by Lara Vapnyar
The waitress appeared with their food: fried clams and soggy French fries served in checkered paper baskets, with coleslaw in tiny paper cups, and soft, seedy pickles.
Ben picked up a bunch of clams with his fork, put them into his mouth and started to chew.
He had four deep lines across his forehead. They moved slightly when he ate. There was a crease over his left cheek that looked like a scar. Lena hoped that he didn’t notice how she stared at him. But then again, he appeared to be discreetly studying her too.
“So Inka was more popular than you in the camp?” Ben asked.
“Only at first. Then I finally went on a date, and bizarre things started to happen. I turned into a femme fatale.”
Ben put his glass down and stared at her.
“What do you mean?”
“I would go on a date with a guy and the next day he would disappear.”
“Disappear? How?”
“Um—it’s a mystery.”
“I love mysteries!”
“Well, it’s a long story, we won’t have time for that anyway.”
Ben shrugged and took another sip.
“Have you kept in touch with Inka?” he asked.
“No. Not since I left Russia. I’ve been following her career, though. It was hard not to. She’s all over the news. You know what’s funny, though? I ran into her two days ago. In New York. At Macy’s in Herald Square.”
Ben shook his head.
“Interesting coincidence. You saw Inka and I saw Gerry. I hope Inka wasn’t as obnoxious as Gerry.”
“She was a little bit obnoxious. But, you know what, she said that she just found out I had a secret admirer at the camp.”
“Nice! Who was it?”
“She wouldn’t tell me.”
For dessert they had ice cream with homemade blueberry jam.
His lips were cold and tasted like blueberry jam when he finally kissed her in the long corridor by the door just as they were about to exit, and then again, by the car, where they kept kissing for a very long time.
Outside, it had stopped raining but became very dark. Still, they had a clearer picture of their surroundings, with glimpses of boutiques on the main street, and fishermen’s boats, and the dark ocean speckled with tiny islands. They drove past the jetty, over onto the main street, past the grand inns and cute bed and breakfasts, all sporting proud NO VACANCY signs.
“There is a Holiday Inn a few miles north,” Ben said, as if they’d already discussed this.
Lena fought a surge of anxiety and said, “Okay.”
How strange, she thought, that when you meet a man you don’t know whether it will happen or not. And then suddenly you know. And know with such certainty, it’s as if it already happened.
It was very cold in the lobby of the Holiday Inn. Lena poured herself some acrid coffee from a big urn and sipped it as Ben signed them in. The key the receptionist gave them wasn’t the usual plastic hotel key, but a real metallic one with something like a heavy wooden pear attached to the ring. The pear banged against the door when Ben turned the key to the right and then to the left. Lena was the first to enter the room. She walked to the middle and stopped between the bed and the bureau. There wasn’t any other furniture except for a single chair by the window. She caught her reflection in the mirror beside the commode. She looked rumpled, helpless, and small. She felt like that too. She dropped her bag to the floor and turned to Ben.
One day that summer, Lena and Inka went to the underground spring to get some fresh water.
The path to the spring branched off the main road to the camp and wound through the fields and meadows and narrow strips of birch forest. They walked at a leisurely pace, swinging the empty teakettles, savoring all the little pleasures of the countryside: the view of rolling hills, tiny houses far on the horizon line, the warm sun on their shoulders, the prickly grass against their ankles, the crumbly soil under their feet, the yellow flowers, the clucking of chickens, the dust in the middle of the road, even the smell of manure from the fields.
“Why is it that the smell of cow shit has these romantic associations, and human shit is simply disgusting?” Inka mused.
“I don’t know. Maybe you should write a poem about it,” Lena said.
Inka laughed and swung her teakettle at Lena.
Just a few days before, they wouldn’t have been able to imagine their stay in camp could be enjoyable. Then they discovered the secret that experienced counselors had known all along: their job wasn’t that hard if you didn’t try to do it all that well. So what if the kids didn’t eat on time? So what if they soiled their clothes? So what if they didn’t wash their faces or brush their teeth? Nobody died from that. And that terrible fear that a kid would get lost. So far nobody had, and it was unlikely that anybody ever would. The kids were terrified of the woods. They wouldn’t have dared venture anywhere on their own. As far as they understood, there were only two things Yanina cared about: full attendance during assemblies and keeping the kids’ hands above the blankets. Once Inka and Lena had devised ways to ensure that, they stopped worrying. Another thing that they discovered was that there were times when they could be completely free. There were movies twice a week, when they just dropped the kids at the club and could do whatever they wanted. They could even leave the camp. Sometimes they went to the country store and bought cakes of brown soap, bread, cookies, and fresh strawberries. They didn’t really need any of it, but the idea of going somewhere with the purpose of buying something made them feel civilized and accomplished. Or sometimes they would walk to the cornfield, pick a few ears of unripe corn, slim and tender, silky, greenish-white, and eat it raw. Still, their favorite trip was to the spring.
They swerved off the path and entered a thicket of birches. The grass there was tall and damp, and even the air smelled fresh and green. After they filled their teakettles, they usually sat down in the shade to chat. Sometimes, they would even bring a book. Today it was volume six of The Arabian Nights:
“ ‘And Nur ad-Din turned to her at once, and clasping her to his chest, sucked on her upper lip, having sucked on her lower lip first, after which he shot his tongue into her mouth.’ ”
Lena liked how Inka read. Not too fast, and in a calm, casual manner.
“Kind of hot, don’t you think?” she asked.
Lena nodded.
Inka continued: “ ‘Then he raised himself up to her and found her to be an undrilled pearl, an unbroken mare.’ ” Inka put the book down and sighed.
“So, are you?” she asked.
“Am I what?”
“An undrilled pearl, an unbroken mare?”
If Lena had seen the question coming, or if Inka had asked “Have you ever done it?” she would’ve probably said that she had done it, but the question came as a shock, and it was so funny that she started to laugh, and after she finished laughing she said that she was in fact an undrilled pearl. Having admitted this to Inka, she immediately felt better. At least she didn’t have to lie anymore.
“I had a guy put his hand down there,” Lena said.
“And?” Inka asked.
“It felt good, but I started getting wet, and I didn’t want him to notice it, and moved his hand away. I regretted it afterwards.”
Inka said that she had done it. A couple of times, with a boy from her hometown. She didn’t like it. She said that once the penis was in, you felt nothing. She claimed that a woman could only experience pleasure from the stuff that came before, touching, kissing, petting. And that you got so crazy from all that touching and kissing that you all but begged the boy to put it in. “You see,” she explained, “hormones work like that, they fool you into thinking that you want a penis inside of you. They have to fool you for the sake of reproduction. But once the penis is actually inside of you and starts to move in and out, you feel nothing, you just lie there and wait until it’s over. Sometimes, you get so tired of waiting that you start to move too, or to tighten your muscles in there so that i
t will be over sooner. The funny thing is that when you start to do that, the boys think you’re really enjoying it. But I don’t know, maybe it’s different when you’re in love.”
SIX
Lena woke up at six with a terrible headache. At first she almost welcomed the headache, which somehow made her feel less guilty for what they’d done. But then the noises from the construction site right in front of the Holiday Inn started making her pain intolerable. An excavator kept advancing and retreating as if performing some court ritual. She brushed her teeth and dressed and tiptoed out of the room trying to make as little noise as possible. There was no coffee in the lobby. It was damp and bitterly cold outside, shreds of early morning fog hanging over the gray parking lot. Lena spotted a mall across the street that was bound to have a coffee shop. She decided that the fastest way to get to the mall would be through the opening in the barbed-wire fence behind the pool. She scratched her leg against a broken wire as she was climbing through. Tiny beads of blood broke through the skin in a long thin line.
The Joy of Java place was crowded; patrons with their coffee and opened papers occupied every table. At the next table, an elderly emaciated man in shorts was staring at Lena over his coffee with an expression of curious disapproval. He looked like Vadim’s father. Lena wondered if it was possible to guess from the look on her face that she’d just spent the night having wild sex. Well, the sex hadn’t been exactly wild. It had been earnest rather than wild—earnest and awkward.
She took another sip of coffee.
She was bad at one-night stands—she’d always known that. It took her forever to figure out what it was that she wanted and how exactly she wanted it, and it took her even longer to gather up the courage to say it out loud. And as for her own actions—they weren’t too impressive either, because she was too afraid to try something that her partner might not like and too shy to ask him. She must’ve seemed silent and morose to him. She had been silent and morose.
Another reason—possibly the main reason—why she couldn’t enjoy it was that Ben was a stranger. A complete stranger in every sense—from his smell, to his movements, to the sounds he made. She knew that a lot of people found the idea of strangeness exciting. She didn’t. She found it frightening and somewhat disgusting.
She wondered if Ben really had come the second time. She couldn’t tell. He’d roared with great enthusiasm, but his eyes had looked tired. She herself never faked, because she found it awfully embarrassing—for some reason it was easier for her to admit that she didn’t come (although this was embarrassing too) than to fake an orgasm.
She was pretty sure that Ben had faked his orgasm that second time. Did men even fake orgasms? She had nobody to ask about that. It was strange, but Inka had been the only person with whom Lena was completely open about sex. It had taken Lena a long time to admit to Inka that she was a virgin, but since then, they had exchanged the most intimate information, growing closer and closer in the process.
“I just know that I’ll meet somebody,” Inka told Lena on the eve of the first dance. “Last night, I had a dream that I was naked with a guy, in the woods, at night.”
Lena wished she could share something equally exciting, but she never remembered her dreams.
On the morning of the first dance, everybody in the camp was checking the weather. Inka and Lena studied the clouds, and discussed what their shape and color meant. They even sent a couple of kids to check on the dance floor, to see whether the boards appeared to be solid enough. Everything seemed fine, yet as evening approached Lena was overcome by panic. The girls who had been there before said that the first dance was crucial to your dating future. If nobody asked you, then your prospects were probably pretty bleak.
The floor didn’t collapse, and the loudspeakers were working fine, and by eight the whole population of the camp was there. Dressed up and excited camp residents were walking up the steps to the dance floor from all sides. Little kids came in pairs, holding hands, preceded and followed by their counselors. Big kids came in groups of four or five. Soldiers came as one big crowd, making the boards creak under their feet. Staff members came by themselves, wearing clothes that nobody would have imagined them wearing, like Galina’s silver top, or Yanina’s very tight, very yellow dress, or Natasha’s scarf with the pattern of horsemen.
Inka and Lena led their kids up the steps and took the space to the left by the fence, opposite the corner occupied by the soldiers. Lena scanned the crowd of soldiers, trying to determine who she liked. She picked two. One was a tall guy with dark curly hair. He looked smart and he observed everything with a sly smirk, and whatever he was saying made other soldiers double up laughing. The other guy that she liked wasn’t talking to anybody. He stood a little apart from the others, leaning against the fence. His features were still and sharp, like those of a wood-carving, but his eyes were dark blue, very bright and alert. Dena, a very pretty counselor with sunshine-yellow hair, noticed Lena’s stare and said: “That’s Danya, he is our artist.” Lena blushed and looked away. When she turned in the soldiers’ direction again, she noticed that the tall guy was staring at her. Their eyes met. He smiled and winked at her. Did this mean that he was going to ask her to dance? Lena decided that she liked him better than the wooden-faced Danya, who wasn’t looking at her at all.
And then boom—the first beats of music rippled through the air. They felt the vibrations first—through the floor under their feet, through the rickety fence behind their backs—and the next instant the music came, so loud that they couldn’t recognize the words or the tune.
Dena was the first to venture to the middle of the floor. She ran out, dragging two fourteen-year-old girls from her unit with her. Their movements were light and swift. A couple of soldiers stepped forward and joined Dena and the girls. Other counselors and older kids started to move closer to the middle. Lena caught the tall soldier staring at her again. She started to laugh and grabbed Inka’s hand and dragged her to the middle of the floor. Suddenly, though, the song ended, and they had to freeze in the middle of the floor. They felt like idiots. When the next song started, it was very fast. Too fast. Lena didn’t know how to dance to that, but eventually decided to try. She jumped, and rocked, and dunk, and bent down, and threw her hands up, and jumped again still higher. At one point she almost knocked over Sveta Kozlova, who tried to dance as close to the counselors as possible. But Lena didn’t care. It was as if she were drunk.
Then the music stopped and Volodya, the DJ, paused meaningfully and sighed into his mike before announcing the slow dance. Everybody who had been dancing in the middle of the floor filtered back toward the fence, hoping to be asked for a slow dance. Dena was asked before she even made it to her place. Lena tried very hard not to look at the soldiers. She was staring down at her sandals, at her skirt, smoothing folds, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. She didn’t say anything to Inka, but she felt Inka’s presence next to her, her breathing—she was still catching her breath after all the jumps—and her heat. Lena saw a soldier walking across the floor toward her. She could only see his boots, but she knew, she simply knew that he was the tall soldier who’d been staring at her.
“My name is Andrey. Shall we dance?” he said. Lena raised her eyes. Andrey wasn’t looking at Lena. He was looking at Inka. He was asking Inka to dance with him. Inka and not Lena. Inka’s face lit up with a smile as she followed Andrey to the middle of the floor. Lena felt foolish and angry. She suddenly remembered about Danya, the soldier with dark blue eyes, and turned to see if he was still standing alone. He wasn’t there.
Lena spent the whole five minutes of the slow dance awkwardly leaning against the fence, mulling over her bleak dating prospects, because she did believe that camp superstition that claimed that the first dance decided your fate. After the slow dance it was time to take the kids to bed. Most of them were still in place hanging by the fence. But sweaty and red-faced Alesha Pevtcov kept running and dodging and hiding from the counselors. “Alesha!” I
nka screamed. Andrey jumped over the fence and a moment later emerged with a squealing and wiggling Alesha squeezed under his arm. He put him down and gave Inka the military salute. It was the perfect fairy-tale moment. A brave knight conquering a three-headed fire-breathing dragon to save a fair-haired maiden. And when Alesha got hyper, he was hardly any easier to conquer than a dragon. So, yes, Inka beamed with gratitude. But she was too fat for a fairy-tale maiden! Inka then took Lena aside and asked her to take the children back. “I need to talk to Andrey, okay? You don’t mind, do you? Really? Thank you! Thank you so much!”
Lena led the kids back to their unit. She could still hear the beat of the music, but the excitement had petered out. She felt tired and a little nauseous, and embarrassed about the way she’d danced.
After the kids were asleep, Lena went to her room and tried to read, then tried to sleep, then ate some candy. She felt like an elderly spinster aunt who always takes care of the children. She listened to the sounds coming from the kids’ bedrooms, hoping that something bad would happen to distract her from thinking about Inka, or maybe that something really bad would happen and Inka would feel guilty for going on a date. Lena thought that she was just as pretty as Inka. Actually, she considered herself much prettier. Inka wasn’t that pretty to begin with. Inka looked like a cow. She fell asleep while trying to imagine her roommate grazing in the meadow with a cowbell around her neck.
Somebody in the café dropped a tray with coffee mugs, breaking Lena’s reverie.
She looked into her own empty mug and wondered if she should’ve bought coffee for Ben as well. Her mother loved to say that every relationship was a journey from a cup of coffee served to you in bed to a coffee mug thrown in your face. Yet, wouldn’t it be really selfish and impolite not to bring him coffee? She stood up and went to the end of the line.
