Russian Debutante's Handbook (25 page)

To those who have observed Vladimir throughout the years, it would have appeared his standard smile, the weight of it sunk into his jutting lower lip and the hazy, peaceful green eyes. But Vladimir (through reading too many bad novels, perhaps) believed that a
smile could convey an entire story if only he sighed and shook his head with good humor at the right moments. In the instant case, Vladimir hoped this smile would say, “Yes, we have been through a lot together, this pen and I. We have kept each other from falling apart through all the strange, self-inflicted years. Portland, Oregon; Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Austin, Texas; then, of course, Sedona, Arizona. Maybe Key West. Hard to remember. Lots of barely functioning cars, women who didn’t care, bands that fell apart because the personalities involved were just too strong. And through it all: the pen. Writing. I am a writer. No, a poet.” He had heard that poetry had cachet here. Everybody was rhyming, jazz clubs were branching out into poetry slams. But then he had to distinguish himself . . . “I am a writer-poet. No, a novelist-poet. But for a living I make investments. A novelist-poet-investor. Plus I do dance improv.”

Vladimir was smiling at his pen for too long now. Enough with the pen already. He lowered himself into a poem. It was a poem about Mother; it came easy, Mother lent herself well to verse. His two drinks arrived and the waitress smiled at his efforts. Yes, they were all in this together.

He was making good time, describing how his mother looked in a Chinese restaurant, using such imagery as “a small string of pearls from her birthland,” which had scored good marks from a comparative literature professor back at the Midwestern college. Then tragedy struck. His globetrotting pen ran out. Vladimir shook it as gracefully as he could, then started aheming to the Eudora Welty’s other artist-in-dining. The fellow would not respond, lost (or pretending to be lost) in work, he narrowed his eyes and shook his head at the words before him as if they were his undoing. He bunched up his mane with both hands then let it unravel—it unraveled very elegantly, like a Chinese fan. He sighed and shook his head with good humor.

The women’s collective, however, responded by hushing their already subsonic conversation. They looked at Vladimir and his pen with great mystery and worry as if they were lost tourists confronted with a spontaneous native dance on a street far from the safety of their Hilton. Vladimir picked up his beer, his sole credential, and walked over to the women. “Pen?” he said.

One woman had a purse; she opened it and tore through a ream of facial tissues, new and used. She stole frightened glances at her compatriots until one of them—the blond spikes of her porcupine-cut bristling with authority—spoke up for her: “She doesn’t have a pen.” The others nodded.

“You need a pen?” It was the writer. He had pressed his lager against his cheek, which Vladimir took to be an international symbol of good will by way of mild inebriation.

“I need a pen,” Vladimir said, feeling the drama was about to come to a head. He crossed over to the writer mumbling thanks to the women for their effort (no response), and accepted a ballpoint. “Damn thing ran out,” Vladimir said.

“A writer carries two!” the writer barked. “Always.” He put the beer down and, with his round and cratered chin held high, appraised Vladimir as would a grade school principal his most bumbling charge.

“That one ran out too,” Vladimir said, although his strained voice pronounced him guilty—guilty of packing only one pen. “I’ve been writing too much today.”

Too much writing? Too much was never enough. Now it seemed for certain his idiocy would do him in, but instead the writer said: “Write anything good?”

“This poem about my Russian mother in Chinatown,” Vladimir said, trying to exoticize himself with as many ethnic references as possible. “But I’m just not getting it right. I came here, came to Prava, to get enough distance and I’m still lost.”

“How’d you get a Russian mother?” the writer asked.

“I am Russian.”

“Shhh.” They looked around. “The barmaid is Stolovan,” the writer explained.

A pair of uneven saloon doors separated the bar area from the rest of the joint; the Russophobic Stolovan was somewhere behind those doors. Vladimir looked down to his feet in embarrassment and took a swig of his beer in lieu of something to say. Yes, he was definitely starting to lose ground with all the fits and starts afflicting his attempts at conversation with the literary god. He decided, against his best instincts, to take a stab at honesty, that mortal enemy of the pyramid schemer. “I just got here,” he said. “I’m still a little out of it as far as the locals go.”

“Forget about them,” the writer said. “This is an American town. Why don’t you sit down? Come on, take a break from your Russian mommy poem for a second. Oh, don’t look so sore. Hell, I remember my mother-as-muse stage. Trust me, the maternal teat will still be there tomorrow morning.”

And then Vladimir knew he was going to like this guy. The helpful instructions about always having two pens, the worldly attitude toward the Stolovans, and now the learned appraisal of the maternal teat, all confirmed that the writer was what the uninitiated would call an asshole. But Vladimir knew these pretty castoffs of well-to-do America, cruising along on their five-year plan of alcoholic self-discovery, then trolling desperately for a five-year renewal option.
Hell, I remember my mother-as-muse stage.
What disarming aggression. It was Midwestern progressive college redux, confirmation that this Adonis was definitely in Vladimir’s cards, his “Patient Zero.”

Vladimir took a seat just as a second mint julep was brought out by the waitress, smiling soberly at her countrymen’s meeting of the minds. Vladimir polished off his first beer and placed it on the outgoing tray. “Another?” she said.

“Please.”

“Nuts?”

“No nuts.”

“Lemon?”

“
Sans
lemon.”

“On me,” said the writer, impressed by the brevity, the honesty of the exchange. Now they were in Raymond Carver territory. “Drinking up a storm?” he said to Vladimir as the latter reached for the julep.

“Jet lag. I’m out of it,” Vladimir said. Think. Carver dialogue. Deceptively simple yet profound. “I haven’t got it all together yet,” Vladimir said, as he looked away mysteriously.

“You find a place to live?”

“My boss gave me a flat in the suburbs.”

“Boss?” The writer’s mouth came open revealing Yankee orthodontia at its best. He shook his head, his mane rippling; it felt very natural to just reach out and touch the silky thing. “You mean you got a job? With whom?”

The iconoclast scribbler seemed to perk up nicely at this mention of the material world. Vladimir imagined a background of worried parents, angry transatlantic phone calls, pouches full of law-school applications being dragged through the streets of Prava by exhausted Stolovan postmen. “A development firm,” Vladimir said.

“Development firm? What are you developing? My name’s Perry, by the way.” He stuck out a hand. “Perry Cohen. Yes, it’s a surprising name. I’ll have you know that I’m the only Iowa Jew ever.”

Vladimir smiled, thinking: what happens if there’s another Iowa Jew in the room when he introduces himself as the sole specimen? The embarrassment! He filed that one away for future leverage. “How’d you Jews get all the way out to Iowa?” he asked. (“I’m a Jew, too,” he added for reassurance.)

“My father’s the Jew,” Perry explained. “My mother’s the mayor’s daughter.”

“And the mayor let her marry a Jew. How nice.” There. He was catching the vibe. The expat, in-your-face vibe. “Your father must be blond like you. And assimilated, too.”

“He’s Hitler with a circumcision,” Cohen said. And as he said it, something uncalled for, perhaps even unscripted, took place: his head bent forward so that his mane naturally covered his face, and beneath the mane Vladimir noticed—what? A quick nasal exhalation to forestall a whimper? A rapid blinking of the eyes to shoo away the moisture? Teeth biting hard into a quivering lip to bring it back in line? But before Vladimir had a chance to ponder the question of whether this was a true display of emotion or a performance for his benefit, Cohen brushed his hair back, ahemed loudly, and regained his composure.

“Hitler, yes,” Vladimir said, eager to appear blithely unconcerned. “Do tell.”

And so Cohen told Vladimir the story of his father. The two men had known each other for two minutes now; a pen had been transferred from one to the other; ethnic backgrounds had been established; a few sallies had been launched. Was that all it took—the equivalent of two dogs sniffing out each other’s rear—to get the writer Cohen to tell the story of his father?

Could this story have been Cohen’s trademark then? His theme? One thing Vladimir had learned from his years of wandering and self-invention was that it was important to have a theme. A coherent story you could riff off when the opportunity presented itself. A chance to more firmly establish yourself in other people’s minds. Cohen’s story, ironically enough, wasn’t even his own; it was his father’s. But Cohen was desperately trying to make it his own.

He even had visual aids to help him along! A Polaroid of his
father, an especially pink and heavy American Jew, tiny eyes partly covered by an enormous brow drenched in sweat, the rest of him stuffed into a green checkered suit, his arm around Richard Nixon in front of a sign reading, “Des Moines Business Caucus—1974.” Both men smiling at each other as if this was not 1974 but just another undistinguished year in the course of the American presidency.

“Da-ddy,” Cohen said, rubbing his thumb on his father’s bald dome, aping the voice of a three-year-old. And quite a papa he was. On Perry’s thirteenth birthday, when, according to Hebrew scripture, Perry was supposed to be saddled with the dubious responsibilities of manhood, his father presented him with a gift. “I’m changing your name,” his father declared. “You shouldn’t have to go through life as a Cohen.” He gave his son a ream of paperwork to sign. His name would now be Perry Caldwell.

Now, Cohen had had intimations of this self-hate business before. He was named
Perry,
after all. On high holy days, the only times when his father would take Perry into faraway St. Louis for services, he would make a habit of referring to the rabbi as Reverend Lubofsky. “Hope the Reverend lays off the Gipper this year,” he’d say, crumpling his big, sad, fleshy-lipped face in frightened anticipation of any Iowa local seeing them pull into the little synagogue’s parking lot.

And so Cohen found himself at the progressive Midwestern liberal arts college (a sister institution to the one Vladimir attended), a college where communal father-hatred was the norm, and where Cohen excelled particularly. In the early nineties the school also served as a kind of way station for hundreds of unhappy Midwestern young men and women on their way to the redemptive land of Prava. Cohen, angry and confused, took the cue by junior year. And here he was.

SO THAT WAS
his story! That was Cohen’s theme! His father was a rich asshole. How shocking. Vladimir was ready to attack Cohen with his own background, from the Jew-baiting of Leningrad to his years as a Stinky Russian Bear in Westchester. Assimilation, my ass. What do
you
know of assimilation, spoiled American pig? Why, I’ll show you . . . I’ll show you all!

Oh, and the way Cohen had told the story. Lowering his voice during the bit about the Gipper, trying to sound hurt but brave when recalling his father’s transgressions. Crocodile tears, my suburban friend. Your father could be a deforester of forests and a murderer of Hutus, but in the end what determines your fate is the size of your trust fund, the slope of your nose, the quality of your accent. At least his daddy wasn’t accusing him of
walking
like a Jew. God damn it! Vladimir could just kill this Cohen! But instead he shook his head mournfully and said, “My God. It’s hard to believe such things can still happen in this day and age.”

“I can’t believe it either,” said Cohen. “I hope you don’t mind me sharing it with you.”
My
sharing it with you, Vladimir mentally corrected him (idiot Americans didn’t even know their own language). And no, as long as there was hard currency down the road, he did not mind.

“My relationship with my father is something that really informs my work,” Cohen continued. “And I thought you’re the kind of person . . .”

Oh? What kind of person was he?

“You seem very wise and world-weary.”

“Ah,” Vladimir said. Wise and world-weary. Well he got
that
right, the son of a bitch. But then the supercilious Girshkin softened a little. Come to think of it, wise and world-weary was
possibly the kindest thing you can say to a twenty-five-year-old. And then the Iowan
was,
as we have said, a big, attractive fella, a grungy lion (if only Vladimir could look more like him), confident enough of himself to share his intimacies over the course of a single beer. Plus, he had nice, heavy rural hands, the hands of a man, and had probably slept with all kinds of women. Vladimir, too, had designs on manhood, and to that end, Vladimir wanted to be Cohen’s friend. The need for friendship and closeness was not something Vladimir imagined would rekindle so soon after his ignominious flight from the States, but it was certainly there; Vladimir was still a social animal with the need to rub up against fellow creatures. And he had before him this lion. This goofy wandering beast.

Cohen finished by asking Vladimir if he could see his mother poem. “It’s not ready yet,” Vladimir said. “I’m sorry.”

A long silence followed his apology. Cohen may have felt rebuffed after his own fifteen minutes of candor. But soon the pit-barbecued pork arrived and the waitress cleared her throat to remind them that they had a waitress.

“Oh, you never told me what your company develops,” Cohen said finally.

“Talent,” Vladimir said. “We develop talent.”

VLADIMIR AND COHEN
walked off the pork as the sun prepared for its bedtime swoon into the river. Over the Emanuel Bridge they went to the tune of buskers playing saxophones behind Bata shoe boxes lined with velvet; a blind accordion player and his wife belting out German beer-hall songs with great aplomb and to the jingle of the largest coins; a rendition of
Hamlet
by a pair of peppy young California blondes drawing stares and whistles from young Stolovan men but little coinage from
their embarrassed conationals. With all this low-tech commerce and entertainment, the bridge felt to Vladimir like the oldest crossing imaginable, a stone carpet unfurled from the castle overhanging the scene like a one-piece skyline. It was lined on both sides with statues of saints, grimy with coal dust and contorted into heroic positions. “Look,” Cohen said, pointing out three indistinct figures lost in the robes of two of the grander saints. “That’s the devil, that’s a Turk, and that’s a Jew.”