by Lucy Morris
View: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
XI.
I spend the spring working with a new gentleman, Vanya, who appears to be about fifteen but is actually my age. The fact that he has no years on me does not stop him from dispensing all kinds of advice. “Listen,” he starts one day, apropos of nothing in particular. “All I’m saying is that a person’s education is never over – and I’m not talking about school.” And with all the wisdom garnered in his twenty-two lengthy years: “Every problem in life can be solved with math except for women.” I can’t really fathom what he means by this, and math is not exactly my strong suit, but I nod in agreement. Upon finding out I am newly single, he decides to share his courtship experience with me. “I finished my rapid dating phase early,” he lectures. “By nineteen I was just ready to settle down.” Vanya spends a lot of his day acquiring and consuming beverages, among them Mighty Leaf tea, peppermint mochas and the occasional glass of microwaved plum wine; at night, he reminds me, he prefers cognac with the occasional glass of Jack Daniels. “Jack and Coke – that’s the family drink,” he tells me proudly, like this family of Ukrainian émigrés that I have come to know through his screaming phone conversations with his mother thrice daily actually invented it.
Vanya introduces music to our office, which is initially an improvement upon the hums of our servers and the habitually shrieking cashiers. Unfortunately, Vanya has a European’s taste in American music. There is a lot of techno - the booming kind that makes you feel like you’re in a cavernous club where the lights flash epileptically. For some time after that, we spend our days tuned to an Internet radio station called Chill FM. Just happy to be listening to something with words, I express my enjoyment of an Air song. “Just wait,” he says excitedly, inviting me to turn and face his monitor. While I watch over my shoulder, he logs into his Deviant Art account to show me a photograph he took inspired by the song “Playground Love.” It actually depicts a playground, the one just across the street by Restaurant Tatiana. But compositionally I am surprised to find I like it a lot.
Over the course of our months together, several things happen to Vanya. The first is that he falls in love around the same time I fall out of it. “Girl,” he tells his beloved Sasha over the phone, “You want me to bring a bottle of champagne tonight? Tell you what: I’ll bring two.” I type out an email to a friend with more force than is truly necessary: “Fuck love and everybody in it.” Then it turns warm and I fall into a relationship just as Vanya falls out of his. “All these Brighton girls,” he complains, “They just wanna get married.” I have headphones on listening to “Hold Yuh;” I am feeling positive for the first time in a while. In April, Vanya goes to Coachella and returns having discovered marijuana and Burning Man. He seriously considers the idea of growing dreadlocks. This combination of revelations puts him in touch with his long-touted but somewhat latent musical side and he starts seeking my help in writing song lyrics. “Lusya,” he inquires. “What rhymes with ‘inspiration?’” Having concluded that my marketable skill is not so much Russian as it is English, he begins consulting me as his personal spell-check. “How do you spell ‘lingerie’?” he asks. “And ‘stewardess?’ I need this for a really important Facebook post.”
XII.
There are a lot of things I find to be vaguely morally challenging about this job. Aside from translating copy for revisionist pro-Stalin histories – what would my anarchist Russian ancestors think? – I translate promotional articles stating that all girls are born wanting to be moms and wives someday, swallow hard during the racist and sexist jokes, yell at angry babushkas on the telephone and take part in a lexicon of phrases like, “I am watching you” and, “You will be held responsible for your mistakes.” (Everyone seems to have learned their English by watching The Godfather or playing World of Warcraft.) There are days when I think I should get paid twice as much for working in two languages, and other days when I appreciate that I am perhaps only truly required to be half-good at either one.
In June, when I decide it is time to move on, to leave New York and translating behind for a while, I learn that Russians have certain traits that are terribly hard to walk away from: their tradition of buying food for everyone else on one’s own birthday, occasional champagne afternoons, and heated discussions of UFOs and Greek myths. Mostly, though, it is their total laxness hiding behind a veneer of dictatorship; their genuine concern and crazy commitment - even for a girl who wears thrift store sweatshirts - concealed by the stern looks or the constant yelling and shoes so pointy they’d pierce your shins.
It takes two full months to quit my job. I start large by announcing I am moving to Asia. “What are you going to do?” my boss asks me quizzically when I inform him of this. “Learn Chinese?” As if this is actually an insane thing to do, as if he doesn’t read the news, as if learning Russian makes more sense than learning a language spoken by a sixth of the world. Soon he dismisses the idea entirely. “So you’re going to Israel,” he informs me with a bemused grin, because, to him, this is the only country that allows Jews. “And when will you come back?” I tell him I’m gone for good. He smiles merrily and gives me a look of the kind people give during the early stages of relationships, when they’re skirting genuine feeling. “We’ll see,” the look said.
One day in the beginning of July, when I give my final month’s notice, I type this on my phone on the train home: “When I lived in Russia I appreciated most my lack of responsibility for anything except, essentially, staying alive. Even failing classes seemed like it might not have the consequences it would in the States. All my relationships were far away, fourteen hours away, and while this was hard at times, it was also incredibly easy. When I go to work every day, I am distancing myself from all the things that are familiar to me. It has become its own alternate reality, my little Working Vacation on the Beach. I won’t miss the unpredictability of the office clamp-downs, or finding myself locked out of my office because some men need to catch a mouse with their bare hands – “Lusya, step back, there will be blood,” they say, totally serious. But I’ll never work somewhere like this again – at least on many days I hope I never do.”
New York is unbearable, like it is every summer, and my usually peaceful commute gets rowdy as the B train fills up with high school kids on their way to the beach. I tell myself I can’t wait to get out of here. But as the end date approaches, I find myself on a tipsy humid night telling a boy I wish someone could say “Lusya” the way the Russians do. He tries valiantly but I shake my head; it’s in that softest of spaces between the “s” and “ya.” I wake up some weekend mornings with Vanya’s favorite Pink Floyd song in my head, thinking of the way we both confidently sing along to the line, “Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way,” as though we have any knowledge of English ways at all. I start asking with genuine interest how his artistic endeavors are going, concede that this one abstract photo does, in fact, look a little like Kandinsky if you squint your eyes just right. My boss announces abruptly one day during my second to last week that I am “the best,” and I consider that boyfriends saying it never sounds as good as when he does, his “the” sounding more like “they” and the intonation of the second word rising out of his mouth like smoke. I try to imagine a life where Misha doesn’t sit down next to me at 2 PM every day to eat a banana. If not Marya, who will sneak up from behind and scare me? Who could come up with more diminutive variations for my two-syllable name than Natasha? Probably not the Chinese.
XIII.
I have by now collectively spent days of my life waiting for the B train: in lots of rain and some shine, among beach girls in rompers and aging Russian men in gold chains. I have gotten unreasonably indignant when asked for directions in Russian – this is New York! – but answered in Russian just the same without thinking. I have tried to listen for waves from the elevated platform and seen sunsets over Soviet-style high rises taken straight out of the exurbs of Vladivostok. I have sent text messages in Cyrillic by accident. I have quaked in my Keds dreading to ask for vacation in a language I didn’t feel I understood. I have smiled when I had to concede the Russians were so much more generous than I’d anticipated, in almost every way imaginable.
The trains in Brighton Beach swing toward you around a sharp bend. The B trains are the older kind with orange seats and graffiti and out-of-date ads, and their approach reminds me of the Cyclone roller coaster at Coney Island, just down the boardwalk from my office. There’s the sound of rickety wood and a whoosh of air and the moment when the angle allows you to see both the conductor in the front car and the tail end of the last one simultaneously. It’s not often that you see the start and end of trains, or anything else really, all at once. I remember my first day of work, the start of the period that one day months from now, I’ll call My Slow Descent Into Fluency. I don’t remember the last day, because it turns out it never happens: Two weeks after my last day in the office -- “Will you come back to us a ninja, Lusenka? A spy?” they ask over champagne toasts -- I get a call from Misha. I am back in my hometown for a while before leaving the States. I ignore his call, as I have always done with the Russians, and wait to listen to the message. “Lusya,” he says, not as sheepishly as I would like but still somehow sweet in his resigned tone. “We were wondering. Can you work for us from home?” And I say yes, because I always have said yes to the Russians eventually, because I am not ready, it seems, to say no, to say goodbye for real.
