Lara Vapnyar - The Scent of Pine

“Does Leslie know how unhappy you are?”

“No, I don’t think so. For the most part, she doesn’t. She has an enviable ability to believe what she wants to believe. And when she notices that I’m kind of down, she ascribes it to my general inclination to be depressed.”

“Are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Depressed?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes I get painfully aware that I’ve lived the active part of my life through, and from now on it’ll be just gray and endless like the credits after a movie. Take travel. I used to love to travel. But now, as soon as we get to a new place, I have the acute sensation of a void, as if something essential is lacking. We appear to be fine, we talk, we laugh, we walk hand in hand, we do look as if we’re enjoying the trip a lot, yet everything seems murky and distant, as if I were watching life passing by through the unwashed window of a train. And I catch myself thinking that I want this trip to be over as soon as possible. Leslie and I went to England this fall. Leslie was really looking forward to it. I was too, hoping for distraction, excitement, I don’t know—fresh impressions. I tried so hard to make it a good trip, to enjoy it, to be happy. And you know what happens when you try hard to be happy. When you have to ‘work’ at it. On the outside, you succeed, everything looks fine. But inside, you feel such boredom and exhaustion. In one of the bed and breakfasts where we stayed, there was something wrong with the light switch in the bathroom. The light would go out every ten seconds or so, and then you had to fumble against the wall looking for the switch. I felt kind of like that throughout the trip. I would see something exciting—and I would come alive, and be pleased with myself that I was able to come alive at all. And then the light would go off, and all the things around me would look fake and dull like pictures in an old dusty coffee-table book, and all I felt would be boredom and longing to get somewhere else, to get out, to go to a different destination, to arrive somewhere where I could rest and stop forcing myself to feel alive.”

“Oh, Ben. Ben. Ben. Ben.”

The fire was almost out and the rain had stopped. It had gotten darker and colder in the cabin, and Lena became suddenly aware of the woods around them. Tall, dark, and eerie. Full of creepy sounds and smells. Lena turned to her side and moved closer to Ben, her hair touching his face, her ass grazing his stomach. She felt warm. Even her hair felt warm.

Ben hugged her and closed his eyes.

She shifted her body closer. He reached with his hand and touched her bare back, then ran his fingers down her spine to the little sweaty hollow. Her ass trembled under his hand. As they pushed toward each other, the position of their bodies on the bed changed, they seemed to be moving clockwise, until they were across the bed, her forehead pressed to the wall. She felt the fuzzy exposed logs against her face, splinters, soft hairy strings, the old homey smell of wood and decay. She moved even closer to Ben so that every single spasm that rippled through her body reached his as well.

Afterward, she lay quietly with tears streaming down her face, down her right side, all the way to her ear. Ben kept wiping them away so that they wouldn’t get inside her ear. He whispered “I love you” in an endlessly tender but barely discernible voice. She whispered “I love you” back.

They could hear each other’s breathing, the sizzle of pine branches in the stove, and moths rustling over the lamp and banging against the glass. And then there were no more sounds, and no more images, just the heavy warmth all around them.

Lena woke up in the middle of the night with the strange feeling that there was a moose in the room. Standing between their bed and the wall, right next to her, pointing its head toward her, sniffing, and scratching the floor with one hoof. It was skinny just like the one they had seen on the road, with the same dingy, worn coat, and long strings of wet grass stuck to its chin. Lena knew that if she opened her eyes it would look right at her, and she knew that she should avoid that at any cost. “Why?” she thought. “I’m not the one who is afraid of moose.” But she couldn’t make herself open her eyes, so she just lay listening for the sounds the moose would make. The moose was quiet. At least it wasn’t in distress. She hoped it would just quietly leave the room, but then realized that it wouldn’t be able to do that. There wasn’t enough space between the bed and the wall for it to turn around, and she wasn’t sure if a moose could move backward. She’d never seen a moose moving backward. They probably couldn’t do that, or weren’t smart enough to figure out that they could. She snuggled up to Ben for protection.

When Lena woke up a couple of hours later, Ben was already up. She heard him open and close the door.

Lena started to pull on Ben’s jeans, then remembered that she should leave them here. She reached for her bag and took out a T-shirt and her linen pants—all wrinkled, light blue, silly-looking. She got dressed, folded Ben’s clothes, and put them back into the box. She picked the used tissues up off the floor and carried them to the tiny garbage pail that overflowed with the remnants of their food—they hadn’t eaten that much. Two crumpled sheets of lined paper were stuck to the side of the pail. She knew what they were. The drawings they made the day before. Seeing them in the garbage pail stung. Which was ridiculous. What did she expect? That Ben would take them with him, frame them, and put them on the wall? She remembered the barely discernible words that they had whispered to each other right before they fell asleep. The memory formed a knot in the pit of her stomach.

She looked out the window and saw Ben splashing at the edge of the lake. He stood with his back to her. Naked—a towel, and a pile of clothes nearby on the grass. Shivering. Scrubbing himself with a tiny piece of soap. She put the kettle on, and took two Advil.

She was eating bread with cheese and drinking tea when he came back. She moved the second steaming mug toward him.

He sat down and started to drink his tea. He was still shivering. His long wet hair stuck to the sides of his head.

She finished her tea and went to rinse her mug.

“When do you plan to leave?” she asked.

“Soon, I think. Before traffic starts.”

He put his mug into the sink and swept the crumbs off the table.

She wondered when the Advil would start working. He went behind the curtain and returned with the old thermos.

“Is there more hot water in the kettle?” he asked.

“Yeah, there’s plenty.”

“Do you mind making tea for the road?”

“Not at all.”

She got the thermos out of the leather case, unscrewed the white plastic top, and pulled out the cork. The shiny surface on the inside was scratched and chipped. Not too badly though. She put two tea bags in, added some sugar—she had no idea if this would be too much or not enough—poured some hot water over the bags and put the cork back in.

“Do you want to take the book with you?” Ben asked.

Lena had thought about it. No, she didn’t want to take the book with her. She certainly wasn’t going to show it to Vadim, and she couldn’t imagine that she would want to look at it again.

“If you’re not taking it, I’d like to take it back with me,” Ben said.

She realized that this was exactly what she wanted, for Ben to have it, for Ben to look at it from time to time.

She said, “Yes, please, take it with you.”

He carried their bags to the car. That was it. She went out with the heavy thermos pressed to her chest. He locked the door and put the key into the little box under the porch.