Lara Vapnyar - Still Here

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.