by Lara Vapnyar
He started leafing through it, then put it down.
“I wanted to ask you for an autograph, but now it seems silly and wrong,” he said.
I agreed with him that it was silly.
A waitress put our drinks down. His glass was filled to the brim and loaded with slices of fruit. B. lifted it up, and some of his drink splashed over the cover of my novel. A puddle of orange liquid gathered around my name. I was afraid that I’d start laughing and wouldn’t be able to stop and whatever brittle connection we had would be destroyed, but for some reason I didn’t feel like laughing. B. was so nervous that it relaxed me.
“So, how long has it been?” I said. “More than ten years?”
“What? Since my broken dick? Fourteen,” he said, dabbing at the book with the napkin. “That was the lowest point in my life, but once I left for Boston everything started to fall into place.”
“That Dr. Solomon must have been a wizard!” I said.
B. shook his head.
“I’ve always thought it was you who cured me. You were my shock therapy. The look on your face when I recited Brodsky! Nobody’s ever despised me that much.”
I said: “I didn’t despise you! Not even a little!”
“I deserved it. Of course I did. I had such a crush on you back then! You can’t imagine. I think I managed to pull myself together to prove to you that I could.”
But he never contacted me, I thought, except years later to congratulate me on the story. It was possible that he was scared of rejection, but a more likely scenario was that as his life kept improving, he didn’t care as much. I could see that he was creating this romantic narrative even as we spoke. But I could also see that he was being sincere, he wasn’t doing it for my sake, to flatter or manipulate me; he was trying to make sense of things for himself. I was impressed with my own maturity. I wasn’t seventeen or twenty-two anymore. I was thirty-six, I was an adult, I was a married woman with two kids, I was a writer with a well-developed professional ability to put myself into other people’s shoes and understand their motivations. I was immune to the craziness of love. All I wanted was to get to know a bit more about B.
We sat and talked for a long time, about this and that, movies and books, and our lives and feelings and thoughts. I realized that I had never talked to B. as an equal before, and that I hadn’t really known him. I used to see him as a blank screen for my romantic projections, without trying to understand him as a person. Perhaps this was how he used to see me too. In Moscow, he was a young idealistic teacher, and I was a teen madly in love with him. In Brooklyn, he was a thoroughly lost recent immigrant, and I was an elusive object of desire born out of nostalgia more than anything else. But now, now we were a man and a woman, opening up to each other for the first time in our lives.
B. said that the luckiest thing in his life was that his ex-wife, Oksana, decided that she couldn’t handle being a single mother and shipped Mark back to B. He might not have been the perfect father, but Mark was the closest person to him.
I said that my kids were that for me.
“What about your husband?” B. asked.
I said: “He’s not.”
B. stared at me intently.
His phone buzzed; he checked the screen and said that it was Nadya, his wife of two years. She was a wonderful woman and she had been very good, even healing, to him. But she didn’t trust him.
“Do you love her?” I asked.
“No,” B. said.
He walked me to the Staten Island bus stop, and while we were waiting for the bus, I asked him if he still remembered which Brodsky poem he recited to me on Brighton Beach. He said: “Of course I do.” I asked him to recite it for me again. B. looked around and chuckled in embarrassment. We were not alone at that bus stop; there was a small queue of people behind us, and a fidgety man in front of us who kept running into the road to see if the bus was approaching. I dared B. to recite it anyway. He leaned in and half said, half whispered the first lines:
“My dear, late at night today, I went outside
to get a breath of fresh air.”
This sounded so intimate that I had to look away. I listened to the rest of the poem while staring at B.’s chest, at the frayed edge of his leather jacket, the round leather buttons, at some sort of silver chain stuck in the opening of his shirt. This was the first time that I ever got a Brodsky poem. And this was the first time I was deeply moved by any poem at all. When I suggested that B. recite the poem, I thought of it more as a joke. Now I was embarrassed by my reaction. I couldn’t look at B. even after he finished reciting. I pointed to his silver chain and asked him what it was. He said that this was his cross.
“But I thought you were Jewish,” I said.
He said that he had converted to Christianity while studying at Harvard.
I asked if I could see his cross.
He pulled the chain out of his shirt, untangling it from his graying chest hair. It was a small silver cross engraved with words in Church Slavonic. I said that I had studied Church Slavonic in college and asked if I could read the engraving. He leaned still closer. I took the cross in my hand—and peered into the letters. They still held the warmth of his body. My heart was beating so hard that I was afraid B. would hear it. I thought I could hear his heart too.
“When did you know?” I asked B. a month later, after he told me that he loved me for the first time.
“When you were holding my cross,” he said.
And that was how a whole new room was added to my Escher-house life. The room so vast that it seemed to open up into another dimension. Or rather a high-dimensional space was created, like the one in my mother’s flash card.
Sometimes I think that I turned to math the way B. turned to Orthodox Christianity, to fill a spiritual void that became acutely unbearable after my mother died.
If you think about it, math is as good a religion as any. It’s both endlessly abstract and irresistibly precise. You can grasp the entire world with the help of math and make it seem less chaotic, unpredictable, and scary. Isn’t this why my mother started to work on her last book to begin with? She must have felt that something was wrong; she must have glimpsed into the chaos of death, and so she turned to math—her safe, perfectly structured space.
One way to describe love according to the gospel of math is as a condition that causes a dimensional shift. The emerging new world that contains love becomes so vast that it opens into an entire new dimension, dwarfing all the worlds that existed in your life before you fell in love.
B. and I couldn’t spend that much time together. We would go to a motel about once a month, and we would see each other in the park by the river twice a week. The rest of the time we kept in touch through email, and we wrote to each other so much and so often, hundreds of emails a day—some long, others containing just a couple of words—that it seemed as if we never parted at all. In those emails we covered everything: the minutiae of the day, childhood memories, philosophy and religion, favorite movies and books, people in our lives, work problems, sex and love. I emailed him from my personal account, so I would usually delete the email thread at the end of the day, but B., who had been writing to me from his work email, didn’t have to do that. At one point, the university decided to change servers, and he had to convert all of our emails into a text file so they wouldn’t disappear. Most of the letters got lost or truncated in the process, merging together so sometimes it wasn’t possible to tell where one letter ended and the next started, and at other times it wasn’t even clear which one of us wrote what.
I kept thinking about you the entire time, remembering all these insane details.
Like what?
Like the fact that the three birthmarks on your face form a triangle.
I took the wrong exit last night, kept driving down the same roads someplace in southern New Jersey, to get back on the turnpike, but, you know, the crazy thing about it was that it was all somehow about you. I don’t know how to explain it, but it was
like all the gas stations, and overpasses, and the factory smoke, and these planes flying right over the highway, it was all filled with you.
I watched Mulholland Drive with the kids tonight. I didn’t get it.
Oh, no! Please, try watching it again. It takes patience and a certain freedom of imagination. Think of the second part as Betty’s hallucination before she dies.
You were so close today, I still feel your breath on my neck.
I kiss you in my mind, in all the places where I kissed you today, and all the other places where I couldn’t reach.
Your smell drives me crazy.
Do you want me right now?
Yes! Like crazy!
Right now? Right this minute?
Yes!
Have you ever read Brodsky’s Watermark?
No.
It’s an essay about Venice. Here, this is my favorite passage: “I simply think that water is the image of time, and every New Year’s Eve, in somewhat pagan fashion, I try to find myself near water, preferably near a sea or an ocean, to watch the emergence of a new helping, a new cupful of time from it.”
Cupful of time! So beautiful!
One day we’ll go to Venice together.
Promise?
Promise!
You know, the more I see you, the more I miss you, and the less I see you, the more I miss you.
This is some sort of stupid math, isn’t it?
In the first happy period of our love, which lasted for nine months or so, B. and I must have written thousands of emails to each other. Thousands—I am not exaggerating! But that doesn’t mean that the other areas of my life suffered. This is the mathematical miracle of happy love: it can expand one part of your life to a crazy degree without diminishing the others. I was writing and teaching better than ever; I had more energy for my kids, more patience for Len, and more warmth for my mother.
When I look at it now, I don’t understand how I could have been so naive. Everybody knows that there is no such thing as having a happy or peaceful love while being married to someone else. It’s a time bomb. It will blow up. It absolutely will. There is no way around it. The only question is how much destruction that blow will bring.
But perhaps I wasn’t that naive. Perhaps I chose to ignore the timer, the way people do about death. Or perhaps I ascribed too much significance to the fact that my life had been highly compartmentalized.
There was one time when Len caught B.’s name in the long chain of emails in my inbox and asked who it was. I said he was my colleague and we were working on a project together. Len seemed satisfied with my answer, and I dismissed the incident altogether.
In my mind, my affair with B. didn’t concern Len at all. It wasn’t Len’s wife who was in love with another man; it was an entirely different version of me, the version Len didn’t know, want, or understand. Len’s wife, who walked around the house in sweatpants, leaving a trail of used tissues and apple cores, and later cuddled with Len in bed, had nothing in common with the woman who rushed to meet her lover in a clingy dress and stiletto heels, or sat hunched over her laptop composing love letters to him.
It was as if I were an actress playing several different parts at the same time. Say the same actress has a lead in three different shows. She is Lady Macbeth in one, Elizabeth Bennet in another, and a US presidential candidate in the last one. The fact that her character in Macbeth arranges to murder her rivals cannot hurt the chances of her other characters to secure the presidency or win over Mr. Darcy.
I even shared this sentiment with B. in one of our longer emails, and he wrote that he felt exactly the same way.
The first person to break into my new world from the outside was my mother. One day she reached into my purse and found my balled-up panties there. She hadn’t meant to pry, she said. Dan needed money for his school trip, and she didn’t have enough cash.
I suggested we go to the backyard. We put on our rubber boots and went over there, carrying the chairs and tea, careful not to splash in the puddles. As we walked, I was feeling excited rather than apprehensive. I was sure that this time my mother would understand.
We unfolded our chairs under the apple tree and poured out the tea. I didn’t tell her that the man was B., because I didn’t think that was important, and because I thought it would make my mother mistake my feelings for B. for yet another bout of childish obsession.
I was in love, I said. I met a man, and what we had together was real love. He was married, but it didn’t matter, because he didn’t love his wife, just the way I hadn’t loved Len in a long time. This was love, real love. I’d never felt like this about anyone.
My mother listened to me in silence, nodding from time to time. I was so relieved and so grateful to her that I felt like dropping to my knees and sobbing into her lap, as I used to do when I was a child.
Then she asked: “Are you having an affair with him?”
I said: “Affair? No! This is not an affair! I love him! What we have together is exactly what you and my father had.”
My mother sighed and said: “When are you ever going to grow up?”
I couldn’t take it. I jumped up, picked up my chair, and stormed toward the house.
I stopped speaking to her after that. It wasn’t conspicuous or dramatic; I just avoided speaking to her as much as I could. I would answer her questions, and I would occasionally tell her some everyday unimportant things, but I wouldn’t engage her in conversation and I would find ways to escape if she did.
Often when I needed to ask her something, or when I needed to share some important news, I would delegate the task to either Dan or Nathalie. “Mom is rushing off to work, but she wanted me to tell you that she’s having a new story published in the Magazine soon.” Or: “Mom is busy working on her book upstairs, but she wanted me to ask if everything went all right with your doctor’s visit.”
Nobody questioned me about this, but if they had, I would have had to admit to myself that I wasn’t speaking to my mother because I found it oppressive. The fact that she knew what my life was really like, the fact that she judged me, and the fact that she was disappointed in me.
When I finally told Anya and Sasha about my love for B., they weren’t exactly supportive either. Anya sounded both jealous and skeptical, and Sasha started to laugh: “Not B.! Not again!” But their reactions didn’t offend me at all, probably because I didn’t care about their opinions nearly as much as I cared about my mother’s.
Once my mother bumped into me in the kitchen. I was standing by the counter eating. When she walked in, I turned away, hoping to stave off any attempt at a conversation. She started opening and closing drawers, pretending that she was looking for something. Then she said something under her breath, and I had to ask: “What?”
“Why do you act like that?” she asked.
“Like what?”
“As if you couldn’t stand me.” Her voice broke and she hurried to leave, before I could protest.
But she was right. That was exactly how I felt about her for the entire duration of my affair with B. I couldn’t stand her. I especially couldn’t stand her when the troubles started.
SIXTEEN
This was one of the first notes my mother made after her diagnosis. I can’t tell for sure where she was going with this, but the obvious suggestion would be that she wanted to explain how cancer worked through the concept of exponential growth.
Or rather to explain exponential growth using the example of cancer. Cancer is all about cell division, right? Cancerous cells multiply too fast, making the tumors grow with dangerous speed, which saps strength from the rest of the body.
I will never forget how my mother likened love to cancer when I was twenty-two and told her that I wanted to leave Len and look for real love. How she screamed that love was awful and dangerous, and it had the power to destroy you from within.
Fifteen years later, I saw that she might have been right. Love does have that power. Unhappy love, that is.
N
ine months into our affair, Nadya, B.’s wife, opened one of his emails to me.
“It’s hell,” B. said after he broke the news to me. “I’m living in hell. But I can’t leave her.”
We were sitting on a bench in the park crowded with all these pointless people and their pointless children and dogs.
“Why?” I asked. “Why can’t you leave her?”
“I can’t stand the thought of causing her pain.”
This expression sounded strangely familiar. Then I remembered. This was what Sergey told my mother about his wife. Right before he left her.
“What did you say to Nadya?”
“I promised that I’d stop seeing you.”
I started to shiver from the cold, anger, and fear. B. made a motion to hug me, but I moved away.
“Will you stop seeing me?” I asked.
“I can’t stop. I love you.”
This was the conversation B. and I would have every day, sometimes twice a day. We would inevitably start it every time we saw each other and continue in the endless chain of emails. The same shit over and over again. All the exciting subjects, like sex, childhood memories, movies and books, philosophy and religion, were gone. All we did to each other was hurt, cry, beg, forgive, and hurt again.
I feel awful, but I can’t see you tomorrow.
But it’s my birthday! [But it’s our anniversary.] [But it’s the only time I can see you.] [But we haven’t seen each other in such a long time.]
Nadya’s sick again.
What’s wrong?
Some sort of cold, she’s had it on and off ever since she found out.
That sucks.
Are you being sarcastic?
Go to hell!
Look, I want nothing more than to be with you all the time! You know that. You must know that. But I don’t have the heart to leave Nadya. I can’t do to her what Oksana did to me.
If you’re not going to leave Nadya, you have to give me up! You can’t torture us both like this!
I can’t give you up. I love you.
You’re a coward!