Lara Vapnyar - Still Here

There was Barbara, the New Age — y masseuse. Before Barbara (but actually during) there was Abby. Then Barbara found out about Abby and Abby found out about Barbara, and Vadik was alone again.

Who else was there? Jesse, his headhunter. Dana, the woman who worked in the next cubicle at Morgan Stanley — he’d sworn off dating his coworkers after Dana. Vica. Yep, his former girlfriend now his best friend’s wife, Vica. That was the one encounter he was trying very hard to forget. Nothing had happened, he’d managed to stop himself at the very last moment, but he still squirmed with shame for months afterward. He felt awful guilt toward Sergey — he could only hope that Sergey would never know — but he also felt revulsion because the encounter with Vica had made him regress into his Russian past. He had come here to start his life anew, not to rehash his old romances.

Before Vica there was Sue, a waitress at Mom’s Diner in Avenel, New Jersey. Before Sue there was Angie, another waitress at Mom’s. Sue had a faded tattoo of a kitten on her shoulder. Vadik couldn’t remember a single detail about Angie.

“I’m sick of this mess,” Vadik confessed to Regina right after his breakup with Abby. Via Skype, because Regina was still in Russia back then.

“Of course you are,” Regina said, “dating is exhausting. You know what is the most exhausting for me?”

“What?”

“Getting my hopes up. It’s as if I needed enormous physical strength to get them up, like a weight lifter or something.”

Vadik’s friendship with Regina started out awkwardly, when Vica left him for Sergey — then Regina’s boyfriend. A few days after the breakup, Regina asked him to come and pick up some of the things Sergey had left at her apartment. Vadik wondered if she was interested in him. He wasn’t really attracted to her — she had this weird stale smell that he found off-putting — but he was definitely curious. But when he got to her apartment, Regina was so shaky and sad that trying to have sex with her seemed obnoxious. They got to talking instead. Neither of them would say anything bad about Vica or Sergey — that would have been tacky, but they couldn’t resist talking about Fyodorov, Sergey’s obsession, and confessing to each other how much they hated his philosophy. Gradually they had become each other’s confidants/therapists/dating mentors. After Vadik left Russia, they would talk on Skype two to three times a week.

“I need to be tied down. I can’t go on like this!” Vadik said to Regina via the screen.

“Just pick a girl and marry her,” Regina said. She was about to get married to Bob and was feeling very enthusiastic about marriage.

Vadik was dating Rachel II then, a social worker studying for her master’s. When Rachel II was a young girl, she’d had a passionate relationship with horses. She kept the photograph of her pet horse, Billie, on her desk.

Rachel II and Vadik broke up because she walked in on him making fun of Billie to Regina. At first Vadik denied it. He was speaking in Russian, so why would Rachel even think that? But wasn’t he holding up the picture of Billie and laughing? Rachel asked. And wasn’t that ugly Russian woman on the screen hooting in response? Vadik had to admit his fault.

The sad thing was that Regina actually thought that Rachel II was the best fit for Vadik. She was the most grounded of the lot.

Vica disagreed. Vica thought that the sane Sofia was the best fit. She said that it was a good thing that Sofia was quite a bit older than Vadik, because that would make her more forgiving. The sane Sofia taught comparative literature at SUNY New Paltz. She had a club membership to swim the lap lane in Lake Minnewaska, situated about ten miles away from campus. Sofia listed that membership as one of the six things she couldn’t live without on her Hello, Love! profile. She kept urging Vadik to get a membership too. “There is a rope right in the middle of the lake,” Vadik told Sergey, “and they’re just swimming along the rope, back and forth, back and forth, like convicts.” Vadik and Sofia broke up because Vadik refused to see the beauty of lap swimming in a natural body of water.

Sergey’s top choice for Vadik was Sejun. He couldn’t believe you could meet a girl like that through online dating. Vadik met up with Vica, Sergey, and Regina soon after his latest housewarming party, and since the subject of the failure of Sergey’s pitch was too painful, they were discussing Sejun. Sergey said that Sejun was remarkably pretty for such a smart girl. Vica said that first of all that was an incredibly sexist remark and that she didn’t find Sejun all that pretty. Regina started to laugh.

“Oh, yes, she is very pretty,” Sergey said. “The problem is that she is way out of Vadik’s league.”

“Why is she out of his league?” Vica asked. “He makes quite a bit of money, doesn’t he?”

“Right,” Sergey said.

“Hey, guys,” Vadik said. “I’m sitting right here!”

But they continued to argue, not paying any attention to Vadik, as if his own opinion didn’t matter.

“I think I’m still in love with Rachel I,” Vadik said. Regina stopped laughing. And all of them looked away as if he had said something intensely embarrassing.

Vadik met Rachel I on his very first day in the United States.

He arrived in New York on a Saturday morning in the middle of winter. It was snowing pretty hard that day. Vadik woke up as the plane started its descent into JFK. He rushed to open the shade on the window, hoping to catch a glimpse of that famous Manhattan skyline. He couldn’t see anything but the murky white mess. It was still thrilling. He could not see the contours of the buildings, but he could sense them right there, right underneath the plane, hidden by the clouds. He felt a familiar surge of excitement, the excitement that had buoyed him for months, ever since he’d gotten that coveted H1-B visa that allowed him to work in the U.S. for three years. He had spent two year in Istanbul and had grown sick of the place. He had celebrated his thirtieth birthday there, but the new decade began in the new country for him. Every now and then he would open his passport and stroke the thin paper of the visa as if it were something alive.

The announcement came through with the usual crackle. The flight attendant said that it was snowing rather hard and that they might not land in JFK after all, that the plane might be rerouted to Philadelphia. No, no, no! Vadik thought. Landing in Philadelphia would certainly ruin his plans. He was starting work on Monday, as a computer programmer in the corporate offices of EarthlyFoods in Avenel, New Jersey. He was to live in Avenel too, in an apartment provided by corporate housing. Sergey was meeting him at JFK. He was supposed to take Vadik to his and Vica’s house on Staten Island and then drive him to Avenel on Sunday. But Vadik hoped to ask Sergey to take him straight into the city so that he could spend the entire Saturday exploring. He knew exactly what he wanted to do. He wanted to walk the streets without direction, just follow his intuition wherever it might lead him. He wanted to walk like that for hours, then find a bohemian-looking bar, where he would spend the rest of the day with a glass of wine and a book, like a true New York intellectual. And he would wear his tweed jacket. Vadik had put the jacket on before boarding the plane, because he hadn’t wanted to put it in the suitcase where it might get wrinkled. He had spent a lot of time choosing the book to read in that bar. Something French? Sartre’s Nausea ? Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema I ? And no, this wasn’t sickeningly pretentious. Vadik wasn’t doing it to make an impression on other people. He did want to be seen as a charismatic tweeded intellectual, but it was more important to him to be seen as such in his own eyes.