by Lara Vapnyar
“I should’ve probably left Vadim back then, but he got really sick. He was sick for months. I got so scared that I broke off all contact with Marcus, I promised that I would never ever do something like that again, and I begged Vadim to forgive me. And then we hit that bubble of intimacy. Everything became brightly lit, brought into unbearably sharp focus. We were forced to see each other not just like partners or roommates, but like human beings with all this complicated shit inside. We suddenly wanted to know each other, to understand each other. But what we found out about each other didn’t help us in the long run; if anything, it made things worse. The most important thing that we understood was that we couldn’t possibly understand each other. We were too different. In a few months I found out that I was pregnant with our second child. This time the news didn’t make me happy. By then, whatever newfound intimacy we’d discovered had already evaporated. I felt further apart from Vadim than I’d ever felt.”
“What happened to Marcus?”
“He quit the graduate program and left. I haven’t heard from him since then.”
They lay in each other’s arms in silence, and then Ben said, “Remember, how you asked me if I was happy with Leslie?”
“Yes.”
“And I started mumbling that nonsense about the elusive nature of happiness.”
“Yes.”
“I am not happy. I’ve been miserable for a very long time. But Leslie has this very precise, very beautiful model of happiness, and she builds our lives together according to it, and if something doesn’t work, she just thinks of it as an obstacle that we should work through. In her opinion, family is something you have built and continue building, something that exists according to certain rules, something that will fall apart once the rules are broken. When we first started the affair, it was really intense. These little trips back and forth. Waiting, anticipation. And then, you know, the passion was gone, at least for me. But I was afraid to hurt Leslie’s feelings, so I started faking it.”
He turned onto his back and put his arms behind his head.
“If you stop and think about it, practically every single thing that we do is either to distract ourselves from what is wrong with our lives, or to please somebody else, to shield ourselves from reproaches and guilt. And while doing that, we’re building a cocoon around ourselves, thicker and thicker, and we stay inside and suffer from loneliness, and long to break out of the cocoon. But as soon as we do break out, people around us get hurt, and we feel guilt, reproaches, and shame, and so we go back and continue building that cocoon, and it gets unbearably lonely in there.”
“I know. I know. I know.”
“About three years ago Leslie caught me with this woman I was seeing. Catherine, a sculptor. Leslie was devastated and she said that she was leaving me. And I was scared—you know, scared of winding up alone, yep, that’s how pathetic I am—but mostly I was relieved. Because I knew that I didn’t love Leslie anymore, and I knew that I didn’t want to stay with her for the rest of my life. But Leslie didn’t leave me. She went ahead and left her husband, so we could really be together.”
“Are you going to stay with her for the rest of your life?”
“Don’t say ‘the rest of your life’! It fills me with such horror. The thought of marrying Leslie makes me sick, but the thought of leaving her makes me sick too. The process of leaving, I mean. I know that I’d be better off without her, and I’m pretty sure that she’d be better off without me. But I can’t bear the thought of actually telling her that I want to leave. It’s like a child’s fear of throwing up. You know that in order to feel better you have to do something awful and scary, and you can’t, you’d rather stay where you are and feel bad.”
“Does Leslie know how unhappy you are?”
“No, I don’t think so. For the most part, she doesn’t. She has an enviable ability to believe what she wants to believe. And when she notices that I’m kind of down, she ascribes it to my general inclination to be depressed.”
“Are you?”
“Am I what?”
“Depressed?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I get painfully aware that I’ve lived the active part of my life through, and from now on it’ll be just gray and endless like the credits after a movie. Take travel. I used to love to travel. But now, as soon as we get to a new place, I have the acute sensation of a void, as if something essential is lacking. We appear to be fine, we talk, we laugh, we walk hand in hand, we do look as if we’re enjoying the trip a lot, yet everything seems murky and distant, as if I were watching life passing by through the unwashed window of a train. And I catch myself thinking that I want this trip to be over as soon as possible. Leslie and I went to England this fall. Leslie was really looking forward to it. I was too, hoping for distraction, excitement, I don’t know—fresh impressions. I tried so hard to make it a good trip, to enjoy it, to be happy. And you know what happens when you try hard to be happy. When you have to ‘work’ at it. On the outside, you succeed, everything looks fine. But inside, you feel such boredom and exhaustion. In one of the bed and breakfasts where we stayed, there was something wrong with the light switch in the bathroom. The light would go out every ten seconds or so, and then you had to fumble against the wall looking for the switch. I felt kind of like that throughout the trip. I would see something exciting—and I would come alive, and be pleased with myself that I was able to come alive at all. And then the light would go off, and all the things around me would look fake and dull like pictures in an old dusty coffee-table book, and all I felt would be boredom and longing to get somewhere else, to get out, to go to a different destination, to arrive somewhere where I could rest and stop forcing myself to feel alive.”
“Oh, Ben. Ben. Ben. Ben.”
The fire was almost out and the rain had stopped. It had gotten darker and colder in the cabin, and Lena became suddenly aware of the woods around them. Tall, dark, and eerie. Full of creepy sounds and smells. Lena turned to her side and moved closer to Ben, her hair touching his face, her ass grazing his stomach. She felt warm. Even her hair felt warm.
Ben hugged her and closed his eyes.
She shifted her body closer. He reached with his hand and touched her bare back, then ran his fingers down her spine to the little sweaty hollow. Her ass trembled under his hand. As they pushed toward each other, the position of their bodies on the bed changed, they seemed to be moving clockwise, until they were across the bed, her forehead pressed to the wall. She felt the fuzzy exposed logs against her face, splinters, soft hairy strings, the old homey smell of wood and decay. She moved even closer to Ben so that every single spasm that rippled through her body reached his as well.
Afterward, she lay quietly with tears streaming down her face, down her right side, all the way to her ear. Ben kept wiping them away so that they wouldn’t get inside her ear. He whispered “I love you” in an endlessly tender but barely discernible voice. She whispered “I love you” back.
They could hear each other’s breathing, the sizzle of pine branches in the stove, and moths rustling over the lamp and banging against the glass. And then there were no more sounds, and no more images, just the heavy warmth all around them.
SEVENTEEN
Lena woke up in the middle of the night with the strange feeling that there was a moose in the room. Standing between their bed and the wall, right next to her, pointing its head toward her, sniffing, and scratching the floor with one hoof. It was skinny just like the one they had seen on the road, with the same dingy, worn coat, and long strings of wet grass stuck to its chin. Lena knew that if she opened her eyes it would look right at her, and she knew that she should avoid that at any cost. “Why?” she thought. “I’m not the one who is afraid of moose.” But she couldn’t make herself open her eyes, so she just lay listening for the sounds the moose would make. The moose was quiet. At least it wasn’t in distress. She hoped it would just quietly leave the room, but then realized that it wouldn’t be able to do that. There wasn’
t enough space between the bed and the wall for it to turn around, and she wasn’t sure if a moose could move backward. She’d never seen a moose moving backward. They probably couldn’t do that, or weren’t smart enough to figure out that they could. She snuggled up to Ben for protection.
When Lena woke up a couple of hours later, Ben was already up. She heard him open and close the door.
Lena started to pull on Ben’s jeans, then remembered that she should leave them here. She reached for her bag and took out a T-shirt and her linen pants—all wrinkled, light blue, silly-looking. She got dressed, folded Ben’s clothes, and put them back into the box. She picked the used tissues up off the floor and carried them to the tiny garbage pail that overflowed with the remnants of their food—they hadn’t eaten that much. Two crumpled sheets of lined paper were stuck to the side of the pail. She knew what they were. The drawings they made the day before. Seeing them in the garbage pail stung. Which was ridiculous. What did she expect? That Ben would take them with him, frame them, and put them on the wall? She remembered the barely discernible words that they had whispered to each other right before they fell asleep. The memory formed a knot in the pit of her stomach.
She looked out the window and saw Ben splashing at the edge of the lake. He stood with his back to her. Naked—a towel, and a pile of clothes nearby on the grass. Shivering. Scrubbing himself with a tiny piece of soap. She put the kettle on, and took two Advil.
She was eating bread with cheese and drinking tea when he came back. She moved the second steaming mug toward him.
He sat down and started to drink his tea. He was still shivering. His long wet hair stuck to the sides of his head.
She finished her tea and went to rinse her mug.
“When do you plan to leave?” she asked.
“Soon, I think. Before traffic starts.”
He put his mug into the sink and swept the crumbs off the table.
She wondered when the Advil would start working. He went behind the curtain and returned with the old thermos.
“Is there more hot water in the kettle?” he asked.
“Yeah, there’s plenty.”
“Do you mind making tea for the road?”
“Not at all.”
She got the thermos out of the leather case, unscrewed the white plastic top, and pulled out the cork. The shiny surface on the inside was scratched and chipped. Not too badly though. She put two tea bags in, added some sugar—she had no idea if this would be too much or not enough—poured some hot water over the bags and put the cork back in.
“Do you want to take the book with you?” Ben asked.
Lena had thought about it. No, she didn’t want to take the book with her. She certainly wasn’t going to show it to Vadim, and she couldn’t imagine that she would want to look at it again.
“If you’re not taking it, I’d like to take it back with me,” Ben said.
She realized that this was exactly what she wanted, for Ben to have it, for Ben to look at it from time to time.
She said, “Yes, please, take it with you.”
He carried their bags to the car. That was it. She went out with the heavy thermos pressed to her chest. He locked the door and put the key into the little box under the porch.
They pulled out of the driveway onto the path leading through the woods. Lena kept turning back, looking at the cabin, once again marveling at its asymmetrical shape, and how lost and lonely it looked among all the pines and bushes. The car bounced up and down on the tree roots. She hit her shoulder against the door handle. She didn’t remember the road being that bumpy.
The fog was lifting off the surface of the lake in patches. Where it had already cleared, the lake was a deep festive blue. And the sky was bright blue too. It was shaping up to be a really nice day.
When they drove onto the highway, their phones beeped to indicate that the wireless signal was back on. They were now officially getting back to their lives.
Lena checked her phone. There was just one text message, from Inka. She wrote to say that she was flying back to Moscow, that her plane was about to take off, but she was really hoping that they’d stay in touch. She wrote that she had been thinking about Lena these past four days. She promised to write her a long letter as soon as she got back. She sounded sincere, and Lena allowed herself to wonder if this time they really might stay in touch.
There were no calls from Vadim. It was still morning in San Diego. They could be still asleep. Vadim in the upstairs bedroom painted butterscotch, with all those bright oil paintings on the walls, alone in that enormous white bed. Misha and Borya in twin beds in the downstairs bedroom. A tiny room facing the garden. She wondered if her mother-in-law’s famous roses were in bloom now. She hoped not, she hated how they peeked inside the window, thorny branches scratching against the glass. Borya often had nightmares when he slept in strange places. She had an urge to hug her kids, to kiss them on the tops of their heads, to smell their hair.
There was little traffic, letting her forget about the road. She thought that she had never felt lonelier.
Lena looked at Ben’s thermos in her lap. His old thermos in a ragged leather case. She had a vivid image of Ben as a child skiing with his dad. Freezing, exhausted, frightened, reaching for his cup of hot tea with gratitude. For some reason she imagined that he looked exactly like Sasha Simonov. He probably did look like him as a child. And even behaved like him. Ben used to be obsessed with death. Lena was sure that Ben used to be “afraid of where he was going when he fell asleep.”
Then she had a vivid image of Ben fixing the leak the other night. The way he’d stretched and reached for the ceiling, and how he’d stood there looking at the drops as if counting them. Lena’s deep and ever-growing affection for Ben had turned into a fleeting certainty that this wasn’t over between them. It was unbearable to imagine that they wouldn’t see each other again.
She put her left hand on the nape of his neck, pressed down with her fingers. Ben moaned and closed his eyes for a second before focusing again on the road. She dropped her hand and buried her head in his shoulder so that her hair touched his neck.
It was slowly getting foggy, as if somebody kept closing curtains over the road. One gray opaque curtain after another. Lena felt like peeling the curtains off, and she wanted to tell Ben that, but she didn’t know how to put it into words.
“I’m afraid to fall asleep and wake up when we get there,” she said.
She reached for a bottle of water under her seat and splashed some on her face.
“Ben.”
“What?”
“Tell me a story.”
“I don’t really know any stories.”
“Tell me something. Anything.”
Drops of water were dripping down her forehead, all the way to her eyes, and farther down.
He scrunched his nose and ran his free hand through his hair.
“Have I ever told you how hedgehogs fuck?”
“No.”
“Do you know how they fuck?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Weren’t you ever interested in finding out?”
“Not really.”
“Their backs are covered with spines, right?”
“Yes, so?”
“So, they can’t do it the usual animal way, because the male can’t get past the spines.”
“Oh, right, right. How do they do it then?”
“They have their own special way.”
“Hedgehogs’ way?”
“Yes, hedgehogs’ way. What they do is this. The female lies on her back.”
“Can they even do that?”
“Do what?”
“Hedgehogs. Lie on their backs.”
“Of course. They do it all the time. She picks a comfortable spot on the ground—a soft mossy patch is the best. She lies on her back and spreads her little hind legs as far apart as possible and she raises her front legs up. And the male comes and mounts her, but very gently. He doesn’t really mou
nt her but lies on top of her.”
“But that’s just missionary position.”
“Yes, but in the animal world missionary position is considered the most sophisticated.”
“Oh. Have you seen hedgehogs fuck many times?”
“Are you kidding? Hedgehogs are extremely private animals. Naturalists have to spend months waiting to catch them in the act. But I saw a video of them doing it three times. Once on the Discovery Channel, once on PBS, and once in an empty movie theater in the natural history museum in Springfield, Massachusetts. The whole act is very tender, because they do it ever so slowly and gently. One wrong move and a hedgehog gets hurt.”
“I imagine that they rub against each other first. Their bellies are covered with very soft fur, and they get really warm when they rub against each other.”
“Yes, you’re absolutely right—they do that. But so lightly that you can barely notice they are moving at all. To the untrained eye they just lie on top of each other. But they rub, up and down and sideways until their genitals meet, and his dark hedgehog’s knob enters her tiny pink hole.”
“Pink? Is it really pink?”
“Why not?”
“Yes, you’re right. Why not. Do they make any sounds?”
“Yes, yes, they do. They pant, and sniff, and grunt. Actually, I don’t know if you can call it ‘grunt’; maybe oink like pigs but not quite in the same way.”
“Pigs are rude and they oink rudely.”
“Hedgehogs are anything but rude. They oink very softly and tenderly.”
“Yes, softly and tenderly. Did you know that every so often the female reaches with her little paws and strokes the male’s snout?”
