Back in Russia, she would rush to meet him when he came home from work every night. She jumped around him like a puppy while he removed his shoes and jacket, hugging him, grabbing him by the hands, covering him with untargeted kisses. He would smile and peck her on a cheek, embarrassed to show how much her reaction stirred him, afraid to reveal his anxiety of the moments before. Every time, as he walked up the stairs leading to their apartment, he tried hard not to run, wondering if Lenka would be jumping when she saw him or if this would be the day when he came and found that something was gone, and Lenka would be clanking dishes in the kitchen or watching TV on the couch and would just nod at him when he entered the room.
The woman in the snapshot smiled at him with her mouth closed and explained in a patient schoolteacher’s voice that since he had such a great job there was simply no point in his returning to Russia now. Yes, the snapshot remembered that they had decided he would go for only a year. And yes, they had saved enough money for a small apartment. But that was enough only for a very, very small one, and then they would need nice furniture and a new car, right? She told him that she missed him a lot, missed him more than he missed her, and that the separation was harder for her than for him anyway, so if she could find the strength to be patient, so could he. It was the woman in the snapshot that Sergey was angry with, in a way he had never been with the real Lenka. He shoved the snapshot farther between the cushions, sat up, and swung his legs to the floor.
There wasn’t any aspirin in the bathroom medicine cabinet. None by the kitchen sink or in the clay bowl where he kept random pills found in his pockets. Sergey took a broom from the corner, shoved it under his couch, and with a generous swing produced a gray, fuzzy pile of objects. He lowered himself onto his knees, carefully, so as not to move his head too much, and examined what he had found. There — among Pavel’s bottle of brandy, which Sergey had finished after last night’s phone call, a months-old Russian newspaper, a telephone bill with a long string of Lenka’s number broken in places by the number of Pavel’s wife, three hardened socks, two emptied aspirin foils, and about a dollar fifty in change — he found a plastic snippet with two extra-strength Ibuprofens inside. He swallowed them dry, swept the rest of his finds back under the couch, and lay down.
Sergey fell asleep and dreamed of a woman’s light cool fingers touching his forehead, stroking his face, dancing down his chest and stomach, getting warmer as they went.
He woke up an hour later to the sound of running water and the bang of a teakettle landing on the stove. Pavel was moving swiftly around the kitchen like a big nervous cat. “Shit, we’re out of milk,” Pavel said in English. Pat, Pavel’s current girlfriend, slouched over a mug at the table, her bare feet hooked around the chair’s legs. Pat had a ruddy complexion and wild hair dyed purplish red. New Jersey sunset, Sergey thought, the first time he saw her. In the mornings after she stayed overnight, Pat always wore a short white bathrobe, which made her seem even more startlingly red by contrast. Her thighs, visible to Sergey under the table, looked flushed, as if they emanated heat. Sergey turned over and closed his eyes, embarrassed by the almost painful sensation this sight produced in him.
WHEN SERGEY got up hours later to an empty apartment, he washed his face and ate a few handfuls of cornflakes right from the box. The teakettle was still warm, so Sergey poured water and instant coffee into a cup and began stirring, watching how the dark granules circled around his spoon, refusing to dissolve, and listening to the sounds of the apartment: the low buzz of the fridge, the dripping faucet, the clock ticking off each wasted second. Pavel and Pat had left a swirl of bread crumbs on the table, and Sergey could still smell the sweet scent of Pat’s hand cream.
The top of the Russian newspaper Sergey had pushed back under the couch caught his eye. It was covered in sticky dust and feeble strands of brown hair, but Sergey spread it out on the table. He sipped his coffee, flipping through real estate ads with pictures of frosty, unattractive brokers, and immigrations services ads with roguish lawyers in bulky suits. He leafed through countless pictures of enormous teeth gleaming next to the names of dentists. Flipped right past the ads for oncologists, for the treatments of skin diseases and erectile dysfunction. Stopped to snort at the holistic medicine ads, which promised to cure whatever the other ads didn’t. Chuckled at the ad for “an authentic witch from the woods of Western Ukraine” who claimed the ability to solve both marital and financial problems. And finally arrived at a section that dazzled him.
The naked women on the page came in various shapes and colors, yet they all had two things in common: they were visibly moaning, and stars and solid black rectangles covered their breasts and genitals. Sergey took a long swallow of coffee and tried to mentally unscrape the stars and rectangles. He imagined that he was the one who made the women moan. The words accompanying the snapshots boasted of heavenly pleasures and hot, hot, hot women. One of the ads promised time with a beautiful, blue-eyed, long-haired mermaid. Sergey imagined her cold, slimy tail, the smell of yesterday’s fish at a Brighton Beach food market.
The ad he liked was small and plain, placed in the lower right corner of one of the pages: A warm, sexy woman will tend to your needs. Affordable. He scraped more cornflakes off the bottom of the box and read the words again, trying to hear them spoken by the woman who had placed the ad. “A warm, sexy woman will tend to your needs. Affordable.” Her voice was soft but clear, and she paused slightly before affordable, so he knew she didn’t want to humiliate him. She was expressing encouragement and understanding. This was a woman who wasn’t going to torture him with longing, who wasn’t trying to deceive or manipulate him, but who would tend to his needs: warmly, skillfully, quickly.
He imagined her looking like Lenka, but not the Lenka from the snapshot and not even the real Lenka — rather, a different, simpler, kinder version. Then he thought that he didn’t want her to look like Lenka at all. Maybe like Pat, with her flushed thighs, or like the young cashier at the supermarket, who smiled as Sergey paid for his cereal. The trilling voice on the phone gave him a different image, however, that of a short, plump young woman with full lips and small white hands. He thought that this was exactly how he wanted her to look, not like Lenka, not like Pat. Her name was Alla. They made an appointment for six.
AT TEN OF SIX, Sergey got off the train at the Brighton Beach Avenue stop and walked down the station’s metal stairs. Normally Sergey hated this street. “Stop moping and go to Brighton Beach,” Pavel would tell him. “You would feel right at home.” But Sergey never felt at home there. He loathed the gloomy brownstones, the loud store windows, the honking cars, the gray ocean, the cold sand the color of carpet in a New Jersey home, and the smug, well-fed people smoking by the shining doors of restaurants, picking through piles of fruit, loading heavy bags of food into the trunks of their cars. This was the fake Russia, the parody of Russia, that made the real Russia seem even farther away and hopelessly unobtainable.
But now the bustle of Brighton Beach Avenue filled Sergey with a kind of spiteful satisfaction. All those months he’d been saving every penny, thinking of every dollar as one step closer to taking him home, every thousand as one giant step. He didn’t buy any clothes, he didn’t accompany Pavel to bars, he stinted on everything, living on cornflakes, pasta, and an occasional chicken. And now he was about to blow so much money on this obscenely selfish thing? He felt as if he were tearing the money out of Lenka’s hands and he chuckled, imagining the expression of stunned fury the snapshot-Lenka would assume if she knew. He walked onto 6th Street, turning to face the stark wind blowing in from the Atlantic.