The Scent of Pine (23 page)

She started to cry.

Ben took her into his arms and stroked her back with such tenderness that it made her cry harder.

“Do you think that was how it happened?” he asked.

“Yes, I’m sure that was how it happened. Sasha might be wrong about small details, but everything else adds up.”

Her face was pressed into his chest, so her words came out muffled. She had felt awkward about reading the book with Ben, but now she was deeply moved by the fact that Ben was there with her as she was learning what really happened in her camp story. She had told him her version, but they had discovered the real version together. It was he who gave her the book, the book that had been in his car the whole time they were driving to Maine, hidden between the pieces of Ben’s past, witness to everything that happened between them, and to Lena’s delusional interpretation, the way those misunderstandings had affected the rest of her life.

He was so warm that she felt that if he continued to hug her, she would melt.

She raised her face and said, “I have to tell you about Danya now.”

Ben nodded.

Lena took one of his hands and pressed it against her face.

“He did write to me. It took him six months. At first I was waiting for the letter like crazy. I would come down to the mailbox every morning and linger before opening it, prolonging the expectation that the letter would be there that day. Then I was hoping rather than waiting. Desperately hoping. Once, I even had a dream about getting the letter. And then I started to forget Danya. I thought of him less and less. There were days when I didn’t think of him at all. Then there were weeks when I didn’t think of him. After a while, I stopped thinking about him altogether. It was then that I finally got the letter. Danya wrote that he had been transferred to an outpost close to the Arctic Circle. He wrote that it was very cold and quiet there, but he’d gotten used to the cold very quickly, and he liked the quiet. He’d seen the Northern Lights, the most beautiful sight he had ever seen. The trees there were very low—knee high—and the animals were all white.

“He didn’t ask me any questions. He didn’t mention anything about the camp. He didn’t say that he missed me. He signed it ‘Danya.’ Just ‘Danya,’ not ‘your Danya’ or ‘love, Danya.’ The whole letter was less than a page. I cried for an hour and wrote my reply. I wrote that I loved college, that I was studying ancient languages (we were supposed to study some Latin, but not until the next year), and that he must paint the Northern Lights, that it would be a shame if he didn’t, that it was such a rare opportunity for an artist to see something like that. He didn’t write me back.”

“You never saw him again?” Ben asked.

“I saw him about four years after that. By pure accident. On a subway train in Moscow.”

Lena took a few sips of tea. The story of her past was getting closer and closer to the present. Closing in on her.

“He called my name, and when I looked up from the book I was reading, I saw him standing right next to me. He was smiling. But he looked different. I wasn’t sure how. Less boyish? I was so surprised to see him that I screamed, ‘Danya!’ He winced and said that he hated that name and that nobody called him that since the army.”

Ben wanted to ask Lena something, but she ignored him and continued talking.

“We got off the subway together and went to have ice cream in a little café in the center. He said that he thought about me all the time, but he was too depressed to write. He said that being in the army, especially on that base up North, really screwed him up. He said that he got some very rough treatment on that base, but he wouldn’t elaborate. Not then, not ever. No matter how much I begged him. I asked him about his art. He said that he’d quit art school and was studying math. He said that he thought that painting was stupid. We talked for an hour or so, and then I had to run to my class. He walked me to school. He acted like he was really happy to see me.”

“Did you see each other again?”

“Yes, we did. We started to date.”

“You and Danya dated?”

Lena cleared her throat. She had to tell Ben.

“Yeah, we dated for about a year. And then we got married.”

Ben put his mug down and stared at Lena: “You married Danya?”

“Yes.”

“What happened? Did you get divorced?”

“No, we’re still married. Danya is my husband.”

“But you said that your husband’s name was something else. Vadim, was it?”

“Yes, his name is Vadim, which is how I think of him now. But Danya was his nickname.”

Ben groaned and sank lower in bed: “Okay, I need to process that.”

But Lena continued: “When we first got married, it was good. Fun. I loved making our home—it wasn’t really a home, Vadim simply moved into my room in the apartment where I lived with my mother. But I loved helping him put his favorite posters up and set up his desk. And I loved shopping for food and cooking, and just watching TV together as we ate the pie I just learned how to bake. Vadim was teaching math to undergraduates. I graduated from college and found a job on the radio—I was in charge of finding and editing little-known fairy tales for a children’s show. I loved that job. Then I found out that I was pregnant. Both Vadim and I were ecstatic. But soon after the baby was born, things started to turn sour. There was a huge wave of emigration, and most of our friends were planning to leave Russia to find jobs in Europe or the U.S. Vadim’s parents left for California. Vadim eagerly supported them, saying that there was no future in Russia, for us, or for our son. He became obsessed with that idea, and whenever I tried to object, he would get very angry and bring up his experience in the army and say that I had no idea how horrible Russia was. He never really explained what happened to him on that base up North, but hinted that he had had a really hard time. And I kept thinking it was my fault that he ended up there.”

“So you decided to go?”

“Yes. Vadim’s parents were already living in California, so it made it easier to get our visas. Once we got here, we kind of switched roles. He became euphoric, and I became depressed. Misha was very young, so I was mostly stuck at home. I was overwhelmed by how much I hated everything here: from the sickening smell of eucalyptus in the air to the fact that you couldn’t get anywhere without a car. But Vadim felt in sync with everything. He found a wonderful job within a month. He sang praises to the ocean, to the palm trees, to his new office, to the people around us, to life in general. And he didn’t even notice how lost and unhappy I was. We were growing apart with such frightening speed. I would look at him and think: ‘He is my husband. He’s supposed to be the closest person in the world to me. Why don’t I feel that way? Why? What’s wrong with me?’

“Then I met Marcus. He was a graduate student in the film department and worked in a video store. He asked what I was looking for, and I explained how I had read the screenplays for all those famous movies, but never actually seen them and that I finally wanted to watch them. He found some of the movies for me and made me promise that I’d come and tell him about the experience of finally seeing them. We talked about movies a lot. And then gradually we fell to talking about other things. I don’t even remember how it happened that we became lovers. It seemed to be the most natural thing in the world. And I didn’t even feel horrible, because by that time I was so far away from Vadim that he seemed like a mere physical presence at the house, a roommate. I suspected that he felt the same way about me.”

“How long were you and Marcus together?”

“For a year. He was the one that persuaded me to go to grad school. He wanted me to leave Vadim, but I couldn’t make up my mind to do it. Mostly because of Misha. And then Vadim found out about us, and it was so horrible, you can’t imagine how horrible it was. It wasn’t just that he was jealous—he couldn’t fathom how it was possible at all. I don’t think he loved me anymore, but he trusted me completely, he thought of me as a part of him, you know, like an arm or a leg—he couldn’t understand how I could betray him, the way he wouldn’t be able to grasp if his arm or leg chose to betray him.

“I should’ve probably left Vadim back then, but he got really sick. He was sick for months. I got so scared that I broke off all contact with Marcus, I promised that I would never ever do something like that again, and I begged Vadim to forgive me. And then we hit that bubble of intimacy. Everything became brightly lit, brought into unbearably sharp focus. We were forced to see each other not just like partners or roommates, but like human beings with all this complicated shit inside. We suddenly wanted to know each other, to understand each other. But what we found out about each other didn’t help us in the long run; if anything, it made things worse. The most important thing that we understood was that we couldn’t possibly understand each other. We were too different. In a few months I found out that I was pregnant with our second child. This time the news didn’t make me happy. By then, whatever newfound intimacy we’d discovered had already evaporated. I felt further apart from Vadim than I’d ever felt.”

“What happened to Marcus?”

“He quit the graduate program and left. I haven’t heard from him since then.”

They lay in each other’s arms in silence, and then Ben said, “Remember, how you asked me if I was happy with Leslie?”

“Yes.”

“And I started mumbling that nonsense about the elusive nature of happiness.”

“Yes.”

“I am not happy. I’ve been miserable for a very long time. But Leslie has this very precise, very beautiful model of happiness, and she builds our lives together according to it, and if something doesn’t work, she just thinks of it as an obstacle that we should work through. In her opinion, family is something you have built and continue building, something that exists according to certain rules, something that will fall apart once the rules are broken. When we first started the affair, it was really intense. These little trips back and forth. Waiting, anticipation. And then, you know, the passion was gone, at least for me. But I was afraid to hurt Leslie’s feelings, so I started faking it.”

He turned onto his back and put his arms behind his head.

“If you stop and think about it, practically every single thing that we do is either to distract ourselves from what is wrong with our lives, or to please somebody else, to shield ourselves from reproaches and guilt. And while doing that, we’re building a cocoon around ourselves, thicker and thicker, and we stay inside and suffer from loneliness, and long to break out of the cocoon. But as soon as we do break out, people around us get hurt, and we feel guilt, reproaches, and shame, and so we go back and continue building that cocoon, and it gets unbearably lonely in there.”

“I know. I know. I know.”

“About three years ago Leslie caught me with this woman I was seeing. Catherine, a sculptor. Leslie was devastated and she said that she was leaving me. And I was scared—you know, scared of winding up alone, yep, that’s how pathetic I am—but mostly I was relieved. Because I knew that I didn’t love Leslie anymore, and I knew that I didn’t want to stay with her for the rest of my life. But Leslie didn’t leave me. She went ahead and left her husband, so we could really be together.”

“Are you going to stay with her for the rest of your life?”

“Don’t say ‘the rest of your life’! It fills me with such horror. The thought of marrying Leslie makes me sick, but the thought of leaving her makes me sick too. The process of leaving, I mean. I know that I’d be better off without her, and I’m pretty sure that she’d be better off without me. But I can’t bear the thought of actually telling her that I want to leave. It’s like a child’s fear of throwing up. You know that in order to feel better you have to do something awful and scary, and you can’t, you’d rather stay where you are and feel bad.”

“Does Leslie know how unhappy you are?”

“No, I don’t think so. For the most part, she doesn’t. She has an enviable ability to believe what she wants to believe. And when she notices that I’m kind of down, she ascribes it to my general inclination to be depressed.”

“Are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Depressed?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes I get painfully aware that I’ve lived the active part of my life through, and from now on it’ll be just gray and endless like the credits after a movie. Take travel. I used to love to travel. But now, as soon as we get to a new place, I have the acute sensation of a void, as if something essential is lacking. We appear to be fine, we talk, we laugh, we walk hand in hand, we do look as if we’re enjoying the trip a lot, yet everything seems murky and distant, as if I were watching life passing by through the unwashed window of a train. And I catch myself thinking that I want this trip to be over as soon as possible. Leslie and I went to England this fall. Leslie was really looking forward to it. I was too, hoping for distraction, excitement, I don’t know—fresh impressions. I tried so hard to make it a good trip, to enjoy it, to be happy. And you know what happens when you try hard to be happy. When you have to ‘work’ at it. On the outside, you succeed, everything looks fine. But inside, you feel such boredom and exhaustion. In one of the bed and breakfasts where we stayed, there was something wrong with the light switch in the bathroom. The light would go out every ten seconds or so, and then you had to fumble against the wall looking for the switch. I felt kind of like that throughout the trip. I would see something exciting—and I would come alive, and be pleased with myself that I was able to come alive at all. And then the light would go off, and all the things around me would look fake and dull like pictures in an old dusty coffee-table book, and all I felt would be boredom and longing to get somewhere else, to get out, to go to a different destination, to arrive somewhere where I could rest and stop forcing myself to feel alive.”

“Oh, Ben. Ben. Ben. Ben.”

The fire was almost out and the rain had stopped. It had gotten darker and colder in the cabin, and Lena became suddenly aware of the woods around them. Tall, dark, and eerie. Full of creepy sounds and smells. Lena turned to her side and moved closer to Ben, her hair touching his face, her ass grazing his stomach. She felt warm. Even her hair felt warm.