by Lara Vapnyar
EIGHTEEN
I cried and cried and cried over this note. Because it was clear that my mother was losing her mind when she wrote it, but still knew who I was and remembered that I had loved hyperbolic geometry. She was right. I used to be crazy about hyperbolic geometry when I was a child. I’m still crazy about it.
I always thought that Lobachevsky came up with the concept of hyperbolic geometry, because he refused to believe that reality was as straightforward and as limited as implied by conventional science. For example, he objected to this postulate (offered by Euclid around AD 450).
For each straight line and a point not on it, there can be just one line parallel to the first that goes through that point.
This sounds so right, and it’s so easy to check on a simple piece of paper.
But Lobachevsky refused to confine his mind to a stupid piece of paper. He imagined a space that was enormous and curved. And in that space there could be many parallel lines drawn from the same point.
When Lobachevsky first presented his theory, other mathematicians pronounced him crazy, but he kept insisting that he was right.
“He was like Giordano Bruno,” my mother told me. “Giordano Bruno who was burned at the stake for insisting that the earth revolved around the sun.”
He discovered that reality was actually wilder and more crooked than people thought it was, or rather, than people wanted to think it was. He proved that there were things beyond our concept of the possible.
Lobachevsky’s theory gave me strange solace. It made me feel that my crooked life was in sync with the general crookedness of the universe.
Soon after that caviar dinner, I told Anya, then Yulia, that I was over B. and falling in love with another man. He was handsome, intelligent, and incredibly rich. We were getting married!
“No, you’re not!” Anya said. “Are you fucking crazy?”
But Yulia only shook her head and said that she had underestimated me. Then she asked, “Did you tell Len?” I said I was going to tell him soon.
I couldn’t reach Sasha, so I sent him a text message. I described Victor as a Russian Gatsby.
Sasha called me from Berlin at 2:00 AM and started to yell. I had to get out of the bed and tiptoe downstairs so I could talk to him.
“His money is blood money!” Sasha screamed at me. “His business is built on corpses! Don’t you understand how Russia works? You can’t become an oligarch by being a nice, loving man!”
“He doesn’t have enough money to be considered an oligarch. He’s not Kotov!”
“How much money does he have?”
I had to admit that I had no idea. “I’m sure it’s under a billion,” I said, hoping that the word “under” would placate Sasha.
“Under a billion, huh?” he said. “Poor fucker can’t seem to ascend to the Forbes list. So how exactly did he build his business?”
“He used to go on lots of business trips prior to the Soviet Union collapse,” I said. “It helped him to establish all these connections abroad after perestroika.”
At this piece of information, Sasha’s tirade turned into unintelligible screaming. I heard somebody speaking angry German in the background, most likely asking him to shut up.
I said that it was 2:00 AM, and I was going back to bed.
“Listen,” Sasha said in a softer tone. “I’m sorry that I screamed at you, but please, don’t marry the guy. Promise me that you won’t.”
I said goodbye and hung up.
Upstairs, I found Len awake and staring at me from the bed through the semidarkness—we never found blinds that would completely block the light from the neighbors’ security lamp.
My heart fell.
“So,” he said, his voice quivering with hatred, “a call at 2:00 AM?”
“That was Sasha from Berlin—he must have confused the time.”
“Your imaginary gay friend—how convenient!”
That was so stupid that I almost laughed. Len had met Sasha many times. Sasha was at our wedding. Sasha had stayed with us on several occasions. Len certainly knew that he wasn’t imaginary.
I said, “Let’s go to sleep,” got into the bed, and turned away from him. The sharp creak of the bedsprings told me that he had turned away from me as well.
I woke up at six. Len wasn’t there. I got up and went to check on the kids. They weren’t there either. I had a fleeting paranoid thought that Len had kidnapped them; then I remembered that my uncle Grisha had picked them up last night to take them to the Poconos for the weekend.
I went downstairs and saw Len in the kitchen, sitting at the table with my phone in his hands. He didn’t attempt to hide it from me.
“Aren’t you going to work?” I asked.
“No,” he said, not taking his eyes off the phone screen.
Len was trembling a little, as if he were rocking on waves of anger and hurt. I also saw his resolve to “behave like a man no matter what,” which for him probably meant calm as opposed to hysterical, when everything inside screamed that hysterics were just what he needed, were what would make his pain a little less. I wondered how men even knew what the appropriate mode of male behavior was. From their fathers, their friends, movies, books?
“So, Victor Suvorov. A new lover, I presume?” he asked, tapping on the surface of my phone. That “I presume” broke my heart. Or rather Len’s attempt to sound cool and unperturbed broke my heart. He wanted to mask his fear, his desire for this to go away, his need for what was about to happen not to happen. It was as if he were silently begging me to lie.
I wasn’t going to lie this time.
I said, “We need to get a divorce.”
We both fell silent and stayed like that until we heard my mother coming up the stairs. I had completely forgotten that she was home!
She was slowly making her way up the staircase, groaning, making the stairs creak and groan with her. She stopped in the middle when she saw Len and me together. She spoke to us from there, from the darkness of the staircase into the light of the kitchen, her feet planted on the middle step, both her hands grabbing on to the railing.
“Good morning!” she said.
We said “good morning” back.
“It’s Friday. Aren’t you going to work?” she asked Len.
“Not today.”
Then she said that her colonoscopy appointment was later that day.
“Do you need anything?” Len asked.
She said no. She had everything. She was going to use an enema and then poop nonstop to clean her bowels. She wanted to make sure that we wouldn’t barge in at an unfortunate moment.
Len winced at the word “poop,” as he always did. I was sure my mother had used the word on purpose.
I said that we wouldn’t barge in.
Then my mother started her descent in the same slow and creaky manner. She had almost made it to her door when we heard a long, loud, reverberating fart, after which she hurried into her room and shut the door behind her.
I couldn’t help but laugh, and Len gave me a reproachful look, but then started to laugh himself. We couldn’t stop laughing for a long time. We would stop for a second, but then look at each other and continue to laugh.
“Let’s go somewhere where we can talk in peace,” he said.
I made some tea, poured it into the thermos, and we drove to the park. There we sat at the picnic table and had a calm, grown-up conversation. Everything was peaceful until Len pinned me down and tried to strangle me.
Afterward, Len asked if I wanted him to take me to the hospital. I said no, I felt fine, I just needed to get away. I asked him to drive me home so I could get my purse and go to Manhattan. I was more worried about him. I said that he shouldn’t be alone today. He should go to a friend’s. Len chose his skiing buddy, nicknamed the Snow Baron, who had recently lost his job, so he was bound to be home. He dropped me off at the bus stop and drove to the Baron’s place in Hoboken, New Jersey.
I went to Victor’s, where I spent several hour
s sobbing and talking about Len and how worried I was about him.
“Worried about him?” Victor said. “Look at your neck! We should go and file a police report!”
I screamed: “No!” I screamed that I absolutely wasn’t doing anything to hurt Len! I screamed that Victor didn’t get it.
Victor went very still, his eyes narrowed into tiny threatening slits, and said in a quiet and calm voice that I should never ever raise my voice at him again.
My phone rang. It was Len. I grabbed the phone and ran up onto the freezing roof deck so I could talk to Len in private. He said that he would sue for full custody, and considering what a whore and a monster I was, he would get it. He sounded drunk. I don’t think he had ever been drunk before. His voice became high-pitched, whiny, and revoltingly mean. There were other drunk voices in the background, and I figured that the Snow Baron must have called his other jobless friends, and now they were drinking together, swapping stories of their awful wives and giving Len various contradictory advice on what to do with his.
Len held me on the phone for a long time. I was barefoot on a snow-covered roof deck, and I had to run from one snow-free patch to another while listening to Len’s insults.
Finally, Len got tired of berating me and got off the phone.
I sat down on a little stoop so I could have my peace before I had to go down and face Victor. After everything that had happened, I wasn’t sure if I had enough resolve to go through with the divorce and be with Victor. I was wondering if I should go back to Len and beg him to forgive me. At that moment it was hard to imagine that I would ever want something like an affair again, so I was ready to promise everything.
It was then that my mother called me with the happy news about her colonoscopy results. And it was then that I screamed at her that her symptoms weren’t real.
I was about to go down when I heard Victor’s steps on the stairs, light, but resolute. He skipped the ladder and pulled himself up out onto the roof. He found me hunched on the stoop and sat down next to me.
He asked me for my phone; I gave it to him without thinking. He dialed Len’s number.
I was terrified; I expected Victor to threaten Len or worse—to humiliate him—but he said: “Trust me, I know what I am doing.” He spoke to Len in a very calm voice. He said that he had been through a divorce, and he certainly knew what Len was going through, and that the best, and in fact the only thing to do right now was to sleep it off. There was a stunned silence on the other end, then Len said, “Thank you,” and hung up.
Victor led me downstairs, gave me his warm sweater, and made me some tea.
I was struck by the disparity in how we looked. Victor was dressed in a crisp, light green shirt and impeccably groomed. I had the same sweatpants on that I’d worn to the park; there were pine needles and dirt stuck to the back. My hair was disheveled, my neck bruised, my face blotchy and wet, my eyes so puffy that I could barely see.
Victor asked me if I was sure that I wanted to divorce Len and be with him. I thought that if I answered no, Victor would be relieved. I was about to answer “no” when Victor moved closer, put his arms around my shoulders, and hugged me very tight.
“I think I figured out something about you,” he said. “You act like a child, and I usually hate people who do that. But with you it’s different. You act like a child because you’re a child in a way. You never did manage to grow up, did you?”
I gasped at his words. This was the first moment when Victor managed to get through the more palatable version of myself that I had created back on our first date to please him and get a tiny glimpse into my true self. He grasped something very important about me, and he seemed to accept it.
Note to a reader. Would you give up a man like that? Blood money or no blood money? Really? Well, I couldn’t.
“I’m sure that I want to be with you,” I said. He asked if I was coming to his place in Italy. I said that Len was planning to take the kids to Mexico for the winter break, so I would come then.
“I will miss you,” Victor said and then added, “I still can’t believe that I met you. It’s a miracle!”
And that was exactly what it was—a miracle, something that is possible only in the realm of the curved space.
Lobachevsky didn’t receive due recognition in his lifetime. Back when he first published his findings, other mathematicians ridiculed him. “Is he trying to suggest that parallel lines cross? Seriously? Crazy!”
There was another mathematician who had an inkling of a similar idea at about the same time. But he was more cautious than Lobachevsky. He never developed his theory, because he knew that his peers would see it as crazy. As a result, few people outside math circles remember his name. Which was Carl Friedrich Gauss. That same Gauss who was so much smarter than me as a child, who came up with the brilliant solution to his teacher’s problem when he was only nine.
Who is the big fat loser now, Carl Friedrich Gauss?
NINETEEN
The kids took the news better than I expected. I decided not to tell them about Victor until I was positive that we’d stay together. All I said was that I was going to Italy to write. But I told them that Len and I were separating. They had clearly been waiting for something like this to happen. Each of them had a best friend whose parents were divorced—Masha and Zac. Both of them were fine, there was no reason to think that our family wouldn’t be fine too. The kids asked some practical questions concerning their daily lives, such as “Will Grandma still live with us?” and “We won’t need to switch schools, will we?” and when they received satisfactory answers, they seemed to accept the fact of the divorce.
What I dreaded was telling my mother. I asked both Len and the kids not to say anything to her, because I needed to wait for the right moment. But that right moment wouldn’t come, and one day when I came home from work, a sobbing Nathalie rushed to hug me. She kept saying that she was sorry, so sorry, so very sorry, but she couldn’t help it—she told Grandma. She told her on the way home from school. Grandma asked her why she was so sad, and she started to cry, and then Grandma asked her why she was crying, and she told her. But it wasn’t that bad, it was all better now, Grandma was better, she had almost stopped crying.
And that was how my thirteen-year-old daughter did the hardest part of the job for me. I wonder now if I subconsciously manipulated her into doing that for me. I couldn’t handle telling my mother, I was afraid of her wrath, her pain, her open disappointment in me, and so I pushed it onto her other daughter, her better daughter.
We decided that Len would stay in the house until he and the kids left for vacation and that he would move out right after they returned. The Snow Baron had plenty of empty rooms at his house, and was willing to rent them to Len.
Now that Len and I knew that we wouldn’t have to stay together for the rest of our lives, it felt as if the burden was lifted off. We both found untapped resources of affection for each other. We were better to each other than we had been in years. It wasn’t that we rediscovered our lost love—we knew that the people we used to be seventeen years ago were gone—but we were trying to get to know the people we had become. We slept in the same bed, where we would press our bodies against each other, seeking comfort in the familiar and still unknown. The sex wasn’t premeditated, or vengeful or passionate. It felt like the most natural thing to do. So natural that I didn’t once feel like I was doing something wrong. I definitely didn’t feel like I was deceiving Victor, for example. If he asked me, I would’ve told him the truth, but frankly I felt it was none of his business. Victor was far away, and even though we exchanged phone calls and emails, he didn’t seem real anymore. My upcoming trip to Italy didn’t seem real either, even though the date was getting closer and closer.
I had a ticket to Milan for December 22.
On December 20 Len and the kids left for Mexico.
As soon as they left, I went down to my mother’s place after avoiding her for such a long time. She was bent over her desk cuttin
g up sheets of lined yellow paper. This was a sign familiar from childhood. This was what she always did before starting a new book. I had a series of instant flashbacks of her sitting like this, cutting up paper, from twenty, twenty-five, thirty years ago.
I was struck by how much she had aged. Not in twenty years but in a couple of months. She looked haggard and ashen, her back was bent more than usual; it seemed like she had lost a lot of weight. For the first time in a long time, I was actually concerned about her health. But I reminded myself that I didn’t have to worry—her colonoscopy had been fine; her doctor had been so happy with the results that he’d cried!
I sat down across the table from my mother and asked if these were notes for a new book. She took off her glasses, so now they dangled on her chest on a thin chain she had bought at CheapLot. Yes, she said, she had come up with an idea for a new book. She cleared her throat and snickered in an almost embarrassed way.
“You might find it crazy,” she said, “but this time I want to write a math textbook for adults. Not for mathematicians but for regular people, who haven’t thought of math in ages, whose knowledge of math is dusty and tattered like their old school backpacks.”
“People like me?” I asked.
My mother wiped her glasses with a tissue (You don’t wipe them with a paper tissue! I thought) and put them back on. She was trying to gauge whether I was making fun of her or not.
“Yes,” she said. “People like you. I want to show how math can be relevant to your everyday life.”
“Oh, so a math self-help book, then?”
“You could say that,” she said, and went back to cutting. She was hurt by my sarcastic tone, but not too much, because she hadn’t expected me to be encouraging.
“I have a ticket to Milan on Friday,” I said.
She removed her glasses again and looked straight into my eyes. I was relieved to see that her expression was finally free from either reproach or resentment.
“You can’t order the heart around,” she said. This was a Russian saying. It was more resolute than “the heart wants what the heart wants” because it also implied that you had to obey the heart’s orders. My mother had never spoken in sayings before. It took me aback and puzzled me.