Still Here (11 page)

The problem was that Sergey's new boss proved to be insane. “He looks like a demented squirrel,” Sergey complained to Vadik and Regina, making them laugh. “He does!” he insisted. “He has these rodent teeth and vacant little eyes.” Vica failed to appreciate this comparison. She really hated Sergey's being so negative about his boss. It wouldn't help him succeed, she said. But it was hard not to be negative. The guy kept piling the most boring, humiliating work on Sergey and making him the office scapegoat. The worst was his patronizing contempt. If Sergey asked him to clarify this or that, he would stare at him with his beady black eyes for ten seconds or so and say, “Didn't they teach you that at business school?” And if he had to ask Sergey a question, he would pretend that he couldn't understand the answer because of Sergey's English. “Excuse me?” he would say, or “Say that again,” or just shake his head.

“Sergey demonstrates fine professional expertise, but he could use some improvement in his verbal skills,” he wrote in an evaluation.

“What if he really doesn't understand you?” Vica asked. “Your English is not that great.” Well, yes, Sergey knew that his English was far from perfect, but he strongly believed that his brilliance and wit should compensate for that. Sergey loved to watch interviews with European luminaries on PBS. They too spoke with strong accents and made occasional grammatical mistakes, but these imperfections weren't seen as a handicap, but rather as a sign of superiority. They spoke the English of European intellectuals. And they sounded just like Sergey. Sergey got really mad when Vica burst out laughing when he shared that sentiment with her. That was when they had their first really big fight. Vica refused to understand why Sergey had to quit that job. “I hate my job too, so what?” she said.

“I'll find a new job in no time,” Sergey told her. And he did. He found a new job within two weeks. The salary was almost as good as his last job, but the workload was lighter, and the boss was a nice, really nice, man. Kind of pale and sickly looking with these dark circles under his eyes, but nice. When, after two months, the decision was made to let Sergey go, his boss actually bothered to explain his reasons. It was not Sergey's fault, this was just a wave of layoffs. It happened. “Yeah, right,” Vica said, when Sergey repeated that to her. She threw the cake he brought to appease her directly into the garbage bin. She kicked his computer bag with her foot. She yelled at Eric to get the hell out and go play outside. Sergey thought she was rather unreasonably angry. He promised to find a new job, a better job, within weeks. He'd done it once, he could do it again. Sergey did find something, but then the financial crisis hit and he lost it almost immediately.

It all went downhill from there. His enthusiasm faltered. His panic grew. His insecurities bloomed. His résumé became stained with longer and longer periods of unemployment. Each of the jobs he managed to find seemed to be a little bit worse than his last one, and the effort required to find them was greater and greater. There were fewer and fewer graduates from good schools among his coworkers, more and more immigrants like him.

“So what is it you do there exactly?” Regina asked when he got the job at Langley Miles. How he hated when people asked him that!

“I perform daily reconciliation of interest rate derivatives positions,” he said to Regina.

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“Do you really want to know or do you just want to rub it in about how senseless my job is?”

“Sorry,” she said.

No, his job at Langley Miles wasn't great, and still Sergey wouldn't have gotten it at all if not for Vadik's help—Vadik used to work there as a programmer before he accepted Bob's offer. Vadik had come to the United States years later than Sergey, and now Vadik was helping him. Still, the worst was Vica's attitude. She reacted to his work problems as if they were entirely his fault, as if he had done something to get fired on purpose, to spite her, to punish her, to make her life harder. Sergey's body couldn't handle the relentless disappointment either—he developed gastritis and a host of sexual problems. Vica took the latter as a personal affront.

His evaluations were getting increasingly critical, and Sergey found he was reacting to them with more and more pain. He knew them all by heart, he couldn't help it. They seemed to attack everything about him from his technical skills to his character, merging in his mind into sickening poems of judgment.

Lacks skills, spirit, drive.

Lacks goals.

Lacks control.

Fails to aspire.

Fails to evolve.

Fails to progress.

Apparently, he was failing not just professionally but on some basic human level.

He imagined that people were displeased with him everywhere. He would get embarrassed if it took him more than two seconds to produce his credit card to a cashier; he would be mortified if somebody asked him for directions and he didn't know the answer. When he ordered in restaurants, he imagined that waiters made fun of his imperfect English. He constantly saw dissatisfaction in Vica's eyes, more dissatisfaction that she actually felt, and far more than she meant to express. Even Eric….Didn't he look annoyed when Sergey failed to assemble his toy robot? Didn't he sound sarcastic when he said “Yeah, Dad, the instructions must be wrong.” Until just a couple of years ago, his son used to sit at the top of the living room stairs waiting eagerly for Sergey to come home from work. “Daddy's here!” he would yell when Sergey opened the door. He would slide down the stairs and jump into Sergey's arms. When Eric was born, Sergey had been hoping that his boy would grow up to be somebody who could understand him, become his true friend. There were moments when Sergey still hoped that was possible. Most of the time, though, he would look at Eric and imagine his son judging him as a father, listing his failures, mocking his weaknesses. He couldn't understand why these evaluations plagued him to such a degree. Perhaps it was a personality flaw that he couldn't “react to criticism in a more constructive way.”

In his youth, he was accustomed to being admired, adored, praised, showered with applause, starting when he was four or five. Every single time his parents hosted a party, his father would bring little Sergey into the room and ask him to sing. And Sergey didn't disappoint. His musical ear might not have been perfect, but he had a strong, ringing voice and plenty of confidence. His father encouraged him to forgo stupid children's songs and go straight for romances and even arias from famous operas. His biggest hits were “La donna è mobile” and Lensky's aria from
Eugene Onegin
. He didn't understand any of the words, but it didn't matter. He took enormous, almost sensual pleasure in producing the sounds, in the musical reverberations that seemed to run down his body. And there were adoring stares all around. Smiles of delight, murmurs of appreciation. This was how Sergey's addiction to praise started. He'd stopped singing for an audience when he hit puberty, but he'd had ample gratification from other sources throughout his entire life, up until the last few years. Excellent grades in school and college, becoming the youngest person with a Ph.D. he knew, acceptance to an American business school, great friends, the love of intelligent, discerning Regina, the admiration of Regina's brilliant mother. Regina's mother used to give him English lessons. Lots of people of his generation dreamed of emigrating, so English lessons were essential. Regina and her mother lived in a tiny one-bedroom apartment crowded with antique furniture and paintings. And books, so many books—old, new, foreign, neatly typed manuscripts, disheveled hand-written drafts. The apartment looked unlike any other place Sergey had ever seen. It seemed to radiate waves of a bookish culture that inspired awe and admiration. Regina's mother was a large woman with a horsey face. She wore pants and had a man's haircut. Regina looked a lot like her except that she wore her hair in a long braid and was very shy. Regina's mother conducted the lessons in their sunny kitchen, and there was always a plate of crumbly cookies on the table. English had always intimidated Sergey, and Regina's mother often insisted that he take a break and eat a cookie. As he ate, she would ask Sergey questions about his dreams, about books, about his general opinion of life. He loved answering her questions, and it took him a while to notice that they were talking in English. Regina's mother was amazing. More than once Sergey caught himself wishing that his mother, Mira, was more like her. Sometimes, as he studied, Regina would often appear in the kitchen and sit on the edge of the windowsill, her long braid hanging over her left shoulder and her very long legs stretching all the way to the kitchen table. “I love this boy!” Regina's mother would say, addressing Regina but looking at Sergey. “He's read everything!” And Regina would smile and flip her braid. When Sergey and Regina started to date, everybody thought they were a perfect match. Except that he wasn't in love with her. He had never been in love with her, but he didn't know that until he met Vica. Vadik brought Vica to Regina's place so that he could impress her with his cool Muscovite friends. Vica walked in, took off her enormous fur hat, and looked around the apartment with her hungry, disapproving eyes. Her short reddish hair was damp with sweat and her upturned nose was glistening. She took in every object one by one. The antique furniture. The paintings. The china. Regina. Sergey. And he was gone. He started on a rant about some stupid scientific concept that interested him at the time (he couldn't remember what it was now) and he couldn't stop. Vica listened to his words with such fervent attention! She would lean forward and nod, and even gasp when he said something especially striking. Sergey had never experienced that before. Regina listened to him with interest, but her interest was patient rather than passionate. He went on for a crazy long time, but he couldn't bring himself to stop. It was getting embarrassing, and he was afraid that Regina, or Vadik, or especially Vica would think that something was wrong with him.

When Vica and Vadik left, he couldn't stop thinking about her. He didn't think he would see her again, because Vadik never kept his girlfriends for a long time, which was probably for the best, and yet he kept fantasizing about her. Then a week later he saw her in Lenin's library by pure chance. She had come to research her paper on Pavlov. He sat next to her in the reading room while she studied, then they went to get ice cream and ended up walking around Moscow for hours. By the end of the night, it became impossible to imagine that they wouldn't be together.

Vica broke up with Vadik right away, and Sergey was relieved to know that Vadik wasn't too mad at him. If anything he seemed amused. “You and a girl like Vica, huh! Good luck!” He seemed to gloat a little bit too, because Sergey's remarkably uncomplicated love life was becoming bumpy just like his.

The hardest part of it was telling Regina. It was the thought of disappointing her mother that horrified him the most. For some reason Sergey imagined that the breakup scene would involve all three of them. They would be sitting in the kitchen, just like they had during English lessons, their cups on the table with a dirty spoon, a half-eaten cookie, a crust of bread. And then Sergey would deliver his news and disrupt the harmony. He imagined that Regina would run out of the kitchen in tears, but her mother would stay. She wouldn't say anything, she'd just stare at Sergey for a very long time. Vadik unwittingly spared him from that. He had no idea that Sergey hadn't yet told Regina when he talked to her. She called Sergey right after to say that he disgusted her and that she never wanted to see him again. “Disgusted”—that was what she said, and the word bothered him for a long time after that. But he was with Vica, and he felt that no amount of pain or guilt could ruin his happiness. It was like this: He would wake up in the morning, go out onto the street to get to work or to the university, and find the world saturated with Vica. The trees, the sidewalks, the honking cars, the heavy buses were all somehow about Vica. The image of her seemed to bounce off every single thing and go straight to Sergey, making him impatient to see her. He'd never wanted anyone as much as he wanted Vica, nor had anybody wanted him as much as she did. She kept telling him how she loved his taste, how she missed his smell, how he could have her anytime, anytime at all—“even if I'm asleep, you can just wake me up. I won't get mad, I promise. Always, anytime!” She was greedy and loud, but she was also fragile—something that very few people saw in her. She had this capacity to feel more intensely than other people he knew—both joy and grief. There was something raw about the way Vica experienced the world, something that always moved him, and he had always felt the need to protect her, to hug her, to shield her from the pain of living.

Hug her! Sergey thought with bitterness now. It had been a long time since Vica let him touch her. In the past couple of weeks, there were days when she wouldn't even look at him.

He walked across Whitehall Street toward Broad Street. The skyscrapers there formed solid walls and blocked the view, making Sergey feel as if he were at the bottom of a gigantic water well. When they first came to the U.S., Sergey was thrilled by skyscrapers. He would stop in the middle of a street, throw back his head, and stare at the tops of buildings that floated in the sky against light, sluggish clouds. He would stand like that with an aching neck, marveling at how something so amazing, so impossible could exist right here, within reach, constructed by mere humans. But after 9/11 their splendor was suddenly gone; they looked vulnerable, exposed, just like the residents of the city who seemed to lose their confidence overnight. He and Vica were at home when the planes hit the towers. He had no classes that day and Vica had a late shift. They still lived in Brooklyn then. He was sitting in their falling-apart armchair that they had picked up off the sidewalk and hauled four flights up to their apartment. Sitting as if frozen, staring at the TV screen without really seeing the images. While Vica—Vica couldn't sit still. She was darting back and forth between the TV and the kitchen, where she was cooking something red and messy (borscht? tomato sauce?)—her apron had disgusting red stains all over it. She was constantly on the phone with her mother, screaming at her that she should calm down. Then she got this idea into her head that people buried under the towers were still alive. Their bodies were smashed, but they were still breathing. She took her apron off and threw it to the floor and was crouching by their entrance trying to untangle the shoelaces on her sneakers. She had medical training! She could help! She could! And Sergey had to stand up and walk over to her, then crouch before her, take her by the shoulders, and tell her that there couldn't be any survivors, that those people were dead. Dead, do you understand this, dead! And there was absolutely nothing either he or Vica could do about it. Then he walked back to the armchair. He needed to process his grief in peace. They had lived through the tumult of the 1990s in Russia and arrived here, in the land of stability and permanence and well-being, where if you played by the rules, a bright future was basically guaranteed. And here they were, with stability blown up just like that. Sergey couldn't imagine what the future held for them anymore, couldn't count on everyone playing by the rules. This was probably the only time when he found himself on the same wavelength with Americans. They felt the same thing, they were like him, he was like them. This was his country. Sergey had felt like that for a long time, all the while the trauma of 9/11 had been fresh. Then the grief faded, and he became a stranger again. Now, when Sergey looked at the city, he found it hostile rather than vulnerable, threatening and boring at the same time.