Divide Me by Zero

SEVEN

It would be tempting to say that I fell in love with B. when I was seventeen and carried that love throughout my whole life. But I know that this is not true. I stopped loving B. shortly after I turned eighteen, and hardly felt anything toward him up until we started seeing each other almost twenty years later. I had become a different person by then, and so had he, and what happened between us then was an entirely different story.

Back when I was seventeen, the only love that I had witnessed was the love between my parents, which was all-consuming and absolute, and I thought that it was only natural that my love for B. should be the same. What I didn’t know then was how quickly all-consuming and absolute can turn into obsessive, strip you of sanity, and make you do crazy embarrassing things.

I shared this with Nathalie after she experienced her first heartbreak. This was five years after my mother died. Nathalie had just turned eighteen. We were cuddled together in my bed, trying to sit very still, because we knew that if we didn’t, the bed would start to shake and slide back and forth across the barren wooden floor. The thing was that the house had gotten infested with bedbugs. We had tried most of the conventional bedbug remedies, we had thrown out all of the rugs, we had scourged the furniture with poison—Danny had driven from college to help us—but so far nothing had worked, or not completely. The bedbugs would still come to bite us at night. That was when I became an addict of countless bedbug forums, willing to try things that were thoroughly insane. In that sense, bedbugs act just like unhappy obsessive love. They strip you of your sanity in a matter of weeks.

So here is one of the craziest suggestions for how to fight bedbugs. You have to pour an inch or two of cooking oil into small plastic containers and fit the legs of your furniture inside the containers. That way the bugs won’t be able to make it off the floor and up the legs—they will end up drowning in oil. I’m not sure if it works (we still had bite marks, but perhaps they were imaginary), but I do know that it makes the furniture wobbly and prone to sliding back and forth. So you can cry but you can’t sob while sitting on the oil-supported bed. You can’t even blow your nose—or you end up on the other end of the room.

I explained to Nathalie my “pain-scale theory of heartbreak,” but it didn’t go over well.

“So you’re basically saying that there are worse things to come?” Nathalie said. “That’s not very comforting!”

And anyway, pain wasn’t the problem, she could handle the pain. What she couldn’t handle was the embarrassment. She was very close to sobbing now, so I offered to tell her about the embarrassing things I did when I fell in love for the first time.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes!”

Nathalie loved it when I told her stories about myself at her age, especially stories about my failure. I couldn’t help but notice that she was subconsciously competing with the main character of my stories, as if that girl were her sibling rather than a younger version of her mother.

But perhaps it was I who tried to distance myself from that younger version of me, because it made me feel that all the pain and embarrassment of love was far in the past.

So I took a piece of paper and listed the top five embarrassing things that I had done under the influence of love.

Stalking B. for days.
Confiding to Sasha and Yulia that I’d do everything for B. Which included sucking his dick (a taboo in Russia at that time) and ruining his marriage (less of a taboo).
Screaming that B. was stupid in a room full of his relatives and friends.
Spitting half-chewed hamburger into a sweet old lady’s purse.
Leaving my grandmother at the store with twenty pounds of frozen chicken thighs and completely forgetting about her.

“That’s all?” Nathalie asked.

I nodded.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” She was looking at me with panicky concern, the way she used to look at her grandmother when she started to lose her mind. I didn’t understand.

“What about the chair?” she asked.

“What chair?”

“Remember how you threw a chair at him?”

And then I remembered. I did throw a chair at B. Across a crowded room. In front of the kids, in front of Len, in front of everybody. At my mother’s funeral. And this didn’t happen to that stupid seventeen-year-old all those years ago. It happened to me just five years ago. My whole body contracted with the pain of embarrassment. Now it was Nathalie’s turn to comfort me. She reached to hug me, but her movement made the bed move to the left. She sat back, and the bed moved to the right. Its little legs soaked in cooking oil squeaked under our weight. We both started to laugh.

“You know what the best cure for heartbreak is?” Nathalie asked.

“What?”

“Bedbugs.”

Note to a skeptical reader. Just try it!

Even though I didn’t confide in my friends about all of the embarrassing things I had done, I did nothing to conceal my feelings, and both Yulia and Sasha soon became aware of my obsession. Sasha reacted with persistent “Urghs,” but Yulia was riveted. She had read about the insanity of passion in one novel after another, and here it was, up close, and just as crazy as those writers described, or possibly even crazier. She’d be trembling with excitement every time she talked to me about B., and her pale freckled skin would turn glowing pink. I hated her interest, but I couldn’t resist talking about B.

“Would you let him do all sorts of things to you?” she would ask me with cautious fascination, as if I were a dangerous animal in a zoo.

“Yes!” I would say.

“Even that thing?”

“Yes, even that!”

We had recently discovered descriptions of oral sex in a dirty hand-typed pamphlet somebody brought to class, and it seemed more frightening and disgusting to us than any other version of the sexual act.

“Would you run away from home with him?”

“Yes!”

That last question she asked in Sasha’s presence, making him utter the loudest “Urgh!” so far.

“What are you talking about?” he asked. “Boris Markovich is married. He has a baby!”

But this didn’t deter me at all. I didn’t see little Mark as a child, as an important person in B.’s life, but rather as an accessory—something to take with you on walks, along with Max the dog. And B.’s wife didn’t seem real to me at all. I couldn’t imagine her sharing a home with B., eating breakfast with him, going to bed with him, or even giving him a kiss. He couldn’t possibly love her. And she couldn’t love him either, because I loved him so much. I thought that the amount of love directed toward one person by all the other people couldn’t be unlimited, and I definitely used it all up.

Just like Tolstoy’s Natasha, I was ready for either ecstasy or despair. What took me by surprise was that love turned out to be a constant back and forth between these two states.

Since meeting B. in the park, I never missed a screening, and there were times when he lavished a lot of attention on me, each word of praise making me deliriously happy. But there were also times when B. wouldn’t even look in my direction. Or worse—he would ask me a question but ignore my answer, and turn his attention to somebody else, and my heart would sink, and I would experience it in a physical way. My heart grew heavier, bulkier, weighted down by disappointment.

The thing was that I was completely ignorant about world cinema. I would intuitively understand certain moments in the films we watched, especially if those moments were emotional, but every time a little bit of hard knowledge was required I would be lost. “Isn’t this a homage to Fellini?” Yulia would ask, squinting at B. from behind her glasses, licking her lips. And I would think: Who’s Fellini? And also think: I want Yulia to die.

Another thing that amazed me about love was how quickly it could turn from something bright and bubbly into a destructive and exhausting force. Within two months of meeting B., I stopped doing my homework. Instead, I devoted myself to reading every book that B. ever mentioned and searching for the films (by Bergman and Bertolucci and Pasolini) that he recommended. Finding those films was a Herculean task. Nobody I knew had a VCR or a movie projector, and even if they had, it would have been impossible to find the movies themselves in the Soviet Union of that time. Perestroika had just started, and huge stores of information, from historical facts to previously forbidden movies and books, were being unlocked for us, one by one. The process seemed overwhelmingly fast to older people. My grandmother, for example, who had abandoned novels and inherited the newspaper-reading business after my grandfather died, would spend her days buried under the fresh spread of periodicals, gasping and moaning and screeching: “Nina, look! Look what they’re writing about Stalin! Are they crazy or what? Oh my God, these poor stupid writers are all going to die!”

But for younger people, the process was maddeningly slow. You could read Gulag Archipelago, but you still couldn’t see any of the Western art-house classics. I had to resort to going to the Theater Library, which had a great collection of Western plays, as well as screenplays and even film magazines. You couldn’t check out any of that, so I spent hours in the reading room, trying to collate the script of, let’s say, The Passenger with the photos of Nicholson and Schneider in film magazines, so I could imagine the whole film in my head.

Only once did I get to see one of these films on a large screen. They were screening Pasolini’s Salò in the brand-new Artists Palace, which boasted the largest movie screen in Moscow. B. said that Salò was one of the most provoking films of all time. Such a stunning metaphor of Nazism! So exquisitely made that B. had a perfectly visceral reaction when he saw it. I absolutely had to see it so I could tell B. that I had a visceral reaction too. Everybody knew that it was impossible to buy tickets, but Yulia hinted that her parents had an in. “If you get me the ticket, I will give you my red T-shirt!” I said.

Yulia got us three tickets, for herself, Sasha, and me. We came to the Palace early and went to the cafeteria, famous for serving exotic foreign foods like pizza and hamburgers. We ordered three hamburgers, which took a crazy long time. When we made it to the theater, the film had already started, and we had to squeeze to our seats past some very indignant people. I think I even stepped on the foot of a neat gray-haired lady sitting next to me. I apologized, and she was sweet enough to tell me that “it could happen to anyone.” We finally settled in our seats, impatient to sink our teeth into those huge hamburgers that smelled better than anything I had ever smelled in my life. Mine was too big for me, so I had to remove the top bun, which made the patty slide out and onto the floor. I bent to retrieve it from under my seat (this was my first hamburger—I couldn’t let it go!), put the patty back on top of the bun, took the first juicy bite, sat back, and only then looked at the screen.

I saw a group of naked boys and girls being led on leashes by grown men, made to bark and pant and eat off the floor like dogs, while the men groped and tortured them.

I turned to Yulia and Sasha. Sasha sat as if paralyzed with his hamburger suspended in his hands, dripping warm grease onto his pants, but Yulia was nonplussed. She was taking neat tiny bites out of her hamburger, chewing it carefully, an appreciative smile on her face. The gray-haired lady to the right of me had the same smile, only hers looked more genuine than Yulia’s. I couldn’t believe people could actually enjoy the film. As for me, I sat there with my mouth full of meat and bread, gathering more and more saliva, but unable to swallow, because I knew that as soon as I swallowed I would immediately throw up, as I had during ballets at the Kremlin Palace. Luckily, I had my mother’s large purse with me, right there on the floor by my seat. I leaned in, opened the purse, spit the contents of my mouth into the purse as discreetly as I could, dropped the rest of the hamburger there as well, and shut it closed. I’d clean it out later, I thought.

We sat through ten more minutes of rape and scatology, then Sasha stood up and headed out, and I stood up too and reached for my purse. The gray-haired lady shook her head, smiling. This was her purse. I remembered that I had pushed mine under the seat. I said “Sorry,” retrieved my purse, and started squeezing toward the exit.

It was only when I made it outside, and stood on the steps gulping fresh air, that the horror of the situation got to me. I opened my purse—there was nothing there, except for my loose change and my mother’s stomach pills. No hamburger. I must have spewed my half-chewed hamburger into the purse of that sweet lady in the adjacent seat. The image of her reaching into her purse for the subway fare and finding the wet, greasy, gooey, stinking mess haunted me for weeks. It would’ve probably haunted me even longer if I hadn’t received this devastating news, which made me forget about everything else.

“There won’t be any more screenings,” Sasha told me. “Boris Markovich quit.”

“Why?” I screamed.

“He’s leaving for America next month. For good. Like your uncle Grisha.”

I couldn’t, wouldn’t believe him.

“How do you know this?” I asked.

“He told me himself after class. They are all leaving. His wife and his baby too,” he added with a nasty smile.

So this was it? I would never see him again? He would leave just like that? Without talking to me? Without saying goodbye? This was inconceivable.

I begged Sasha to give me B.’s phone number, but he wouldn’t. He said he didn’t know it himself, and I didn’t know whether to believe him or not.

I started skipping school and going to the park every day, hoping to see B. as I had that one time, with his baby and his dog. This was the end of March, a strange month, when you’re so tired of winter that you want to pretend it’s spring, and you go around shivering in your light coat and thin boots, hoping for a bit of sunshine to fall on your face, to at least warm up your nose a little. I would walk and walk and walk down the barren alleys, the thin soles of my boots slurping in the slush covering still-frozen ground, until my toes started to feel numb. Sometimes I would exit the park and walk around B.’s neighborhood, circling the streets, entering random stores to warm up, hoping that B. would happen to be shopping there at that precise moment. Once I spotted little Mark’s stroller at a fish store called the Ocean. It wasn’t B. pushing the stroller, though, but an imposing older woman wearing crimson lipstick who must have been B.’s mother or mother-in-law.

Around that time I got a school report card that was so bad that I had to fix it before showing it to my mother. I did a rather crude job of it, with razor scratches and ink stains all over it, but my mother, who had broken up with Sergey, was morose and distracted, and didn’t notice.

“We need to talk about your future,” she said.

“I’m applying to the university with Sasha and Yulia,” I said.

“Don’t you need to study a lot?” she asked.

“I do.”

She said, “Okay.”

I prayed to God, or rather to Something, that I’d get to see B. I begged and begged and begged, and I finally got my wish.

I saw B. at the large supermarket somewhere in between our two neighborhoods, in the long line to get so-called Bush’s thighs.

The year was 1990, perestroika was in full swing, and the enormous slow country couldn’t keep up with the speed of the changes, political as well as economic. One of the changes that was hard to ignore was that food had started to disappear from supermarket shelves. The late Soviet Union couldn’t boast of a food bounty either, especially in the remote regions. But in Moscow, we could always count on the staples, like bread and meat, and dairy products, and basic seasonal vegetables and fruit. We were used to standing in huge lines to buy delicacies when and if the supermarkets had them in stock, but the bread lines were something new. As were the lines to buy vodka. My mother had to spend hours to buy two bottles of vodka—they wouldn’t sell more than two. Nobody drank vodka in our household, but we kept a solid supply in the back of the kitchen cabinet, because it was precious currency in those times. You could ask a neighbor to move heavy furniture for a bottle, or to fix a leaking faucet for two.

Flooding the struggling Soviet Union with American chicken thighs was a brilliant idea. We liked to believe that the idea belonged to George H. W. Bush himself. It was a win-win situation. The US could unload unpopular chicken parts, help stabilize Gorbachev’s West-friendly regime, and display the patronizing generosity of Cold War winners. And we—we got the thighs. Bush’s thighs. Dream thighs. Twice as big as the thighs of underfed Russian chickens, plumped up with antibiotics and hormones, with buttery fat pushing through their pale skin, promising gastronomic delights of an unprecedented degree.

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People hunted for them in stores all over the city and stood in long lines to get them. My grandmother established a whole network of friends who promised to tell each other whenever they spotted Bush’s thighs on sale.

“They are selling Bush’s thighs in the big store!” my grandmother announced one morning in April.

“I’m busy,” my mother said. “Take Katya.”

I groaned. The big store was far away, way outside of our neighborhood, and I had just come home after fruitlessly roaming the streets in search of B.

“I’m busy too,” I said.

“But Bush’s thighs!” my grandmother repeated, and my mother glared at me. Everybody knew that missing the chance to buy Bush’s thighs wasn’t just insane, it was criminal.

I had to go. My grandmother insisted on coming with me, which would make the trip twice as long, but I couldn’t say no. Ever since Grisha had left and my grandfather had died, my grandmother had been getting progressively weaker. Recently she had developed bouts of dizziness and my mother wouldn’t let her go to the store alone anymore, stripping her of her favorite activity.

We walked very slowly, making frequent stops so my grandmother could catch her breath. By the time we finally made it to the store, the line had spilled out onto the street and was stretching along the entire length of the store. People kept peeking into the glass window, trying to get at least a glimpse of the Bush’s thighs. It took us a while to make it inside the store, and it was then that I saw B. He was approaching the cashier with a large block of frozen thighs in his arms. At first, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I’d been searching and searching, and there he was, at the same store, in the same line, buying the same thing. He paid, put the thighs into a large shopping bag, and headed to the exit.

“Grandma, I’ll be right back,” I said and ran after him.

“Boris Markovich!” I yelled. He stopped and looked at me in surprise.

“Katya?”

I said that I needed to ask him something.

“Go ahead,” he said.

“Is it true that you’re going to America?”

My heart was beating so hard that I wrapped my coat tighter as if it could help to hide it from B. He looked at me for what seemed like a very long time, then asked if I had some time. He knew a café nearby where they served hot chocolate.

Yes, he said after we sat down at the café, it was true. They were leaving in two weeks. They had the tickets and most of their things were packed. There were six duffel bags on the floor of their living room, of the exact size and weight allowed by the airline, two for each of them. His wife and her mother kept repacking them. They would think of something essential to add, but that would wreck the weight balance, so they would need to remove something of equal weight to restore it. And they kept arguing, and fighting, and crying. And every time he looked at those bags, B. would be paralyzed with dread. Because he knew something now. He knew that it didn’t matter what they packed, because the whole idea was a mistake. It was a mistake to leave. He had wanted to go for a long time, he was the one who had to talk his wife into going. And now she was so excited, and he now knew how wrong this all was. How unhappy they would be there. And to leave now, at the peak of perestroika, when so many exciting things were happening in Russia? This was insane, right? A friend had just offered him a job at a brand-new TV channel. He would be a producer. He would have a license to create his own show. Something modern and cool about film. Instead of the old and tired Kinopanorama. He kept thinking about his show, fantasizing about possible topics and guests, coming up with witty lines of dialogue in his head, even as he knew that he was leaving. Leaving in two weeks!

I got hot chocolate on my nose, and B. flicked it with his fingers, making me laugh. This was real hot chocolate, not the weak American version. It was silky and dark and viscous and so sweet that it made me high. We drank two large cups each.

“Stay!” I said.

And B. looked at me as if I had just offered a simple solution that hadn’t occurred to him before.

“Stay? Just like that?” he asked.

I eagerly nodded.

“Because nobody can make me go, right?”

I shook my head.

“You know what, Katya, you’re right. They can’t make me!”

Before we parted, B. kissed me on the cheek and told me that I was his favorite girl in the world!

I walked all the way home with a delirious smile on my face.

“Poor Mamochka!” Nathalie said. “So, so stupid.”

This was the point of telling the story, to make Nathalie feel smarter, more together than I was at her age. But still, her words hurt me a little bit.

“What about your grandmother?” she asked.

“Who?” I asked. The thing was, I completely forgot about her. Both now, as I was telling this story to Nathalie, and then, when I left her at the store.

I remembered about her only when my mother opened the door for me and asked where my grandmother was.

“Oh, no!” I said. I looked at the clock. Almost three hours had passed since I left my grandmother at the store. My mind was flooded with all these scary images. My poor grandma waiting for me in vain, starting to walk, bending under the twenty pounds of Bush’s thighs, trying to make it through the slush, down the slippery path, getting dizzy, slipping, falling, lying on the ground, moaning and crying for help, whimpering, panting, dying. Dying because of me.

Fortunately, we didn’t have to worry for long. The doorbell rang, and my grandmother walked in. There was a quiet drunk by her side, dressed in a filthy overcoat, smelling of either urine or pickled cabbage, holding the bags of chicken thighs in both hands. My grandmother sat down on a little chair and began removing her boots. She was breathless, but she sounded victorious. Apparently, she had waited for me for a long time, before figuring out that she was waiting in vain. Then she spotted this wonderful man, Stepan. “Semyon,” the drunk corrected her shyly. She had promised him a bottle of vodka to get her and the thighs home. My mother groaned, but went to get the bottle.

“Here!” she said to the drunk. But he wasn’t leaving.

“What?” my mother asked. He cleared his throat and whispered without raising his eyes: “The dinner?”

“What dinner?”

“The woman said the bottle of vodka and a dinner ‘worthy of the tsars.’”

My grandmother nodded with a guilty expression.

“Wait here,” my mother said. She went to the kitchen, cut a thick slice of rye bread, spread it with butter, slapped bologna on top, and gave that to the drunk. “Many thanks!” he said. He was almost out the door when he suddenly stopped and took a long, skeptical look at his sandwich. “Would a tsar eat that?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” my mother said. “That’s exactly what they served Nikolai II on special occasions.”

How she yelled at me afterward!

I didn’t really care. My grandmother was fine, and my mother could yell all she wanted. I was so happy that B. was staying that I was invincible. I shut the door on my mother and called Sasha to tell him the good news.

My happiness lasted for the entire week following the Bush’s thighs episode, until Sasha dropped by and told me that B. had called to invite him to his going-away party.

“You must have misunderstood!” I said.

“Do you want to come with me?” Sasha asked. “Yulia’s coming too.”

“Did you go?” Nathalie asked.

I nodded. She cringed and said that she had a feeling she wouldn’t like the rest of the story. Then she asked what I wore.

I didn’t remember. I remembered what I wanted to wear—one of my American T-shirts—but I couldn’t find any. They must have all made it to Yulia by that time, one by one. Then I remembered one of the photos and imagined that I looked exactly as I had in that photo. Dressed in a short checkered dress that made my legs look painfully skinny, hair gathered in a messy ponytail, eyes glowering.

I became deeply embarrassed for that girl, as if she were someone separate from me, as if she were my daughter. I had an impulse to warn her of what was about to happen, to shield her from the imminent pain even if I knew that it had already happened and there was nothing I could do, except maybe tell the story to my real daughter in hopes that it would warn and possibly shield her.

I walked into B.’s apartment together with Sasha and Yulia, but there were so many people that I lost them almost right away. I craned my neck, but I couldn’t see B. anywhere. I made my way forward, cutting through groups of people I didn’t know, tobacco smoke and noise. I still couldn’t see B. I saw Max thrashing about the apartment, bumping into people, his voice all coarse from barking and excitement. I saw little Mark in the arms of the older woman sporting crimson lipstick, both looking terrified. I saw B.’s wife, whom I recognized because she was the only one who looked like an actress. She was sitting on the edge of a windowsill, fixing her long shiny hair into a braid, laughing at the jokes of all these men who crowded around her, shaking her head to undo the braid.

I finally saw B. on the small balcony, drinking in the company of five other men who barely fit there. There was no way for me to approach him except from the back.

I made my way to the back, which was a mistake, because while I was squeezing between all those people, the crowd shifted, cutting me off from the balcony. I found Sasha and Yulia though. They stood between a large buffet and a TV cabinet, giggling and sneakily drinking vodka from the same glass, Sasha’s hand on Yulia’s waist. I did register this as a betrayal, but an unimportant one, compared to the tumult of my feelings for B.

I had my eyes on the balcony door. Any minute now B. would emerge from the balcony and announce that he wasn’t going to America. He had decided to stay. He was staying. And there wasn’t anything anyone could do about it.

Here he is! Opening the balcony door, stepping into the room. Stumbling from all those vodka shots, grabbing the edge of the gleaming buffet to keep his balance, in an untucked shirt with missing buttons, smiling stupidly. His neck is so thin. He’s so young.

He pushes past all those people, walks up to his wife, squeezes her in a big hug, and lifts her off the floor. She squeals, and B. lets her go, because she is heavy, and he is so skinny and weak and also very drunk. Somebody hands him a shot of vodka, B. raises it up and yells: “To Oksana and me! To our new life!” There is applause. Drunken yelps. Everybody cheers.

And I, I stand in the middle of the room, stuck among all those drunk sweaty bodies. I’m shocked, overwhelmed, gasping for breath. Nobody warned me that the pain could be that intense, that scary.

“But in fact it was a three or four on the pain scale?” Nathalie asked.

“Yes,” I said. “As I see it now. But back then it was a perfect ten. Worse than my father’s death, way worse than my grandfather’s.”

I didn’t know how to handle this. What to do.

So here is what I did. I screamed: “Boris Markovich! You’re a coward and a fool!” and shoved my way through the crowd out of the apartment.

I ran and ran and ran through the dark park. There was only one person I desperately wanted at that moment.

“Grandma?” Nathalie asked.

Her question startled me.

“My grandma,” she said. “Your mom.”

“Yes,” I said, “my mom.”

Bonus problem. List all the embarrassing things you have done for the sake of love and place them on the scale of embarrassment, where 1 is mildly embarrassing, easily remedied with a chuckle, and 5 is so embarrassing that you hesitate before committing it to paper.