Vladimir(54)
“I want to kiss you,” Vladimir said. And though I knew it was just an expression my heart rate seemed to double, and I felt queasy. He told me that it had been a very long time since he had gotten feedback like that—in fact he had thought the days of hearing his work reflected or analyzed in that way were over. He would be reviewed in the future, he would hear from advisers about what he could change to help sell a manuscript or from publishers about parts that weren’t clear or from a copy editor about usage and grammar, but he hadn’t expected to hear someone fully reflect his work back to him—what he was trying for—with such specificity or rigor.
“Cynthia’s a good reader,” he said. “But her advice is always so holistic. She’ll say, ‘cut this part’ or ‘that guy seems fake.’?” He waved his hands at me, as if to say I was “too much.” “I knew I was excited about our date for a reason.”
“Well, I didn’t want to read your book. And then I was very jealous of you when I first started it. But then I realized it was very good, and when something’s very good, it doesn’t make me jealous, it makes me happy that it exists.”
“No more—I’ll float away on my own inflated ego.”
I put my elbow on the table and leaned my head against my fist, in a gesture of total attentiveness. “How’s the next book coming?”
Badly, he said, he didn’t have enough time to work on it, so he could never find the kind of rhythm he needed for an honest start. It was hard in the condo—he missed his writing space in his apartment. It had been a closet, he had stared at a blank wall—there had been nothing picturesque about it—he had sat in a folding chair that murdered his back. Still, it was where the first book came from. Also, as a first-year tenure-track junior professor, he needed to publish in some journals, so he had to keep working on an essay he was writing comparing Zamyatin’s We, Huxley’s Brave New World, and recent trends in apocalyptic television. The essay was taking him forever, because as he was writing it he kept forgetting why the topic had ever been interesting in the first place. Finally, with his next book he felt he needed to “swing for the fences” and write something really big—historical, maybe, or with multiple perspectives, or concerning a social issue. He felt scattered, he kept changing topics, he couldn’t settle on something true.
“I think, what do I care about? And for a moment I’ll convince myself that I care about veterans from Afghanistan, or drone operators, or Russian political hackers, or sex slavery, or cults, or the friendship between Babel and Gorky. And I’ll do all this research—this will be it, this will be my big novel. And then I’ll start to write and it will feel so dead and so false that I can’t go on. I think, genre twist, I think personal, and then I’ll think, why am I trying so desperately to find what to write? Doesn’t the world have enough books in it? I should just give up.”
The waiter approached and inquired about dessert. Vlad asked for a cappuccino, but at the risk of appearing domineering, I told him to hold off and asked for the check. “Their coffee is terrible,” I said after the waiter had left. “Not worth it. And also—” I hesitated. The lunch had gone better than I could have dreamed. My dining companion, I could tell, was in an agreeable emotional state and a high level of intoxication. If I were to enact the next steps in my plan they would most probably succeed. And would I want them to? I pictured the alternative—driving him home, dropping him off at the front door of his condo, watching him walk inside, a bomb of hollow sadness falling upon my breast, knowing we would most probably never engage like this again. He would find appropriate friends, other parents his age, “that sexy playground,” as Grace Paley named it. I would get older, we would become familiar with each other, in faculty meetings we would get on each other’s nerves, our interactions would be reduced to mostly brief, pained, “so busy” smiles as we passed each other in the hallways, as it was now between David and me.
No, I couldn’t bear that. I let myself look at him, fully in the face, nurturing a feeling of warm affection: loving the puffy bags beneath his eyes, the large pores on his chin, his spiky nostril hairs, his self-doubt, his neediness…
“I want to show you something,” I said, as though confessing an intimate secret. “May I take you somewhere?”
He said I sounded mysterious and that he was intrigued. And that yes, he would go with me anywhere I wanted. He breathed heavy sighs—“I haven’t felt this kind of release in a long time,” he said. “Do you remember that fairy tale, where the soldier or the prince or the pauper—I forget who—puts the bands around his chest to keep his heart from breaking?”
“You stop that,” I said. “I was just thinking of that story recently.”
“I feel like that, sometimes. Like I need to keep myself held together with bands of iron. For my daughter, for my wife. I have to use the bathroom.”
He stumbled away from the table. I’d had one glass of wine, he’d had the rest, and our harvest salads and minestrone soups—no breadsticks for low-carb Vlad—couldn’t effectually sop up the wine, which came in at an astonishing 15.5 percent alcohol level. (Not too many years ago, you were unlikely to encounter a wine greater than 11 percent; somehow in the past decade we had internationally agreed we needed to get drunker faster and for less.) He had mentioned his “wife” again. “My wife.” “Mine.”