I was so caught up in this, in my own martyred suffering, in images of the two of them as eternal archetypes, that I did not spend a lot of time wondering what life was like for Katya. Did she enjoy being a mother? Was it hard? Did the baby keep her up all night crying, or did they sleep together peacefully, the bassinet beside her bed? Did she like her coursework at UCLA? Did she regret not going to Brown? Did it chafe, having to live with her parents after failing to achieve their dreams for her? I did not think about any of these things at the time, though now they seem like the only questions.
Probably, things were grim for Kat in those years of Vera’s early childhood. Kat’s father, Pavel, was a fat and pouty man with unpredictable moods and fairly conservative values. He had gotten his family out of the USSR in the 1980s when Jews could request visas to move to Israel, and from Jerusalem they had rerouted to LA where he had opened a coin and autograph-memorabilia shop that did quite well. He had an innate gift for telling when something was authentic just by touching it, a sixth sense that people in collectibles claimed was real. He was a believer in America, in capitalism, and he wanted his children to have everything. Katya was the eldest and he had sent her to Exeter, paid through the nose for four years, and then she had come home pregnant. Luckily, or perhaps unluckily, Kat’s little sister, Tamara, was better able to live up to their parents’ expectations, attending the University of Chicago for a degree in business. I imagine this created something of a divide between the sisters. Certainly it meant that Tamara was not around much during those first years when Kat was a young mother. I realize now that Kat must have been very lonely.
Her mother, Inna, was around, but she and Kat were not very close, at least not back when Kat was in high school and I was privy to her life. When Kat was a girl, Inna had harbored bizarre hopes that Katya would become a child star and dragged her all around LA on auditions. Finally, at eleven or so, Kat had rebelled and refused to go anymore. She never got cast anyway, and she hated it, she told her mother. They hadn’t been close after that. For a time, her mother had taken Tamara around, but Tamara was not as pretty as her sister and so eventually this too was dropped.
But that day in the IHop, I was not thinking about any of this. I was not prepared for a real Vera and a real Katya. I had been living with them for so long as characters in my mind, that seeing them in person was a bit grotesque. I had a searing headache and it felt like my temples had been bound in ice-cold twine that was slowly being tightened by an invisible hand. Possibly I was going to need to leave the table and vomit in the bathroom at some point. Katya was wearing unflattering eye shadow, too much of it, and her hair looked crunchy with hair spray and she wouldn’t meet my eyes or smile at me. Vera didn’t answer any of my pandering, awkward questions, but stuck to her pancake with its whipped-cream smile. She was hesitant even to take the bear, and then when she did, she frowned. “It’s wet,” she said.
“I guess it is,” I said.
How many times have I gone over this exchange? How many solutions to this problem have I come up with over the years? I could have said, “Yes, it’s raining outside — do you like the rain? I love the rain. Have you ever jumped in rain puddles?” I could have said, “I know, that silly bear! I kept telling him to hurry but he wanted to try to catch raindrops on his tongue and now he is all wet!” I could have said anything, any stupid thing.
But instead, I said, “I guess it is.” What is a child supposed to say to that?
“Say thank you,” Katya insisted, and Vera stared at me with round calf eyes.
“Thank you,” she said, as though I were the grim reaper or some other terrifying figure that only politeness could keep at bay.
The omelet I had ordered was disgusting, and so as Katya neatly cut her eggs and toast into squares and placed them in her mouth, almost as though she wasn’t eating but sorting papers or something, and as Vera moved the whipped-cream globs around on her giant chocolate pancake, I stumbled on, trying to present my plan, my ridiculous plan, to Katya.
I had applied for a PhD program in literature at the University of California at Irvine. If I were accepted, and I would hear in just a few months, then I could be close to them and possibly be a more active participant in Vera’s life. I had also applied to NYU and a few other programs, in case I didn’t get into UCI, but I didn’t mention that part to Katya. Vera could stay with me on weekends. I could babysit. I could play whatever role Katya wanted and we could take it slowly, as slowly as she felt comfortable with.
“Where would she sleep?” Katya asked.
“Well, I would get an apartment down here,” I said. It hadn’t really occurred to me that Vera would need her own bed and bedroom. I felt sick even thinking about how I would pay for a two-bedroom, if that was what Katya was suggesting.
“Lucas,” Katya said, then faltered.
“It isn’t unreasonable,” I said, “for me to be part of her life. Come on, I’m her father.”
Katya set her fork down, struggling for words. “Lucas,” she said, “you know nothing about children. You don’t know when a fever is serious and when it’s not. You don’t know what is safe and what is not. I don’t even trust you to feed her regularly! You think you can just take a little girl and put her in your grad-student apartment and she will be happy?”
“I could learn all that — I could read books, and I could—”
“Books?” Katya laughed.
“Yes, parenting books,” I said.
“Lucas,” she said, leaning forward. “You stink of booze. Do you realize that? Do you think we can’t smell you at this tiny table? You show up for the first time you ever meet your daughter, and you’re still obviously drunk. And then you think that I am going to let her come live with you on weekends?”
“It was New Year’s Eve,” I started, trying to explain.
“Yes, it was New Year’s Eve last night in my world too, but I have a daughter, so I didn’t go out and get wasted like an animal and not even bother to shower! Lucas, you don’t understand what being a parent means. You just don’t get it,” she said.
“You could teach me,” I said. “I could learn.”
Katya didn’t say anything, just crumpled her napkin in her hand, shaking her head.
“Can we go now?” Vera asked.
Katya said something to her in Russian, leaned over and kissed her on the head, then got up to leave. “I assume you are fine with paying for breakfast?” she said.
“Of course,” I said.
“Say goodbye,” Katya instructed our daughter.
“Bye bye,” Vera said, and handed the purple bear back to me. They left and I sat, waiting to get the check, holding that stupid purple bear, its fur still wet.
When I was accepted by NYU’s comparative literature program, I went.
During graduate school, I didn’t see Vera at all. What little money I didn’t send to Katya, I spent on beer, which was about pleasure and revelry to be sure, but which was also a form of penance. There was something about being hungover that I sought out, that I needed. I would watch ESPN all day, skipping class, drinking warm blue Gatorade, feeling deep in my guts that nothing was okay and that I was a horrible person.
I spent the next seven years in New York. It was during this period that my mother began her bicoastal career path, doing Shakespeare in the Park during the summers in New York, and then making her real money by filming commercials and bit parts on TV during the winters in LA. We shared a tiny studio apartment during the summer, and I lived in it alone during the school year. I learned to be many things during those years: a scholar and a writer of research papers, a rider of subways, an eater of squid, an estimator of danger, a buyer of marijuana and sometimes other things, a seducer of women, and a reader of books. Oh, above all else, I learned in those years how to be a reader. My life was worth nothing except the books I read, and I spent years, literal years, reading in that studio apartment.