Still Here by Lara Vapnyar Page A

point. He idolizes women, but he doesn’t view them as equals. They’re these sacred sexual objects for him. Something to idolize and discard, or, better yet, discard first and idolize later.”
    Rachel took another sip of her cider and asked, “Do you know the song ‘Waiting for the Miracle’?”
    “Of course, it’s my favorite!” Vadik said.
    “Well, I find the lyrics offensive.”
    Rachel looked at Vadik intently. “See what’s going on here? We have a man up there, having these existential thoughts, talking to God, expecting to experience divine grace, and the woman is down below. Literally beneath him! Waiting stupidly. And for what? For him to marry her?”
    Vadik shook his head.
    Rachel was about to say something else, but she stopped herself. She looked embarrassed.
    “So what are you studying in your graduate school?” Vadik asked. “North American misogynists?”
    “No, actually, English romantics.”
    What luck! Vadik thought. He had been given the perfect opportunity to steer the conversation away from tricky Cohen and toward something that would allow him to shine. He said that he knew the entire “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by heart. In Russian. Rachel smiled and asked him to recite it. He did. Rachel loved it. She said that it sounded amazing in Russian, even though she couldn’t help but laugh a couple of times.
    The waiter came up to them just as Vadik belted out the last line. He asked if they wanted anything else. Vadik realized that this was the fourth or fifth time the waiter had asked them that. It was time to leave.
    “I’ll walk you home,” Vadik said, and Rachel nodded and smiled.
    The color of the sky had changed to gloomy indigo, and it had gotten really cold. The slush on the sidewalks had turned into cakey ice. Vadik offered Rachel his hand, and they started to walk like that: holding hands, but at a distance from each other. It was only outside that Vadik noticed that he was much taller than Rachel. Her head was level with his shoulders.
    She asked him where he was staying. He told her Staten Island. The answer seemed to horrify her.
    “Staten Island?” she said. “But it’s so late! How are you going to get there?”
    And then she cleared her throat and offered him the option to stay at her place. Vadik squeezed her hand tighter.
    It’s New York, he thought. It’s New York that makes everything so easy.
    They walked down a large avenue, then turned onto some smaller street, then onto another small street. Vadik loved Rachel’s street. The dark trees. And the cheerful details on the stone facades. And the piles of hardened snow gleaming under the streetlamps. They entered one of the buildings and walked up the creaky stairs to Rachel’s fifth-floor one-bedroom. Rachel walked ahead of him. The stairs were carpeted. The railings were carved. Vadik’s heart was beating like crazy.
    But once they were inside the apartment, the easy feeling was gone. Rachel took her boots and coat off but kept the scarf on. And she moved nervously around the apartment as if she were the one who was there for the first time. Vadik felt that he needed to do or say something that would make her relax, but he had no idea what.
    “Do you want some tea?” Rachel asked, rebraiding her hair. She seemed grateful when he agreed. She disappeared into the kitchen, still in her scarf. Her apartment was small and dark, with art posters on the walls. Vadik recognized only one painting, Memling’s
Portrait of a Young Woman.
He had never liked it that much. Since this was the first real American home Vadik had seen, he couldn’t tell how much of the decor was typical and how much of it revealed Rachel’s personality.
    He sat down on her small couch and took off his shoes.
    His socks were soaking wet. These were the socks that he had put on yesterday morning in Regina’s Moscow apartment, where Vadik had to spend a week between Istanbul and New York. He stared at his feet for a while, stunned