Russian Debutante's Handbook (18 page)

“No, no, I believe there’s been a misunderstanding,” Vladimir began, working off the erroneous middle-class premise that when in trouble it was best to sound educated. “I have mentioned earlier my girlfriend—”

“Yes, good, okay,” Jordi said. “This discussion is over, prince.” Then, in one move, the technicalities of which were lost on
Vladimir, he had sprung to his feet and snapped off his shorts, his penis swinging upward then falling into position. Vladimir averted his gaze from it, watching instead the bulbous shadow it cast upon the neatly made-up bed that separated them. Without warning, there was a flurry of motion: Jordi had struck his own head and cried out, “Wait! K-Y!” Vladimir’s instant recall was of the cabinet that contained Challah’s lubricant; quickly that image was discarded as irrelevant. He retreated in the direction of the balcony and the four-story drop, already calculating between the probable death behind him and what was in front of him.

But as Jordi reached down into the suitcase beneath him, Vladimir’s eyes made contact with the oak door to his rear—the kind of respectable door you would find gracing the better homes of Erie and Birmingham, Fairbanks and Duluth. There it was, the barrier that separated him from the outside world of hotel staff and sun-drenched retirees and acceptable person-to-person relations. In the single instant that it took to establish the association between himself and the door, he bolted.

A fist grabbed the tail of his billowing T-shirt, pulled, then slammed Vladimir, shoulder-first, into the wall. After the initial pain there was Jordi, or, more precisely, fragments of his sweating body—an armpit here, a nipple there—pressing against Vladimir’s face, until he found himself nose-to-nose with his tormentor.
“Au va!”
Jordi screamed, spitting into both his eyes, sinking his nails. “Fucking
fogo!
Twenty grand isn’t enough for you, bitch?”

Vladimir closed his eyes tightly, seeing the sting of the foreign saliva swirl into circle-eight figures of pain. “I didn’t—” he started to say but instantly forgot what it was that he didn’t. What came to mind instead was an image of Fran, her raised clavicle, her sideward-pointing breasts bunched together in a sports bra, her honest smile when she entered a room full of friends. She was going to make him into a human being, an indigenous citizen of this world.

And then Vladimir punched him.

He had never hit a person before in his life, or heard the crunch of knuckle bone ramming cartilage; once, enraged at the poolkeeper’s stupid collie at the upstate
dacha,
he had swatted its fluffy hind with a badminton racket: that was the extent of his violence.

Vladimir had hit the nose or near the nose, yet there was not a hint of blood between the two perfectly round and fur-lined nostrils; there was only Jordi’s measured nasal breathing and the wide-eyed look of a confused toddler whose xylophone had just been taken away, and for no apparent reason.

There was a momentary lapse in the pressure of Jordi’s nails buried in his shoulders, not that the weight of his hands had been altogether lifted, but there was, as Jordi’s absent expression suggested—a moment.

Vladimir ran. The door opened then slammed behind him, the carpet was arrow-red and seemed to point his way to the elevator, but he couldn’t afford to wait for the elevator to appear. Next to the elevator—stairs. He burst upon the humid staircase and began looping his way down, his feet at times heroic facilitators of his escape, at other times two dead objects over which the rest of his body threatened to trip, smashing his head into the concrete below.

The sound of pursuit was thankfully missing, but all that meant was that Jordi was on his way down in the elevator. Vladimir would bolt into the lobby right into Jordi’s arms. “There you are, boy,” Jordi would say, grinning unbearably as he explained to the hotel staff about their lovers’ spat. Yes, Vladimir had read about that happening once before and in a case involving a convicted cannibal, no less.

He landed hard on the last stair, a thigh tendon seemingly snapping beneath the weight of the rest of him. Vladimir limped into the velvet-and-glitter lobby where his face, distorted by lack of oxygen and sporting a ghastly hue, received a comprehensive round of
looks from the geriatric crew manning the recliners. Not to mention his T-shirt torn at the shoulders.

Vladimir caught sight of the row of elevator banks, one assertively registering descent: “Three . . . . . . . Two . . . . . . .”

He had stood there transfixed by the numbers long enough to hear an elderly voice articulate a prolonged: “Vaat?”

Then he was out the palatial doors, past the circular driveway, and running with no heed for objects moving or stationary. Running quite literally, as they say, into the night, and the Floridian night, stinking of car exhaust, fast-food onions, and maybe a little something of the sea, accepted him and shrouded him in its boiling darkness.

EVERYTHING HAD CHANGED
.
His body had been easily handled by a man whose intent was to hurt. And the man had done it, had smashed his shoulder and spit into both his eyes. How meager the insults of his childhood by comparison to what had just happened. All the miserable years of adolescence, the daily drubbing at the hands of parents and peers, had been no more than a dress rehearsal; all those years, it turned out, young Vladimir had only been
preparing
himself for victimhood.

He massaged and pressed his cheek against his damaged shoulder. It had been some time since he had had to provide tenderness for himself, and the self-pity felt unfamiliar, as if from another lifetime. He was resting, half-naked, against a squat little palm tree in what might have been a national forest but was actually the front garden of a vast condominium complex. And he was still having trouble breathing: the throaty tingle of an approaching hacking cough was upon him and he tried hard to ignore it. As a respected Park Avenue pediatrician had once told him, half of an asthma attack was psychological. One had to divert one’s attention with other matters.

The other matter, aside from the asthma, consisted of leaving Miami, of finding a cab and getting to the airport. Of course, Jordi
was probably already on his way there, off to meet his estranged lover at Gate X departing for La Guardia. But this boundless Miami metroplex had more than one egress. There was, Vladimir remembered, another airport out of which his parents would fly on discounted carriers with names like SkyElegance and Royal American Air. It was Fort Lauderdale’s airport, up the coast.

Now what? He put on the remains of his T-shirt and coughed up a chunk of mucus thick as a sponge and traced with rills of blood. In his wallet Vladimir found the remnants of his take from his father and Mr. Rybakov: $1,200.00 in denominations large and small. Bonanza number two was a lone taxi circling the condo’s driveway, waiting for the crowd with smart shoes and breathing linen to come out and play. Vladimir scrambled past the shrubbery, then took his time strolling over to the cab, a millionaire enjoying the freedom of a torn shirt on a Sunday night. The cabdriver, some kind of Middle Eastern pituitary giant, nevertheless checked out his attire thoroughly in the rearview mirror and asked if Vladimir’s girlfriend had kicked his ass. His nameplate read Ben-Ari, or Son of a Lion, as Vladimir remembered from Hebrew school where many of these huge lion cubs were in evidence.

“And I’m leaving the bitch for good,” Vladimir said (given the events of the last hour, it was oddly comforting to appropriate that word—“bitch”). “To the Fort Lauderdale airport!” he commanded.

He waited till they were way past the Eden and into the North Beach section to pull into a phone booth under the swaggering shadow of O’Malley’s Blarney Leprechaun, with his three-for-one Guinness special. “Please wait for me,” Vladimir told the driver.

“No, I will drive off without the fare,” said the Son of a Lion, a friendly Israeli growl substituting for laughter.

He dialed Royal American Air and found out that it had gone out of business last Tuesday. SkyElegance now operated only between Miami and Medellín, although they were working on a
nonstop to Zurich. Finally, a mainstream airline sold him a ticket on the next flight to New York for the equivalent of two weeks’ salary.

Vladimir didn’t blink at the price—he was still alive and possibly things would soon return to normal. Return to Fran, that is (the days measured out by cigarettes, chocolate, and coffee; the mornings with Frank talking shit about Kerensky’s provisional government over the breakfast table; the joys of opening one of Vincie’s packed lunch boxes at the Absorption Society: carpaccio-and-endive on toasted seven-grain, a generous sprig of balcony-grown mint, plus two tickets to a lunchtime concert at Trinity Church featuring a visiting Prava quartet—yes, he would need to spend forty days and nights just snuggling in bed with all three Ruoccos to cleanse himself of the last two hours).

In the interim, his recent maneuvers with the airline had empowered him, and now he was ready to dispense some authority Baobab’s way. He dialed the bastard collect, and after the familiar, bumbling voice hesitantly accepted the charges, Vladimir began without restraint: “So, I just spent some time looking over Jordi’s prick, and I meant to ask you, to borrow Jordi’s words, how do
you
take it?”

On the opposite end of the eastern seaboard there was silence. “And he still hasn’t given you the Brooklyn College franchise?” Vladimir said. “I think for all your hard work you might at least demand Brooklyn. Don’t sell yourself short, Thumper.”

“He didn’t, did he?” Baobab said.

“No, he didn’t, you living proof of social Darwinism. I’m standing by the road to the airport, my shoulder’s bashed in, I can hardly walk, but my asshole’s still intact, thanks for asking.”

“Listen.” Baobab paused as if he himself was listening. “I really didn’t . . . He would grope me sometimes or squeeze my ass, but I thought—”

“You thought?” Vladimir said. “Are you sure? Remember how you always had extra time on tests in school because you had the doctor’s note saying you were dyslexic? You faked that note, didn’t you? Come clean now. You’re not dyslexic, you’re just a fucking idiot, am I right?”

“Now—”

“Now let’s take stock, why don’t we? You’re twenty-five years of age, majoring in Humor Studies, your girlfriend can’t go to the movies without a legal guardian, and your boss is keen on banging your bum for kicks. And you wonder why you don’t get together with Fran and her friends more often? Believe me, that would be the last I’d ever see of Fran. Her anthropological curiosity only goes so far.”

“Okay,” Baobab said. “I heard you. Okay. Where are you, exactly?”

“Are you going to make everything all right, sweetheart?”

Baobab remained calm. “Where are you, Vladimir?”

“I told you, on the way to the airport. My meter’s running.”

“And where is Jordi?”

“Gee, I would think he’s trying to find me, unrequited love and all.”

“Cut it, cut it,” Baobab said. “So he tried to . . . And you ran away?”

“Well, I hit him first,” Vladimir said. “I socked him a nice one!” Socked him a nice one? When would this night end already?

“Jesus Christ. You really are fucked beyond anything. Listen, don’t take a plane to New York. Go to Wichita, go to Peoria—”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” shouted Vladimir, a pinch of apprehension already registering on his uncharted Fear-Money gland, uncharted save for when it ran against his bladder. “What, he’s going to track me down in New York and kill me?”

“I doubt that
he
is the one that’s going track you down, but, yes, he might very well take the time out to kill you, and maybe
fuck you one last time for good measure. Vlad, listen to me! He’s got a hundred people working for him in the Bronx alone. Last year my friend Ernest, this crazy spic who used to run the LaGuardia College franchise, he called Jordi a
maricón,
as a joke, you understand . . .”

“And?”

“ ‘And?’ you say?
And?
Who do you think these people are?” Baobab shouted. “The Catalan cartel! My God, the way they kill, the flair with which they commit violence . . . It’s
modernismo!
Even you Russians can learn a thing or two. And then there’s the fact that he tried to . . . That you know that he’s—”

“I see what you’re saying, now. You’re saying that although you were fully aware that this man is a killer and a pederast, you nonetheless encouraged me to go down to Florida with him. To stay in the same hotel with him.”

“How the hell was I supposed to know? I knew he liked that waif look, but you’ve got all that hair on your face.”

“Not anymore, you dolt!”

“Look, you needed the money!” Baobab said. “I thought this was a way to win back your respect. You’re the only friend I have, and you’ve been spending all your time—”

“Oh, so it’s my fault now. You are one deluded monkey, Baobab. I’m trying to stay mad at you, but it’s not easy considering . . . Considering this is just a night for me, but you’re going to spend an entire lifetime in this condition. Fare thee well, my poor sod.”

“Wait a second! He’s probably tapped my line. He’s probably going to have the Miami airport surrounded.”

“Well, he’s in for a surprise because I’m going to the Fort Lauderdale airport.”

“Jesus Christ! Don’t tell me that! The phone’s bugged.”

“Yes, and I’m sure all of Lauderdale is surrounded by angry Catalonians with semiautomatics and glossy headshots of me. Is
there free therapy at City College? Why don’t you look into that after your humor class?”

“Wait! Forget the bus terminals and the train stations! And don’t rent a car! He can trace . . .”

Vladimir hung up and ran to his impatient Israeli.

“Onward!” he shouted.

“
YOU
’
RE IN BIG
trouble, nachon meod?” the Lion said. He laughed and laughed, upsetting the rearview mirror with his happy hands.

Vladimir looked up. He had actually been asleep for a minute or two. This is what extreme fear did to him after its initial effects petered out: it put him to sleep. A thoroughly fear-inducing, but somehow dreamless sleep, its sole background—a bottomless void.