Still Here (30 page)

On Friday, he began dressing about two hours earlier than necessary. He just wanted to make sure that his second-time-around jacket went well with his compromise beard. They looked okay. He took the L train to Fourteenth Street and Second Avenue, then walked down ten blocks to Fourth, turned west toward the blue neon letters spelling out KGB, and walked the one flight up to the bar. It was only six forty-five. The bar was nearly empty. He ordered a beer and sat down at a dark slippery table in the corner. There were numerous portraits of Lenin staring at him from the red walls. Red Soviet flags. A wartime poster with the angry red woman raising her arm in the air to demand that he give his life for the Motherland. This poster had been in a museum in his hometown. It had been displayed next to a glass case with empty shells in it. The red woman was supposed to be the Motherland or EveryMother. He remembered being scared shitless when he saw the poster for the first time when he was a child. And yet somebody found it cool enough to display in a bar. Vadik was on his second beer when the writer, a tall, pudgy man in a sweat-stained shirt, squeezed behind the podium and cleared his throat into the mike to signal that he was about to start. There were a few more people there now. But no Rachel. Vadik tried to listen to the writer. He couldn't understand a single word. The writer was sweating even more profusely. He had to wipe his forehead and his nose with the back of his hand. His hands were shaking, making the typewritten pages he was holding quiver and rustle. There were times when he had trouble understanding his own text and had to apologize and reread a sentence. He couldn't have been a good writer, could he? But what if he was? What if he was an unrecognized genius who couldn't bear reading aloud in public?

Vadik picked up one of the books stacked on the adjacent table for sale and signing.
The Frozen Train.
Vadik opened it to page one and read a couple of sentences. He hadn't had that much experience reading fiction in English, so he knew that he wouldn't be able to form a trustworthy opinion, but he liked what he read. The prose was dense, with a thorough absence of clarity, no clearings, no cracks that would allow even the thinnest ray of light, no loopholes, no compromises. You had to respect the guy. Vadik raised his eyes from the book and met Rachel's quizzical stare. She was sitting just two tables away from him. She must have walked in while he was reading and taken a seat somebody had saved for her. She looked away as soon as their eyes met and fixed her gaze on the writer. There was no way to tell if she recognized him or not. She looked plainer than in her photographs, much plainer than he had remembered. But he experienced a shock of recognition so great that his whole body contracted in a painful spasm. There was Rachel. His own Rachel. And the whole bar started to crumple. The writer's voice turned to a distorted drone. The Communist posters blended with the walls. The people turned into blurry figures. There was only Rachel. Sitting as if in a vacuum. Excruciatingly real, unbearably close. So close that he thought he could see her heart beat under her thin white sweater with some sort of ridiculous leather appliqué across the front.

She didn't look at him once. The reading ended and she stood up, raised her hands above her head, and gave the writer tensely enthusiastic applause. Other people started to clap too. The writer inched from behind the podium to the table where he was supposed to sign books. A young red-headed girl arranged the books in a beautiful pyramid, then put a pen and a glass of water next to it. She looked over at Vadik and saw that he was holding a copy of
The Frozen Train.
“Do you want to purchase the book, sir?” she asked. “It's twenty-five dollars.”

Vadik reached for his wallet, gave the girl two crumpled twenties, and turned to search for Rachel. She was still at the same table talking to a whole bunch of people, nodding eagerly. “Do you want me to sign it?” the writer asked. He was drinking water from the glass and it was dripping down his neck into the opening of his shirt. “Yes, please,” Vadik said.

“Your name?” the writer asked.

“Vadim.”

“Spelling?”

Vadik paused. He couldn't remember.

“Just sign it, please,” he said to the writer, and the writer shrugged and made a fat, ugly doodle in the middle of the title page.

“Here's your change, sir,” the bookseller said, handing Sergey a wad of bills.

Rachel was still talking to those people. Vadik decided that it would be best if he approached her outside. He would come up to her as she exited the bar and introduce himself. It was unlikely that she would be alone. He would still go and talk to her. He would ask her for a drink. There was no plan B.

People were exiting the bar in groups. Chatting, laughing, discussing plans for the evening. They had no idea how irrelevant they all were. Vadik kept looking at the door.

He expected to see her in about twenty minutes or so. She appeared in three. Alone. Wearing a blue raincoat. She stopped on the top step, took a beret out of her bag, put it on, and headed down the steps.

“Rachel,” he said, stepping forward. It sounded too coarse and was barely audible. “Rachel,” he said again. She stopped and looked at him. She was a few steps above the ground, so their eyes were on the same level. She reacted with the polite uncomprehending smile that he had anticipated and feared. But then almost immediately she gasped and said, “Oh!” She walked the few steps down and looked up at him. “Vladimir, isn't it?”

He hadn't expected this. He had expected her not to remember his name at all, but to use another name? And a Russian name at that. Like he was just some random Russian guy with some random Russian name.

“Vadik,” Vadik said.

She crinkled her nose in embarrassment. “Right! I'm sorry!”

That bulky beret looked ugly on her. He could see that she had aged a little bit. She wasn't wearing any makeup, which made her look strangely exposed, unprotected. There were sharp lines as if separating her mouth from her cheeks. And her beautiful amber eyes looked even brighter, highlighted by the dark circles underneath. She kept touching her lips, kneading them with the knuckles of her fingers. He couldn't remember if that was something she had done back then.

“I enjoyed the reading,” Vadik said, pointing to the book under his arm.

“Thank you! I thought it went very well too. And thank you for buying the book! I'm John's editor, you know. Do you like his work?”

Vadik said that even though he hadn't read that much of Garmash's work, he admired how there weren't any compromises, no deference to public demands. Not a lot of people were brave enough to write like that anymore.

Rachel was nodding eagerly. She seemed to warm to Vadik a little bit. Now was his chance to ask her for a drink. He made a huge effort to quiet his twitchy heart and did just that.

“Well, it would have to be a very quick drink, then,” she said. “I have to be home by ten.”

Vadik didn't know any nice places in the neighborhood. He was kicking himself for not having done any research on the neighborhood before the reading.

“This one looks okay,” Rachel said, pointing to a bar next door.

They went in, winced at the loud fifties music, and walked to a table in the quietest corner. Rachel ordered a glass of wine, Vadik a beer, and by the time they finished them, they managed to exchange all the important facts about their lives. Rachel was lucky to get an internship at Random House right after she graduated, and even luckier to get a permanent position in a year. Then one of the senior editors left to open her own house and took Rachel with her. She was paid next to nothing, but she loved her job. His own job was too materialistic, Bob's applications too silly. There wasn't any existential meaning in Dancing Drosophilae whatsoever. Its main purpose was to advertise more genetic testing for medical companies. And, anyway, his position at Bob's company was too low.

He said that he was a partner in a start-up that was developing an amazing application. It would allow you to keep your online voice after you died. And not just an online voice, but the very essence of a person. Because where else could we find our essence nowadays? Social media.

Rachel seemed to be impressed. She said that it must be very challenging.

“It is challenging,” Vadik said, “but if you get some excellent programmers and team them up with some excellent linguists, it's very doable.”

He wondered if he should mention Fyodorov, then thought better of it. He said that it had been Shakespeare's
Hamlet
that had given him the idea.

“
Hamlet
?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “ ‘The rest is silence.' ”

“Oh, yeah, yeah,” she said, “
Hamlet.
You probably know the whole thing by heart too.”

Vadik detected a mocking note in her tone, but that could have been his paranoia. As a matter of fact, he did remember quite a few passages from
Hamlet
in Pasternak's translation.

To change the subject, he said that he lived in Williamsburg now. He loved the neighborhood.

Rachel lived in Greenpoint. With her fiancé, Peter, a journalist. They were getting married in May. This bit of news didn't shock Vadik. Rachel's demeanor had already told Vadik that she was either married or in a serious relationship. It was as if she was wearing a T-shirt with huge letters on it spelling out
TAKEN
on the front. Vadik felt a desperate need to lie that he used to have a fiancée as well.

He mentioned Sejun and said that she had left him for his best friend.

“That sucks,” Rachel said, but she didn't appear to be as moved as he'd hoped she'd be.

Vadik recognized the song that was playing now: “Bye Bye Love.” How fitting, he thought. How cheesy, but how fitting.

Rachel checked her messages and said that they had time for another drink.

It was only then that they started talking about that day. Both remembered it well, but they differed on the details. Rachel didn't remember the smell of chlorine in the diner or that there was a homeless man sleeping in the corner. She didn't remember that it was snowing. She didn't remember her angry rant about Leonard Cohen. She laughed when Vadik quoted some of it. Vadik didn't remember that there was some change jiggling in his pocket all the way to Rachel's place. She found two quarters on the bedroom floor after he left. He didn't remember the dog (Kibbles was his name) who came and sniffed him by the entrance to Rachel's building. “You said something in Russian to the dog.” He didn't remember that Rachel wasn't asleep when he left. She heard him moving in the other room and called for him. He didn't answer. He said that he couldn't hear her.

He asked her to forgive him.

She said, “No! There was nothing to forgive!” Her protest was so violent that she almost knocked her wineglass over.

She said that their encounter had been wonderful for her in every sense. She had had just one boyfriend all through college. He had dumped her a few months before she came to New York City to study. She was still reeling from her breakup, and everybody told her that dating in New York was brutal. She was a quiet bookish girl from the Midwest—she didn't know if she could handle it. Her roommate told her: “Just have your first horrible one-night stand, so everything that comes after will seem better.”

Is that what I was? Vadik thought. Her first horrible one-night stand?

“And I thought no, I can't possibly do that. To be naked with a complete stranger? To touch a stranger's private parts? To let him touch mine? But then I decided that it was something I had to do. To prove myself or something. It was like going down a double-diamond trail. Or like skydiving.”

He could see how that second drink was affecting her, making her looser or, as a Russian expression had it, “untying her tongue.”

“And there you were. Tall. Foreign. In your ridiculous professor's jacket. With your Sartre! I couldn't believe somebody would be reading Sartre in a diner. With your English poetry in Russian. The fact that you were so bizarre made the whole thing much easier. It was like having sex with some eccentric literary character, not with a person. I wasn't scared or intimidated.”

Okay, Vadik thought.

“And then the sex turned out to be surprisingly good. Tense, awkward, of course, but also so much better than I'd expected.”

She reached for her wineglass, but it was empty, so she finished her water in a couple of gulps.

“I mean, it was a bit hurtful when you left without saying good-bye, but I thought that this was a necessary part of the experience. A one-night stand is called that for a reason. You need that moment of pain in order to feel really free and unencumbered.”

There was no need to explain himself now. Still, Vadik felt that he had to say something.

“It was my first day in America. I didn't know what I was doing. I really didn't.”

Rachel nodded and looked at her phone again.

“Where are you going?” Vadik asked when they exited the bar.

“Home. Greenpoint,” she said.

“Let's share a cab,” he said. “I'll get out in Williamsburg, and you'll continue to Greenpoint.”

She nodded.

In the cab, Vadik immediately felt carsick, and he knew from experience that it was best not to talk when you felt nauseous, but he had to tell Rachel the truth. He thought it was crucial that somebody besides him knew what she had really meant to him.

“I've been looking for you,” he said. “All these years. I didn't know your last name. I didn't know your address. I couldn't even remember where that diner was. I would come to the city every weekend and just go to the corner of Fifty-ninth Street and Sixth Avenue and walk downtown, swerving down the side streets hoping to find that diner.”

She was now looking right at him and it was hard to take, he had to turn away.