Victoria
Short story | Memoir | 20 min read
A lonely, heavy drinking expatriate in his own city falls hard for Victoria, a Russian hostess at an empty Times Square restaurant, building a romance out of shared headphones and stolen subway rides. Small cultural mismatches, starting absurdly with a box of dark chocolates, slowly curdle their connection into resentment on both sides. A drunken late night phone call to her furious brother brings the whole thing to its humiliating, honest end. Contains alcoholism. "I delete the motherfucker"
I was a drunk in New York once. That meant that I drank every day, every night, every morning, every afternoon. That meant that I had favorite places to drink, places I drank every day. The only people in New York I knew were bartenders, servers, owners of restaurants. I knew busboys, custodians. I lived with my sister but I didn't know her. I lived with her friend but I didn't know her. I stayed out late enough each night so that they would be asleep by the time I got home and I woke up early enough each morning so that I could leave before they woke.
I went to work.
I worked as hard as possible.
I left as soon as possible.
Then I drank.
That's how I got through the week. Then the weekend came. That's how I got through the weekend too.
I was friends with hosts. I was friends with hostesses. They showed me their pictures. They told me their stories. They sat with me at my tables and drank with me.
But at the end of the night, when all the customers had gone home but me, my bartender friends didn't come with me. I left alone, to find the subway or more likely a cab because riding the subway drunk didn't seem safe. And then I was on the yellow line back to Queens, and my sister's apartment, with my sister and her friend hopefully both asleep.
One weekend I was walking near Times Square. A side street. And I found some middle eastern restaurant as wide as a truck. Out front was a host station, and the host stood there in a suit, and even though I had my headphones on, he drew me in, first with a smile, then with talk of New York, then with talk of the food, then by introducing me to his fellow hostess. Now his smile was nice, but it wouldn't have brought me in. And his talk was nice, but it wouldn't have brought me in. But his hostess, who he brought out to show me, stopped me walking down this tiny street.
"This is Victoria," he said.
And the story stopped for me.
She served me and we were the only ones in the restaurant.
She kept it formal.
I ordered, ate, drank wine, and paid my tab.
But I didn't leave.
As I ate, I kept my headphones on, and only when Victoria approached did I take them off.
I sat after the meal finishing my glass of wine.
Victoria asked me if I'd like another.
Then she asked me what I was listening to.
I took the headphones off and held them out for her.
She put them on her head.
She listened for a moment.
She looked confused.
And then she smiled.
She took the headphones off her ears.
"Who is this?" she asked.
I said, "Arvo Pärt. That's all I listen to on Saturdays."
Victoria gives me a quizzical look.
"Is he Ukrainian?" she asks.
"He's Estonian," I say.
Her head turns sideways.
"Why are you looking at me like this," I say.
"Because you are American," she says.
She laughs.
"I just would not expect you to be listening to such a thing."
"I listen to the best," I say. "I don't care where there're from. Why? What do you listen to?"
Victoria reaches into her apron and pulls out a tiny music player with pink and white ear buds. She steps close to me and I can feel her heat. She puts first one earbud into my ear, then the other. She hands me the player and says:
"This is the volume."
Then she presses play on the thing.
It's pop music, some crazy wild singing of an American teenage girl. Insane bass. Million-dollar production. Meaningless lyrics, repeating over and over some phrase about how to get down her pants.
I ripped the earbuds out of my ears.
"What is this?" I ask.
"Nicole Scherzinger and the Pussycat Dolls."
"She sounds like she's on crack."
Victoria busts out laughing.
"What's so funny?"
And Victoria says, "Because..I am listening to American pop idol and you are listening to Russian composer."
"Estonian," I say.
But Victoria is doubled over, gripping her sides, so much so that the manager of the restaurant comes out.
"Is everything okay here?"
"Everything is fine," I say.
But the manager says, "Victoria, I need to have a talk with you."
But it's too late. I'm already in love with this Russian teenager named Victoria.
I become a regular at their restaurant. Victoria is their only server. I am their only customer. I order the same thing every time: Victoria. It doesn't matter what I eat. It doesn't matter what I drink. I just want to talk with Victoria. I want to put my headphones on her and show her the music I like. I want her to put her earbuds in me and show me the music she likes. I love her delight that I have no idea who Nicole Scherzinger and the Pussycat Dolls are, and my musical choice, if not the Cello Suites, is Arvo Pärt.
I love Victoria's Russian accent.
I love that almost everything about her is not American.
After a while the manager lets her sit at the table with me when I'm done eating. It is possible the only reason he does this is that the longer Victoria stays with me, the larger the tip gets. It is possible, too, that he can see what fun we're having and he can see how empty his restaurant is and he wants it to go to some use.
I play up my ignorance of American pop music, because it gives Victoria such joy to have met an American character who has never even heard of the Pussycat Dolls or Rhianna, when in fact I have heard of them I just don't know their music. Victoria takes me to the Virgin Records in Times Square and plays new artists for me. I prefer my Arvo Pärt.
It becomes tradition for Victoria and I to walk around Times Square after my meal. At a listening kiosk in Virgin Records, our hands touch for the first time. By the time we leave the store, at dusk, in the crowds, we are kissing and touching and everyone moves around us like fish avoiding a rock and as I hear her Russian accent come out not even in words but in the little mmms and nns that she makes while we're kissing, I think to myself that I would listen to any type of music with this girl.
We walk Times Square everyday. We go to Virgin Records. We kiss. I covet her Russian accent. She tells me the story of why she's here. She and her brother wanted to come to New York for the summer and their dad paid for their tickets. Her brother is working in a barbershop in Brooklyn. They share a tiny room.
We hold hands on our walks around Times Square, interlocking fingers, and saying goodbye in front of the record store turns into riding the subway together as long as we can before I really have to get off, change trains, and go the other direction. On the subway car she sits in my lap and things get hard and things get wet and her hand goes between her legs and touches me and my hand goes up her shirt.
I can feel the reflex over her belly as I brush it with my fingers.
I feel her bra.
I feel her nipples beneath it.
She lets me kiss her neck.
When I bite her she pushes me away and simply says:
"The restaurant."
We both laugh because we both live with our siblings in tiny rooms in this gargantuan city. We don't even have a room where we could go if we wanted to. Our bedroom is a southbound train that takes her home and that I stay on as long as is worth it to spend time with Victoria. I usually wait until right before the bridge.
We have each other's number, we text. We call. I don't always want to go to her restaurant and eat before I take my casual bride around the Square. Sometimes I stop at the host station and ask if Victoria is there. Her days off are the darkest for me. I text her in Brooklyn and she never wants to leave. But when she is at the restaurant she unties her apron and grabs her things and runs outside and kisses me in the middle of a street which is no wider than an alley.
Her boss doesn't like this and stops letting her leave. I have time and money though, so I leave, buy her things, and bring them back to her. I even take requests, and one day she requests chocolate. I huff it up the street, find a Godiva store, and buy her many small chocolates, all dark.
When I return to the restaurant, I ask the host for Victoria.
"Another gift?" he asks.
"For Victoria," I say, "there will always be another gift."
Victoria comes out, blushing.
I hand her the bag.
She picks through the chocolates and says:
"Only dark?"
"It's only chocolate if it's dark," I say. "It's only wine if it's red."
"I only like light chocolate," she says. "And I like white wine!"
This is where our relationship started to fall apart.
I mean I can forgive the white wine thing, but I don't know if I could ever really be with the woman who didn't like dark chocolate.
"You're joking," I said.
"No," said Victoria.
"You don't like dark chocolate."
"I only like milk chocolate."
I was stammering in my brain. I was having difficulty. I thought she was playing with my affections.
It was my understanding that the most romantic, the only romantic, type of chocolate was dark.
Maybe in Russia they do things differently, but here roses are red, chocolate is dark and white wine is for casual lunches and couples who can't get it up.
It might sound trivial, but this dark chocolate thing was a serious showstopper for me. I mean sure I wanted to take walks around Times Square with this girl. Sure I wanted to make out in the subway and have her reach between her legs and touch my cock and I wanted my hands up her bra brushing her Russian nipples as hard as those soft nubs could get. But I seriously wasn't about to eat light chocolate to get it.
To me, light chocolate represented everything weak, everything ill designed, everything Americanized about this beautiful food. And, to me, the fact that Victoria only liked light chocolate made me question her grit. It did, it made me like her less. It made me question how serious a person she was. I didn't like to think of myself eating light chocolate and giving a yellow rose to my date while we drank white wine even if it was Victoria. I imagined spreading pink rose petals over the bed where we would first have sex because she didn't like red roses and fucking her against a backdrop of pastel colors. It wouldn't really matter how tight or cute or Russian her pussy was—it just wouldn't be right.
And here's how fragile our relationship was. And how doomed.
She could see the reaction on my face. She could see how much I wanted her to like her gift.
But she had to be herself. A light-chocolate girl couldn't just turn into a dark-chocolate girl to please some guy. She was a light-chocolate girl for reason, and even though I would never understand that reason, that reason was hers, it was true, it was pure within the context of her life. And nothing I ever did was going to change that.
And what I could see on her face, as she rifled through that bag of dark chocolates, was that she could see that there was nothing she could ever do to change me from being a dark-chocolate guy.
The honeymoon was over.
In fact the whole motherfucking thing was over.
She stopped wanting to leave the store. We still went to Virgin Records but when we went out front to be the rock fish swim around, our kisses sucked. All the technicals were there, but it wasn't the passion of the new boy meeting a new girl, exploring each other, tasting each other, knowing all the bad things they would do to each other behind closed doors. When our fingers interlocked to hold hands, it was awkward. When it came time for Victoria to go back to Brooklyn, I didn't always ride the train with her anymore. She took that bag of Godiva chocolates home with her and I imagined her feeding them to some neighbor dog, hoping it would die, my gift to her just poison to kill some scruffy little pooch. And I didn't want to kiss a dog murderer. I didn't want to kiss someone turned her nose up at dark chocolate. At first the pop music thing was cute but then it became part of a larger trend within Victoria. American pop music. Milk chocolate? I mean honestly what was next?
And the attraction waned on her side, too. She stopped texting me back. Our kisses grew shorter. And sometimes, on the train, we wouldn't make out at all—she would sit on my lap and stare into the tunnels and have nothing to do with me.
Then it got to where, when I went to her restaurant, I could see her sitting at one of the tables doing side work and when I asked the host if I could see Victoria, he would always say she's busy.
I would stand there, dumb, watching Victoria fold silverware into white napkins and she would look up at me, with her earbuds in, and just stare at me blankly.
I hoped she was listening to Arvo Pärt, secretly keeping a part of me, as we crumbled.
One day, on a walk around Times Square, I admitted to her that I not only knew who the Pussycat Dolls were, knew who Nicole Scherzinger was, but that Nicole had been in my house for a party back in Ohio when she was still in school.
Victoria, rightly, looked at me like she wanted to kill me.
"What," I said, "are you going to tell me you really never heard of Arvo Pärt before you met me?"
"I hadn't," she said meekly.
"How can you be Russian and never heard of Arvo Pärt?"
"I feel like you're insulting my nationality."
"I'm not. I'm insulting your taste in music."
"Well forgive me if your American music intrigues me."
"American music is one thing. But the Pussycat Dolls?"
"This is about the chocolates isn't it?"
We stop, in Times Square, and we're the rock with the fish swimming around us again.
"I wanted to get you something romantic. And dark chocolates from Godiva is just about the most romantic thing I can think of, short of jewelry which I don't think we're there yet."
"You could've gotten me a tiny ring."
"I would've gotten you anything. But the way you accepted—or didn't accept—my gift, made me feel like instead of taking what I offered, you were unable to do that, and maybe you are very picky person, and maybe that's not the kind of person I want to be with."
"But if I don't like dark chocolate, what am I supposed to do, spend the rest of my life with you eating dark chocolate, smelling red roses, drinking red wine? I am not American sophisticated enough for you? What if you only fuck the ass, and I don't want my ass to be fucked? Then what? A lifetime of ass fucking from your American cock and I never get my pussy taken care of?"
"I wanna take care of your pussy! I never need to ass fuck you a day in my life. I want your pussy so bad. I want to eat every part of you, every day, for the rest of your life and make you cum with my fingers and my mouth and my cock and feed you light chocolate the entire time!"
This is where talking in New York is amazing, because even though everyone's right around you, no one's listening to what you have to say.
"Did you plan to have my pussy before I went back to Russia at the end of the summer?"
"Yes. No. Either way. I just like hanging out with you, Victoria. Honest truth I don't care if we ever fuck, kiss, hold hands ever again if we just get to talk and walk around Times Square together."
"Is this true?"
"Yes."
"Let me think about it."
Of course I said yes. Think about it all you want. Take a week, take a month, take a year. Go back to Russia, and every time you hear Arvo Pärt think of me, and in 20 years, if you want to take a single stroll with me around Times Square, I'll be here waiting.
Victoria left me standing at the listening kiosk in front of Virgin Records while I had my headphones on listening to Rihanna and Victoria took her earbuds out and went into the crowd without even saying goodbye. That's the last time I ever saw or talked to her. I stood there for a long time hoping she would come back, knowing she wouldn't, pretending I was there for reason, pretending I was waiting for someone, pretending I wasn't so, so alone.
Then I went and did what people like me do—I got terribly drunk. I went a few blocks north to the Playwright Tavern, hoping, of course, that sitting in a place so named would magically cause me to become a playwright. It did not. But for a few bucks it did magically fill my belly with steak and two bottles of red wine and took the slightest edge off the pain of losing Victoria.
I cabbed it home and here's where my real embarrassment came.
Victoria would not respond to my texts, so I began calling.
She would not pick up the phone.
So I continued calling.
My cab driver could tell that I was insanely drunk, and based on my voice messages, that I was love sick as well, so he did the only appropriate thing and took advantage of me by driving an unnecessarily long route to my home in Queens. This made no difference to me because what's an extra 20 bucks when a person you have romantically walked around Times Square with, you have made out with on the subway with, you have shared music with at the listing kiosk in front of the Virgin records store, is suddenly no longer part of your life. Just walks away. Just goes into the crowd, gets on the train, get on the plane, goes back to Russia, and probably never comes to Times Square again.
Finally, Victoria's brother picks up the phone. He is shouting from the start.
"Victoria doesn't want to talk to you. She never liked you. She has a boyfriend in Russia and so she can't do anything with you. We are leaving tomorrow. Tomorrow we get on the plane. Stop calling my sister. She is through with you! Do you understand? She wants nothing to do with you! We have your number and I am going to block your number and if I get any more calls from your number I am going to kick your ass. DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?? HERE IS VICTORIA, HEAR? YOU MADE HER CRY!!"
And he puts the phone up to Victoria and in fact I hear her crying.
"I'm crying too, man," I tell this guy.
And I am, I'm bawling into the phone.
"I just liked Victoria," I say. "And it's innocent. It's pure. And it's nothing that would over offend you as her brother. I have sisters. I'm protective of my sisters. But when a guy comes along who makes one of my sisters happy, the only responsible thing to do is for that to make me happy too. I want my sisters to be happy. Don't you want your sister to be happy too?"
"YES," this guy yells at me. "BUT SHE IS NOT HAPPY WITH YOU."
Click. Another Russian relative I've pissed off. Pretty soon these kids' father is going fly to New York and kick my ass.
I lean up to the cabby and bawl at him through the hatch.
"This girl was perfect man. You know, we had our disagreements, but it'll be years before another girl like this comes along."
"There's girls everywhere," the cabby says. "Town is full of girls."
"But this one. I'm telling you. Her psyche was unspoiled. You know that look I'm talking about? The childlikeness that exists in some adults? You know what I mean. It's..innocence."
"You believe in innocence?" this New York cabby says to me.
"YES I DO!!" I belt out, sobbing. "It's here and there. It still exists, one out of every hundred thousand people you meet. Some people aren't robbed of that by their upbringing, their experiences, all the bullshit they go through. It's there and I believe in it and I have a non-selfish interest in it."
"What's your non-selfish interest in it?" this cabby says.
And I say, "To fan the flames. To get two sparks together and make a fire. That kind of thing is possible, you know. This world isn't just days and dollars and rates and scams and grease and trucks and bridges and rats and all that. You got to get out of New York sometime—go to Utah—this is a beautiful world, man."
"Well if I can give you some advice?" says the cabby.
"What's that?"
"It sounds like this girl don't want to talk to you. So maybe, leave it alone for the night?"
"I won't. I won't call her anymore. Her brother wants to kick my ass. She won't even talk to me."
"That's what I'm saying," says this guy.
I slump down in the back of the taxi. I take out my phone. I scroll to Victoria's number.
I shake my head.
And I delete the motherfucker.