Lara Vapnyar - Still Here

The last time Vica had a chat with Ethan was about two weeks ago.

“I know what you want to ask me,” Ethan said.

He was staring at her intently, even aggressively. She had to look away. He couldn’t have guessed that I had been thinking about his money, could he? Vica thought, her spine tensing.

“Go on, ask me. Ask me if I’m scared of dying.”

“Are you scared?”

“Hell, yeah, I’m terrified. I’m not ready. It’s funny, isn’t it, how my docs devote so much effort to prolonging my life and none of it to preparing me for death. Which is coming no matter what! Couldn’t they think of something to make dying just a little bit easier, a little bit less scary?”

Vica had no idea what to say to him. Her heart was breaking, but she was rebelling against having to feel it. She wasn’t Ethan’s girlfriend or his friend. She wasn’t even his shrink or his doctor. She was a mere radiology technician, and she couldn’t afford to feel that strongly about a patient!

“There are excellent hospice programs; they take care of emotional issues as well as physical ones,” she said weakly.

Ethan looked stricken with disappointment. He must have expected something honest, crazy, Russian from her, but what he’d gotten was a generic reply à la Bing Ruskin.

She looked at his “FYI” tweet again and her eyes filled with tears. She had to tip her face up not to let them escape.

“Hi!” Somebody interrupted her thoughts.

Vica raised her eyes and saw that there was a smiling man sitting across from her.

“You were in that line at the Castle school, weren’t you?”

Vica nodded. The man was white, wearing a puffy coat, jeans, and working boots. Speaking with a slight Eastern European accent. Polish? Serbian? In other words, he was a typical Outer Borough.

“I heard the questions are even tougher than usual this year,” he said. “My Ginnie nearly had a panic attack this morning. And I told her, ‘Honey, no school is worth whipping yourself into a frenzy like this.’ ”

Except for this school, Vica thought. This school was worth it. She wondered if Eric had been whipped into enough of a frenzy.

“Listen,” the man said, “can I buy you another coffee or a pastry?”

He was nice-looking. In his forties. Probably divorced. Broad shoulders. Attractive crinkles around his blue eyes.

“I have an appointment,” Vica said with an apologetic smile and got up to leave. She had no desire to have a conversation with an Outer Borough.

As she walked toward the park, she wondered if she had been too curt with the man. And no, she hadn’t left because she was a snob and felt that she deserved better, or not only because of that, but mainly because she couldn’t help but see all Outer Borough men as variations of Sergey. Or just variations on the type of Husband. A Husband knew her the way she didn’t want to be known, at her worst, her ugliest, her most embarrassing. He had heard how she lied, and he had heard how she screamed in rage. He had seen her throw up, seen her with cracked nipples, seen her pick an uneaten sandwich from the garbage bin in his mother’s kitchen — she swore that she put the sandwich right back, but he didn’t see that. A Husband knew her and he didn’t want her. He didn’t even fight for her. This was definitely one of the reasons Vica didn’t want to date Vadik. She couldn’t be with another man who knew her well. She had been attracted to Vadik for such a long time, but now that she was actually free, the mere thought of dating him made her squirm.

What she needed was a Lover. A man who came from another world. A man who didn’t know her. A man who would take her for somebody good, and bright, and exciting. Special. Delicate.

The thought of such a man made Vica giddy with desire. Ever since Sergey left, she was plagued by these random bouts of desire, unwelcome and unexpected. Her recurrent fantasy was of a man throwing her onto a bed, spreading her legs, and greedily licking her, lapping her up as a cat would a bowl of milk.

The last time she felt like that was when she first went to Moscow for the medical school entrance exams. She was seventeen. The heated subway car smelled of old leather and sweat. Some of that sweat was her own. Vica was wearing a short cotton dress. She was holding her large backpack on her lap, and there were imprints of the bag’s buckles on her bare legs. She felt damp all over, and messy and disgusting. But still men looked at her. She couldn’t help but feel their gazes running through her body like electrical currents. It was exhilarating.

And then, when she was accepted to the best medical school in the country (the only one from her hometown!) and went to Moscow to live, she felt overwhelmed with the buzz of a sexual current all over the city. She would walk down a Moscow street or stand in a crowded subway car and catch somebody’s stare and her knees would grow weak. But she was a good girl, brought up by her strict mother, by all the books about great romantic love she had consumed while growing up, and so sex for the sake of sex was out of the question. She would only have sex for the sake of great love. Or, rather, she would have a great love for the sake of great sex.

Lovelovelove/sex/love/sex/love/sexsexsex was all she could think about, so it was surprising that she found a way to study and earn good grades. Vica did go out with a couple of guys, but she wouldn’t let them go all the way, because she was sure that what she felt for them wasn’t great love. Great love was supposed to make you crazy, set your world on fire, move the earth — all those clichés, though Vica didn’t know they were clichés back then. She refused to go to all those empty dachas with these guys, and their parents’ apartments, and their friends’ dorm rooms, so instead, they ended their dates on the dark staircase of some building close to her dorm that smelled of cats and rotten potato peels. She let the guy press her against the mailboxes, or the staircase railing, or the garbage chute, or the warm spines of the radiator, and they kissed until it hurt. She would try to stop and remind herself that she wasn’t supposed to have sex without love, and that love was nowhere near, but her will would fail her and she wouldn’t be able to stop. So she let the guy sneak his hand under her sweater, and his finger inside her panties, and his dick pressed to the damp skin of her upper thigh, and she moaned and wriggled and sometimes even came — when it happened, she tried her best to conceal it from the guy. Then Vica said good-bye, walked up the stairs to her dorm room, and wiped the semen off her thighs, crying from shame but wanting more.

One of these guys was Vadik. They met at her classmate’s party — Vadik was the classmate’s older brother’s friend. He was twenty-two, in grad school in the department of applied mathematics at the university. He was tall and handsome, smart and funny, and liked to recite poetry. He boasted that he knew Moscow better than anybody else, and he was eager to impress Vica by being a connoisseur of all the finer things the city could offer. He took her for walks along the little-known “secret” nooks like Kuskovo park or Simonov Monastery, he treated her to the best hot chocolate ever, he took her to see a double feature at a Truffaut retrospective. Then he took her back to her dorm and kissed her at the entrance. Vica tried very hard to will herself into falling in love with him. “I’m crazy about him, I’m crazy about him, I’m crazy about him,” she kept repeating in her mind as if trying to hypnotize herself. She enjoyed kissing him, but the craziness wouldn’t come.

On their sixth date, they had a fight. Vadik was from a small town too, but his attitude toward Moscow was startlingly different from Vica’s. Vica thought that the city was exciting and tough and strange, very strange, and it was pointless to try to fit in or even understand it, but that eventually she would conquer it (she didn’t know how — she had no idea what conquering the city even meant — she just knew that she had to do it). Vadik grew up thinking he didn’t belong in his dumb hometown, but in sparklingly cultural Moscow he would fit right in. He said that his father was dead, his mother was sleeping around, and his older brother was a drug addict (“he sniffs glue and other shit”), and that he hated them and had nothing in common with them and nothing in common with his hometown. He was a true Muscovite at heart. Vica said that she got it how you could hate your parents and your hometown, but that wasn’t enough to make anybody a real Muscovite. He was just fooling himself that he could fit in. To prove that Vica was wrong, Vadik took her to meet his “true Muscovite” friends, Sergey and Regina.