Divide Me by Zero

by Lara Vapnyar

  “You’re dripping wet!” my mother said. “Go change or you’ll catch a cold.”

  I nodded and went to change.

  For the next few weeks after watching The Mirror, I avoided both Sasha and Yulia. I hated the fact that they had witnessed my embarrassment. What was even worse was that they both knew why I was avoiding them. “Hey,” Yulia said, “it’s not like you pooped your pants!” And Sasha said that his mom cried over movies all the time. A week later he told me that Boris Markovich was asking about me, that he actually said in class that I was the only one who truly got the film. This made me feel even worse. Not only did they still remember the incident, but they were talking about it, bringing it up in classroom discussions.

  In order to dodge Yulia after school, I started walking home through the park, making a huge detour. These walks relaxed me. The farther into the park I’d walk, the fewer people I’d see, the more detached I’d feel from the incident, the easier it was to think about something else. Once I even made it to the farthest end of the park. I saw the light at the end of the tunnel of oak trees and the tops of the high-rises framing the park on the other side, and I heard the sounds of traffic. I was about to turn back when I heard somebody speak to me.

  “Hey, is it you? Sasha’s friend? Yes, it is you!”

  There was Boris Markovich sitting on a bench with a book in his lap, a baby stroller pushed against a tree, and a large fidgety dachshund by his feet. I considered running away, but his eyes were so kind and bright and he appeared to be so happy to see me that I smiled and confirmed that I was Sasha’s friend.

  “Sit down,” he said. I sat down. “That’s Max,” he said, pointing to the dog. “We named him Max because he is big for a dachshund.” Then he pointed to the sleeping baby and whispered that this was Mark, his son. “I still can’t believe that I have a baby,” he said, “a real human baby. So, what’s your name?”

  We sat and talked for a long long time, ignoring the fussing Mark and the persistent Max, who kept nibbling on my shoes. We talked about The Mirror, and about his favorite books, and my favorite books, and about all the amazing exciting things that were happening around us. The country was changing. There was no going back. We could do whatever we wanted. We could be whatever we wanted. We talked about what it was that we wanted to do. Boris Markovich wanted to start a magazine or to have his own radio show. He would invite people to discuss politics and art and life in general. In an honest open way. It would be unlike anything we had known before. And it wasn’t an empty dream either. He had friends who were eager to do this with him. Then he asked what I wanted to do. I surprised myself by saying that I wanted to be a writer. He said that he was sure I would become one, he knew, he could feel it. I had cried over a movie, that meant I had a tremendous amount of empathy. People rarely talked about empathy, but he personally thought that this was the most important quality in an artist. Then he grabbed my hand and shook it as if congratulating me on my choice of profession. I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t speak. I suddenly felt as if I had a fever. I was nauseous, light-headed, and hot.

  There was a moment in War and Peace that I hadn’t understood until that day. Tolstoy is describing how the dashing Anatole seduces Natasha, even though she’s betrothed to far-superior Prince Andrei.

  And, blocking her way, he brought his face close to hers.

  His shining, big, masculine eyes were so close to her eyes that she saw nothing except those eyes.

  “Natalie?!” his voice whispered questioningly, and someone squeezed her hands painfully. “Natalie?!”

  Someone squeezed her hands painfully. There was nobody else in the room, just Natasha and Anatole. So why “someone”? I used to think this was a glitch, a mistake that crept into the manuscript and somehow escaped the attention of the editors of all the later editions of the novel. But then I understood that this wasn’t a mistake. Far from it! This was Tolstoy’s way to show that Natasha had lost her head. Because of sex, the promise of sex, the deep dark power of the sexual touch. This was exactly what I felt when Boris Markovich took my hand. And Tolstoy knew it—he saw right through me.

  I came to my senses only when little Mark started to whimper, and Boris Markovich let go of my hand and said that he had to go home and give him a bottle.

  Later that day I did something that I’d never done before and would never do again. I made a diary entry. I took one of my mother’s pristine notebooks, opened it to the first page, and wrote: “I think I’m in love with B.”

  SEVEN

  It would be tempting to say that I fell in love with B. when I was seventeen and carried that love throughout my whole life. But I know that this is not true. I stopped loving B. shortly after I turned eighteen, and hardly felt anything toward him up until we started seeing each other almost twenty years later. I had become a different person by then, and so had he, and what happened between us then was an entirely different story.

  Back when I was seventeen, the only love that I had witnessed was the love between my parents, which was all-consuming and absolute, and I thought that it was only natural that my love for B. should be the same. What I didn’t know then was how quickly all-consuming and absolute can turn into obsessive, strip you of sanity, and make you do crazy embarrassing things.

  I shared this with Nathalie after she experienced her first heartbreak. This was five years after my mother died. Nathalie had just turned eighteen. We were cuddled together in my bed, trying to sit very still, because we knew that if we didn’t, the bed would start to shake and slide back and forth across the barren wooden floor. The thing was that the house had gotten infested with bedbugs. We had tried most of the conventional bedbug remedies, we had thrown out all of the rugs, we had scourged the furniture with poison—Danny had driven from college to help us—but so far nothing had worked, or not completely. The bedbugs would still come to bite us at night. That was when I became an addict of countless bedbug forums, willing to try things that were thoroughly insane. In that sense, bedbugs act just like unhappy obsessive love. They strip you of your sanity in a matter of weeks.

  So here is one of the craziest suggestions for how to fight bedbugs. You have to pour an inch or two of cooking oil into small plastic containers and fit the legs of your furniture inside the containers. That way the bugs won’t be able to make it off the floor and up the legs—they will end up drowning in oil. I’m not sure if it works (we still had bite marks, but perhaps they were imaginary), but I do know that it makes the furniture wobbly and prone to sliding back and forth. So you can cry but you can’t sob while sitting on the oil-supported bed. You can’t even blow your nose—or you end up on the other end of the room.

  I explained to Nathalie my “pain-scale theory of heartbreak,” but it didn’t go over well.

  “So you’re basically saying that there are worse things to come?” Nathalie said. “That’s not very comforting!”

  And anyway, pain wasn’t the problem, she could handle the pain. What she couldn’t handle was the embarrassment. She was very close to sobbing now, so I offered to tell her about the embarrassing things I did when I fell in love for the first time.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes!”

  Nathalie loved it when I told her stories about myself at her age, especially stories about my failure. I couldn’t help but notice that she was subconsciously competing with the main character of my stories, as if that girl were her sibling rather than a younger version of her mother.

  But perhaps it was I who tried to distance myself from that younger version of me, because it made me feel that all the pain and embarrassment of love was far in the past.

  So I took a piece of paper and listed the top five embarrassing things that I had done under the influence of love.

  Stalking B. for days.

  Confiding to Sasha and Yulia that I’d do everything for B. Which included sucking his dick (a taboo in Russia at that time) and ruining his marriage (less of a taboo).

  Screaming that B. was
stupid in a room full of his relatives and friends.

  Spitting half-chewed hamburger into a sweet old lady’s purse.

  Leaving my grandmother at the store with twenty pounds of frozen chicken thighs and completely forgetting about her.

  “That’s all?” Nathalie asked.

  I nodded.

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” She was looking at me with panicky concern, the way she used to look at her grandmother when she started to lose her mind. I didn’t understand.

  “What about the chair?” she asked.

  “What chair?”

  “Remember how you threw a chair at him?”

  And then I remembered. I did throw a chair at B. Across a crowded room. In front of the kids, in front of Len, in front of everybody. At my mother’s funeral. And this didn’t happen to that stupid seventeen-year-old all those years ago. It happened to me just five years ago. My whole body contracted with the pain of embarrassment. Now it was Nathalie’s turn to comfort me. She reached to hug me, but her movement made the bed move to the left. She sat back, and the bed moved to the right. Its little legs soaked in cooking oil squeaked under our weight. We both started to laugh.

  “You know what the best cure for heartbreak is?” Nathalie asked.

  “What?”

  “Bedbugs.”

  Note to a skeptical reader. Just try it!

  Even though I didn’t confide in my friends about all of the embarrassing things I had done, I did nothing to conceal my feelings, and both Yulia and Sasha soon became aware of my obsession. Sasha reacted with persistent “Urghs,” but Yulia was riveted. She had read about the insanity of passion in one novel after another, and here it was, up close, and just as crazy as those writers described, or possibly even crazier. She’d be trembling with excitement every time she talked to me about B., and her pale freckled skin would turn glowing pink. I hated her interest, but I couldn’t resist talking about B.

  “Would you let him do all sorts of things to you?” she would ask me with cautious fascination, as if I were a dangerous animal in a zoo.

  “Yes!” I would say.

  “Even that thing?”

  “Yes, even that!”

  We had recently discovered descriptions of oral sex in a dirty hand-typed pamphlet somebody brought to class, and it seemed more frightening and disgusting to us than any other version of the sexual act.

  “Would you run away from home with him?”

  “Yes!”

  That last question she asked in Sasha’s presence, making him utter the loudest “Urgh!” so far.

  “What are you talking about?” he asked. “Boris Markovich is married. He has a baby!”

  But this didn’t deter me at all. I didn’t see little Mark as a child, as an important person in B.’s life, but rather as an accessory—something to take with you on walks, along with Max the dog. And B.’s wife didn’t seem real to me at all. I couldn’t imagine her sharing a home with B., eating breakfast with him, going to bed with him, or even giving him a kiss. He couldn’t possibly love her. And she couldn’t love him either, because I loved him so much. I thought that the amount of love directed toward one person by all the other people couldn’t be unlimited, and I definitely used it all up.

  Just like Tolstoy’s Natasha, I was ready for either ecstasy or despair. What took me by surprise was that love turned out to be a constant back and forth between these two states.

  Since meeting B. in the park, I never missed a screening, and there were times when he lavished a lot of attention on me, each word of praise making me deliriously happy. But there were also times when B. wouldn’t even look in my direction. Or worse—he would ask me a question but ignore my answer, and turn his attention to somebody else, and my heart would sink, and I would experience it in a physical way. My heart grew heavier, bulkier, weighted down by disappointment.

  The thing was that I was completely ignorant about world cinema. I would intuitively understand certain moments in the films we watched, especially if those moments were emotional, but every time a little bit of hard knowledge was required I would be lost. “Isn’t this a homage to Fellini?” Yulia would ask, squinting at B. from behind her glasses, licking her lips. And I would think: Who’s Fellini? And also think: I want Yulia to die.

  Another thing that amazed me about love was how quickly it could turn from something bright and bubbly into a destructive and exhausting force. Within two months of meeting B., I stopped doing my homework. Instead, I devoted myself to reading every book that B. ever mentioned and searching for the films (by Bergman and Bertolucci and Pasolini) that he recommended. Finding those films was a Herculean task. Nobody I knew had a VCR or a movie projector, and even if they had, it would have been impossible to find the movies themselves in the Soviet Union of that time. Perestroika had just started, and huge stores of information, from historical facts to previously forbidden movies and books, were being unlocked for us, one by one. The process seemed overwhelmingly fast to older people. My grandmother, for example, who had abandoned novels and inherited the newspaper-reading business after my grandfather died, would spend her days buried under the fresh spread of periodicals, gasping and moaning and screeching: “Nina, look! Look what they’re writing about Stalin! Are they crazy or what? Oh my God, these poor stupid writers are all going to die!”

  But for younger people, the process was maddeningly slow. You could read Gulag Archipelago, but you still couldn’t see any of the Western art-house classics. I had to resort to going to the Theater Library, which had a great collection of Western plays, as well as screenplays and even film magazines. You couldn’t check out any of that, so I spent hours in the reading room, trying to collate the script of, let’s say, The Passenger with the photos of Nicholson and Schneider in film magazines, so I could imagine the whole film in my head.

  Only once did I get to see one of these films on a large screen. They were screening Pasolini’s Salò in the brand-new Artists Palace, which boasted the largest movie screen in Moscow. B. said that Salò was one of the most provoking films of all time. Such a stunning metaphor of Nazism! So exquisitely made that B. had a perfectly visceral reaction when he saw it. I absolutely had to see it so I could tell B. that I had a visceral reaction too. Everybody knew that it was impossible to buy tickets, but Yulia hinted that her parents had an in. “If you get me the ticket, I will give you my red T-shirt!” I said.

  Yulia got us three tickets, for herself, Sasha, and me. We came to the Palace early and went to the cafeteria, famous for serving exotic foreign foods like pizza and hamburgers. We ordered three hamburgers, which took a crazy long time. When we made it to the theater, the film had already started, and we had to squeeze to our seats past some very indignant people. I think I even stepped on the foot of a neat gray-haired lady sitting next to me. I apologized, and she was sweet enough to tell me that “it could happen to anyone.” We finally settled in our seats, impatient to sink our teeth into those huge hamburgers that smelled better than anything I had ever smelled in my life. Mine was too big for me, so I had to remove the top bun, which made the patty slide out and onto the floor. I bent to retrieve it from under my seat (this was my first hamburger—I couldn’t let it go!), put the patty back on top of the bun, took the first juicy bite, sat back, and only then looked at the screen.

  I saw a group of naked boys and girls being led on leashes by grown men, made to bark and pant and eat off the floor like dogs, while the men groped and tortured them.

  I turned to Yulia and Sasha. Sasha sat as if paralyzed with his hamburger suspended in his hands, dripping warm grease onto his pants, but Yulia was nonplussed. She was taking neat tiny bites out of her hamburger, chewing it carefully, an appreciative smile on her face. The gray-haired lady to the right of me had the same smile, only hers looked more genuine than Yulia’s. I couldn’t believe people could actually enjoy the film. As for me, I sat there with my mouth full of meat and bread, gathering more and more saliva, but unable to swallow, because I
knew that as soon as I swallowed I would immediately throw up, as I had during ballets at the Kremlin Palace. Luckily, I had my mother’s large purse with me, right there on the floor by my seat. I leaned in, opened the purse, spit the contents of my mouth into the purse as discreetly as I could, dropped the rest of the hamburger there as well, and shut it closed. I’d clean it out later, I thought.

  We sat through ten more minutes of rape and scatology, then Sasha stood up and headed out, and I stood up too and reached for my purse. The gray-haired lady shook her head, smiling. This was her purse. I remembered that I had pushed mine under the seat. I said “Sorry,” retrieved my purse, and started squeezing toward the exit.

  It was only when I made it outside, and stood on the steps gulping fresh air, that the horror of the situation got to me. I opened my purse—there was nothing there, except for my loose change and my mother’s stomach pills. No hamburger. I must have spewed my half-chewed hamburger into the purse of that sweet lady in the adjacent seat. The image of her reaching into her purse for the subway fare and finding the wet, greasy, gooey, stinking mess haunted me for weeks. It would’ve probably haunted me even longer if I hadn’t received this devastating news, which made me forget about everything else.

  “There won’t be any more screenings,” Sasha told me. “Boris Markovich quit.”