by Lara Vapnyar
I continued to think about what she’d said after I went back upstairs. Was this a positive message? If you couldn’t order your heart around, did that mean that you had to follow its orders? Did that make it okay to leave your husband and be with the man you loved? But I didn’t love Victor. I was hoping to grow to love him, but I certainly didn’t love him now. At the rare moments when I let my heart’s guard down, I knew that I still loved B. Was that what the saying meant? That I shouldn’t go to Italy because I didn’t love Victor?
I opened my inbox full of emails from B. where he begged me to let him know how I was. I had promised myself that I would never answer them. I was so angry at myself for breaking that promise that I was especially curt. I wrote that Len and I had separated, and that I had met somebody else, and that I was flying to Italy tomorrow. He replied within thirty seconds, begging me to see him before I went. I wrote that I could see him today at six, at the Goat’s Hoof.
I didn’t know what I expected to happen.
I knew what I hoped for. That same old thing—that B. would say he was finally ready to leave Nadya, that he wanted us to be together, all the time, forever and ever. I also knew that this was not going to happen, because if it could happen, B. would’ve written me about it.
So I guess what I expected was to cause B. maximum pain. To sting, to scald, to strike, to stab him. To make him see that he was truly losing me. To make him realize how much he still loved me. To make him understand how miserable he was going to be without me.
And so I opened my closet to pick clothes to see B. in, trembling with anger. This will show you! I thought, putting on one of my new expensive T-shirts that Victor had bought for me and I had kept hidden from Len in the back of my closet. This will make you wriggle in pain! This will make you want to die!
Note to women going to see the love of their life for the last time. Why, why, why do we think that what we wear matters?
I entered that bar poised to keep my cool, my head high and my gait languid. But then I saw B. sitting at a dimly lit corner table, tired and sad, his wrinkles deeper than I remembered, the circles under his eyes darker. He looked like an adult who had to plow through his painfully responsible adult life, and I looked like a silly, vengeful child.
He asked me questions about the divorce, about my mother and my kids and how they were taking it. I said that the divorce was hard, but easier than I’d expected. He said that reality was rarely as bad as our fears. Then he sighed and started kneading his face with his hands for what seemed like a long time. When he asked me his next question, his eyes were half-hidden behind his whitened knuckles. “Is it serious with that new guy?”
I said, “Yes.” He moaned, but his pain didn’t bring any relief to me.
I said that we were getting married. I told him whatever I could about Victor, trying to downplay his wealth so B. wouldn’t talk about “blood money” like Sasha.
“He sounds like he might be good for you,” B. said. “But then what else can I say, right? This is nobody’s fault but mine.”
He finished his beer and poured himself half of what was left in my glass. That was what we always did in restaurants. I saw that he did this without thinking.
“I tried to leave Nadya a month ago,” he said. “She got into a car, went onto the highway, and swerved into oncoming traffic. She says it was an accident, that it was raining and the roads were slippery.”
“Is she all right?” I asked, making an enormous effort to sound kind.
“Yes, yes, she’s fine, just scared. She doesn’t have anybody except for me.”
And I had so much and so many. Except for him. I could feel a surge of anger rising, but I managed to keep it down.
“I thought you needed to know that.”
“No, I didn’t,” I said, standing up.
He put two twenties onto the table and rushed out of the bar after me. He walked me to the bus stop and we stood there waiting for my bus in silence. When we saw the bus approaching, B. grabbed me and squeezed me so tight that I was afraid he would crush my ribs. “I love you,” he said, “I love you. I can’t promise you anything, but know that I love you.”
I was crying so hard all the way to Staten Island that a man who sat next to me drinking orange Gatorade offered me a travel pack of Kleenex, and ten minutes later his remaining Gatorade.
The next day I flew to Milan.
Victor was waiting for me at the airport, impatient, nervous, pressing a modest bouquet of roses to his chest. I was relieved to realize that I really liked him. I must have forgotten how much I liked him in the tumult of the past month.
I yelled: “Victor!” and waved at him.
He seemed to be relieved as well.
He had a car waiting for us at the airport and two hours later we arrived at Victor’s villa on Lake Garda.
The first thing I noticed about the villa was how cold it was. Chilling to the bone. Victor had asked his housekeeper to run the heat three days before our arrival, but she must have confused the dates and didn’t turn it on until that morning. Victor offered to book a room at a hotel, but I said that I would prefer to stay. I wanted to feel what his home was like. “It will be fun,” I said. “We will be like a pair of vagabonds breaking into somebody’s house, burning furniture for heat.” Victor liked the idea, except for the burning furniture part. He asked the housekeeper to bring tons of firewood. We spent most of the day sitting by the fire, drinking wine, eating prosciutto stored in Victor’s cellar, telling each other funny stories about our Russian childhoods, all the while dressed in two sweaters each. I refused to take off the sweaters even for sex, which we had on the sofa by the fire. I took off my jeans and my panties, but not the sweaters and not my thick woolen socks, so the sex was less exemplary, and in my view much better.
After that first very cold day, the heat managed to seep into every corner of the house, making it simultaneously toasty and bright, bright because we could finally open the shutters. Yet I could feel that some of the chilliness was hidden inside, which made me resistant to the beauty and also less emotional than I’d expected myself to be.
A couple of times, when Victor left for a business meeting, I went on long walks around the town. The view of the lake framed by the mountains was truly magnificent, but for some reason it too left me cold. I preferred to walk in the opposite direction from the embankment. Most of the streets led up into the mountains, so if you walked away from the lake for forty minutes or so, you would leave the town behind and find yourself on one of the trails leading into the wilderness, and if you walked long enough, if you walked for days, you would find yourself either dead or at the very top of the Alps. That thought inevitably made me turn back down, so I spent the rest of the day walking down the promenade, stopping in the little cafés to drink espresso among the festive old ladies and forlorn old men leisurely drinking their wine.
I thought about B. a lot, but I didn’t miss him. He was absent no matter where we were geographically.
I didn’t miss Len either.
I missed my kids, badly. I did worry about them, but I longed for them more than I worried for them. I thought how much fun it would be if they were here with me right now, walking the paths all the way to the Alps and sampling delicious pastries afterward. I sent them emails, and they sent emails back to me mostly gushing about all the fun things they did in Mexico. Nothing in those emails suggested that they missed me. I didn’t want to call them. Len was the only one whose phone was working in Mexico, and he’d promised to call if something happened to the kids, but he’d made it clear that he didn’t want to hear from me. I could certainly understand. He didn’t want to hear my voice, knowing that I’d just fucked another man and would do it again and again.
What surprised me was that I missed my mother. I kept thinking about our last conversation, how she sat there wiping her glasses with a paper tissue, looking so frail, and I wanted to hug her. Not for her, for me. I wanted to feel her physical warmth, something I hadn�
��t wanted in years. Once, while walking down the cold empty street sloping toward the lake, I even said “Mama” out loud, startling an old lady standing by the gates of her villa. She must have thought that I was calling her and looked at me expectantly. I shook my head. I didn’t want any mama; I wanted mine.
When Victor was home, he liked us to cook together, or do other domestic stuff like shop for groceries, or pick furniture from a catalog, or discuss whether we wanted the gardener to plant more roses in the spring. His eagerness to talk about the future frightened me, because it often felt as if he were trying to entrap me in his life rather than to involve me, so I wouldn’t be able to escape.
One evening, Victor introduced me to his mother. Via Skype, because his mother lived in Russia. Victor’s mother was a tiny woman dressed in drab Soviet-style clothes. She didn’t look like Victor at all, except for some barely distinguishable mannerisms that they had in common, like raising and lowering their shoulders when they spoke. She didn’t smile or even look at the camera; she sat with her hands folded in her lap and her back very straight, staring straight ahead. Her eyes never met mine. I was both disturbed and relieved by it. I said that her son was a wonderful man, but I wasn’t sure if she heard me. She congratulated me on the engagement and wished me all the best, reciting a long list of specific wishes (that I have excellent health, peace, happiness, professional success, that I preserve my youth for a long time). Then she said goodbye and started to cry. She fumbled with something on the keyboard, then moved closer to the screen and looked straight into the camera for the first time. “Vitya,” she said, “how do you turn it off? Vitya, turn it off! Please, turn it off!” Victor turned it off and sighed. “She is not the same since my brother died,” he said.
I met Victor’s kids in the same way, via Skype. The girl was nine and the boy was four. The kids looked exactly like Victor and exactly like each other. They had the same slanted eyes and small chiseled noses, but whatever made Victor look catlike and slightly menacing made the kids look kittenish and sly. They were sitting on a floor pillow, their eyes fixed on an iPad placed on the rug between them. There was also a Yorkshire terrier jumping around. At one point he landed right in front of the iPad and I saw his wet beard fill the entire screen. Both kids were exquisitely polite to me, up to the point when Victor told them that I had two children too. Victor’s son turned away from the screen and started playing with his toy cars, and the girl visibly tensed. Wanting to reassure her, I said that my kids were both in their teens, that they were basically adults, and my son even had a small beard. “Like my daddy?” she asked. “No,” I said, “more like your dog.” Then she finally dropped her mask of exquisite politeness and started to laugh.
I could see Victor hovering as I talked to his kids, watching me, and watching them, trying to gauge our reactions. When the call was over he squeezed me in a hug. “They loved you!” he said. “They did. I can tell!”
Then he buried his face in my hair and whispered: “I think we’re going to make it. Don’t you?”
I said that I did. I honestly did.
TWENTY
Topological net? Seriously? I know nothing about topological nets. I don’t even understand what it means. You probably need a PhD in mathematics to understand what it means. And yet I can’t let it go. I feel that I must understand it. This is what I’ve been doing obsessively ever since my mother died. Looking for ways to use my mother’s notes to sort out the mess I made of my life. Looking for nonexistent connections between complex mathematical concepts and the events of my life. Delving so deep into advanced mathematics that I often lose my way. Really stretching it when I think that one or another theory almost fits. I have to be honest here—I fail to understand what “limit of the function” means in mathematical terms.
But if I stretch it, I might make it out to mean that every function has a limit.
Eight weeks before my mother died, Victor sent me four emails with our photos, because all the photos wouldn’t fit into one email. The subjects were: “Photos 1,” “Photos 2,” “Photos 3,” and “Photos 4.”
I was sitting at my mother’s desk, grateful for the opportunity to check my email in peace, while my mother was a few feet away from me, dozing in her bed in an opiatic haze.
The first photograph of Victor and me standing on the Lake Garda embankment blinded me with its colors. The deep blue of the sky, the softer rosy blue of the water, the gleaming orange balls hanging on the orange trees, looking more like Christmas tree decorations than real fruit, my brand-new navy blue woolen coat and my hot-pink cashmere scarf. It was a soft scarf. I had given it to my mother to wear to her chemotherapy appointments, because all our other scarves irritated her skin. At some point she had vomited all over it and I’d had to throw it away. But here it was in the photo, clean, cheerfully pink, flapping in the wind almost parallel to the shore.
I paused before opening the rest of the photos. These were photos of me taken a month before, yet they seemed to be from another world, another life, another reality.
My whole life now was devoted to seeing my mother on that last journey, being her guardian, her nurse, her intimate companion, but also her Charon in a way. This was a reality filled with sights, sounds, and smells of the process of dying, smells of the body and smells of extraneous objects (the most surprising smell being of rubber and plastic, because people accumulate so many rubber and plastic things when they’re about to die). Even the language we used in the family became different; what used to be a homey mix of Russian and English had to make space for a lot of hostile Greek roots. Metastasis, ascites, dysphagia.
I thought that if I opened the rest of the photographs, that other bright reality would come rushing into the room and clash with the present one. I imagined the oranges from the trees on the Lake Garda embankment springing from the computer screen into my mother’s tiny apartment, smashing into the countless vials with pills, bouncing off her desk, rolling under her bed.
But when I finally looked at them, I noticed that the photos, arranged in chronological order, were a perfect example of a line graph. The same line graph I had used to determine when Len’s and my love died.
The last photo where Victor and I looked happy together was dated December 28. It was taken by a waiter at some fish restaurant on Lake Garda. There is a huge plate of grilled fish between us on the table, and an old oil painting of fishermen sorting their bounty right above it. One fisherman is in the process of overturning a basket of fish, so it looks as if the fish—some of them still alive—are about to pour all over our heads and join the fish on our plates. Victor’s arm is over my shoulder; we are both looking up and giggling at the ridiculousness of the painting.
And here is another restaurant photo snapped by a waiter. This one is from Venice. Victor and I are sitting in the Terrazza Danieli, indoors. We’re wearing matching sweaters, bought a day before in a Transit Par-Such store. “Morbido! Morbido!” the saleswoman kept cooing, and I knew that the word must have meant something else in Italian, but it made me feel morbid. I’m looking into the camera, trying so hard to smile that my lips end up being squeezed in a thin ugly line. Victor is looking at me. He’s both wary and worried. The budding anger makes his features appear sharper, his eyes even more catlike.
The date on the bottom is December 31.
I can’t say that our love died between December 28 and December 31, because we didn’t love each other. What died in between those dates was the hope that someday we would.
But on the morning of December 30, Victor and I were still okay. We were having breakfast together. Suddenly, Victor pushed his plate away and said: “When do you have to go back to New York? January 5? Let’s take a short trip to Venice. I want us to do something memorable before you go.”
I was beside myself with happiness. Not only had I always wanted to see Venice in winter, but I also dreaded that first New Year’s Eve after my family’s collapse.
We packed in no time, Victor called his driver
, and an hour later we were already in the car, on the way to Venice.
As we drove I spotted the word “Salò” on one of the road signs. The name pricked me in a vague, uncomfortable way, but I couldn’t understand why. Victor snickered seeing my reaction. “Yes, yes, it’s that Salò,” he said, “the seat of Mussolini’s republic. It used to give me the creeps, but I’m used to it now.”
Despite its history, Salò looked quaint. The promenade merging with the lake of iridescent blue, the mountains in the background lacking the grandeur you expect of the Alps, neat, well-cared-for villas painted soft pastel colors, the gentle fog making everything look like a drawing smudged with impatient fingers. There was not a soul in the streets. I thought the lack of tourists would give the place a more real feel, but since there were no locals either, it looked more like an abandoned movie set than an actual town. It was the image of the movie set that finally made me recognize the cause of my discomfort. Salò, that revolting Pasolini film that I saw with Sasha and Yulia on B.’s recommendation. The memory made me angry. B. was following me everywhere, even to this modest little town with immodest Nazi history.
It didn’t help that Victor decided to read Brodsky’s Watermark in the car. Not that, I thought, please, no! But it was only logical to read one of the most lyrical descriptions of Venice on the way to Venice.
Victor read surprisingly well. His manner was subdued, almost self-effacing. He let the text shine. B. didn’t. He always put too much feeling into his recitations, making the poems or the passages more about him than anything else. I had to stop thinking about B.! I slipped my right hand inside my left sleeve and pinched myself on the delicate flesh right above my left hand. Again and again, harder each time.