Divide Me by Zero

by Lara Vapnyar

  I knew that my marital math was bullshit, I knew what it was that I wanted—to leave Len—just as I knew that I didn’t have the guts to do it.

  The only thing that made me feel slightly better was reading long emails from my readers, people who wrote to say that something in my fiction clicked with their own experiences and created the unexpected feeling of connection, making them feel less lonely. I kept the letters in a special Gmail folder, and when I felt especially bad, I would shut myself in my Escher house bedroom and get into bed with the laptop and a box of tissues. There weren’t that many letters, so I would read the same ones again and again, weeping over moving moments.

  Note to my best readers. Postmodernism, the fourth wall—what bullshit! I started writing fiction out of loneliness and desperation, as an attempt to connect to other people. Remember that woman at the Russian store who sold me caviar? Remember how she and I had a fleeting moment of true connection? I depend on my readers to connect with me in this way. And when I feel that I succeeded, I’m moved to the point of tears.

  Most of the emails were from strangers. But there were a few from people I knew. One was from my mother’s friend Rita, who had read one of my stories in Russian translation and was impressed by the way I captured our Moscow neighborhood; one was from one of Dan’s teachers, who felt proud because I wrote about the profession of teacher with such respect; and there were two emails from B. One was a short note I received right after my debut publication in the Magazine. He recognized himself in the man with a broken dick, and while he tried very hard to remain impartial and praise the literary merits of the story, I could see how hurt he was. I left that note unanswered. He sent me the second email about two years ago, and that one was very different from the first. It was a long, thoughtful, and genuinely moving analysis of my two novels and collection of short stories. He seemed to have read every single thing that I’d written, and while he provided some specific criticism, he focused on my growth as a writer, on the subtler changes that propelled me forward from one book to another. He wrote about his life a little. He had earned his PhD in film studies at Harvard and had been lucky to find a teaching position in New York. He concluded the email by saying how proud he felt of my career, even if he knew that it was ridiculous, because he couldn’t have possibly influenced me. I wanted to answer him this time; I kept composing the email in my head, juggling half-finished sentences, none of which were satisfactory. Then I put B.’s email aside. Then I forgot about it. Then I remembered it, but so much time had passed that I decided not to bother. I never did answer it. But I read it again and again, dabbing my eyes every time.

  I found that my postpartum depression would get worse with each new book, and when I finished my third novel, exactly a year before my marriage collapsed, it hit me especially hard. That time the depression coincided with a heat wave, which I coped with by lying on the floor of my bedroom next to the AC vent. After a week of this, my mother became worried and began looking for something to make me feel better. She came up with a brilliant plan. We would stay at Uncle Grisha’s dacha for a week, which would be good for everybody. Uncle Grisha’s “dacha” was actually a stationary trailer in Eagle Lake, a trailer park in the Poconos. And so what that the trailer was ugly—it stood right on the lake. And so what if it had a leaky roof—it hardly ever rained! And so what if the toilet didn’t always work—we were in the woods!

  Len was the only one who hated the place, but he didn’t have to stay there, just drive us there and back, and as a reward he got to spend the whole week in the empty house, which he loved more than anything.

  The trouble didn’t start until the way back.

  Len was driving in silence. I sat on the right side of the middle row of our minivan, and I could see the right side of his droopy nose, his shiny, furrowed forehead, and his tightly squeezed mouth, all of which were meant to express how much he resented having to drive us to and from the place that he hated so much. I found him so unlovely and so unloved at that moment that I was overcome by some sort of squeamish guilt toward him. Which did nothing to alleviate my anger. I was getting madder and madder at him. I was tired and uncomfortable, because there were all these shopping bags, next to me, by my feet, in my lap. We always stopped at the supermarket in the Poconos on the way back, because everything there was so much cheaper than in New York. Among other things, there were twenty glass jars of Thai peanut sauce, several packages of Eggo frozen cinnamon-toast waffles, a whole pack of V8 cans, and six two-liter bottles of Coca-Cola meant for Dan’s upcoming birthday (all of those items were on a huge sale). I had been so excited about the bargain prices, but now I was doubting the wisdom of our purchases.

  The kids didn’t look very happy either. They were in the back seat, engaged in their usual low-key squabbling. Nathalie was annoyed with the sounds Dan’s Nintendo DS made, and Dan was annoyed with Nathalie’s elbow being too close to his side. My mother was in the front passenger seat, half sleeping, half battling motion sickness, nodding off until her chin bumped against her chest—that would rouse her and she would inquire if the kids wanted a snack. This annoyed me too. There weren’t any snacks left. They had eaten their carrots and apples a long time ago, and they weren’t supposed to eat anything else until we got home. They were twelve and fourteen! They didn’t have to be eating all the time! But as we were passing the pink stone walls of some New Jersey town, meant to protect the neighboring developments from the noise of the highway, my mother found a piece of old chocolate in her bag and tried to throw it to Dan over my head. It landed on the floor between the seats.

  “Great, now it’s going to stain the car!” Len said. Then he asked for some water.

  The bottle in my lap was empty. My mother never drank anything on car trips so that she wouldn’t need to go to the bathroom. I asked the kids. Dan reached for his bottle but dropped it to the floor and it rolled under the seat. “Sorry, Daddy!” Nathalie said, but immediately ruined her attempt at sympathy by giggling.

  I said that we had warm Coca-Cola and warm V8 in the shopping bags.

  “Cola, please,” Len said.

  I took a bottle out of the bag and unscrewed the top, mindful of the foam. Not that I cared about stains, but I cared about peace in the car. I did a very good job of unscrewing—not a drop of foam came out. Then I put the lid in my lap, picked up the bottle by the middle, and thrust my hand out.

  “Here,” I said.

  Len’s eyes were on the road, his left hand on the steering wheel. He reached with his right hand, which he bent toward me over his shoulder. I moved the bottle closer. He picked it up by the neck. Why would he pick it up by the neck? I thought. The next instant he flipped the bottle over and the dark liquid gushed all over his arm, his right knee, pooling in a puddle on the car floor. Len’s reactions have always been very quick, so he restored the bottle to the upright position almost right away, and the car didn’t so much as swerve. But the damage was done. Once the puddle dried, it would leave the stain of all stains.

  “What the fuck did you do?” Len screamed.

  “What did I do?” I screamed back.

  “Why did you open it?”

  “Why did you flip it?”

  The kids started to giggle.

  “Shut up!” Len screamed. “You think this is funny, huh? You think this doesn’t concern you? You know why? Because you think that you’re passengers in this car and I’m your chauffeur. This is your attitude, right? This is your attitude to life as well. Once a passenger, always a passenger. Just like your mom. Taking it easy. Not giving a shit. Right? Passengers. That’s what you are.”

  Thankfully he delivered this lecture without turning back.

  “I’m sorry, Daddy,” Nathalie said. “We’ll help you clean it.”

  “What a suck-up,” Dan mumbled, annoyed that she always seemed to come up with the right thing to say.

  I turned back to admonish him and saw that Nathalie was covering her face, struggling to contain more giggles. Her ent
ire body was shaking, and her hands were squeezing her cheeks, making her look like a hamster. I’d had barely any time to admire her effort when I felt the unstoppable wave of laughter rising up from the depths of my own body. Now this would be a disaster.

  Len and I had been married for sixteen years by that time, and all those years I tried to explain to him that I can’t do anything at all to control my laughter, and he still didn’t get it.

  “Why don’t you think about something sad?” Len would ask. I tried that. It didn’t help. Nothing helped. Not even thinking about my grandmother’s death, or my grandfather’s death, or my father’s death.

  “Okay, how about this,” I said to Len once. “Sometimes I laugh so hard that I pee in my pants. If I could control it, I would!”

  He shook his head.

  There was this one time when Nathalie fell off the bed twice in a row. She was barely three and an awfully fussy sleeper. When she fell for the first time, I ran up to her and picked her up and comforted her. But an hour later she fell off the bed for the second time. She said: “Not again!” That “not again” just killed me. This was my kid and I pitied her with all my heart, and yet I couldn’t contain my laughter. I was sitting on the floor, stroking the crying Nathalie on her back, shaking with laughter, when Len walked in on us.

  “You’re a psychopath,” he told me.

  That time in the car, I tried to hold it in, as hard as I could. Then, when it became clear that I couldn’t, I pushed the bags to the floor and moved to the left so Len wouldn’t see me. I tried to laugh into the bag with frozen waffles to muffle the sound. It helped, but only for a second or two. Soon my laughter grew so potent it was completely futile to try to conceal it. The bag with peanut sauce jars fell off my lap, and the jars started rolling around the car floor, which only intensified my laughter. My eyes were clouded with tears, but I could see how Len was getting tenser and tenser, readying to blow up.

  “God, please, let it pass. Let me stop,” I thought. Then I realized that I was actually praying to stop laughing and it struck me as unbearably funny.

  Soon the kids joined in and it seemed as if the whole car was shaking with laughter. Thank God, my mother was too carsick to laugh. Oh, no, shit no! She was laughing too!

  I expected Len to start screaming, but he didn’t. He kept driving. Eyes on the road. Perfectly composed.

  I was starting to calm down. There was less pressure on my chest. I knew from experience that in a few moments the laughter would die down, and once I stopped, everybody would stop too.

  But the next moment Len turned to me with a raised fist and a mad expression. He swung and the blow was so great that the entire car started to shake. He couldn’t have hit me with such force, I thought. And then I realized that he hadn’t. He hadn’t hit me! Another car had crashed into our minivan, and the minivan was spinning on a busy highway, out of control. It was a matter of seconds before another car would crash into ours, then another, and we would all die. I prayed, and I prayed, and I prayed. God, Something, please spare us! Spare us! Please!

  And God spared us. The minivan swerved to the right and crashed into a guardrail, which stopped the spinning. I was afraid that the gas tank would blow up the way it always happens in movies, so I grabbed the kids and pushed them out of the car, and then opened the door for my mother and dragged her out too. Len came out of the car from his side. We all seemed to be okay. “Well, nobody died,” Len said. He was shaking.

  We sat in the grass for quite a while. The police came. Roadside assistance came and took away the car. Then we walked about a mile to the nearest exit with a rest area and a McDonald’s. Len bought us three Happy Meals to share and we sat down in a large booth by the window to wait for a cab home. My mother kept going to the bathroom and back. Nathalie’s face was tear-streaked, and Dan kept hiccupping. “Well, that was an adventure!” Len said.

  I couldn’t bear to look at him, because I’d discovered something definitive about our marriage. Not only did we not love each other, but we hated each other so much that we had come close to dying because of it.

  I remembered how when Len and I got married, our love was so strong that it felt like a presence. Something amorphous but dense, something you could touch if you moved your hand through the air. I thought that the lack of love wasn’t only empty space. It had a physical presence too. Negative presence. And like negative numbers, it had the ability to multiply and grow. You couldn’t stop it.

  I can’t tell why—I don’t think this was something rational at all—but the next day I went and found B.’s email in my fan folder and wrote him a short note asking him if he wanted to meet.

  FIFTEEN

  Eight months before my mother died, I came close to dying myself. What happened was that Len grabbed my neck and proceeded to squeeze it until I started to choke.

  I had just told Len that I was leaving him for Victor, my rich Russian lover. He took the news reasonably well. I think he was even relieved. Our life together had become so unbearable that any option seemed brighter than staying together. We went to a small deserted park a few minutes away from our house so we could discuss the future in peace. In peace, yes: the park was achingly peaceful. We got out of the car and sat down on top of a nearby picnic table with our feet on the bench. There was a large oak tree towering over the table, and the ground was covered with last year’s brown leaves and occasional acorns. We’d even brought hot tea in a thermos, and we were taking turns drinking it out of the thermos’s plastic top. We were courteous and even affectionate to each other. Len asked me all kinds of questions about Victor, and my answers seemed to reassure rather than anger him. The fact that Victor was both committed and rich made the logistics of the impending divorce appear manageable.

  Then Len asked me about B. I tensed even though I wasn’t surprised. I’d always thought that Len had known about B. for a long time. I admitted that I had been in love with B., but it was over. It turned out that Len both knew and didn’t know. Or rather he knew but wouldn’t admit to himself that he knew. My confession forced him to fully know. And he couldn’t take it. He dropped the thermos top to the ground and pressed his hands to his face. His knuckles went very white, and his breathing was so hard that he seemed to be moaning.

  I wanted to touch Len’s shoulder, but I was afraid that he’d hate that. I said: “Len.” He didn’t react.

  The next instant Len reached for my neck and squeezed it as hard as he could. I don’t remember if I fought him, I must have fought him, but I don’t remember it at all. At first I wasn’t even scared; I thought he’d let me go in a second. But he didn’t. And then I got scared. Very scared. And it was as if the world came closing in on me, constricting me in a tighter and tighter space. I remember willing myself to get smaller, to get really tiny so that I could, if not escape, then at least fit inside that grip. Then I didn’t have any thoughts anymore, and everything became murky and viscous. I don’t know how much time passed before he let me go. Obviously not too much, or I wouldn’t be alive.

  He helped me to sit up afterward, and pressed his face to my legs and stayed like that, sobbing.

  Before that moment, I truly hadn’t realized (or wouldn’t let myself realize) that by pursuing my love for B., I was doing something horrible to Len. I’d always thought that I was doing something horrible to myself.

  One of the results of the compartmentalization was my grossly mistaken belief that what I did in one of my lives couldn’t possibly affect people in the others.

  Note to disconcerted readers. Yes, I realize how strange and shocking it sounds, that right after Len’s violent assault, I was only thinking about how I wronged him. I never blamed him afterwards either. You’re free to analyze me any way you want, but this was my reaction, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

  When I wrote to B. after the car accident, I wasn’t sure if he would answer me at all, or if he still had the same email address. He wrote me back within an hour. Yes, of course he wanted to s
ee me.

  I didn’t know where to meet him. Anya suggested the Goat’s Hoof in Chelsea, which she described as an unremarkable little bar.

  I saw that the Goat’s Hoof was a mistake as soon as I walked in. The dimmed lighting. The predominance of red in the decor. The paintings of various goats, all looking human and horny. The deep benches. The glimmering cocktails. The couples holding hands over tables, while their knees touched under the tables. I sat down at an empty table thinking this place set the tone and sent the message better than any conversation could. And this was the wrong message. It had to be the wrong message. I didn’t want to have an affair with B.

  But if I didn’t want to have an affair with B., what was it that I wanted? Why had I asked him to see me? I needed some time to figure that out. I had an urge to run away from that bar, but it was too late. I saw B. at the entrance, removing a leather jacket, scanning the place with an anxious and hopeful expression.

  I waved at him, thinking that perhaps everything would be okay if I managed to maintain my cool, to remain cautious and firm. He was shorter than I’d remembered, but also much better-looking. He had grown his beard back, and his dark, downturned eyes sparkled with excitement.

  I smiled. He shook his head. Neither of us seemed to know what to say.

  “My heart is beating really hard,” B. said and reached for the little card listing the signature cocktails. I ordered a vodka martini, and he ordered something tropical and sweet. His phone rang. He put it on ignore.

  He reached into his shoulder bag and pulled out a copy of my third novel.