Dear Fang, with Love Read online

  Judith had on her red lipstick and her red beret. She was, as my mother would say, “ready to be seen.” She had survived this trip, this foray out into the world as a widow, and she looked happy. I was genuinely glad for her. I invited her in. “You don’t still have any of that cheese?” she asked.

  “Indeed, I do!” I said. Vera had made fun of me for buying it at the store. “It looks like someone tried to make soap out of cottage cheese,” she’d said. But Judith and I had both become swiftly addicted to the farmer’s cheese. I sliced some for us now, along with a huge red tomato, and we ate from a large platter with our fingers.

  “I feel very badly,” Judith said finally, “about the way things ended between Vera and myself.”

  I nodded. I didn’t know how much to say. I knew about their fight only because I had read Vera’s e-mails, and I didn’t really want to get into that right now. All I wanted was to absolve Judith as quickly and resoundingly as possible.

  “Don’t spend even a second feeling bad,” I told her. But she went on speaking as though I hadn’t.

  “I, of course, did not know she suffered from mental illness and that what I was seeing was part of a manic episode, but in retrospect it seems very clear. She kept asking me about being a Jew. She kept asking me if it was really important to be born a Jew, and I didn’t get it because her mother is a Jew so even by Orthodox standards, she’s a Jew.”

  I nodded, listening. This seemed like a very different conversation than the one Vera had reported in her letter to Fang. But perhaps it was foolish to try to piece together reality from letters. Maybe Vera had been censoring herself, not wanting to seem so manic in her summary to Fang. Or maybe there had been two distinct fights, and it was I who was trying to force them into congruity.

  “Anyway, this did not comfort her for whatever reason, and she had some idea that she was a new kind of identity, a thing she kept calling a post-Jew. Which, if I am being totally honest, I found both appalling and amusing because how could she not know that I myself am a post-Jew? I mean, she was coming to me as though I were some bastion of traditional wisdom, when the truth is that I am just a hippie who has patched together her own sense of Jewishness, mixing it with Buddhism and modern poetry and all sorts of things as I saw fit.”

  “Listen, Judith,” I said, “none of this is something you should feel bad about. There wouldn’t have been any right answer you could have given. She has delusions of grandeur and—”

  “Well, I know,” Judith said. “That’s what I’m trying to apologize for!”

  I was starting to feel really anxious and sick, but I wasn’t sure why. I ate another piece of farmer’s cheese.

  “She was getting agitated and she was talking about Jews being the chosen people. She was really hung up on that word: chosen. I said what I usually say, which is, Yes, but did God choose the Israelites or did the Israelites choose God? But she wasn’t interested in that question. It seems so painfully obvious now that I could just kick myself, but at the time I was irritated and overtired, and I felt like she was being a melodramatic teenager. Unsatisfied with my un-flashy old woman’s truths. She’d asked me the secret to true love and she hadn’t liked that answer either!”

  “What is the secret to true love?” I asked.

  “Oh. To be nice to each other.”

  We sat in silence for a minute. To be nice to each other.

  “That’s actually the secret to raising children, too,” she said. “You just try to be nice to them. Not to coddle them or spoil them, not to be afraid of their anger or disappointment, but to be just to them, to be kind. Or at least, that’s what I think.”

  It occurred to me that I ought to go out and buy one of Judith’s books and read it.

  “I have no idea what I could ever do that could be of help to you, but please know that you can always call on me,” she said. “I will do anything I can for her. And for you.”

  I didn’t know what Judith could do to help us, either, but I was deeply touched that she had offered. “Thank you,” I said.

  “I should go downstairs. Adam called me a taxi, that sweet boy, so I wouldn’t have to try to find one myself. It’s supposed to be here at ten.” It took me a moment to realize she was talking about Johnny Depp. I had forgotten entirely that his real name was Adam.

  I offered to walk her out and help her with her suitcase since I was on my way to the hospital anyway, and thank God I did because I have no idea how she would have gotten that enormous suitcase down the three flights of stairs by herself. Judith seemed to exist in some kind of special space where the things she needed just appeared: someone to carry her bags, someone to find the light switches, someone to sell her pot. It was tempting to believe the world was like that. All you had to do was need something, and it would appear, like the SS officer flinging open the door and saving you from death, or like your soul mate suddenly walking up and shaking your hand.

  “Wish me safe flight!” Judith chirped. I wished her a safe flight, kissed her on the cheek, and left her at the curb to wait for her taxi, which I had every confidence would appear and take her wherever she wanted to go.

  —

  And then there was nothing to do but wade through the thick molasses hours until Katya would arrive in Vilnius. Her plane was scheduled to arrive the following morning. I had already called Johnny Depp and arranged for him to ride with me to the airport to fetch her. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to communicate with the cabby. I hadn’t quite been aware of how much I needed Vera’s Russian to get by, but now that she was in the hospital and the program was over, I didn’t hear English anywhere. It was like a curtain of incomprehensibility had come down all around me. It was hard to separate this from my emotional state.

  I visited Vera in the hospital that day, only to discover that she had broken out in hives from one of her medications. They were unlike any hives I had ever seen. Pink welts the size of quarters covered her entire body, worst around her collarbones where they were a deep raspberry. Her eyes were almost swollen shut. She was just whimpering under the blankets in her room, unable to talk or answer my questions.

  I lost it completely, storming around, yelling for a nurse, for an orderly, for a doctor, somebody who spoke English. It must have just happened because none of them knew about it yet, but in the moment it seemed like a sign of some dangerous and malevolent neglect. It was only when I saw how alarmed the nurses and doctors were, how they rushed to Vera with syringes of antihistamines, how they brought cold cloths for her eyes and helped me build a nest for her on the couch in the dayroom, that I calmed down. They weren’t trying to hurt her. They turned on the TV for us, brought her an apple juice. There was an episode of Friends on, dubbed in Lithuanian. We watched it together and by the end of it, the swelling had gone down enough for Vera to talk a little bit, and she said, “You don’t even need to know what they are saying for this show to be comforting.”

  When visiting hours were over, no one asked me to leave, and I stayed for another two hours, just watching TV with her. I didn’t ask her about the dragon. I didn’t tell her I had read her e-mails and her computer files. I couldn’t see the point of it. For one thing, I knew her doctors wouldn’t want me dredging up her delusions, making them fresh in her mind. But that wasn’t really why I didn’t bring it up. It was that there was nothing she could say to explain to me. There was no piece of information I needed from her, or rather, the one piece of information I needed didn’t really exist. It was madness, and that was all.

  When I left, I had a conference with the doctor on call. The hives had gone down, but since it seemed to be a reaction to her medication, she would have to switch, which meant she would have to stay for at least another several days.

  “It might mean another round of psychosis,” he warned. “Probably not. But it isn’t out of the question.”

  I nodded, helpless. What else could we do?

  Katya, I thought, as I walked home in the bright, horrifying sunshine. Katya, come qui
ckly.

  —

  The next morning, on the way to the airport to get Katya, I was as nervous as if I were taking her to the prom. I met Johnny Depp on the corner by our apartment where he was waiting with a cab. I suppose I had imagined us riding to the airport in silence. I really would have preferred to pretend he wasn’t there at all. But it became obvious right away that this was not going to be possible. He was in a chatty mood. He kept rubbing his hands up and down his slacks on the tops of his thighs as we made our way out of the city.

  “How is Rūta?” I asked.

  “Mad at me,” Johnny Depp said.

  “What did you do?” I asked. I wasn’t worried about prying. He clearly wanted me to ask.

  He paused for a minute, then said, “My Fulbright was over this spring. So I’m going back to the States at the end of the summer. And it turns out that all this time, she’s been waiting for me to ask her to marry me. To come with me to live in America.” He laughed a little, flashed a nervous smile with those glaringly white teeth.

  “And you’re not going to ask her?”

  “Not a chance.”

  I thought about the beautiful Rūta in her orange knit dress with her familiarity with torture and her sweet laugh like wind chimes sounding. “Why not?” I asked.

  “She has a kid,” he said, not looking at me, but out at the city we were slowly leaving behind.

  I had not known that Rūta had a child. She seemed too young for children. Too beautiful and fresh. “How old?” I asked.

  “A little boy. He’s six. I’m just not ready to be a father, if you know what I mean,” he said, and laughed again. “But he’s a great kid. It’s not that.”

  “How long have you been together here?” I asked.

  “Two years,” Johnny Depp said.

  Of course Rūta had been thinking he would ask her to marry him. Of course it had never occurred to her that he could enter her life, playact Daddy to her child for two years, and then leave as though the whole thing were a lark.

  “But, it’s like, she doesn’t get that where I am in my life, I don’t have a steady income—you know? I can’t just, like, get married.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “It’s not that simple,” he said.

  “It is, though,” I said.

  “What?”

  I don’t think he had been expecting me to contradict him. I hadn’t been expecting myself to contradict him, either. We were out of the city now, on a narrow highway going through pine forest. There were no buildings or human habitation in sight.

  “Do you love her?” I asked.

  “Of course I love her,” he said.

  I shrugged. “So marry her.”

  “But I can’t do that,” he said.

  “Sure you can. You can do whatever you want. It’s your life.”

  He shook his head, perplexed that I was failing to understand his predicament. “But I can’t be responsible for her. I can’t, like, move her to a whole different country with her kid and take care of them. I don’t have any money!”

  “You’d figure it out,” I said.

  “It’s not that easy,” he said.

  “No,” I agreed. “It wouldn’t be easy at all. It’s just that it’s that simple. But simple and easy are different.”

  Johnny Depp said nothing. I had clearly pissed him off, and I was glad. Glad to have this opportunity to give Johnny Depp the gift of being contradicted. The airport came into view. “Whatever,” he said. “My life, so I guess I get to decide what I want to do with it.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” I said.

  When we got to the airport, he volunteered to wait in the cab while I went inside to collect Katya. I was expecting to wait for a while, loitering outside of baggage claim, but her flight had gotten in early and she was sitting on top of her suitcase just inside the doors, eating an apple. I wondered for a moment where she had gotten it. Was it an apple she had brought with her? Was it an American apple? I don’t know why I found the idea of this so enchanting.

  She got up and threw her arms around me. I don’t think she had hugged me since we were eighteen. Her arms, while thin, were surprisingly strong. “Come,” I said, letting her go. “I’ve got a cab.” I rolled her suitcase for her, and she followed me, wordlessly, as though this was something we did all the time. Before getting in the back of the cab, she tossed her apple core out onto the spotless pavement.

  “Katya!” I said, aghast. It seemed perverse to me that she would assume she had the right to litter here in this strange country that she had only just arrived in.

  “It’s for the birds,” she said, and waved me off. “How is she? Tell me everything.”

  Probably it had been unwise to pick a fight with Johnny Depp on the way to the airport, as now it was awkward to talk to Katya freely with him listening, sullen and slumped in the front passenger seat, but the story itself eventually broke down my reserve and in the end I almost forgot he was there. Katya had been in the air for a full twenty-six hours, so I hadn’t gotten to tell her about the hives. “I don’t know what state she’ll be in when we see her,” I said, and relayed the doctor’s warning about the possibility of a return to psychosis.

  “My poor baby,” Katya said, and insisted the cab drop us off not at the apartment but at the hospital, bags and all. “You will carry them,” she told me. “Who pays him?” she asked. “This guy?” She jerked her thumb at Johnny Depp.

  “How much was the trip?” I asked.

  “Forget it,” Johnny Depp said. “The program will cover it.”

  “No,” I said, “I insist. This is beyond anything the program should cover.”

  Johnny Depp took off his sunglasses and his eyes were soft. “I’m really sorry that this is happening to Vera,” he said. “I don’t think I realized the full extent of things when you told me on the phone. We’ve got the apartment booked for another week for you, but please know, if there is anything that I can do, or that the program can do for you, we are more than happy to. Just call.”

  I shook his hand. I wondered if he would ask Rūta to marry him. Probably he wouldn’t. I didn’t think I had the power to single-handedly change his mind, by any means. And yet. He pushed his floppy hair back out of his eyes with his other hand and gave me a weird salute.

  And I followed Katya into the mental hospital, dragging her huge rolling suitcase behind me.

  Chapter 15

  “Dear Mother”

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  Dear Mother,

  I already know that I am not going to send you this letter. Some communications must take place outside of time. Some of the things we have to say to each other would break our voices if we tried to say them, or would make the ears of our listeners leak dark blood. What I have to say to you is something that probably cannot even be contained in words, though if it can be captured at all, it can only be fleetingly embraced by the curves of the letters of an electronic document that will never be sent and will most likely be immediately deleted. Like electrons aware of being observed, the truth will pretend to be something more sensible if it is aware you are looking at it. But when the truth is all by itself, it is chaotic and manifold.

  It wounds me deeply that you do not believe I am well. That when Papa called you and told you about the acid, you were so unmoved. Weren’t you even a tiny bit hopeful? Don’t you want me to be well?

  And yet, I know I am not well. It is not my wellness that I wish to argue over. It is that my reality has never truly mattered to you. You have been so uncurious. Your irony has been a thick protective coating keeping you from the world, from me, from any true confrontation with yourself. The character of my delusions matters to you as little as the character of my thoughts. All of it is discounted, as though I were happening in another world that is not entirely real to you.

  I know and understand all of the reasons you could not be with my father. I can see your si
de of things completely. But did you ever stop to wonder what I would have wanted? What would have been best for me? I do not think you ever did. How could you think that nothing was better than something? Do you remember how I would throw fits in the car and refuse to get out, demanding that you find him for me, that you take me to him? Do you remember how I cried and cried, asking why he didn’t want me?

  You always said Dedushka Pavel was more of an American than you were, and you would say this with such pride. You came to this country when you were seven! You are American! Certainly you are not Russian or at least not as Russian as you think, though I know that part of the reason you stay with Misha is because he came later when he was a teenager, and so he lends credibility to your narrative: the émigré fantasy. Everything is framed for you by how conflicted you feel simply to be existing. Your feelings are of immense importance to you. Nothing is as real as your feelings: not facts, not truths, not even the existence of other people with their distinct points of view. Sometimes I imagine that being you is like being a fly, where the world can only be seen in fragments by your giant compound eye which turns everything into a peculiar reflection or distortion of your own pretty face.

  And on the other hand: your pretty face. If you knew how much I missed you, it would break your heart. How much I long for the intimacy we shared when I was a child. You would let me sleep in your bed, the two of us in T-shirts and underwear. I remember exactly the warmth of your skin, the smell of the bed, the slithering sound of your hair on the pillowcase. Back then you had that brown duvet with the feather patterns on it that was impossibly soft. You threw it away because it got moth holes, I think, but it was the best duvet cover in the history of the world, and every time I see a bed, what I think about is how inferior the duvet cover is compared with that duvet cover.