Lara Vapnyar - The Scent of Pine

They swerved off the path and entered a thicket of birches. The grass there was tall and damp, and even the air smelled fresh and green. After they filled their teakettles, they usually sat down in the shade to chat. Sometimes, they would even bring a book. Today it was volume six of The Arabian Nights:

“ ‘And Nur ad-Din turned to her at once, and clasping her to his chest, sucked on her upper lip, having sucked on her lower lip first, after which he shot his tongue into her mouth.’ ”

Lena liked how Inka read. Not too fast, and in a calm, casual ­manner.

“Kind of hot, don’t you think?” she asked.

Lena nodded.

Inka continued: “ ‘Then he raised himself up to her and found her to be an undrilled pearl, an unbroken mare.’ ” Inka put the book down and sighed.

“So, are you?” she asked.

“Am I what?”

“An undrilled pearl, an unbroken mare?”

If Lena had seen the question coming, or if Inka had asked “Have you ever done it?” she would’ve probably said that she had done it, but the question came as a shock, and it was so funny that she started to laugh, and after she finished laughing she said that she was in fact an undrilled pearl. Having admitted this to Inka, she immediately felt better. At least she didn’t have to lie anymore.

“I had a guy put his hand down there,” Lena said.

“And?” Inka asked.

“It felt good, but I started getting wet, and I didn’t want him to notice it, and moved his hand away. I regretted it afterwards.”

Inka said that she had done it. A couple of times, with a boy from her hometown. She didn’t like it. She said that once the penis was in, you felt nothing. She claimed that a woman could only experience pleasure from the stuff that came before, touching, kissing, petting. And that you got so crazy from all that touching and kissing that you all but begged the boy to put it in. “You see,” she explained, “hormones work like that, they fool you into thinking that you want a penis inside of you. They have to fool you for the sake of reproduction. But once the penis is actually inside of you and starts to move in and out, you feel nothing, you just lie there and wait until it’s over. Sometimes, you get so tired of waiting that you start to move too, or to tighten your muscles in there so that it will be over sooner. The funny thing is that when you start to do that, the boys think you’re really enjoying it. But I don’t know, maybe it’s different when you’re in love.”

Lena woke up at six with a terrible headache. At first she almost welcomed the headache, which somehow made her feel less guilty for what they’d done. But then the noises from the construction site right in front of the Holiday Inn started making her pain intolerable. An excavator kept advancing and retreating as if performing some court ritual. She brushed her teeth and dressed and tiptoed out of the room trying to make as little noise as possible. There was no coffee in the lobby. It was damp and bitterly cold outside, shreds of early morning fog hanging over the gray parking lot. Lena spotted a mall across the street that was bound to have a coffee shop. She decided that the fastest way to get to the mall would be through the opening in the barbed-wire fence behind the pool. She scratched her leg against a broken wire as she was climbing through. Tiny beads of blood broke through the skin in a long thin line.

The Joy of Java place was crowded; patrons with their coffee and opened papers occupied every table. At the next table, an elderly emaciated man in shorts was staring at Lena over his coffee with an expression of curious disapproval. He looked like Vadim’s father. Lena wondered if it was possible to guess from the look on her face that she’d just spent the night having wild sex. Well, the sex hadn’t been exactly wild. It had been earnest rather than wild—earnest and awkward.

She took another sip of coffee.

She was bad at one-night stands—she’d always known that. It took her forever to figure out what it was that she wanted and how exactly she wanted it, and it took her even longer to gather up the courage to say it out loud. And as for her own actions—they weren’t too impressive either, because she was too afraid to try something that her partner might not like and too shy to ask him. She must’ve seemed silent and morose to him. She had been silent and morose.

Another reason—possibly the main reason—why she couldn’t enjoy it was that Ben was a stranger. A complete stranger in every sense—from his smell, to his movements, to the sounds he made. She knew that a lot of people found the idea of strangeness exciting. She didn’t. She found it frightening and somewhat disgusting.

She wondered if Ben really had come the second time. She couldn’t tell. He’d roared with great enthusiasm, but his eyes had looked tired. She herself never faked, because she found it awfully embarrassing—for some reason it was easier for her to admit that she didn’t come (although this was embarrassing too) than to fake an orgasm.

She was pretty sure that Ben had faked his orgasm that second time. Did men even fake orgasms? She had nobody to ask about that. It was strange, but Inka had been the only person with whom Lena was completely open about sex. It had taken Lena a long time to admit to Inka that she was a virgin, but since then, they had exchanged the most intimate information, growing closer and closer in the process.

“I just know that I’ll meet somebody,” Inka told Lena on the eve of the first dance. “Last night, I had a dream that I was naked with a guy, in the woods, at night.”

Lena wished she could share something equally exciting, but she never remembered her dreams.

On the morning of the first dance, everybody in the camp was checking the weather. Inka and Lena studied the clouds, and discussed what their shape and color meant. They even sent a couple of kids to check on the dance floor, to see whether the boards appeared to be solid enough. Everything seemed fine, yet as evening approached Lena was overcome by panic. The girls who had been there before said that the first dance was crucial to your dating future. If nobody asked you, then your prospects were probably pretty bleak.

The floor didn’t collapse, and the loudspeakers were working fine, and by eight the whole population of the camp was there. Dressed up and excited camp residents were walking up the steps to the dance floor from all sides. Little kids came in pairs, holding hands, preceded and followed by their counselors. Big kids came in groups of four or five. Soldiers came as one big crowd, making the boards creak under their feet. Staff members came by themselves, wearing clothes that nobody would have imagined them wearing, like Galina’s silver top, or Yanina’s very tight, very yellow dress, or Natasha’s scarf with the pattern of horsemen.

Inka and Lena led their kids up the steps and took the space to the left by the fence, opposite the corner occupied by the soldiers. Lena scanned the crowd of soldiers, trying to determine who she liked. She picked two. One was a tall guy with dark curly hair. He looked smart and he observed everything with a sly smirk, and whatever he was saying made other soldiers double up laughing. The other guy that she liked wasn’t talking to anybody. He stood a little apart from the others, leaning against the fence. His features were still and sharp, like those of a wood-carving, but his eyes were dark blue, very bright and alert. Dena, a very pretty counselor with sunshine-yellow hair, noticed Lena’s stare and said: “That’s Danya, he is our artist.” Lena blushed and looked away. When she turned in the soldiers’ direction again, she noticed that the tall guy was staring at her. Their eyes met. He smiled and winked at her. Did this mean that he was going to ask her to dance? Lena decided that she liked him better than the wooden-faced Danya, who wasn’t looking at her at all.