“I thought about her unconsciously, hopelessly, greedily”

“I have rarely felt worse than the day when Pippa came straight from the London plane to us with this Everett. I was counting the days, counting the hours, shaking from lack of sleep and overexcitement, every five minutes I glanced at my watch, when the doorbell rang, I jumped up and, really, rushed to open it with all my might – and there she was standing with this vulgar Englishman.

I had to gather all my strength to, without changing my face (inside – writhing, end of everything), to answer his sweaty English handshake and Hello, I’m Everett, and you must be Theo, I’ve heard so much about you, la-la Well, while I stood there in the front, frozen as if impaled on a Yankee bayonet, staring at the stranger who had just finished me off. He was a skinny, naive hipster—innocent, polite, cheerful, dressed like a teenager in jeans and hoodies. As soon as we were alone in the living room, I almost climbed the wall from his quick guilty smile. While they were visiting us, every moment was sheer torture. But somehow I held on. Although I tried to meet them less often (I was, of course, a skilled actor, but I could hardly resist being rude with him: everything in him – pinkish skin, nervous chuckles, hairs sticking out from under his cuffs – just incited me to pounce on him, to count his horse’s English teeth; that would be the number, I thought gloomily, looking angrily at him across the table, if old Four-Eyes, the antique dealer, unscrewed his balls), but, no matter how I tried, I could not tear myself away from Pippa – forever obsessively spinning next to her, and despising himself for it, and painfully acutely rejoiced at her closeness: her bare feet at breakfast, her bare legs, her voice. A sudden flash of white armpits as she pulled off her sweater. The agony of her touch on my arm. “Hello, dear. Hi, my dear”. She sneaks up behind me, slaps my eyes with her palms: guess who? She wanted to know everything about me, about everything, everything that I do. He will curl up next to a small “love” couch from the era of Queen Anne, so that our legs touch: Lord, Lord. What am I reading? Can I get into my iPod? And where did I get such an amazing watch? From her smile breathed paradise. But as soon as I was left alone with her under some pretext, he would rush in – slap, slap, slap – with a stupid smile, grab her by the shoulder and ruin everything. There are voices in the next room, an explosion of laughter: are they talking about me? He hugged her around the waist! Called her “Pips”!

How angered me, how touched I was by her amiable even tone, with which she spoke to me in the presence of this “Everett”: no, I answered restrainedly when she asked if I had anyone, “yes, no, in general” , although (and I was somehow gloomily, consciously proud of this), in fact, I slept with two different girls at once, who did not even know about each other. One guy lived in another city, and the second had a fiancé, from whom she got tired – once in bed with me, she usually dropped his calls. Both are very pretty, and the one who cuckolded the groom was a beauty at all – but I didn’t feel anything for either one or the other, they were just Pippa’s understudies.

My feelings irritated me. Sitting and crying over a “broken heart” (this expression was the first, unfortunately, to come to mind) – only idiots behave like that, nurses, weaklings and nerds – oh-she-she is now in London, she has a different one, so go , damn it, buy wine and live on. But thinking about Pippa was so painful that forgetting her was like trying to forget a bad tooth. I thought about her unconsciously, hopelessly, greedily. For years I would wake up and think of her first thing, fall asleep with the thought of her, and she would invade my day unceremoniously, annoyingly, forever – like an electric shock: what time is it in London – I constantly added and subtracted, figured out the difference in time, as the obsessed climbed into the phone to check what the weather was like there in London, plus eleven, 22.12, light rainfall; standing on the corner of Greenwich and Seventh Avenue near the boarded-up St. Vincent’s Hospital, hurrying to meet the dealer, I kept thinking about Pippa: where is she? riding in a taxi, eating at a restaurant, drinking with people I don’t know, sleeping in a bed I’ve never seen? I longed madly to look at pictures of her apartment to add much-desired detail to my fantasies, but I was ashamed to ask for it. I languished with thoughts about her sheets, what they were, what they were, I imagined them dark, official-colored, crumpled, unwashed – a dark student nest, a freckled cheek turning white on a burgundy, crimson pillowcase, English rain drumming outside her window. The photographs lining the walls outside my bedroom door – different Pippas of all ages – became daily torture, every time like the first, every time unexpected; I tried to look away, but every time something happened, I looked up – and there she was, laughing at someone’s jokes, smiling at me, and again a fresh wound, again a blow evenly to the heart. And the strangest thing: I knew that few people see her the same as I saw her – rather wonderful, because of her peculiar gait and ghostly pallor, which is found in redheads. For some reason, I foolishly always flattered myself with the thought that, they say, I’m the only one in the world and I can appreciate her, that she will be surprised, moved, and maybe even look at herself with completely different eyes if she finds out what she is for. me is beautiful. But this will never happen. I furiously pounced on her flaws, peered at photographs where she was not captured at the most flattering age, from unsuccessful angles – a long nose, sunken cheeks, eyes (despite their stunning color) because of pale eyelashes, as if naked, simple yes only. But for me, all these features of her were so glorious, so special, that I only despaired more. If she were beautiful, I could console myself with the fact that I care about her like the moon, but from the fact that I was so worried, so pursued by her ugliness, it inexorably turned out that this was love, which tied stronger than physical attraction, the resinous swamp of the soul, where I can flutter and wither for years.

But the deepest, most unshakable part of me was not taken by any arguments of reason. She was a lost kingdom, that innocence of mine that I lost with my mother. All of her was like an avalanche of curiosities, from the vintage valentines and embroidered Chinese robes she collected to the tiny scented bottles from Neal’s Yard Remedies; there was always something bright, something magical in her distant, unfamiliar life: house 23, Timbuktu boulevard, canton of Vaud, Switzerland, Blenheim Crescent, W11 2EE, furnished rooms in countries that I had never seen. It is clear that this Everett (who is “poor as a church mouse” – his, his expression) lives on her money, more precisely on Uncle Welty’s money, old Europe fattens at the expense of young America, as I put it in my senior year in my essay on Henry James. Maybe write him a check so he can fuck off? On slow, chilly evenings in the store, the thought crossed my mind: fifty thousand if you leave today, a hundred thousand if you promise never to see her again. He had a gag with money, it was obvious: he was always nervously rummaging through his pockets, always running to the ATM, withdrawing twenty at a time, for God’s sake. Hopelessly. Yes, in life she will not mean as much to him as she meant to me. We were made for each other, there was some fabulous correctness in this, undeniable witchcraft; the very thought of her filled with radiance every corner of my consciousness, illuminated such wonderful expanses that I had not even suspected, panoramas that existed only in conjunction with her. I played her beloved Arvo Pärt again and again, in order to be with her at least like that, as soon as she mentioned the book she had read, I greedily took over her in order to crawl into her thoughts, as if to become a telepath. Some of the things that passed through my hands—a Pleyel piano, a lovely little scratched Russian cameo—were exactly the physical evidence of the life she and I were rightfully supposed to live.

I wrote her thirty-page letters and erased them without sending them, instead sticking to a mathematical formula that I myself deduced so as not to expose myself to ridicule: my email should always be three lines shorter than hers, you need to send it after waiting exactly one day longer than I had been waiting for a response from her. Sometimes, in bed, sliding into a whooping, opiate, erotic oblivion, I had long frank conversations with her: I imagined how we were talking to her (angrily) – no one can separate us, we press our palms to each other’s cheeks, we are together forever. Like a maniac, I hid the pieces of her autumn hair color – she cut her bangs in the bathroom, I pulled her hair out of the trash can, worse, I stole her dirty shirt, which smelled all insanely of her straw, vegetarian sweat.

Hopelessly. Everything was worse than hopeless, it was all humiliating. When she came, I always kept my bedroom door half open – not too subtle a hint, come in, they say. Even the cute way she dragged her leg (like a little mermaid who can hardly walk on the ground) drove me crazy. She illuminated everything with a golden light, she was a lens that magnified beauty, so that the whole world was transformed next to her, with her alone. I tried to kiss her twice: once in a taxi, while drunk, once at the airport, having come to complete despair at the thought that I would not see her again for many months (or, you know, years):

“I’m sorry,” I said a little too late…

– Nothing.

“No, really, I…

– Listen, – with a sweet absent-minded smile, – everything is fine. Landing will be announced soon (not true, not soon). I have to go. Take care of yourself, okay?

Take care of yourself. What the hell did she see in that Everett? What was left for me to think – how fed up I was with her, if she preferred this sluggish slug to me. Someday, when the children will go … He said this as if in jest, but my blood froze in my veins. Just such a loser and will be dragged everywhere with a bag of diapers and baby clothes. I reproached myself for not being more assertive with her, although, to tell the truth, much further, without any encouragement from her. I already disgraced myself: as soon as her name came up, Hobie became very tactful, spoke evenly, carefully. And all the same, I languished over it for years, as if I was suffering from a long-lasting cold, firmly believing that if you want it, everything will pass. And after all, Pippa did not give me any hope, just the opposite – if I were even a little bit dear to her, she would return to New York, and not stay after school in Europe, and for all that, like a fool, I clung to for the look she gave me when I first came to her, when I was sitting on her bed. For years I was nourished by that childhood memory, as if, exhausted from longing for my mother, I, like an orphaned animal, clung to her, but in fact it was fate that played a trick on me – Pippa was drugged due to a head injury brains on one side, but she would have climbed to the first comer with hugs.