Divide Me by Zero

by Lara Vapnyar

  “But what about love?” I asked.

  The great love that she and my father had. Wasn’t it unfair that I would be denied that?

  “Love!” she screamed. “You don’t know what it means.”

  Love was awful! Love was like cancer! The affection that grew too large, its cells multiplying with amazing speed, forming growths that kept getting larger and larger, taking up the space reserved for the good working organs, pressing on them, squeezing them out, not letting them work. And the pain! I couldn’t possibly imagine the pain! The last thing I should want was love.

  I ran out of the apartment shaking. I didn’t expect this at all. I didn’t know what upset me more, my mother’s view of love or the way she saw me, as a spoiled, obnoxious child. My mother couldn’t have meant what she said, could she? Of course she couldn’t. She was so proud of my success. I must have upset her by mentioning Elijah. I shouldn’t have asked about him.

  I managed to calm myself by the time I got to the office, but one look at my framed article on the waiting room wall filled me with disgust.

  Len was right. It was a paid advertisement. A paid advertisement hanging on the wall between a photograph of the authentic witch from the woods of western Ukraine and a flyer for the miraculous new tea that Solomon had recently started selling.

  The company distributing the tea sent us a new batch of posters and Solomon spent the better part of one morning hanging them up. Eventually, he decided that two would go on the left and right walls of the waiting room—one above Evelina’s desk, and the rest on one wall of each of the rooms. He summoned me to help. I was holding a poster up, my palms against its shiny surface, while Solomon happily pushed cheap brittle tacks in. The tea business was going well, and I noticed that lately Solomon didn’t look as glum as he used to. “One thing the cardboard walls are good for is sticking tacks into them,” he said and winked at me from under the curling-down edge of the poster. We stood side by side, so close to each other that the folds of his jacket brushed against my hip. I marveled how little his proximity excited me. When I thought back to our movie night now, it was the image of his money that appeared in my mind. Everything else—the pressure of his hands on my back, the feel of his lips brushing against my hair—faded away, while that wad of crumpled, frayed, sweaty bills stayed clear in my mind.

  “It’s a beauty,” Solomon said, stepping away from the poster. “I’ll use it for a two-page ad in Our Brooklyn next week.”

  The new poster showed a steaming teacup with the word “cancer” dissolving in the bluish-white plume of vapor.

  “Cancer?” Evelina asked after she peeked into her room.

  “You don’t understand, Evelina,” Solomon said. “We’re selling hope, not the cure. Hope is priceless.”

  “If it’s priceless, why do we charge for it?” she asked.

  The poster claimed that the tea cleansed the body of every harmful chemical substance it had ingested and promised relief within days. Boxes of the tea lay everywhere in the office, in Solomon’s room, on Evelina’s counter, on Evelina’s desk next to her crystal ball, on the chairs in the waiting room, on the windowsills, and on the VCR stand in my room. The office worked as a team. Solomon always asked his patients if they wanted to learn better English, Evelina the witch always directed her ailing clients to Solomon, I was expected to praise Evelina, and everybody was expected to sell the tea. I didn’t push the tea, but I didn’t try to dissuade my students from buying it either. I didn’t say anything even after I heard that more and more patients were complaining that the tea had brought them nothing but diarrhea. “How else did you expect to be cleansed?” Evelina retorted.

  I wasn’t making as much money as I’d expected either.

  The advertisement in Our Brooklyn had managed to attract a few new people, but with several of my old students leaving, the total soon dwindled to even fewer than I’d had before. A couple of students left because they didn’t like my thick Russian accent. Others left because they weren’t satisfied with my knowledge of English grammar. Two women complained that I charged too much. Every time Evelina counted the profits from my classes, she let out a very audible sigh.

  On Monday mornings, Len and I still walked to the train together, and Len still waved to me from the opposite platform, but I could barely make myself wave back. I noticed something that I hadn’t noticed before. In the morning hours, there were one or two people waiting on my side of the platform. Almost all of the commuters stood on the other side with Len. They were going into the city, to work real jobs. I was going even farther away, to sell the Cinderella dream and a laxative hyped as a magic potion. More than once, I saw something like pity in Len’s expression. I think it was his pity that I truly couldn’t stand. But also his kindness. And especially the genuine joy in his eyes when he ran upstairs with an envelope from the Magazine.

  “Look, they did write to you after all!”

  I had thought that I wasn’t really hoping that my story would be published in the Magazine, but once I saw that envelope, my heart started to thump like crazy and I couldn’t deceive myself any longer. I had to admit to myself that I had been desperately hoping for acceptance. What was more—I had been completely unprepared for rejection.

  “It’s not that big a deal,” Len said to me as I lay on the bed sobbing. But he did try to console me anyway. “They seemed to like the story, didn’t they? See here? The woman says she was very impressed. And at the end, she asks you to send them other stories.”

  “You don’t understand!” I mumbled through the mucus and snot. “They’re just being polite! Probably because Elijah asked them to.”

  “Yes, Elijah did come through on this,” my mother said. She took the letter from me and hid it among her things as a sort of memento.

  Strangely enough, the rejection didn’t diminish my resolve to leave Len; it was only getting stronger day after day after day. I kept thinking of my half of the money my mother and I had made by selling the Moscow apartment as “my freedom money.” I could leave Len and sustain myself with that money, until I found a better job. All I needed was a push.

  I was itching to do something bad, something vile that would be sure to destroy my marriage.

  One night I stayed behind, after my evening class. I waited for the last of Solomon’s patients to leave; then I went and knocked on his door.

  “Katya, is that you?” he asked.

  I walked into Solomon’s semidark red-and-blue office. He was sitting at his desk, looming over rows of plastic penises.

  “What?” Solomon asked.

  The telephone rang in the waiting room, but neither of us looked in its direction.

  “How does your method work?” I finally asked.

  Solomon looked up at me with a quizzical expression, as if he couldn’t believe that I’d ask something silly like that, when we both knew perfectly well why I was here in his office. He threw a quick glance at his mobile phone—a bulky Nokia with chunky white buttons—and asked me if I wanted cognac. I shook my head. He poured himself cognac in a paper cup and told me to sit down.

  There was nowhere to sit, except for the narrow lounge chair. I sat down and leaned back, letting my hair fall over the edge of the chair. The enormous Irène Jacob was staring at me from the right, her mouth half-open, the word “Masterpiece!” hovering over her head like a halo. Juliette Binoche, on the left, looked away from me, branded by the words “sexy . . . mysterious” on her forehead.

  The telephone rang again. Then again. “Somebody is having a dick emergency!” I quipped.

  “Shh!” Solomon said. He finished his cognac and rose from his chair, pushing it away so hard that it knocked against the wall. I felt my entire body turn into this liquid dripping mess, which had never happened to me before. He came up close, swung his leg over me, and pushed his hands against the back of the chair. He was straddling me but standing up. His crotch was right in my face, the entire thing, living and breathing and straining the thin material of his
scrubs held together by a worn-out white string.

  “I’ve wanted this for such a long time,” he said. His voice was so hoarse that he almost croaked out the last word.

  I’d wanted this too. I’d wanted this ever since I sat down in this chair for the first time, a few months ago. In fact, I’d wanted this a mere few minutes ago.

  All I needed to do was to pull on that white string, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. My mouth went dry and I was suddenly paralyzed with an awful premonition.

  I have to do it, I was willing myself. I have to!

  The phone rang again. This time the sound was sharper, louder, closer. It was Solomon’s Nokia that kept jerking with each ring, knocking against the glass surface of the desk.

  “Shit, it’s my wife,” Solomon said and rushed to answer. “Yes, I’m working,” he said.

  I sat up, marveling at how quickly Solomon went limp.

  “No, Katya’s not here. She left. Yes, I’m sure that she left. Wait! What do you mean? Who called you? Who is Len? Wait! What? Oh, shit! Wait! Maybe I can still catch her outside.”

  He hung up and looked at me. I could tell that something horrible did happen, even though I didn’t pull on that string.

  “Your mother is in the ER,” he said. “New York-Presbyterian on Avenue U.”

  We ran toward Brighton Beach Avenue, where Solomon hailed me a cab. It didn’t occur to me to ask if Solomon knew what was wrong with her, until the cab arrived and I climbed in. “Heart attack, they think, she collapsed on the street,” Solomon said and shut the door for me.

  For the ensuing forty minutes or so I was absolutely sure that my mother would die. I was especially sure of it as I was running around in the blinding light of the New York-Presbyterian halls, having followed directions to the wrong wing, then to the wrong floor, opening one wrong door after another, peeking behind wrong partitions and catching glimpses of people strapped to cots, bound in gauze, entangled in tubes, some moaning, some drooling, some unconscious, some of them probably dying right at that moment, right as I was looking at them.

  When I finally found my mother, she had dozed off. She was half sitting in bed, her head hanging to the right. Her eyes were closed, but she looked alive, more alive than other patients I’d seen. Len was sitting in the small armchair by her side. He was leafing through a magazine in his lap, and holding my mother’s hand in his free hand. He looked at me, and for the first time in a long long time I saw the old Len in him, exposed, tender, trying so hard to be brave.

  “No heart attack!” he whispered. “Her blood pressure is very high though, so they wanted to keep her for a little while longer.”

  I rushed to him, kneeled by his chair, buried my face in his lap, and started to sob.

  I quit my job the very next day, and a few weeks after that enrolled in a technical translation class so I could have a grown-up profession. A few months later, I got pregnant and we started looking for a house in the suburbs. We found the perfect house on Staten Island. A narrow three-story semidetached, it stood in a tight community of identical narrow houses, like a worn hardcover in a crowded bookcase. The design was called a mother/daughter house, because it had a tiny separate apartment off the side of the house for a hypothetical mother, or a real one as in our case.

  I used my freedom money as a down payment.

  TWELVE

  How do you sustain x days of a loveless marriage?

  That’s easy—you compartmentalize.

  When I was six, my mother introduced spatial paradoxes to me. She used the drawings of Maurits Cornelis Escher. We had a stack of Escher’s prints tucked behind the glass doors of our bookcase. One of the prints was called Relativity and showed a house that looked neat and solid at first glance but attacked you with its craziness if you held your gaze.

  “I hate it!” I said. “It’s scary!”

  “Show me what makes it scary,” my mother said.

  I pointed to a man casually walking on the underside of a staircase, perpendicular to the rest of the house.

  “Okay,” my mother said, “now rotate the drawing all the way to the right.”

  I did.

  Now that particular man was doing okay, but the previously normal parts of the house suddenly turned crazy. I said that I especially hated the upside-down dinner table on the bottom.

  I kept turning and turning the print, watching how craziness migrated from one spot to another.

  “Do you see what’s going on here?” my mother asked. “Each part of the drawing is working perfectly well, they just don’t work as a whole.”

  Our house on Staten Island was an Escher house. This type of architecture turned out to be essential to sustaining my marriage for so many years. The secret was that I could conduct the different parts of my life in the different parts of the house and ignore the fact that they didn’t work as a whole.

  The ground floor was divided into two parts, my mother’s apartment and the heated garage.

  My mother’s apartment was a tiny studio with its tiny alcove of a bedroom and its own kitchen that also served as my mother’s living room, her study, and even a makeshift math school for local kids.

  The garage served as Len’s home office, where Len did work for his own software company, SoftUniverrse. (The extra r was a necessity caused by the fact that there was another company called SoftUniverse. I liked to roll the extra r the Spanish way, as in the word perro.) Len would come home from work, have his dinner, and disappear into the garage, making it to the bedroom long after I was asleep. On weekends he would go to the garage right after breakfast and stay there for most of the day. This schedule was extremely helpful for reducing our opportunities to fight with each other. There was one problem though. The garage didn’t have a door connecting it to the rest of the house, so every time Len needed to use the bathroom he would have to exit through the aluminum garage door and enter the house through the front door, which he often found locked. Since it was impossible to make our doorbell work, Len would have to knock, then bang, then kick the door, yelling and frightening the neighbors. “Sorry! I must have forgotten that you were home, Len,” my mother would explain. My mother and Len had had a single affectionate moment at the hospital, but since we’d left Brooklyn, their relationship had been slowly progressing to a steady cold war.

  The second floor had the large living/play room that was crowded with not-yet-discarded toys and also housed a TV set and shelves with our “good” books (meaning books we had brought from Moscow). I kept all our books in English in the upstairs bedroom under and around my bed, where I did most of the reading. There was also a kitchen, spacious and bright, designed for lengthy family dinners, which we had only once or twice. Actually, the largest gathering of people our kitchen would see was my mother’s funeral, when I threw one of our heavy chairs at B. and made an ugly dent in the wall. The best feature of our house was that the kitchen’s narrow glass door opened onto the patio. The patio overlooked the small park between the rows of houses, where the kids, even when they were really young, could play unsupervised. If I woke up very early, I liked to drink my coffee on the patio, alone, in blissful silence. I wouldn’t go near it at other times, because it was only inches away from the patios of our neighbors. The neighbors on the right were relentless barbecuers; they would grill their food all day, every day—they even grilled bananas for breakfast. The neighbors on the left had a mean dog who wouldn’t stop barking. Ever. The dog is significant, because it caused one of the biggest fights I would ever have with Len. My mother and I were wondering if the dog was male or female. Len said: “She’s vicious and cowardly; of course it’s a female!”

  The second floor also served for housing extra people. When Len’s parents came to visit, they would sleep on the couch and take up the entire kitchen to chop vegetables for a never-ending succession of salads and soups. I would hide out in the bedroom, which was what Len did when Sasha came to visit. Len and Sasha couldn’t stand each other, because each of them beli
eved that the other was a pretentious fool. Yulia seemed to be avoiding me, but Sasha and I had reconnected two years after we had left Brooklyn. He lived in Germany now and made his living as a documentary filmmaker. He would visit New York about once a year, alone or with one of his boyfriends.

  Note to an astute reader. If Sasha ever was in love with me, it was probably because I wore boys’ clothes and looked like a boy. I blame my Soviet upbringing for the fact that I didn’t pick up on this sooner.

  Len wasn’t very fond of my new friend Anya either. She was a nurse who worked at a cancer center in New Jersey but lived a few minutes away from me on Staten Island. We met through our daughters, who attended preschool together. Anya had established a routine of “no bra” visits. That meant that if one of us felt really shitty, she could throw a winter coat over her pajamas, pull snow boots over bare feet, and drive straight to the other’s house, where she could sob in peace, unconcerned about uncombed hair or bobbing breasts. This became essential to me during the unhappy phase of my affair with B.

  Anya was also the only person with whom I could talk about sex. I remember discussing “whether size matters” on my patio.

  Anya said that for her it was more about sensual intelligence. But I advocated for size. “See,” I said, “it has to be able to reach all my secret nooks.”

  And Anya slapped me on the back and said that I was a real poet.