Still Here

Chapter 5: #Knowthyself

“Next customer!” said the pale, pimply boy with the blue hair, and Vadik obediently unloaded his purchases onto the cashier’s belt of HippoMart. When he first moved there, Vadik misread the name of the store and thought it was called HipMart. “How fitting! Even groceries are hip here,” he said to Vica, Sergey, and Regina.

Organic ground chicken, maitake mushrooms, a small container of coconut rice, a pack of mâche salad, eggs, Icelandic yogurt, Intelligentsia coffee, a thin wedge of Gruyère, a smallish bunch of broccoli, three bars of Ritter Sport chocolate, a six-pack of local IPA, ultra-strength toilet paper, a pack of condoms, and a package of dishwashing sponges. Wait, where was the package of sponges? Nowhere. He’d forgotten to pick it up. It was too late to run back and get it, especially since that ghoulish boy didn’t seem too happy to be helping Vadik to begin with. He looked at Vadik’s items with a patronizing smile, as if he had a way of knowing that all of them had been forced on Vadik either by other people or by circumstances. That he had switched to Intelligentsia coffee because of Sejun’s insistence; that he didn’t really like broccoli but kept eating it, because broccoli was on the list of the ten healthiest foods; that he didn’t need his toilet paper to be ultra-strength; and that he longed to be in an exclusive intimate relationship that didn’t require condoms. He composed a Tumblr post in his head: “I used to think that stocking up on condoms was a sign of virility, now I think it’s a sign of loneliness.”

The cashier cleared his throat. Vadik looked up.

“Eighty dollars and seventy-five cents,” the boy hissed. Vadik swiped his credit card, picked up the plump shopping bag, and headed for the door.

All the passersby crowding Bedford Avenue on Saturday at midday were young and dainty, both men and women. Vadik felt bulky and old. He was thirty-nine years old, over six feet tall, and one hundred and ninety-five pounds. He didn’t fit in here at all. And not just in his physical dimensions.

Here in Williamsburg, Vadik often felt as if he had wandered into the wrong theater by mistake and had to sit there watching some stupid play that he didn’t understand and didn’t want to watch, then finally realizing that he was sitting not in the audience but on the stage and was expected to act his part. The sensation of being onstage was even stronger at home. His new apartment was situated on the first floor with all of the windows looking out over the busy street, with its constant traffic of cars, bikes, and pedestrians. He felt like he was being watched even when the blinds were drawn.

He decided that he didn’t have the strength to go home yet and entered a small expensive coffee place on the corner of Bedford and Fifth. Vadik ordered an espresso and sat down at a table away from the window, with his bag by his feet — veggies, condoms, ground chicken, and all.

Williamsburg had been Sejun’s choice. She had announced her decision to move in with him in August. Vadik was overjoyed, even though the circumstances of the announcement were a little strange. In the weeks leading to her decision, they were getting more and more distant — Vadik had prepared himself for the imminent breakup. But then Sejun asked him to come visit her in Palo Alto. “I’ll come in a few weeks,” Vadik said. “No, come now! Come this weekend!” she insisted. That last-minute ticket was outrageously expensive, but it was worth it. Sejun was unusually affectionate to Vadik. She kept snuggling against him, crying and laughing, cooing over him and praising him, and telling him how he was so much better than all the other jerks out there. At the end of his short stay, she announced that she was done with California, that she would be looking for a job in New York, and that they would be living together. Vadik was so happy that he picked her up, squeezed her in a hug, and spun her around the room so hard that she hit her shoulder against her garage-sale antique armoire. It was only when he was on the plane back to New York that her behavior started to seem suspicious.

“Sounds fishy!” Vica said, adding to his unease. Regina agreed. But Sergey was all “Sejun’s coming!”

Vadik half expected her to call him the next day and say that she had changed her mind. She did call him very early the next morning — it must have been 6 A.M. in California — and his heart dropped, but she just wanted to tell him that she had sent out her résumé to several promising places in New York.

She found a job in no time, at some hip start-up in Brooklyn. They asked if she could relocate in two months. She said yes. “Ura!” Vadik screamed into his iPad. He immediately imagined all the wonderful dishes he would cook in his immersion cooker for her, all the wine that they would drink on his beautiful terrace, and all those interesting stimulating things they would do in his enormous bedroom. But when he shared some of his fantasies with Sejun — fantasies that included cooking and fantasies that didn’t — she said: “No! Your apartment is too far from Brooklyn, you need to find a new one.”

Vadik went silent. He thought about the deposit he would lose if he moved out of his current place and all the other costs of moving again so soon, but then he thought that he should be ashamed of worrying about such things on the verge of this life-changing event.

“Hello?” Sejun said.

“Yes?” Vadik answered.

“What do you think about Williamsburg?”

Vadik didn’t know much about Williamsburg, but he figured that if Sejun thought it was a cool place, there was no reason he wouldn’t be happy there.

Over the next few days, Sejun picked out a few places on StreetEasy and asked Vadik to go there with his iPad so that she could check them out via Skype.

“Okay, now move it forward so that I can see inside that closet. Oh, wow, that’s huge! I’m not in love with the bathroom tile though. Ask the landlord if we’re allowed to change it.”

The apartment Sejun finally approved was a large two-bedroom (“We need a second bedroom in case my parents come to visit from Seoul”). It was on the first floor, but Sejun said she didn’t mind. The rent was a little higher than Vadik’d expected, but he thought that with two salaries they could certainly manage it. The next step was to pick out the furniture. Sejun allowed Vadik to keep his immersion cooker, but not much else. Most of his things were either sold or ended up in Vica and Sergey’s house on Staten Island. Sejun then furnished all the rooms via her iPhone using an app called Stuff Me! All Vadik had to do was receive the furniture when it was delivered and connect Sejun with the delivery guys so that she could explain where exactly she wanted it.

Two weeks before she was supposed to arrive, Vadik vacated his old place in Morningside Heights and moved into the new one.

“Show me all the rooms again,” Sejun demanded on his first night there. “I want to see how they look with a person there.”

It was then that Vadik noticed the first signs of trouble. Once Sejun saw the pictures of the apartment “with a person there,” she didn’t seem to love it as much as before.

“Shit, you’re too tall for that chair,” she said.

“You can use it then,” Vadik said.

“No, no,” she said, “I ordered it specifically for you. I won’t be comfortable in that chair. Oh, and please don’t lean on the table — it’s delicate.”

“It seems like she likes everything about our apartment except for me in it,” Vadik complained to his friends. Sergey laughed. Vica said, “Imagine that!” Regina was the only one to reassure Vadik, but even she didn’t sound too convinced.

A few days before Sejun’s arrival date, Vadik called to ask her for her flight number — he wanted to meet her at the airport.

There was a long pause and then Sejun said that she hadn’t bought the ticket yet.

Vadik almost dropped his phone. “But you have to start work in less than a week!”

Sejun explained that she was waiting for a cheaper last-minute rate.

“I’m fucked, right?” Vadik asked Regina.

“I’m afraid so,” she said.

After that conversation, it became really hard to reach Sejun. She refused to pick up the phone and ignored Vadik’s texts. Her final communication came in the form of an e-mail with a huge video attached. Vadik read the text of the e-mail while lying on the Danish Modern bed she had ordered, so low that it seemed like a continuation of the sidewalk outside. If Vadik opened the blinds, there would be strangers’ legs on the same level as his head, marching back and forth and all over him. Sejun explained that they couldn’t possibly live together. How they didn’t match at all but were simply drawn together out of loneliness, and how terribly sorry she was for making him move. “It’s a really nice apartment though, I’m sure you’ll grow to love it.”

Then Vadik opened the attachment. It was an electronic collage of their best moments together. A tasteful and moving collection of their photographs, with snippets from their e-mails dancing on the screen to Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love,” hiding, fading, suddenly coming into focus and ultimately merging into a large “I AM SORRY!”

Cohen! What a nice touch! Vadik thought before smashing his iPad to pieces against the footboard of his Danish bed.

This new place was the seventh apartment he had had since he moved to the U.S. Seventh! He knew that his friends made fun of this fact, but he had never thought it was ridiculous. He had tried out different places and he had enough courage to admit that they were wrong and move. He used to think it was admirable. A lot of people hated their lives, but just a few were able to admit it, and even fewer to make a change. And how on earth were you supposed to figure out what worked for you if you hadn’t tried and discarded the things that didn’t work? Weren’t you defined by what you were not? Wasn’t it Sartre who said that? Vadik took a sip of his espresso and googled the quote, confirming the words did belong to Sartre, but the sentence was a little different. “You are what you are not and are not what you are.” The second half made the entire sentence pretentious and senseless. Vadik decided to tweet just the first part and typed: “You are what you are not. #KnowThyself.” That sounded too serious. He changed the hashtag to #KnowThyselfie.

His phone buzzed just as he was posting the tweet. “Where are you? I’m hungry,” the text read.

Vadik sighed, left a generous tip on the table, and hurried home.

When he opened the door, he found Sergey in his usual position: sprawled on the settee by the window with his old laptop propped against his chest. Comfortable, contented. His dainty frame made him fit Sejun’s furniture better than Vadik. Sergey even enjoyed the fact that the apartment was on the first floor. He insisted that they leave the blinds up, because that way he felt “in the middle of the racket.”

“Hi, there!” Sergey said.

“Hi,” Vadik said, trying hard not to wince. Seeing Sergey first thing when Vadik entered his apartment was getting harder and harder to tolerate.

When Sergey appeared on Vadik’s doorstep three weeks ago, Vadik had no choice but to take him in. He was even a little excited. Vica threw Sergey out! No, he didn’t gloat that Vica and Sergey had finally broken up, he was excited because something huge had happened, some major event that would inevitably change their lives — his and Regina’s too. Of course Vadik welcomed the distraction from the prickly humiliation of his breakup with Sejun.

So he had led Sergey into the living room, brought him a shot of vodka and a huge mug of green tea, and listened to the stuttering account of what had happened.

Vica wasn’t shocked or angry when Sergey told her he’d been fired. Her expression was that of deep revulsion. She said that she knew it would happen. She asked if he understood how selfish it was of him to keep losing his job. Yes, she thought it was his fault. He acted like a child. He was ridiculous. What grown man would insist on drinking a glass of milk before bed? She said that he would never ever accomplish anything with the apps either. He was delusional about his genius. He was incredibly, sickeningly pretentious and some foolish people took this for intelligence. She used to be one of them. She was duped into admiring him. But now she was positive that not only was he not a genius, he wasn’t even very smart. He had loser genes. He was pathetic. She was sick of him. The thought of touching him made her shudder with disgust.

Sergey sat in Vadik’s elegant chair, rocking back and forth, his hands on his knees, staring straight ahead as if his life were a sad, incomprehensible movie playing out on the invisible screen in front of him.

“Do you have your things?” Vadik asked.

Sergey nodded and reached for a yellow plastic bag with MYEUROPE on it. There were several crumpled pairs of white briefs, an odd number of cheap socks, a falling-apart volume of Fyodorov’s writings, and a two-quart carton of milk. “I stopped in a deli on the way,” Sergey explained to Vadik. “I wasn’t sure if you had any milk.” That carton of milk in a plastic bag made Vadik choke up.

Sergey had been Vadik’s best friend for more than twenty years now. They first met when they were sixteen. Sergey and his parents came to spend two weeks at the Black Sea resort town where Vadik lived. Vadik’s aunt was their landlady. Vadik was immediately impressed by Sergey’s looks, his knowledge of American music and French philosophy, and his cool Muscovite airs. But Vadik managed to impress Sergey too. Vadik knew a lot of poetry by heart and he had already had sex with a girl. Her name was Nina. She made Vadik so crazy that he kissed her on the butt once. “Did you really kiss her butt?” Sergey asked. Vadik confirmed that he had. “I would never do that,” Sergey said. “Yes, you would, when you’re in love,” Vadik said. They spent hours talking about sex, and love, and death, and poetry, and the meaning of life.

They must have made a very funny pair. Sergey, short, trim, and Jewish-looking, and Vadik, blond, burly, and big, humming Leonard Cohen songs, reciting Mandelstam and Sartre, strolling along the beach together, Vadik’s footprints noticeably larger than Sergey’s.

They solidified their friendship when Vadik came to Moscow to study mathematics at the same university where Sergey was studying linguistics, and sustained it through all the calamities of their lives. But it was there in the United States that they grew especially close, taking turns navigating each other through the intricacies of American life.

—

“Stay as long as you want,” Vadik had said to Sergey. “Make yourself at home.”

And Sergey did.

It was amazing how fast he recovered. He had been thoroughly miserable for the first couple of days, but then one morning he woke up, made some Intelligentsia coffee (overbrewing it and splashing it all over Vadik’s white counter), and announced that he felt much better. He actually felt better than he had in months, possibly in years. After Vadik left for work, Sergey took the car, drove to Staten Island, picked up his clothes, drove back to Williamsburg, and spent the day exploring the neighborhood. When Vadik came home, Sergey told him that he had walked all the way to the Brooklyn Bridge and crossed into Manhattan and back.

“Did you know that if you go to the top of the bridge and stick out your open hand, you can see the entire downtown fit onto your palm?”

Vadik did know that. That was exactly how he felt when he first came to New York. Gigantic, omnipotent, bursting with energy. That was so many years ago.

The next morning Sergey announced to Vadik that he simply wasn’t a corporate nine-to-five guy. It had been a huge mistake for him to have spent so much time trying to fit in when it was impossible. Vica was too narrow-minded to see that. Virtual Grave was a brilliant idea, but trying to approach a developer with the mere idea for an app was an idiotic move. What he need was a working prototype so that he could ask investors for money and oversee the development himself. And now he had all the time in the world to build the prototype!

He wanted to tell Vadik more about his plan, but Vadik, being a “corporate, nine-to-five guy,” had to leave for the office. Sergey’s words stung precisely because lately Vadik had begun to doubt that he had made the right choice of profession. Back in Russia he used to enjoy programming. It was cool, it was exciting, it gave him a small adrenaline rush whenever he came up with some clever solution to a problem or wrote especially elegant lines of code. But more important, the job gave him the freedom to look for a perfect lifestyle. Programmers were needed everywhere — he could change companies, locations, even countries. The work was hard, the hours were long, but the money was pretty good, really good, in fact. Especially the money he made at DigiSly. The money allowed him to travel, to dress well, and to try out expensive hobbies like tennis, skiing, skydiving, or molecular cooking. But lately the senselessness of working so much was starting to dawn on him. He had to work for eight to ten hours every weekday and often on weekends too. It took him a couple more hours simply to unwind after work. So what time did that leave him to actually enjoy his life? A few hours every day and a bit more on weekends? It was ridiculous that he had to work so hard for a mere couple of hours of enjoyment, yet he could have lived with that if enjoyment was still there. But there was less and less of it, and whatever pleasure he experienced was becoming increasingly meager and forced.

So yes, it was hard not to envy Sergey, who plunged into his new life with youthful abandon. The first thing he did was to sign up on Coursera for several classes on new discoveries in linguistic patterns, web design, and user experience. Then he created a detailed schedule for his work over the next few weeks. He would wake up at six, make his awful coffee — spilling it on the counter every single time — and go for a run. Then he would buy and eat a bagel, and study for exactly four hours. At twelve thirty he would put on Vadik’s gym shorts — which looked ridiculously big on him — and do a hundred jumping jacks and fifty push-ups. “Draw the blinds when you do it,” Vadik told him. “Why?” Sergey asked. “I like it when people watch me.” Then he would make himself a sandwich, consume it at the tiny side table by the window, and put in four more hours of work. Then he would wait for Vadik to come home and make dinner, after which he would sometimes persuade Vadik to go out with him. He spent most of his weekends on Staten Island with Eric. He arranged it with his mother so that he could pick Eric up and drop him off without having to see Vica. He didn’t talk about her either. He would tense if Vadik mentioned her, and he never ever mentioned her himself.

Vica talked about Sergey all the time.

The first time she called Vadik was five minutes after Sergey arrived at his place.

“Is he there?” she asked. Her voice was thick with snot and tears.

“Yes,” Vadik said.

“Is he okay?”

“More or less.”

“Okay,” she said and hung up.

She called Vadik often.

“I just want to make sure he is okay,” she always said.

But Vadik sensed that there was some other motivation behind those calls. He was expecting her to ask him out or something like that, and the prospect was both frightening and intensely unpleasant. He still remembered the stickiness of her hug, the hunger in her eyes, when he first arrived in the country. As if she had been waiting for him, as if she had been hoping that he could fix whatever was wrong with her life. And then those two stupid hours on her couch five years ago and the feeling of shame afterward. Now that Vica was practically single, there was no stopping her. He would have to reject her, but he had no idea how to do that without hurting her. He desperately needed to talk to Regina, but Regina was reluctant to discuss their friends with him. “I don’t think I should meddle,” she told him. “I used to be Sergey’s girlfriend, remember? All of this is really awkward.”

Still, it was unfair that the entire burden of dealing with Vica and Sergey fell to Vadik. It was Regina’s duty to share some of that!

“What’s for eats?” Sergey asked, not raising his eyes from the screen.

“Chicken and broccoli.”

“Broccoli again? I think we should vary our lunches a little. Well, it doesn’t really matter, I guess, as long as we’re eating healthy. Did you remember the toilet paper?”

“Yep.”

“Ultra-strength?”

“Yes, ultra-strength!”

Vadik added the need for ultra-strength toilet paper to his mental list of things he couldn’t stand about Sergey.

The list also included:

Sergey’s inability to close cabinets after he opened them.

Sergey’s socks strewn all over the apartment.

Sergey’s habit of wearing Vadik’s socks, because he could never find his own.

Sergey’s bite marks left on wedges of cheese in the fridge.

A collection of dirty glasses was building up by Sergey’s bed. Every night he would put a glass of milk by the bed to drink during the night, but he never put the empty glass into the dishwasher in the morning; he would just take another glass the next night. So dirty glasses accumulated by the bed, a few cloudy with a milky film, others boasting some thick yogurtlike substance at the bottom or dried-up mold on the sides.

But the worst was Sergey’s singing on the toilet:

“Dance me to your beauty with a flaming violin.”

Vadik would groan and think: Burning violin, you idiot! Burning! Not flaming.

And there was also the question of money. In the three weeks that Sergey had spent at Vadik’s, he had yet to offer to pay for rent or groceries. It seemed as if contributing money had simply never occurred to him.

Vadik turned on the immersion cooker to preheat, washed the broccoli, and broke through the wrapper on the ground chicken container. Shortly after his breakup with Sejun, he invented this dish that was delicious, soothing, and easy to make. “Soothing?” Regina had asked. “Why do you need soothing food?”

“For my broken heart,” Vadik said.

“Your heart is not broken!”

It was incredible how all his friends denied him the ability to experience genuine heartbreak. None of them cared about his breakup with Sejun. None of them took his suicide attempt seriously. None of them even pretended to believe that what he had had with Rachel I was love. There were times when he doubted it himself, yes, but he never let himself doubt it for long, because the loss of Rachel was the only thing that gave his life in America a hint of tragic beauty. Without it, all that had happened to him in all those years was a stupid farce. A ceaselessly spinning carousel of crazy women. He would hop on and hop off, hop on and hop off, and there was no end to it.

The immersion cooker announced its readiness with a series of happy beeps. Vadik mixed chopped broccoli florets with ground chicken, added minced garlic and ginger, poured over some soy sauce, and put the green-gray mass into the cooker.

“How much longer? I barely had any breakfast today,” Sergey yelled from the living room.

“Eight minutes, forty-three seconds,” Vadik said.

“Good!” Sergey said. “I think we should go out tonight.”

“Aren’t you going to Staten Island?”

“No. Eric’s on a school trip to Washington.”

The bathroom door opened and closed, and a few seconds afterward Vadik could hear Sergey’s flawed rendition of a Cohen song filter down the hallway.

Vadik went into the living room and sat down on Sejun’s squeaky loveseat. He had counted on Sergey’s being on Staten Island tonight because Vica had finally asked him out after all. She’d called and said that she really needed to talk to him, and suggested a nice place for dinner. Hole in the Woods. Right off Union Square, so it was convenient for both of them. She said that Saturday at six would work best for her, because she was doing a weekend shift until five thirty. Vadik had no interest in dating Vica, and he was fully prepared to turn her down, but he couldn’t possibly tell Sergey that he was meeting her. And if he just told him that he was going into Manhattan, Sergey would definitely want to go with him.

A series of loud beeps broke his reverie. There were two messages on his phone: “Your food is ready, dude” and “Seriously, dude.” Vadik made himself stand up and went into the kitchen. The chicken and broccoli looked gray and pathetic, and smelled like burned garlic.

They ate it anyway.

After lunch Sergey went back to work and Vadik tried to read some Sartre.

“If you are lonely when you’re alone, you are in bad company.” Vadik wondered if he should tweet it or post it on Tumblr. He decided to tweet it. And a few minutes later this: “Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.” #KnowThyselfie now seemed stupid, so Vadik changed it back to #KnowThyself.

Around five, Sergey knocked on his door. To be fair, he always knocked.

“I’m done for the day. What time are we going out?”

Vadik cleared his throat and looked away.

“I have a date tonight.”

“Nice! With who?”

“Just this girl I met online.”

Sergey shrugged. “I could never understand online dating.”

“And why is that?” Vadik asked.

“It’s just so rational, so unromantic.”

“And what is romantic in your opinion?”

“A sudden meeting, a thunderbolt kind of thing.”

“Like what you had with Vica?” Vadik didn’t want to be mean, but he couldn’t help it.

Sergey tensed. “Yes, or like what you had with Rachel,” he said and left the room.

But an hour later, they were fine again, and Sergey said that he’d walk Vadik to the subway and then go for a long stroll around the neighborhood.

And so they walked to the subway, a grumpy Vadik and Sergey, delighted with everything — strange angles of buildings, graffiti, window displays, girls with funny hair, girls with funny shoes on, girls in funny shorts over funny tights—“I don’t even want to talk to them. I’m just happy that they are in such near proximity.

“Would you look at that graffiti!” Sergey exclaimed, pointing to the crumbling wall of a building across the street.

Vadik squinted, but all he could see was the green and yellow muddle of lines. Looks like vomit, he thought.

“I think these are aliens invading the earth,” Sergey said. “Reminds me of Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death.”

It was probably Sergey’s enthusiasm that annoyed Vadik the most. His ability to enjoy the same things that depressed Vadik proved that there was nothing wrong with Vadik’s surroundings, but that, instead, there was something wrong with Vadik himself.

“Look at it, it’s really good!” Sergey insisted.

“I can’t see,” Vadik said.

“I’m worried about your eyesight. You should seriously check it out.”

Was it just Vadik, or was Sergey starting to sound like a wife?

It was such a relief to finally reach the subway and part ways.

He had to prepare himself to reject Vica though. He hadn’t heard about Hole in the Woods before, but the name sounded peculiar, and he imagined that it would be dark and romantic and they would be sitting in a booth, and at some point she would touch his hand. Would it be rude if he moved his hand away? Would she take the hint or continue with her advances? Wouldn’t it be better if he told her right away that they couldn’t possibly be a couple? He thought about it all the way to the Union Square stop.

He couldn’t find the damn place. He checked Fourteenth Street and Seventeenth Street, the east side and the west side. The restaurant wasn’t there. He even asked a few passersby — nobody had heard of it. He thought for a second that it was some stupid prank. He felt like a fool. Then he got a text from Vica. “Where are you? I’m already in.” “I can’t find it,” he texted back. “It’s right off the south side of the square.” He walked back to the south side. There wasn’t a single restaurant there. Just Burlington Coat Factory, Forever 21, and the huge Whole Foods.

Then it dawned on him. Whole Foods! That was what Vica had said. She didn’t mean to meet him in a dark romantic place. She meant the fucking salad bar at fucking Whole Foods.

He saw her right away, standing at the counter with a little paper container in her hand, dressed in a nondescript pantsuit and looking wan in the harsh fluorescent lights. She didn’t appear to be happy or excited to see Vadik. “Hi,” Vadik said, leaning in to hug her. She had the sad smell of a medical facility hanging about her, drowning out her perfume.

“Are you coming straight from work?”

“Yes, I signed up for a weekend shift since Eric’s not here. Grab some food. I’m starving.”

There was a pile of dry spinach leaves in her container and a large pile of shrimp that she must have picked out of the big vat of paella.

“Are you still eating according to your formula?” Vadik asked.

It took her a moment to understand what he meant. She forced a smile.

“Yes, kind of.”

Eight years before, when Vadik first arrived in the U.S., Vica shared a few personal survival rules with him, just as he did for Regina six years later. One of Vica’s tips was about choosing food in a salad bar.

“If you want to get the best value, pick the items that cost the most and weigh the least. Don’t pick a piece of meat that has a bone in it, like a chicken drumstick, bones give it extra weight. Don’t drown your salad in dressing, it’s both heavy and unhealthy; skip the gravy; pick the shrimp out of the pasta dish; pick the octopus out of the octopus and chickpea salad; leave the carrots and potatoes in the stew.”

Vadik quickly put some salad into his container and followed Vica to the cashier.

They picked a table by the window overlooking the square. It seemed squashed by the surrounding buildings.

“Don’t you just love Whole Foods?” Vica said. “So many choices and the best salad bar in the city!”

Vadik saw that she hadn’t intended to offer herself to him. In fact, it was clear that the thought of offering herself to him hadn’t even occurred to Vica. He felt relieved, but a little bit annoyed too. The idea of dating Vica suddenly seemed filled with irresistible narrative logic. A guy makes a clean break from his past, goes away, explores another country, has adventures, overcomes setbacks, only to make a full circle and return to the woman he loved in his previous life. He imagined telling all this to Regina and seeing her approving nods, her admiring smile. “Yes, Vadik, of course! That’s how it’s supposed to be.”

But the woman he loved in the past wasn’t even looking at him. Vica kept piercing spinach leaves with her fork as if she wanted to see how much she could pick up in one go.

“So tell me honestly now. How is he?” she asked.

Just last night Sergey had confided to Vadik that he was able to envision his future for the first time in years. Before, every time he tried to picture it, he felt as if he had opened a door and there was nothing but dark stinky smog outside. Now, he could see some vague but cheerful shapes.

Vadik couldn’t bring himself to tell this to Vica. He sighed and looked away.

“That bad, huh?” Vica said.

She put her fork on the table and ran her fingertips over the tines.

“It was the right thing to do, right?” she asked. “It’s been hell for the last few months. You have no idea. He would walk in the door and I would immediately start fuming, because he didn’t shut the door well enough, or he slammed it too hard, or he didn’t put his boots in the right place. Or, you know, I would look into his eyes, and his expression would be so harsh, as if he couldn’t stand the sight of me. And I would get so angry, so angry that I would try to do something to make him hate me even more.”

She kept talking, picking up her salad with her fork, putting it back, looking up at Vadik as if begging him for support. She seemed to want some reassurance that she hadn’t made a horrible mistake. She looked thinner and younger in her distress. Less like American Vica, more like the Vica he remembered from their days in Russia. He had never been nostalgic for the past before, but now he found himself missing not just that Vica but his college days, his time in Moscow.

Vadik felt like reaching for Vica’s hand and pressing it to his face, to his lips. He imagined the tart taste of her skin. He looked away, afraid that she would read his mind.

They ate in silence for a minute or two. Then Vica said, “Okay, so I need your advice.”

Vadik nodded.

“I keep thinking of Virtual Grave.”

“Uh-huh,” Vadik said.

“You see, Sergey is a quitter. I’m not.”

Vadik didn’t have the heart to tell her that Sergey was actually working on the app like crazy, because it would reveal that he wasn’t pining for her all that much.

“Bob turned us down, because the idea was too morbid,” Vica said, “just as I’d predicted. I’d always wanted to make it more optimistic and upbeat. I actually had some great ideas. It was Sergey who wouldn’t budge. So I’m going to try to rework it. It doesn’t even need to be an actual app, just a service for people concerned with their online legacy. I was thinking of writing a business proposal and then maybe approaching some people at work. But it has to be more palatable. No more Fyodorov! What do you think?”

“Oh, yes, absolutely,” Vadik said. “No more Fyodorov!”

He wondered if he was wrong to encourage her about Virtual Grave, especially since he knew that Sergey was working on it too. The fact was that neither Vica nor Sergey had a chance to succeed. So what was the harm in their trying? If anything, it would distract Vica from her pain.

Vica smiled. She still had that tense closemouthed smile, a leftover from the era of crooked teeth. Vadik had forgotten how much he had always liked that smile.

“Do you want to go listen to some music?” Vadik asked after they scraped the last of their salads off the bottom of their Whole Foods containers. “There are some excellent venues around here.”

“No,” Vica said, “I have a bottle of sauvignon blanc waiting for me in the fridge. I’m going to drink the entire bottle as I browse through Hello, Love! I’ve been looking forward to doing that for ages!”

Vadik squirmed. The idea of Vica on Hello, Love! seemed offensive to him. Disgusting. Unbearable.

“What’s wrong?” Vica asked.

“Nothing. Just something in my teeth,” Vadik said.

When Vadik hugged her before they parted, he was overcome by that smell again. The sharp, chemical, merciless smell.

The smell haunted him all the way back to Williamsburg and for hours after that. It was barely nine when he got home, but he went to bed right away.

He woke up around eleven with a dull headache and exasperation over a wasted Saturday.

He sat up in bed and called for Sergey. There was no answer. He walked into Sergey’s room, but he wasn’t there. This was unusual, because Sergey started his day at six and didn’t like to stay up past ten thirty. He dialed his number, but there was no answer. Should I worry? Vadik wondered, then decided that he shouldn’t. Not yet.

He went to the living room, plopped onto the couch, turned on Netflix, and browsed for a long time until he found what he wanted to watch. Doctor Who, the series with David Tennant. Vadik was on episode six of season three when he heard some commotion at the door. Did he forget the key again? Vadik thought and went to open the door.

There was Sergey leaning against the wall kissing a girl. When Vadik opened the door, the girl moved her face away from Sergey’s mouth and said, “Hello.” She was small, with large, widely set brown eyes, a pale face, and long dark hair highlighted with yellow. Her smile exuded unwarranted friendliness.

“Hi,” Vadik said and stared at Sergey.

“Rachel, meet Vadik. Vadik, meet Rachel,” Sergey said. He looked a little scared and a little embarrassed.

Rachel #3, Vadik thought, even though for Sergey it was Rachel #1.

“Pleasure!” Vadik said.

“Likewise!”

Then they all fell silent. Sergey was the one to break it.

“I’ve had a very nice time, Rachel,” Sergey said. “I’ll call you soon.”

She looked a bit disappointed.

“I’m going out of town for a while. But call. Sure, call. Or, you know, message me on Facebook.”

“Sure,” Sergey said, and he and Vadik went into the apartment.

“Here, I brought some food for you,” Sergey said and handed Vadik a large paper bag. Then he went into the bedroom and closed the door behind him.

The paper bag had the words FETTE SAU BARBECUE on it. Inside there were three pork ribs, half a pickle, and a chicken drumstick with neat round teeth marks on it.

Vadik turned the TV back on and bit into the chewed-on drumstick, marveling at the degree of his discontent.