Lara Vapnyar - The Scent of Pine

The waitress had a blond crew cut and creased skin, like an old leather jacket. She handed them the menus and asked what they wanted to drink. Ben asked for a beer. Lena said, “Just water.” The waitress snorted with disapproval.

Ben started to read the menu with deep concentration, as if it contained a math problem. There was still something boyish about his face. That shock of hair across his forehead and the way he scrunched his nose when reading.

She wanted him to kiss her. She imagined that his lips would be cold and taste like beer.

Lena took a long drink of her water and looked away.

“Fried clams are supposed to be very good,” Ben said.

“Okay.”

“Gerry orders them all the time.”

“You used to come here with Gerry?”

“Yeah, when I lived here.”

“How did you feel when Gerry won the Pulitzer?”

“How did I feel? I was insanely happy for him. That’s how I was supposed to feel, right?” Ben paused for a while, his eyes searching her face. “No, I couldn’t force myself to be happy for him. Gerry won a Pulitzer even as my book proposal was rejected and I was struggling to hold on to my shitty job teaching art at a local Catholic school. His win devastated me.”

Ben took a long sip of his beer and continued.

“But it was nothing compared to his being the first to get laid. That was when I really felt crushed.”

Lena laughed.

“I know what you mean. My friend Inka turned into this really big shot. She is one of the most famous Russian journalists.”

“The very Inka who would fall off the bed while reading Chaucer?”

“Yes. Can you imagine that? And I’m insanely jealous of her career, but it’s nothing compared to how jealous I felt when I thought that she was more popular than me in the camp. She would go on all those dates, and I would be stuck taking care of the kids.”

“Who would you even date in a summer camp?”

“Ours was a very special camp. It belonged to the Ministry of Defense, so it was full of officers and soldiers. And all the counselors were the girls from the State Pedagogical University, a school famous for its lack of men. Everyone called it the School of Virgins. So you can imagine the chemistry.”

The waitress appeared with their food: fried clams and soggy French fries served in checkered paper baskets, with coleslaw in tiny paper cups, and soft, seedy pickles.

Ben picked up a bunch of clams with his fork, put them into his mouth and started to chew.

He had four deep lines across his forehead. They moved slightly when he ate. There was a crease over his left cheek that looked like a scar. Lena hoped that he didn’t notice how she stared at him. But then again, he appeared to be discreetly studying her too.

“So Inka was more popular than you in the camp?” Ben asked.

“Only at first. Then I finally went on a date, and bizarre things started to happen. I turned into a femme fatale.”

Ben put his glass down and stared at her.

“What do you mean?”

“I would go on a date with a guy and the next day he would disappear.”

“Disappear? How?”

“Um—it’s a mystery.”

“I love mysteries!”

“Well, it’s a long story, we won’t have time for that anyway.”

Ben shrugged and took another sip.

“Have you kept in touch with Inka?” he asked.

“No. Not since I left Russia. I’ve been following her career, though. It was hard not to. She’s all over the news. You know what’s funny, though? I ran into her two days ago. In New York. At Macy’s in Herald Square.”

Ben shook his head.

“Interesting coincidence. You saw Inka and I saw Gerry. I hope Inka wasn’t as obnoxious as Gerry.”

“She was a little bit obnoxious. But, you know what, she said that she just found out I had a secret admirer at the camp.”

“Nice! Who was it?”

“She wouldn’t tell me.”

For dessert they had ice cream with homemade blueberry jam.

His lips were cold and tasted like blueberry jam when he finally kissed her in the long corridor by the door just as they were about to exit, and then again, by the car, where they kept kissing for a very long time.

Outside, it had stopped raining but became very dark. Still, they had a clearer picture of their surroundings, with glimpses of boutiques on the main street, and fishermen’s boats, and the dark ocean speckled with tiny islands. They drove past the jetty, over onto the main street, past the grand inns and cute bed and breakfasts, all sporting proud NO VACANCY signs.

“There is a Holiday Inn a few miles north,” Ben said, as if they’d already discussed this.

Lena fought a surge of anxiety and said, “Okay.”

How strange, she thought, that when you meet a man you don’t know whether it will happen or not. And then suddenly you know. And know with such certainty, it’s as if it already happened.

It was very cold in the lobby of the Holiday Inn. Lena poured herself some acrid coffee from a big urn and sipped it as Ben signed them in. The key the receptionist gave them wasn’t the usual plastic hotel key, but a real metallic one with something like a heavy wooden pear attached to the ring. The pear banged against the door when Ben turned the key to the right and then to the left. Lena was the first to enter the room. She walked to the middle and stopped between the bed and the bureau. There wasn’t any other furniture except for a single chair by the window. She caught her reflection in the mirror beside the commode. She looked rumpled, helpless, and small. She felt like that too. She dropped her bag to the floor and turned to Ben.

One day that summer, Lena and Inka went to the underground spring to get some fresh water.

The path to the spring branched off the main road to the camp and wound through the fields and meadows and narrow strips of birch forest. They walked at a leisurely pace, swinging the empty ­teakettles, savoring all the little pleasures of the countryside: the view of rolling hills, tiny houses far on the horizon line, the warm sun on their shoulders, the prickly grass against their ankles, the crumbly soil under their feet, the yellow flowers, the clucking of chickens, the dust in the middle of the road, even the smell of manure from the fields.

“Why is it that the smell of cow shit has these romantic associations, and human shit is simply disgusting?” Inka mused.

“I don’t know. Maybe you should write a poem about it,” Lena said.

Inka laughed and swung her teakettle at Lena.

Just a few days before, they wouldn’t have been able to imagine their stay in camp could be enjoyable. Then they discovered the secret that experienced counselors had known all along: their job wasn’t that hard if you didn’t try to do it all that well. So what if the kids didn’t eat on time? So what if they soiled their clothes? So what if they didn’t wash their faces or brush their teeth? Nobody died from that. And that terrible fear that a kid would get lost. So far nobody had, and it was unlikely that anybody ever would. The kids were terrified of the woods. They wouldn’t have dared venture anywhere on their own. As far as they understood, there were only two things Yanina cared about: full attendance during assemblies and keeping the kids’ hands above the blankets. Once Inka and Lena had devised ways to ensure that, they stopped worrying. Another thing that they discovered was that there were times when they could be completely free. There were movies twice a week, when they just dropped the kids at the club and could do whatever they wanted. They could even leave the camp. Sometimes they went to the country store and bought cakes of brown soap, bread, cookies, and fresh strawberries. They didn’t really need any of it, but the idea of going somewhere with the purpose of buying something made them feel civilized and accomplished. Or sometimes they would walk to the cornfield, pick a few ears of unripe corn, slim and tender, silky, greenish-white, and eat it raw. Still, their favorite trip was to the spring.