The Scent of Pine (8 page)

She handed him the cup of coffee and a paper bag with a muffin. He took them from her and was about to kiss her when she said “here” and pulled a few cream containers out of her pocket, and packets with three kinds of sugar: white, brown, and fake. He took the white, poured the contents into his cup, and drank the coffee quickly, standing up. It took them no more than five minutes to pack up their things, check out, and get to the car.

The fog had lifted, but windows were all misty on the inside. Lena picked up a rag from under her seat and wiped hers.

They swerved onto Main Street and drove toward the highway in silence. At the red light Lena reached into her bag, pulled out a tube of Neosporin, and put some over her cut, then put her feet on top of her bag.

Ben’s face was creased. His eyes were puffy. He looked tired and distant. The ride to Boston would take them forty minutes or so. He would drop her off, and they’d say good-bye to each other. She would spend some time at home, trying to do some household chores, then she’d realize that she was too tired and sad to do that, and she’d take a bus to Cambridge and aimlessly wander the streets, thinking about Ben. Some of her memories would be embarrassing and she’d try to banish them; others would be stirring and she’d try to savor them, bringing them up again and again. She would evoke certain things about Ben and feel the immediate shock, the shiver. Physical memories—an amazing thing, if only they didn’t fade so quickly. In a few weeks she would feel nothing. She would be just as sad and empty as before except that now she would be guilty and ashamed as well.

The sign read 95
NORTH PORTLAND AUGUSTA
—
RIGHT LANE
. 95
SOUTH PORTSMOUTH BOSTON
—
LEFT LANE
.

The prospect of going home filled Lena with unbearable dread.

She shifted in her seat and turned to Ben.

“Take me to Maine with you,” she said.

“To Maine?”

“Yes. To your cabin. I don’t have to be in Boston until Monday.”

She didn’t know why she said that. She couldn’t really want to go to Maine with him, did she? Why would she?

She needed to show Ben that she’d been joking. How do you show that you’re just joking? Her mind was blank.

“It’s on the rustic side,” Ben said.

“What?”

“My cabin.”

Here was her chance to laugh and say that she hated everything rustic.

She said: “I love rustic.”

Ben looked away and ran his finger around his lips. She was mortified. In a second he would look at her with a kind patronizing smile as if she were a child and say, “You know I can’t,” or worse yet, “You know we can’t.” And then they would have to spend the next thirty minutes to Boston in dreary silence.

But instead he looked at her and chuckled.

“Okay. Let’s see if there are cops around.”

“Why?”

“See, no U-turn here.”

Lena could barely hold back a squeal of delight.

“No cops. Make a U-turn!” she cried.

The car made a sharp U and sped back to the crossing.

“Now we’re officially outlaws,” Ben said.

They went through the toll booth and onto 95 North. They were going to Maine.

Lena couldn’t believe how relieved she felt, despite her uncertainty just minutes before. She stretched in her seat and bumped her leg against the juicer again. This time she picked it up and put it on the back seat.

S
EVEN

T
hey were about to pass the
WELCOME TO MAINE
sign when Ben’s phone rang. He kept it on vibrate. She heard a barely audible buzz and saw how Ben paled and stiffened as if there was a nagging pain in his left thigh. He pulled his phone out of the pocket of his pants, looked at the number, and put it back.

His phone was elegant and thin.

Lena’s phone, buried deep in her backpack, was sturdy and plump, metallic, no extra features, an older model. It rang a few minutes later. She always kept it at the top volume, and she jumped when it rang. She turned the music off and rushed to get the phone out of her bag, but she couldn’t find it right away. She rummaged in her bag with her hands shaking, dropping her other things on her lap or to the floor, her lipstick, or her sunglasses, or her tiny French dictionary, while the phone rang and rang. When she finally took it out, there was a dollar bill and an old receipt caught in it. She paled and stiffened just like Ben a few minutes before. She didn’t pick up.

A long and awkward stretch of silence followed.

“Why don’t you tell me your mystery story?” Ben asked.

“My mystery story?”

“Yes, you said there was a long mystery story about those guys that disappeared after a date with you. It’s about five hours from here to the cabin. We have all the time in the world.”

“Okay, sure. There’s time. It’s a little confusing, though. I’m not even sure where to begin.”

“How about the first guy who disappeared?”

“Yeah, you’re right. Seems logical.”

Lena stretched in her seat and wrinkled her nose in concentration.

“Kostik was the first,” she said. “He disappeared on June twelfth. I remember the date because it was my grandfather’s birthday.

“It happened after a double date with Inka and Andrey, which had been Inka’s idea. She had just met this soldier, Andrey, at the first dance. He asked her on a date, and she asked him to bring a friend for me. I had never had a double date before and I didn’t know that they were supposed to be awful by definition. One couple is always better, hotter, more at ease, happier than the other, which inevitably makes the other couple find a million things that are wrong with them and their relationship.

“In our case there was no doubt which couple was the happy one.”

Lena stopped talking and cleared her throat. She couldn’t believe she was actually telling the story out loud. Over the years she had spent so much time telling it in her head that now every word she used felt awkward and wrong. The main problem was not even the content: what to tell, which scenes to choose, which characters or events to bring forward, which to omit altogether, but how to transform images into words. Because in her head, the story ran like a movie. A movie that would randomly jump from one image to another, depending on how she felt or what was on her mind. Sometimes she would even see the same image over and over again, a little differently each time. And since she had been thinking about this story for years, she could no longer tell which of the images came from memory, which from her interpretation of the memory, and which purely from her imagination.

She closed her eyes and tried to evoke the exact image of how they’d sat at the picnic table.

“We sat at the picnic table outside our unit,” she said. “The four of us. Inka and Andrey sat on one side, snuggled against one another, staring into each other’s eyes, engaged in happy banter, laughing at each other’s jokes or sometimes for no reason at all; and Kostik and I sat opposite them, about two feet apart, silent, dumbly smiling as Andrey and Inka joked. I didn’t know why Inka wanted me there at all. By then, I began to doubt that I understood Inka at all. Ever since she had hooked up with Andrey (which was only three days before, I wanted to remind her), she’d behaved as if she had always been popular, as if the whole lifetime of her loneliness and insecurity had never happened. I noticed that she’d become drawn to Dena, the slutty, pretty, popular counselor. Suddenly, it seemed like Inka’d rather spend time with her than with me, and she even subconsciously mimicked Dena’s words and expressions. Which didn’t suit a fat pig like Inka at all, I would think, and then become surprised at the nastiness of my thoughts.”

Ben chuckled, and Lena became momentarily embarrassed, but she continued the story anyway.

“Well, okay, Inka’s reasons for inviting me on this date weren’t clear, but my reasons for accepting were even foggier. Could it be that I thought that even this humiliation was better than staying in the room alone while Inka was on a date?

“Kostik had brought a bag with sunflower seeds, and Inka brought out a jar with sour cherry jam that she had confiscated from Sasha Simonov. They were all eating the jam, taking turns sticking their spoons right into the jar. I hated jam, so I concentrated on the seeds.”

Lena paused and looked at Ben. He was looking at the road ahead, but his expression was pensive. Did he even know what sunflower seeds were? Lena wasn’t sure if she was telling the story right. It still ran in her head like a movie, brighter and louder than ever, and now in first person, like a movie addressed to Ben. But the movie was happening in her head, her words were a pale voiceover, they couldn’t possibly convey everything that was there to convey. She wondered how much he saw or understood.

“ ‘Hey,’ Inka said, ‘you’re shelling the seeds the wrong way!’

“I knew I was shelling them the wrong way. I could never shell them the right way. You’re supposed to put a seed in your mouth and bite on it, and then it’ll somehow get out of the shell and you’ll spit the shell out. I couldn’t do it the right way, because when I bit on the seed, the seed just turned to mush and didn’t come out of the shell. So I shelled them one by one with my hands.

“ ‘You look cute like that, Lena,’ Andrey said. ‘With a seed in your fingers, you look like a little squirrel.’

“ ‘Yeah, you do look like a squirrel like that!’ said Kostik.

“Furious, I wanted to grab a handful of seeds, throw them at Inka, and leave. But then Andrey took out his new watch, and everybody forgot about squirrels. It was a beautiful imported watch that showed the date and the year as well as the time. ‘It’s June twelfth today,’ Andrey announced. June twelfth! It was my grandfather’s birthday, and I hadn’t called him yet.

“I stood up and said that I had to go to the phone booth. Kostik stood up too and said that he would go with me.

“It was a long walk from our unit to the booth, which stood on the edge of the woods by the headquarters. Away from Inka, and her happiness, I immediately felt better. Kostik put his arm around my shoulder. It was heavy and warm and felt good.

“There was this amazing sexual tension in the air. I thought I could actually smell couples. You would walk across the camp territory in the dark, and the smells would reach you before you heard the sounds. Sharp, distinct smells: sweat, lip gloss, perfume, hairspray. And sounds, barely audible, almost drowned out by cicadas and bullfrogs, but still perceptible—panting, whispering, giggles, moans, and gasps.

“I thought that Kostik must have noticed it too.

“He cleared his throat and asked if I lived in Moscow. I said yes. He asked if I’d lived there all my life. I said yes. He said that he was from a small town on the Volga and that big cities like Moscow frightened him. I said that the neighborhood where I lived was on the outskirts of Moscow and looked more like countryside than a city. I said that there were cherry and apple trees. He said that his hometown was overgrown with apple trees, and in the summer everything smelled like apples.

“I smiled, and shivered, and moved closer to Kostik. I thought he might kiss me, but he moved away looking strangely tortured.

“There was a long line at the phone booth. Camp personnel and counselors calling home to check on their families. The women stood shivering in the night cold, swatting at the mosquitoes, shifting from one foot to the other, usually too cranky to chat. They would roll their eyes whenever somebody was on the phone too long, and sometimes even tap on the glass. Natasha, the camp nurse, talked the longest. I was sure that she was on the phone with her lover. She was completely engrossed in her conversation, and her tone and expression would change from weepy to elated and back. And every time somebody impatiently tapped on the glass, Natasha, usually so meek and considerate, gave the tapper a fierce, almost threatening, glare. She may have looked like a rabbit with bad skin to Inka, but to her mysterious lover, she must have seemed beautiful. For some reason, watching Natasha talk on the phone filled me with an almost unbearable longing to be in love.”

Lena stole another glance in Ben’s direction. She wondered if Ben could understand that. But he just sat there silently, concentrating on the road.

“When it was finally my turn to talk on the phone, Kostik stepped away from the booth. I thought he was being polite, but then I noticed that he had a particularly tortured expression. I wanted to ask what was wrong with him, but other people in line yelled at me to hurry up, and I went into the booth.

“The call took me about ten minutes—my grandfather wouldn’t be satisfied without giving me a detailed description of all the presents he got. ‘That shirt can’t be cheap, right?’ ‘Grandpa, I can’t really talk now, there is a line of people.’ ‘Uh-huh, and what about that radio your mother gave me? Sixty rubles—no less!’

“By the time I hung up, my left ear was all red and throbbing. I thought the two women that had been in line behind me would be livid. But there wasn’t anybody. The women must have left. Kostik wasn’t there either. I looked behind the booth. I called his name, peering in the dark, listening for the sounds of his steps, then looked around and called his name again and again.

“I walked up to the headquarters and knocked. Yanina’s aunt shuffled toward the door. I asked her if she’d seen a soldier walk in. She said no. I asked her if she was alone. She said that Major Vedeneev was still there, ‘Working, as always,’ she added with reverence in her voice. I thanked her and headed back. It was completely dark, except for the sharp yellow light that came from the lantern that stood on the headquarters porch. I saw my shadow—enormous, reaching as far as the tops of the tallest pines. I started to run and ran all the way to our unit.

“Instead of Inka and Andrey, I found a squirrel poking around in the bag of sunflower seeds. It stopped and looked at me with the meanest expression I’d ever seen on a squirrel. For one crazy second, I thought that this was Inka turned into a squirrel.

“But, no, when I walked into the room, Inka was there, lying on the bed, daydreaming. I was surprised that her date was over so soon. I told her about Kostik. She said: ‘Ah. He dumped you because he must have gotten tired of waiting for you to finish your call.’ Then she scratched her stomach and said: ‘Andrey is amazing, you know! Amazing! And a real gentleman too. Listen, do we have any stomach meds? I think I ate something funny at dinner.’ I took a pack of Festal and threw it at her.”