“Health,” Ivan said in Russian, and we clinked glasses.
The beer was cold and not especially unpleasant but I couldn’t tell what the point of it was. Like the iced coffee, it was at once watery and bitter. Apparently that was desirable.
“Is it okay?” Ivan asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said. He picked up my glass and took a sip. I looked at him closely. “It’s beer,” he said, shrugging. “Try this one.” He pushed his glass toward me. I tried it. It tasted extremely similar to mine.
“Do you like mine better?” he asked. I shook my head. We traded back our glasses.
I wasn’t sure I would be able to finish the beer. Swallowing became increasingly difficult. I thought I could feel my body swaying ever so slightly on the high barstool. I didn’t find that talking was any easier. All around us people were laughing and roaring so loudly that we had to lean in close and shout past each other’s ears. “Linger” by the Cranberries was playing in the background. “You’ve got me wrapped around your finger,” the singer warbled over and over, in a girly, excessively beautiful voice. It felt ominous to me—the aestheticized girliness, infatuation, and weakness.
“Do you like the Cranberries?” Ivan asked.
“I don’t really like this song,” I said. “Do you?”
“I like it.” He was pulling apart and counting a wad of fives and singles. “I have enough money for two more each.”
I realized he meant two more beers. My heart sank. I had thought getting “a drink” meant you only had to have one drink.
“I can’t,” I said.
“Why not?”
“I have to get up early.”
He stared at me. “It’s not even eleven yet.”
I felt so unhappy. I just didn’t understand why we couldn’t skip the part where I drank two more pints of beer. “Well, I don’t want to push you,” Ivan said, somehow ironically, as if alluding to the scenario known to us both in which boys pushed girls, and which was so obviously not what was going on. I was embarrassed, because I felt that, by refusing to drink—by being afraid to drink—I was implying that I thought that was what was going on, and that he was going to “take advantage of me,” a phrase it was impossible to imagine without quotation marks.
“How about if I get one more and we share it?” Ivan said.
I said okay. He went to the bar. “Linger” ended and was succeeded by “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” a song I liked because it seemed so companionable and free, and simultaneously negative and cheerful. Ivan came back with another pint. It was the slightly darker beer that he had been drinking. Perhaps for this reason, because it was his, and because we took turns picking up the glass, I liked it better. I took tiny sips, barely enough to swallow, and each time I felt the cold, unfamiliar flavor again, I thought about whether it was a reminder of something or a continuation, and whether it mattered how long you continued something that was temporary.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t have another?” Ivan said when the pint was finished. I thought about it, but couldn’t see how to back down from the stand I had somehow taken.
When I stood up, the room swayed and I immediately walked into a table. Ivan took my arm. I felt embarrassed for causing him trouble, but I also felt wronged, because it was his doing that I was causing trouble.
“I might be drunk,” I said.
“I don’t think it’s possible to get drunk from one beer,” he said.
My feelings were hurt. Did he think I was faking it? In the next moment I wondered: Was I faking it? Was I actually capable of walking in a straighter line than I had been? It seemed to me that when I concentrated, I was. My face grew hot. I walked very carefully in a straight line.
As we were heading down Mass Ave toward campus, a man stepped out of a doorway. “I’m selling books,” he said. Instinctively I averted my eyes, picked up my pace, and changed course slightly to give him a wider berth—just as Ivan did the opposite, slowing down right in front of the man, looking right at him, right into his eyes. “Books, really?”
I was overcome by the sudden sense of Ivan’s freedom. I realized for the first time that if you were a guy, if you were some tall guy who looked like Ivan, you could pretty much stop to look at anything you wanted, whenever you felt like it. And because I was walking with him now, for just this moment, I had a special dispensation, I could look at whatever he was looking at, too. So I, too, looked at the man—at the lines etched into his face, at his crafty and reproachful expression, at his cloudy eye and his piercing eye, overhung by a wilderness of eyebrows.
The man opened one flap of his trench coat. Strapped to the inside, contraband-style, was an array of paperbacks: The Fountainhead, Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution, an introduction to the philosophy of Heidegger, The Communist Manifesto, a Dear Abby anthology, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and a Spanish-English dictionary. The man looked awkwardly down over the titles, apparently deciding which one to offer Ivan. I wondered which it would be—what it was that he had noticed about him.
“I don’t know if you’re a Spanish speaker,” the man said finally, pulling out the dictionary. He had noticed Ivan’s foreignness.
“No. I’m not.”
“Then you can really use this dictionary,” the man said ingeniously. “It’s only one dollar. See the price on the cover—fifteen dollars. In Canada, twenty-one dollars. Canada’s just a few hours from here.”
Ivan dug in the pocket of his jeans—an amazing sight, someone you’re infatuated with trying to fish something out of a jeans pocket—and came up with fifteen cents.
“Every bit helps,” said the man, filing the nickel and the dime away in separate pockets. He took out a bunch of postcards, the kind dispensed in restaurant toilets, and gave one to Ivan.
“Are you going to give it to your girlfriend?” he asked, looking from Ivan to me. “Why aren’t you holding hands when you love each other?”
“Well,” Ivan said. “Because there’s a time and place for everything.”
As we turned to walk away, some object came flying at us, toward Ivan’s chest. He caught it with one hand. It was the Spanish dictionary. “You already bought it,” called the man, who seemed related to Nina’s shaman in Ulan-Ude.
Ivan asked if I needed a dictionary for my Spanish class. I told him I already had one. He crammed the dictionary into his jacket pocket. “Well, maybe I’ll use it someday.” I felt a wave of longing. Where would he use the dictionary, with whom?
The sidewalk got wider and I again had difficulty walking in a straight line. Ivan explained that all I had to do was keep a constant distance between myself and the wall. This struck me as indescribably funny. When I laughed, Ivan also laughed. We were at the campus gates now—we were really near my dorm. Ivan handed me the postcard. It showed an Eskimo drinking Evian water in an igloo. Etched on the back with a ballpoint pen were the words “You have a warm hart.”
“Is it true?” asked Ivan.