by Lara Vapnyar
“Just imagine how happy his mother was to get rid of him,” Inka said every time they had to turn his mattress over.
Back then, Lena was sure she would never be a mother. That she was unfit to be a mother. Even now, she had her doubts. She loved her children, there was no doubt about that, but they couldn’t make her happy. And if she were a truly good, devoted mother, shouldn’t the children be enough to make her happy, or at least contented?
She sighed and turned to the bleak hotel wall, hoping for a sound, solid sleep, so solid there would be no place for guilt and disappointment to creep in.
FOUR
The next morning Lena overslept. There were two conference panels that she needed to attend. She dressed, packed her things so she could leave for the station right after the events, and rushed downstairs to get to the campus. There was no time for a proper breakfast, so she grabbed a bagel and nibbled on it as she sat through the first panel. The discussion was on the Kinsey Reports. Lena expected it to be interesting but found it hard to concentrate. The bagel tasted like old chewing gum. The sandwich that she had during lunch break didn’t taste much better. Lena dreaded seeing Ben in the cafeteria, imagining how awkward their conversation would be after he had waved her away at the bar the night before, but when she saw that Ben wasn’t there, she felt something like disappointment.
By the time she got to the station, it had started to rain.
On the platform, people were shaking their umbrellas, shuffling their luggage, craning their necks to see if the train was coming.
Lena closed her umbrella and sat down on one of the benches.
She dialed Vadim’s number. He said there was nothing to report. She didn’t have anything to report either. She felt guilty about her encounter with Ben. Not just guilty but pathetic, because the only thing she could be guilty of was her desire to be guilty. The train heading up to Montreal arrived on the opposite platform. Two or three people walked toward the doors. Apparently, most of the passengers were going to New York. Lena had a fleeting urge to pick up her bag and get onto that train. She had no desire to go to Montreal, she just wanted to be traveling in the direction opposite from home.
More people were pushing through the station door. Among them, she spotted a tall man in a green slicker. Ben? His hair had gotten wet in the rain. He kept turning his head rapidly, looking for someone. He hadn’t seen her, and she felt like hiding. But where, the bathroom? No, it was too late. Ben had seen her and was waving to her. She had to wave back.
He walked over with a small, awkward smile. He was out of breath.
“I was hoping I’d catch you here,” he said.
Lena was so stunned that he had come here looking for her that she didn’t know what to say.
“Are you alright?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Listen, I’m so sorry about last night. I acted like a coward. In fact, I acted like a piece of shit. It’s just that my girlfriend is very sensitive, and Gerry—you saw what Gerry was like. Anyway, it’s a long story.” He looked sick with embarrassment.
“You don’t have to apologize,” Lena said. “It’s okay. It really is fine.” She just wanted for this conversation to be over.
A look of gratitude swept across his face, which just made her feel even more awkward.
“Are you still willing to give me your paper? I’d love to read it,” he said.
“It’s at the bottom of my bag.”
He seemed to welcome her answer.
“Oh, I’ll just give you my email then so you could send it to me.” He handed her his business card.
“Thank you,” she said, slipping his business card into her pocket, the same place where Inka’s card now lay buried under a pile of loose change and some cough lozenges. She glanced at the big clock on the wall.
“Are you waiting for a New York train?”
“Yes. I’m taking the train to New York, and then another train to Boston from there.”
“Boston?”
“Yes, I live there.”
Lena moved her bag to her shoulder and shifted from one foot to another.
“Boston! I’ll take you to Boston! I’m going to Maine. I go past Boston anyway. It’s absolutely no problem for me to drop you off there. Do you want me to take you?”
He reached for her suitcase. His eagerness made Lena laugh, but she couldn’t help being moved by it. She couldn’t remember the last time the prospect of her company inspired such enthusiasm.
“Fine. Take me to Boston!” she said.
He laughed and picked up her suitcase.
“You pack light, don’t you?” he asked, lifting her suitcase in the air.
His car was an old blue Chevy, the back seat crammed with boxes of books and random household objects. Ben had to remove a fur hat and something that looked like a portable stove from the passenger seat. Lena hit her foot on some huge chunk of metal lying under the seat. She bent to take a peek and was surprised to see something that looked like the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz.
“That’s an Italian juicer,” Ben explained. “The one they use to make spremuta. It was a gift from my ex-wife. Just throw it in the back.”
Lena could hardly lift it, let alone throw it, so she just moved it away from her feet.
They spent the first hour of their trip in uncomfortable silence.
“Are you okay?” Ben kept asking.
“Yes.”
“You look all hunched up.”
“No, I’m fine. It’s just that I’ve been driving a minivan for years and this feels a little low.”
“Put the juicer in the back, you’ll have more leg space.”
“It’s fine.”
“You’re not hungry, are you? We can stop for a sandwich.”
“No, no, I’m fine.”
“I think I have some water in the back.”
“I’m fine.”
There really was no space for her feet. So she rested them on her backpack. She was thirsty and longed to look at herself in the mirror.
She cleared her throat and asked if Ben had some music.
“The CD player is broken. You can try the radio.”
Lena tuned the radio to a jazz station, but then a commercial break came on and she turned the radio off.
“Where do you live in Boston?”
“Chestnut Hill.”
“Nice area. I used to live in Boston. Cambridge, actually.”
“Cambridge is nice too.”
The conversation died.
It had been so easy to talk to him at the reception. And now whenever Lena felt that she was about to come up with something to say, it slipped away.
There weren’t too many cars on the road, until suddenly there were. The traffic got really dense and slow around Albany.
Lena craned her neck to look at the traffic ahead.
“It stretches for miles,” she said.
“I think there’s an accident ahead,” he said.
Why did he sound apologetic? It wasn’t his fault.
“Why are you going to Maine?” she asked.
“I have a cabin there. My girlfriend hates it, so we never go there. She’s decorating our apartment in New York now, and since we don’t have any space for my old junk, and I can’t bring myself to throw it away, I’m taking it there.”
”You have a lot of books.”
“These are mostly graphic novels. I have hundreds of them.”
“We went to Maine on Labor Day weekend,” Lena said. “It took us seven hours. The kids were going crazy.”
“How old are your kids?”
“Six and eleven. Do you have kids?”
“Yes, a daughter from my first marriage. She’s nineteen. What does your husband do?”
“He’s a math professor. What does your girlfriend do?”
“She’s a lawyer.”
“Her name’s Leslie, right?”
“Yes. Leslie. What’s your husband’s name?”
“Vadim.”
The conversation died once more.
Lena wanted to ask about Gerry Baumann, but she was afraid it would make Ben apologize about last night again. Still, awkward conversation was better than no conversation at all, she decided after another ten minutes passed.
“Is Gerry Baumann an old friend of yours?” she asked.
Ben seemed grateful to have a new topic.
“Oh, yeah. We go way back. We were best friends in high school. We even drew a comic strip together.”
“Didn’t he win a Pulitzer?”
“Yep. For a graphic novel. But I always thought that the comic strip we did in high school was his best work.”
“What was it about?”
“I guess it was about sexual education in a sense. We called it Grammatology of a Pussy.”
Lena thought that she misheard the title and turned to Ben.
“Grammatology of a . . . ?”
“Yes, that’s right. Grammatology of a Pussy.”
“What does it mean?”
“Huh. Good question. It all started with Gerry’s father’s bookcase. It was our favorite after-school game. We went through his father’s philosophy books and tried to incorporate the word ‘pussy’ into the titles. Grammatology of a pussy, for example. That one was our favorite.”
Lena laughed. So now that they had some kind of a conversation going, the important thing was to not let it die.
“So what was it like? Did you have some brilliant insights on pussy?”
Ben shook his head. Lena noticed that his face looked different in profile. His nose seemed sharper, larger, his forehead more pronounced. The smile made the deep furrows that ran along the corners of his eyes more pronounced. Lena had a sudden impulse to touch his face. “I don’t think there were any insights. Mostly pictures. And then we were afraid that our parents would find the manuscript, so we wrote in code. We just substituted ‘Township of P’ for the word ‘pussy’: ‘When you enter the Township of P, you have to do this and that.’ We had to draw in code too.”
“How do you draw in code?”
“I would make hedgehogs out of pussies.”
“Hedgehogs?” Lena asked. “How on earth can you make a hedgehog out of that?”
“It’s really very simple. Imagine a hedgehog lying on its back. It looks remarkably like a pussy as it is. I just had to add tiny paws and draw a hedgehog’s nose over the top.”
“Have you ever seen a hedgehog? I thought they weren’t native to America.”
“It so happened that I did see a live hedgehog. Two of them actually. But that’s another story.”
There were crinkles in his eyes. He looked remarkably more attractive when animated.
“Tell me.”
“Gerry had this crazy uncle who brought two hedgehogs from Germany as a present to his wife. His wife hated them. She said they looked like rats with spikes. They gave the hedgehogs to Gerry, but he wasn’t sure how his parents would react, so he kept them in the basement. They had a neat basement. Gerry’s grandfather (he’d died by that time) used to fish, and there was all kinds of fishing equipment around, nets, rods, tackle, huge dusty boots, even a boat motor, but there was no boat. God, I remember it so well—the small dusty basement, the fishing rods suspended on the walls, two hedgehogs in a cage, the smell of pot.”
“Pot?”
“Well, yes. We started going to the basement, because it was a perfect place to smoke pot—Gerry’s grandma had recently fallen on the basement steps and she was too afraid to venture down there again. She would bake a big batch of carrot muffins for us, and we would take them down to the basement. I’d sit on the floor with my notebook, and Gerry’d prance around in those boots, with a muffin in his hand and muffin crumbs all over his chest, spouting his brilliant thoughts on pussy.”
Lena smiled.
What the hell were they talking about? Hedgehogs, pussies, pot. But she loved it. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had so much fun.
“Do you still have it?”
“Do I have what?”
“Grammatology of a Pussy?”
“The manuscript? No, I’m afraid not.”
“A pity!”
“Oh, yeah. Huge loss for humanity.”
“Do you know where I first saw the word ‘pussy’?”
“Can’t wait to find out.”
“The Canterbury Tales.”
“The Canterbury Tales?”
“Yes. At the camp, Inka and I used to read them aloud at night, hoping to find something about sex. We would read a passage and start laughing. One time Inka laughed so hard that she actually fell off the bed. And when she fell, I started to laugh, and laughed so hard that I couldn’t stand up and help her, and she got very mad at me.”
“The Canterbury Tales?” Ben asked. “Sex? Fun? Falling off beds? Are we talking about the same book? I read them in school and they were dreary. And how could you even get through Middle English?”
“Oh, we read them in modern Russian.”
“The Canterbury Tales in Russian! That must have been what made them sexy.”
“No, Russian made them confusing! I remember there was a line that I couldn’t understand. In Russian it read, ‘He grabbed her little box.’ I didn’t know what to make of it. Did he snatch her jewelry box and run? It was Inka who found the explanation in the footnotes. In the original it said, ‘And prively he caughte hire by the queynte.’ ”
“Queynte? What’s that? Wait! Is it . . . ?”
“Uh-huh. Very evocative, isn’t it?”
“Queynte, huh?” Ben said.
The green road sign rushed at them and then past them: 25 MILES TO BOSTON.
“Boston,” she said.
“Boston, right,” he said. “How far do you live from here?”
“About twenty minutes.”
“Only twenty minutes!”
He looked at her in mock disbelief. Lena picked her bag up off the floor and put it onto her lap, holding it tight by the handle and the strap. Parting with Ben in twenty minutes seemed inconceivable. Only thirty minutes to Boston.
“Listen. Do you have to be home at a particular time?” Ben asked, “because if you don’t, we can go to Rockport, and take a walk along the beach, and maybe have a bite to eat afterwards.”
“Rockport! Yes! I always wanted to go to Rockport, but for some reason we’ve never gone.”
“Perfect,” Ben said, and Lena put her bag down.
FIVE
But by the time they got to Rockport, it had started to rain so hard they could barely see the streets. It seemed as if the whole town were a watercolor painting, and everything—streets, houses, trees—was getting erased, washed off the paper.
“Where is the ocean?” Lena asked. “I thought we were getting to the coast.”
“You’ll see it in a second,” Ben said, making a turn onto another street. And there it was. The ocean, or at least the little of it they could see through the solid wall of rain and fog. Huge gray waves broke through the rain, threw themselves up, and smashed against the jetty. She gasped, and chuckled, and shook her head.
“Well, yes. But I guess a walk along the beach is out of the question now. Are you hungry?”
“Hungry? I don’t know.”
“We left Saratoga four hours ago. You must be. There’s a restaurant right on the dock.”
The restaurant turned out to be on the second floor. The stairs were outside, under the roof, which didn’t protect them from the rain that seemed to rush in from different directions. Ben took Lena’s hand and led her up the darkened, slippery steps.
Inside, it was empty and warm. Dark exposed wood everywhere, and the tables made of the same kind of wood with red-and-white-checkered tablecloths and pink napkins sticking out of pink plastic glasses. Ben led her to a window table even though they couldn’t see anything through the window except for cascades of water running down the glass on the other side.
The waitress had a blond crew cut and creased ski
n, like an old leather jacket. She handed them the menus and asked what they wanted to drink. Ben asked for a beer. Lena said, “Just water.” The waitress snorted with disapproval.
Ben started to read the menu with deep concentration, as if it contained a math problem. There was still something boyish about his face. That shock of hair across his forehead and the way he scrunched his nose when reading.
She wanted him to kiss her. She imagined that his lips would be cold and taste like beer.
Lena took a long drink of her water and looked away.
“Fried clams are supposed to be very good,” Ben said.
“Okay.”
“Gerry orders them all the time.”
“You used to come here with Gerry?”
“Yeah, when I lived here.”
“How did you feel when Gerry won the Pulitzer?”
“How did I feel? I was insanely happy for him. That’s how I was supposed to feel, right?” Ben paused for a while, his eyes searching her face. “No, I couldn’t force myself to be happy for him. Gerry won a Pulitzer even as my book proposal was rejected and I was struggling to hold on to my shitty job teaching art at a local Catholic school. His win devastated me.”
Ben took a long sip of his beer and continued.
“But it was nothing compared to his being the first to get laid. That was when I really felt crushed.”
Lena laughed.
“I know what you mean. My friend Inka turned into this really big shot. She is one of the most famous Russian journalists.”
“The very Inka who would fall off the bed while reading Chaucer?”
“Yes. Can you imagine that? And I’m insanely jealous of her career, but it’s nothing compared to how jealous I felt when I thought that she was more popular than me in the camp. She would go on all those dates, and I would be stuck taking care of the kids.”
“Who would you even date in a summer camp?”
“Ours was a very special camp. It belonged to the Ministry of Defense, so it was full of officers and soldiers. And all the counselors were the girls from the State Pedagogical University, a school famous for its lack of men. Everyone called it the School of Virgins. So you can imagine the chemistry.”
