Lara Vapnyar - Still Here

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.