Lara Vapnyar - The Scent of Pine

“Did you see each other again?”

“Yes, we did. We started to date.”

“You and Danya dated?”

Lena cleared her throat. She had to tell Ben.

“Yeah, we dated for about a year. And then we got married.”

Ben put his mug down and stared at Lena: “You married Danya?”

“Yes.”

“What happened? Did you get divorced?”

“No, we’re still married. Danya is my husband.”

“But you said that your husband’s name was something else. Vadim, was it?”

“Yes, his name is Vadim, which is how I think of him now. But Danya was his nickname.”

Ben groaned and sank lower in bed: “Okay, I need to process that.”

But Lena continued: “When we first got married, it was good. Fun. I loved making our home—it wasn’t really a home, Vadim simply moved into my room in the apartment where I lived with my mother. But I loved helping him put his favorite posters up and set up his desk. And I loved shopping for food and cooking, and just watching TV together as we ate the pie I just learned how to bake. Vadim was teaching math to undergraduates. I graduated from college and found a job on the radio—I was in charge of finding and editing little-known fairy tales for a children’s show. I loved that job. Then I found out that I was pregnant. Both Vadim and I were ecstatic. But soon after the baby was born, things started to turn sour. There was a huge wave of emigration, and most of our friends were planning to leave Russia to find jobs in Europe or the U.S. Vadim’s parents left for California. Vadim eagerly supported them, saying that there was no future in Russia, for us, or for our son. He became obsessed with that idea, and whenever I tried to object, he would get very angry and bring up his experience in the army and say that I had no idea how horrible Russia was. He never really explained what happened to him on that base up North, but hinted that he had had a really hard time. And I kept thinking it was my fault that he ended up there.”

“So you decided to go?”

“Yes. Vadim’s parents were already living in California, so it made it easier to get our visas. Once we got here, we kind of switched roles. He became euphoric, and I became depressed. Misha was very young, so I was mostly stuck at home. I was overwhelmed by how much I hated everything here: from the sickening smell of eucalyptus in the air to the fact that you couldn’t get anywhere without a car. But Vadim felt in sync with everything. He found a wonderful job within a month. He sang praises to the ocean, to the palm trees, to his new office, to the people around us, to life in general. And he didn’t even notice how lost and unhappy I was. We were growing apart with such frightening speed. I would look at him and think: ‘He is my husband. He’s supposed to be the closest person in the world to me. Why don’t I feel that way? Why? What’s wrong with me?’

“Then I met Marcus. He was a graduate student in the film department and worked in a video store. He asked what I was looking for, and I explained how I had read the screenplays for all those famous movies, but never actually seen them and that I finally wanted to watch them. He found some of the movies for me and made me promise that I’d come and tell him about the experience of finally seeing them. We talked about movies a lot. And then gradually we fell to talking about other things. I don’t even remember how it happened that we became lovers. It seemed to be the most natural thing in the world. And I didn’t even feel horrible, because by that time I was so far away from Vadim that he seemed like a mere physical presence at the house, a roommate. I suspected that he felt the same way about me.”

“How long were you and Marcus together?”

“For a year. He was the one that persuaded me to go to grad school. He wanted me to leave Vadim, but I couldn’t make up my mind to do it. Mostly because of Misha. And then Vadim found out about us, and it was so horrible, you can’t imagine how horrible it was. It wasn’t just that he was jealous—he couldn’t fathom how it was possible at all. I don’t think he loved me anymore, but he trusted me completely, he thought of me as a part of him, you know, like an arm or a leg—he couldn’t understand how I could betray him, the way he wouldn’t be able to grasp if his arm or leg chose to betray him.

“I should’ve probably left Vadim back then, but he got really sick. He was sick for months. I got so scared that I broke off all contact with Marcus, I promised that I would never ever do something like that again, and I begged Vadim to forgive me. And then we hit that bubble of intimacy. Everything became brightly lit, brought into unbearably sharp focus. We were forced to see each other not just like partners or roommates, but like human beings with all this complicated shit inside. We suddenly wanted to know each other, to understand each other. But what we found out about each other didn’t help us in the long run; if anything, it made things worse. The most important thing that we understood was that we couldn’t possibly understand each other. We were too different. In a few months I found out that I was pregnant with our second child. This time the news didn’t make me happy. By then, whatever newfound intimacy we’d discovered had already evaporated. I felt further apart from Vadim than I’d ever felt.”

“What happened to Marcus?”

“He quit the graduate program and left. I haven’t heard from him since then.”

They lay in each other’s arms in silence, and then Ben said, “Remember, how you asked me if I was happy with Leslie?”

“Yes.”

“And I started mumbling that nonsense about the elusive nature of happiness.”

“Yes.”

“I am not happy. I’ve been miserable for a very long time. But Leslie has this very precise, very beautiful model of happiness, and she builds our lives together according to it, and if something doesn’t work, she just thinks of it as an obstacle that we should work through. In her opinion, family is something you have built and continue building, something that exists according to certain rules, something that will fall apart once the rules are broken. When we first started the affair, it was really intense. These little trips back and forth. Waiting, anticipation. And then, you know, the passion was gone, at least for me. But I was afraid to hurt Leslie’s feelings, so I started faking it.”

He turned onto his back and put his arms behind his head.

“If you stop and think about it, practically every single thing that we do is either to distract ourselves from what is wrong with our lives, or to please somebody else, to shield ourselves from reproaches and guilt. And while doing that, we’re building a cocoon around ourselves, thicker and thicker, and we stay inside and suffer from loneliness, and long to break out of the cocoon. But as soon as we do break out, people around us get hurt, and we feel guilt, reproaches, and shame, and so we go back and continue building that cocoon, and it gets unbearably lonely in there.”

“I know. I know. I know.”

“About three years ago Leslie caught me with this woman I was seeing. Catherine, a sculptor. Leslie was devastated and she said that she was leaving me. And I was scared—you know, scared of winding up alone, yep, that’s how pathetic I am—but mostly I was relieved. Because I knew that I didn’t love Leslie anymore, and I knew that I didn’t want to stay with her for the rest of my life. But Leslie didn’t leave me. She went ahead and left her husband, so we could really be together.”

“Are you going to stay with her for the rest of your life?”

“Don’t say ‘the rest of your life’! It fills me with such horror. The thought of marrying Leslie makes me sick, but the thought of leaving her makes me sick too. The process of leaving, I mean. I know that I’d be better off without her, and I’m pretty sure that she’d be better off without me. But I can’t bear the thought of actually telling her that I want to leave. It’s like a child’s fear of throwing up. You know that in order to feel better you have to do something awful and scary, and you can’t, you’d rather stay where you are and feel bad.”