Still Here

Chapter 3: Eat’n’watch

More often than not Regina woke up to the sound of Bob’s alarm.

This morning the sound was sharper than usual. Bob must have changed it the night before.

Regina moved closer to him and squeezed her fingers over his stiff dick without opening her eyes. There was nothing sexual about that move. Neither of them was aroused. Bob’s stiff dick in the morning was a simple fact of married life. Regina was thirty-nine, but before marrying Bob two years ago she had never lived with a man for longer than a month. And here was her man, a man of the house, a large and strong human being in possession of a penis.

Regina buried her face into Bob’s armpit. Bob smelled especially nice in the mornings. Less like a squeaky-clean American, more like a man.

Regina enjoyed the simple facts of married life more than anything else. She couldn’t have children. Bob didn’t need children (he had a grown daughter from his first marriage). They would have to just enjoy each other for the rest of their lives. That is, if they stayed together for the rest of their lives. But so far it looked like they would.

Their bedroom was huge, square, and perfectly dark. (“Wow, those are some blinds!” their friends said.) There was no light even on the brightest mornings except for the soft glow of Bob’s iPad screen. That was the first thing that Bob did every morning — checked his messages and the news.

“Did you sleep well?” Bob asked.

“Yes, Bobik, pretty well.”

She called him Bobik, and Bobs, and Bobcat, Bobbety Bob, and Bobbety Cat. This was another thing that she loved about her marriage — to be so close to someone that even his name felt like it belonged to her.

“Did you sleep well?”

“More or less. My shoulder’s acting up again.”

“Do you want me to put the ointment on?”

“Yes, please.”

Regina took her hand off Bob’s dick, which had become significantly softer, and groped for the ointment on the nightstand.

She squeezed out a cold slippery dollop and began to smear it a little above Bob’s right shoulder. His shoulder was freckled and substantial like the rest of him. The sharp sweetish smell of the alcohol in the ointment made her gag, but she continued to rub it in with tender force. This was her husband and she was eager to take care of him. Sometimes Regina wondered if it would feel any different if she actually loved Bob. She doubted that it would.

“Thank you, sweetie,” Bob said and climbed out of the bed. Regina wiped her hand with a tissue and stared at him as he did his morning stretches. All that square bulk. All those muscles gained on exercise machines. Even on his butt. She hadn’t known people had muscles in their butts. Her own butt was all skin and bones with some lumpy fat, as was the rest of her body. She didn’t like to be seen naked. She slept in her old gym shorts and a stretched-out tank top. Regina looked in the wall mirror and winced at her reflection. She wondered if her new hairdo with the part in the middle made her look like an Afghan hound. It did, didn’t it?

She was tall and long-limbed though. Bob got a kick out of how tall she was. Tall, long-legged, imperfect, and Russian. Ph.D. in linguistics, fluent in four languages, but missing two teeth. (The missing teeth were in the back of her mouth. This was not a big deal.) Regina suspected that Bob got a kick out of the strangeness of his choice as well.

Regina sat up in bed to watch Bob doing push-ups, her favorite part of his routine. Five, six, seven. Muscles bulge, relax, bulge. Then he went to take a shower and Regina lay back down and closed her eyes.

She remembered the thrill of meeting Bob for the first time. At the doors of a theater on Forty-third Street. She stood leaning against the door, squeezing that extra ticket in her hand. “Make sure you sell that ticket,” Vica had said. But nobody was asking for tickets, and Regina couldn’t just assault strangers and offer it to them. She hadn’t wanted to see that show in the first place. She’d always hated musicals. She was sad. She was hungry and cold. But it was Vica’s firm belief that no visit to New York City could be considered a success if a visitor didn’t get to see a Broadway show. It was a great show too, she insisted, Billy Elliot. Vica had procured the tickets using her boss’s member discount. They were forty dollars each. Regina felt guilty — Vadik had paid for her plane ticket, but it was Vica and Sergey who housed and fed her and spent a lot of money to entertain her, even though it didn’t look like they were very well off themselves.

The show was about to begin. Nobody wanted her ticket. Regina was cold and tired and filled with mixed feelings toward Vica. She had twenty dollars in her purse. She decided to just tell Vica that she sold the ticket for twenty dollars instead of forty and go in alone. Vica would be angry, but there was no way Regina could sell that ticket. She was about to enter the theater when a bulky bald man tapped her on the arm.

“Are you selling that ticket?” he asked. She nodded. He paid for the ticket and led her in.

He said that he’d seen Billy Elliot before, with his clients, but he liked it so much that he was excited to see it again. He seemed genuinely moved when Billy sang that ridiculous song about how it was “inner electricity” or something that made him dance. There were tears in Bob’s eyes. Normally, a song like that would have made Regina gag, but she found Bob’s emotional reaction to it exotic and wonderful and intensely American. All through their after-theater dinner, Regina tried to decipher Bob. He seemed to be stranger to her than all those foreign writers and artists she’d met at the translator residencies that she used to attend. Writers and artists belonged to a unified, easy-to-understand social group. They’d read the same books, were familiar with more or less the same art and music, had similar personality traits. Bob was different. Bob was unlike anybody she’d met. Regina didn’t have any choice but to try to understand him through the classic American novels she’d read. His father’s family came from the South. Faulkner? He was a self-made man. Gatsby? He dabbled in politics. Willie Stark? He had a tumultuous relationship with his ex-wife. Philip Roth? Then, by the time they ordered dessert, Bob said that Regina reminded him of Lara from Doctor Zhivago. And Regina realized that Bob was doing the same thing — trying to decipher her through the Russian novels he knew. Well, maybe Bob was referring to the American movie rather than the Russian novel, but Regina was delighted anyway. She said that her grandfather used to be friends with Pasternak and was impressed by how impressed Bob was. They spent the remainder of her visit together, and at the end of it, as they were saying good-bye to each other at the airport, Bob told Regina that she was precisely the kind of woman he’d always hoped to meet. And it was smooth sailing ever since. The initial sexual enthusiasm might have waned, but respect and affection were still there.

Bob was back in the room, but Regina was reluctant to open her eyes. She just lay there taking in the sounds of Bob dressing: opening and closing the drawers, rustling his clothes, grunting a little as he put on his socks. Then he leaned in to kiss her; even the smell of him was clean and energetic.

“Bye, honey,” Regina said, opening her eyes a little.

“Aren’t you going to get up?” Bob asked.

“Soon,” she said.

Regina heard the resolute bang of the door and closed her eyes again.

—

Actually, there were a couple of annoying things about Bob. For example, he couldn’t help but flirt with other women when he was drunk. “Please don’t take it seriously!” Bob’s daughter, Becky, said to Regina once, noticing her discomfort. “Dad’s embarrassing, but he means well. He flirts with women out of politeness rather than anything else. My uncles are like that too. Even Grandpa used to be the same way.”

Well, she could live with that. Another surprising problem was Bob’s jealousy. Completely unfounded! She would occasionally catch him browsing through her e-mails and text messages, but every time he would apologize so profusely that she couldn’t help but forgive him. There was the mitigating fact of Bob’s ex-wife’s betrayal. Apparently, she had been cheating on him with his various colleagues for years. Another reason why Regina was so quick to forgive him for snooping was that she secretly found his jealousy flattering. Nobody had ever been jealous of her before!

But what upset her the most was Bob’s need to do the “right thing” no matter what or, rather, his belief that there was one single “right thing” to do in every situation. Vadik, who considered himself the expert in all things American, told her that this was a common belief here.

Vadik told her that the major difference between Russians and Americans was that Americans believed that they were in charge of their lives, that they could control them. Not just that but that it was their responsibility to control their lives as much as they could. They would try to fight to the very end against all sense, because they considered letting go irresponsible.

Another thing was that Americans didn’t believe in luck as much as Russians did. They believed in hard work and fair play. They believed in rules. That life had certain rules, and if you followed them and did everything right, you were protected. They said things like “life ain’t fair,” but they secretly believed that people brought the unfairness of life on themselves.

Vadik had told her that Bob once asked him why some very stupid apps succeeded and others didn’t. “Pure luck?” Vadik asked.

“No, my friend, no way!” Bob said. “The success comes from a combination of hard work and smart strategy.”

When genetic testing for all kinds of diseases became all the rage, Bob put a lot of pressure on Regina to take the test. “Why do I need the test?” Regina protested. “I can’t have children, remember?”

“But what if you carry a gene for a disease that needs to be found and treated early?” he said. “Getting tested is the right thing to do, Regina.”

Well, Bob’s obsession with genetics was really annoying too.

He and Becky had recently ordered an online test from this hot new genomics company, Dancing Drosophilae, to look for their distant relatives and found thousands of them. Queen Elizabeth I was listed as one of their ancestors. Becky thought it was hilarious and she even started referring to Queen Elizabeth as Grandma Liz, but Bob was secretly proud of this fact. He ordered two very thick biographies on Amazon — Henry’s and Grandma Liz’s — and spent a lot of time reading them and looking at the pictures. Regina once caught him staring at himself in the mirror while studying Holbein’s portrait of Henry VIII. She found it silly but endearing.

Most of Bob’s extended family thought that his lifestyle in New York was too frivolous and his business too silly, so they kept offering him idiotic app ideas to mock him. Last Thanksgiving Bob’s brother, Chuck, had suggested that Bob create an app for people who were bored on the toilet and wanted to chat or play chess with somebody who was also on the toilet and bored. Little did Chuck know that a company called Brainstorm Commandos already had an app like that in development and was calling it Can Companion. Regina had been terrified of meeting Bob’s extended family, but it turned out to be okay. Since Bob’s parents were dead, everybody gathered at the huge house of Bob’s older sister Brenda in Fort Collins, Colorado. Everyone was very welcoming to Regina, and none of them seemed put off by her quietness. Cousin Willie had a foreign wife too — Thai in his case — and she didn’t talk much either. Nor were they particularly curious about Russia save for an occasional drunken question about politics: “Now, how about that Putin? Flying with cranes, poisoning his enemies! Some guy, huh?” Some of the men made occasional drunken attempts to flirt with her: “You’re a very special woman, Regina! Very special, very delicate.” Other than that, Bob’s family mostly left Regina in peace. She would sit there at the table enjoying exotic American food like mashed yams with marshmallows and studying Bob’s relatives in search of common genetic traits. All those prominent cheekbones, all those heavy jaws. Bob always said how much he hated Thanksgivings with his family. Still, Regina thought, it must be reassuring to be surrounded by people who shared so much of your genetic makeup. And he had a daughter, who looked just like him and who was the closest person in the world to him. Closer than Regina could ever hope to be.

Becky was twenty-six years old, a Williams graduate now enrolled in the NYU Tisch film school. She lived in a sprawling decrepit house in Bushwick, which she shared with her best friend, Martha, and a team of Polish construction workers who had come to renovate the house six months ago and stayed. The house was bought with Bob’s money. It was bought at a bargain price, because it was part of a group of houses meant for low-income people, and Becky, with her annual income of $12,000, easily qualified. Vica was close to having a heart attack when Regina told her about this. Even Vadik was outraged. Bob was the only one who didn’t see anything wrong with the arrangement. “She’s an artist trying to survive,” he said.

Regina had expected Becky to be spoiled and obnoxious, but she was surprised to find that she wasn’t that at all. If anything, she was too nice. “The innocence of privilege,” Vadik had said. He had asked Becky out once, but she answered with a very firm no. Becky was really welcoming with Regina though. She kept hugging her and saying how pleased she was to finally see her dad so happy. She was squarely built, like Bob, but she had softer, warmer features, and her hugs were forceful and affectionate at the same time. She was very impressed with Regina’s work and even more impressed with the roster of artist residencies Regina had attended. She was ecstatic when she saw Infinite Jest on Regina’s shelf. “It’s my favorite too!” She was awestruck by Regina’s samizdat books. “Those are incredibly important artifacts!”

When they first met, Becky showered her with questions. Regina made an effort to answer them all, but lately she couldn’t help but notice that when she talked, Becky’s enthusiasm for her seemed to be waning. “Regina is nice but a bit standoffish,” she overheard her saying to Bob recently.

“Why would she think that?” Regina asked Vadik, and Vadik, so proud of his expertise, rushed to explain. “So she asked you all these questions and you gave her detailed, honest answers?”

Regina confirmed.

“Did you ask her questions in return?”

“No! What would I ask a perfect stranger? And I was too busy answering.”

“There you go. You were supposed to skip the answers — Americans don’t really care about them — and ask her questions in return.”

“Wouldn’t that be rude?” Regina asked.

“No!” Vadik said. “Quite the opposite! Giving long answers is rude and arrogant.”

The next time Regina saw Becky she used some of Vadik’s strategy and found that it worked better. There wasn’t any real warmth between Becky and her but rather a solid goodwill. She could live with that.

The clock read 10:00 A.M. It was time to get up. Or not. What difference would it make if she slept just a little bit more? Regina turned onto her stomach and buried her face in the pillow.

She dreamed that she and Bob had a baby. The baby was tiny, the size of a medium carrot. It appeared to be healthy though. “Do you think it’s all right?” she asked Bob. He laughed. “Of course it’s all right, it’s our baby, Regina!” “But why is it so tiny? Are babies supposed to be this tiny? Did your daughter used to be this tiny?” Bob laughed again. “Heck if I remember, Regina.” Then she tried to pick the tiny baby up, but it kept slipping right out of her fingers and falling onto the floor.

Regina woke up in shock. This was not the first time that she’d had a dream about some sort of weird or disfigured baby. Every time it happened, her heart was beating so hard that it took her ten minutes or so to calm down.

Regina showered and walked out of the bathroom. There was a whole day in front of her. The problem was that she had no idea how to fill it.

In Russia, her days had belonged to her job. She would tackle the most challenging projects. In fact, the more difficult the translation was, the more she loved it. But she had abandoned her work when her mother got sick. Taking care of her seemed to have eaten up all of Regina’s time, energy, and spirit. She would let the assignments pile up and then look at them and cry, because it was futile to hope to ever complete them, and the whole idea of work seemed pointless in the face of her mother’s impending death. Her favorite editor, Inga, who used to be the closest to a friend that Regina had in Russia after Vadik, Sergey, and Vica moved away, was very understanding. She kept offering to help, but Regina was too drained and depressed to sustain a relationship that required even a minimum amount of energy. Then after her mother died, Inga kept asking if Regina was going back to work, and Regina kept being evasive and vague until she finally called Inga and said that she was getting married and moving to the U.S., and that, no, she wouldn’t be returning. Even on the phone she could hear how shocked and offended Inga was.

When she married Bob, there was a chance that her editors would have let her work remotely, but she was so eager to be done with her Russian life that she broke all ties with them.

Regina started missing her job about three months after the move. She would have these violently real dreams about working on a manuscript, about missing a deadline. She would wake up and experience relief at first, because she hadn’t actually missed a deadline, but then feel disappointment.

She wrote to Inga and said that she wouldn’t mind an assignment.

“Don’t be a pig, Regina. There are people who actually need money,” Inga replied. The meanness of her reply told Regina just how hurt Inga still was.

Bob tried to interest her in politics, but all his efforts failed. Regina subscribed to Tolstoy’s point of view that particular candidates or even political parties didn’t matter, that historical process was shaped by the collective will of all people and not one single politician could possibly change anything.

“Okay,” Bob said, “we’ll let a nineteenth-century Russian writer guide you in matters of contemporary U.S. politics.” He then suggested that she “take up” something else. But the expression “take up” disgusted her. “Taking up” meant doing something fanciful rather than serious. There were wives in Bob’s circle of friends who had given up their jobs after marriage and now “taken up” photography or art or writing. Some of them were deeply engaged in motherhood, so they didn’t have the time to “take up” things; what they did instead was “dabble.” Regina had been a professional woman all her life — the thought of “dabbling” made her stomach turn. She would rather spend her time reading books than “dabbling” in anything.

But what frightened Regina was that she had stopped reading. In Russia, she used to read voraciously, both in English and Russian, but here she hadn’t yet finished a single book. Their entire den was crammed with unread books.

Today will be different. I’ll definitely read a book today, Regina thought. I’ll make coffee and start reading.

There were no traces of Bob in the kitchen. He didn’t like having breakfast at home. He usually bought some seriously enhanced smoothie on the way to his office and drank it there while listening to his assistant’s report.

Regina put the kettle on, sat down on the edge of the windowsill, and reached for her iPhone to check her messages while the water boiled. A confirmation for her ticket to Moscow made her squirm. The two-year anniversary of her mother’s death was approaching, and Aunt Masha — not her actual aunt, but her mother’s best friend — insisted that Regina come and visit the grave. Regina had missed the one-year anniversary because she had been sick. This time she didn’t have any excuse. She had gone ahead and bought the ticket for early November.

The next e-mail was from Aunt Masha. She was overjoyed that Regina was coming to Moscow! They would go to the cemetery together and then have a meal in Olga’s honor. She insisted that Regina stay with her during her visit. “It’s unthinkable,” she wrote, “for you to stay at a hotel in Moscow, like a tourist in your own city!” Regina groaned. It was hard enough to go to visit the grave, but to stay with Aunt Masha would be unbearable. Ever since Regina’s mother had died, Aunt Masha wouldn’t leave her alone. Even though Regina lived in America now, and was married to a kind, wonderful, and very rich man, Aunt Masha felt that her duty was to watch over Regina and take care of her. She would write her very detailed letters and ask embarrassingly personal questions about Regina’s new life. She would ask if Regina had found work, if she was happy with her new life in general, if she was happy with Bob, if she was in love with him. Did Bob have any children? Was he a good father? Did he want more children? Was he sad that Regina couldn’t have children? Would he consider adoption? Aunt Masha wasn’t subtle, no. She worked as a math teacher at an orphanage, and sometimes she would even go so far as to send Regina pictures of younger orphanage kids. Mostly babies, an occasional toddler. All had pleading expressions in their eyes, or was Regina just imagining that? She had to be firm and told Aunt Masha that adoption was out of the question, that the subject of children was painful and uncomfortable to her, and if Aunt Masha wanted to keep in touch with Regina she had to stop badgering her. The pictures and the questions did stop after that. Yet something told Regina that they hadn’t stopped for good. Aunt Masha often brought kids from the orphanage home. They would stay with her for days and sometimes even weeks. Regina could only hope that Aunt Masha’s apartment wouldn’t be teeming with adorable little orphans by the time she arrived.

The next e-mail was from a former classmate Alexey Kuzmin, who claimed that he was Abramovich’s business partner. He said that he lived in New Jersey now and wanted to get together. Kuzmin had been the sleaziest, most obnoxious guy in their entire grade. They had never been friendly; in fact, Regina didn’t think they had ever talked while they were in school. It was clear that he had heard that she was married to Bob and was now trying to get to him through her. Regina switched off her Gmail and turned to Facebook. Facebook was easy: a perfect stranger named Anita Lapshin who wanted Regina to like the page “Anita Lapshin.” Regina hesitated but didn’t “like” the page. She did “like” Vica’s photo of a smiling Eric though, just so Vica wouldn’t get mad. Vadik identified Regina’s social media personality as “the lurker,” because she rarely posted anything herself and almost never commented or liked. There was something unsavory in that description, as if she was spying on people, but she had to admit that Vadik was right. She thought of the drama unraveling in her friends’ social media as something like a TV series she could watch without participating. The idea of commenting and liking was foreign to her as well. Or perhaps she simply didn’t have the skill of responding to something that wasn’t addressed to her personally but released into the wild for everybody’s attention. Now, Vica was “the affirmer”: she “liked” everything and posted all these uplifting photos of their family trips, of Eric smeared with ice cream or pasta sauce, and especially of colorful breakfasts. Sergey was — she forgot what it was called. Sergey never posted anything himself, but he would often butt in on his friends’ discussions with an especially lengthy intellectual comment and then comment on his own comment, sometimes days later. Vadik himself thrived on social media, because it allowed him to try all those different personalities. He was witty on Twitter, charming on Facebook, philosophical on his Tumblr. When Regina shared Vadik’s social media ideas with Bob, Bob just shook his head. “Why are you making such a big deal out of this? Social media is meant for communication, it’s not supposed to be creative, definitely not supposed to be soul shaping.” Bob and Becky were model social media citizens. Their posts were not too frequent and not too long; they liked generously and commented sparingly; they radiated personal warmth and promoted their work in moderation.

There was a Facebook message from Vadik. He wanted her to help him interpret Sejun’s sudden idea to look for a job in New York so that she and Vadik could live together. Regina was so tired of interpreting Vadik’s love life! “But you’re so levelheaded,” he would say. Which meant what? Cerebral, coldhearted, incapable of love herself?

When Vica dumped Vadik for Sergey and Sergey dumped Regina for Vica, some people were hoping that Regina would take up with Vadik. The problem was that they weren’t attracted to each other. Well, Vadik definitely wasn’t. Everyone said he was still pining for Vica. It would have been disastrous for Regina. To be with another man who preferred Vica to her? No, thank you! So, yes, a romantic relationship between her and Vadik was out of the question, especially now that she had Bob, but Regina couldn’t help but hate it when Vadik came to her with his love puzzles.

Her relationship with Sergey and Vica was more complicated. After her breakup with Sergey back in Russia, Regina had never expected to become friends with him and Vica. She found herself forced into this friendship because she was friends with Vadik, and Vica and Sergey and Vadik kind of came as a package. And here, in New York, she didn’t really know anyone and couldn’t afford to refuse friends. She was especially starved for female company. Becky was there and Becky was smart and nice, but she belonged to a different generation and she was Bob’s family — you couldn’t be completely open with your husband’s daughter. So Regina did try to become better friends with Vica, but each of her attempts was met with spiky resistance on Vica’s part. And every time the four of them met, Vica kept darting sneaky inquisitive stares at Regina, clearly worried that she still loved Sergey. Sergey seemed to wonder the same thing. She didn’t love him! More than that, she now doubted that she ever had. But the worst thing about Vica and Sergey was that they constantly tried to push yet another of their stupid app ideas on Bob. They tried to exploit him, and she felt exploited as well. Regina cringed every time Vica made allusions to her frivolous lifestyle while complaining about her job, and her awful commute from Staten Island, and all those chores she had to do, and the fact that she basically had two children — Erik and Sergey. Was Vica trying to guilt her into helping them? That would be so unfair. Still, Regina couldn’t help but feel guilty because of the simple fact that Vica and Sergey had to struggle financially and she didn’t. Sergey kept asking her if it was possible to change Bob’s mind about Virtual Grave. No, she told him, it was not possible. And even if it was, Regina wouldn’t have lifted a finger to try. She hated the idea of Virtual Grave. Death was an ugly, stupid, terrifying joke. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, you could do to make it more meaningful, or more beautiful, or easier to stomach. The only way to deal with it was to ignore it for as long as you could.

The water started to boil. Regina put coffee into her French press, poured the hot water, stirred, let it it brew for a little while, and pressed down on the plunger. She poured herself a cup and carried it out to the terrace. To unlock the terrace door, Regina needed both hands, so she had to balance the cup against her stomach. Some coffee splashed — onto her stomach.

And then she was outside and blinded by all the light from the sky and the river, the boats, and the pretty disarray of buildings in New Jersey. The weather was perfect too — cool and delicious with an early September breeze.

“Did you even dream of living like this?” her father had asked when he visited. They were standing on her terrace together. He was short, shorter than Regina, thin wisps of his gray hair fluttering against his bald crown. He used to be a writer. “His very first short story was published in Novyj Mir!” Aunt Masha told Regina. When Regina was five years old, he went to Canada and decided to stay there, basically abandoning his wife and child. Now he lived in Montreal and taught Russian literature.

“A simple Russian girl like yourself. And look at you now — the queen of Manhattan.”

His words made Regina gag. She was neither simple nor Russian (she had Jewish, Polish, and a smidgen of French blood in her veins), and she definitely was not the queen of Manhattan. She was tired of explaining to people that Bob wasn’t that rich. When the news of the Occupy Wall Street protests reached Regina’s father, he called to ask if Bob was in the “one percent.” He was. Regina’s father couldn’t be prouder. He wasn’t nearly as excited when Regina told him about her latest translator’s prize. It was her father who had given Regina her stupid embarrassing name. He must have been hoping that she would eventually become a queen. Regina had never been very fond of her father, and now she couldn’t forgive him for the simple fact of his being alive, when her mother was dead.

She sat down on one of their pretty metallic chairs and took the first sip. The seat was still wet from yesterday’s rain, but she decided that she didn’t care. The huge letters on the other bank of the river spelled the word Lackawanna. She didn’t know what that meant, but the word fascinated her. She took another sip. The coffee hadn’t come out that well, but at least it was still hot and bitter. It was her mother who had taught Regina to drink black coffee: “Black coffee tastes like a punishment that makes you strong.”

Regina wasn’t nearly as talented a translator as her mother had been. She did her job well, but she couldn’t boast of any special gift. Her mother’s special gift was humor. She could find the smallest grain of humor in the novel and push it just a tiny bit more, so that it became suppler, brighter, but didn’t lose its subtlety. Regina had read the entire oeuvre by George Eliot in her mother’s translation, chuckling and grinning and sometimes even laughing like crazy. She was deeply disappointed when she read the novels in the original English. She found them to be rather moralistic and dull.

Not only was her mother a brilliant translator, she also seemed to have had a personal relationship with each of her dead authors. She would read all of their biographies, diaries, correspondence. She would call them by their first names and talk about them as if they were family members. “Did you know what Charlotte’s father did when she died? Charlotte Brontë?” she would ask at breakfast while stirring the kasha in her bowl. “He cut up her letters and sold the pieces to her grieving fans so that he could make more money!” And then hours later, when they were sitting at their adjacent desks working, she would cry out: “The bastard!” “Who are you talking about, Mom?” Regina would ask. Her mother would answer, “Charlotte’s father, who else!”

They’d lived in a one-bedroom flat on Lyalin Lane in Moscow. The kitchen was dark and moldy, and there were always pigeons on the window ledge, peeking in, tapping on the window. Her favorite room was the living room. At noon there was always a thick ray of sunlight coming from the locked balcony door into the middle of the room. When Regina was little, she loved to run into that ray and freeze there so that she could catch the sparkling specks of dust that flew around her like snowflakes.

There was the old sofa in the back, where her mother loved to sit with little Regina and show her family heirlooms. Photographs, letters, various old trinkets. Regina’s favorite objects were the buttons. They were kept in a large tin box, and what a treat it had been to open the lid — she had to push it really hard, as it sometimes would get stuck and then she would have to pry it with a butter knife — and plunge both her hands into a smorgasbord of shapes, textures, and colors. And then as Regina arranged and rearranged the buttons on the table — by size, by color, in ornaments, in artistic disarray — her mother would look at them and say: “Oh, I remember that one! It’s from my old blue jersey dress.” Or “This golden one is from your grandfather’s uniform.” That sofa was where Regina slept and where she spent long hours crying for Sergey. She cried so much that the wallpaper next to her pillow became damp and warped. It was her mother who nursed Regina through the heartbreak. She didn’t pester Regina with questions; didn’t say anything bad about Sergey; didn’t pressure Regina to confront Sergey, to get back at Vica, or to have a rebound, like all her friends did. She just took Regina on walks and fed her and gave her books to read, but other than that she let her be. She offered just one piece of advice: “Don’t show him how much you’re hurting. It won’t help and it will make you feel even worse.” And so Regina didn’t. She distanced herself from Sergey and Vica as much as she could, and whenever they met by chance, she went to great pains to keep it normal. And it did help. The effort it took her to pretend to be free of sorrow distracted her from her actual sorrow.

Regina learned to live in her work, to become submerged in her texts. There were days when she worked for twelve or even fourteen hours, until her vision started to get blurry and her butt would get numb and achy, pressing into a chair for so long that it felt like a frozen piece of meat. Perhaps this was the reason she had become so successful. Offers of teaching jobs followed and invitations to participate in panels and writers’ residencies. Writers’ residencies were the only places where she could have something resembling a love life.

She’d been to the French Villa Mont-Noir six times, where she drank bottomless glasses of free Bordeaux and had affairs with three different French writers.

She’d been to Swiss Maison d’écrivains at the Château de Lavigny four times, where she napped in the haunted library, ate excellent soups, and had an affair with a sweet German writer suffering from performance anxiety.

She’d visited Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers in Scotland twice, where she ate oatmeal for breakfast and had sex only once (her second time there), with Ben, an American translator of Russian literature who liked everything Russian and dressed like a character from Turgenev. They exchanged letters for months afterward, mostly helping each other with puzzling cultural references. Elephant tea? he would ask. What does it mean? And Regina would explain that the author was referring to the Soviet brand of Indian tea with an elephant on the label.

There were also Bellagio Center and Bogliasco Foundation in Italy. At Bellagio she ate and drank so much that she fell asleep as soon as her body made contact with the bed. Her lover, a warty and passionate Polish artist, complained about it. He told her that he was in love with her, then confessed that he was engaged to be married.

What a pain it was to return to Moscow after these trips. To step out from Sheremetyevo International into the darkness and the cold, shivering in her light Italian raincoat. To walk down smelly alleyways, stepping over puddles, her heart skipping a beat whenever she saw a suspicious stranger. Regina would feel depressed for weeks after she returned. Sometimes she would be depressed for a period of time that was longer than her term at a residency.

Still, there was something worse than the cold and gloominess of her surroundings. Back in Russia, Regina seemed to lose her sex appeal. Instantaneously and irreversibly, as if she were stripped of a precious layer of attractiveness by Sheremetyevo customs officers. Whatever it was about her that had seemed exotic and wonderful to her foreign lovers was thoroughly unexciting to Russian men. Regina had had occasional short-lived reationships with Russians, but outside those writers’ residencies, she mostly led a monastic existence. Sometimes her foreign affairs continued in the form of intense epistolary relationships, but those either bored or distressed her. The Polish artist kept sending her long passionate e-mails, but Regina couldn’t help imagining him pressing the Send button, closing his laptop, and then going to bed to snuggle next to his wife. It wasn’t the sex, but the snuggling that made her insanely jealous. Going to sleep next to a warm familiar body, opening her eyes in the morning to see a dear familiar face.

Being an introvert, she didn’t have that many friends either, almost nobody since Sergey and Vica and then Vadik left for the U.S. Her mother was the only person who kept Regina from feeling hopelessly lonely. She did enjoy their long walks together, drinking tea in their tiny kitchen, gossiping about long-dead writers as if they were acquaintances.

Regina and her mother had had only two disagreements in all of their life together. The first one was over Regina’s abortion. Regina had gotten pregnant on her last trip to Villa Mont-Noir. She had just turned thirty at the time. The father was a mediocre French writer who had a wife and three children at home. Regina’s mother was vehemently against the abortion. She developed this fantasy of them bringing up the baby together, being a tight little unit, no need for men. But it was precisely this idea of the baby tying her to her mother forever that scared Regina. If she had the baby she would never be able to get married or even to leave. Their life together was comfy, but Regina hoped that she could lead a different life someday, a freer, more independent one. Plus, she doubted she would make a good mother. “Are you even capable of truly loving another human being?” the Polish artist asked her once. She wasn’t sure she was. She had been deeply hurt when Sergey left her for Vica, but she wondered if it wasn’t her wounded pride that had caused most of the pain.

Regina went ahead and had the abortion. It didn’t go well. There were complications that rendered her unable to have children. The surgery following the procedure left her with lingering pain that grew so intense at times that she felt as if the baby was being yanked out of her again and again. As for the emotional side of it, Regina didn’t suffer that much. She had to admit to herself that she was a little relieved. Not everybody was meant to have a child. It was her mother who was devastated, not Regina.

The second disagreement happened when a university in Berlin offered Regina a two-year teaching appointment. She was beside herself with joy. She pictured her time in Germany in minute detail. She would improve her German, impress her students and colleagues, go to concerts and gallery openings, meet interesting people, eat warm apple strudel in a little café at the Tiergarten in the company of a European academic who would find what Russian men saw as homeliness mysterious and alluring. As for her mother, Regina didn’t really see a problem. They would visit each other often. With the salary that the university offered her, they would certainly be able to afford travel. But her mother didn’t share Regina’s enthusiasm. She said that if Regina wanted to teach, she should look for a position in Moscow. She would have a much better standing there. Regina was adamant. Her mother had cried for three days and then she started to get sick. She would complain of the lingering pain in her abdomen, digestive symptoms, fatigue, arthritis-like aches in her knees. She even lost some weight. She said that she had actually had those symptoms for a while, she just hadn’t wanted to worry Regina. Regina was sure that her mother was doing it on purpose. Well, not exactly faking the symptoms, but bringing them on herself, because she didn’t want to let Regina go. There were some ugly scenes between them. A lot of words were said that made Regina squirm for months afterward. Then there were doctors’ appointments. Tests. Waiting for the results. Regina was impatient for proof that her mother was healthy as a horse so she could go ahead and accept the Berlin offer. Then the results came back. Advanced and aggressive cancer. What really broke Regina’s heart was the expression on her mother’s face the morning they got the news. She looked ashamed, apologetic, horrified for Regina. “I didn’t mean to do this to you,” she said. She did mean to try to make Regina stay, but not like that.

She died three months later. Aunt Masha and some of her mother’s other friends would come to help, and there was a hired nurse who came twice a week, but it was Regina who stayed with her mother most of the time, who had to witness the rapid transformation of her large, strong mother into a withered corpse. “At least she didn’t suffer,” her mother’s friends kept telling Regina. It’s true, she didn’t suffer — thanks to their decision to forgo debilitating and largely useless treatment, and the morphine that Regina managed to buy after selling most of her great-grandfather’s paintings, but still the horror of witnessing her mother being erased as a human being was indescribable.

Years earlier, Regina translated an American bestseller Dealing with Death. Chapter one was titled “Stages of Dying.” The encroachment of death was described in a series of detailed steps that seemed to be ridiculously specific.

Two to three weeks before death the patient will take to his/her bed and spend most of the time sleeping.

One to two weeks before death the patient will lose his/her appetite and become disoriented.

One to two days before death, his/her eyes will become glazed.

A few hours before death the body temperature will drop and the skin of the knees, feet, and hands will become a mottled bluish-purple.

It can’t be like this, Regina had thought back when she was laboring over the sentences. It can’t possibly be the same for everybody!

But apparently it was like that. And it was the same for everybody. Regina’s mother took to her bed three weeks before she died. “Regina, can I sleep for a little while longer?” she would ask with the pleading expression of a young child. Two weeks before she died she stopped eating. “Oh, yes, this soup is very good, can I finish it later?” Shortly after that the confusion set in. “How do you tell time? Take this clock, what are you supposed to do with the numbers? Add them up?” And then: “Are you my mother? But you are!”

She would refer to Regina as her mother more and more often, the closer to death she got.

“Mama, where were you?”

“I just went to the bathroom.”

“But I wanted you. I cried — that’s how much I wanted you!”

Is this the only experience of motherhood I’m going to get? Regina thought as she turned away to hide her tears. She tried to feel maternal as she stroked the warm fluff on her mother’s head; as she held her hand, shriveled and cold like an autumn leaf; as she whispered “It’s okay.” She couldn’t. She didn’t feel like a mother; she felt like a child instead, a frightened, abandoned child.

On the day of her death, her mother’s eyes lost focus and filmed over. Then her feet and hands became a mottled bluish-purple. Then she died.

She hit all the marks described in that book.

There was something insulting, something demeaning, about the universality of death. Regina’s mother, who had always refused to follow the rules and live her life like everybody else, couldn’t escape dying exactly like everybody else. Regina plunged into depression and anger. Or, rather, she wallowed in anger while she had the strength and sank into depression when the anger exhausted her.

Her mother’s old friends took care of the funeral and tried to take care of Regina as well, but she couldn’t bear their attention. Aunt Masha was especially persistent. Regina had to tell her she was going to visit her father in Canada and she said the same thing to her editor Inga, to avoid their visits and calls. The truth was that she didn’t even tell her father. She didn’t tell her friends either. She had mentioned that her mother was sick, but she didn’t tell them how serious it was. And when her mother died, Regina simply couldn’t bear making that phone call. “Vadik, my mom died.” “Sergey, my mom died.” “Vica, my mom died.” The mere thought of dialing a number and saying those words out loud made her shudder with revulsion. How could you possibly express the horror of what had happened in those three ordinary words? Regina abandoned her work, ignored her e-mails, didn’t answer the phone, and just stayed on the sofa crying until she fell asleep. She barely ate. She’d lost eighteen pounds by the time Vadik knocked on her door about six weeks after the funeral. He had a connection in Moscow on his way back to New York from Minsk, where he was interviewing some Belarusian programmers, and he had tried to contact Regina, but since she wasn’t answering her phone or e-mails, he’d come to her place. She was so weak from hunger and exhaustion that she could barely make it to the door. “Vadik,” Regina said when she opened the door, “my mom died,” and folded over sobbing. Vadik canceled his plans, changed his return ticket, and stayed in her apartment for about a week, and then he insisted that she visit all of them in New York. He even offered to pay for her ticket and help with the visa.

Regina told all of this to Bob during the period of insatiable intimacy they had in the first couple of months of their relationship. They were cuddled against each other on the huge sofa in Bob’s apartment. They had been talking for hours; it had gotten late and the room had gone dark, but they didn’t bother to get up and turn on the lights.

“I still don’t know what it was,” Regina said. “Did she subconsciously want to punish me for trying to get away? Or was this a gift of freedom? She knew how much I needed freedom, but she understood that she wouldn’t be able to give it to me while she was alive. So she had to die.”

“Or maybe it was neither,” Bob said, stroking her hair. “She could’ve died because it was her time. People die. They don’t do it on purpose, and they don’t do it for somebody else.”

The swoosh that Bob’s fingers made when they went over her ears reminded her of the sound of the sea. It was amazingly soothing.

Bob said that Regina’s mother was actually very lucky to have died like that, at home, in her own bed, in the presence of her daughter. Most people he knew died in hospitals, hooked to machines, surrounded by strangers, rendered speechless by trach tubes — no last words there. When his father was dying, Bob’s older brother, Chuck, kept screaming at the doctors to “do everything,” to “use every fucking heroic measure!” They broke two of his father’s ribs performing CPR. Bob told her, “You can’t imagine how much he suffered.” Later, he recounted all that to his shrink, and the shrink sighed and said, “Yep. Death is not what it used to be.”

Bob had never loved his father that much, but his death devastated him. The man had been a driving force behind Bob’s many endeavors. The family legend was that when Bob’s father saw Bob for the first time in the hospital, he had winced and said, “He’s nothing like Chuck!” Chuck was already the best and the biggest student in his kindergarten class. He could count to one hundred and kick the ball far into the bushes. Bob’s shrink told him that in a way this made Bob’s life easier, because if you’re born as a disappointment there’s no crippling pressure to succeed. Perhaps he was right. Bob’s biggest aspiration was not to succeed but to live his life in a completely different way. Bob went to an East Coast university, moved to New York, aligned himself with liberal politics, entered the IT field, and married a difficult woman.

“I mean my first wife, honey,” he explained to Regina, “she was a real piece of work.” And Regina felt momentarily jealous. Was she less challenging, less interesting than Bob’s ex?

“So when my father died, I felt lost, perfectly empty, as if my life was stripped of purpose. I felt as if I had been living my life for my father, even if my main goal was to defy him. I think I felt depressed for about a year.

“When my mom died, it was different. I loved her more, and the pain of losing her was way, way more intense. Once, something reminded me of her smell — she had a very particular smell, clean and dry like freshly sawed wood — and I started to cry like a baby. She was very reserved. Loved to read more than anything else. Actually, you remind me of her a little bit.”

That’s alarming, Regina thought, but the tenderness of Bob’s tone reassured her.

“My mom wasn’t a very warm person. I don’t think she ever kissed us unless we were sick. I used to believe that her kisses were a legitimate medical solution. Once I had a fever in school and the nurse gave me some aspirin, then later asked me if I was feeling better. And I said, ‘No! My mother didn’t kiss me!’ ”

“Bob, honey!” Regina said.

“Yes, I was very sad when my mother died, but I wasn’t devastated. It wasn’t as if my life stopped, which was how I felt when my father died. But the real horror reached me a few months after her death. I was at a dinner party with my old friends. Everyone’s in their late forties just like me. And then it hit me that I was the only person in the room with both parents dead. There was nobody between me and death anymore. No protective layers. I was next in line. I’ve never felt more scared or exposed.”

Bob had slid down and was lying on the sofa with his head in Regina’s lap. Regina leaned down to kiss him and her hair fell over his face as if to shield him from the horror, to create that protective layer he was seeking. She felt an affection for Bob swelling inside her, pushing against her rib cage, hurting her.

That memory never failed to move her. “Bob, sweetheart,” Regina said out loud, looking in the direction of the Hudson.

A baby’s cooing broke into Regina’s reverie.

“Now look at the nice lady! Is that a nice lady? Yes, it is! Yes, it is! Let’s wave to her.”

Regina turned to her right. On the next terrace over, there was a woman with a baby in her arms. Theirs would be the perfect neighborhood if it wasn’t for all the kids. Everybody seemed to come there to have a child. The woman was swinging the baby’s little hand so it would appear that the baby was waving to Regina. Regina gave the baby and the mother a Soviet-style young pioneer salute, picked up her empty cup, and headed inside.

Regina closed the balcony door behind her and walked over to the bookshelves. They had a whole wall of built-in shelves — Bob had installed them as a wedding gift to Regina, to house the books she’d brought from Russia. Old editions of Russian poetry, her mother’s translations, all the European classics, Soviet relics — like a samizdat copy of Solzhenitsyn. But there were also several shelves devoted to the American books she’d been meaning to read ever since she moved to the U.S. The novel Infinite Jest had the most handled cover, because this was the book she’d made the most attempts to read. Every time Regina opened it, she would be knocked out by its sheer brilliance. And the language! Reading Infinite Jest was such a powerful experience for Regina that she couldn’t read more than a few pages without stopping to take a rest. A long rest. More often than not, Regina wouldn’t resume reading it for months. But that book wasn’t the only one that presented a problem. There were shorter, less draining books on her shelf that didn’t fare much better. Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children. Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. Back in Russia she would have finished novels like these in a couple of days. She traced her fingers over their worn-out spines, pulled out Infinite Jest, and sat down on the sofa trying to summon the energy to start reading. The energy refused to be summoned. Regina remembered that she hadn’t had breakfast yet. Breakfast should help! she thought, leaving the book on the sofa and walking into the kitchen.

She wouldn’t eat a big, distracting breakfast. She wasn’t even hungry. She would just drink some more coffee — enough to give her the necessary energy for reading — and reward herself with food after she had finished a certain number of pages. She made herself a fresh pot of coffee. The coffee was good. In fact, it was so good that it would be a shame to consume it quickly. Regina put the coffee on a tray and carried it to the living room. She placed the tray on the coffee table, sat down on the couch, and clicked on the remote. Now what would be the perfect show to watch while drinking coffee? She knew where to get her answer. She had an app, this secret piece of joy that she had hidden from Bob on her phone. The problem was that the idea for the app had been Bob’s young assistant’s. He had pitched it to Bob and Bob had rejected it on the spot. More than that, Bob had laughed at it. Well, the assistant had gone ahead and pitched it to somebody else, who had developed it, and the app had became incredibly successful. Bob was still reeling. “I’ve misjudged the American consumer,” he liked to complain. “We are even lazier and more stupid than we think we are.”

Bob’s assistant had called his app “Dinner and a Movie,” but the company that developed it renamed it “Eat’n’Watch,” because they thought that “Dinner and a Movie” was too outdated and too limiting. Why not watch a movie while eating breakfast or lunch? “My thoughts exactly,” Regina had confessed to Vadik once.

You picked a movie or a TV program on Eat’n’Watch, then it suggested the best food to eat while watching it and helped you order it from a neighborhood restaurant. The app saved and studied your preferences too, so that after a few months of working together, it seemed to know you better than you knew yourself. And sometimes even better than you wanted to know yourself, thought Regina. Eat’n’Watch asked you to rate the shows and the food, but it never actually based its suggestions on your rating system. The algorithm was based solely on the frequency of your ordering a certain item or on the time you spent enjoying it. Eat’n’Watch got you what you truly liked, not what you wanted to think that you liked. For example, Regina would give five-star ratings to Bergman and Rohmer and healthy salads, but based on the frequency of her orders, Eat’n’Watch knew that she really liked pizza, hamburgers, the greasiest items on Chinese menus, and American TV series like Seinfeld, Friends, and Cheers.

“How about the TV series Blameless, about a mousy wife and mother secretly running a chain of adult-only resorts (Season 1, Episode 1), and the Lumberjack Special from Just Food on Leonard Street?” Eat’n’Watch was asking her now.

That shit and the Lumberjack? Really? Why do you think of me so meanly? Regina thought. She wasn’t even planning to have a big breakfast, yet the second the suggestion was made she realized that this was exactly what she wanted — some fast-paced, juicy, and brainless show, accompanied by a deliciously satisfying amount of sugar, salt, and fat.

She pressed the Okay button. That’s how effortless it was. All she needed to do was to turn on her TV and wait for the delivery person.

The problem was that Regina could never synchronize the time it took her to watch an episode with the time it took her to consume food. By the time episode one of Blameless ended, she still had one pancake, two strips of bacon, and some home fries left. She could just eat them in dumb silence like an animal, like a stupid zombie, or she could do the more civilized thing and turn on episode two. Regina chose to do the latter. Episode two was even better than the first episode, because that was when those blonde PTA bitches started to suspect that the main character was involved in something clandestine. Imagine Regina’s disappointment when she reached for a bacon strip in the middle of a very important scene and found out that there was none left. She clicked Pause. It was unthinkable to watch this shit for the sake of watching it. Or, rather, it was impossible to enjoy it without food. Regina thought of those Pavlovian dogs that started to salivate when they heard a bell, because they were used to hearing the bell right before the scientists brought them food. Physiological reflexes — blah blah blah. It was the same with her. Regina was so used to watching TV while eating, and eating while watching TV, that her mouth wouldn’t salivate unless there was something on the screen, and her brain wouldn’t accept video and audio stimulation unless she was eating. Eat’n’Watch had a solution — an excellent Cobb salad from Parsley, just around the corner. Regina sighed, added some extra blue cheese to her order, and pressed Okay.

She fell asleep in the middle of season three of Blameless and slept until six forty-five, when a phone call from Bob woke her up.

“I got held up,” Bob said, “but I’ll be home in ten minutes.”

Regina got off the sofa and surveyed the scene. The smell of kimchi permeated the room. There were crumbs on her bare legs and a gob of blue cheese was stuck in her hair. The coffee table was littered with plastic containers and dirty napkins. There were four huge plastic bags on the floor: Just Food, Parsley, Muriel’s Sweets, and Happy Wok. Infinite Jest, which had somehow ended up on the floor by the sofa, was stained with soy sauce. Regina was disgusted with herself. She felt sad and angry. She picked up the largest bag, which happened to be from Happy Wok, scooped all the trash along with the other bags into it, and pushed it down the garbage chute. Then she shoved Infinite Jest back onto the shelf, opened the balcony door to air out the room, removed her stained clothes and threw them into the laundry bin, and rushed into the shower.