Rufi Thorpe - Dear Fang, with Love

I saw Johnny Depp, the guy who had picked us up at the airport, and on whom Vera had an obvious and instantaneous crush, the kind that is big and painful like cystic acne. He was standing with a young woman who was evidently his date. She was radiantly beautiful and wearing an orange knit dress that made her look like an Italian movie star. She too had beautiful teeth. I imagined her and Johnny Depp bleaching their teeth together. It must be weird to be part of such an attractive couple. Why would they even watch pornography and ruin their eyes with the specter of people less beautiful than themselves?

“This is Rūta,” Johnny Depp introduced her to me. His real name was Adam, but Vera continued to refer to him as Johnny Depp and I found myself unable to think of him otherwise.

“Nice to meet you,” I said. “Have you seen my daughter anywhere?”

“Uh, I did see her earlier, I think,” Johnny Depp said.

“So nice to meet you,” Rūta said, in a lightly accented English that I immediately recognized as not-Russian.

“Are you Lithuanian?” I asked. Despite being in Lithuania for almost a day now, I had mostly only met other Americans here for the history tour. Even the cabdriver and the shopkeepers I had met seemed to be Russian or Polish.

Rūta nodded. “I am sorry if my English is poor.”

“You sound very good,” I assured her. “I need to learn some Lithuanian. My daughter speaks Russian, which is good, but…”

“Yes,” Rūta said, understanding immediately, “most people will understand her, but it will not…endear her to them.”

“That’s what I was wondering about,” I said. I knew that Lithuania had been under Soviet rule and native Lithuanians must have very mixed feelings about Russians, even though they had learned the language. Lithuania had only gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1990, so it wasn’t exactly ancient history, either.

“Some people still will not go to the symphony,” Rūta said and made a sour face.

“The symphony?” Clearly I had missed something.

“The KGB offices were right next door,” Johnny Depp explained. “They would schedule torture for while the symphony was playing so that the music would cover up the screams.”

“My God,” I said, and Rūta nodded emphatically, all the while smiling brightly in a winning way. She had an ease and an intimacy with the idea of torture that would be impossible to find in an American woman.

“If you see Vera, tell her I’m looking for her. It was very nice to meet you,” I said, before plunging back into the crowd.

A woman tapped me on the shoulder. “Are you Nikolai?”

“No,” I said, unsure if I had heard her correctly, though clearly she had not said, “Are you Lucas?” She was holding two glasses of champagne and wearing a top with many sparkly beads on it.

“Somebody said you were Nikolai. The writer.”

“Sorry to disappoint,” I said, still scanning the room for Vera.

“Do you want champagne anyway?”

A man behind us laughed very loudly. I still couldn’t see Vera anywhere. It took me a moment to register that the woman had pressed a plastic champagne flute into my hand, and I looked back to her.

“Are you looking for someone?” the woman asked.

“I’m sorry,” I said, realizing that she was rather beautiful. She had a cloud of frizzy strawberry blond hair, and she was older, perhaps in her fifties, but her eyes were a liquid brown and large. I immediately wanted to sleep with her. It was just something about her, about her skin or the way her head sat on her neck. I knew I wouldn’t because I was traveling with Vera, but it still occurred to me. “I’m looking for my daughter,” I explained. “I don’t want her to get into any trouble.”

“How old is she?”

“Seventeen.”

“My son is seventeen,” the woman said. “I wouldn’t have thought you were old enough to have a teenager!”

I nodded, sipped the champagne. It was an observation I had heard many times. “I was a baby when I had a baby,” I said, my standard limp joke. There was actually something about the woman that reminded me of my mother, so probably sleeping with her would trigger some kind of Oedipal curse and should be avoided at all costs.

“Well, I’ll keep an eye out for her,” the woman said.

“Thank you.” I intended to go on and say something nice to make up for my rudeness, but when I turned back to her again she was gone.

I found Vera outside smoking a cigarette under the portico, positively radiating unhappiness. She had been so happy before, giddy to be at the party, delighted to be stealing wine, that I didn’t know what to make of it.

“I was scared I’d lost you,” I said. “You shouldn’t be smoking.”

“Whatever,” she said.

“What’s wrong? I thought you were having a good time.”

It had begun to rain again, but we were sheltered by the colonnade. I worried, as I always did, that something was wrong, that she was having another episode. I was constantly scanning her for reactions or emotions that seemed off, which probably made me seem horribly distant and humorless, but I couldn’t help it.

“I need different clothes,” Vera said. She blew smoke out of her nostrils like a dragon.

“What?”

“None of my clothes are right here,” she said, suddenly on the verge of tears. “I look like Rancho trash! No one dresses like this here!” She gestured to her outfit, a garment she had earlier assured me was called “skorteralls,” which was ridiculous in the first place but which looked even sadder having gotten wet and then dried on her.

I was so relieved that her problem was not existential in nature that I almost laughed. She was not being insane. She was just being a teenager. Which was a different and altogether more manageable form of insanity. “You want new clothes?”

Vera nodded. She dropped her cigarette and pinched the bridge of her nose.

“We can get you some new clothes,” I said, walking over to her. I held out my arms tentatively, afraid a hug was not what she wanted, but she practically fell against me, shivering from the hours in the air-conditioned hall. She hugged me tight and hid her face in my shirt.

“I want to look like her, ” she said into my shoulder.

“Who?”

“I want to look like Rūta. ”

She said this while hiccuping so forcefully she squeaked.

“We’ll get you new clothes,” I promised her. “Tomorrow. First thing. We’ll get you new clothes.”

—

The next morning, I awoke with the novelist Judith Winter drinking coffee in my kitchen. Evidently she was housed in our building, just one flight down, and she and Vera had become friends the previous night.

“Vera is out buying provisions,” she informed me. She looked oddly formal, even though she was wearing a robe and pajamas. Maybe because she had on red lipstick.

“Is that coffee?” I asked. And like a merciful angel from heaven, she motioned for me to pour myself some from the pot on the stove.

“I packed it in my suitcase,” she explained. “I didn’t trust the Lithuanians to have coffee up to my exacting standards. And I am very old and unwilling to compromise.”

“As well you should be,” I said. The coffee was pitchy black and smelled glorious.

I sat with her at the table, trying to think up some safe conversational gambit. She was writing busily in a journal and it seemed rude to interrupt her, but also strange to sit silently. She looked up. “Have you ever been on a history tour before?”

“No,” I said. “Have you?”

“My husband and I used to love to take history tours, especially of Jewish places of interest or historical sites. We’ve been on many, but I think this program is particularly unique.”