Dear Fang, with Love

by Rufi Thorpe

  Maybe that is why I love you so much: We are both doing dances with cultures that aren’t ours and your empty spaces form the perfect foil to my empty spaces so that when you are dancing with death, you are also dancing with me, and vice versa. Because in the end, isn’t it all about death? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Sorry, I’m cracking myself up.

  There you have it, right from the horse’s mouth: It’s all about death. Then again, I’ve always been a nei-ei-eigh sayer.

  With Love,

  From Vilnius,

  Your night-mare (get it?),

  V

  PS: Darius told us about Napoleon’s campaign on Moscow (big fat disaster, like major, major cock-up in the deep doo-doo) that ended in 40,000 French soldiers descending on Vilnius only to push people out of their homes, steal all their food, and die anyway because they were so starved they weren’t able to digest the food. They even broke into the university and ate the jars of organs preserved in alcohol. CAN YOU IMAGINE HOW HUNGRY YOU WOULD HAVE TO BE TO DO THAT? More French soldiers died in Vilnius than there were inhabitants of the city, and it was winter, so there was no way to bury them because the ground was crazy frozen. So naturally people began stacking the dead soldiers around buildings as a layer of extra insulation. Holes in the walls of the hospital were stuffed with hands, feet, heads, trunks, whatever would fit. For real, Fang. For real. The spring brought a terrible thaw and…wait for it…plague! Which, I mean, duh, but still.

  MOST PEOPLE ASSUMED THAT KATYA had gotten pregnant by mistake, and often I let them believe this because the truth was very difficult to explain. The truth was that I had been blindingly in love and eighteen and Katya had whispered in my ear one night, “Let’s make a baby, baby,” and we made a blurry, moonlit decision which, through careful lack of critical thinking, grew into a plan. We would turn our backs on the corrupt world of money-grubbing, status-hungry adults and start our own family. We would live a real life, safe and far away from all the phonies. The summer after our senior year at Exeter, we took a road trip, cut off contact with our parents, and finally settled on a communal farm in North Carolina, nestled at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It took me only a few weeks to discover that I hated it.

  I remember mostly being sunburned and eating beet greens and lentils and other food that was too healthy to taste very good. Farming, which I had thought sounded noble and interesting, turned out to be very boring. Everyone on the farm was dopey and friendly, and there was a lot of group sex and partner swapping going on. I wanted to be like them, many of whom were older than me, guys in their twenties with beards, wearing overalls and no shirt and Birkenstock sandals, playing music in the evenings, talking earnestly about the concept of personal liberty. But the idea of being a father, the insane permanence of what Kat and I were doing, gave me a perpetual fever of panic, a swaying wobbly feeling that our lives were out of control.

  Katya was only three months along and not really showing. She hadn’t been to a doctor. She said she didn’t need to, that her body knew what it was doing. Sometimes I believed her. Her pregnancy kept away most of the sexual advances from other men. There was a rule against monogamy on the farm. “There is no ownership here,” they said. Still, most guys felt like a pregnant woman was somehow off-limits, and for this I was grateful. I was so in love with her that I think it would have literally killed me to stand by as she slept with someone else.

  But her pregnancy wasn’t enough to keep other women away from me. One girl, Chloe, was the most persistent, following me around as I did my chores, making gestural sex jokes with a zucchini. She was a runaway, and as far as I could tell, every guy on the farm had slept with her. One night, I saw three of the men playing with her at once, passing her around. Chloe seemed to be more than fine with all of this. She had been smoking pot, but they all had. There was nothing forced or nonconsensual or even coercive in what I saw, except for the sheer visual wrongness of it: She was short and small, built almost like a child, and she simply looked like a victim when she was making out with three adult men.

  Katya called me uptight. “She’s a free person,” she said, “those boys shouldn’t make her do anything, and you shouldn’t make her not do it either.” One day I came into our room to find Kat and Chloe on the bed together. Kat grinned at me wickedly. That was what I hadn’t understood, I think. That she wanted all of this. That she had chosen the farm, not just because it was a way of rejecting the world, rejecting Exeter and sport coats and aspirations to become a member of Congress, but because this was what she wanted. This wildness, this heat and sunburn and freedom. There was a kind of triumph in her eyes as she beckoned me to the bed where she and Chloe were in their underwear. She wanted to trick me into it, sure that if I just did what she said, I would find it as wonderful as she did. Of course, I got in bed with them. I didn’t even have words for what I found objectionable about the whole thing, and the feeling in my stomach, like hot static, seemed indicative of a crucial lack of virility.

  The sex was, in retrospect, fairly comical. Chloe explained early on that she was non-orgasmic and taking this off the table left me completely unable to know what to do with her. It was a lot of making out, a lot of awkward taking turns. It probably wouldn’t have been remarkable if Chloe hadn’t started softly crying afterward in our bed. Kat cradled her, comforting her, and extracted from Chloe only that she was very homesick. “That’s all,” Chloe kept saying. “I just miss my mom.”

  The next day, someone mentioned in casual conversation that Chloe was fourteen. It was like an explosion that seemed to impair my hearing. I went around deaf all day. I told Katya, and she was unfazed. “Just because she’s fourteen doesn’t make her less able to make her own decisions,” she said. “You remember freshman year. Do you think you were not a ‘real’ person then?” I did remember being fourteen. And I had felt like an adult. But had I been? Did an adult draw the Dead Kennedys icon all over their shoes? But it was true that Chloe was close enough to Kat and me in maturity that I hadn’t even guessed she was so young. Though now that I knew, I couldn’t see Chloe as an adult, I could only see her as a child. I couldn’t see the farm as an Eden, either, but only as a place where a cluster of losers had gathered to fuck each other.

  That night I called my mother. What a ridiculous and weenie-ish thing to do, to call your mother, blubbering and scared, late at night, hiding in the communal kitchen that smelled of nutritional yeast flakes and old curry powder, and confessing that you have knocked up an intoxicatingly beautiful and possibly mentally unstable Russian girl who was in your biology class and who now you found yourself lying to continuously:

  “Yes, if the baby is a boy we should name him Absalom.”

  “Yes, I too believe that the moon landing was faked.” (In my experience, nearly all Russians harbor at least a tiny hope that the American moon landing was faked.)

  “Yes, Western medicine is probably entirely a fraud perpetrated by the drug companies and most people could heal themselves by eating dandelion greens.”

  My mother had been hot with rage on the phone, wanting to talk about my betrayal, about how hurt she had been by my disappearance, but I couldn’t even take it in, I just kept saying: “Kat needs prenatal care. She needs to be with her parents. I need to get a job. We can’t stay here, Mom. It isn’t safe here. Please help. I know I fucked up, but please help.”

  My mother had flown out that very night and arrived in the morning in a rented Ford Taurus to return the cursing, spitting, wrathful Katya to her parents. Everyone in my life assured me I had done the right thing. But of course I also worried that I was nothing but a coward, so scared of myself, scared that I had fucked a child, that I gave up knowing my own.

  Throughout my life, a sort of flickering ghost hovered, a mirage of who I might have been had I stayed there with Kat on that farm. Who I would have become instead of myself.

  —

  The first time I met Vera, she was already four years old. Katya agreed to have breakfast with me at an I
Hop so that I could finally meet my daughter. I brought with me to this meeting a pale purple teddy bear. It was winter in California and it was lightly raining, and the bear’s fur had gotten wet on the walk from my car, and the toy looked exactly like what it was: a bribe, too late and not enough. Vera was shy in a way that I know now was perfectly normal for a four-year-old, but which at the time I found devastating. Our meal was short—it is impossible to have a protracted meal at an IHop, anyway. I had never been around kids. I had no idea how to engage Vera. Katya pointedly did not help and would only murmur things to the girl in Russian. The breakfast experience was so awful that I didn’t ask Katya to see Vera again for seven years. The whole thing lasted maybe half an hour.

  One thing that went wrong with that morning was that I was hungover. I was almost always hungover in those days, it is true, but I had not intended to be hungover that morning. I was in my senior year at Reed College in Oregon and this visit was happening on one of my trips home to California, specifically my Christmas break, and the night before had been New Year’s Eve. My mother and I and some asshole she was dating named Jerry had gotten wrecked drunk at a Hawaiian-themed bar that served oversize hamburgers. I had not understood heading into the night that it was going to be so insane. Who knew middle-aged people even liked to drink that much? Who could have imagined my mother would wear a plastic lei and begin dancing barefoot on the bench of our booth before being asked to stop by the management? Jerry was footing the bill so the drinks just kept coming, and it was the first New Year’s I had spent legally able to drink so I may have gotten carried away.

  But I had not anticipated any of that, and so it had not seemed unreasonable to agree to this New Year’s Day breakfast date with Katya and Vera. In a way, it had even seemed appropriate to me: A new year was beginning, a new era of my life in which I would be a father. This misconception seemed laughable and bitterly ironic as I drove, squinting in the glare between rain clouds, to the IHop where I was to meet my daughter for the first time, sad purple bear in tow.

  Katya was living with her parents in LA by then, surrounded by a nest of extended family and Russian Jewish émigrés who made that city home. Her mother watched little Vera while Katya took classes at UCLA, slowly reclaiming her life after our time on the farm and her ensuing pregnancy had derailed everything, causing her to defer and then ultimately give up her admission to Brown. Needless to say, her parents hated me. Katya hated me, too. For calling my mother to come get us. For bringing her back to her parents. For not believing in our love, and worse, for not telling her that I was having second thoughts myself but allowing my mother to do the talking for me. I never talked to her about the night with Chloe, never tried to put into words the wrongness of it, in part because I already knew she couldn’t see whatever it was I saw. There was some insult to Kat in the fact that I saw Chloe as a victim, because really, what was the difference between Kat and Chloe? A few years?

  But I think Kat also hated me for going ahead with my own plans. I was the guy, and so I got off relatively scot-free. In my defense, at the time I made the decision to go to Reed as planned, she wasn’t speaking to me at all, refused to see me. It didn’t seem there was much point in sticking around and giving up college in the hopes that she would change her mind. I had already been accepted by Reed the previous year, and so actually going was the path of least resistance. I never did see Kat fully pregnant, belly swollen and round. I didn’t see Vera as a baby, only pictures. Our parents hashed out a child-support agreement and that was that. None of this was done in court—my name wasn’t even on the birth certificate. Katya had insisted on leaving it blank.

  Sometimes I would get drunk and heartsick at Reed and write Kat long, incoherent e-mails about how much I loved her and how sorry I was. I would try to bring up fun times we had at Exeter, remind her of our inside jokes, call her by the pet names I used to then, my Rusalka, Russian for mermaid, or the more peculiar “Cabbage Face” that had come from a joke about how weird the French were. Most of the time, she did not respond, but sometimes she sent me e-mails with no words, just pictures of our daughter. Vera was so beautiful it was crushing. There was nothing Katya could have done that would have made me feel worse. I could not even write back, so ashamed did I feel, and I would resolve to leave them alone, since that was what Kat seemed to want, what her parents told my mother she wanted, what she herself told me once, in the very beginning, in a long handwritten letter that she sent just after Vera was born.

  But time would pass and I would long for them. They were a secret I had. I didn’t tell everybody I met in college that I had a child. I didn’t even tell some of the girls who were my girlfriends. I didn’t actually consider those girls my girlfriends because I imagined that I was wedded to Katya in some awful, eternal way. The territory of my body and soul belonged to Katya still. Katya and Vera began to live in my consciousness in the same invisible space Grandma Sylvia inhabited, in the gas chambers of my imagination. At night I would scroll through Vera’s baby pictures to torture myself. Vera on a sheepskin blanket, a chubby dumpling of a baby, naked except for a diaper. Vera on Kat’s mother’s lap, looking serious and jowly. Vera looking mistrustfully at a cooking spoon. Vera laughing on a swing, a yellow barrette in her dark hair. Her beauty was the beauty of all children everywhere, the beauty of youth itself, of life, of flowers, of perfect cells newly divided.

  I was so caught up in this, in my own martyred suffering, in images of the two of them as eternal archetypes, that I did not spend a lot of time wondering what life was like for Katya. Did she enjoy being a mother? Was it hard? Did the baby keep her up all night crying, or did they sleep together peacefully, the bassinet beside her bed? Did she like her coursework at UCLA? Did she regret not going to Brown? Did it chafe, having to live with her parents after failing to achieve their dreams for her? I did not think about any of these things at the time, though now they seem like the only questions.

  Probably, things were grim for Kat in those years of Vera’s early childhood. Kat’s father, Pavel, was a fat and pouty man with unpredictable moods and fairly conservative values. He had gotten his family out of the USSR in the 1980s when Jews could request visas to move to Israel, and from Jerusalem they had rerouted to LA where he had opened a coin and autograph-memorabilia shop that did quite well. He had an innate gift for telling when something was authentic just by touching it, a sixth sense that people in collectibles claimed was real. He was a believer in America, in capitalism, and he wanted his children to have everything. Katya was the eldest and he had sent her to Exeter, paid through the nose for four years, and then she had come home pregnant. Luckily, or perhaps unluckily, Kat’s little sister, Tamara, was better able to live up to their parents’ expectations, attending the University of Chicago for a degree in business. I imagine this created something of a divide between the sisters. Certainly it meant that Tamara was not around much during those first years when Kat was a young mother. I realize now that Kat must have been very lonely.

  Her mother, Inna, was around, but she and Kat were not very close, at least not back when Kat was in high school and I was privy to her life. When Kat was a girl, Inna had harbored bizarre hopes that Katya would become a child star and dragged her all around LA on auditions. Finally, at eleven or so, Kat had rebelled and refused to go anymore. She never got cast anyway, and she hated it, she told her mother. They hadn’t been close after that. For a time, her mother had taken Tamara around, but Tamara was not as pretty as her sister and so eventually this too was dropped.

  But that day in the IHop, I was not thinking about any of this. I was not prepared for a real Vera and a real Katya. I had been living with them for so long as characters in my mind, that seeing them in person was a bit grotesque. I had a searing headache and it felt like my temples had been bound in ice-cold twine that was slowly being tightened by an invisible hand. Possibly I was going to need to leave the table and vomit in the bathroom at some point. Katya was wearing unflattering eye shadow, too
much of it, and her hair looked crunchy with hair spray and she wouldn’t meet my eyes or smile at me. Vera didn’t answer any of my pandering, awkward questions, but stuck to her pancake with its whipped-cream smile. She was hesitant even to take the bear, and then when she did, she frowned. “It’s wet,” she said.

  “I guess it is,” I said.

  How many times have I gone over this exchange? How many solutions to this problem have I come up with over the years? I could have said, “Yes, it’s raining outside—do you like the rain? I love the rain. Have you ever jumped in rain puddles?” I could have said, “I know, that silly bear! I kept telling him to hurry but he wanted to try to catch raindrops on his tongue and now he is all wet!” I could have said anything, any stupid thing.

  But instead, I said, “I guess it is.” What is a child supposed to say to that?

  “Say thank you,” Katya insisted, and Vera stared at me with round calf eyes.

  “Thank you,” she said, as though I were the grim reaper or some other terrifying figure that only politeness could keep at bay.

  The omelet I had ordered was disgusting, and so as Katya neatly cut her eggs and toast into squares and placed them in her mouth, almost as though she wasn’t eating but sorting papers or something, and as Vera moved the whipped-cream globs around on her giant chocolate pancake, I stumbled on, trying to present my plan, my ridiculous plan, to Katya.

  I had applied for a PhD program in literature at the University of California at Irvine. If I were accepted, and I would hear in just a few months, then I could be close to them and possibly be a more active participant in Vera’s life. I had also applied to NYU and a few other programs, in case I didn’t get into UCI, but I didn’t mention that part to Katya. Vera could stay with me on weekends. I could babysit. I could play whatever role Katya wanted and we could take it slowly, as slowly as she felt comfortable with.