Still Here, page 5
Vadik grabbed Sergey by a sleeve and pleaded, “Serega, please, take me to the subway or something. I’m dying here. I need to get to the city!”
Sergey studied his watch, then listened to Vica’s and Eric’s muffled voices upstairs. “There is no subway here. The ferry is far away. I’ll take you to the express bus. It goes straight into midtown.”
The MetroCards were upstairs and Sergey didn’t want to chance it with Vica, so he took a jar with quarters from the windowsill and counted out the exact change (forty quarters) for the ride to Manhattan and back and gave it to Vadik. Vadik loved the weight of the coins in his pockets. It made him feel as if he were doing something illicit. Running away with stolen gold.
They were almost out the door when Vadik remembered his book. Cinema I was in his suitcase upstairs. “Can I borrow a book?” he asked.
“All my good books are upstairs,” Sergey said. “Here we keep garage sale books.”
Vadik rushed to the shelves. There were used DVDs of Bambi and The Lion King and used copies of A Complete Idiot’s Guide to Home Repair, A Complete Idiot’s Guide to Mortgage, Eat Healthy!, and Hell Is Other People: The Anthology of 20th-Century French Philosophy. He grabbed Hell Is Other People and hurried to the door.
They made it to the bus stop a second after the bus pulled away. They had to rush to intercept it at the next stop. And then Vadik was in, dropping his coins one by one as the bus was pulling away. Going to the city.
The jetlag and vodka made him fall asleep, and by the time he woke up, they were approaching the last stop. Central Park South and Sixth Avenue. It had gotten dark and chilly, and the sidewalks were covered with melting slush, but none of that mattered to Vadik. He was finally here. He’d made it. It was snowing ever so slightly, and all that light pollution colored the sky yellow. The skyscrapers hovered above his head, as if suspended in a yellow fog. Vadik had no idea where to go from there. The park looked deserted, so he decided to head down Sixth Avenue, into the thick of the city. He walked along the wet sidewalk looking up, crossing whenever the light switched to green, stepping right into puddles of slush. He turned right or left whenever he felt like it, whenever he liked the sight of the side street. Soon he had no idea in which direction he was going. He didn’t care. He was taking everything in, the buildings, the storefronts, the limos and yellow cabs, the people. There were so many people. Alive, energetic, determined, all in a rush to get to places. Women. Beautiful women. Some of them looked at him. Some even smiled. He felt very tall. He felt gigantic. He felt as if his head were on the same level as those breathtaking Times Square billboards. Everything seemed within reach. Hell, he felt as if he could just snap that huge steaming cup of noodles off the top of the building. He felt as if he were consuming the city, eating it up. It was his city. He had finally found it.
Vadik walked for hours. He stopped only when he noticed that his shoes were soaked through to his socks. There was a brightly lit diner a few feet away. Vadik decided to go there. The diner was nothing like the elegant Greenwich Village bar he’d imagined, but he decided that he liked it better. Plus he didn’t feel like drinking wine or beer. He ordered a cup of tea with lemon and a piece of cheesecake, because he remembered Sergey mentioning that cheesecake was the ultimate American food. He liked the place. It was nice, homey, with American pop songs quietly playing in the background. There were almost no people in that diner except for an elderly couple at the counter eating soup, an unkempt, possibly homeless guy fiddling with the jukebox in the corner, and a girl in a bulky checkered coat sitting across the aisle from Vadik. The girl had a runny nose. She kept wiping it with a napkin and making sniffling sounds like a rabbit. Her nose was swollen and red, and he could hardly see her eyes behind her dark bangs, but he liked that her hair was done in two short braids. She had a clear mug filled with a cloudy brown liquid in front of her. Vadik wondered what it was. She raised her eyes for a second and he saw that they were small and amber-brown and very pretty. Vadik wanted to smile at her, but she lowered her gaze before he had a chance. She was reading a book. Vadik decided it was time to get out his. He opened it in the middle, took a long sip of his tea, and plunged into reading.
He couldn’t understand a single word. Or rather all he understood was single words. He tried to concentrate, but he found it impossible because his mind was still busy thinking about that runny-nosed girl. Vadik took a bite out of his cheesecake and found it disgustingly sweet. He leafed through the rest of the book and discovered that about fifty pages were missing. When he finally raised his eyes, he saw that the girl was looking at him. He smiled and asked if he could join her. Normally, he would be too shy to do that, but just then he felt as if he was fueled by some strange happy confidence that helped him do whatever he wanted.
“What is it in your cup?” he asked after he settled in her booth.
“Cider with rum,” she said.
Vadik asked the waiter to bring another cider with rum for him. He liked it very much.
The girl’s name was Rachel. Vadik introduced himself and asked if she lived in the city. She said that she was from Michigan and that she had moved here a couple of months ago to go to graduate school. He said that he’d only arrived this morning.
She smiled and said, “Welcome.”
Days, weeks, months, even years later, whenever Vadik thought of their first conversation (and he thought of it a lot), he would marvel at how easy it had been. His English was pretty good—he had spoken a lot of English while he worked in London, and even in Istanbul—but his conversations were never that effortless. He would struggle to find the right word, he would confuse tenses and articles, he would pronounce the words wrong. But in that diner with Rachel, he talked as if he was inspired. Not once did she ask him to repeat something because she didn’t understand.
The track changed to Cohen’s “I’m Your Man.” Vadik laughed. Cohen seemed to be following him throughout the entire day.
“I love this song!” he said.
“Really?” Rachel asked. She seemed to tense.
“What?” Vadik said.
“Oh, it’s nothing.”
“No,” Vadik insisted, “please tell me.”
“I actually hate this song,” Rachel said.
“Hate this song? Why?” Vadik asked. “The guy is offering himself to a girl. He’s pouring his heart out.”
Rachel tried to soften her words with an apologetic smile, but she couldn’t help but say what she had on her mind. “Oh, he’s pouring his heart out, is that right?” she said. “Look, this is typical precoital manipulation. He’s offering her the world, but that’s only until she gives herself to him. Do you understand?”
“I understand what you mean, but I disagree. The guy is expressing what he feels at the moment. He might not feel the same way afterward, but that doesn’t mean he is not sincere in that precise moment.”
Rachel shook her head with such force that her braids came undone and the fine wisps of light brown hair flew up and down. “Leonard Cohen is a misogynist.”
“Myso…gynist?” Vadik asked. The word sounded vaguely familiar, but he wasn’t sure what it meant.
“Antifeminist,” Rachel explained.
“I don’t understand,” Vadik said. “Cohen? Antifeminist? Doesn’t he idolize women?”
“Yes!” Rachel said. “That’s precisely my point. He idolizes women, but he doesn’t view them as equals. They’re these sacred sexual objects for him. Something to idolize and discard, or, better yet, discard first and idolize later.”
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. Biggguy@gmail.com (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.
