Authors: Lara Vapnyar
T
HREE
T
he conference reception attracted Lena with all its busy noise and hectic movement. She felt entertained for a minute or two, watching all those people, choosing food to put on her plate, enjoying the sweet chill of Riesling on her tongue, and half-listening to the merged-together buzz of the conversations.
Lena was momentarily seized by a powerful desire to be noticed. To be admired? Maybe, she wasn’t sure. But she needed to be seen, to make an impression, to be on the receiving end of some interest, curiosity, attention. The hunger that she felt was almost physical. She looked around, hoping that she’d see the man from the pool. He wasn’t there. She scanned the room trying to find faces familiar from the conference brochure. There was Althea LaGrange from Tufts. Lizzie Gess from Wellesley. Gerry Baumann from Harvard. Gerry Baumann was a Pulitzer Prize winner, so his picture had been the largest. A fat, balding man with a splotchy face, he looked restless and tense. Lena could hardly imagine initiating small talk with anybody, let alone with somebody like that. Althea LaGrange didn’t seem any more accessible. Lena was becoming increasingly aware of how awkward it must have seemed moving through the room completely alone, without direction or purpose. Anybody who bothered to look at her would have noticed this and the fact that she had an embarrassing amount of food on her plate. So, she retreated onto the porch and stood there sipping her wine, balancing her plate on the banister, trying to tell herself that she was just fine here, restless, alone, but with a pile of shrimp on her plate.
Somebody cleared his throat.
“You picked the best spot!”
Lena turned and saw the man from the pool.
“Yes, it’s quiet here.”
“Didn’t I see you earlier today at the pool?”
“Yes,” she said. “I think so.”
The man had longish graying hair that would have looked pretentious if it hadn’t been a little unkempt. She found him slightly pathetic and this fueled her confidence.
“So,” he said, “are you enjoying the conference?”
“No,” Lena said, surprising herself with her frankness, “not at all. Nobody came to my talk today. Not a soul.”
Strangely, she felt better as soon as she admitted that, but the man looked concerned.
“What was your topic?”
“Sexual education in Soviet Russia.”
“Sounds amazing. I would’ve come.”
“Thank you.”
“My name is Ben, by the way.”
“Lena.”
His eyes were really very dark.
“So tell me, Lena, do you teach sexual education?”
She laughed.
“No, I teach film history. You?”
“History of the graphic novel at Rutgers. Do you like graphic novels?”
“I don’t know. Probably not. I haven’t read that many.”
Actually, she hadn’t read any, but she didn’t want to admit that.
“Tell me about your presentation. What were you planning to talk about?”
He appeared to be genuinely interested.
“Well, how sexual education was mostly prohibiting things rather than informing.”
“Tell me more!”
Lena smiled.
“For example, this: I worked in a Russian summer camp once, where the head counselor insisted that the kids sleep with their hands over the blankets.”
“You were a counselor?”
“Yes. I was eighteen.”
“How could you possibly ensure ‘hands over the blankets’?”
“The head counselor suggested that we simply yell at the kids, but our more humane idea was to tell the kids stories until they fell asleep. Horror stories worked best, because the kids were so scared that they weren’t about to do anything under the blankets.”
“Horror stories? How’s that more humane?”
“You see, my co-counselor Inka dug out this article in
Psychology Today
that said that horror stories were very healthy, because imaginary horrors managed to distract us from whatever real fears we had, and calm us down. Neither Inka nor I had been to summer camp as children, so we didn’t know any of the classic horror stories. And that’s where our college summer reading list came in handy
. The Arabian Nights, Canterbury Tales, Decameron, Divine Comedy
. We would recount kid-sized renditions of the stories until the kids fell asleep.”
“What would a kid-sized
Divine Comedy
sound like?”
“It wasn’t mine. It was Inka’s. It went something like this:
“ ‘Yeah, well, I have to tell you, kids, Hell wasn’t a nice place at all. They hit people there and even roasted them in the fire.’
“And the kids would ask ‘Like we do with potatoes?’
“ ‘Uh-huh. Exactly like that. Now imagine that you are that potato.’ ”
“You were horrible!”
“I know!”
“What about
The Decameron
?”
“ ‘Once upon a time, in Florence, which is this really cute city in Italy, which used to be like a whole separate country, there was an epidemic of plague.’
“And the kids would ask ‘What’s plague?’
“ ‘Plague, you know, it’s like flu, only much worse. You catch it if you don’t wash your hands or brush your teeth. You develop these scary enormous boils all over your body and then you die. So these people in Florence didn’t like to wash their hands, and they all got sick.’ ”
“Poor kids! But you know what, it sounds a little familiar. A summer camp, where counselors stopped children masturbating by scaring them to death. I might have read a book about that.”
“I don’t think so. I honestly doubt that anybody else would think of that. But the kids loved our stories. They kept asking for more.”
A waiter with a tray full of dirty glasses opened the door, gave them a look and went back.
“I think the dinner’s over,” Lena said, heading toward the door to the reception lounge.
When they walked back into the room, only a few people were left in the corner, eating cake off tiny round plates and drinking coffee from the same institutional mugs they laid out at breakfast. The waiters were removing warming trays with the remains of lasagna and couscous. The trash bins overflowed with paper plates, glasses stained with red wine, forks, and half-eaten rolls. Lena slipped on a piece of melon somebody had dropped. Ben reached for her, but she grabbed the edge of the table instead.
They both stopped at the door. She didn’t want this to be over. She had gotten her wish. Somebody had noticed her, had listened to her, been interested in her. She had forgotten how good that felt! But instead of quenching it, this encounter seemed to intensify her hunger. She didn’t want to have an affair. She could swear that she didn’t. She just wanted the attention, the sweet wonderful undivided attention. Lena hoped Ben would offer to continue the conversation. Ask her to a bar? It wasn’t that late yet.
“Listen,” he said, “do you have your conference paper with you?”
Her conference paper?
“My conference paper? Yes, it’s in my room, why?”
“Would you let me read it? I’m fascinated by the subject.”
Lena summoned the paper in her head, trying to decide if it was good enough to show to Ben. Was it too boring? Too poorly written? No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t brilliant, but it was okay. Peppered with subtle humor. She hoped Ben would be able to appreciate that. She imagined Ben reading it in his hotel room, leafing through the pages, smiling at her jokes, thinking about their meeting, remembering her face, the sound of her voice. The thought filled her with strange excitement.
“Okay,” Lena said. “If you really want to see it.”
“I do.”
They walked down the narrow path through the park on the way back to the hotel. Towering trees whose leaves rustled high above their heads. Occasional benches—some of them missing planks in the middle. Lena wished desperately for Ben to touch her, to take her hand, or put his arm around her shoulders, or just brush his fingers against her back, but he walked with his hands in the pockets of his jacket. Dim streetlights a little too yellow. There were no stars in the sky, just the occasional bright spark of a plane, and the half-moon in a pale halo.
When they arrived at the lobby of the hotel, however, it was so brightly lit by contrast that Lena felt like closing her eyes for a moment.
“Will you wait for me?” Lena asked Ben. “I’ll be right down with my paper.”
There was loud piano music coming from the bar, and he had to lean closer and ask her to repeat. His heated breath on her skin made Lena dizzy. She repeated her question.
“Sure,” he said. “I’ll be at the bar.”
Upstairs, Lena gave her paper a quick once-over. There was a typo on page 3. A long winding paragraph on page 6. A stupid joke and two more typos on page 7. Lena knew that the quality of her paper didn’t matter, but by the time she made it to the bar, she was sick with anxiety.
She couldn’t find Ben right away. She finally spotted him at the back of the bar, sitting across from the fat red-faced man whom she recognized as Gerry Baumann. Lena smiled and waved at Ben, but Ben shot her a pleading look and shook his head. She stopped. Gerry’s meaty hand was now on Ben’s sleeve. He was kneading Ben’s arm and pushing him down toward his bar table.
“So, how’s our little Leslie, Ben? Are you treating her well?”
“She’s fine, Gerry.”
“Glad to hear that. When is your wedding, then? Are you planning on inviting me? Wouldn’t it be monstrous if you didn’t?”
Lena turned and walked toward the elevator. As the elevator doors closed, she saw Ben desperately looking in her direction.
Up in her room, Lena shoved her paper back into her bag, changed into her nightgown and plopped onto the bed. She couldn’t believe how upset she was.
There was a missed call from Vadim on her phone. Lena dialed his number, but he couldn’t talk because he was busy with his parents, and she felt relieved that she didn’t have to talk to him, and spoke instead to her children. Her six-year-old Borya asked if he could bring back a lizard from California. He was pretty sure he could catch one, they were really fast, but you could catch them while they were eating a piece of banana, he would’ve caught one today if he’d had something to put it in, he would go back with a paper cup tomorrow. Her eleven-year-old Misha didn’t know what to say—like Lena, he was never any good on the phone. He must be lonely there; she had the feeling that the intensity of his California relatives frightened him. She imagined him hiding out in one of the empty rooms—her in-laws had a huge sprawling house—with a book or a videogame, lying on his stomach on the bed, propped on his elbows, feet in the air. Thin legs sporting white socks. The socks must be dirty by now. And Borya, who was healthy and square, built more like his father, would be running around the house looking for his brother. He was so cheerful and lively all the time, but what if he felt lonely too? She felt an urge to hug them both. To protect them, to be protected by them. It was strange how affection and pity went hand in hand. How, whenever she felt true affection, her heart would ache with compassion, even when there was no obvious reason for it. She’d learned that while dealing with the children at camp, though it had taken her a while.
At first Lena didn’t even see the kids as human beings with their own feelings, fears, and problems. She thought of them as creatures specially designed to provide counselors with work and to create problems that would get them all punished.
As they waited for the kids to arrive, Lena kept checking her watch and silently praying that maybe they wouldn’t come at all, that maybe a war would start, or a sudden epidemic of plague, or a nearby nuclear plant would explode, and the camp would be canceled before she started to work there. And then, an hour later, the buses started rolling in, sending clouds of dust into the air. One, two, three, four . . . “You go meet bus number eight, your kids are in there,” somebody told them. The doors opened and, one by one, the kids started to get out. Little kids between the ages of eight and ten, smaller than Lena’d expected, wearing shorts and dusty sandals and summer hats, carrying their labeled suitcases, tired after a two-hour bus ride, terrified of the camp, terrified of the counselors, terrified of each other, some restless, some looking as if they hadn’t woken up yet, some crying because they had been tortured by bullies during the ride, some crying because they were already missing their mothers, some crying for no reason at all. Lena realized, with a start, that she had no idea how to deal with children. She was supposed to tell them what to do, and they were supposed to listen. But what if they wouldn’t? And then she heard Inka’s voice: “Okay now, kids! Pick up your things and let’s go to our building. Go!” Lena could hear an unmistakable note of fear in her voice. Lena had read somewhere that dogs could always feel your fear and that they would tear you apart when they did, but kids apparently didn’t work that way. They picked up their things and followed Inka.
The first few days swirled by in a nonstop storm of big and small tasks. Wake the kids, take them to the bathroom, yell at them so they wouldn’t splash each other, search for missing toothbrushes, search for toilet paper, chase a slippery piece of soap on the floor, yell at the kids some more, take them back to the bedrooms to dress, search for missing socks, search for missing pants—how can you lose your pants?! Help them make the beds, look for missing sheets—how can a sheet go missing?! Take the kids to assembly, make sure the kids stand straight and don’t talk, hiss at them since yelling is not permitted during the morning assembly. Take them to breakfast, distribute the bread and butter cut into little cubes, have thirty seconds of peace while gulping down some tasteless kasha with a cup of weak tepid coffee, yell at the kids who smeared butter on their chairs, at those who smeared butter on their knees, and especially at those who threw butter cubes at one another, yell at the kids who don’t want to finish their kasha, yell at the kids who finish too soon and are now bothering other kids. By the time they took the kids for the scheduled three hours of playing outside, Lena and Inka could no longer yell. They would just yank them by their sleeves or grab them by the collars of their shirt if they started to fight or tried to run too far.