Lara Vapnyar - The Scent of Pine

Lena was momentarily seized by a powerful desire to be noticed. To be admired? Maybe, she wasn’t sure. But she needed to be seen, to make an impression, to be on the receiving end of some interest, curiosity, attention. The hunger that she felt was almost physical. She looked around, hoping that she’d see the man from the pool. He wasn’t there. She scanned the room trying to find faces familiar from the conference brochure. There was Althea LaGrange from Tufts. Lizzie Gess from Wellesley. Gerry Baumann from Harvard. Gerry Baumann was a Pulitzer Prize winner, so his picture had been the largest. A fat, balding man with a splotchy face, he looked restless and tense. Lena could hardly imagine initiating small talk with anybody, let alone with somebody like that. Althea LaGrange didn’t seem any more accessible. Lena was becoming increasingly aware of how awkward it must have seemed moving through the room completely alone, without direction or purpose. Anybody who bothered to look at her would have noticed this and the fact that she had an embarrassing amount of food on her plate. So, she retreated onto the porch and stood there sipping her wine, balancing her plate on the banister, trying to tell herself that she was just fine here, restless, alone, but with a pile of shrimp on her plate.

Somebody cleared his throat.

“You picked the best spot!”

Lena turned and saw the man from the pool.

“Yes, it’s quiet here.”

“Didn’t I see you earlier today at the pool?”

“Yes,” she said. “I think so.”

The man had longish graying hair that would have looked pretentious if it hadn’t been a little unkempt. She found him slightly pathetic and this fueled her confidence.

“So,” he said, “are you enjoying the conference?”

“No,” Lena said, surprising herself with her frankness, “not at all. Nobody came to my talk today. Not a soul.”

Strangely, she felt better as soon as she admitted that, but the man looked concerned.

“What was your topic?”

“Sexual education in Soviet Russia.”

“Sounds amazing. I would’ve come.”

“Thank you.”

“My name is Ben, by the way.”

“Lena.”

His eyes were really very dark.

“So tell me, Lena, do you teach sexual education?”

She laughed.

“No, I teach film history. You?”

“History of the graphic novel at Rutgers. Do you like graphic novels?”

“I don’t know. Probably not. I haven’t read that many.”

Actually, she hadn’t read any, but she didn’t want to admit that.

“Tell me about your presentation. What were you planning to talk about?”

He appeared to be genuinely interested.

“Well, how sexual education was mostly prohibiting things rather than informing.”

“Tell me more!”

Lena smiled.

“For example, this: I worked in a Russian summer camp once, where the head counselor insisted that the kids sleep with their hands over the blankets.”

“You were a counselor?”

“Yes. I was eighteen.”

“How could you possibly ensure ‘hands over the blankets’?”

“The head counselor suggested that we simply yell at the kids, but our more humane idea was to tell the kids stories until they fell asleep. Horror stories worked best, because the kids were so scared that they weren’t about to do anything under the blankets.”

“Horror stories? How’s that more humane?”

“You see, my co-counselor Inka dug out this article in Psychology Today that said that horror stories were very healthy, because imaginary horrors managed to distract us from whatever real fears we had, and calm us down. Neither Inka nor I had been to summer camp as children, so we didn’t know any of the classic horror stories. And that’s where our college summer reading list came in handy . The Arabian Nights, Canterbury Tales, Decameron, Divine Comedy . We would recount kid-sized renditions of the stories until the kids fell asleep.”

“What would a kid-sized Divine Comedy sound like?”

“It wasn’t mine. It was Inka’s. It went something like this:

“ ‘Yeah, well, I have to tell you, kids, Hell wasn’t a nice place at all. They hit people there and even roasted them in the fire.’

“And the kids would ask ‘Like we do with potatoes?’

“ ‘Uh-huh. Exactly like that. Now imagine that you are that potato.’ ”

“You were horrible!”

“I know!”

“What about The Decameron ?”

“ ‘Once upon a time, in Florence, which is this really cute city in Italy, which used to be like a whole separate country, there was an epidemic of plague.’

“And the kids would ask ‘What’s plague?’

“ ‘Plague, you know, it’s like flu, only much worse. You catch it if you don’t wash your hands or brush your teeth. You develop these scary enormous boils all over your body and then you die. So these people in Florence didn’t like to wash their hands, and they all got sick.’ ”

“Poor kids! But you know what, it sounds a little familiar. A summer camp, where counselors stopped children masturbating by scaring them to death. I might have read a book about that.”

“I don’t think so. I honestly doubt that anybody else would think of that. But the kids loved our stories. They kept asking for more.”

A waiter with a tray full of dirty glasses opened the door, gave them a look and went back.

“I think the dinner’s over,” Lena said, heading toward the door to the reception lounge.

When they walked back into the room, only a few people were left in the corner, eating cake off tiny round plates and drinking coffee from the same institutional mugs they laid out at breakfast. The waiters were removing warming trays with the remains of lasagna and couscous. The trash bins overflowed with paper plates, glasses stained with red wine, forks, and half-eaten rolls. Lena slipped on a piece of melon somebody had dropped. Ben reached for her, but she grabbed the edge of the table instead.

They both stopped at the door. She didn’t want this to be over. She had gotten her wish. Somebody had noticed her, had listened to her, been interested in her. She had forgotten how good that felt! But instead of quenching it, this encounter seemed to intensify her hunger. She didn’t want to have an affair. She could swear that she didn’t. She just wanted the attention, the sweet wonderful undivided attention. Lena hoped Ben would offer to continue the conversation. Ask her to a bar? It wasn’t that late yet.

“Listen,” he said, “do you have your conference paper with you?”

Her conference paper?

“My conference paper? Yes, it’s in my room, why?”

“Would you let me read it? I’m fascinated by the subject.”

Lena summoned the paper in her head, trying to decide if it was good enough to show to Ben. Was it too boring? Too poorly written? No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t brilliant, but it was okay. Peppered with subtle humor. She hoped Ben would be able to appreciate that. She imagined Ben reading it in his hotel room, leafing through the pages, smiling at her jokes, thinking about their meeting, remembering her face, the sound of her voice. The thought filled her with strange excitement.

“Okay,” Lena said. “If you really want to see it.”

“I do.”

They walked down the narrow path through the park on the way back to the hotel. Towering trees whose leaves rustled high above their heads. Occasional benches—some of them missing planks in the middle. Lena wished desperately for Ben to touch her, to take her hand, or put his arm around her shoulders, or just brush his fingers against her back, but he walked with his hands in the pockets of his jacket. Dim streetlights a little too yellow. There were no stars in the sky, just the occasional bright spark of a plane, and the half-moon in a pale halo.