Still Here, page 4
Before Sejun there was Rachel II, and before Rachel II there was the sane Sofia, and before the sane Sofia there was Catherine Jenkins, and before Catherine Jenkins there was Tania. Vadik had met all of them through Hello, Love!
Tania had used the face of Saga Norén as her profile picture. Saga Norén was a Swedish detective with Asperger’s from the Danish series Broen. Vadik didn’t really like Tania, but he loved Broen and Broen’s quirky heroine, so every time he saw Tania, he imagined that he was really seeing Saga Norén.
Millie, Fosca, Teresa, the insane Sofia. He had met them on another dating site Match4U because the vastly superior Hello, Love! hadn’t been available yet. Match4U made it very difficult to read the insanity level of a person based on his or her profile. The insane Sofia had turned out to be a freelance doll-maker. She made tiny scary dolls with eyelashes and fingernails and silky pubic hair. Who would’ve thought that three-inch dolls with pubic hair were even possible? “Touch it, Vadik!” Sofia would insist. “Stroke it. See how soft it is?”
Or take DJ Toma, for example, who Vadik had also met on Match4U. DJ Toma said that she used to own the largest PR firm in all of western Siberia but had to flee Russia because of political persecution. When Vadik met her, she was working as a cleaning lady during the day and deejaying in an East Village club at night. In her spare time she was trying to set up a business selling ancient Siberian potions. In the four months that Toma lived in Vadik’s apartment in the Bronx, she managed to fill the entire fridge with different potions in labeled jars. The labels read: DIVINE INSPIRATION, GRACE, LOVE, HEALTHY HEART, STOMACH PROBLEMS, and A LOT OF MONEY. Sergey had been particularly interested in the last two. He kept asking Vadik if they worked. “I guess they do,” Vadik said. “I guess they do.” One day, while Vadik was at work, Toma poured most of her potions down the toilet, packed her things (and a few of Vadik’s things), and left. She wrote Vadik a note in which she said that she was going to Peru to find out if San Pedro was all that different from LSD. She’d bought a package trip that included a week of San Pedro tastings at the house of a real shaman. Vadik hadn’t heard from her since. There was a rumor that she had overdosed and died. But there was also another rumor that she had become the shaman’s manager and helped him expand his client base.
There was Barbara, the New Age–y masseuse. Before Barbara (but actually during) there was Abby. Then Barbara found out about Abby and Abby found out about Barbara, and Vadik was alone again.
Who else was there? Jesse, his headhunter. Dana, the woman who worked in the next cubicle at Morgan Stanley—he’d sworn off dating his coworkers after Dana. Vica. Yep, his former girlfriend now his best friend’s wife, Vica. That was the one encounter he was trying very hard to forget. Nothing had happened, he’d managed to stop himself at the very last moment, but he still squirmed with shame for months afterward. He felt awful guilt toward Sergey—he could only hope that Sergey would never know—but he also felt revulsion because the encounter with Vica had made him regress into his Russian past. He had come here to start his life anew, not to rehash his old romances.
Before Vica there was Sue, a waitress at Mom’s Diner in Avenel, New Jersey. Before Sue there was Angie, another waitress at Mom’s. Sue had a faded tattoo of a kitten on her shoulder. Vadik couldn’t remember a single detail about Angie.
“I’m sick of this mess,” Vadik confessed to Regina right after his breakup with Abby. Via Skype, because Regina was still in Russia back then.
“Of course you are,” Regina said, “dating is exhausting. You know what is the most exhausting for me?”
“What?”
“Getting my hopes up. It’s as if I needed enormous physical strength to get them up, like a weight lifter or something.”
Vadik’s friendship with Regina started out awkwardly, when Vica left him for Sergey—then Regina’s boyfriend. A few days after the breakup, Regina asked him to come and pick up some of the things Sergey had left at her apartment. Vadik wondered if she was interested in him. He wasn’t really attracted to her—she had this weird stale smell that he found off-putting—but he was definitely curious. But when he got to her apartment, Regina was so shaky and sad that trying to have sex with her seemed obnoxious. They got to talking instead. Neither of them would say anything bad about Vica or Sergey—that would have been tacky, but they couldn’t resist talking about Fyodorov, Sergey’s obsession, and confessing to each other how much they hated his philosophy. Gradually they had become each other’s confidants/therapists/dating mentors. After Vadik left Russia, they would talk on Skype two to three times a week.
“I need to be tied down. I can’t go on like this!” Vadik said to Regina via the screen.
“Just pick a girl and marry her,” Regina said. She was about to get married to Bob and was feeling very enthusiastic about marriage.
Vadik was dating Rachel II then, a social worker studying for her master’s. When Rachel II was a young girl, she’d had a passionate relationship with horses. She kept the photograph of her pet horse, Billie, on her desk.
Rachel II and Vadik broke up because she walked in on him making fun of Billie to Regina. At first Vadik denied it. He was speaking in Russian, so why would Rachel even think that? But wasn’t he holding up the picture of Billie and laughing? Rachel asked. And wasn’t that ugly Russian woman on the screen hooting in response? Vadik had to admit his fault.
The sad thing was that Regina actually thought that Rachel II was the best fit for Vadik. She was the most grounded of the lot.
Vica disagreed. Vica thought that the sane Sofia was the best fit. She said that it was a good thing that Sofia was quite a bit older than Vadik, because that would make her more forgiving. The sane Sofia taught comparative literature at SUNY New Paltz. She had a club membership to swim the lap lane in Lake Minnewaska, situated about ten miles away from campus. Sofia listed that membership as one of the six things she couldn’t live without on her Hello, Love! profile. She kept urging Vadik to get a membership too. “There is a rope right in the middle of the lake,” Vadik told Sergey, “and they’re just swimming along the rope, back and forth, back and forth, like convicts.” Vadik and Sofia broke up because Vadik refused to see the beauty of lap swimming in a natural body of water.
Sergey’s top choice for Vadik was Sejun. He couldn’t believe you could meet a girl like that through online dating. Vadik met up with Vica, Sergey, and Regina soon after his latest housewarming party, and since the subject of the failure of Sergey’s pitch was too painful, they were discussing Sejun. Sergey said that Sejun was remarkably pretty for such a smart girl. Vica said that first of all that was an incredibly sexist remark and that she didn’t find Sejun all that pretty. Regina started to laugh.
“Oh, yes, she is very pretty,” Sergey said. “The problem is that she is way out of Vadik’s league.”
“Why is she out of his league?” Vica asked. “He makes quite a bit of money, doesn’t he?”
“Right,” Sergey said.
“Hey, guys,” Vadik said. “I’m sitting right here!”
But they continued to argue, not paying any attention to Vadik, as if his own opinion didn’t matter.
“I think I’m still in love with Rachel I,” Vadik said. Regina stopped laughing. And all of them looked away as if he had said something intensely embarrassing.
Vadik met Rachel I on his very first day in the United States.
He arrived in New York on a Saturday morning in the middle of winter. It was snowing pretty hard that day. Vadik woke up as the plane started its descent into JFK. He rushed to open the shade on the window, hoping to catch a glimpse of that famous Manhattan skyline. He couldn’t see anything but the murky white mess. It was still thrilling. He could not see the contours of the buildings, but he could sense them right there, right underneath the plane, hidden by the clouds. He felt a familiar surge of excitement, the excitement that had buoyed him for months, ever since he’d gotten that coveted H1-B visa that allowed him to work in the U.S. for three years. He had spent two year in Istanbul and had grown sick of the place. He had celebrated his thirtieth birthday there, but the new decade began in the new country for him. Every now and then he would open his passport and stroke the thin paper of the visa as if it were something alive.
The announcement came through with the usual crackle. The flight attendant said that it was snowing rather hard and that they might not land in JFK after all, that the plane might be rerouted to Philadelphia. No, no, no! Vadik thought. Landing in Philadelphia would certainly ruin his plans. He was starting work on Monday, as a computer programmer in the corporate offices of EarthlyFoods in Avenel, New Jersey. He was to live in Avenel too, in an apartment provided by corporate housing. Sergey was meeting him at JFK. He was supposed to take Vadik to his and Vica’s house on Staten Island and then drive him to Avenel on Sunday. But Vadik hoped to ask Sergey to take him straight into the city so that he could spend the entire Saturday exploring. He knew exactly what he wanted to do. He wanted to walk the streets without direction, just follow his intuition wherever it might lead him. He wanted to walk like that for hours, then find a bohemian-looking bar, where he would spend the rest of the day with a glass of wine and a book, like a true New York intellectual. And he would wear his tweed jacket. Vadik had put the jacket on before boarding the plane, because he hadn’t wanted to put it in the suitcase where it might get wrinkled. He had spent a lot of time choosing the book to read in that bar. Something French? Sartre’s Nausea? Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema I? And no, this wasn’t sickeningly pretentious. Vadik wasn’t doing it to make an impression on other people. He did want to be seen as a charismatic tweeded intellectual, but it was more important to him to be seen as such in his own eyes.
Vadik looked out the window again. It seemed like they were suspended in the clouds. Vadik closed his eyes and concentrated on willing the plane to land at JFK. He imagined the hard body of the plane pushing through the sticky mass of clouds, emerging in a clean empty space between sky and ground, and then sliding down in one bold determined move until its wheels touched the runway. The cabin erupted in applause, and for a second Vadik thought that the applause was meant for him.
“Can you take me to the city?” Vadik asked Sergey as soon as they finished hugging.
“To the city? Now?” Sergey asked with a degree of puzzlement that suggested that the city was very far away. That there was some existential impossibility to getting there.
“Now. Yeah,” Vadik said.
“But Vica is waiting with all the food. She’ll be disappointed.”
The horror in Sergey’s eyes showed how much trouble Vica’s disappointment would bring to him.
So they went to Staten Island. Drove on the JFK Expressway followed by the long stretch of Belt Parkway, past the gray jellied mass of the ocean, across the foggy Verrazano Bridge, and finally down the endless Hylan Boulevard with its depressing storefronts. All that while Sergey sang along to his favorite Leonard Cohen CD.
Back at the university Sergey used to be a star. He was really handsome—everybody said that his sharp, taut features made him look like a French movie star; he was the smartest and most talented (professors used to quote him in classes); he played guitar; and he could sing, badly but still. He could have any girl he wanted. Hell, he’d snatched Vica right from under Vadik’s nose.
Anyway, Sergey was still handsome. It was his singing that made him look unbearably ugly. The scrunching of his nose whenever he had to draw out a lyric. The furrowing of his forehead whenever he had trouble pronouncing the words. The pained expression on his face during the especially emotional moments. And the singing itself. It wasn’t just that Sergey sang out of tune or that he sang with a gooey Russian accent—although that bothered Vadik too. The main problem was that Sergey’s voice, which completely drowned out Cohen’s baritone, was plaintive and childlike.
Baby, I’ve been waiting,
I’ve been waiting night and day.
Sergey sounded pathetic! Vadik couldn’t help but feel squeamish pity for him. He felt anger too, mostly because “Waiting for the Miracle” was his favorite song and Sergey’s singing was ruining it for him. Vadik saw a finger of Sergey’s leather glove sticking out from the glove compartment. He felt like yanking the glove out and stuffing it into his friend’s mouth.
He hadn’t been looking forward to being at Sergey’s place, but now he couldn’t wait to arrive. Apparently, Vica couldn’t wait for their arrival either. She rushed out of the door as soon as she heard the car and ran down the driveway barefoot, leaving footprints on the thin layer of fresh snow. Her hug was sticky and tight, and somewhat embarrassing. Vadik struggled to free himself. She looked great though, in those snug jeans and even snugger sweater, with her short curly hair cut in some new fancy way. “Vica, you look amazing,” Vadik said.
“It’s my teeth,” she said, scowling at him. “See, I finally fixed my teeth!” Vadik had no idea what she was talking about. “I used to have crooked teeth in college. Don’t you remember?”
And then he remembered. She used to smile with her mouth closed and would cover it with her hand when she laughed. When Vadik first met her, at a college party, he thought that she covered her mouth because she was shy. He found this habit intensely endearing even after he discovered that Vica wasn’t shy at all.
Vica led Vadik upstairs on a tour of the house. All that Vadik noticed was that the furniture was brown and the walls were painted yellow. “We’re giving you this exercise bike,” Vica said, pointing to a bulky apparatus in the corner of the bedroom. “It’s like new. I gave it to Sergey for his birthday, but he seems to hate it.” Vica showed Vadik where he would be sleeping. Then she took him to meet Eric. There was a four-year-old person, small, sulky, and looking like a chubby version of Sergey. He was sitting on the floor of his tiny bedroom with a Game Boy in his hands. His fingers pressed buttons with such intensity, as if his life depended on it. “Hi,” Vadik said. Eric looked at him and said “Hello.” It hadn’t occurred to Vadik to bring Eric a gift—a toy or something—and now he felt awkward. He had no idea how to talk to a child. “So, Eric,” he asked, “what do you like to do?”
“I like to kill,” Eric said and went back to pressing buttons.
The rest of the morning and the entire afternoon were spent in their roomy kitchen with a distant view of a playground and a cemetery outside. “They told us that this house had a view of the park,” Sergey explained. “It was summer, so we couldn’t see the graves behind all those leafy trees—”
Vica interrupted him. “But we can let Eric play across the street by himself, because, you know, we can see him from the window.”
Vadik pictured sad little Eric on a deserted playground, rocking in the swings facing the graves. Then he remembered to admire the house.
“Yep, this was the right choice,” Sergey said without conviction.
Vica told him that Sergey’s grandmother had died and that Sergey’s father had sold her apartment and sent the money to Sergey for the down payment. Now they were struggling to pay a huge mortgage every month, but still, it had been the right move to buy a house. Because that was how it worked here, Sergey added. Everybody we knew kept telling us that. You rented in the cheaper parts of Brooklyn for a while, then you bought a house in the suburbs or on Staten Island, then you sold that house and bought a bigger, better house, then when you grew old you left that house to your kids and moved into a retirement community. Sergey’s tone was a dark mix of hatred and resignation, which made Vadik uneasy and even frightened him a little. He tried to imagine a happier Eric, all grown up, driving his parents to the retirement community so that he could take possession of their house.
Vadik made a few attempts to steer the conversation away from real estate. In his e-mails, Sergey had always asked about their university friends, so Vadik now tried to tell him that Marik was still working on his genealogy dissertation, but that Alina had quit hers and was busy making an animated Nabokov game, and Kuzmin—remember that shithead—was involved in some business with Abramovich. Abramovich, you know, the man who owns half of Europe including the Chelsea soccer club? But then Vica stepped on his foot and shook her head. Apparently, she thought that this line of conversation would be upsetting to Sergey. “He misses our old life too much,” she had confided to Vadik during the tour of the house. She switched the subject to Vadik’s long-term plans, but that filled him with panic. He didn’t know if he wanted to go to school. He didn’t know if he wanted to get married. He didn’t know if he wanted to stay in the United States for good. He had no idea. He just wanted to lead the life of an American for a while, whatever that meant. He failed to explain his view to Vica. Even Sergey didn’t seem to get it.
They drank vodka and ate cold cuts, pickles, and salads that Sergey had bought in the only Russian grocery store on Staten Island called MyEurope. Beet salad, carrot salad, eggplant salad, mushroom salad, cheese salad, herring salad, and cabbage salad with the lovely name of Isolda. There was some bickering about that Isolda. Apparently, Vica had specifically asked Sergey to check the expiration date and he hadn’t. “Look, all the other salads expire on the nineteenth, and this one expires on the sixteenth. Which was yesterday!” Vadik volunteered to eat the Isolda, because he claimed to have an iron stomach.
At some point Eric emerged from his room and demanded to be fed too.
“What do you want, chummy chums?” Sergey asked. Eric declined the salads but took a few pieces of salami off the plate and squeezed them in his hand. Vica took the salami away from him and put it on a piece of bread, then took a cucumber and a salad leaf out of the fridge, put all that on a plate, gave the plate to Eric, and sent him to the living room to watch TV. Now their conversation was interspersed with the screams and squeaks of cartoon animals interrupted by the happy voices of children praising a certain brand of cereal or juice. After a while Eric complained of a stomachache. Vica took him upstairs promising to be right back.
