by Lara Vapnyar
I know.
Don’t give me up!
I won’t. I love you.
I love you too.
I don’t want to keep living like this!
Are you going to leave Len?
I want to, but I’m scared.
Why? Because of the kids?
Because of the kids, yes, and because of math, because of negative numbers.
I just can’t hurt Nadya like that.
But you’re hurting me!
Yes, I am. But I don’t feel as bad when I’m hurting you.
Why???
Because I love you.
You’re a piece of shit!
. . .
Forgive me.
We’ll figure it out.
How?
Perhaps we shouldn’t see each other so often. We should cherish what we have, and not be greedy.
Is this some sort of your Christian bullshit?
You’re an idiot.
. . .
Are you there?
Please answer.
Please forgive me.
I am here.
Please forgive me.
No, you forgive me.
I love you so much.
I love you too.
I can’t take this anymore. I’m afraid that I’ll start hating you soon.
Are you trying to hurt me?
No. Yes!
It’s amazing how fast your life deteriorates when you’re in the middle of an unhappy love. I couldn’t stand my mother at all, I couldn’t stand our house, and I could barely stand Len.
I stopped writing within a month. My mind was blank. I would force some heavy wrong words into convoluted sentences, but the result would be so bad that I’d start sobbing in frustration. In two months I stopped reading—I couldn’t focus. Soon even talking to the kids became hard. Dan told me that every time he tried to talk to me, I would space out within a minute or two. Once he decided to test if I was listening. He said: “Mom, they’re building this new trailer park right on Mars. Let’s go there this summer. They don’t have enough air to breathe, but they give out free hot dogs to make up for it.” I failed the test by nodding and saying: “Sure, let’s ask Dad to drive us there. Hot dogs, how great!”
I can only hope that my students didn’t attempt to test me like this as well.
There were days that I spent in bed, doing nothing except for pondering the expression “consumed with love.” I found it to be incredibly accurate. I shared it with Anya during the next “no bra” visit. She poured me some Sheridan’s that was so sweet it made my teeth ache. I was taking tiny sips and washing it down with coffee.
“You talk about love the same way my patients talk about cancer,” Anya said.
She was right. I was disgusted with myself.
“You need to stop seeing him right away!”
Sasha said the same thing.
“You need to run!”
What annoyed me about their advice was that they kept using the word “just.”
“Just get ahold of yourself.”
“Just pull yourself together.”
“Just deal with it.”
Unless the word “just” had an added meaning of “with the help of magical powers,” urging me to “just do” something sounded like telling a person consumed by anxiety to “just calm down” or a clinically depressed person to “just lighten up!”
Strangely enough, Yulia turned out to be the only one of my friends to take me seriously. She came to New York on business and got in touch with me. We met at the same restaurant where we’d met the last time, and the first thing she asked me was: “Are you sick?”
I said no.
Yulia shook her head. She said that she’d thought that I looked like shit the last time she saw me, but now I looked like double shit or something.
I started to laugh; then I started to cry. Yulia looked frightened. She said she was joking; she asked me to forgive her. She grabbed my hands and squeezed them so hard that I felt her heavy rings cut into my flesh. I felt like I had to tell her about B., and once I started I found myself unable to stop.
“So you love him that much?” she asked with genuine warmth.
I said yes. Then I added that this was nothing like the stupid obsession I felt for B. when I was seventeen. Back then I didn’t know what he was and didn’t know what I wanted. Now, I was certain that I wanted him, just the way he was.
I said: “He’s my person. Do you know what I mean?”
And then it was Yulia’s turn to cry, which embarrassed her to no end. She pressed herself into the corner of the banquette and placed her elbow on the table to cover her face with her hand.
She said that she knew exactly what I meant. She felt like that about her second husband, the one she married after she found out that Sasha was gay.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I got pregnant. He made me have an abortion. Then he left me for another woman.”
I tried to hug her, but she jerked away from me.
“Stop! People are looking!”
I had never cared about decorum myself, but it moved me that it meant so much for Yulia. And to think that I had bought her tough talk about making balance sheets for her marriages.
“What I need is an exorcism,” I said. “Nothing short of that would help.”
“Actually, no,” Yulia said. “I can offer you something better.”
And like that she was back in business mode. She told me that the reason she had come to New York was that the Résistance was expanding to North America, where she planned to establish the elite club. They would create the special community open to all subscribers, but only the small elite group would have visibly different privileges, like having a larger photo on the community’s social media site. And of course, only the elite members would be invited to the elite parties—think The Great Gatsby—also very visible events, because half of the Résistance content would be focused on covering those parties.
“The beauty of my idea,” Yulia said, “is that the regular member would be watching elite members as if from behind a fence. Their desperation to get in would be bound to create enormous buzz for the project.”
“So are you going to make me an elite member?” I said.
Yulia snickered into her drink. Her confident mask was back on; it was hard to believe that she had been crying over unhappy love a few minutes ago.
“Making you an elite member would be a stretch, don’t you think?” she said. “You’re not really a Blavatnik-type person, are you? I can make you a regular member for free and sneak you into some of our elite parties.”
I said, “Okay, so I’ll meet a handsome freedom-fighting billionaire who will fall madly in love with me and will want to marry me? Perfect! B. will be insanely jealous!”
Yulia shook her head. “That’s not very likely, is it? And anyway, if anybody’s marrying a billionaire, it would be me.”
We started to laugh, then we started to drink, then we spent a couple of hours together laughing and drinking. I felt better than I’d felt in months.
When I got home, everybody was asleep, except for Len, who was still working in the garage. I went straight into the bedroom, plopped onto the bed, and opened my laptop. There was one new email from B. I knew what was there without opening it: “Are you there? Lo. B.” He had started spelling “love” as “lo.” in the past few weeks, as if to suggest that what we had was truncated and incomplete. I braced myself for that “lo.” and opened his email. It was much longer than usual, five paragraphs at least. I took the length as a good sign at first, then as a disturbing sign, then as a sure sign of disaster. My hands were shaking and I couldn’t bring myself to read those five paragraphs for a long time, and when I finally started reading them, I would stop every few sentences and go back to the beginning, afraid to read further, dreading to read the last line, refusing to comprehend its meaning, because once I did, it would be all over. But I couldn’t put it off forever. Eventually
I read to the end. And it was over. And B. was the one who ended it.
“You were right,” he wrote. “We can’t go on like this, and I’m the one who has to make a decision.”
I got dizzy and nauseous, and for a second I got scared that I’d throw up all over my old bedspread. I stood up with great effort, my legs were barely functioning, and walked toward the bathroom.
Once I finished in the bathroom, I had the urge to check my email again, because this couldn’t possibly be true. But it was. Of course it was. Nothing had changed. He ended the letter with a plea to keep in touch with him. Even though we wouldn’t be seeing each other anymore, he needed to hear from me now and then. He wrote, “I want you to know that I will always care about you.”
His “care about you” made me so angry that I felt like doing something violent, but I was too tired to move. I took two Ativans, got into bed, and fell asleep.
When I woke up the next morning, I was afraid to open my eyes. I was in the room that used to be inhabited by my love for B. So what now, I thought. Now that the love was destroyed, the room couldn’t possibly stay the same. It must be scorched, covered with debris like a site of nuclear disaster. But no, it looked exactly the same. A boring suburban room, not very neat or welcoming, but perfectly livable.
As did all the other rooms of my Escher house. I was amazed by the signs of how smoothly life in the house had gone on in my absence. Nobody else experienced it as an Escher house. What seemed like a crazy disjointed structure to me was a wholesome home for the other inhabitants. Which brought me to an inevitable conclusion: that our house was fine, that I was the upside-down person.
SEVENTEEN
What are the odds of meeting a handsome billionaire within a month of having the love of your life break it off?
Pretty slim.
And what are the odds of that billionaire offering to marry you? I would say zero, or even less than zero. If I tried to solve this problem with the help of my childhood calculator, it would certainly beep and scream “ERROR” at me, as it did when I attempted to divide numbers by zero.
And yet this is exactly what happened. I met Victor and he asked me to marry him. The only explanation I have is that the extreme upside-downness of my life at that moment matched the extreme upside-downness of Victor’s, and this was what produced the extremely unlikely result.
Nikolay Kotov, the money behind the Résistance (or the money behind Asshole Monthly, depending on how you looked at it), was visiting New York City. Yulia thought that it was time to introduce him to the NYC segment of the opposition and saw no better way to do it than to throw a party. In addition to the obvious movers and shakers and celebrities, she also invited a token number of starving artists (exactly one for each discipline—one fiction writer, one poet, one visual artist, one composer, and one choreographer). I got to be the token starving writer.
The party wasn’t quite up to Great Gatsby standards, but it was lavish enough, with hired models, a Balkan jazz orchestra, Dom Pérignon, foie gras, and slabs of raw salmon. If this was supposed to be a political gathering, nothing in the atmosphere of the party suggested it. In fact, the only remotely political conversation tidbit I overheard was about real estate. A heavyset young man in very expensive eyeglasses was asking a heavyset older man in very expensive shoes if he thought that sanctions against Russia would affect property prices. The shoes man kneaded his meaty chin and said that he didn’t think so. People circulated in two large rooms and a huge terrace overlooking the Hudson; there was also another smaller terrace in the back. Nobody appeared to be happy or relaxed. The token artists mostly clung to the walls. Glamorous women looked tortured by their clothes; moneyed men carried an expression of chronic constipation.
Yulia herself was flying around the room, flattering women, flirting with men, and managing the myriad of little problems. She was wearing a long silvery dress and enormous shades in green frames. Her spaghetti straps kept sliding off her shoulders, and her eyeglasses kept sliding down her nose, and she kept fixing one or the other while tipping the champagne glass in her free hand. Needless to say, she didn’t have any time to talk to me, and since I didn’t know anybody else, I was making silent circles around the room while keeping my eye on the caterers with their irresistible trays, so I could lunge forward and get a piece of salmon or foie gras before other people got to them. I imagined that my movements resembled those of a heron fishing by the edges of a lake. I was wearing a light dress with a years-old wine stain across my chest. This was my only suitable dress, and I decided that the stain was okay, because people would assume that it was a fresh stain. All I needed to do to maintain the impression of the stain’s freshness was to keep it moistened and carry a glass of red wine with me at all times. I probably didn’t have to do that, because nobody looked in my direction anyway.
In the middle of the evening, Kotov himself deigned to honor the guests with his presence. At six foot eight, he towered over everybody else in the room. I remembered a recent piece in the Résistance that claimed that Kotov was the tallest of the world’s richest people and the richest of the world’s tallest. A mob of people wishing to get close to Kotov formed within seconds and gradually drove him into a corner. Some guests were content with mere proximity to Kotov’s body as their friends snapped pictures of them and the great man together. But others were more imaginative in their quest; the token poet presented Kotov with his book, a translation of Pushkin’s verses into English, and the token visual artist handed him a painting, an abstract rendering of Russia’s political future. Kotov kept staring above their heads, seemingly lost. There was something quixotic about his appearance. He looked as if he didn’t understand Russian or didn’t understand what he was doing at that party.
I didn’t understand what I was doing there either. Plus, I was getting queasy from all the champagne and foie gras. I had a brief flashback of vomiting in the marble and gold splendor of the Kremlin Palace, so I grabbed my jacket and rushed to the back terrace for some air.
And that was where I met Victor. When I entered, Victor was standing in the dark corner of the terrace, looking out at the dark part of the city, ignoring the river and the lights. He turned to me, and I saw that he was short, slender, and exceptionally graceful. His face was half-obscured by the dark, but when he moved into a spot of light I saw the tense, tired expression of somebody who had recently experienced a loss. I recognized it because I saw the same expression in the mirror every day.
“I have an extra ticket to the opera,” was the first thing that Victor said to me. “Tomorrow at eight. Do you want to come with me?”
I said yes, before he had a chance to tell me which opera.
I didn’t even have to lie at home. I said that somebody at the Résistance party offered me a free ticket to the opera, and it would be a pity not to use it. My mother sighed. Len couldn’t care less. The kids were relieved that I wasn’t taking them.
The next day, right before I had to leave for the opera, an email from B. came. There was just my name. “Katya . . .” I took it for a pathetic attempt to pull on the string attached to my heart. The attempt was successful—my heart reacted with pain.
“Go to hell!” I screamed at my laptop and didn’t reply.
Victor and I met an hour before the performance, in a bar near Lincoln Center. In better lighting, he looked older—both his beard and his wavy light brown hair had some gray in them. I figured that he was about ten years older than me. Wide cheekbones and slanted green eyes made him appear catlike, wary, slightly threatening. As did his chiseled nose, constructed of sharp lines and bold curves. He was impeccably dressed. Victor suggested that we have some champagne, but I was still queasy from last night’s party, and asked for hot tea. He ordered for us. I was surprised by the superb quality of his English. I wrote books in English, but my spoken language wasn’t nearly that good. Victor spoke a classic old-school British, but with forceful Russian undertones, which made simple sentences sound like military comm
ands.
I thought of a TV program my mother and I once saw in Russia. The host was telling how Georgy Chicherin, one of the first Soviet diplomats, came to deliver a speech at some international convention. All the British diplomats were snickering, expecting a dumb Russian hick to speak some mangled English, but when Chicherin opened his mouth, they fell silent, because what they heard “was not just good English, but brilliant English, the best English they had ever heard, Chicherin’s English!” I remember how my mother and I laughed at these words. This was Soviet propaganda at its comical extreme. Soviet people were meant to be superior in everything, even in their spoken English. We even started using the expression “Chicherin’s English” as an inside joke. But now, listening to Victor’s “Chicherin’s English,” I understood something about New Russia that had escaped me before. The country was emerging from a series of humiliating shocks. The Cold War had been lost. The Soviet Union had collapsed. Its status as a world superpower was seriously diminished. The new capitalist autocracy was both pathetically criminal and dangerously unstable. The first batch of Russian elite became a laughingstock for the supposedly more civilized Western world. What with the Russian nouveaux riches sporting garish dresses, garish sports cars, and garish gold watches. What with the parties boasting live camels and live flamingos, where their wives, daughters, and hired prostitutes were dressed the same and were indistinguishable from each other.
Victor belonged to a different, later generation of Russian elite. They had to work very hard at distinguishing themselves from their predecessors. Out went garish clothes and garish tombstones; in came culture and superior education. Fluent English wasn’t enough anymore; it needed to be standout English. And if you had to err on the side of too much perfection, so be it. This was why the idea behind the Résistance media project made at least some sense: it appealed to people who cherished their superiority.
Victor said that he had looked me up online. I feigned surprise even though I had looked him up too. I knew that he had a PhD in physics but had decided to abandon science in the nineties to build his own business. I knew that he was massively rich. And I knew that he could read and write in six languages, but speak with fluency in four: Russian, English, Spanish, and Italian.