The Scent of Pine (13 page)

“Then when Becky turned three, I decided to go there with Becky and Erica, my ex-wife. We’d had a difficult couple of months, we had been fighting, something was clearly wrong between us, but I couldn’t tell what. I thought maybe a couple of weeks in the woods would help. I’d mentioned to Erica that I had a cabin before, but I’d never suggested going there. I’d said that it wasn’t livable. But this time I said, ‘Let’s think of it as camping.’ Erica wasn’t a big fan of camping, but she was surprisingly enthusiastic about the cabin. She gasped when she saw it. She climbed out of the car and laughed: ‘Beautiful! So beautiful!’ She said she’d had no idea it would be so beautiful. How could I have described it as such a dreary place? How could I have hidden it from her? When everything was so poetic and wonderful?”

Lena took a sip of her coffee and looked around. The little boy had finally managed to wiggle out of his seat and was now parked in his mother’s lap, happily eating French fries off his mother’s plate, dunking them in his Coke from time to time. “Oh, come on, Brandon,” the woman kept saying. “No, stop. You’re asking for it. Yes, you are! You’re pushing it, Brandon.”

Ben kept talking. He was completely engrossed in his story now. As if he was transported into the past and was talking to her from there. Lena thought she could even see his younger self in his features. Strangely, this made her feel closer to him.

“Yes, that first day at the cabin was perfect. We had breakfast by the campfire. We made orange juice using that juicer that Erica had given me on my birthday. Erica took Becky for a walk, and she kept gushing about every little chipmunk that ran past. She made us pasta on the stove (‘Look! I’m like a Stone Age housewife!’), and after lunch she took Becky to splash in the lake. I watched them from the porch. Becky was wearing Erica’s big floppy hat. You couldn’t see her head or shoulders, just her tiny arms and legs, and her skinny bottom in bunched-up underpants, so fragile that it almost broke your heart. Erica was wearing a black swimsuit. Her body was soft, her skin very pale, the wind made her blond hair brush over the mole on her back. I wasn’t sure if I was still in love with her, but she was my wife. She was the closest person to me in the whole world.

“ ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ Erica kept asking Becky, and Becky squealed in delight. She kept turning and waving at me, holding her hat with her hand. ‘Daddy, come swim with us!’ But I felt perfectly content just watching them from the porch.

“Later that night Erica snuggled up to me in bed and said that this was what happiness was. Happiness was peace. Happiness was having a husband and a child. Happiness was going back to nature.”

“She really talked like that?” Lena asked.

“Oh, yes, she did. Much worse than that actually. But back then I didn’t see anything wrong with it. Didn’t notice what a phony she was. Erica—so beautiful, so smart, so refined. And then she started telling me how perfect I was and how much she loved me, how she knew every little thing on my body by heart (‘Do you want me to recite all your birthmarks with my eyes closed?’), and how she loved my smell, and my taste (‘But, you do have a very distinctive taste, honey’) and how right it felt when I entered her, how my penis was exactly the right shape and size for her, and how ‘right’ and ‘familiar’ were more important than anything else. Then she recited some poetry, and then she started to sob, and she sobbed for hours and wouldn’t tell me why. Finally, she said, ‘I’m crying because I’m happy.’

“It turned out that Erica had been having an affair for the whole year before that, and she had just broken up with her lover a week before we went to the cabin. She was scared and lonely. She was bitterly miserable. She was clinging to me for protection. She practically begged me to find a way to persuade her that she was going to be okay.”

Lena stopped eating and was staring at Ben.

“How do you know all that?” she asked.

“I didn’t know any of it before she left me. I didn’t even suspect. But after she left me, I kind of put together all the details, and I was amazed that I hadn’t guessed earlier.”

“But how do you know exactly how she felt? That she was scared and lonely and clinging to you for protection?”

“I figured it out, once I saw the whole picture. I did know Erica pretty well, after all.”

Lena pressed the cold water glass to her forehead. She thought about Vadim going through the same pain over her infidelity. She even imagined him telling somebody their story, using the exact same expressions as Ben.

“What’s wrong? Are you upset?” Ben asked.

“No, no, I’m fine. Please, go on. Go back to the cabin. I mean to the story.”

“The next morning Erica slept late. I made some breakfast for Becky, we went for a walk, then a swim. I had already started preparing lunch when Erica woke up. The first thing she said to me was that she hated the shirt I was wearing. ‘Want some coffee?’ I asked.

“She sat at the table cradling her mug, rocking in her chair, staring at my shirt. ‘I positively hate that shirt,’ she said. ‘You look weak and slouchy in that shirt, and I’ve told you this many times. Now, why did you have to wear it?’ Becky climbed into her lap and said, ‘No, Mommy, Daddy looks very good, very pretty in this shirt.’ Erica hugged Becky, looked at me, and said that she was sorry. Then she started to cry.”

Lena felt another pang of recognition. Just before this trip she had had an argument with Vadim that started with a sweater. Her favorite old sweater. “Why you insist on wearing that thing is beyond me!” he said. “Don’t you see that it’s way too tight?”

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Ben asked.

“Yes, yes, I’m fine.”

He continued.

“It went like that for the rest of the day, a total shift from the day before. Whatever I did or didn’t do irritated the hell out of Erica. She would yell at me, she would nag me, I would yell back at her, and then either she or I would get scared and apologize. Toward nighttime, Becky grew listless and started to complain about an earache. She was burning up. We locked up the cabin, got in the car, and started to drive back home. The roads were dark and empty. In a couple of hours, it started to rain. Becky whimpered in the back seat. And Erica, who sat in the front seat, because riding in the back seat made her vomit, kept shushing her from the front seat, and failing that, screamed that it was my fault that Becky had gotten sick, because we had gone swimming in the morning, when the water was still cold, and that I ‘always, always, always, ruined everything.’ ”

Ben paused and took a few bites of his sandwich. A piece of tomato fell off Ben’s fork and landed on his chest, leaving a tomato-mayonnaise stain that he sloppily blotted with a napkin. He was staring at his food, but he looked as if he was having trouble focusing.

“We stayed together for a couple of years after that. But the rest of our marriage was pretty much like that weekend at the cabin. Erica would try to be nice to me, then she would get bored, then she would get angry, then she would get depressed. And then she ran away with another lover, leaving Becky to me. I didn’t even feel rage or jealousy. What tortured me the most was shame. We lived in this small university town, where everybody knew each other. And I couldn’t go out to the store without somebody asking about Erica. In a perfectly benign way. ‘How’s Erica?’ ‘Where’s Erica? We haven’t seen her in a long time.’ ‘Say hello to Erica.’ ‘I have something I need to discuss with Erica, would you ask her to call me?’ And I thought that everybody knew what was going on, and that they were all secretly laughing at me. And in a while I started to wish that everybody suspected that I had killed Erica, because this would be better than their knowing that I was a pathetic deceived husband. Then I was offered a job in Boston. You can’t imagine how happy I was to take it and move.”

The waitress came with the dessert menu, but they didn’t want anything and just asked for some coffee to go. They were already by the door when they heard a loud “Brandon! I told you this would happen!” Little Brandon had choked on a piece of French fry, and the mother lay him facedown across her knees and whacked him on the back with her fist, and after the French fry was out, slapped his butt several times.

Ben rolled his eyes and asked the waitress for their bill.

“I’m actually looking forward to the rest of your story,” Ben said when they got to the car.

“Thank you!”

“No, seriously. It’s like a welcome routine now. We go somewhere, we take a break from your story, then we come back to the car, and you start off where you stopped. I remember feeling like that when I was a child. I would be reading a book, a long attention-grabbing one, like
The Count of Monte Cristo
, and I would have to leave—my mother would send me to a store, I’d have classes—but I would be thinking of the book waiting for me at home, and when I finally got back, I wouldn’t even open the book right away; I would look at it and stroke the pages, trying to prolong the anticipation. Have you ever felt like that?”

“Sure.”

“Well, that’s how I feel. You know what?”

“What?”

“I’ll be sorry when the story is over.”

Lena couldn’t help but feel a jolt of pain. The camp story will be over sooner or later. As will the story of Lena and Ben. If only she could learn some of Scheherazade’s storytelling magic and make it last.

T
WELVE

“T
he third week of July brought three new experiences to the camp: the heat wave, the lambada, and the landing of the UFOs. There was no doubt in my mind that all three were connected.

“The heat wave came stealthily, pretending to be something pleasant at first. One Friday morning Inka and I went out on the porch and noticed that our breathing didn’t produce white clouds as usual. ‘Huh,’ Inka said, ‘nice!’ and took off her sweater. Small kids were allowed to go outside in shorts and tank tops, we counselors wore the teeniest tops, mosquitoes seemed to have dropped dead overnight, and the air filled with the smell of heated pine needles, smothered grass, and overripe wild strawberries.

“ ‘Are they going to open the pool?’ Sveta asked.

“ ‘They’d have to fill it with water first,’ Inka said.

“And then Sasha Simonov said they couldn’t open the pool, because it served as a landing pad for the aliens, and they were expecting aliens soon.

“ ‘What are you talking about?’ Inka asked. To me it just sounded like the usual Sasha nonsense, but Inka seemed genuinely interested.

“Other kids joined in the conversation, providing us with necessary alien-related info. Last year the aliens came twice. One looked like a big garden hose. They didn’t do much. They landed. They stayed for an hour or two and took off. When aliens try to take you, always scream, because they can’t stand high sounds. Or you can spray them with water. Just splashing water on them won’t help. You have to spray them.

“Inka laughed and shook her head and said, ‘Bullshit.’

“After lunch we took the kids to wade in the pond. On the map the pond appeared to be a tiny smudge of black paint. But in reality it was large, shallow, and green, overgrown with weeds and water lilies, with some irises and forget-me-nots by the banks. The kids dropped their things to the ground, kicked off their shoes, and rushed right into the water, squealing and pushing each other.

“ ‘Paradise on earth,’ Inka said, and lay down right on the grass, not bothering to spread out the blanket. I lay down too. The grass was cool and slightly damp, and the sun on our faces felt just perfect.

“ ‘Listen, listen,’ Inka said. She rose onto her elbow.

“ ‘The sun’s warm and nice,

Like the sweet sticky buns

That the kids have with milk

For their afternoon snack.’ ”

“I was so overcome with the sensation of perfect physical comfort that I actually liked the poem.

“ ‘Inka, you are a poet!’ I said.

“ ‘Thank you,’ she answered, and turned onto her stomach.

“After Inka had broken up with Andrey, we were on the same page again. We would go to the store together, we would walk to the spring, we even resumed our private book club. But we still didn’t feel completely comfortable around each other. There was something that annoyed me about Inka, something that bothered me like an itch, and I couldn’t understand what it was, and the fact that I couldn’t understand bothered me too.

“Inka stretched and took out a book from her backpack. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘remember that scene with butter in
Last Tango in Paris
?’

“ ‘Yes.’ (None of us had seen the movie, but we had just read the screenplay in the
Art of Cinema
.)

“ ‘What do you make of it? Do you think it is what I think it is?’

“I nodded, trying very hard to appear unflustered.

“ ‘I thought so,’ Inka said. ‘Yuck! Right?’

“I nodded.

“ ‘I mean it must hurt like hell, and wouldn’t it, you know, be all covered in shit?’

“Even though Inka had had some sexual experience, she appeared to be as clueless as I was.

“We went on to discuss how this scene had a deeper existential meaning, as did the one about the pig and the vomit. We didn’t come to any conclusion about the existential meaning, but we agreed that this was what sex was all about! Not the pig and the vomit, of course. But being capable of getting that crazy.

“Inka sighed and closed her eyes. I closed my eyes too.

“We woke up when the kids stumbled over my feet and splashed cold dirty water all over me. Inka’s face was all covered in creases because she’d used the
Art of Cinema
as a pillow. My face was sore—I must have gotten sunburned. There was no water. The kids had drunk all of it and were now terribly thirsty. And hungry. Myshka said that she was so hungry that she might faint. Sasha Simonov looked as if he were actually about to faint.

“ ‘Get your things and start walking!’ Inka said. ‘You don’t want to miss dinner.’

“The first half of the way, the kids walked at a crawling pace. I could barely walk myself. It felt as if we were climbing a very steep mountain, even though the ground was perfectly flat. The only thing that gave me some energy was the intense hatred of the kids. They just wouldn’t shut up. Myshka was sniveling because Sveta Kozlova punched her. Alesha Pevtcov claimed that he had been bitten by a frog. Sasha Simonov was whimpering like a dog, because his stomach ached. I thought that if I heard one more complaint from somebody, I would hit him or her with an empty teakettle. Apparently, Inka felt the same, because when Alesha said that he couldn’t walk anymore because his frog-bitten butt itched, she did hit him with her kettle.