Lara Vapnyar - Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love

The man shook his head, making his fine light-brown hair fly off his forehead and land back.

“Don’t you hate it?”

Ru ena nodded, even though she didn’t own a car and wasn’t familiar with driver’s guilt. She kept peering at the electronic board as if her whole future depended on seeing her number there, not turning to the man, merely answering further questions with nods or one-syllable words. To the question, was she a student in New York? she said yes. To the question, where had she come from? she said Prague. And to the question, could he call her sometime? she answered with a nod. With her side vision, Ru ena caught the vague shape of a tall man in jeans and a tweed jacket. She hoped his books would arrive first and he would leave without seeing hers, books documenting eighteenth-century birth control and female hygiene. Her wish came true and the man left, after putting a crumpled piece of paper with Ru ena’s number into his jeans pocket.

Later that day, the hazy image of the man appeared to Ru ena several times. First, when she sat in a subway car, squeezed between two chatting women whose voices seemed to bounce off the sides of her head. Another time, on the pages of her paper about an eighteenth-century diaphragm and the French prostitute who invented it. The last image appeared late that night, in Ru ena’s tiny Brooklyn apartment, while she watched the news with her Polish roommate. They were both dressed in sweatpants, T-shirts, and oversized slippers and were munching on baby carrots rather than fattening chips; the man appeared to her on a train going through the countryside. They were sitting across from each other and talking — or, rather, Ru ena talked and the man listened. By the time the weather broadcast came on, the train image was replaced with one of Ru ena standing by the window with a little boy, vaguely resembling the man, nestled in her arms. The boy giggled and sucked on Ru ena’s hair. Look, a birdie, she wanted to tell him, but she wasn’t sure which language should she use, Czech or English. “Definitely Czech,” she decided. “He will pick up English when he is older.”

“I’m turning off this crap,” her roommate said. She pressed the button and shuffled to her room, struggling to free a piece of carrot stuck in her teeth.

THE CANDLEon their table exuded a faint smell that resembled burning plastic. The flickering light fell on Ru ena’s plate in a few uneven spots, illuminating the spinach that didn’t look like Ru ena had expected. The twisted brown strips resembled malnourished earthworms. She attempted to slice off a piece, but the knife made whiny sounds and proved helpless before the rubberlike matter. Ru ena was deciding between twisting the strips on a fork, as if it were pasta, or leaving the spinach jumble alone, when she felt the man’s hand just above her knee. His words rustled in her hair. “I want to take your clothes off and make love to you.”

What a cliché! the critical part of Ru ena protested. Yet her uncritical part melted just like the plastic-smelling candle on the table. It had been more than a year since a man had touched her knee or whispered to her.

Ru ena gulped ice water while comparing the man’s description of her beauty with her reflection in the stainless-steel pitcher. She did have an unusual face, with regular if slightly sharp features, dense eyebrows, light-blue eyes, and pale skin that easily blushed and broke into blotches. She wasn’t sure if she could be called “breathtakingly beautiful,” but she agreed that her flaxen hair looked “spectacular”—she had washed it just before the date and hadn’t spared expensive conditioner. As for her “magnificent” Eastern European accent, Ru ena could only shrug. She’d always thought of it as an embarrassing handicap, imagining that the English words came out of her mouth either wounded or coated in mud.

“I want to be your lover,” the man whispered. He spread his fingers wider on Ru ena’s thigh, elaborating a long speech in which Ru ena caught the word marriage close to the end. “I don’t take marriage lightly. It’s probably not the sanest decision, but I’ve made it and I’m going to stick to it.”

For a second Ru ena thought he was proposing to her. Then she realized he was talking about another woman, his fiancée, with whom he’d been living for almost six years. This man was about to marry someone else, but he wanted to be Ru ena’s lover.

“I won’t push you,” he said, by the restaurant door. His fingers were cool as he ran his hand between her shoulder blades.

Ru ena’s roommate wasn’t home that night, so she took the opportunity to eat cream cheese out of the container. Hunched on the kitchen windowsill, Ru ena scooped up the cheese with brittle Ritz crackers, while repulsion at the man’s offer fought against the stubborn memories of his touch.

If he cheats on his fiancée, it’s his moral dilemma, not mine. I should enjoy myself now; I don’t care about the future. I’m not interested in marriage. How many people do I know who have benefited from one? Ru ena had the whole arsenal of worn-out but sturdy arguments to defeat the repulsion. Still, repulsion probably would have won if only loneliness weren’t so exhausting. Loneliness followed her everywhere like an unwelcome companion, creeping in at parties she attended, sitting beside her at matinees in a movie theater, dragging along when she took a walk, staring at her mockingly from the cream-cheese surface littered with cracker crumbs.

She removed all the crumbs with a teaspoon before returning the container to the refrigerator.

ON THEIRsecond date, she ate old-fashioned creamed spinach in a crowded diner. It didn’t taste particularly good, but Ru ena swallowed one steaming spoonful after another. They had just made love in his friend’s apartment, where the air conditioner had been blowing full blast the whole time. The man took her clothes off and stepped back to savor the sight. Ru ena had never felt quite so naked. With her lovers back home, she had gone on dates for weeks, sometimes months, while they gradually revealed and touched all of each other’s body parts before going to bed. So when they saw each other fully naked at last, there were no surprises. They had enough time to get used to all the little imperfections and to begin to see each scar, each birthmark, and each stubborn twist of hair as a familiar and endearing attribute of the lover’s body.