by Lara Vapnyar
One of the Dominicans said that it was too bad that Aron didn’t have a family. “That’s a wonderful observation,” Angie noted.
A man from one of the Chinese couples said that Aron taught everybody a lesson. “This is an excellent point.” Angie nodded and reached into her purse for a tissue.
She had never had a student die during her class before. Nobody she knew had ever had a student die during class. She had been plagued by ghastly flashbacks throughout the whole weekend. Bright and loud, the images of the last feast kept spinning in her head as if she were caught inside a horror movie. And now the movie was starting to play again.
They tune the radio to some nasty Latino music. They uncover the food. The smell! She is so sick of that smell. They stomp their feet to the beat of the music. Poor Aron, happy as a child. Moving closer to the table. Filling his plate. Gorging. Starting to choke. They all step away in horror. Angie pushes buttons on her phone. For the life of her she can’t remember which buttons to push. Jean-Baptiste rushes forward, grabs Aron from behind; his fist thrusts into Aron’s stomach. Thrusts again. Again and again. Finally! The fucking Russian meatball is out! Sighs of relief all over the room. Angie snaps her phone closed. And then Aron’s legs go slack and Jean-Baptiste starts to sway under Aron’s weight. For a moment it looks like they are dancing together to the loud beats of Latino music. Old Oolna starts to laugh, a horrible cackling laugh. And then, only then, they finally realize what has just happened….
Angie blew her nose and looked over her silent class. “Do you want to say something, Jean-Baptiste?”
“Yeah. Aron was a funny man.”
“Good, Jean-Baptiste, good,” Angie agreed.
Luda said that they would all miss Aron, and Milena said that his was an enviable death. Angie raised her brows at her.
“Quick and easy. And he died happy, didn’t he?” Milena explained in a calm patient voice.
Angie shuddered and pronounced the class over.
IT WAS COLD and very bright outside. Milena reached into her bag for her sunglasses, but Luda only squinted her eyes.
“Going down that way?” Milena asked. Luda nodded. They started walking down the street together.
“You know,” Luda said, after a while, “I don’t enjoy cooking that much.”
“Me neither,” Milena said, and they continued to walk.
Slicing Sautéed Spinach
FOR ALMOST A YEAR, Ruena had been eating spinach in restaurants. She’d eaten sautéed spinach in Italian eateries, creamed spinach in old-fashioned American diners, pureed spinach in Indian places, and once she even ate spinach dumplings in a dark and overheated Mongolian restaurant on East 12th Street. Ruena didn’t have any particular fondness for spinach; she ate it simply because her lover ordered it for her. “It’s easy,” he would say, urging her to order. “You pick what you want to eat and you say it aloud.”
But it wasn’t easy for Ruena. She felt apprehensive when a menu appeared before her, panicky when she opened it, and paralyzed with fear when she read the fine script describing what was served on a bed of what and under which sauce. So many choices! So easy to make an embarrassing one! Ruena begged her lover to order something for her, anything, the same thing he wanted to eat. He agreed. And since his gastronomic preferences were limited to salmon, rice, and spinach, those three things invariably appeared on Ruena’s plate. Nothing could tempt Ruena to eat salmon (she was allergic to fish) or rice (she simply hated it), so she ended up eating only spinach. Ruena didn’t dislike spinach. She would even have said that she didn’t mind spinach, if it weren’t so difficult to slice.
On their first date they ate sautéed spinach with garlic and pine nuts in a red-brick Italian place. On the walls, black-and-white photographs glistened in candlelight. They had met a few days before on a bench in the Central Library while waiting for their order. The man pointed at the electronic board above their heads. “I can’t stand the thing. Reminds me of hours spent in Department of Motor Vehicles lines. The mere sight of those changing numbers stirs up memories of parking tickets, lost licenses, expired inspections. You know, that nagging feeling of driver’s guilt.”
The man shook his head, making his fine light-brown hair fly off his forehead and land back.
“Don’t you hate it?”
Ruena nodded, even though she didn’t own a car and wasn’t familiar with driver’s guilt. She kept peering at the electronic board as if her whole future depended on seeing her number there, not turning to the man, merely answering further questions with nods or one-syllable words. To the question, was she a student in New York? she said yes. To the question, where had she come from? she said Prague. And to the question, could he call her sometime? she answered with a nod. With her side vision, Ruena caught the vague shape of a tall man in jeans and a tweed jacket. She hoped his books would arrive first and he would leave without seeing hers, books documenting eighteenth-century birth control and female hygiene. Her wish came true and the man left, after putting a crumpled piece of paper with Ruena’s number into his jeans pocket.
Later that day, the hazy image of the man appeared to Ruena several times. First, when she sat in a subway car, squeezed between two chatting women whose voices seemed to bounce off the sides of her head. Another time, on the pages of her paper about an eighteenth-century diaphragm and the French prostitute who invented it. The last image appeared late that night, in Ruena’s tiny Brooklyn apartment, while she watched the news with her Polish roommate. They were both dressed in sweatpants, T-shirts, and oversized slippers and were munching on baby carrots rather than fattening chips; the man appeared to her on a train going through the countryside. They were sitting across from each other and talking—or, rather, Ruena talked and the man listened. By the time the weather broadcast came on, the train image was replaced with one of Ruena standing by the window with a little boy, vaguely resembling the man, nestled in her arms. The boy giggled and sucked on Ruena’s hair. Look, a birdie, she wanted to tell him, but she wasn’t sure which language should she use, Czech or English. “Definitely Czech,” she decided. “He will pick up English when he is older.”
“I’m turning off this crap,” her roommate said. She pressed the button and shuffled to her room, struggling to free a piece of carrot stuck in her teeth.
THE CANDLE on their table exuded a faint smell that resembled burning plastic. The flickering light fell on Ruena’s plate in a few uneven spots, illuminating the spinach that didn’t look like Ruena had expected. The twisted brown strips resembled malnourished earthworms. She attempted to slice off a piece, but the knife made whiny sounds and proved helpless before the rubberlike matter. Ruena was deciding between twisting the strips on a fork, as if it were pasta, or leaving the spinach jumble alone, when she felt the man’s hand just above her knee. His words rustled in her hair. “I want to take your clothes off and make love to you.”
What a cliché! the critical part of Ruena protested. Yet her uncritical part melted just like the plastic-smelling candle on the table. It had been more than a year since a man had touched her knee or whispered to her.
Ruena gulped ice water while comparing the man’s description of her beauty with her reflection in the stainless-steel pitcher. She did have an unusual face, with regular if slightly sharp features, dense eyebrows, light-blue eyes, and pale skin that easily blushed and broke into blotches. She wasn’t sure if she could be called “breathtakingly beautiful,” but she agreed that her flaxen hair looked “spectacular”—she had washed it just before the date and hadn’t spared expensive conditioner. As for her “magnificent” Eastern European accent, Ruena could only shrug. She’d always thought of it as an embarrassing handicap, imagining that the English words came out of her mouth either wounded or coated in mud.
“I want to be your lover,” the man whispered. He spread his fingers wider on Ruena’s thigh, elaborating a long speech in which Ruena caught the word marriage close to the end. “I don’t take marriage lightly. It’s probabl
y not the sanest decision, but I’ve made it and I’m going to stick to it.”
For a second Ruena thought he was proposing to her. Then she realized he was talking about another woman, his fiancée, with whom he’d been living for almost six years. This man was about to marry someone else, but he wanted to be Ruena’s lover.
“I won’t push you,” he said, by the restaurant door. His fingers were cool as he ran his hand between her shoulder blades.
Ruena’s roommate wasn’t home that night, so she took the opportunity to eat cream cheese out of the container. Hunched on the kitchen windowsill, Ruena scooped up the cheese with brittle Ritz crackers, while repulsion at the man’s offer fought against the stubborn memories of his touch.
If he cheats on his fiancée, it’s his moral dilemma, not mine. I should enjoy myself now; I don’t care about the future. I’m not interested in marriage. How many people do I know who have benefited from one? Ruena had the whole arsenal of worn-out but sturdy arguments to defeat the repulsion. Still, repulsion probably would have won if only loneliness weren’t so exhausting. Loneliness followed her everywhere like an unwelcome companion, creeping in at parties she attended, sitting beside her at matinees in a movie theater, dragging along when she took a walk, staring at her mockingly from the cream-cheese surface littered with cracker crumbs.
She removed all the crumbs with a teaspoon before returning the container to the refrigerator.
ON THEIR second date, she ate old-fashioned creamed spinach in a crowded diner. It didn’t taste particularly good, but Ruena swallowed one steaming spoonful after another. They had just made love in his friend’s apartment, where the air conditioner had been blowing full blast the whole time. The man took her clothes off and stepped back to savor the sight. Ruena had never felt quite so naked. With her lovers back home, she had gone on dates for weeks, sometimes months, while they gradually revealed and touched all of each other’s body parts before going to bed. So when they saw each other fully naked at last, there were no surprises. They had enough time to get used to all the little imperfections and to begin to see each scar, each birthmark, and each stubborn twist of hair as a familiar and endearing attribute of the lover’s body.
This time, in front of the stranger, Ruena’s whole body shrank, resisting being exposed to judgment, wary of confirming her gender. She covered her breasts with her elbows. She resisted acknowledging that her pale pathetic mess of a body could actually attract a man, was so obviously attracting a man, while her mind begged her body to yield, to behave according to the situation, not to show its fear and embarrassment.
Ruena’s spoon clinked against the bottom of her bowl. The man whispered something, but she couldn’t make out the words in the diner’s noise.
“What?” she asked.
“You were fantastic.”
Are you kidding? she almost said, barely managing to keep her mouth from gaping.
“Was it good for you too?”
Ruena put her spoon down. It would have been awfully impolite not to give him a compliment in return. “Yes,” she said. “It’s been wonderful.”
They met once a week, during his lunch hour, at his friend’s place on East 18th. Soon everything in the apartment became so familiar to her that she could see the wallpaper pattern—green diamonds and lilac wavy lines—with her eyes closed and name all the titles in the bookcase, starting with the self-help books on the upper shelves and ending with the heavy art volumes on the lower. Their lovemaking usually took just over an hour. Ruena learned to glance up at the antique clock to see when her lover was about to climax. Afterward they went out to lunch, sampling rice and spinach in one or another ethnic restaurant in the neighborhood. They walked separately, so nobody would see them together. That didn’t bother Ruena. His shy request not to tell anyone didn’t bother her either. She even liked it in a way. She didn’t have a boyfriend, but she had a secret. Her life had become more interesting with a secret: more mysterious, less straightforward. Loneliness, if not disappearing entirely, didn’t follow her as closely as before.
ONCE THEY WERE seated at a table, the man smiled at her, made a quick compliment to their lovemaking, ordered their lunch, and began talking. “It feels wonderful to talk to you,” he often said.
Ruena had heard that before. She credited it to the fact that she didn’t talk much herself.
They talked about his job. He edited a respectable scientific magazine, which required dealing with impossible deadlines, an unpredictable boss, and his pregnant assistant, who broke into sobs whenever he pointed out her mistakes. They talked about his friends and his fiancée, whom he described as if they were television characters, labeled with one or two personality traits and behaving according to them. As they ate their spinach empanadillas, he confided that he was writing a book.
“I’ve been writing it for over ten years. Actually, it isn’t going along well. In fact, I often wake up in the middle of the night overcome with a surge of panic that at forty-five I’m a complete failure.”
The spinach empanadillas—tiny puffed pies—would have been very convenient to eat if the stuffing didn’t fall out so easily. Ruena didn’t know whether she should pick it up and put it back into her mouth or leave it on the plate. She asked what the book was about.
“It’s a memoir—well, not exactly a memoir. I would rather call it a novel with a strong presence of me.”
Sometimes he asked about Ruena’s school—she was pursuing a PhD in Women’s Studies—or about her country, which Ruena described in a calm and precise manner, without the ridicule or nostalgia typical of most emigrants.
They were eating spinach gnocchi when he asked, “Do you miss your country at all?”
Ruena swallowed the piece that she had just put in her mouth and was about to answer his question, when she felt a spasm in her throat. A scalding flow of tears coursed down her cheeks. She grabbed the linen napkin off her lap and pressed it to her eyes.
In a few seconds, her banquette sagged under the man’s weight. “Tell me,” he whispered. “Tell me, what is it?”
Ruena turned away, trying to hide her face behind the rough fabric of the napkin. She had nothing to tell, nothing that could justify a breakdown in a public place. He’ll either think that I’m suffering from a bad case of homesickness or that something horrible happened at home, Ruena thought in panic. For a second, she was tempted to invent a lie. She ran through a jumble of television images in her head, choosing between killing off her mother, her father, or her nonexistent twin sister.
She let the napkin slide down her face. Her lover looked blurry behind the screen of tears, his features distorted as in an abstract painting. He sat too close to her. There wasn’t enough space between them, not enough for her to lie.
She told him that she used to miss home very much. She told him that images of Prague, obscure, often false, used to haunt her during her first year in America.
“I would hunt for glimpses of Prague landscapes in New York streets. I would raid Brooklyn groceries in search of strawberries that tasted like the ones at home. I would go to my room at night, slump on a chair at my desk, drop my head on a pile of books, and just give in to longing. There was one place that I especially missed: a tiny bakery, which for some reason always smelled like fresh laundry. You know, the stuffy, hot smell of boiled sheets? I’d never liked that smell, but here in New York I became infatuated by it. I would sniff the air every time I passed a Laundromat, feeling the tingle in my stomach. I was reluctant to visit Prague for a long time, fearing I wouldn’t find the strength to go back to New York. But when I went home at last, I felt cheated. I visited all my favorite places, I saw all my friends, I ate all the food I had longed for, but I didn’t feel the tingle, not even in the bakery. The smell was still there, but it didn’t move me at all. I went back to New York, hoping my homesickness would return—you know, we always wish for something that we can’t have. But it didn’t. I went home every night and slumped in my chair with nothing to long
for.”
Ruena dabbed her eyes and nose with the napkin and glanced up at the man apologetically. That was all she had to tell.
The man’s eyelashes blinked frequently as if they were operated by some mechanism. He suddenly moved toward her and closed his hands around her back in one startling movement. She felt the hard seam of his jeans on her stockinged calf, the stiff collar of his shirt pressed to her wet neck, the warm, stuffy fabric of his jacket touching her whole body, his breath smelling of Italian spices enveloping her face. She freed her arms and hugged him back.
Afterward they ordered more gnocchi. The man moved his plate from the other side of the table to sit next to her. He sprinkled freshly grated Parmesan over her plate, refilled her glass, and entertained her with some silly stories of his childhood.
Ruena, suddenly ravenous, ate all of her gnocchi and then some from his plate.
SIX DAYS LATER they ate lunch in an Indian restaurant, where the booths resembled bamboo huts with straw mats for seats. They had been asked to leave their shoes outside the booth, and Ruena felt funny sitting barefoot in a restaurant. She smiled at her lover, who had been unusually silent at his friend’s apartment.
They were served bitter spinach puree, too spicy for Ruena. She’d said, “Mild, please,” when asked by the waiter, but apparently her voice had been too low. She was licking smidgens of spinach off the tines of her fork when the man spoke at last.
“Ruena,” he said.
She’d never noticed how harsh her name sounded in English.
“Ruena, I can’t marry you.”
The rest poured out in long, emotionally charged sentences. He wanted to be honest with her, he didn’t want to give her the wrong idea, his life was not going to change, he couldn’t allow their relationship to become too intimate, he couldn’t afford to have two women emotionally dependent on him. He was sorry, but he couldn’t marry her.
