Valentine’s Day: For Some, 50 Shades of Blue

I’ll call her Lara Lipschitz, even though that’s not her real name. Her real name doesn’t matter. In her professional life as model, artist, EFL instructor and go-go dancer, she generally goes by a pseudonym. That pseudonym isn’t “Lara Lipschitz,” but it is unmistakably Jewish, so “Lara Lipschitz” seems like a fair enough substitute for me.

Why Lara — who is Russian, and a gentile, and living in a pious section of town a scant hundred yards from a mosque, and probably too young to take much inspiration from Whoopee Goldberg – should have chosen to infiltrate this particular minority group, even by nominal implication, remains a mystery to me. But the more my path and Lara’s cross, the less willing I am to be surprised by anything she does. She’s a friend of a friend – her Ukrainian roommate, Serafima, teaches at my school. A sweet-faced social animal, Serafima likes to invite the office gang home for homemade borshch. When we arrive, we find Lara seated primly on the couch, striped knee socks and pink slippers setting off the spider tattooed on her shoulder.

As guests fill their faces, Lara keeps her eyes fixed on her laptop. Every once in a while, though, when the muse gets into her, she’ll burst out with the kind of autobiographical detail guaranteed to stun the average listener into silence. Here is a sampling of Lara-isms:

“My father looks like Andrei Chikatilo. He is fat and has innocent blue eyes like child.”

“I have eaten human flesh once, at a Wiccan initiation. They didn’t tell me that it was human flesh until later.”

“I almost became a nun.”

Coming from almost anyone else, these would sound like crude grabs for attention, but I don’t think that’s what they are in Lara’s case. Once she gets our attention, she drops it, returning her own to the Russian power ballads on YouTube. Sometimes, before turning the mic back to the guests, she’ll introduce a topic of general interest. Once she asked us, one by one, to say what memories the Cranberries’ “Zombies” evoked for us. Everyone had a ready answer.

Toward the end of one soiree, as the rest of us were losing steam, Lara became animated and shared a story of a childhood friend of hers – a rock musician – whose girlfriend had dumped him on New Year’s Day. “He got on his motorcycle and drove it into rear end of truck and died. The next New Year’s Day, his friends found the girl and beated her to death. And that’s why I don’t like New Year’s Day.”

I decided then that Lara is just one of those people who have no gift for small talk. Rather than assault us with her authentic self, she sends out little raiding parties to probe our defenses and see how much of her we’re willing to take. In its loopy way, her approach shows both tact and modesty and ended up winning my trust.

Last Friday, my day off, Lara PM’d me on Facebook:

You know some hours earlier very sad thing happened to me. Maybe you can listen to it. I have really no mature male person to share with, and I need male point of view.

I’ve served as a crisis counselor before. Mostly, it’s a horrendous job. Not being a professional, I am unable to maintain clinical objectivity. Either the problems are big enough to frighten and depress me or small enough to make me feel as though my time is being wasted. But Lara flattered me by supposing that I had a distinctly male point of view, and a mature one at that. To sweeten the deal, she offered a meal. About an hour later, I knocked on her door. Serafima answered, ushered me inside, and with a roll of her eyes, repaired to her bedroom.

“Please excuse me,” she said, “but I heard all of it last night.”

Lara was sitting cross-legged on the couch. I took the chair opposite. At her most poised, Lara has something of Natasha Fatale about her. But now — jiggling her foot, twisting her fingers, and grinning — she looked like any other nervous tomboy.

This time we did make small talk. She asked whether I’d had any trouble finding the place – I’d gotten lost once before – and I asked why so many religious people lived in her neighborhood. After directing me to the fried eggs and potatoes and salad by my elbow on the table, she came to the point.

Through Facebook, Lara had fallen in love with a man who lived in the Balkans. She had made plans to visit him in the springtime. But now the man’s religious scruples were getting in the way. “He tell to me, ‘I can’t have a close relationship until we marry’; I say, ‘Okay’ — I can’t live even with someone nice like Serafima for long time. But last night, he say he can’t have sex before marriage, and he don’t want to marry for another five years. How I can wait five years?”

I suggested she might have guessed that a religious person would use a delicate expression like “close relationship” when he wanted to refer to sex. Raising both hands before her face, Lara clenched them as though throttling her lover — or maybe all of maledom — and said, “You can tell this! I can’t tell! I do not have mind of woman! If you want me to understand some things, you should say clearly!”

Composing herself, Lara continued. “I want to forget this man, but I can’t. I want see him and know is there any chemistry or not. How can I change his mind? How can I make him break his principles?”

When I offered that perhaps certain principles shouldn’t be broken and that, in any case, such a person seemed like a bad match for her, Lara said, “I know this! In the beginning when we meet, he is very formal with me. I can tell he wants–” She spread her hands to represent distance. “So I am very careful with him. But then we talk more, and one day he tell me he love me. He is crying, I am crying. Where are his principles then?”

This was turning out better than I’d hoped. It seemed that Lara didn’t want to be provided with an easy recipe for success, or with false hope of a happy ending, or even with reassurances of her worthiness. She just wanted someone to make the common-sense arguments so that she could tilt with them. That I could handle. But first I needed a cigarette. When I excused myself, Lara pulled the pink slippers off her feet and handed them to me.

“For balkon,” she said.

As I stepped out the sliding door onto the balcony, she went on. “In all my life,” she said, “I have only four friends” — Spockishly, she held up four fingers. “I love them all forever; my love can’t be broke. One man I love for many years, even though he is not a man. We can say — yes, we can say he is a monster. Finally, I leave. In a few years, he calls and tells me he is changed and loves me. Don’t you know? Love can change a personality, and a personality can change principles.”

I found the argument too intriguing to reject out of hand. In fact, it sank me into a morbid reverie. Since my mid-20s, I’d viewed love as a precious and limited resource, like petroleum. It could make life go, as long as you were careful not to use too much of it too quickly. Like a wartime rationing board, I’d made a practice of assigning people strict priority values based on cost-benefit analyses. Is this trip really necessary? Is this person worth loving? Lara’s dogged, extravagant belief in it made me feel petty. I stepped back into the living room and spooned a few potatoes onto my plate.

“Take all,” she said. “Also eggs.”

For her benefit, I shoveled it in. When I finished, I nodded for her to go on.

“My needs are really very few,” she said. “I want tea, and sunshine, and place to listen to music. It is very rare that love affects me like this. But now that I love this man, I must see him. I don’t care, he has one arm, one eye -– “

Just then, a blooping sound came from Lara’s laptop. Lunging across the couch, Lara hit a button. After a few seconds, she gasped, “Oh!”

“What was that?” I asked.

“He said he wants to be friends.”

“Well,” I said. “That settles that, I guess.”

It didn’t settle anything, but I suddenly felt tired — maybe it was all the heavy food. I wasn’t sure I could start again from the very beginning. Collecting the plates, I stacked them in the sink, running each one under water to wash away the worst of the grease. Then I handed Lara back her slippers and told her I hoped I hadn’t stretched them.

Serafima stepped out of the bedroom. We exchanged knowing looks.

“She’s going to do whatever she’s going to do,” I said, and Serafima nodded. When I took my leave, Lara was already crouching back over her laptop.

Walking home, I reflected again on Lara and what a noble, risk-taking nature she had. With her contemplative tastes, I thought, she might make a good nun someday — provided she were willing to change her name again.