Lara Vapnyar - The Scent of Pine

In three hours, when they finally got off the train, their knees were trembling and their butts hurt from all the riding. They felt queasy and lightheaded, but they were immediately taken in by the beauty. It was very quiet and unusually cold for July. Everything had the air of spring. The woods, the pines, the squishy soil under their feet, the unbelievably loud singing of birds. Inka shivered in her light shirt and laughed. Lena laughed too. They wanted to run, to squeal, to jump. On the way to the camp headquarters, they passed a group of soldiers sawing branches off a huge fallen pine. One of them waved. They waved back. Lena was overcome with the strange feeling that she experienced only a couple of times after that. She didn’t know what to call it. Anticipation of happiness? No, it had to be stronger than that. Certainty of happiness.

Inevitability of happiness.

The train arrived at Saratoga Springs at a quarter to ten. There were no taxis at the station. The thin crowd that got off the train with Lena petered out within minutes. Some people walked to cars that had been waiting for them with their lights on, others disappeared along the semidark streets leading to the town. And now Lena stood all alone facing the dark parking lot with the empty, brightly lit station behind her. She walked back into the station and asked the woman at the ticket booth for the number of the car service. The woman gave her the number but said that the hotel was only fifteen minutes away by foot. “Twenty—max,” she added before dropping her glazed stare back to her Stephen King novel.

It was slightly colder here than it had been in Boston. Streetlights and windows of the closed shops shone brightly, brighter than necessary, Lena thought. She would see her shadow against the wall of one or another strange house. The shadow would be larger than life, and sometimes if the light was especially bright, the shadow would be so large that she saw the contours of her head looming on somebody’s roof. There were no people around. No movement—not even wind. And no sounds, except for the pleasant rapping of her heels against the pavement. She would hear an occasional car honk up on the main street, too far in the distance to sound real. There was nothing specifically American about this place. A town like this could be anywhere. Western Europe. Eastern Europe. Russia. Lena had a fleeting thought that her summer camp memories had actually transported her to Russia.

It took her thirty minutes to get to the hotel, and by the time they gave her the keys, it was ten fifty-five. She went up to her room and dialed Vadim’s number. He said that he was okay as were the kids. He asked if she was okay. She said that she was. They didn’t know what else to say to each other. Lena plopped down onto the bed, feeling tired and heavy, as if the bed was pressing down on her and not vice versa.

Impossibility of happiness was what she felt now.

The hotel pool was small and plain, functional—no mosaic or exotic plants. Saturated with morning light. Empty, except for a teenage boy who was folding towels. Lena had been swimming the length of the pool back and forth hoping that it would relax her before the talk. So far, it hadn’t.

She found the slippery heaviness of the water around her body annoying, and the insufficient length of the pool bored her—it was an effort to turn back and continue every time she touched a wall.

The steamed-up door opened with a deep sigh, releasing a thin trail of cold air. A man in a white bathrobe walked in and headed toward the deep end of the pool. He stopped by the chair where Lena had dropped her bathrobe and took off his own, placing it on the adjacent chair. He looked at Lena and made a hesitant movement toward the pool. He appeared to be feeling like an intruder. He was tall, a little slouchy, with stooped shoulders and strong calves. He looked at Lena with dark sunken eyes, an intense stare that made her look away. He jumped in with a modest splash and took the right lane. Lena switched from the middle lane to the left. For a few minutes they swam parallel to each other, in different directions—he, under water, fast—she, on the surface, slowly, on her back, then on her stomach. The pool was so small that there was something intimate about the experience, awkwardly stirring, almost indecent. Lena thought that she’d better get out. She climbed out of the pool, walked to her chair, put on her flip-flops, picked up her bathrobe, and headed toward the door. The man swam to the edge and pulled himself up. He looked as if he was about to say something, but then changed his mind and dove in.

At 9 o’clock, Lena found her way to the main building where the lectures were taking place. The room that was assigned for Lena’s talk was a large lovely room, with big windows, and two green armchairs on a stage. Though the talk was supposed to start in five minutes, there was nobody there. She sat down in one of the two armchairs and waited, with her paper on her lap. Across the hall from her room was the breakfast lounge. The smell of fresh coffee wafted in, and she watched the waiters pass her door with trays of colorful fruit and baskets of gleaming bagels. Since it looked like she had some time before she’d have to begin her talk, Lena was tempted to run across the hall to pick up a bagel or a piece of fruit but knew she’d be too nervous to eat anyway.

At about 9:25 the moderator popped in and said that she shouldn’t worry, people were often late for morning events. Lena waited. Nobody came. A blond woman with a long nose and long loose hair peeked in, looked at Lena, and walked away. Lena stood up and walked to the back of the room so that nobody else who happened to peek in would guess that she was a lonely presenter.

At 9:35 the moderator came back, sat down in the back row next to Lena, and made an attempt at conversation.

“Sleepyheads, huh?” she said.

Lena nodded.

The attempt at conversation failed.

The moderator looked at her watch, sighed, and stood up. She shook Lena’s hand and said how sorry she was.

Lena went back to the breakfast room, completely empty now, littered with stained coffee cups and half-eaten bagels, with overflowing trash containers. She ate a little of everything that was left on the trays, then some more of everything, took a cup of coffee and went outside. She sat down on a bench surrounded by flowerless lilacs—it must have been pretty a couple of weeks ago—and dialed Vadim’s number, wondering if he’d be awake. He was. He asked about her talk. Lena said that it had gone fine, better than she’d expected. Nice crowd, interesting questions. She didn’t feel like telling the truth, yet lying left her feeling a little angry, not with herself but with Vadim for some reason.

Lena contemplated whether she could skip the rest of the conference, pack her things and go, but instead she plunged into the masochism of walking down the corridor and listening to the sounds of laughter and applause coming from other rooms. Back in Russia, she used to imagine America as something like this campus—a country with many buildings and many paths leading from building to building, a building with many rooms and many corridors leading from room to room. Nobody came to her room. Nobody cared to listen to her. And yet other rooms were filled with people and voices and laughter. Speakers spoke, listeners reacted to what they said. As if everyone around her was engaging in some sort of a chemical reaction, from which she was excluded. Lena was suddenly seized by an acute feeling of being a stranger in America.

She’d lived here for thirteen years, and in that time her relationship with her adoptive country had gone through several stages. Originally, she had imagined America as a land steeped in adventure, which filled her with panicky adoration. Then there was the incomprehension and dejection which characterized her first months in America, when everything had seemed so strange and hostile: the scenery, the climate, the people. Mostly the people. Everybody seemed to participate in a complicated game based on very particular rules. But eventually, she stopped looking at Americans as a unified mass. They were all lonely to a certain degree, they were all strangers to a certain degree. Some were accessible, others were not; some were interested in her, others were not. This led her to an acceptance of America and Americans that she had enjoyed for the last few years. But recently, with her career going nowhere and her loneliness getting greater and greater, she’d started to feel the onset of panic again.