Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

And so I began to talk. And talk. I rambled with uncharacteristic fluidity, unhinged and incoherent and even more self-absorbed than usual. What I was getting at, I guess, was that I was terrified, although I never would have come flat out and said so, to Lars or to anyone. Lars could tell, though — you don’t achieve his heights of success in life without an instinctive ability to read people — and he watched me swirl my coffee, ignore my muffin, and knock over my pawns with an expression of mounting disgust. I was midway through a monologue about the relative merits of a quiet departure from Jonathan’s life before he could see my brain break down, when Lars couldn’t take it anymore. He nearly spat out his coffee and his five weeks of silence along with it.

“Oh, please,” he said. “Don’t you know that you like to feel this way? You like to brood. It is, I am afraid, your limited charm.”

“You’re talking.”

“You drove me to it.”

“I don’t brood. I contemplate.”

“What do you want me to say to you?” His eyebrows waggled mournfully, and he offered me his castle in despair. “You never listen. That’s why you never get any better at chess.”

“I’ve gotten better,” I said, watching the castle, trying to catch sight of whatever gruesome trick he might be baiting me for. “Haven’t I?”

“No,” he said. “You haven’t.”

“Oh.” I took the castle and waited — waited for the wire to be tripped, the world to crash down on me, a plague of bishops to fall on my besieged head. But nothing happened. He skimmed his knight over into the neighborhood of my queen. For now, at least for now, I had sustained a minor victory.

“Look, if you want to run away, run away. I’m not stopping you.”

“Obviously.”

“But maybe you should stay with this man for a little bit. He’s probably very dull but unlikely to be any duller than you. You have some sex, you know? It will be good for you. Sex, yes? You’ve heard of it?”

“I can’t remember.”

“It will be good for you. It will make you smile. You are always so serious.” He made a mock-serious face at me. His cheeks puffed out and his eyes shone earnestly.

“You look like Kim Jong Il.”

“Or don’t. Fine. You want to be sad and sorry, you go ahead. Probably better for your game this way.”

“That’s a primary concern of mine.”

“Yes. I am sure. Check your king.”

As I was on my way out of the game and the conversation, Lars actually grabbed my lapel and pulled me down, close to his graying face. He blinked at me reproachfully. “Look,” he said. “Since I’m already talking, since you’ve already ruined my petition, I’ll tell you something. You know what your problem is?”

“I daresay I do.”

“You are afraid to have anything you care about leaving,” he said victoriously, as though he’d just toppled my king for exactly the one thousandth time in a row — which, it’s entirely possible, he already had.

“What?” I said. “There are a lot of things I care about leaving.”

“No,” said Lars, sitting back down on his concrete slab, his voice thickening into something deeper, more somber. Usually, his voice tripped lightly between stories and lies, advice and aphorism — the ongoing banter of a magician who is trying, ultimately, to keep you from seeing what he’s doing. Now his voice dropped a register; his accent seemed to flatten slightly. “Right now,” he said, “the only thing you can’t stand to leave is yourself. Maybe there are other things you like. Maybe there are other people you enjoy. Your old pal Lars, for example. But the only thing you absolutely cannot bear to lose is your own — what? Self-knowledge?”

I squirmed in my seat. “Self-awareness, maybe.”

“Self-awareness. You are in love with your own self-awareness.”

“I am fond of my own self-awareness, sure,” I said, trying to sound reasonable, nondefensive, restrained. “Isn’t everyone, though?”

“Some of us more than others, maybe.”

I scanned Harvard Square for a moment — the ebb and flow of multicolored humanity, the rotating courses of individuals with their competing agendas and dreams and plans for the day. The girls who marched through the square in business attire, making international phone calls, were starting to look heartbreakingly young to me. One of them stood still, holding a bouquet of flowers in one arm and her phone in the other, talking angrily in what I thought was Mandarin Chinese.

“Your life has been too quiet,” Lars said decisively, and I drew my attention back to him. “Your life has been too lonely.”

I looked into my coffee cup hard and noticed with some alarm that there was a shimmering sheen floating across the top.

“Well,” I said, trying to fight down the minor seizure happening in my throat. “I’m thinking of going to Russia.”

“To Russia?” He sat back. “Why? Your beloved old pedophile?” He meant Nabokov.

I shook my head. “No.” I sucked in my cheeks and straightened up in my chair. “I want to meet Aleksandr Bezetov. The chess player.”

“Ah,” said Lars, looking at his nails with interest. “Thinking of challenging him to a game?”

“My father and he were correspondents, actually.” I said this huffily, in the overly offhand way that people mention things they are desperately, embarrassingly proud of.

“Indeed?” he said. His eyes twinkled with an elfin merriment that might have been endearing were it not so self-satisfied. I waited for him to ask about the details but realized he wasn’t going to. Lars’s brush with political dissidence had made him patient, stoic.

“They were correspondents before my father was ill.”

Lars’s tufts of gray hair were starting to be backlit by the afternoon sun, and in silhouette they made his head look either haloed or horned. “You know,” he said, “I drove across Soviet Russia in the eighties. Nasty place. The women, though. The women there are amazing.” I waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. With a wave of his hand, he relegated this trip, with whatever dangers and briberies it had involved or should have involved, to the vast vault of items deemed none of my business.

“Well, great,” I said. “I don’t trouble myself with countries possessed of substandard women.” His face was taking on a sentimental look, arranging itself into a far-off gaze and a wistful smile, an expression worthy of double-edged regrets and state secrets. I was losing his attention. We were sinking back into the realm of the fictive — whatever shreds of reality just emerged were going to disappear under churning waves of sarcasm, speculation, and story. “Enough,” I said. “Stop that right now.” I stood up, and this time I meant it.

His face refocused slightly with the momentary clarity of a poker player who suddenly knows that his opponent isn’t kidding around. “Irina,” he said.

“Yes.”

“It’s good for you to have an adventure.”

“I think so, too.”

“You’ll send me a postcard, won’t you?”

“Sure.”

“And,” he said. “Just think of how many stories you’ll have to tell me when you get back.” He hugged me. He smelled of ash, with wilder undertones of coffee and sky and liquor before noon. And then he clapped me on the back, and I turned and walked down Mass Ave. I left him there, sitting on his block, reorganizing his pieces, and though I have no way of knowing for sure, I would imagine that he’s sitting there still.

I shuffled forward in line at Sheremetyevo, squinting at the Cyrillic on the signs and mouthing words to myself. I proffered my papers and had them stamped glumly, suspiciously. I coursed through mobs of older, cabbage-scented women; younger women with clacking talons and color-leeched hair; shifty-eyed men who shuffled and cut the lines. Everybody seemed to know better than to complain.