Sour cherries, translucent and red. Vish-nya. Veee-sh-nya. A cutting sound. A woman fumbles around with a knife in one hand, trying to cut the cherry. Good grief, there’s no tool for pitting cherries in the big 202–, in her kitchen? She should have gotten one after work, but it was too late at night to go outside as a woman on East 116th Street. She gives up, throwing down the knife and tearing into the ripe cherry with her thumbs. She picks out the pit with her tongue, spitting it in the white trash bin with a neat swoosh. She eats until her teeth begin to ache, raw and open, and thinks of him.

When he thinks of her, who goes first: the blonde American white woman or the Russian émigré? Yeah, I guess my celebrity crush when I was little was Emma Watson. She had kept listening to him. Why do you even like me? I’m not 6’4 like Shohei Ohtani. I’m only 5’11. That’s not the point, she thought, that’s not the point!

Spitting out pits, she hears each pit hit the ceramic bowl, the faint ping. Ping. Pingping…ping! Ping! Ping! Ping! She eats less when she loves herself, more when she hates herself, less when she hates him. A bowl of cherries, gone. A bowl of pits. She grabs a fistful and chews, stems and all. She spits all of it out, one gloppy mass, stained with the blood from her bitten lip. It hurts to love him.

For the summer, she had been his intern, and he was just a coworker. Her heart jumped when he said he was a forex trader, but, if you’re looking for the payments manager, he’s over there. They were both at Litadec, at the end of the day. She wouldn’t date anyone on her own team, but why not him?

🍒

Fetal position. Fetal position in the empty bathtub, nothing hidden and nobody watching. First thing she did in the morning that day before work, 5am. The porcelain is less cold than she expects it to be, and she stretches out a leg, then both. Her thighs bend downwards with gravity. They curve just enough for expression, like the legs of nude women in figure drawing classes, possibly the only nice way to describe them. She has a fat bruise on one knee, aside from being kind of fat in general. Her thighs are riddled with blue healed acne scars, and there are stretch marks along the inner parts. It was hard to love herself until someone else loved her. He doesn’t know how she feels when he touches them, watching him so unafraid.

When it’s 95 degrees hot in New York City, their days blend together. Every day is a repeat. It goes like this: after work, they take the E from Hudson Yards, their office, to East Harlem, her apartment. He had lied that he owned a place a few blocks away, but he actually took the E all the way back to his brownstone in the West Village. Her hands feel stiff at her sides, as she only kept her left hand free for him. Her bathroom is a museum curated exclusively for him: empty bottles of vitamin E next to her Sertraline, French fig hand cream. He still asks why she likes him. If only he saw what she had built for him.

🍒

When she thinks of him, who goes first: the American finance bro or the Chinese immigrant? Yeah, I think Ohtani is cute, but it’s also a cultural thing, you know? Eastern values, family, education, that sort. Eventually, he had said, you’re my Russian model; I’m your Chinese salaryman. She cried, No! No! No! He always needs an explanation. At one point, she snapped at him: If you keep this up, all you’ll be is the Chinaman from that Duras book, if he was half Taiwanese! He was very, very quiet. He doesn’t have a counterargument. They don’t exist anywhere else; not a single other couple in the media is like them. Either both white, both Asian, or an Asian woman with a white man. The only existing film is one that separates them.

At work, he swipes his pointer finger on his matte black laptop. It is his fingerprint; he knows this. It takes three tries: vertically, to swipe the dust away, horizontally, to swipe more dust away, and a mildly harder touch, getting every edge of his tip. Gross. It becomes a caress. He doesn’t want to do anything on his laptop anymore. His elbows press into his thighs; his fingertips dig into his temples until he sees purple bruises.

What else could he do to give her a reason to love him? It can’t be because he’s smart, even with Princeton and Stuyvesant in his diploma cabinet. Her state school, in-progress business degree is humble, sure, but that wouldn’t make her like him. She nervously laughed when he said he was one of the traders at Litadec, but she walked through the same office doors the whole summer. The magic of a Litadec job must have been gone by then. It can’t be because of his looks, and she had no plans to travel to any East Asian country. Surely not for the 180cm or the other 16cm. No way she’s using him for the brownstone that he never took her to. His parents struck gold in real estate, but that was private. Dirt, money, blue numbers in his bank account. In his opinion, that was the closest thing he had to worth.

On the E train after work, he asked her, “Why do you like me? Is it because of the money, trading?”

No, she doesn't love him for the money, she had claimed. She never loved him for the money. He always bites his tongue to quote Duras to her, to taunt her. She knows he hates Duras’ novels, her films, but she couldn’t look into any other mirror. Staring at their reflection on the E train window, he spent more time wondering if they suit each other than admiring her. When he brushes his teeth, he does not stay in front of the bathroom mirror. He leaves, risks a toothpaste stain on his bed or rug, all so that he would not have to see himself above the sink.

🍒

The next day, he commutes back to his brownstone alone. He walks down his quiet street in the West Village. Nobody is outside on a Tuesday night. His house smells like nothing. He could hear his throbbing headache. Nobody greets him except for a framed photo of him and his ex. She was a California-raised ABG he met in a seedy East Village bar and dated for one year. When people saw them together, he felt very normal. He felt nothing. He felt okay. That’s it. Not much else. A flat feeling. She believed that it was impossible for him to be completely satisfied; the media taught her to unpack her trauma like a blind box surprise toy. Apparently, this extended to him. He was okay being okay. ‘Unpacking’ his childhood did not make his algorithmic trading models faster.

He ate dinner at home, and it felt too silent. Every time he got lunch with the intern, she asked him about his day. Not his childhood, not the way his mom screamed or beat him, not the way his dad made him do math at the kitchen table. She just wanted to know if things were going well, and if she could help, and if his sandwich was tasty, and if she could have a bite. He ended things with his ex before he even held hands with the intern. After the breakup, he still kept the picture to remind himself that someone had loved him once. He can love someone again. She would hate him if she ever found out about that picture, the Russian intern. If only she saw what he had broken for her.

She could do so much better. From what she had told him, her last ex was six feet tall and jacked, a trilingual Kazakh. Her ex probably used pick up lines on her in all three languages.

A trilingual Kazakh. He was not trilingual or Kazakh. What even is a Kazakh?

He looks up “Kazakhstan”. Huh, a Central Asian country. He did not know Asians could be Central, only East, South, Southeast, Wasian, and sometimes the ever so confusing Asian-American. Kazakhs speak Kazakh, Russian, and English. They all look like him. Her ex was probably naturally tan, just like him. He probably teased her about burning in the sun. She had loved this kind of man, once. He could have been a Kazakh who got lost in Southern China, forgot how to speak Kazakh and Russian, improved his English, and made his way to the United States. He was Kazakh with some pieces missing, and he wasn’t sure why she wouldn’t want a real one.

🍒

He believed it was a good idea to bring her over at night. It would be pretty romantic to draw her into his bedroom without the lights on, and he also wouldn’t have to hide that picture of his ex.

A quick, cautious kiss, then more. Brushing against his bottom lip. They are so soft. With him, she feels everything. She tastes her own cherry lip balm on his lips. Angle of a smooth jawline. Wiry black hair, satisfying to hold. Everything feels safe to her in private. His poreless skin, her porcelain skin.

When he returns to his bed, he hands her a glass of water. The moon makes her blonde hair look brunette, and her skin look whiter. She traces a finger along his thigh and drunkenly laughs. She nearly slides off the bed, reaching towards him.

Sobering up, she begins to entertain him with Russian words: “Gusinitsa! It’s so musical! Think of the G in English; it bends just like a caterpillar. And, and then there’s an online meme thing, too. You take a cat, kot, then gusinitsa, and it’s katagusinitsa… it’s like our American thing; it’s like meowl.”

“Is there a word for me?”

“Kitaiyets, I guess. Kitaichon–” she hesitates, says, “forget it. What do you mean?”

“What’s that, the Russian word for Kazakh?”

“No! No, that’s over, forget I even told you. No, it’s… I…um, what did you mean, for you?”

🍒

It was just like him to do something dangerous. Waiting for scripts to load at work, he was lost in thought: kissing her was nearly as exciting as sneaking into the unused Princeton housing to stay the night while he visited his college friends over the weekend. He loved smoking Belomorkanals re-stuffed with weed and playing heads-up poker, preferably both at the same time. He would walk around his flat naked to save money on air conditioning, but he saw no issue with dropping thousands on the people he loved, even if he wasn’t quite sure they loved him back.

“I’m finally taking PTO”, she laughs. “Montreux.”

“Where’s that?”

“Switzerland.”

“Then I’m taking PTO too.”

🍒

The Russian restaurant at Montreux was one of the finest in the country. She was never this excited to have pelmeni. Would he wince at the holodets? What drink would he order? Did he know what sea buckthorn was? As far as he was concerned, he just had to pick up the bill. She had complained that he looked like he hated her after their last dinner date, so maybe he should get comfortable.

He slouched in his chair. He crossed a leg. He ordered cranberry juice and plain roasted chicken, even though she nudged him to order something new. He hoped she would see this as a sign of closer intimacy. He didn’t notice any of the other couples, how the men were stiff save for their faces, looking at their women with reverence and a little fear, possibly because he didn’t want to lose them.

She had gone on five dates while she was in New York, and she still shared the gory details with him, lauding him for how patient and how kind he was. He had booked a last-minute flight to Geneva, she knows those cost thousands. To some extent, he deserved her.

“Have you ever tried organ meat?”

“Sweetbreads. No.”

“How do people even eat kidneys? Or livers, isn’t there that thing where they stuff ducks until they’re overfed–”

“I’m gonna teach you a few words in Russian. Whenever someone says something gross at the table, you say, priatnavo appetita, which is essentially bon appetit.”

“Right, so, I’ve never tried organ meat, but it’s interesting how they rip the heart right out–”

“Did you hear what I said?”

“Yes.” He was quiet. He did not straighten himself out.

All she did for the rest of the dinner was watch the flame at their table. A father was singing along to the song– nadezhda, hope, something that she did not have much of left. His kids were making fun of him for it, and he stopped when they wanted him to. An elegant woman sat alone, and the servers brought her an enormous bowl of Slavic candy.

“You’re not talking”, he noticed.

She didn’t have anything to say at all. She felt okay, normal. Not particularly wanted. Not for the rest of the dinner, not for the bus ride home. He could tell that she was unhappy, she was such a chatterbox when he made her happy. He wasn’t sure what could possibly make her happy; he was ready to do anything but never say anything.

🍒

They laid in bed together that night, even though she had to ask him to spend the night. He noticed how hard she was staring into his eyes. Again, he thought of the man before him. Was she relaxing her eyes, blurring her vision until he looked Kazakh enough?

“You never called me pretty the whole day”, she chokes out. He says nothing and makes no expression, as he usually does, but he did not feel okay, nothing, or fine. Not quite jealous anymore, either. Frankly, he felt guilty that he loved her neediness.

When she falls asleep beside him, he searches up “how to call gf pretty” and “how to compliment gf” and “wife hates me”, ignoring the fact that she wasn’t his girlfriend or wife, as much as he wanted her to be.

He reviews the list of suggested options:

• You’re so pretty
• You look gorgeous today
• You look so good, all for me?
• I’m glad I have you all to myself

These all felt stupid on his tongue. Forget about flirting in three languages, he couldn’t even flirt in one. He felt like a predator when he tried expressing any verbal hint of romantic interest.Who deserves attention from someone like him? Only something natural, from the heart, would work.

“You’re a pretty white girl,” he whispers to her.

“What?” She jerks awake. “...I’m pretty for a white girl? What do you mean?”

He doesn’t clarify, and forces a nervous laugh.

“You’re a pretty white girl,” is all that comes out. Isn’t that all that she thought of him, just an Asian guy?

🍒

Sunday is for pretending that Saturday, or, her trip to Montreux, did not happen. She met up with her two Russian friends from college, Mariia and Lena.

They gathered in the gazebo along the Brighton Beach boardwalk. Any joke she made about the show Girls fell flat around Lena, which was its own way of affirming how white she was. Often, she needed a reminder that she was not born to drink Aperol Spritzes in the West Village, and instead had to gather over Tarhun soda and bundles of maska candy in Brighton Beach. There was no word in Russian for “humiliationship”, so today, the girls felt like discussing whether or not Cheburashka was a Soviet Jew.

— Его привезли в коробке с апельсинами. Вы же знаете откуда апельсины родом.

(They brought him in a crate of oranges. You guys know where oranges are from), Mariia whispers.

Lena considers this.

—  Не, вообще-то я не знаю.

(Actually, I don’t know.)

— Из Израиля! это ужас какой-то был!

(From Israel! It was horrific, back then!) Mariia buries her head in her hands.

— Какая вам разница что Чебурашка из Израиля?

(Why do you guys care if Cheburashka is Israeli?) She glances between Mariia and Lena.

— Это важно потому что когда его привезли в зоопарк, ему отказали. Они не знали кто он такой.

(It’s important because when they brought him to the zoo, he was rejected. They didn’t know what he was), Mariia explains, defending Cheburashka more seriously than her physics dissertation.

— Если бы вы увидели Чебурашку перед зоопарком, вы бы ему отказали?

(If you guys saw Cheburashka at the zoo, would you have rejected him?) Lena asks them.

— В те времена может быть были проблемы, но в текущее время я даже не знаю. Я бы всех приняла если у них не было никаких государственных связей.

(In that time, maybe there could have been issues, but in the present, I don’t even know. I would accept everyone if they didn’t have any ties to the government.) Mariia answers.

— Ну хватит уже про Чебурашку! Мы этот мультик не смотрели сколько лет. Как насчёт мужчин? Вы бы отказали… ну… например… китайцу?

(Enough about Cheburashka already! We haven’t seen that cartoon in years. What about men? Would you refuse…well…for example…a Chinese guy?) This time, her glances between Lena and Mariia are much quicker.

—  Казаху, нет, китайцу да. Один из них знает обе части меня, другой из них знает только одну. Если китаец ещё и родился в Китае, знает китайский, то мы никогда не узнаем друг друга наполовину.

(A Kazakh, no, a Chinese, yes. One of them knows both parts of me, the other knows only one. If the Chinese guy was also born in China, knows Chinese, then we both will never know half of each other.) Mariia takes a long sip of her Tarhun.

— А если выучишь китайский?

(What if you learn Chinese?) She asks Mariia.

— более вероятно что я выйду замуж за 190-сантиметрового казаха до того как я выучу китайский язык.

(It’s more likely that I’ll marry a 190cm Kazakh before I learn Chinese.)

It’s hard for her to slide down the bite of maska candy, Russian for “mask”, down her throat. She didn’t want to be white; she didn’t want to be Russian. She wanted to sink to the bottom of the ocean off Brighton Beach and fall asleep.

🍒

“Vyatch, what do you think of those HR girls?” he asks his VP, Vyatcheslav Alexeivich Nametsnikov, while waiting for his report to load. Vyatch is fifty-six years old, has an imposing and authoritative name, no hairline, three degrees from three countries, and must know a lot about Russian girls, or at least a little bit about one of them.
“Woah, not all of them are girls. Watch it.” Vyatch laughs.

“Have you talked to the Russian one? Cause, like. You’re Russian too.”

“Adorable girl, very cute. She fills my coffee to the brim. I like her.”

“She’s been talking to me.” He traces the edge of his laptop’s fingerprint sensor.

“Good or bad way? Don’t tell me they found out,” he looks over his shoulder, “about your grass.”

“Good way, we get lunch sometimes.” They did much more, he thought.

“Reminds me of my wife, though. Nightmare to marry.”

“Why?”

“Odd number of roses, and God forbid the roses are yellow. If they leave hungry and rose-less, you don’t see her again.”

She left hungry and roseless each time, and she still chose to see him again. By the time his report had loaded, his brief flash of superiority had settled into guilt.

During lunch, he smokes a Belomorkanal and stomps extra hard on the ashes, imagining himself as a pretty Russian girl stomping out the twelfth rose. He wished he was Russian, but pretty happy that his love could be quantified.

🍒

Redline Tango, a contemporary classical piece inspired by the screeching New York subway, blasted through the 34th St Stop. She had gone on a tangent about it, and now the ACE trains were putting on a three-train performance. She was not standing next to him waiting for the train, but he remembered all of her, more than he wanted to. She was everywhere. He saw her, heard her, felt her, everywhere.

He noticed someone: a couple he noticed at Geneva Airport. An East Asian man, and a white, blonde, blue-eyed woman. Around the same height. They had three children, around the ages of five to seven. Blond hair mixed with dark black hair to create a gorgeous light brunette.

Here was someone who had made it work. Here was someone who knew something he did not.

He approaches them: “sorry, are you guys from Geneva?”

“Yes, yes we are! How did you know?!” the woman laughs, a thick German accent.

He said, “I saw you guys around Terminal 1. I was with my wife,” he lies. “You're just like us… you… you know.”

“Hell yeah,” the man says. His wife adds, “good luck to you guys!”

Good luck? So it was, it was possible to have good luck?

Conversations, voices, all blending around him and into each other and into him. He blinked, wiped his sweat off his cheek, kept blinking, kept wiping his face, blinked faster than his heart could beat, never blinked so fast or hard in his life, and when sixteen minutes had passed, he prayed that it was raining above his stop at West 4th Street.

🍒

She took two more days to visit Montreux, but this time, she did not tell him. At her house on Lake Geneva, she woke up at four AM. She could not go back to sleep, and went outside to watch the sunrise. A statue of Nabokov nearby seemed to wave hello to her. Checking to make sure she was entirely alone, she stripped completely and descended into the pink and teal water. She had not seen water this bright in a long while. She tumbled, and splashed, and dived, and blew bubbles underwater. Surrounded by water. Her body inflated, deflated, warped, blended into shades of pink and teal.

At a small cafe, she picks out a beautiful slice of Swiss chocolate cake, just one for today. She eats less; she wants to savor the slice. Swiss chocolate is delicious because of the process that it takes to make it. Somewhere in an Alpine pasture, there is a small herd of cows, and a lone shepherd, who feeds each cow and makes sure it grows up to be big and strong. At four in the morning, the bakers wake up to mix and bake, sometimes going outside for a smoke break and watching the dawn bloom over the Alps. So much devotion. Milk, water, heat, all of it had love. All of this just for her to sit with a piece of cake at a small table looking over Lake Geneva. The water shimmers! Lightness! It is so incredible to be alive, she thought, there is so much time to be happy. She tears open a package of sweet cherries from the local Russian supermarket, and puts one on her cake. Chereshnya. Sweet, dark cherries. A bird call: cherik, cherik. The sound of dawn. So much beauty in the world, but she saw nobody to pit the cherries for her. No one but him.

🍒

She was back in New York, and sick with a terrible cold. In the evening, he had offered to stop by her apartment and help make chereshnya crepes, which she had mentioned during his visit to Montreux.

He stood in her apartment doorway, admiring her wrapped up in a pink scarf and red pajamas. He held a bouquet of twelve flowers, a package of ibuprofen, and a cherry pitter. She did not stamp any flowers out, or throw away the package. While he helped her pit cherries, she collected them in a small porcelain bowl, and they stopped making the annoying ping! sound as they piled up. He eats a few, sweet on his lips. In a brief off-moment, she leaned on her tippy-toes and gently kissed him.

He decided to ask her something he never knew how to answer.

“Why do you like me?” He tilts his head. She frowns, and stares down, recollecting.

“I don’t see you as a ‘cute Asian guy’, and never say that weird white girl thing ever again. Look. I don’t think about any of those things. This is what I think about. I like the way you close your eyes and hug me, laying on my chest in the corner of the 1 train. I like the way your eyes go round when you listen closely to me, how your mouth parts open when you’re listening so closely to me that you forget about everyone else around you. I love how you push me backwards before I walk into incoming traffic on 59th Street. I love how you know that my inside thigh feels the most sensitive, how you buy sour cherries from Netcost–”

“So, only what I do for you?”

“No! Ugh, no, Zhenya! I love the way you don’t smile with your eyes or teeth because you never learned how, and the way you push up the corners of your mouth instead. I love how you took the banana bread loaf I made for you two nights ago and shared it with your coworkers at the trading desk. The way you tap my shoulder and disappear, appearing behind the other one. The way you push my hair behind my ear, the way you play with my dangly earrings like a cat. The way you asked the owners of the cat cafe we went to what kibble they feed them, and then you went to the nearest pet supply store to buy them high quality kibble. I love the way you can multiply one hundred forty-four times two hundred in your head, and the way you never get lost in any museum we go to. The way your voice gets shrill when you throw commands at your coworkers, the same people who have filed scores of baseless complaints against you. You don’t know how many of them I’ve dismissed, and I never had to lie a single time to prove them wrong. I love you when you’re working in the morning, when you’re yawning in the afternoon, when you’re three coffees into the night. When you complain to me about work, how strict Vyatch is, how it makes you feel better that you have rules to follow, and how you secretly admire him. How you always pick a plain ham sandwich, even though I always go all-out with mine. I loved when you said the chili chutney sandwich was now your new favorite because I helped you pick it. I love you when you’re resentful, when I can tell I mean something to you. I love it when you beg: please, Maya, please. But, most of all, I hate the way you see yourself. No damn movie has shown us what we’d look like happy. You would believe every person in the world before you believe me.”