Still Here, page 6
More often than not Regina woke up to the sound of Bob’s alarm.
This morning the sound was sharper than usual. Bob must have changed it the night before.
Regina moved closer to him and squeezed her fingers over his stiff dick without opening her eyes. There was nothing sexual about that move. Neither of them was aroused. Bob’s stiff dick in the morning was a simple fact of married life. Regina was thirty-nine, but before marrying Bob two years ago she had never lived with a man for longer than a month. And here was her man, a man of the house, a large and strong human being in possession of a penis.
Regina buried her face into Bob’s armpit. Bob smelled especially nice in the mornings. Less like a squeaky-clean American, more like a man.
Regina enjoyed the simple facts of married life more than anything else. She couldn’t have children. Bob didn’t need children (he had a grown daughter from his first marriage). They would have to just enjoy each other for the rest of their lives. That is, if they stayed together for the rest of their lives. But so far it looked like they would.
Their bedroom was huge, square, and perfectly dark. (“Wow, those are some blinds!” their friends said.) There was no light even on the brightest mornings except for the soft glow of Bob’s iPad screen. That was the first thing that Bob did every morning—checked his messages and the news.
“Did you sleep well?” Bob asked.
“Yes, Bobik, pretty well.”
She called him Bobik, and Bobs, and Bobcat, Bobbety Bob, and Bobbety Cat. This was another thing that she loved about her marriage—to be so close to someone that even his name felt like it belonged to her.
“Did you sleep well?”
“More or less. My shoulder’s acting up again.”
“Do you want me to put the ointment on?”
“Yes, please.”
Regina took her hand off Bob’s dick, which had become significantly softer, and groped for the ointment on the nightstand.
She squeezed out a cold slippery dollop and began to smear it a little above Bob’s right shoulder. His shoulder was freckled and substantial like the rest of him. The sharp sweetish smell of the alcohol in the ointment made her gag, but she continued to rub it in with tender force. This was her husband and she was eager to take care of him. Sometimes Regina wondered if it would feel any different if she actually loved Bob. She doubted that it would.
“Thank you, sweetie,” Bob said and climbed out of the bed. Regina wiped her hand with a tissue and stared at him as he did his morning stretches. All that square bulk. All those muscles gained on exercise machines. Even on his butt. She hadn’t known people had muscles in their butts. Her own butt was all skin and bones with some lumpy fat, as was the rest of her body. She didn’t like to be seen naked. She slept in her old gym shorts and a stretched-out tank top. Regina looked in the wall mirror and winced at her reflection. She wondered if her new hairdo with the part in the middle made her look like an Afghan hound. It did, didn’t it?
She was tall and long-limbed though. Bob got a kick out of how tall she was. Tall, long-legged, imperfect, and Russian. Ph.D. in linguistics, fluent in four languages, but missing two teeth. (The missing teeth were in the back of her mouth. This was not a big deal.) Regina suspected that Bob got a kick out of the strangeness of his choice as well.
Regina sat up in bed to watch Bob doing push-ups, her favorite part of his routine. Five, six, seven. Muscles bulge, relax, bulge. Then he went to take a shower and Regina lay back down and closed her eyes.
She remembered the thrill of meeting Bob for the first time. At the doors of a theater on Forty-third Street. She stood leaning against the door, squeezing that extra ticket in her hand. “Make sure you sell that ticket,” Vica had said. But nobody was asking for tickets, and Regina couldn’t just assault strangers and offer it to them. She hadn’t wanted to see that show in the first place. She’d always hated musicals. She was sad. She was hungry and cold. But it was Vica’s firm belief that no visit to New York City could be considered a success if a visitor didn’t get to see a Broadway show. It was a great show too, she insisted, Billy Elliot. Vica had procured the tickets using her boss’s member discount. They were forty dollars each. Regina felt guilty—Vadik had paid for her plane ticket, but it was Vica and Sergey who housed and fed her and spent a lot of money to entertain her, even though it didn’t look like they were very well off themselves.
The show was about to begin. Nobody wanted her ticket. Regina was cold and tired and filled with mixed feelings toward Vica. She had twenty dollars in her purse. She decided to just tell Vica that she sold the ticket for twenty dollars instead of forty and go in alone. Vica would be angry, but there was no way Regina could sell that ticket. She was about to enter the theater when a bulky bald man tapped her on the arm.
“Are you selling that ticket?” he asked. She nodded. He paid for the ticket and led her in.
He said that he’d seen Billy Elliot before, with his clients, but he liked it so much that he was excited to see it again. He seemed genuinely moved when Billy sang that ridiculous song about how it was “inner electricity” or something that made him dance. There were tears in Bob’s eyes. Normally, a song like that would have made Regina gag, but she found Bob’s emotional reaction to it exotic and wonderful and intensely American. All through their after-theater dinner, Regina tried to decipher Bob. He seemed to be stranger to her than all those foreign writers and artists she’d met at the translator residencies that she used to attend. Writers and artists belonged to a unified, easy-to-understand social group. They’d read the same books, were familiar with more or less the same art and music, had similar personality traits. Bob was different. Bob was unlike anybody she’d met. Regina didn’t have any choice but to try to understand him through the classic American novels she’d read. His father’s family came from the South. Faulkner? He was a self-made man. Gatsby? He dabbled in politics. Willie Stark? He had a tumultuous relationship with his ex-wife. Philip Roth? Then, by the time they ordered dessert, Bob said that Regina reminded him of Lara from Doctor Zhivago. And Regina realized that Bob was doing the same thing—trying to decipher her through the Russian novels he knew. Well, maybe Bob was referring to the American movie rather than the Russian novel, but Regina was delighted anyway. She said that her grandfather used to be friends with Pasternak and was impressed by how impressed Bob was. They spent the remainder of her visit together, and at the end of it, as they were saying good-bye to each other at the airport, Bob told Regina that she was precisely the kind of woman he’d always hoped to meet. And it was smooth sailing ever since. The initial sexual enthusiasm might have waned, but respect and affection were still there.
Bob was back in the room, but Regina was reluctant to open her eyes. She just lay there taking in the sounds of Bob dressing: opening and closing the drawers, rustling his clothes, grunting a little as he put on his socks. Then he leaned in to kiss her; even the smell of him was clean and energetic.
“Bye, honey,” Regina said, opening her eyes a little.
“Aren’t you going to get up?” Bob asked.
“Soon,” she said.
Regina heard the resolute bang of the door and closed her eyes again.
—
Actually, there were a couple of annoying things about Bob. For example, he couldn’t help but flirt with other women when he was drunk. “Please don’t take it seriously!” Bob’s daughter, Becky, said to Regina once, noticing her discomfort. “Dad’s embarrassing, but he means well. He flirts with women out of politeness rather than anything else. My uncles are like that too. Even Grandpa used to be the same way.”
Well, she could live with that. Another surprising problem was Bob’s jealousy. Completely unfounded! She would occasionally catch him browsing through her e-mails and text messages, but every time he would apologize so profusely that she couldn’t help but forgive him. There was the mitigating fact of Bob’s ex-wife’s betrayal. Apparently, she had been cheating on him with his various colleagues for years. Another reason why Regina was so quick to forgive him for snooping was that she secretly found his jealousy flattering. Nobody had ever been jealous of her before!
But what upset her the most was Bob’s need to do the “right thing” no matter what or, rather, his belief that there was one single “right thing” to do in every situation. Vadik, who considered himself the expert in all things American, told her that this was a common belief here.
Vadik told her that the major difference between Russians and Americans was that Americans believed that they were in charge of their lives, that they could control them. Not just that but that it was their responsibility to control their lives as much as they could. They would try to fight to the very end against all sense, because they considered letting go irresponsible.
Another thing was that Americans didn’t believe in luck as much as Russians did. They believed in hard work and fair play. They believed in rules. That life had certain rules, and if you followed them and did everything right, you were protected. They said things like “life ain’t fair,” but they secretly believed that people brought the unfairness of life on themselves.
Vadik had told her that Bob once asked him why some very stupid apps succeeded and others didn’t. “Pure luck?” Vadik asked.
“No, my friend, no way!” Bob said. “The success comes from a combination of hard work and smart strategy.”
When genetic testing for all kinds of diseases became all the rage, Bob put a lot of pressure on Regina to take the test. “Why do I need the test?” Regina protested. “I can’t have children, remember?”
“But what if you carry a gene for a disease that needs to be found and treated early?” he said. “Getting tested is the right thing to do, Regina.”
Well, Bob’s obsession with genetics was really annoying too.
He and Becky had recently ordered an online test from this hot new genomics company, Dancing Drosophilae, to look for their distant relatives and found thousands of them. Queen Elizabeth I was listed as one of their ancestors. Becky thought it was hilarious and she even started referring to Queen Elizabeth as Grandma Liz, but Bob was secretly proud of this fact. He ordered two very thick biographies on Amazon—Henry’s and Grandma Liz’s—and spent a lot of time reading them and looking at the pictures. Regina once caught him staring at himself in the mirror while studying Holbein’s portrait of Henry VIII. She found it silly but endearing.
Most of Bob’s extended family thought that his lifestyle in New York was too frivolous and his business too silly, so they kept offering him idiotic app ideas to mock him. Last Thanksgiving Bob’s brother, Chuck, had suggested that Bob create an app for people who were bored on the toilet and wanted to chat or play chess with somebody who was also on the toilet and bored. Little did Chuck know that a company called Brainstorm Commandos already had an app like that in development and was calling it Can Companion. Regina had been terrified of meeting Bob’s extended family, but it turned out to be okay. Since Bob’s parents were dead, everybody gathered at the huge house of Bob’s older sister Brenda in Fort Collins, Colorado. Everyone was very welcoming to Regina, and none of them seemed put off by her quietness. Cousin Willie had a foreign wife too—Thai in his case—and she didn’t talk much either. Nor were they particularly curious about Russia save for an occasional drunken question about politics: “Now, how about that Putin? Flying with cranes, poisoning his enemies! Some guy, huh?” Some of the men made occasional drunken attempts to flirt with her: “You’re a very special woman, Regina! Very special, very delicate.” Other than that, Bob’s family mostly left Regina in peace. She would sit there at the table enjoying exotic American food like mashed yams with marshmallows and studying Bob’s relatives in search of common genetic traits. All those prominent cheekbones, all those heavy jaws. Bob always said how much he hated Thanksgivings with his family. Still, Regina thought, it must be reassuring to be surrounded by people who shared so much of your genetic makeup. And he had a daughter, who looked just like him and who was the closest person in the world to him. Closer than Regina could ever hope to be.
Becky was twenty-six years old, a Williams graduate now enrolled in the NYU Tisch film school. She lived in a sprawling decrepit house in Bushwick, which she shared with her best friend, Martha, and a team of Polish construction workers who had come to renovate the house six months ago and stayed. The house was bought with Bob’s money. It was bought at a bargain price, because it was part of a group of houses meant for low-income people, and Becky, with her annual income of $12,000, easily qualified. Vica was close to having a heart attack when Regina told her about this. Even Vadik was outraged. Bob was the only one who didn’t see anything wrong with the arrangement. “She’s an artist trying to survive,” he said.
Regina had expected Becky to be spoiled and obnoxious, but she was surprised to find that she wasn’t that at all. If anything, she was too nice. “The innocence of privilege,” Vadik had said. He had asked Becky out once, but she answered with a very firm no. Becky was really welcoming with Regina though. She kept hugging her and saying how pleased she was to finally see her dad so happy. She was squarely built, like Bob, but she had softer, warmer features, and her hugs were forceful and affectionate at the same time. She was very impressed with Regina’s work and even more impressed with the roster of artist residencies Regina had attended. She was ecstatic when she saw Infinite Jest on Regina’s shelf. “It’s my favorite too!” She was awestruck by Regina’s samizdat books. “Those are incredibly important artifacts!”
When they first met, Becky showered her with questions. Regina made an effort to answer them all, but lately she couldn’t help but notice that when she talked, Becky’s enthusiasm for her seemed to be waning. “Regina is nice but a bit standoffish,” she overheard her saying to Bob recently.
“Why would she think that?” Regina asked Vadik, and Vadik, so proud of his expertise, rushed to explain. “So she asked you all these questions and you gave her detailed, honest answers?”
Regina confirmed.
“Did you ask her questions in return?”
“No! What would I ask a perfect stranger? And I was too busy answering.”
“There you go. You were supposed to skip the answers—Americans don’t really care about them—and ask her questions in return.”
“Wouldn’t that be rude?” Regina asked.
“No!” Vadik said. “Quite the opposite! Giving long answers is rude and arrogant.”
The next time Regina saw Becky she used some of Vadik’s strategy and found that it worked better. There wasn’t any real warmth between Becky and her but rather a solid goodwill. She could live with that.
The clock read 10:00 A.M. It was time to get up. Or not. What difference would it make if she slept just a little bit more? Regina turned onto her stomach and buried her face in the pillow.
She dreamed that she and Bob had a baby. The baby was tiny, the size of a medium carrot. It appeared to be healthy though. “Do you think it’s all right?” she asked Bob. He laughed. “Of course it’s all right, it’s our baby, Regina!” “But why is it so tiny? Are babies supposed to be this tiny? Did your daughter used to be this tiny?” Bob laughed again. “Heck if I remember, Regina.” Then she tried to pick the tiny baby up, but it kept slipping right out of her fingers and falling onto the floor.
Regina woke up in shock. This was not the first time that she’d had a dream about some sort of weird or disfigured baby. Every time it happened, her heart was beating so hard that it took her ten minutes or so to calm down.
Regina showered and walked out of the bathroom. There was a whole day in front of her. The problem was that she had no idea how to fill it.
In Russia, her days had belonged to her job. She would tackle the most challenging projects. In fact, the more difficult the translation was, the more she loved it. But she had abandoned her work when her mother got sick. Taking care of her seemed to have eaten up all of Regina’s time, energy, and spirit. She would let the assignments pile up and then look at them and cry, because it was futile to hope to ever complete them, and the whole idea of work seemed pointless in the face of her mother’s impending death. Her favorite editor, Inga, who used to be the closest to a friend that Regina had in Russia after Vadik, Sergey, and Vica moved away, was very understanding. She kept offering to help, but Regina was too drained and depressed to sustain a relationship that required even a minimum amount of energy. Then after her mother died, Inga kept asking if Regina was going back to work, and Regina kept being evasive and vague until she finally called Inga and said that she was getting married and moving to the U.S., and that, no, she wouldn’t be returning. Even on the phone she could hear how shocked and offended Inga was.
When she married Bob, there was a chance that her editors would have let her work remotely, but she was so eager to be done with her Russian life that she broke all ties with them.
Regina started missing her job about three months after the move. She would have these violently real dreams about working on a manuscript, about missing a deadline. She would wake up and experience relief at first, because she hadn’t actually missed a deadline, but then feel disappointment.
She wrote to Inga and said that she wouldn’t mind an assignment.
“Don’t be a pig, Regina. There are people who actually need money,” Inga replied. The meanness of her reply told Regina just how hurt Inga still was.
