Russian Debutante's Handbook (30 page)

The young men and women cast to populate this postmodern Belle Epoque turned to face the new entrant and kept their gazes
fixed as he walked into the inner circle of seating where a space was reserved for him between Cohen and Maxine, the mythologizer of Southern interstates.

Vladimir walked in with his legs atremble. He had made a terrible mistake immediately upon his arrival by instructing Jan to deposit him at the front door to the Joy, where the entering hordes were treated to the spectacle of an artist alighting from a chauffeured BMW. True, he was supposed to be a
wealthy
artist, but this arrogant spectacle was undoubtedly a mistake, the kind of faux pas that within minutes would be circulated to Budapest and back by Marcus and his Marxish fiends.

To Vladimir’s further chagrin, it appeared that the few readers in the group were distinguished by a spiral notebook much like his own, a fact not lost on Cohen who stared at Vladimir’s tome, mouth agape, then turned to its owner, his eyelids at half-mast with contempt.

It was, thus far, a silent gathering. Plank was asleep on an enormous imported La-Z-Boy recliner, dreaming of last night’s bacchanal. Cohen was too angry to make a peep. Even Alexandra was uncharacteristically silent. She was too busy looking over Vladimir and Maxine, probably trying them on as a couple; the blond and sprightly Maxine had just been picked out as Vladimir’s mate by the Crowd’s informal council on dating. But, of course, it was long, trim Alexandra that Vladimir wanted. Her beauty, her unreserved enthusiasm contributed heavily to his infatuation, and yet there was more: He had found out recently that she was born of a lower-class family! Semiliterate Portuguese dock workers from a place called Elizabeth, New Jersey. The idea that she had come to Prava from this noisy, poorly lit, deeply Catholic household with its abusive men and pregnant women (what else could it have been like?) restored much of Vladimir’s lapsed faith in the world. Yes, it could be done. People could change their life chances with a few elegant
strokes yet remain beautiful and at ease and kind and solicitous, too. Alexandra’s world, despite its artistic pretensions, was a world of possibilities; there was so much she could teach him, she with a stocking ripped exactly at the point where one world-class thigh began to curve into shape.

Meanwhile, the silence continued, save for the last-minute scribbling of some of the artists. Vladimir was frightened. Were they still thinking about his BMW? Any minute now, it seemed, a Stalinist denunciation was to begin, with him the purgee.

Artist 1, a tall dirty-haired boy in Coke-bottle glasses: “Citizen V. Girshkin is charged with antisocial activity, the promulgation of an odious persona and nonexistent literary magazine, and possession of an Automobile of the Enemy as defined in the USSR Criminal Codex 112/43.2.”

Girshkin: “But I’m a businessman . . .”

Artist 2, a big-eared redhead with cracked lips: “Enough said. Ten years hard labor in the People’s Limestone Extraction Facility in Phzichtcht, Slovakia. Don’t start with the ‘Russian Jew’ crap, Girshkin!”

Instead, a sinewy, older gentleman emerged from the shadows. He had no hair save for two sets of overgrown curls rising above his head like devil’s horns, and sagging corduroys that could have accommodated a matching tail. “Hi, I’m Harold Green,” he said.

“Hi, Harry!” This was Alexandra, of course.

“Hi, Alex. Hi, Perry. Wake up, Plank.” Harry Green’s eyes—kind and avuncular, but also with the requisite expatriate glaze that plagued every English speaker in Prava—settled on Vladimir, where they blinked slowly and repeatedly like a skyscraper’s warning lights.

“He owns this place,” Maxine whispered in Vladimir’s ear. “He’s the son of very rich Canadians.”

Harold instantaneously ceased to be a mystery, one less variable
in Vladimir’s co-optation formula. He imagined patting the dear fellow’s naked crown, suggesting minoxidil, a new interior decorator for his club, a new worldview for his cocktail hour, a sizable investment in Groundhog, Inc . . . .

“So, we’ve got here a list.” Harold picked up a clipboard. “Anyone not penned their John Hancock, or Jan Hancock for those of you of the Stolovan persuasion?”

Vladimir saw his hand rise, a small, pale creature.

“VLADIMIR,” Harold read off the clipboard. “A Stolovan name, no? Bulgarian, no? Romanian, no? No? So who do we have to start? Lawrence Litvak. Paging Mr. Litvak. Please step right up, Larry.”

Mr. Litvak tucked in his Warhol T-shirt; checked his zipper momentarily; brushed back a tendril of blond, dreadlocked hair, and took to the magic spot from which Harold had spoken. Vladimir recognized him from the Nouveau and likeminded places, where he always had as his sidekick an enormous blue bong, and where he was happiest when regaling passers-by with war stories culled from his brief, standard-issue life.

“This is a story,” Larry said, “called ‘Yuri Gagarin.’ Yuri Gagarin was a Soviet astronaut who was the first man in space. Later he died in a plane crash.” He cleared his throat, a little too thoroughly, and gulped back the fruits of his besieged lung.

Poor, dead Yuri Gagarin was conscripted into a tale about Larry’s Stolovan girlfriend, a veritable Rapunzel whose untrimmed hair and penchant for Tony Bennett played at fantastic decibels made her an outcast in her own
panelak.
That is, until Prince Larry came along, fresh from his proving grounds at the University of Maryland, College Park: “ ‘Prava will be good for you,’ my writing professor POSITED. ‘Just don’t fall in love,’ he said EVINCING what would happen if I did to the contrary, as had happened to him in 1945, a young G.I.,” etc.

The narrator installs our heroine Tavlatka—a water nymph as her name suggests, and as the long and graphic scene in the communal swimming pool amply illustrated—in his apartment conveniently located in the Old Town. (How did Larry get the money to live in the Old Town? Vladimir made a mental note for PravaInvest purposes.) They smoke a lot of hash and have sex, “in the manner of the Stolovans.” Meaning what? Under a blanket of ham?

Ultimately, the relationship hits a snag. At some point in the middle of the sex a conversation on the space race is launched and Tavlatka, soiled by a decade of agit-prop, insists that Yuri Gagarin was the first man on the moon. Our narrator, a leftist softy, to be sure, is still an American. And an American knows his rights: “ ‘It was Neil Armstrong,’ I hissed into the small of her back. ‘And he was no
cosmo
naut.’ My Tavlatka spun around, her nipples no longer erect, a tear welling in both eyes. ‘Get you out of here,’ she said, in that funny yet tragic way of hers.”

After that things really fall apart. Tavlatka boots our hero out of his own apartment and he, with no place to go, starts sleeping on a little tatami mat by the New Town Kmart, selling nudes of himself to old German ladies on the Emanuel Bridge (go, Larry!), making just enough money for the occasional knockwurst and a Kmart pullover. There’s no mention of what Tavlatka does, but one remains hopeful that she makes good use of Larry’s Old Town pad.

Here, Vladimir lost the narrative thread for a while, his eyes doing a Baedeker’s tour of Alexandra’s ankle, but he did manage to catch the scene where Tavlatka and the narrator seek the truth in an old Stolovan library smelling “sourly of books,” and then the grand finale in bed where both Tavlatka and Larry emerge with their bodies “drenched, satiated . . . understanding that which the mind cannot.”

FIN and BRAVO! BRAVO! The circle congregated around Litvak to pay their dues. Cohen had a turn at the wunderkind with a
full frontal hug and hair ruffle, but Larry had bigger fish to fry: He was looking for pan-seared Girshkin on a bed of shallots in red wine sauce. “Remember me?” he croaked to Vladimir from within Cohen’s anaconda grip. He half-closed his eyes, managed to loosen the top button of his shirt, and rolled his head about to demonstrate his usual late-night demeanor.

“Right,” said Vladimir, “Air Raid Shelter, Reprè, Martini Bar . . .”

“You never told me you were starting a literary mag,” Larry said, maneuvering out of Cohen’s arms, nearly throwing the jilted Iowan off balance.

“Well, you never told me you were a writer,” Vladimir said. “I’m a little hurt, actually. Your talent is shocking.”

“How strange,” Larry said. “That’s the first thing I usually mention.”

“No matter,” Vladimir said. “That story definitely belongs in . . .” They never had settled on a name for the magazine. Something Latin, French, Mediterranean—yes, Mediterranean cuisine was gaining in global popularity, surely its literature would follow. Now what was the name of that famous Sicilian alchemist and charlatan?
“Cagliostro.”

“Dig the name.”

Indeed. “Only I can’t really make that kind of editorial decision,” Vladimir said. “You need to talk to my editor-in-chief Perry Cohen over there. Me, I’m just the publisher.” But before Vladimir could redeem his plummeting stock with Editor & Friend Cohen, Harry Green was lowing for them all to sit and pipe down in his purposeful Canadian Prairie way. “Vladimir Girshkin,” he called out. “Who is Vladimir Girshkin?”

Who indeed?

Vladimir Girshkin was a man who once instinctively moved in the wrong direction and invariably got knocked down every time he saw a person running his way. Vladimir Girshkin once said
“thank you” and “sorry” when there was absolutely no need, and often employed a bow so deep it would have been excessive at Emperor Hirohito’s court. Once upon a time Vladimir Girshkin held Challah in his reed-thin arms and prayed that she would never be hurt again, and, to that end, vowed to be her protector and benefactor.

But presently he held a single sheet of paper in front of him, his right arm unfolding predictably like an architect’s swivel lamp . . . Steady as she goes . . .

He read:

This is how I see my mother—

In a dirty Formica restaurant,

simple pearls from her birthland

around her tiny freckled neck.

Sweat-dappled,

she is buying me a three-dollar dish of lo mein,

gleaming over the gold watch

we found for a bargain,

four hours of a heatstroke Chinatown afternoon

behind us. Blushing as she says,

“I’ll just have water, please.”

There it was. A poem with little to impart but with clean lines like the room at a good bed-and-breakfast: simple wooden furniture, a tasteful framed print hanging above the couch of some sylvan scene—moose-in-brook, cabin-lost-in-trees, whatever. In other words, thought Vladimir, it was absolutely nothing. The kind of garbage that finds its own void and soundlessly disappears into same.

Pandemonium! Standing ovation! A regular riot! The Bolsheviks were storming the Winter Palace, the Viet Cong were massing
around the American embassy, Elvis had entered the building. Apparently nobody in the Joy crowd had yet thought of writing a small poem that wasn’t entirely self-conscious or self-referential. NATO planes had not yet been called in to carpet-bomb the city with William Carlos Williams’s collected work. It was quite a coup for Vladimir.

Amid the blare of applause and the trumpet of Maxine delivering her lip-to-lip kiss for the public record, Vladimir made a note of another promising phenomenon: a woman of deeply American appearance (although she was not blond), a clear-skinned, full-faced, brown-haired young woman dressed in mail-order outdoorsy pants and linen blouse, who probably smelled like an environmentally correct shampoo of apples and citrus with an undercurrent of rain-forest soap, was clapping away, her ruddy face made all the more so with simple, unabashed adulation for Vladimir Girshkin. Our man in Prava.

UPSTAIRS
,
AT THE
vegetarian portion of the Joy, a round metal table of Stolovan unsturdiness was rolled out for the conquering heroes; it tipped back and forth beneath portions of black hummus the consistency of loam and the tureens of beet-red minestrone top-heavy with actual beets. Vladimir got placed in a little male semicircle of Cohen (who refused to look at Vladimir), Larry Litvak (who wouldn’t bother looking at anyone else), and Plank (unconscious). Vladimir glanced about nervously, feeling a heterosexual opportunity being squandered. To wit, the clean and comely American woman he had branded with his verse had also made the trek upstairs. She was sitting at the “Carrot Bar” with the rest of the peons, chatting up a tourist boy. At measured intervals she looked over to Vladimir’s table and smiled with her ointment-shiny lips
and milk-white teeth, as if to quash the rumor that she wasn’t enjoying herself.

King Vladimir waved her over—it was something new he was learning to do with his hand. And he was getting good at it, for instantly she picked her purse off the bar and left the tourist boy with his beer and his crew cut and his stories of what the governor did at his sister’s wedding.

“Scoot over,” Vladimir said to the boys and the seats were shuffled, water spilled, complaints voiced.

She was awkward, navigating to her seat (“sorry, sorry, sorry”) and Vladimir didn’t help matters by moving closer to sniff at her linen blouse. Yes, rain-forest soap. Correct. But what to make of the rest of her? She had what in the Girshkin family would be considered the beginnings of a nose, an outcropping really, a small belvedere overlooking the long, thin lips, circular chin, and beneath that the full breasts that bespoke a successful American adolescence. Vladimir had but one thought: Why was her hair past shoulder-length, given the present-day urban conventions that demanded shortness, brevity? Was she, perhaps, a stranger to hipness? Questions, questions.

But like most pretty people she made a positive impression on the Crowd. “Hi,” Alexandra said to her, and by the sparkling expression on her face it might as well have been a cry of
“Landsman!”

“Hi,” the newcomer said.

“I’m Alexandra.”

“I’m Morgan.”

“Nice to meet you, Alexandra.”

“Nice to meet you, Morgan.”

And then the niceness ended and was replaced by a universal uproar over the talentless Harry the Canadian and how everything would be so much better, so much more dignified, if they (the
Crowd) owned the Joy and its literary legacy. Here all eyes turned to Vladimir. Vladimir sighed. The Joy? Wasn’t the goddamn literary magazine enough for them? What next, a Gertrude Stein theme park? “Listen,” Vladimir said, “we’ve got to get the ball rolling on
Cagliostro.
”