Lara Vapnyar - Still Here

He mentioned Sejun and said that she had left him for his best friend.

“That sucks,” Rachel said, but she didn’t appear to be as moved as he’d hoped she’d be.

Vadik recognized the song that was playing now: “Bye Bye Love.” How fitting, he thought. How cheesy, but how fitting.

Rachel checked her messages and said that they had time for another drink.

It was only then that they started talking about that day. Both remembered it well, but they differed on the details. Rachel didn’t remember the smell of chlorine in the diner or that there was a homeless man sleeping in the corner. She didn’t remember that it was snowing. She didn’t remember her angry rant about Leonard Cohen. She laughed when Vadik quoted some of it. Vadik didn’t remember that there was some change jiggling in his pocket all the way to Rachel’s place. She found two quarters on the bedroom floor after he left. He didn’t remember the dog (Kibbles was his name) who came and sniffed him by the entrance to Rachel’s building. “You said something in Russian to the dog.” He didn’t remember that Rachel wasn’t asleep when he left. She heard him moving in the other room and called for him. He didn’t answer. He said that he couldn’t hear her.

He asked her to forgive him.

She said, “No! There was nothing to forgive!” Her protest was so violent that she almost knocked her wineglass over.

She said that their encounter had been wonderful for her in every sense. She had had just one boyfriend all through college. He had dumped her a few months before she came to New York City to study. She was still reeling from her breakup, and everybody told her that dating in New York was brutal. She was a quiet bookish girl from the Midwest — she didn’t know if she could handle it. Her roommate told her: “Just have your first horrible one-night stand, so everything that comes after will seem better.”

Is that what I was? Vadik thought. Her first horrible one-night stand?

“And I thought no, I can’t possibly do that. To be naked with a complete stranger? To touch a stranger’s private parts? To let him touch mine? But then I decided that it was something I had to do. To prove myself or something. It was like going down a double-diamond trail. Or like skydiving.”

He could see how that second drink was affecting her, making her looser or, as a Russian expression had it, “untying her tongue.”

“And there you were. Tall. Foreign. In your ridiculous professor’s jacket. With your Sartre! I couldn’t believe somebody would be reading Sartre in a diner. With your English poetry in Russian. The fact that you were so bizarre made the whole thing much easier. It was like having sex with some eccentric literary character, not with a person. I wasn’t scared or intimidated.”

Okay, Vadik thought.

“And then the sex turned out to be surprisingly good. Tense, awkward, of course, but also so much better than I’d expected.”

She reached for her wineglass, but it was empty, so she finished her water in a couple of gulps.

“I mean, it was a bit hurtful when you left without saying good-bye, but I thought that this was a necessary part of the experience. A one-night stand is called that for a reason. You need that moment of pain in order to feel really free and unencumbered.”

There was no need to explain himself now. Still, Vadik felt that he had to say something.

“It was my first day in America. I didn’t know what I was doing. I really didn’t.”

Rachel nodded and looked at her phone again.

“Where are you going?” Vadik asked when they exited the bar.

“Home. Greenpoint,” she said.

“Let’s share a cab,” he said. “I’ll get out in Williamsburg, and you’ll continue to Greenpoint.”

She nodded.

In the cab, Vadik immediately felt carsick, and he knew from experience that it was best not to talk when you felt nauseous, but he had to tell Rachel the truth. He thought it was crucial that somebody besides him knew what she had really meant to him.

“I’ve been looking for you,” he said. “All these years. I didn’t know your last name. I didn’t know your address. I couldn’t even remember where that diner was. I would come to the city every weekend and just go to the corner of Fifty-ninth Street and Sixth Avenue and walk downtown, swerving down the side streets hoping to find that diner.”

She was now looking right at him and it was hard to take, he had to turn away.

“It was only years later that I discovered Missed Connections, and I posted hundreds of inquiries about you. And then I found you on Facebook. By pure accident. I was browsing through a friend’s photos and saw you in one of them. Her name is Serena Geller.”

“Yes,” Rachel said, “Serena. We were in grad school together.”

All this talking was making Vadik’s nausea unbearable.

“Do you mind if I crack open the window?” he asked.

She shook her head. He might have been mistaken, but he thought he saw tears in her eyes.

They were approaching the bridge. The wind from the river whooshed right into his ear. He fought a painful spasm in his chest and continued.

“I went and stalked you on Facebook. That’s how I knew about the reading. So I just went there, hoping to see you. I’d never heard of John Garmash before. I’m glad I bought the book though.” He pointed to it in his lap.

Rachel reached over and stroked the cover with her fingers. “I had no idea,” she said.

They didn’t speak for the rest of the trip, but as the cab was approaching Williamsburg, Rachel tapped Vadik on the hand and said, “You know that name I called you, Vladimir? I had thought of it years ago. I thought that if I ever saw you again I would call you by some Russian name. A different Russian name. As if you were some random Russian dude who didn’t matter. I was so proud of myself that I didn’t lose my cool at the last moment, that I did call you Vladimir.”

Her voice kept breaking as she talked.

“I mean, how stupid we all are!”

And then it was Vadik’s stop.

“Can I ride with you to Greenpoint?” he asked.

She shook her head.

Vadik paid the full fare plus twenty bucks extra for Rachel, then got out of the car.

The cab started to pull away. Rachel was looking at him through the window, then as the car sped up, she abruptly turned away.

Vadik followed the car with his eyes for as long as he could, until it merged with the other bright yellow spots on the road and disappeared behind the buildings. He kept staring ahead until it seemed that the streets and the buildings were moving too, moving away from him, getting smaller and smaller, merging with the horizon.

He had come to this city in pursuit of happiness, and the city had in fact offered him happiness on his very first day here, but he had been too stupid and too blind to recognize it.

Vadik was desperate to share this revelation with his friends, but did he even have friends anymore? Sergey wasn’t speaking to him, Vica had just dumped him, and Regina wasn’t answering his messages. Even the virtual friends he had on social media tended to ignore his posts. He imagined telling the Rachel story to some brand-new friends in some new city and perhaps even a new country, because, boy, was he done with this one!

He went home and shot a message to his headhunter asking her to find him a position in some faraway place.

Sergey imagined that Goebbels would be fat, but he turned out to be skinny, mean, and half-blind. “No, no, Goering was the fat one,” his new neighbor, Helen, explained. Helen had a history degree but worked as a receptionist at a beauty salon. Her apartment was on the fifth floor too, and just as tiny as Goebbels’s. Helen was a divorcée who shared a one-bedroom apartment with her fourteen-year-old daughter, Teena. Teena, a pale, pudgy girl, was always there, mostly hiding out in the bedroom. Helen slept on the sofa separated from the rest of the living room by tall bookshelves. She took a liking to Sergey and often invited him over for a drink. She confessed that she hated Goebbels’s owner because he was so rude to her and Teena. But she loved, loved, loved the cat! She also said that she didn’t get the concept of online dating and would have loved to just meet a guy on the street and go home with him. Sergey had the sense that she would have liked for their relationship to be more romantic or at least more sexual, and he was attracted to her, but he couldn’t bring himself to act. Helen was a robust Nibelungen blonde who spoke in a low voice and smelled of artisanal soaps she kept in a basket in her bathroom — Sergey’s favorite were lavender harvest and lemon tea. She would invite him to watch Netflix and sit next to him on the couch, leaning closer and closer, tickling his neck with her hair, making his penis all but bounce in his pants, causing him to perspire from desire and panic. For all these years, having sex had meant having sex with Vica. He had had just two relationships since his separation, one was with an electronic voice of the GPS and the other was via Skype. The idea of touching, let alone penetrating, a real live woman terrified him. He confided this to Vadik back when they were still talking, but Vadik just shook his head. “It’s not supposed to be like that, man! A new woman is exciting, with her new smell, and all these unexplored little nooks on her body.” Sergey knew that he should just take the plunge and have sex with Helen, but something stopped him every single time.