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Nothing had happened, he’d managed to stop himself at the very last moment, but he still squirmed with shame for months afterward. He felt awful guilt toward Sergey—he could only hope that Sergey would never know—but he also felt revulsion because the encounter with Vica had made him regress into his Russian past. He had come here to start his life anew, not to rehash his old romances.
    Before Vica there was Sue, a waitress at Mom’s Diner in Avenel, New Jersey. Before Sue there was Angie, another waitress at Mom’s. Sue had a faded tattoo of a kitten on her shoulder. Vadik couldn’t remember a single detail about Angie.
    “I’m sick of this mess,” Vadik confessed to Regina right after his breakup with Abby. Via Skype, because Regina was still in Russia back then.
    “Of course you are,” Regina said, “dating is exhausting. You know what is the most exhausting for me?”
    “What?”
    “Getting my hopes up. It’s as if I needed enormous physical strength to get them up, like a weight lifter or something.”
    Vadik’s friendship with Regina started out awkwardly, when Vica left him for Sergey—then Regina’s boyfriend. A few days after the breakup, Regina asked him to come and pick up some of the things Sergey had left at her apartment. Vadik wondered if she was interested in him. He wasn’t really attracted to her—she had this weird stale smell that he found off-putting—but he was definitely curious. But when he got to her apartment, Regina was so shaky and sad that trying to have sex with her seemed obnoxious. They got to talking instead. Neither of them would say anything bad about Vica or Sergey—that would have been tacky, but they couldn’t resist talking about Fyodorov, Sergey’s obsession, and confessing to each other how much they hated his philosophy. Gradually they had become each other’s confidants/therapists/dating mentors. After Vadik left Russia, they would talk on Skype two to three times a week.
    “I need to be tied down. I can’t go on like this!” Vadik said to Regina via the screen.
    “Just pick a girl and marry her,” Regina said. She was about to get married to Bob and was feeling very enthusiastic about marriage.
    Vadik was dating Rachel II then, a social worker studying for her master’s. When Rachel II was a young girl, she’d had a passionate relationship with horses. She kept the photograph of her pet horse, Billie, on her desk.
    Rachel II and Vadik broke up because she walked in on him making fun of Billie to Regina. At first Vadik denied it. He was speaking in Russian, so why would Rachel even think that? But wasn’t he holding up the picture of Billie and laughing? Rachel asked. And wasn’t that ugly Russian woman on the screen hooting in response? Vadik had to admit his fault.
    The sad thing was that Regina actually thought that Rachel II was the best fit for Vadik. She was the most grounded of the lot.
    Vica disagreed. Vica thought that the sane Sofia was the best fit. She said that it was a good thing that Sofia was quite a bit older than Vadik, because that would make her more forgiving. The sane Sofia taught comparative literature at SUNY New Paltz. She had a club membership to swim the lap lane in Lake Minnewaska, situated about ten miles away from campus. Sofia listed that membership as one of the six things she couldn’t live without on her Hello, Love! profile. She kept urging Vadik to get a membership too. “There is a rope right in the middle of the lake,” Vadik told Sergey, “and they’re just swimming along the rope, back and forth, back and forth, like convicts.” Vadik and Sofia broke up because Vadik refused to see the beauty of lap swimming in a natural body of water.
    Sergey’s top choice for Vadik was Sejun. He couldn’t believe you could meet a girl like that through online dating. Vadik met up with Vica, Sergey, and Regina soon after his latest housewarming party, and since the subject of the failure of Sergey’s pitch was