Lara Vapnyar - Still Here

“ Reikna, ” the woman said.

“Yes,” Sergey answered.

He imagined her walking toward him wearing one of his dress shirts and nothing else. He couldn’t see her face, but he saw that she had a full bush, like Vica used to have before she started doing Brazilian waxes. Thick brown hair with a golden tint. Just like Vica’s.

“ Reikna, ” the woman said.

“Yes,” Sergey answered.

His right hand rested on the steering wheel while his left hand reached into his pants.

“ Reikna, ” the woman said.

“Yes,” Sergey answered and squeezed his cock tighter.

“ Reikna. ”

“Yes.”

“ Reikna. ”

“Yes,” Sergey said reaching for a tissue.

“ Reikna! ”

“Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Fuck!”

It took Sergey a long time to catch his breath. When he finally got ahold of himself and pressed the gas, he heard that word again: “ Reikna. ” This time it annoyed and even embarrassed him. “Quiet,” he said to the woman, and turned the GPS off. He was driving uphill with the Verrazano looming far in the distance. He felt good. He felt energized. He felt better than he’d had in months.

“ ‘Is competent. Is clear thinking. Is vigorous,’ ” he recited aloud, then added a few more.

“Lacks nothing.

“Fails at nothing.

“Is brilliant. Is persistent. Is strong.”

Sergey made a sharp right turn and headed in the direction of home.

“Next customer!” said the pale, pimply boy with the blue hair, and Vadik obediently unloaded his purchases onto the cashier’s belt of HippoMart. When he first moved there, Vadik misread the name of the store and thought it was called HipMart. “How fitting! Even groceries are hip here,” he said to Vica, Sergey, and Regina.

Organic ground chicken, maitake mushrooms, a small container of coconut rice, a pack of mâche salad, eggs, Icelandic yogurt, Intelligentsia coffee, a thin wedge of Gruyère, a smallish bunch of broccoli, three bars of Ritter Sport chocolate, a six-pack of local IPA, ultra-strength toilet paper, a pack of condoms, and a package of dishwashing sponges. Wait, where was the package of sponges? Nowhere. He’d forgotten to pick it up. It was too late to run back and get it, especially since that ghoulish boy didn’t seem too happy to be helping Vadik to begin with. He looked at Vadik’s items with a patronizing smile, as if he had a way of knowing that all of them had been forced on Vadik either by other people or by circumstances. That he had switched to Intelligentsia coffee because of Sejun’s insistence; that he didn’t really like broccoli but kept eating it, because broccoli was on the list of the ten healthiest foods; that he didn’t need his toilet paper to be ultra-strength; and that he longed to be in an exclusive intimate relationship that didn’t require condoms. He composed a Tumblr post in his head: “I used to think that stocking up on condoms was a sign of virility, now I think it’s a sign of loneliness.”

The cashier cleared his throat. Vadik looked up.

“Eighty dollars and seventy-five cents,” the boy hissed. Vadik swiped his credit card, picked up the plump shopping bag, and headed for the door.

All the passersby crowding Bedford Avenue on Saturday at midday were young and dainty, both men and women. Vadik felt bulky and old. He was thirty-nine years old, over six feet tall, and one hundred and ninety-five pounds. He didn’t fit in here at all. And not just in his physical dimensions.

Here in Williamsburg, Vadik often felt as if he had wandered into the wrong theater by mistake and had to sit there watching some stupid play that he didn’t understand and didn’t want to watch, then finally realizing that he was sitting not in the audience but on the stage and was expected to act his part. The sensation of being onstage was even stronger at home. His new apartment was situated on the first floor with all of the windows looking out over the busy street, with its constant traffic of cars, bikes, and pedestrians. He felt like he was being watched even when the blinds were drawn.

He decided that he didn’t have the strength to go home yet and entered a small expensive coffee place on the corner of Bedford and Fifth. Vadik ordered an espresso and sat down at a table away from the window, with his bag by his feet — veggies, condoms, ground chicken, and all.

Williamsburg had been Sejun’s choice. She had announced her decision to move in with him in August. Vadik was overjoyed, even though the circumstances of the announcement were a little strange. In the weeks leading to her decision, they were getting more and more distant — Vadik had prepared himself for the imminent breakup. But then Sejun asked him to come visit her in Palo Alto. “I’ll come in a few weeks,” Vadik said. “No, come now! Come this weekend!” she insisted. That last-minute ticket was outrageously expensive, but it was worth it. Sejun was unusually affectionate to Vadik. She kept snuggling against him, crying and laughing, cooing over him and praising him, and telling him how he was so much better than all the other jerks out there. At the end of his short stay, she announced that she was done with California, that she would be looking for a job in New York, and that they would be living together. Vadik was so happy that he picked her up, squeezed her in a hug, and spun her around the room so hard that she hit her shoulder against her garage-sale antique armoire. It was only when he was on the plane back to New York that her behavior started to seem suspicious.

“Sounds fishy!” Vica said, adding to his unease. Regina agreed. But Sergey was all “Sejun’s coming!”

Vadik half expected her to call him the next day and say that she had changed her mind. She did call him very early the next morning — it must have been 6 A.M. in California — and his heart dropped, but she just wanted to tell him that she had sent out her résumé to several promising places in New York.

She found a job in no time, at some hip start-up in Brooklyn. They asked if she could relocate in two months. She said yes. “ Ura! ” Vadik screamed into his iPad. He immediately imagined all the wonderful dishes he would cook in his immersion cooker for her, all the wine that they would drink on his beautiful terrace, and all those interesting stimulating things they would do in his enormous bedroom. But when he shared some of his fantasies with Sejun — fantasies that included cooking and fantasies that didn’t — she said: “No! Your apartment is too far from Brooklyn, you need to find a new one.”

Vadik went silent. He thought about the deposit he would lose if he moved out of his current place and all the other costs of moving again so soon, but then he thought that he should be ashamed of worrying about such things on the verge of this life-changing event.

“Hello?” Sejun said.

“Yes?” Vadik answered.

“What do you think about Williamsburg?”

Vadik didn’t know much about Williamsburg, but he figured that if Sejun thought it was a cool place, there was no reason he wouldn’t be happy there.

Over the next few days, Sejun picked out a few places on StreetEasy and asked Vadik to go there with his iPad so that she could check them out via Skype.

“Okay, now move it forward so that I can see inside that closet. Oh, wow, that’s huge! I’m not in love with the bathroom tile though. Ask the landlord if we’re allowed to change it.”

The apartment Sejun finally approved was a large two-bedroom (“We need a second bedroom in case my parents come to visit from Seoul”). It was on the first floor, but Sejun said she didn’t mind. The rent was a little higher than Vadik’d expected, but he thought that with two salaries they could certainly manage it. The next step was to pick out the furniture. Sejun allowed Vadik to keep his immersion cooker, but not much else. Most of his things were either sold or ended up in Vica and Sergey’s house on Staten Island. Sejun then furnished all the rooms via her iPhone using an app called Stuff Me! All Vadik had to do was receive the furniture when it was delivered and connect Sejun with the delivery guys so that she could explain where exactly she wanted it.