Lara Vapnyar - The Scent of Pine

“Vadim.”

The conversation died once more.

Lena wanted to ask about Gerry Baumann, but she was afraid it would make Ben apologize about last night again. Still, awkward conversation was better than no conversation at all, she decided after another ten minutes passed.

“Is Gerry Baumann an old friend of yours?” she asked.

Ben seemed grateful to have a new topic.

“Oh, yeah. We go way back. We were best friends in high school. We even drew a comic strip together.”

“Didn’t he win a Pulitzer?”

“Yep. For a graphic novel. But I always thought that the comic strip we did in high school was his best work.”

“What was it about?”

“I guess it was about sexual education in a sense. We called it Grammatology of a Pussy .”

Lena thought that she misheard the title and turned to Ben.

“Grammatology of a . . . ?”

“Yes, that’s right. Grammatology of a Pussy. ”

“What does it mean?”

“Huh. Good question. It all started with Gerry’s father’s bookcase. It was our favorite after-school game. We went through his father’s philosophy books and tried to incorporate the word ‘pussy’ into the titles. Grammatology of a pussy, for example. That one was our favorite.”

Lena laughed. So now that they had some kind of a conversation going, the important thing was to not let it die.

“So what was it like? Did you have some brilliant insights on pussy?”

Ben shook his head. Lena noticed that his face looked different in profile. His nose seemed sharper, larger, his forehead more pronounced. The smile made the deep furrows that ran along the corners of his eyes more pronounced. Lena had a sudden impulse to touch his face. “I don’t think there were any insights. Mostly pictures. And then we were afraid that our parents would find the manuscript, so we wrote in code. We just substituted ‘Township of P’ for the word ‘pussy’: ‘When you enter the Township of P, you have to do this and that.’ We had to draw in code too.”

“How do you draw in code?”

“I would make hedgehogs out of pussies.”

“Hedgehogs?” Lena asked. “How on earth can you make a hedgehog out of that?”

“It’s really very simple. Imagine a hedgehog lying on its back. It looks remarkably like a pussy as it is. I just had to add tiny paws and draw a hedgehog’s nose over the top.”

“Have you ever seen a hedgehog? I thought they weren’t native to America.”

“It so happened that I did see a live hedgehog. Two of them actually. But that’s another story.”

There were crinkles in his eyes. He looked remarkably more attractive when animated.

“Tell me.”

“Gerry had this crazy uncle who brought two hedgehogs from Germany as a present to his wife. His wife hated them. She said they looked like rats with spikes. They gave the hedgehogs to Gerry, but he wasn’t sure how his parents would react, so he kept them in the basement. They had a neat basement. Gerry’s grandfather (he’d died by that time) used to fish, and there was all kinds of fishing equipment around, nets, rods, tackle, huge dusty boots, even a boat motor, but there was no boat. God, I remember it so well—the small dusty basement, the fishing rods suspended on the walls, two hedgehogs in a cage, the smell of pot.”

“Pot?”

“Well, yes. We started going to the basement, because it was a perfect place to smoke pot—Gerry’s grandma had recently fallen on the basement steps and she was too afraid to venture down there again. She would bake a big batch of carrot muffins for us, and we would take them down to the basement. I’d sit on the floor with my notebook, and Gerry’d prance around in those boots, with a muffin in his hand and muffin crumbs all over his chest, spouting his brilliant thoughts on pussy.”

Lena smiled.

What the hell were they talking about? Hedgehogs, pussies, pot. But she loved it. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had so much fun.

“Do you still have it?”

“Do I have what?”

“Grammatology of a Pussy?”

“The manuscript? No, I’m afraid not.”

“A pity!”

“Oh, yeah. Huge loss for humanity.”

“Do you know where I first saw the word ‘pussy’?”

“Can’t wait to find out.”

“The Canterbury Tales.”

“The Canterbury Tales?”

“Yes. At the camp, Inka and I used to read them aloud at night, hoping to find something about sex. We would read a passage and start laughing. One time Inka laughed so hard that she actually fell off the bed. And when she fell, I started to laugh, and laughed so hard that I couldn’t stand up and help her, and she got very mad at me.”

“The Canterbury Tales?” Ben asked. “Sex? Fun? Falling off beds? Are we talking about the same book? I read them in school and they were dreary. And how could you even get through Middle English?”

“Oh, we read them in modern Russian.”

“ The Canterbury Tales in Russian! That must have been what made them sexy.”

“No, Russian made them confusing! I remember there was a line that I couldn’t understand. In Russian it read, ‘He grabbed her little box.’ I didn’t know what to make of it. Did he snatch her jewelry box and run? It was Inka who found the explanation in the footnotes. In the original it said, ‘And prively he caughte hire by the queynte.’ ”

“Queynte? What’s that? Wait! Is it . . . ?”

“Uh-huh. Very evocative, isn’t it?”

“Queynte, huh?” Ben said.

The green road sign rushed at them and then past them: 25 MILES TO BOSTON.

“Boston,” she said.

“Boston, right,” he said. “How far do you live from here?”

“About twenty minutes.”

“Only twenty minutes!”

He looked at her in mock disbelief. Lena picked her bag up off the floor and put it onto her lap, holding it tight by the handle and the strap. Parting with Ben in twenty minutes seemed inconceivable. Only thirty minutes to Boston.

“Listen. Do you have to be home at a particular time?” Ben asked, “because if you don’t, we can go to Rockport, and take a walk along the beach, and maybe have a bite to eat afterwards.”

“Rockport! Yes! I always wanted to go to Rockport, but for some reason we’ve never gone.”

“Perfect,” Ben said, and Lena put her bag down.

But by the time they got to Rockport, it had started to rain so hard they could barely see the streets. It seemed as if the whole town were a watercolor painting, and everything—streets, houses, trees—was getting erased, washed off the paper.

“Where is the ocean?” Lena asked. “I thought we were getting to the coast.”

“You’ll see it in a second,” Ben said, making a turn onto another street. And there it was. The ocean, or at least the little of it they could see through the solid wall of rain and fog. Huge gray waves broke through the rain, threw themselves up, and smashed against the jetty. She gasped, and chuckled, and shook her head.

“Well, yes. But I guess a walk along the beach is out of the question now. Are you hungry?”

“Hungry? I don’t know.”

“We left Saratoga four hours ago. You must be. There’s a restaurant right on the dock.”

The restaurant turned out to be on the second floor. The stairs were outside, under the roof, which didn’t protect them from the rain that seemed to rush in from different directions. Ben took Lena’s hand and led her up the darkened, slippery steps.

Inside, it was empty and warm. Dark exposed wood everywhere, and the tables made of the same kind of wood with red-and-white-checkered tablecloths and pink napkins sticking out of pink plastic glasses. Ben led her to a window table even though they couldn’t see anything through the window except for cascades of water running down the glass on the other side.