by Lara Vapnyar
“A small woman with red puffy eyes sprung out from behind the bushes and ran toward the gates.
“Inka and I exchanged looks.
“ ‘Isn’t that Sasha’s mom?’ I whispered.
“ ‘Oh, no,’ Inka said. ‘Oh, hell, oh, no, she didn’t tell him she was leaving.’
“And sure enough, as soon as she was past the gate, Sasha sensed something. He jumped up, dropped his pens, and ran to the gates. We ran after him.
“He was too late. The buses had just driven away and one of the soldiers was locking the gates. Sasha stopped and looked at the road. You could still see the cloud of dust. Sasha just stood there not moving, not crying, not making a sound, until he doubled over and started to vomit.
“ ‘Don’t you just hate mothers?’ Inka asked as we carried the listless Sasha back to our unit. I certainly did. I promised myself again that I was never going to become one.
“But that wasn’t the worst of it. Now we had to raid the kids’ nightstands and clear out all the food. Kids were allowed to eat in their parents’ presence, but they were forbidden to keep any food afterward so that it wouldn’t go bad. But of course, they tried to hide whatever they could. Just imagine the mess in their drawers! Broken boxes of chocolate, heaps of candy, bananas, banana peels, half-eaten salami sandwiches, half-eaten chicken drumsticks, squashed tomatoes, smoked fish mixed with crumbling pieces of cake. How they cried and begged us to leave them something! It wasn’t even about the food, they must have felt that we were getting rid of the last vestiges of their parents’ affection. The last nightstand was Sveta’s. She stood in front of it and said, ‘Don’t you dare open that!’ Inka tried to move past her. Sveta bit her on the hand. Inka screamed. She got so angry that she pushed Sveta onto her bed, and pinned her down. ‘Hurry up while I’m holding her!’ she yelled. I opened the drawer to scoop the contents into a garbage pail, but there was nothing there. ‘Where is your stuff, Sveta?’
“ ‘I hid it, you bitches,’ she said, ‘you’re never going to find it,’ and started to cry. And then it hit me. There was nothing to hide. Nobody had come to visit Sveta. We were so frenzied that day that we hadn’t noticed.
“I motioned for Inka to leave Sveta alone and asked Sveta to come with me. I took her to my room, opened a drawer and took out the box of candy that Myshka’s parents had given me. I took the top off and told Sveta to pick the most beautiful candy. I felt very good, very proud of my generosity and my pedagogical skills. She reached for the big truffle with a hazelnut on top, but then paused, raised her fist and smashed it into the middle of the box, making most of the candies scatter on the floor, after which she ran into the kids’ bedroom and plopped onto her bed to sob. I wanted to run after her and say that I was sorry, ashamed that I’d thought I could fix it all with candy. But I was afraid to make it worse.
“All the kids had trouble falling asleep that night. They kept tossing and turning, and sniveling, and blowing their noses, but gradually for each of them the exhaustion defeated anxiety. Each of them, that is, except for Sasha. He just kept repeating what he always did, that he was afraid of ‘where he was going when he fell asleep.’ I told him he wasn’t going anywhere, and that I knew this for sure because I came to check on them in the middle of the night and everybody was there, and he was there. I moved my chair up to his bed and he shifted forward and put his head on my knee. I sat and stroked his thin damp hair until his eyes closed and he fell asleep. I put his head back onto the pillow and left the room.
“I ran to my room, splashed my face with water, changed my shirt, and rushed out, hoping that I didn’t smell of roasted chicken, smoked fish, or vomit. On the way out I heard Sasha calling for me again. I pretended not to hear him and ran down the stairs to meet Danya.”
Lena was so engrossed in her story that she didn’t notice the rain had started.
Raindrops, prickly and hard like grain, fell on the tree branches around them.
“Is it raining?”
“It’s not that bad yet,” Ben said, “but we better hurry.”
But a few minutes later, the raindrops turned big and wet, and there were more and more of them, until they merged into strings, then columns, then a whole solid wall of rain. Ben grabbed her hand and they started to run along the path, jumping over tree roots and branches.
The path veered away from the lake, deeper into the woods, where everything had turned dark, sleek, and slippery. The boulders seemed to grow bigger, crowding the sides of the path, covered with soggy dripping moss. Behind the boulders ran the stream, filled with gurgling water the color of very strong tea.
“That’s the little bridge,” Ben said.
“That’s the bridge?” Lena asked. The bridge was thin and delicate, half-broken, like a toy from a long-abandoned toy box. Most of the railing was missing, and the planks were broken in the middle, some hanging down, touching the water.
She stopped and looked at Ben. His hair was thin and dark and stuck to his head.
He stepped onto the bridge, turned to her and gave her his hand. She took his hand and followed him, trying to keep her feet wide apart so as not to step into the missing middle. She had almost made it, but then Ben lost his balance and pulled her after him, and they both fell into the greenish-black muck.
SIXTEEN
Afterward, the whole cabin was filled with the sweet, sickly smell of burning wood and the moldy stench of wet clothes, which they had draped over every chair to dry. It covered the smell of sex.
They were sitting on the bed, naked, with a half-empty bottle of tequila on the bed between them.
“Did you?” Ben asked.
Lena nodded.
“You did? Really?”
She said, “Yes.”
“But back there, at the Holiday Inn, you didn’t come, right?”
“No.”
“I feared as much. I have this problem that you might have noticed.”
“What problem? I haven’t noticed!”
“I mean, it used to be much worse. I used to come in seconds. Now I’ve learned how to dodge it.”
Lena sat up tipsily and stroked his hair.
“Poor Ben. So what do you do to dodge it?”
“I try to hide from it.”
“Hide? Where?”
“I imagine that I’m this tiny animal. Like a mouse. And I imagine that something big is chasing me. And since it’s bigger and faster than me, and I can’t run very far from it, I have to fool it, I have to hide in places, and confuse it. So I hide under a rock. In the bushes. Between the fences. But you know, more often than not, it fools me. I would dodge it, and get away, and leave it far behind, and think now I can relax a little, but there it would be waiting for me just around the corner.”
“Ben! Really? Seriously? It’s just the other way around for me! I feel like I’m chasing it the whole time, and it runs away from me, and hides from me, and it does exactly what you do—it dodges me!”
Now Ben turned to face her, his eyes giddy.
“Oh, I get it now!”
“What do you get?”
“Well, that first time, you had this really grave, really focused expression. I was worried that I was hurting you. Turns out you were just chasing orgasm.”
“Stop laughing at me! I didn’t laugh at you!”
“Yes you did!”
They drank some more tequila.
Ben shook his head: “Still, I don’t get it.”
“You don’t get what?”
“Why female orgasm should be so challenging.”
“It’s not! Actually, I have a whole theory about orgasm,” Lena said.
“Do you?”
“I do. The key is in continuity. It’s like music.”
“Really? How is it like music?”
“You don’t remember what you felt before, but somehow your sensation at any given moment is partly formed or partly influenced by all the different sensations you experienced earlier.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I used to think that solving the mystery of female orgasm was as futile as trying to invent a perpetuum mobile. But you seem to be on the verge of discovery.”
Lena laughed and drank some more tequila. “I’ll show it to you. I have this thing on my iPod.”
She rummaged in her bag for a long time and finally pulled out an iPod covered in something that looked like cookie crumbs. She wiped the crumbs off and started going through the dial.
“Uh-huh, here it is. Chopin’s Fantaisie. It’s light and sweet. There is a timer on the iPod, so I’ll tell you exactly when the most wonderful part comes.”
She put on her headphones and took a pencil and a piece of paper.
“I think I got it!” she said, handing him the headphones and the piece of paper. “See, the wonderful part comes between thirty and forty seconds, then it goes away to return exactly at 3:35. Listen, so you can see what I mean. I’ll tell you when it’s time.”
Ben put the headphones on. She pushed the play button and peered at the timer: 32 seconds. She tapped him on the shoulder: “Now!”
She peered at the dial again and said: “Okay, there the music kind of changed direction, went higher, got a little more intense, then calmed down again.”
She tapped him on the shoulder: “It’s coming again! Exactly three minutes later.”
She pushed the stop button and took the headphones from Ben: “Did you get what I meant?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Now, if people could only record and replay what they do. Record not just the actions but the sensations. Like this, with the timer. So we could return to a particular sensation and replay it at any time. The mystery of female orgasm would have been solved.”
And she snapped the fingers on both of her hands.
“Just like that!” Ben said.
Lena reached for the blanket, but Ben stopped her: “No, don’t cover yourself. I know what we have to do now!”
“What?”
“I want to draw you.”
“Draw me?”
“Well, not exactly you—”
“Hey!”
Ben reached for the pencil and the piece of paper.
“I might be out of practice. I haven’t done a picture of a pussy in ages. Not since working on that comic book with Gerry.”
Lena laughed and moved away.
“No, no, don’t close your legs.”
Lena put her glass down and opened her legs a little.
“Great, remarkably beautiful.”
“Really? Is it really?”
“Yep. It’s fucking mind-blowing!”
She laughed.
“Lie down and spread your legs more.”
She did.
“Okay. Here goes.”
He made some bold, self-assured strokes.
“It’s very challenging to show it on paper. It’s all about the light. How do you show the curves? All about the light. Light, light, light.”
He grabbed the bottle from the table and took several gulps.
She raised her head to look at his face. He looked completely serious.
“You know what, I’m not sure if my drawing is very good, but I think I caught the essence of your cunt. Its personality.”
She spread her legs a little more. If somebody told Lena just three days before that she’d be doing something like that, she would never have believed it. She didn’t know it was possible to be that intimate or that comfortable with a man. She didn’t know it was possible to feel that good. And she wasn’t even drunk anymore. Not really.
“Yes. Like that. Perfect.”
Ben would glance up at his model, then drop his gaze back to the paper, the movements of his hands fast, confident, and precise. He crumpled the first piece of paper, saying that he’d gotten the proportions wrong, but then went back to work right away. He was especially thorough with shading, which he did with the “pillows” of his middle and index fingers.
“Shading is fun,” he said, raising his eyes to her face. “It’s as if I was stroking it with the tips of my fingers.”
“Are you almost done? I want to see it!”
“Almost. Patience!”
The expression on Ben’s face turned into one of studious concentration. He was putting on the finishing touches.
“Okay, ready,” he said, and lifted up the drawing for her to see.
Lena squealed in delight.
“It’s beautiful! Oh, it’s so beautiful. And you know what, it does look like a hedgehog!”
“Does it?”
Ben took the drawing from her, studied it for some time, then pressed it against his cock.
Lena moaned. She wanted him like crazy, but what she wanted even more was for this drawing session to continue.
“Come here,” he said.
“No!”
“Why?”
“I’ll draw you first.”
And then it was she sitting cross-legged, holding the notebook and the pencil, staring at him.
“I haven’t drawn anything in ages. It’s a nice pencil, though. Soft. I took this one art class in college. I turned out to be very bad at it. Okay, just put your arms behind your head. Perfect.”
She put her index finger forward, squinted, and measured it against his cock. Then she held her finger horizontally and measured like that.
“I’m trying to remember how they taught us about proportions. I think you do it like this.”
Lena shook her head and moved away to continue working on her drawing.
She was holding the pencil in the tips of her fingers very close to the paper. Ben was staring at her fingers fluttering over the contours of his cock in the drawing. She moistened her middle finger’s tip and rubbed it against the paper to make the lines a little smudgy.
He moaned.
“It looks more realistic if you smudge,” she explained.
She held the notebook in her hands and admired the drawing. She looked at his cock, then at the picture again.
“It’s absolutely perfect.”
“Can I look?”
She handed him the paper.
“Well, I’m not sure about the proportions—”
Lena threw a pencil at him: “Hey! It was done with love!”
“I can see that.”
Then he pushed the drawings away, grabbed Lena by the ankles, pulled her right up to him, and said:
“Enough art talk, okay?”
His damp hair stuck out in all directions. His eyes were dark, bright, and happy.
“Okay!” she said, laughing.
Afterward, they fell asleep. When they woke up, a couple of hours later, it had gotten dark outside, and the fire had almost gone out, and they were no longer drunk.
“Is it still raining?” she asked.
“I don’t know, I don’t think so.”
“I need to pee.”
She put on his jeans and shirt, filled a mug with water, and ran out to the outhouse. The rain had stopped, and it wasn’t that cold, but it was misty and windy, and not particularly welcoming outside. She peed, then washed herself as quickly as possible so that mosquitoes couldn’t get to her. She couldn’t really do it well, with just a mug in her hands, in the dark of the outhouse. How she longed for a warm bath! The first thing she would do when she got home would be to take a warm bath. This was a lovely thought, until she remembered that this would be tomorrow. She would get home tomorrow. In one day. In an instant she felt sober.
Ben had revived a fire in the stove and put the kettle and the big pasta pot on. When the pasta was ready, they emptied the whole jar of sauce onto it, and since they couldn’t find a cheese grater, crumbled some cheese with a fork. After the pasta they had t
ea. And after tea they went back to bed. They both felt that this had been such a long day, and they were too exhausted, too drained of energy, to move, or even to sleep, so they just stayed like that in each other’s arms. Listening to the rain fall onto the cabin’s roof.
“Tell me the rest of the story,” Ben asked.
The rest of the story. So this would be the rest of the story.
Lena sighed and started speaking in a soft voice.
“Where was I? Oh, I had just gone out to meet Danya. He was waiting for me at the picnic. When I came out, he stood up, grabbed my hands, and pulled me close. We kissed standing up for a very long time, and then he pulled me toward the woods.
“We walked to the spot where the barbed wire was trampled and broken. We passed the pool and headed onto the path that led to ‘the end of the woods.’
“I was wearing sandals. The strap on the left one was broken, so I had to clench my toes to keep it in place. The soles were so thin that I could feel every tree root. Blades of grass and hemlock leaves brushed against my ankles, and the warm mushy ground sloshed against the back of my heels. I thought a garter snake might crawl over my foot at any moment. Or I imagined a squirrel jumping right onto my foot, scratching me with its tiny claws, brushing against my legs with its tail. I looked over at Danya to see if he was worried about the same thing, but Danya was wearing his black army boots. I had no idea what he was thinking about. He was silent, far away, despite walking next to me with a firm grasp on my hand. I stayed silent too.
“I couldn’t believe how different the woods felt at night. We were walking down the same path that I had walked with the kids many times before, but I didn’t recognize it at all. Without the visual markers, like that fallen tree or a certain blackberry bush, I lost my understanding of location and distance.
