Lara Vapnyar - Still Here

Sergey put the bowl on the counter and looked at Vadik. A muscle or something must have shifted in his face and Vadik caught it. His expression immediately changed from vicious and mocking to helpless and almost scared.

“Huh, so you did, didn’t you?” Vadik said. There was a pleading note in his voice now. As if he were begging Sergey not to answer. “On Skype?”

Sergey pushed Vadik away and walked toward the bedroom.

“That’s pathetic!” Vadik yelled at his back. “Do you know how pathetic that is?”

It didn’t take him long to pack his things. Vadik had barely given him any space in the closet, so most of his clean clothes were still in his duffel bag, and he kept the dirty ones in the plastic HippoMart bags under the bed — the red fat hippo stretched even fatter by his socks and underwear. Vadik employed a complicated sorting system in his laundry hamper, so Sergey preferred not to mess with it. He zipped up his duffel bag. Put his old laptop in his sturdy backpack, pondered whether he should take the paperback of Hamlet, decided that he should — after all, Vadik had never returned his copy of Hell Is Other People: The Anthology of 20th-Century French Philosophy. He threw the book into the backpack, picked up the hippo bags, and headed to the door.

Vadik was in the living room pacing, in sync with all those passersby in the window, his facial expression a complex mix of hatred, remorse, and fear, as if he were debating whether to hit Sergey or beg him to stay.

“You don’t have to go, man,” he said in a more or less controlled voice. “It’s all perfectly understandable. I mean, who wouldn’t try to fuck his best friend’s woman, given the opportunity? We are not saints, neither of us.”

Vadik was about to say something else, but he stopped himself.

Sergey was standing with his back to Vadik, his right hand on the door handle. The image of a wild-eyed, disheveled Vica with that strange scratch across her cheek tramped through his mind. His heart was beating so fast that it was becoming less and less possible to breathe. He thought that if Vadik followed through and admitted that he had fucked Vica in their house on Staten Island, his heart would collapse, he would go into cardiac arrest and die.

“Oh, come on, man,” Vadik finally said, and Sergey opened the door and left.

He walked briskly down Bedford Avenue, away from Vadik, away from Vadik’s words, toward the place where he parked his car. A few blocks away from there, he stopped and looked around. He had no idea where to go. Some tiny cold drops fell onto his face and hands. Sergey looked up and saw that it was either drizzling or snowing. He went into the coffee shop next door, ordered a large tea, pushed his bags under the table, and sat down.

He could go back to Staten Island. Vica would have no choice but to let him in. But that would be the Vica who had thrown him out, who wanted to “get it over with,” and who might have fucked Vadik. He couldn’t bear to see her.

There was his mother, who would be overjoyed to let Sergey into her one-bedroom in the projects and have him stay on her “Italian” sofa. She would feed him the foods that he used to love when he was five, like rice meatballs called ezhiki and sweet farmer’s cheese, and make him watch some endless movie on her Russian TV channel, and after the movie was over she would plague him with talk of his inevitable decline until he felt the decline in his bones.

And there was Regina, who had reacted to the news of his separation from Vica with shocking coldness. Didn’t want to meet for a drink, didn’t bother to answer his long letter. Still, it was impossible to imagine that she would refuse to let him stay at her place for a couple of days. He thought she should be back from Russia by now. He imagined entering her and Bob’s sparkling lobby with his bulging HippoMart bags, then Bob looking at him with squeamish pity. No, that was out of the question.

His mother was the only acceptable option. Sergey braced himself. It looked like a night of Russian TV and ezhiki.

“I’m fucking desperate, man!” cried out the man at the adjacent table. “I can’t believe Natalie just bailed on me. Now I can’t go.”

He had a long silky beard that probably required very expensive shampoos. His friend had no facial hair himself, but he wore an “I Love Castro” T-shirt as if to compensate.

“What about your neighbor? She could watch your cat.”

“My neighbor Helen? The one who called the police on me? Twice? My music was too loud? No, thank you! She would just poison the fuck out of him.”

“Why don’t you leave him with a pet care service?”

“Hey, why don’t you leave your child with a child care service?”

“I would. Absolutely!”

“Well, I happen to love my cat. And you know how Goebbels is crazy, he loves the apartment, he loves his fucking cat tree, he won’t be happy anywhere else. And he’s arthritic, poor thing. He needs his pills.”

So this man had to go on a trip, Sergey thought. But there was this arthritic cat, and he couldn’t leave the cat anywhere else but in his apartment. And the catsitter had fallen through. This could be his chance!

“Hey,” Sergey said after he cleared his throat, “sorry, I couldn’t help but overhear. I happen to be really good with cats.”

The bearded man turned to Sergey and looked him over, as if trying to determine his trustworthiness.

“I’m a financial analyst,” Sergey said as proof of his reliability. “I work at Langley Miles.”

The bearded man seemed duly impressed.

“My wife just threw me out and I need a place to stay.”

“Ouch!” the beardless man said.

The bearded man tapped his fingers on the table surface. “We’re talking about six months here. I got this composers’ fellowship in Rome. You can’t bail on me, because I’ll be in Europe.”

“Six months is perfect.”

They continued to discuss details and logistics, but it was clear that the thing was going to work out.

Okay, Sergey thought, a sick cat named Goebbels. This could be interpreted either as yet another unfortunate complication in his already terribly confusing life or as divine intervention — a cat savior, a redeemer cat, a knight cat on a white horse.

The flight back to New York took nine hours and fifty-five minutes, and that was exactly how long it took Regina to get her bearings. By the time the plane was approaching the fuzzy rabbit-shaped Newfoundland, she felt together enough to brush her teeth and comb her hair in the plane’s lavatory. She even thought about applying some makeup. By the time they landed, she felt almost normal. She decided that she would write Aunt Masha a letter in which she would calmly explain why she couldn’t possibly adopt a child, that while Aunt Masha had a right to suggest it, she certainly didn’t have a right to demand it from her. Even if Regina eventually decided to adopt a child, it would have to be her own decision. She couldn’t be either pressured or rushed into it. She mentally composed most of that letter while she stood in the long line at passport control. She was almost finished when the young officer stamped her papers and welcomed her back to New York. The last sentence came to her in the cab. “And even though adoption is out of the question, I want you to know that Nastya can count on our help.” Yep, that was the solution. Regina would send them money. She was sure that Bob wouldn’t mind. That would certainly make her feel less shitty. Regina wanted to send the e-mail right away but decided that typing it all out on her phone would be bothersome. She’d send it as soon as she got home. So as soon as she got there, she dropped her bags at the front door and went straight to her computer. “Your message has been sent,” Gmail informed her, and Regina felt instant relief. She took off her clothes, went to shower, fell onto her bed all clean and wrapped in two large towels, and slept. She woke up just as Bob entered the apartment after work. They ordered a square gourmet pizza and had a quiet dinner together, or rather it was Bob who was having dinner, while Regina just nibbled on his uneaten crusts. She was still jet-lagged and deaf in one ear after the flight, so Bob’s voice sounded as if it were coming from far away. He told her that she had towel marks all over her neck and the left side of her face. He said it was charming. She smiled. Then he asked her a question she couldn’t hear. “What?” she asked.