Lara Vapnyar - Still Here

There was nothing Vadik could do but nod his head in support. Nod and nod and nod.

Luckily, Vica had only twenty minutes before she had to get back to the clinic.

Vadik endured the rest of the day in the office. Did all that was required of him. Fixed some lines of code. Wrote some new ones. Answered an e-mail from Bob. Discussed a few issues with Dev. Discussed a few issues with Laszlo. Said “Yes, sir!” to yet another “Buckle up.” Fixed some more lines of code. So what was he to do now? He didn’t know, but, fuck, how he wanted to swat those stupid flies on his screen! And God help them, if they started to dance, God help them then!

It took an eternity for the working day to be over. Vadik went home to his empty apartment, He was looking forward to a few ammonia-soaked seconds of inner peace that the act of peeing never failed to grant him, but the first thing he saw in his bathroom were Vica’s underpants hanging on the shower curtain rod. They were dry and stiff. He shoved them behind his large laundry hamper and peed quickly and without any pleasure.

He made himself a light dinner and ate it while browsing through Hello, Love! offerings.

There were some very attractive new faces. He went ahead and scheduled four dates in the next three days.

His best date was with a woman named Serena who worked as an adjunct professor at NYU. “What do you teach?” Vadik asked. “English,” she said with a shy smile, as if this was a frivolous and slightly embarrassing choice of profession. That smile made Vadik like her right away. He wasn’t that attracted to Serena, but she was nice and she seemed to get his jokes.

Later at home he studied her profile once more. Yep, it was witty and smart and brief, a bit too brief. He wanted to know more about her. He looked her up on Facebook. Her posts were mostly shares of op-eds from the New York Times, Salon, and Slate. She rarely commented on them, only if one of her friends asked her a specific question. Vadik looked at her photos. There were countless cityscapes, autumn leaves, and spring flowers. He skipped over them, hunting for actual photos of Serena. There she was in bulky skiing garb, red cheeks, wet bangs. And there she was at a party, adorably drunk. Serena in a Halloween costume — fake dark braids, short black dress with a white collar, chalk-white face. Vadik tried to guess who she was supposed to be. A schoolgirl with cancer? A schoolgirl who studied too hard? Nope, no clue. Not getting cultural references was his secret shame. You could pretend to fit in all you wanted, but you couldn’t truly fit in unless you understood Halloween costumes.

There was a nice photo from five years ago — Serena and two more girls posing on a white cliff overlooking a bright blue lake: “Lake Minnewaska reunion.” It was the same Lake Minnewaska where the sane Sofia had a membership to swim laps. Vadik smiled at the coincidence. All three girls in the photograph wore knitted hats and Windbreakers. Nice colors. Serena was in a yellow Windbreaker and a blue hat, the girl next to her all in green, and the last girl in a red Windbreaker and an orange hat — her light brown hair was sticking out from under the hat. There was something vaguely familiar about her face. He moved the mouse closer to her face to read the Facebook name tag. Rachel Meer. No, that didn’t ring a bell, he decided. Until suddenly it did. It rang a deafening bell. Rachel! The girl in the picture was Rachel. His Rachel. The one and only Rachel I.

He wanted to switch to Rachel’s page but was terrified to let go of that photo as if it were a mirage about to disappear. Rachel Meer. After years of searching, to stumble upon her just like that. It couldn’t be real, could it? He had to force himself to go to her page; his heart was beating wildly and his hands shook so badly that he missed the Enter button.

And finally there she was. Rachel Meer. Big black-and-white profile photo. Still so lovely. He braced himself before looking at her About page. He was almost sure she’d be married, but there was nothing about her relationship status. Well, that didn’t confirm or disprove his fears — not everyone shared details of their private lives on Facebook. She’d graduated from the CUNY Graduate Center and was working at Our City Books as a senior editor. How old was she now? Thirty? Thirty-two? Senior editor was impressive. Other than that her Facebook page told him nothing about Rachel’s life. Apparently, she only used it to push the books by Our City’s authors. She posted good reviews, press releases, and invitations to readings. There was a reading scheduled for this coming Friday. John Garmash would present his deeply haunting novel The Frozen Train. Rachel insisted that this would be a fun event—780 people were invited, 23 had confirmed that they would attend. The invite was public, which meant that she was inviting everybody, absolutely everybody, everybody including him. That’s how easy it was. All Vadik had to do was go to KGB Bar on the corner of Second Avenue and East Fourth Street at 7:00 P.M. this Friday, and he would see Rachel.

In the following days more and more reasons for anxiety accumulated, legitimate and not (Rachel could be married, her husband could be there, Rachel could be mad at him, he might not be able to summon up the courage to talk to her), until all of them were drowned out by his biggest fear — that Rachel wouldn’t recognize him, wouldn’t remember who he was. She would look at him and give him a blank stare, a polite, uncomprehending smile that would demolish the entire myth of the great love of his life. He wouldn’t be able to bear that. All Vadik’s efforts became focused on making it impossible for her not to recognize him. He would do his best to look exactly like he had that day. He found some photos of his first months in the U.S. There were a couple that Angie had taken, a waitress in Avenel. In most of them, he was wearing that horrible pretentious tweed jacket over ill-fitting jeans that he had bought in Istanbul. He had been wearing that jacket when he met Rachel, he was sure of it. The problem was that he no longer owned it. It was Sejun’s fault, because she had made fun of that jacket every time she had seen him in it. When he thought about it, Sejun had robbed him of many things dear to his heart — to name just a few: his jacket, his futon, and his best friend. The hell with Sejun! He went and bought himself a very similar tweed jacket in a great secondhand store on Bedford Avenue. He tried it on — it looked perfect, just as ridiculous as in that photo. His body and his face hadn’t changed that much in eight years. He hadn’t gained much weight. He was starting to calm down when a new panicky thought hit him. His beard! He went through so many beard/no-beard periods that he couldn’t remember if he had had one back when he first came to the U.S. In that Avenel picture he had had a beard, but a very closely trimmed one. It could have been a new one that he’d decided to grow, or it could have been the mutilated remains of an old one. He looked in the mirror — he had a nice lush beard now, but it might make him unrecognizable. Vadik sat down and closed his eyes, trying to focus and remember if he had had a beard on his first day in the United States. For the life of him, he couldn’t remember. There were only two people who would possibly remember that: Sergey and Vica. Well, he wasn’t speaking to Sergey and he really didn’t want to ask Vica. He finally decided that he would have a compromise beard. He went to a barber and asked him to trim his beard as closely as possible. The nudity of the face that met Vadik in the mirror after the barber was done filled him with a new wave of anxiety, but what was done was done.

On Friday, he began dressing about two hours earlier than necessary. He just wanted to make sure that his second-time-around jacket went well with his compromise beard. They looked okay. He took the L train to Fourteenth Street and Second Avenue, then walked down ten blocks to Fourth, turned west toward the blue neon letters spelling out KGB, and walked the one flight up to the bar. It was only six forty-five. The bar was nearly empty. He ordered a beer and sat down at a dark slippery table in the corner. There were numerous portraits of Lenin staring at him from the red walls. Red Soviet flags. A wartime poster with the angry red woman raising her arm in the air to demand that he give his life for the Motherland. This poster had been in a museum in his hometown. It had been displayed next to a glass case with empty shells in it. The red woman was supposed to be the Motherland or EveryMother. He remembered being scared shitless when he saw the poster for the first time when he was a child. And yet somebody found it cool enough to display in a bar. Vadik was on his second beer when the writer, a tall, pudgy man in a sweat-stained shirt, squeezed behind the podium and cleared his throat into the mike to signal that he was about to start. There were a few more people there now. But no Rachel. Vadik tried to listen to the writer. He couldn’t understand a single word. The writer was sweating even more profusely. He had to wipe his forehead and his nose with the back of his hand. His hands were shaking, making the typewritten pages he was holding quiver and rustle. There were times when he had trouble understanding his own text and had to apologize and reread a sentence. He couldn’t have been a good writer, could he? But what if he was? What if he was an unrecognized genius who couldn’t bear reading aloud in public?