Still Here

Chapter 2: Hello, Love!

Before Sejun there was Rachel II, and before Rachel II there was the sane Sofia, and before the sane Sofia there was Catherine Jenkins, and before Catherine Jenkins there was Tania. Vadik had met all of them through Hello, Love!

Tania had used the face of Saga Norén as her profile picture. Saga Norén was a Swedish detective with Asperger’s from the Danish series Broen. Vadik didn’t really like Tania, but he loved Broen and Broen’s quirky heroine, so every time he saw Tania, he imagined that he was really seeing Saga Norén.

Millie, Fosca, Teresa, the insane Sofia. He had met them on another dating site Match4U because the vastly superior Hello, Love! hadn’t been available yet. Match4U made it very difficult to read the insanity level of a person based on his or her profile. The insane Sofia had turned out to be a freelance doll-maker. She made tiny scary dolls with eyelashes and fingernails and silky pubic hair. Who would’ve thought that three-inch dolls with pubic hair were even possible? “Touch it, Vadik!” Sofia would insist. “Stroke it. See how soft it is?”

Or take DJ Toma, for example, who Vadik had also met on Match4U. DJ Toma said that she used to own the largest PR firm in all of western Siberia but had to flee Russia because of political persecution. When Vadik met her, she was working as a cleaning lady during the day and deejaying in an East Village club at night. In her spare time she was trying to set up a business selling ancient Siberian potions. In the four months that Toma lived in Vadik’s apartment in the Bronx, she managed to fill the entire fridge with different potions in labeled jars. The labels read: DIVINE INSPIRATION, GRACE, LOVE, HEALTHY HEART, STOMACH PROBLEMS, and A LOT OF MONEY. Sergey had been particularly interested in the last two. He kept asking Vadik if they worked. “I guess they do,” Vadik said. “I guess they do.” One day, while Vadik was at work, Toma poured most of her potions down the toilet, packed her things (and a few of Vadik’s things), and left. She wrote Vadik a note in which she said that she was going to Peru to find out if San Pedro was all that different from LSD. She’d bought a package trip that included a week of San Pedro tastings at the house of a real shaman. Vadik hadn’t heard from her since. There was a rumor that she had overdosed and died. But there was also another rumor that she had become the shaman’s manager and helped him expand his client base.

There was Barbara, the New Age — y masseuse. Before Barbara (but actually during) there was Abby. Then Barbara found out about Abby and Abby found out about Barbara, and Vadik was alone again.

Who else was there? Jesse, his headhunter. Dana, the woman who worked in the next cubicle at Morgan Stanley — he’d sworn off dating his coworkers after Dana. Vica. Yep, his former girlfriend now his best friend’s wife, Vica. That was the one encounter he was trying very hard to forget. Nothing had happened, he’d managed to stop himself at the very last moment, but he still squirmed with shame for months afterward. He felt awful guilt toward Sergey — he could only hope that Sergey would never know — but he also felt revulsion because the encounter with Vica had made him regress into his Russian past. He had come here to start his life anew, not to rehash his old romances.

Before Vica there was Sue, a waitress at Mom’s Diner in Avenel, New Jersey. Before Sue there was Angie, another waitress at Mom’s. Sue had a faded tattoo of a kitten on her shoulder. Vadik couldn’t remember a single detail about Angie.

“I’m sick of this mess,” Vadik confessed to Regina right after his breakup with Abby. Via Skype, because Regina was still in Russia back then.

“Of course you are,” Regina said, “dating is exhausting. You know what is the most exhausting for me?”

“What?”

“Getting my hopes up. It’s as if I needed enormous physical strength to get them up, like a weight lifter or something.”

Vadik’s friendship with Regina started out awkwardly, when Vica left him for Sergey — then Regina’s boyfriend. A few days after the breakup, Regina asked him to come and pick up some of the things Sergey had left at her apartment. Vadik wondered if she was interested in him. He wasn’t really attracted to her — she had this weird stale smell that he found off-putting — but he was definitely curious. But when he got to her apartment, Regina was so shaky and sad that trying to have sex with her seemed obnoxious. They got to talking instead. Neither of them would say anything bad about Vica or Sergey — that would have been tacky, but they couldn’t resist talking about Fyodorov, Sergey’s obsession, and confessing to each other how much they hated his philosophy. Gradually they had become each other’s confidants/therapists/dating mentors. After Vadik left Russia, they would talk on Skype two to three times a week.

“I need to be tied down. I can’t go on like this!” Vadik said to Regina via the screen.

“Just pick a girl and marry her,” Regina said. She was about to get married to Bob and was feeling very enthusiastic about marriage.

Vadik was dating Rachel II then, a social worker studying for her master’s. When Rachel II was a young girl, she’d had a passionate relationship with horses. She kept the photograph of her pet horse, Billie, on her desk.

Rachel II and Vadik broke up because she walked in on him making fun of Billie to Regina. At first Vadik denied it. He was speaking in Russian, so why would Rachel even think that? But wasn’t he holding up the picture of Billie and laughing? Rachel asked. And wasn’t that ugly Russian woman on the screen hooting in response? Vadik had to admit his fault.

The sad thing was that Regina actually thought that Rachel II was the best fit for Vadik. She was the most grounded of the lot.

Vica disagreed. Vica thought that the sane Sofia was the best fit. She said that it was a good thing that Sofia was quite a bit older than Vadik, because that would make her more forgiving. The sane Sofia taught comparative literature at SUNY New Paltz. She had a club membership to swim the lap lane in Lake Minnewaska, situated about ten miles away from campus. Sofia listed that membership as one of the six things she couldn’t live without on her Hello, Love! profile. She kept urging Vadik to get a membership too. “There is a rope right in the middle of the lake,” Vadik told Sergey, “and they’re just swimming along the rope, back and forth, back and forth, like convicts.” Vadik and Sofia broke up because Vadik refused to see the beauty of lap swimming in a natural body of water.

Sergey’s top choice for Vadik was Sejun. He couldn’t believe you could meet a girl like that through online dating. Vadik met up with Vica, Sergey, and Regina soon after his latest housewarming party, and since the subject of the failure of Sergey’s pitch was too painful, they were discussing Sejun. Sergey said that Sejun was remarkably pretty for such a smart girl. Vica said that first of all that was an incredibly sexist remark and that she didn’t find Sejun all that pretty. Regina started to laugh.

“Oh, yes, she is very pretty,” Sergey said. “The problem is that she is way out of Vadik’s league.”

“Why is she out of his league?” Vica asked. “He makes quite a bit of money, doesn’t he?”

“Right,” Sergey said.

“Hey, guys,” Vadik said. “I’m sitting right here!”

But they continued to argue, not paying any attention to Vadik, as if his own opinion didn’t matter.

“I think I’m still in love with Rachel I,” Vadik said. Regina stopped laughing. And all of them looked away as if he had said something intensely embarrassing.

Vadik met Rachel I on his very first day in the United States.

He arrived in New York on a Saturday morning in the middle of winter. It was snowing pretty hard that day. Vadik woke up as the plane started its descent into JFK. He rushed to open the shade on the window, hoping to catch a glimpse of that famous Manhattan skyline. He couldn’t see anything but the murky white mess. It was still thrilling. He could not see the contours of the buildings, but he could sense them right there, right underneath the plane, hidden by the clouds. He felt a familiar surge of excitement, the excitement that had buoyed him for months, ever since he’d gotten that coveted H1-B visa that allowed him to work in the U.S. for three years. He had spent two year in Istanbul and had grown sick of the place. He had celebrated his thirtieth birthday there, but the new decade began in the new country for him. Every now and then he would open his passport and stroke the thin paper of the visa as if it were something alive.

The announcement came through with the usual crackle. The flight attendant said that it was snowing rather hard and that they might not land in JFK after all, that the plane might be rerouted to Philadelphia. No, no, no! Vadik thought. Landing in Philadelphia would certainly ruin his plans. He was starting work on Monday, as a computer programmer in the corporate offices of EarthlyFoods in Avenel, New Jersey. He was to live in Avenel too, in an apartment provided by corporate housing. Sergey was meeting him at JFK. He was supposed to take Vadik to his and Vica’s house on Staten Island and then drive him to Avenel on Sunday. But Vadik hoped to ask Sergey to take him straight into the city so that he could spend the entire Saturday exploring. He knew exactly what he wanted to do. He wanted to walk the streets without direction, just follow his intuition wherever it might lead him. He wanted to walk like that for hours, then find a bohemian-looking bar, where he would spend the rest of the day with a glass of wine and a book, like a true New York intellectual. And he would wear his tweed jacket. Vadik had put the jacket on before boarding the plane, because he hadn’t wanted to put it in the suitcase where it might get wrinkled. He had spent a lot of time choosing the book to read in that bar. Something French? Sartre’s Nausea? Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema I? And no, this wasn’t sickeningly pretentious. Vadik wasn’t doing it to make an impression on other people. He did want to be seen as a charismatic tweeded intellectual, but it was more important to him to be seen as such in his own eyes.

Vadik looked out the window again. It seemed like they were suspended in the clouds. Vadik closed his eyes and concentrated on willing the plane to land at JFK. He imagined the hard body of the plane pushing through the sticky mass of clouds, emerging in a clean empty space between sky and ground, and then sliding down in one bold determined move until its wheels touched the runway. The cabin erupted in applause, and for a second Vadik thought that the applause was meant for him.

“Can you take me to the city?” Vadik asked Sergey as soon as they finished hugging.

“To the city? Now?” Sergey asked with a degree of puzzlement that suggested that the city was very far away. That there was some existential impossibility to getting there.

“Now. Yeah,” Vadik said.

“But Vica is waiting with all the food. She’ll be disappointed.”

The horror in Sergey’s eyes showed how much trouble Vica’s disappointment would bring to him.

So they went to Staten Island. Drove on the JFK Expressway followed by the long stretch of Belt Parkway, past the gray jellied mass of the ocean, across the foggy Verrazano Bridge, and finally down the endless Hylan Boulevard with its depressing storefronts. All that while Sergey sang along to his favorite Leonard Cohen CD.

Back at the university Sergey used to be a star. He was really handsome — everybody said that his sharp, taut features made him look like a French movie star; he was the smartest and most talented (professors used to quote him in classes); he played guitar; and he could sing, badly but still. He could have any girl he wanted. Hell, he’d snatched Vica right from under Vadik’s nose.

Anyway, Sergey was still handsome. It was his singing that made him look unbearably ugly. The scrunching of his nose whenever he had to draw out a lyric. The furrowing of his forehead whenever he had trouble pronouncing the words. The pained expression on his face during the especially emotional moments. And the singing itself. It wasn’t just that Sergey sang out of tune or that he sang with a gooey Russian accent — although that bothered Vadik too. The main problem was that Sergey’s voice, which completely drowned out Cohen’s baritone, was plaintive and childlike.

Baby, I’ve been waiting,

I’ve been waiting night and day.

Sergey sounded pathetic! Vadik couldn’t help but feel squeamish pity for him. He felt anger too, mostly because “Waiting for the Miracle” was his favorite song and Sergey’s singing was ruining it for him. Vadik saw a finger of Sergey’s leather glove sticking out from the glove compartment. He felt like yanking the glove out and stuffing it into his friend’s mouth.

He hadn’t been looking forward to being at Sergey’s place, but now he couldn’t wait to arrive. Apparently, Vica couldn’t wait for their arrival either. She rushed out of the door as soon as she heard the car and ran down the driveway barefoot, leaving footprints on the thin layer of fresh snow. Her hug was sticky and tight, and somewhat embarrassing. Vadik struggled to free himself. She looked great though, in those snug jeans and even snugger sweater, with her short curly hair cut in some new fancy way. “Vica, you look amazing,” Vadik said.

“It’s my teeth,” she said, scowling at him. “See, I finally fixed my teeth!” Vadik had no idea what she was talking about. “I used to have crooked teeth in college. Don’t you remember?”

And then he remembered. She used to smile with her mouth closed and would cover it with her hand when she laughed. When Vadik first met her, at a college party, he thought that she covered her mouth because she was shy. He found this habit intensely endearing even after he discovered that Vica wasn’t shy at all.

Vica led Vadik upstairs on a tour of the house. All that Vadik noticed was that the furniture was brown and the walls were painted yellow. “We’re giving you this exercise bike,” Vica said, pointing to a bulky apparatus in the corner of the bedroom. “It’s like new. I gave it to Sergey for his birthday, but he seems to hate it.” Vica showed Vadik where he would be sleeping. Then she took him to meet Eric. There was a four-year-old person, small, sulky, and looking like a chubby version of Sergey. He was sitting on the floor of his tiny bedroom with a Game Boy in his hands. His fingers pressed buttons with such intensity, as if his life depended on it. “Hi,” Vadik said. Eric looked at him and said “Hello.” It hadn’t occurred to Vadik to bring Eric a gift — a toy or something — and now he felt awkward. He had no idea how to talk to a child. “So, Eric,” he asked, “what do you like to do?”

“I like to kill,” Eric said and went back to pressing buttons.

The rest of the morning and the entire afternoon were spent in their roomy kitchen with a distant view of a playground and a cemetery outside. “They told us that this house had a view of the park,” Sergey explained. “It was summer, so we couldn’t see the graves behind all those leafy trees—”

Vica interrupted him. “But we can let Eric play across the street by himself, because, you know, we can see him from the window.”

Vadik pictured sad little Eric on a deserted playground, rocking in the swings facing the graves. Then he remembered to admire the house.

“Yep, this was the right choice,” Sergey said without conviction.

Vica told him that Sergey’s grandmother had died and that Sergey’s father had sold her apartment and sent the money to Sergey for the down payment. Now they were struggling to pay a huge mortgage every month, but still, it had been the right move to buy a house. Because that was how it worked here, Sergey added. Everybody we knew kept telling us that. You rented in the cheaper parts of Brooklyn for a while, then you bought a house in the suburbs or on Staten Island, then you sold that house and bought a bigger, better house, then when you grew old you left that house to your kids and moved into a retirement community. Sergey’s tone was a dark mix of hatred and resignation, which made Vadik uneasy and even frightened him a little. He tried to imagine a happier Eric, all grown up, driving his parents to the retirement community so that he could take possession of their house.

Vadik made a few attempts to steer the conversation away from real estate. In his e-mails, Sergey had always asked about their university friends, so Vadik now tried to tell him that Marik was still working on his genealogy dissertation, but that Alina had quit hers and was busy making an animated Nabokov game, and Kuzmin — remember that shithead — was involved in some business with Abramovich. Abramovich, you know, the man who owns half of Europe including the Chelsea soccer club? But then Vica stepped on his foot and shook her head. Apparently, she thought that this line of conversation would be upsetting to Sergey. “He misses our old life too much,” she had confided to Vadik during the tour of the house. She switched the subject to Vadik’s long-term plans, but that filled him with panic. He didn’t know if he wanted to go to school. He didn’t know if he wanted to get married. He didn’t know if he wanted to stay in the United States for good. He had no idea. He just wanted to lead the life of an American for a while, whatever that meant. He failed to explain his view to Vica. Even Sergey didn’t seem to get it.

They drank vodka and ate cold cuts, pickles, and salads that Sergey had bought in the only Russian grocery store on Staten Island called MyEurope. Beet salad, carrot salad, eggplant salad, mushroom salad, cheese salad, herring salad, and cabbage salad with the lovely name of Isolda. There was some bickering about that Isolda. Apparently, Vica had specifically asked Sergey to check the expiration date and he hadn’t. “Look, all the other salads expire on the nineteenth, and this one expires on the sixteenth. Which was yesterday!” Vadik volunteered to eat the Isolda, because he claimed to have an iron stomach.

At some point Eric emerged from his room and demanded to be fed too.

“What do you want, chummy chums?” Sergey asked. Eric declined the salads but took a few pieces of salami off the plate and squeezed them in his hand. Vica took the salami away from him and put it on a piece of bread, then took a cucumber and a salad leaf out of the fridge, put all that on a plate, gave the plate to Eric, and sent him to the living room to watch TV. Now their conversation was interspersed with the screams and squeaks of cartoon animals interrupted by the happy voices of children praising a certain brand of cereal or juice. After a while Eric complained of a stomachache. Vica took him upstairs promising to be right back.

Vadik grabbed Sergey by a sleeve and pleaded, “Serega, please, take me to the subway or something. I’m dying here. I need to get to the city!”

Sergey studied his watch, then listened to Vica’s and Eric’s muffled voices upstairs. “There is no subway here. The ferry is far away. I’ll take you to the express bus. It goes straight into midtown.”

The MetroCards were upstairs and Sergey didn’t want to chance it with Vica, so he took a jar with quarters from the windowsill and counted out the exact change (forty quarters) for the ride to Manhattan and back and gave it to Vadik. Vadik loved the weight of the coins in his pockets. It made him feel as if he were doing something illicit. Running away with stolen gold.

They were almost out the door when Vadik remembered his book. Cinema I was in his suitcase upstairs. “Can I borrow a book?” he asked.

“All my good books are upstairs,” Sergey said. “Here we keep garage sale books.”

Vadik rushed to the shelves. There were used DVDs of Bambi and The Lion King and used copies of A Complete Idiot’s Guide to Home Repair, A Complete Idiot’s Guide to Mortgage, Eat Healthy! and Hell Is Other People: The Anthology of 20th-Century French Philosophy. He grabbed Hell Is Other People and hurried to the door.

They made it to the bus stop a second after the bus pulled away. They had to rush to intercept it at the next stop. And then Vadik was in, dropping his coins one by one as the bus was pulling away. Going to the city.

The jetlag and vodka made him fall asleep, and by the time he woke up, they were approaching the last stop. Central Park South and Sixth Avenue. It had gotten dark and chilly, and the sidewalks were covered with melting slush, but none of that mattered to Vadik. He was finally here. He’d made it. It was snowing ever so slightly, and all that light pollution colored the sky yellow. The skyscrapers hovered above his head, as if suspended in a yellow fog. Vadik had no idea where to go from there. The park looked deserted, so he decided to head down Sixth Avenue, into the thick of the city. He walked along the wet sidewalk looking up, crossing whenever the light switched to green, stepping right into puddles of slush. He turned right or left whenever he felt like it, whenever he liked the sight of the side street. Soon he had no idea in which direction he was going. He didn’t care. He was taking everything in, the buildings, the storefronts, the limos and yellow cabs, the people. There were so many people. Alive, energetic, determined, all in a rush to get to places. Women. Beautiful women. Some of them looked at him. Some even smiled. He felt very tall. He felt gigantic. He felt as if his head were on the same level as those breathtaking Times Square billboards. Everything seemed within reach. Hell, he felt as if he could just snap that huge steaming cup of noodles off the top of the building. He felt as if he were consuming the city, eating it up. It was his city. He had finally found it.

Vadik walked for hours. He stopped only when he noticed that his shoes were soaked through to his socks. There was a brightly lit diner a few feet away. Vadik decided to go there. The diner was nothing like the elegant Greenwich Village bar he’d imagined, but he decided that he liked it better. Plus he didn’t feel like drinking wine or beer. He ordered a cup of tea with lemon and a piece of cheesecake, because he remembered Sergey mentioning that cheesecake was the ultimate American food. He liked the place. It was nice, homey, with American pop songs quietly playing in the background. There were almost no people in that diner except for an elderly couple at the counter eating soup, an unkempt, possibly homeless guy fiddling with the jukebox in the corner, and a girl in a bulky checkered coat sitting across the aisle from Vadik. The girl had a runny nose. She kept wiping it with a napkin and making sniffling sounds like a rabbit. Her nose was swollen and red, and he could hardly see her eyes behind her dark bangs, but he liked that her hair was done in two short braids. She had a clear mug filled with a cloudy brown liquid in front of her. Vadik wondered what it was. She raised her eyes for a second and he saw that they were small and amber-brown and very pretty. Vadik wanted to smile at her, but she lowered her gaze before he had a chance. She was reading a book. Vadik decided it was time to get out his. He opened it in the middle, took a long sip of his tea, and plunged into reading.

He couldn’t understand a single word. Or rather all he understood was single words. He tried to concentrate, but he found it impossible because his mind was still busy thinking about that runny-nosed girl. Vadik took a bite out of his cheesecake and found it disgustingly sweet. He leafed through the rest of the book and discovered that about fifty pages were missing. When he finally raised his eyes, he saw that the girl was looking at him. He smiled and asked if he could join her. Normally, he would be too shy to do that, but just then he felt as if he was fueled by some strange happy confidence that helped him do whatever he wanted.

“What is it in your cup?” he asked after he settled in her booth.

“Cider with rum,” she said.

Vadik asked the waiter to bring another cider with rum for him. He liked it very much.

The girl’s name was Rachel. Vadik introduced himself and asked if she lived in the city. She said that she was from Michigan and that she had moved here a couple of months ago to go to graduate school. He said that he’d only arrived this morning.

She smiled and said, “Welcome.”

Days, weeks, months, even years later, whenever Vadik thought of their first conversation (and he thought of it a lot), he would marvel at how easy it had been. His English was pretty good — he had spoken a lot of English while he worked in London, and even in Istanbul — but his conversations were never that effortless. He would struggle to find the right word, he would confuse tenses and articles, he would pronounce the words wrong. But in that diner with Rachel, he talked as if he was inspired. Not once did she ask him to repeat something because she didn’t understand.

The track changed to Cohen’s “I’m Your Man.” Vadik laughed. Cohen seemed to be following him throughout the entire day.

“I love this song!” he said.

“Really?” Rachel asked. She seemed to tense.

“What?” Vadik said.

“Oh, it’s nothing.”

“No,” Vadik insisted, “please tell me.”

“I actually hate this song,” Rachel said.

“Hate this song? Why?” Vadik asked. “The guy is offering himself to a girl. He’s pouring his heart out.”

Rachel tried to soften her words with an apologetic smile, but she couldn’t help but say what she had on her mind. “Oh, he’s pouring his heart out, is that right?” she said. “Look, this is typical precoital manipulation. He’s offering her the world, but that’s only until she gives herself to him. Do you understand?”

“I understand what you mean, but I disagree. The guy is expressing what he feels at the moment. He might not feel the same way afterward, but that doesn’t mean he is not sincere in that precise moment.”

Rachel shook her head with such force that her braids came undone and the fine wisps of light brown hair flew up and down. “Leonard Cohen is a misogynist.”

“Myso…gynist?” Vadik asked. The word sounded vaguely familiar, but he wasn’t sure what it meant.

“Antifeminist,” Rachel explained.

“I don’t understand,” Vadik said. “Cohen? Antifeminist? Doesn’t he idolize women?”

“Yes!” Rachel said. “That’s precisely my point. He idolizes women, but he doesn’t view them as equals. They’re these sacred sexual objects for him. Something to idolize and discard, or, better yet, discard first and idolize later.”

Rachel took another sip of her cider and asked, “Do you know the song ‘Waiting for the Miracle’?”

“Of course, it’s my favorite!” Vadik said.

“Well, I find the lyrics offensive.”

Rachel looked at Vadik intently. “See what’s going on here? We have a man up there, having these existential thoughts, talking to God, expecting to experience divine grace, and the woman is down below. Literally beneath him! Waiting stupidly. And for what? For him to marry her?”

Vadik shook his head.

Rachel was about to say something else, but she stopped herself. She looked embarrassed.

“So what are you studying in your graduate school?” Vadik asked. “North American misogynists?”

“No, actually, English romantics.”

What luck! Vadik thought. He had been given the perfect opportunity to steer the conversation away from tricky Cohen and toward something that would allow him to shine. He said that he knew the entire “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by heart. In Russian. Rachel smiled and asked him to recite it. He did. Rachel loved it. She said that it sounded amazing in Russian, even though she couldn’t help but laugh a couple of times.

The waiter came up to them just as Vadik belted out the last line. He asked if they wanted anything else. Vadik realized that this was the fourth or fifth time the waiter had asked them that. It was time to leave.

“I’ll walk you home,” Vadik said, and Rachel nodded and smiled.

The color of the sky had changed to gloomy indigo, and it had gotten really cold. The slush on the sidewalks had turned into cakey ice. Vadik offered Rachel his hand, and they started to walk like that: holding hands, but at a distance from each other. It was only outside that Vadik noticed that he was much taller than Rachel. Her head was level with his shoulders.

She asked him where he was staying. He told her Staten Island. The answer seemed to horrify her.

“Staten Island?” she said. “But it’s so late! How are you going to get there?”

And then she cleared her throat and offered him the option to stay at her place. Vadik squeezed her hand tighter.

It’s New York, he thought. It’s New York that makes everything so easy.

They walked down a large avenue, then turned onto some smaller street, then onto another small street. Vadik loved Rachel’s street. The dark trees. And the cheerful details on the stone facades. And the piles of hardened snow gleaming under the streetlamps. They entered one of the buildings and walked up the creaky stairs to Rachel’s fifth-floor one-bedroom. Rachel walked ahead of him. The stairs were carpeted. The railings were carved. Vadik’s heart was beating like crazy.

But once they were inside the apartment, the easy feeling was gone. Rachel took her boots and coat off but kept the scarf on. And she moved nervously around the apartment as if she were the one who was there for the first time. Vadik felt that he needed to do or say something that would make her relax, but he had no idea what.

“Do you want some tea?” Rachel asked, rebraiding her hair. She seemed grateful when he agreed. She disappeared into the kitchen, still in her scarf. Her apartment was small and dark, with art posters on the walls. Vadik recognized only one painting, Memling’s Portrait of a Young Woman. He had never liked it that much. Since this was the first real American home Vadik had seen, he couldn’t tell how much of the decor was typical and how much of it revealed Rachel’s personality.

He sat down on her small couch and took off his shoes.

His socks were soaking wet. These were the socks that he had put on yesterday morning in Regina’s Moscow apartment, where Vadik had to spend a week between Istanbul and New York. He stared at his feet for a while, stunned by this realization, then he removed the socks and stuffed them in the pockets of his jacket. He heard a clatter of dishes in the kitchen and the occasional traffic sounds outside, but other than that it was stiflingly silent in the apartment. There was a small CD rack by the couch, but Vadik didn’t recognize any of the albums. It occurred to him that Sergey and Vica would worry if he didn’t come home. He asked Rachel if he could make a call. “Of course!” she said from the kitchen. Vadik dialed the number, praying that it would be Sergey who answered. It was. Vadik said in Russian that he was spending the night in the city. With a girl. An American girl. He had to listen to Sergey’s stunned silence for what seemed like an eternity. “Okay, see you tomorrow,” Sergey finally said.

Rachel emerged from the kitchen at last, carrying a tray with two mugs on it, some packages of very bad tea, and a little plate with strange grayish cookies. She sat down across from Vadik on a footstool and put one of the tea bags into her mug.

She glanced at Vadik’s bare feet and they seemed to embarrass her.

Vadik took her hand in his. Her fingers were thin and startlingly warm.

“More English poetry in Russian?” he asked.

She smiled and nodded.

Vadik recited a strange medley of Shakespeare, Keats, and Ezra Pound, finishing with “The King’s Breakfast” by A. A. Milne. Rachel was especially delighted with Milne.

He asked her to recite some of her favorites. She said that she couldn’t. That there were two things she simply couldn’t do in the presence of somebody else: recite poetry and dance. Her confession touched Vadik so much that he wanted to squeeze her in a mad hug. He reached and pulled on one of her braids instead.

She was shy in bed, shy and a little awkward. She squirmed when he attempted to go down on her. “It might take a while,” she warned him. “I’m difficult that way.”

But Rachel wasn’t difficult. She was the opposite of difficult. This was the simplest, purest, and happiest sexual encounter he had ever had. And most likely would ever have, as Vadik tended to think of it now.

Memories of that night kept haunting him for months, for years afterward. At first, they were purely sexual — he would remember Rachel’s smell and feel this jolt of desire that made him light-headed. She smelled of something fresh and green, like a slice of cucumber or some really good lettuce. But as the weeks passed, his memories turned more and more nostalgic. He would evoke a certain thing that Rachel said, her facial expression, her tone of voice. The image that Vadik loved the most was of her braids flying up and down when she delivered her ridiculous critique of “I’m Your Man.”

He’d been trying to find her. He came to the city and tried to retrace his steps from Central Park. He searched online forums for scholars of English romantic poetry. He browsed through dating profiles. Once he discovered Missed Connections on Craigslist he started posting ads about Rachel. In fact, it became a habit of his. Every time he met a new woman, he would post a new Missed Connections ad about Rachel.

“Isn’t that unfair to the new girl? Doesn’t that make your new relationship doomed from the start?” Regina wondered.

“I think you simply invented your great love for Rachel to justify your failures with other women,” Sergey said.

“Forget about Rachel!” Vica insisted. “There is a good chance that she would have turned out anorexic, or bipolar, or just plain boring!”

All of them could’ve been right in a way. And yet Vadik couldn’t stop longing for Rachel. He could barely remember what she looked like anymore, but in the compact reality of his memory, Rachel remained perfect. There were times when Vadik tried to banish those memories because they were too painful. And there were times when Vadik felt numb and he would desperately try to conjure Rachel because pain was better than numbness. Once, in Avenel, as he sat perched on his exercise bike, in his empty white room, pushing and pushing on those dusty pedals, he said Rachel’s name out loud and felt nothing. Or rather he felt a palpable nothing, weightless and glutinous at the same time. He felt as if he were about to simultaneously float away and drown. He had never felt worse. It was then that he got off his bike and went to take the Tazepam.

That morning at Rachel’s apartment, Vadik woke at dawn. Rachel was still asleep, lying on her stomach, her face buried in the pillow, her mouth half-open. Vadik felt rested — he was still on Moscow time. He got up, pulled on his underpants, his sweater and jeans, and went to the bathroom. Everything in the apartment seemed smaller and shabbier in the morning. So much clutter in the bathroom. So many unnecessary things. Two blow dryers. Six different shampoo bottles. More clutter in the kitchen. Pots and pans peeking from the tops of the cabinets. Three ceramic cats. A ceramic dog. A ceramic chicken! Vadik went into the kitchen and looked out the long narrow window, but the view of the city was blocked by the stained brown wall of an apartment building across the street. He considered putting the kettle on and making some tea. He thought he would just sit there with his tea and read one of Rachel’s books until she woke up. But he suddenly found himself dreading that moment. Eventually he would have to leave. He would explain that he was going to live in Avenel. She would want to exchange numbers. He didn’t have a phone yet. Would he have to give her his e-mail? He had such a stupid e-mail address. Biggguy@gmail.com (with an extra “g” between big and guy). Rachel would hate how misogynistic that sounded. She hated Leonard Cohen! How could anybody hate Cohen? Anyway, she would ask when they would see each other again. He would have to promise to see her when? Next Friday? And then what? They would have to see each other every weekend? Vadik found the idea oppressive. This was only his second morning in the Land of the Free and he was about to be bound by some weekly routine. His new life was about to begin. He needed to be unbound.

He walked back into the living room and surveyed the scene. There was a notebook and a pen on the mantel. He tore out a page and pondered what to write. English poetry would have been great, but he didn’t know any poetry in English. And Cohen clearly was a bad idea. “You’re beautiful,” he finally wrote and put the paper in the middle of the table. Then he picked up his jacket and sat down on the sofa to put on his socks. They were still wet. He squirmed at the touch of damp cloth against his feet. Then he put on his shoes.

It was so cold outside that it seemed like his damp feet were turning to ice. Vadik knew — Sergey had explained it to him — that the X1 bus to Staten Island stopped every few blocks on Broadway. He had no idea how to get to Broadway though, and he had no idea where he was. He waved down a taxi and asked the driver to drop him off at the closest point on Broadway. It took them five minutes or so. He got out of the cab, bought himself a cup of coffee in a deli, and walked down Broadway until he saw an X1 stop. He wasn’t sure if the buses even ran that early. But the bus came within five minutes. Vadik was two quarters short of the exact fare, but the driver let him ride anyway. The bus was well heated and empty, and for some time Vadik just sat slumped in his seat enjoying the warmth. It was only on some overpass over Brooklyn that Vadik remembered that he had left Hell Is Other People at the diner. He had no idea where that diner was. He would never be able to find it again. He would never be able to go back there. Vadik felt a surge of panic and regret, so bad that it made his heart ache.