re branded as what you really are, no wiggle room after that—you gotta accept the facts. People do a lot of crazy shit right before they turn forty.”
But I still have a little wiggle room, right? Vica thought.
“You know what I did between thirty-nine and forty?” Bob asked. “I divorced my wife, sold my house, quit my corporate job, started DigiSly, and ran for office.”
“I didn’t know you ran for office,” Vadik said. “Which office?”
“Doesn’t matter. It didn’t work out,” Bob said. “My point is, let’s drink to Vadik, and to all of you and to your pivotal time in life!”
They cheered and drank.
I’m younger. I must have at least some wiggle room! Vica thought. She took a sip of her champagne and the bubbles got into her nose. She snorted, then choked and started to cough.
Vadik pounded her on the back.
“Better?” he asked. She nodded.
His expensive cologne had worn off and now he had his dear familiar smell of briny pickles. She remembered that smell ever since she and Vadik had dated in college, and also from the miserable day five years ago when they’d spent two hours kissing on the couch in her house on Staten Island. She’d reached for him, but he’d jerked away and the buckle of his belt scratched her right cheek. It had even drawn a little blood. Vadik acted as if he had long forgotten those two hours. One hour and forty minutes to be exact. He was right. It was wiser to forget. It was always wiser to forget, to let go, to not expect too much, to not demand too much from life.
“Vicusha, you demand too much. That’s your problem,” her mother used to say to her all the time. She worked as a nurse in a small town on the Azov Sea. She had a quiet drunkard of a husband, a dog, and a crooked apple tree in her backyard. She didn’t demand more. Vica’s two sisters didn’t demand anything either. One was older than Vica by fourteen years and the other by twelve. She had always thought of them as her mean, dumb aunts rather than as sisters.
But how could you help but want things, demand things? Especially if there were so many riches around you and life was so shockingly short? There was so little time to make the most of it! Vica spent her working hours performing sonograms, peering at the computer screen, where the signs of disease lurked in the gray mess of inner organs. “Relax, relax,” Vica would say while moving her slippery stick over somebody’s stomach or chest. Everything would seem to be fine on the outside and yet on the screen there would be a jagged dark spot, or a white speck, or a luminous stain. And then she would see a bunch of printouts on the desk. Like a bunch of postcards from Death.
“That’s good champagne!” Sergey said.
Bob grinned.
“Bobik loves it!” Regina said and kissed Bob on the ear, which was a weird way to show affection. Bobik was the number one name for a dog in Russia. Vica wondered if Bob knew that. But how could he know that? His only knowledge of Russia came from the words of his wife, who told him that she came from a famous and very cultured Russian family. Her great-grandfather was a renowned artist, her grandparents were persecuted under Stalin, her mother once went on a date with Brodsky. All of that was true to a certain degree, just not entirely true. Vica couldn’t disprove the story about Brodsky, but she knew for a fact that the artist great-grandfather couldn’t have been that famous. Otherwise, he would have been mentioned in the Soviet encyclopedia, and he wasn’t—Vica had checked.
Vica had once told Sergey that she knew why Bob married Regina. It was really simple. After he had gotten rich, he had developed an old-fashioned American desire to invest in some old-country culture and a philanthropic cause. Regina seemed to provide him with both.
“You’re so mean!” Sergey had said.
A shrill persistent ringing came from the vicinity of Vadik’s crotch.
“Bossa nova?” Sergey asked.
“Osso buco!” Vica corrected once more.
“Sejun!” Vadik said and answered his phone quickly. His face immediately broke into a bright idiotic smile. He whispered something into the phone, then pressed it to his ear, then whispered something again.
“Guys, say hi to Sejun,” he said, turning the phone toward them.
A fuzzy but obviously pretty woman whose face filled the entire screen said: “Hi.” She sounded rather indifferent.
They all greeted her.
Vadik turned the phone away from them and whispered something to the screen. Sejun whispered something back. They kept whispering until the tone of their voices changed from intimate to mildly annoyed to angry, and their whispering turned into hissing.
“I’m switching to the iPad,” Vadik said, “better image there.”
He went into the bedroom, dropped the phone on the bed, picked up the iPad, and dialed.
A larger, prettier Sejun appeared on the iPad screen.
“What now?” she asked.
Vadik headed toward the bathroom.
“Hey, where are you carrying me?” she protested. “You know I don’t like it when you move me around!”
“I have to show you my new shower curtain!” Vadik carried Sejun into the bathroom and closed the door behind him.
“He didn’t show us the curtain,” Regina said, yawning.
“I’m pretty sure he’s gonna show her something else,” Sergey said.
Regina sighed, but Bob started to laugh like crazy. Disgusting, Vica thought.
Something buzzed again. The sound was coming from the phone on Vadik’s bed. Sergey rushed toward the bedroom.
“Don’t answer it,” Vica said, “it’s private!”
“What if it’s a text from osso buco?” Sergey said, checking the number.
“Osso buco!” Vica said, even though this time Sergey was right and there was no need to correct him.
“The caller ID says ‘KitchenDude.’ What do I do?”
“Just open the message!” Vica said.
“Okay. It says: ‘Your food is ready, dude.’ ”
“Did it say ‘dude’?” Bob asked.
“It did! It said ‘dude’!”
Vica snatched the phone from Sergey and headed toward the bathroom.
“Hey, don’t!” Sergey said. “Don’t disturb them!”
But Vica was already pounding on the bathroom door.
“What?” Vadik asked.
“What do we do about the osso buco?”
“Take care of it! Check the app!”
Vadik’s kitchen did have a futuristic-lab feel. To Vica, it looked positively scary. There were all kinds of gadgets, all of them high-tech, gleaming, and enormous.
The stove was empty, as was the pressure cooker, as was a strange machine to the right of the pressure cooker. The only thing that seemed alive and working was a square plastic box that looked like an oversize microwave with a cockpitlike panel on it. Was that the immersion cooker? The red light on top of it was blinking.
Vica tried to open it to check on what was inside, but she couldn’t find any part that would detach from the rest of it.
“I can’t open it!” she yelled.
“Easy,” Bob said.
Vica turned away from the immersion cooker to face Bob. He was standing in the doorway with a full glass of champagne in his hand. He came closer and handed it to Vica. The glass had the imprint of Bob’s fingers on it. Vica took it and sipped.
“Drink up,” Bob said.
She did. There was something about Bob that made her listen to him. His eyes were blue. Very small. Very bright. Slightly bloodshot. He was standing too close to her. She could feel the heat emanating from his body through his expensive shirt. She took a step back but the counter was behind her.
“You’re a very delicate woman, Vica. Very delicate. Very unusual. You’re a very special woman, Vica. You know that?”
Vica felt dizzy. Nobody had ever called her delicate. Nobody saw that in her. Why the fuck couldn’t they see it? She was delicate!
Bob moved closer. If he continued to move forward, he would crush her against Vadik’s counter.
She was overcome by the intense smell of meat. She couldn’t decide if it was emanating from the immersion cooker or from Bob.
She was about to faint when she heard voices in the living room. Sergey and Regina must have come back from the terrace.
“Osso buco,” she said. “What do we do about the osso buco, Bob?”
He chuckled. “Don’t worry about the osso buco,” he said, briskly stepping away from her. “I’ll take care of it.”
Vica hurried into the guest bathroom. It was tiny and dark, not nearly as nice as the bathroom adjacent to the bedroom. The memories of Bob’s smell, Bob’s heat, and Bob’s desire for her were so intense that she had trouble peeing. How strange that they had met so many times before and he never seemed to notice her. Well, he noticed her now. Would he want to have an affair with her? He must! She peered at her reflection in the mirror. She had a tight curvy body (“curvy” didn’t mean fat, did it? She wasn’t fat), full lips, catlike eyes. Vica blew a wisp of reddish hair off her face, admiring the gentle slope of her forehead. Her eyelids were a bit too heavy, but that gave her a “bedroom eyes” effect—she’d read about that in Cosmo. Bob simply had to fall in love with her! They would meet in posh hotels that had bathrobes and slippers and little pillows on the bed. They would have dinners in the best restaurants that served butter in little silver dishes. She would finally try foie gras and chocolate soufflé, and maybe even have one of those omakase meals at a Japanese place. And he would buy her that La Perla slip she’d seen in the window of a shop on West Broadway. And then Bob would leave Regina and marry her. She deserved somebody like Bob so much more than Regina! She could pretend to be cultured just as well as Regina could. She could even invent a grandfather who had perished under Stalin’s regime and a grandmother who had dated Stravinsky or Balanchine. Bob was getting tired of Regina anyway. Who wouldn’t? Would it be too much to ask Bob to pay for her graduate school? Definitely not! But what about Eric? Oh, Eric would be fine. Bob would pay for a private school and take him skiing in the Italian Alps. They usually skied in the Poconos, and Eric complained about how icy and crowded the slopes were. He would like the Italian Alps so much better. And then tennis camp for the summer. Somewhere beautiful instead of that shitty camp in the Catskills where the kids spent their time playing videogames in a dingy clubhouse. What about Sergey, though? She imagined him all alone in their moldy basement littered with Eric’s old toys and discarded household items. Sitting in his favorite chair in the dark, his face wet, his shoulders trembling. A rush of affection for Sergey cut through her like a sharp pain. Vica washed her hands, splashed some water onto her neck, and went out of the bathroom.
