Divide Me by Zero

by Lara Vapnyar

“This Solomon,” Len said once. “He doesn’t have a medical license, does he? He’s kind of a crook, isn’t he?”

  “He helps people,” I snapped. “What do you do all day?”

  I didn’t understand Solomon’s work, though I had certainly heard of alternative medicine before. Making fun of the holistic medicine ads in Our Brooklyn was one of the few remaining pleasures that united me with Len. There were three full pages of such ads. If only half of the healers were for real, the air over Brooklyn would have been crackling from the concentration of psychic energy. But Solomon—I believed that he was for real.

  I asked Evelina if Solomon had been a doctor in Russia. “No, no,” she said. “He used to be a journalist. When they first came here, he tried to apply for jobs at all the big magazines, but they all laughed at him.” Evelina knew this from Solomon’s wife, who sometimes came to the office after work and lingered in the waiting room. She was a tall woman with rough skin and large bloodshot eyes. She never answered when I said hello to her. Evelina told me that she was a managing director at Morgan Stanley, and that Solomon was fully dependent on her. She’d even bail him out here at the office when he couldn’t make rent. Apparently, the business wasn’t doing very well.

  Two weeks later Marina from my class found a job with an American family. She came to thank me with a small bouquet of carnations. My lessons had given her enough vocabulary to pretend she knew English. “They are giving me my own room,” Marina told the other nannies, “and guess what else? My own bathroom. I’ve never had my own private bathroom in my life!” The nannies laughed and chatted, and soon became so loud that Solomon looked in to ask what the commotion was. “This is a great success, girls,” he said. “A real victory. We have to run an article in Our Brooklyn.” He brought a Polaroid from his office and asked Marina and me to pose next to a VCR stand. “Katya, step forward and raise your flowers to your chest . . . a little higher,” he said. “Marina, you’re a big girl, stoop a little. Yeah, like that. Perfect!” He took the photo out and squinted at it, as if willing the image to develop sooner. “You look lovely, Katya,” he said. I blushed.

  When the article came out, in the fresh Sunday issue of Our Brooklyn, I was beside myself with excitement. The author praised my teaching methods, and after reading the piece, I couldn’t help but admire them too. He described how I’d come up with the idea of showing videos at my very first lesson and how I’d managed to develop this into a gracefully coherent system. He ended the piece by stressing how incredible this was: that at only twenty-two I had accomplished something that had escaped all other language teachers; I had created a method that made learning effortless and fun. And I had done all that as a recent immigrant myself. For me, that article was an even bigger victory than my publication in the Reading World. This was a great, great success and definitely the first of many even greater achievements. I finally had something to write to Sasha and Yulia. I made a Xerox of the article for them, and wrote how I planned to expand my method to teach immigrants from other countries too. I didn’t want to limit it to teaching Russians; I would have students from all over the US. I would publish a book, or perhaps even a series of books, based on my method. I would create educational videos. I would be making more money than Len.

  Sasha didn’t reply at all. And Yulia wrote to me something later to say that she and Sasha weren’t together anymore, and that if I knew what kind of a person he was I would never speak to him again. I tried to call her, but she wouldn’t pick up.

  My mother bought the issue of Our Brooklyn to show the article to Elijah. I asked if she wanted me to translate it into English, but she said that she could manage herself. She waited until Len left—to shop for cheap electronics for his parents—then spread the copy of Our Brooklyn over our kitchen table, pulled a few sheets of paper from the printer, took out the Russian-English dictionary, and set to work. When Len came back, loaded with Crazy Eddie bags, she had successfully made it through the first three paragraphs and was attacking the fourth. She looked like she did when she was working on her textbooks, her back very straight, her dark eyebrows furrowed. The sight of her working so hard on my article made Len groan.

  “This is a paid advertisement, Nina,” Len said. “Paid advertisement! In Our Brooklyn!”

  I screamed that I hated him, but my mother didn’t raise her eyes; she continued to work with her usual diligence. She wanted to show it to Elijah first thing on Monday.

  What none of us knew at that time was that she would never see Elijah again. He had died on Saturday night a few hours after my mother left, but she didn’t get the call until Monday morning, minutes before she was supposed to leave for work. The supervisor called to say that my mother’s appointment was canceled, because the client was deceased. She wouldn’t provide any details. My mother wasn’t a relative after all. She had to call everybody she knew at the agency, call after frantic call, until she was able to reconstruct what had happened from bits and pieces of information. Elijah had a stroke on Saturday night. His night nurse called 911. By the time he made it to the hospital, he had gone into cardiac arrest, and since he had strict DNR orders, they let him die. Elijah’s niece was flying in from Chicago to claim the body.

  I asked my mother if I should cancel my morning class and stay home with her. She said no. She refused to call Uncle Grisha either. She sat down at the kitchen table and remained sitting there. She couldn’t stop talking about the DNR papers. She and Elijah had discussed it. This was exactly how he had wanted to die, when the time came. “When the time came,” my mother kept saying again and again. “Do you know what that means?” she asked at some point. “It means never! He wasn’t ready. I know that he wasn’t!”

  I was afraid that my mother would take to her bed, the way it happened after my father died, but instead she became restless. There was no work for her for a while, but she would leave every morning and spend her day walking around the streets, walking and walking and walking, sitting on park benches to take a break, going inside stores to warm herself, but other than that just walking.

  One day, when I came home from work, I found her lying on the couch with a pack of frozen spinach on her face. The right side of her face was bruised and swollen and there was a small gash over her right cheekbone partly covered by a Band-Aid. I asked if she had fallen, but she chuckled and said: “No, I got into a fight. I was trying to find the Times Square and I asked this woman for directions and she wouldn’t answer me.”

  “Why wouldn’t she?” I asked.

  “She kept saying, ‘What?’ and ‘What?’ and ‘Excuse me, I can’t understand you.’ So I just came up very close to her and said: ‘You’re such a stupid fucking American!’ and I laughed in her face.”

  Now it was my turn to ask: “What???”

  “Yes, that’s what I said.”

  “And then what?”

  “She punched me in the face.”

  I had to sit down, but my mother started to laugh.

  “I think I needed that,” she said. “Don’t worry, it won’t happen again and anyway, they found me another client, so I’m resuming work tomorrow.”

  My mother was fired from the new job within two weeks, because she talked back to a client. She was fired from her next job as well, because she talked back again. But since most of the agency’s elderly clients were racist at least to a degree, and white home attendants were in such short supply, my mother kept getting assignments, until the final incident.

  Apparently, an elderly client said that she couldn’t stand blacks and Jews equally, but at least she wasn’t scared of the Jews. My mother growled at her. She said that she wanted to show her that Jews could be scary too.

  Only then did my mother get fired for good.

  ELEVEN

  My work meanwhile was going well. Following the article in Our Brooklyn, the number of my students tripled. The nannies now crowded in the waiting room vying for seats with Solomon’s and Evelina’s patients. Solomon’s patients were the most timi
d of the lot, so they would end up giving up their seats and standing by the wall.

  “Katya?” one of them said, when I walked into the office one morning. He was leaning against the window, so that his right shoulder touched the wilted-daisy poster. A thin man with longish hair and sad downturned eyes, he looked vaguely familiar, especially when he smiled, but I couldn’t place him.

  “It is you, isn’t it?” he asked.

  I peered closer and gasped.

  “Boris Markovich?” I said.

  B. nodded. He said that he had noticed me a few days ago, but wasn’t sure it was me.

  He looked different, very different from what I remembered. The beard. He had shaved his beard. His face without a beard appeared to be both puffy and exposed.

  I asked what he was doing here. He looked away and mumbled something about problems with his back.

  I had to rush, because my class was about to start, but I kept thinking about B. while pretending to listen to my students. Back problems! I thought. I imagined B. lying in Solomon’s chair, with Solomon looming over him, moving his large hands over his body, chanting: “Your penis becomes big and hard and stays that way. Stays that way. Stays that way . . .”

  When my class ended, B. was waiting for me in the waiting room. He offered to walk me to the subway and I agreed. He said that he had read my story in the Reading World. Sasha had sent him a copy. He’d thought it was quite moving. He’d felt strangely proud, even if he knew that he didn’t have anything to do with it. His praise annoyed rather than flattered me. Then B. asked if I liked teaching. I said that I loved it. Solomon was amazing. He let me develop my own teaching method and it was working wonders. Then I told him that I had been married for two years. Len was amazing. I stumbled, because I realized that I’d just said this about Solomon, but B. didn’t seem to notice.

  He said that he worked as a temp in a Russian law firm. They paid next to nothing, but he didn’t need much anyway. He lived alone. His wife had gone back to Russia and taken their son, Mark, with her.

  “What about Max?” I asked.

  He seemed surprised and touched that I remembered the name of his dog.

  “Max died,” he said.

  B. walked me all the way to the subway entrance and headed back. I climbed the stairs leading to the elevated platform and looked down onto the street to try to spot B. in the crowd. There he was making his way through the Brighton Beach crowd, slouchy, hands in his pockets, as if he were trying to take up as little space as possible. It was hard to believe that I had been crazy in love with this man a mere five years ago.

  He would be in the waiting room every Tuesday and Thursday night, staring at me with such intense longing that even Solomon noticed it. “He’s my former teacher,” I told him.

  “Don’t you toy with him,” Solomon said. “The poor schmuck doesn’t need another disappointment.” I caught jealous notes in his voice, which made me very happy.

  One night, as I was getting ready to leave after class, Solomon walked into my room. He pulled up a chair next to mine, sat down, and pressed the play button on the VCR. We watched the ending of Pretty Woman in silence. Evelina, my students, and all the patients had already left, and it was strangely quiet in the office, and strangely cold. I tried to keep myself from shivering as I listened to Solomon’s tense breathing over the soundtrack of the movie. When the credits started to roll, Solomon asked if I liked the movie. I said that I liked it very much, only I couldn’t understand one thing.

  “What thing?” he asked.

  “The fact that the guy has to be so rich. Isn’t it good enough for them to find love? Why does the guy need to be a millionaire?”

  “A billionaire. The guy’s a billionaire.”

  Solomon turned the VCR off and took my hands in his. His hands were cold, like mine. He asked me when I had come to the US. I said, “A few months ago.” He asked me if I liked it here. I told him how much I’d loved it at first. I told him about our trips to Manhattan when we first arrived. He smiled and squeezed my fingers. My hands were slowly getting warmer. I told him why I had stopped going to Manhattan, how I had feared that people on the streets would laugh at me. Then I felt a lump in my throat and stopped talking.

  “Uh-huh,” he said, “so you feel that Manhattan is closed to you?”

  I nodded.

  “You’re right,” he said. “It is closed. But you know what would open it?”

  The expression on his face hardened and I worried that our brittle new intimacy was already gone. I waited for him to start spinning optimistic lies about how confidence and pride could open the world for you. But he reached into his pocket instead, and pulled out a wad of twenty-dollar bills.

  “This,” he said. “This is what would open it.” He shuffled the bills in his hand and put them back in his pocket.

  He rose from his chair. I got up too. He walked up to me, put his arms around me. His lips brushed against my hair. He inhaled and moaned, “You smell like pickled apples.”

  Then he pulled me closer. We stood like this for a very long time, until I felt as if each millimeter of my body were being enveloped by his. I could feel the exact shape and size of his cock pressing hard into my stomach. This frightened me and I freed myself and moved away.

  Solomon sighed. “You’re right, Katya. You’re a good girl. Now go. Go home.”

  I picked up my bag and moved unsteadily toward the door.

  Outside, my legs were weak. I lowered myself onto the stone steps of the porch and sat there, hugging my knees. I was shaken, scared, grateful, disappointed, relieved, but mostly happy, insanely happy. The whole way back on the subway, I was chuckling and muttering random silly lines from Pretty Woman: “You people work on commission, right? Big mistake. Big. Huge. I have to go shopping now.”

  That night I burrowed under the blanket and made myself come, ignoring the lack of air and obnoxious Tetris beeps.

  I still saw B. in the office every Tuesday and Thursday, but I didn’t pay him any attention—not on purpose, no, but because my attention was sucked up by Solomon. We hadn’t spoken since the night we’d watched Pretty Woman together, and I wondered if he thought about it as much as I did, and if he made himself come thinking about me.

  “Tonight is my last session,” B. told me one Tuesday.

  “That’s good, isn’t it?” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “Anyway, I found a job in Boston, so I’ll be moving there.”

  Then he asked if I was in a rush to go home. It was already past eight, but Len didn’t care when I came home. I could always say that I had an extra class.

  “Let’s go to the beach,” B. said. We crossed Brighton Beach Avenue and headed toward the boardwalk.

  It was an especially windy night. The gusts of wind kept pummeling us without mercy, pushing us to walk faster, messing our hair and clothes, smacking us across the face, so we had to keep our heads down and couldn’t look at the ocean. It was dark anyway; the most we could see was the wave breaks in the feeble moonlight. The sound was spectacular though. All that whooshing and crashing, and the resigned grumble of the retreating surf. All of a sudden B. stopped, took my hands in his, and started to recite a poem. I had to turn to B. and look right into his face, right into his mouth, and still all I could hear were separate words and disjointed lines.

  My dear . . .

  Tonight . . .

  A breath of fresh air . . .

  The ocean . . .

  A lifetime ago . . .

  The distance . . . the distances . . .

  Between you and me . . .

  I’m smoking in the dark . . .

  Breathing in the rot of the ocean.

  I didn’t know that poem, but I grasped the general meaning. Love. Past love. Lost love. B. was reciting a poem about love to me.

  “Brodsky,” B. said when he finished.

  I was excited, but also scared, confused, and a little embarrassed, even though I hardly understood what the source of that embarrassment
was. I wouldn’t be able to put it into words until fourteen years later, when B. and I were discussing love poetry. I said that I found it unsavory when a man used somebody else’s love poetry in order to win over a woman, either to stir her heart or to get her into bed. In my view, it cheapened poetry. B. said that I was terribly terribly wrong. He said that the purpose of love poetry wasn’t to make people fall in love, but to make them recognize the feelings they already had.

  But back then, on Brighton Beach boardwalk, I felt overwhelmed. I didn’t know what to say to B., except that it was getting late and they were waiting for me at home.

  They weren’t waiting. My mother was asleep. And Len was lying in bed with a fresh issue of the Economist that he could take from his office for free. “Late class?” he asked, and I nodded and went to brush my teeth. I couldn’t fall asleep for a long time. I lay next to the snoring Len (he snored so very lightly that I found it touching), thinking about Len, and Solomon and B., and life in general. I came up with what seemed like a brilliant idea for a story. I got up and typed the first sentence. “Two men are in love with me, one with a broken dick, another with a broken soul.” Nothing else came to mind and I abandoned the story and went back to bed. I was dying to tell everything to my mother, but I had to wait until morning.

  “Do you think Elijah had a chance to send my story to the Magazine?” I asked her the next morning.

  She said that she wasn’t sure, but she hoped that he did. Then I said something else, surprising myself with the sudden clarity.

  “I don’t want to be married to Len anymore.”

  My mother looked at me in shock. This was not the reaction I expected. I thought she’d understand right away. But apparently I had to spell it out. Len and I had nothing in common. Len and I didn’t love each other anymore. I was only twenty-two. I didn’t see the point of us staying together.

  My mother started to scream. I was an idiot, she said. I was a child. I saw the world as a child. I acted like a child. I had a child’s fantasies. It was her fault. She didn’t know what she had done wrong, but she saw clearly that she had failed to raise a fully functional adult. I was stuck in my childhood. I didn’t understand how life worked. I was too naive. Everybody told her that. Bella told her that. Even Uncle Grisha told her that, Uncle Grisha who was hardly better than a child himself. She couldn’t help me anymore, and I wouldn’t survive on my own. Definitely not here, not in the US. And Len, Len was the real deal. He wasn’t very exciting, but he was devoted to me, to our marriage. I could always count on him. I had to hold on to him and hold on hard.