Russian Debutante's Handbook (33 page)

“Right,” Vladimir said.

“They’re cutting—”

“Yes, the mutilation of genitals. I hear you,” Vladimir said. “Where’s the bathroom?” he asked.

After assuring himself of the wholeness of his scrotum and padding it with a layer of crispy Stolovan toilet paper (as if that would stop the revenge-minded Bulgarians!) Vladimir felt the return of good cheer swell up across his nether region. By the time he staggered back to the table he was nearly ebullient. “You’ve got to have a talk with Gusev!” he shouted across the table. “We’re businessmen!”

“You have a talk with him,” the Groundhog said, throwing up his hands. “You tell him, ‘This is how we do business in America, and this is how we
do not
do business in America.’ A line has to be drawn for those simpletons.”

“Correct, correct, Groundhog,” Vladimir said, quickly toasting with a glass of schnapps. “Only, trust me, you should be the one telling them. They’re not scared of me.”

“They will be scared of you,” the Groundhog said. “As scared as they are of God. Which reminds me, here’s a toast to Kostya and his mother’s health.”

“To a speedy recovery.”

The Groundhog suddenly looked serious. “Volodya, let me speak from the heart. You and Kostya are the future of this organization. I see that now. Before it was fun, sure, run around, blow up a few diners, cut off some dicks, but we got to get serious. This is the nineties. We’re in this . . . ‘informational age’ . . . we need ‘Americanisms’ and ‘globalisms.’ Do you know where I’m coming from?”

“Oh, yes,” Vladimir said. “I say we call a meeting, the whole organization.”

“Whores and all,” said the Groundhog.

“We’re going to teach them America.”

“
You’re
going to teach them America.”

“Me?” Vladimir said, swallowing a cognac.

“You,” the Groundhog said.

“Me?” Vladimir feigned surprise yet again.

“You’re the best.”

“No, you’re the best.”

“No, you.”

What happened next was as good an argument for temperance as any. “You’re the top,” Vladimir sang, squeezing in a shot of pear brandy between the lyrics. “You’re the Colosseum.”

He must have been louder than he thought, for the pianist instantly shifted out of his Dr. Zhivago repertoire and struck up Vladimir’s tune. The pianist was, like nearly everyone in Prava, open to suggestions.

“You’re the top,” Vladimir continued even louder, with the Germans around him smiling appreciatively, thrilled, as always, at the prospect of free foreign entertainment at tableside. “You’re the Louvre Museum.”

“Get up and sing,
Tovarisch
Girshkin!” The Groundhog kicked him hard under the table for encouragement.

Vladimir staggered to his feet, then fell over. A further prod from his employer brought him up again. “You’re the melody from a symphony by Strauss! You’re a Bendel bonnet, a Shakespeare sonnet, you’re Mickey Mouse!”

The Groundhog leaned in, his expression quizzical, and pointed to himself. “No, no, you’re the Groundhog,” Vladimir whispered reassuringly in Russian. The Groundhog pretended to sigh with relief. Hey, the Hog was a fun fella!

“You’re the top,” Vladimir crackled. “You’re a Waldorf salad. You’re the top. You’re a Berlin ballad . . .” The waitstaff was trying hard to position a microphone in his direction.

“You’re the purple light of a summer night in Spain . . . You’re the National Gallery, you’re Garbo’s salary, you’re cellophane.” He wished he could translate one of the lines into German to get an extra kick from the red-faced
deutsches Volk,
maybe hit them up for a tip or a date. “I’m a lazy lout who’s just about to stop . . .”

Oh, what a ham you are, Vladimir Borisovich.

“But if baby . . . I’m the bottom . . . You-ou-ou’re the top.”

There was a standing ovation greater than at the Joy on poetry night. The Groundhog’s security detail regarded their master uncertainly, as if waiting for the secret code to spring into action and spray the whole room with bullets so that no witnesses to this little musical number would remain. There was cause for alarm, as the Groundhog, doubled over with laughter, slipped under the table like a surfer caught in the undertow, and remained there for some time laughing and hitting his head against the table’s bottom. Vladimir had to coax him out with the lobster claws which, true to the menu, really did sit atop a lime-green spread of kiwi puree.

HE DECIDED TO
date Morgan, the nice girl the crowd had picked up at the Joy.

It wasn’t a political decision and not so much an erotic one, although he was attracted to her form and pallor, and, maybe, just maybe, she would make a good Eva to his Juan Perón. But his romantic stirrings extended even beyond public relations. He was lonely for a woman’s company. When he arose from an empty bed, his mornings seemed strange and disjointed; at night, passing out into the comforter, as soft and licentious as it was, was somehow not enough. It was hard to understand. After all the complications that American women had put him through (and would he even be here in Prava if it weren’t for his Frannie?) he still depended on their company to make him feel like a young mammal—so vital, affectionate, and full of sperm. But this time around
he
would take charge of the relationship. He was beyond the “appendage” stage of following Fran around and swooning at the mere mention of semiotics. It was time for someone innocent and pliable like this Morgan, whoever the hell she turned out to be.

There were several courtship options for him. A great deal of them involved various permutations of chance meetings in clubs, poetry readings, strolls across the Emanuel Bridge, or during the
hours spent queuing up at the town’s only laundromat—a hub of expatriate activity. At each of these venues, he, Vladimir, would prove himself superior in intellect, grace, conviviality, and name-dropping, thereby accumulating enough social points to be later cashed in for a date.

Or he could do things the old-fashioned, proactive way and call her up. He decided (since, according to Alexandra, his social coordinator, everything was set for the Eagle to land) to try the latter and rang her from the car phone. But the Stalin-era telephone exchange would not connect the two lovers-to-be; instead of Morgan he kept getting a venerable
babushka
who by the fifth call rasped that he was a “foreign penis” and should “fuck off back to Germany.”

And so Vladimir buzzed Alexandra instead. She and Morgan had twice done the “girls night out” thing and were becoming fast friends. From Alexandra, yawning and likely in Marcus’s arms, he got Morgan’s address out in the boonies and a few bon mots concerning a young girl’s virtue. He longed to orient his car’s compass in the direction of Alexandra’s suburbs, and to ask
her
to the movies or wherever it was people went on dates. But he pressed forward, way beyond the river and the preliminary factoryscape, to a quiet stretch of asphalt and a lone and lonely apartment house which seemed as if it had been blown several klicks downwind from its
panelak
brethren by some bureaucratic storm.

Morgan lived on the seventh floor.

He took an elevator smelling comfortably of kielbasa, whose iron door required his whole being to open and shut (the exercises with Kostya were already proving useful), and knocked on the door of apartment 714-21G.

There was stirring within, a slight creak of springs set against the quiet jabber of television, and Vladimir was instantly afraid that he had been preceded by some large American boy, which would
explain both the creaking springs and the television being on on a Friday night.

Morgan opened the door without asking who it was (the way non–New Yorkers have an appalling tendency to do) and she was, to Vladimir’s welcome surprise, alone. In fact, she was extremely alone, with two dumpy television anchors doing the news roundup in Stolovan; on the coffee table a small pizza from the New Town shop where they piled up such daring combinations as apples, melted Edam cheese, and sausage gravy; and on the windowsill a bored cat, a hefty Russian blue, mewing and scratching at the freedom beyond.

Morgan was sporting a pink starfish-shaped rash on her forehead (a distant cousin of the wine-dark splotch on Gorbachev’s head), which she had slathered with a thick layer of cream, and was wrapped up in a lavender terry-cloth robe several sizes too small, the kind one expects to receive upon being consigned to a cut-rate nursing home. “Hey, it’s you!” she said, her round American face smiling perfectly. “What are you doing all the way out here? Nobody ever comes to visit me.”

Vladimir was caught short. Seeing her as she was, he was expecting several minutes of embarrassment from her over the state of her wardrobe and forehead. Embarrassment which, he hoped, would make him look good by comparison and help him press the case for why she should go out with him and fall in love with him too. But here she was, happy to see him, actually willing to admit that she didn’t get many visitors. Vladimir remembered her unsolicited honesty at the Joy when she had first met the Crowd. Now she was coming through with several more heapings of the stuff.
What fresh pathology was this?

“Sorry to barge in unannounced,” Vladimir said. “I was in the neighborhood on some business, and so I thought . . .”

“That’s all right,” she said. “I’m so glad you’re here. Please,
entrez.
What a mess. You’ll have to excuse me.” She made her way to the couch, and, with the benefit of the snug bathrobe, Vladimir now noticed that her thighs and backside, while not particularly large in and of themselves, were somewhat larger than the rest of her.

Now, why wasn’t she rushing to change out of that ridiculous bathrobe? Didn’t she want to impress her guest? Hadn’t she told Alexandra that she found Vladimir exotic? Of course, Ravi Shankar was exotic, and how many women of Vladimir’s generation would sleep with
him?
Vladimir briefly entertained the thought that Morgan was comfortable being who she was in her own house, but then dismissed such outlandishness. No, something else was going on.

She closed the pizza box, then dropped a magazine on top of it. As if that would conceal the damning proof of her solitude, thought Vladimir. “Here,” she said. “Make yourself at home. Sit. Sit down.”

“We’re modernizing a factory near here,” Vladimir said, pointing vaguely to the window where he assumed another factory in need of a tune-up lay in wait. “It’s very dull work, as you can imagine. Every couple of weeks I have to come in and argue with the foreman about cost overruns. Still, they’re good workers, the Stolovans.”

“I wasn’t doing much myself,” she shouted from what must have been the kitchen, for Vladimir heard water running. She was likely dealing with the creamy buildup on her forehead. “I live so far from the center. Leaving this place is such a bother.”

Such a bother.
An older person’s phrase. But said with a young person’s carelessness. Vladimir recalled this kind of paradox from the young Middle American natives he encountered during his college year, and the recollection relaxed him. After they were both settled on the couch and she had brought out a sad little local wine and a paper cup for Vladimir to drink from (the splotch on her forehead
remained!), a question-and-answer period followed, one which Vladimir found as familiar as the words to the “Internationale.”

“Where’s your accent from?”

“I am Russian,” Vladimir said, in the grave voice which that admission called for.

“That’s right, Alexandra told me something about that. I studied a little Russian in college, you know.”

“Where did you go?”

“OSU,” she said. “Ohio State.” It sounded perfectly reasonable coming out of her mouth, but it made Vladimir think of the “frat-hog” at the Café Nouveau whose Ohio State T-shirt had made Alexandra laugh.

“So Russian was your major?”

“No, psychology.”

“Ahh . . .”

“But I took a lot of humanities classes.”

“Ohh . . .”

Silence.

“Do you remember any Russian?”

She smiled and straightened out a growing partition in her robe, which Vladimir had been watching carefully, feeling piglike and uncouth in his voyeurism. “I just remember a few words . . .”

Vladimir already knew what those few words were. For some reason, Americans undertaking his impossible language were compelled to say “I love you.” Perhaps this was a legacy of the Cold War. All that suspicion and lack of cultural exchange fueling the desires of young, well-wishing American men and women to bridge the gap, to dismantle those nukes by falling into the arms of some soulful, enigmatic Russian sailor, or his counterpart, the warm and sweet-tasting Ukrainian farmer girl. The fact that, in reality, the soulful Russian sailor was smashed out of his mind half the time
and held to a rather loose definition of date rape, while the sweet-tasting Ukrainian farmer girl was covered in pigshit six days out of the week, was fortunately concealed by that gray and nonporous entity, the Iron Curtain.

“Ya vas loobloo,”
she said on cue.

“Why, thank you,” Vladimir said.

They laughed and blushed and Vladimir felt himself naturally moving across the couch to be closer to her, although a very safe distance remained. The way her unfashionably long brown hair was coiled limply around her neck, the way it ended in tangles across the faded lavender of the bathrobe made Vladimir feel sorry for her; it aroused him too. She could be so beautiful if she wanted to. Why wasn’t she then?

“So, what are you doing tonight?” he said. “Feel like taking in a movie?”

A movie. That sacred rite of dating which he had never performed. Not with his college girlfriend, the Chicagoan (straight to bed); or Frannie (straight to bar); or even Challah (straight to nervous tears and hiccuping).

And how about “taking one in”? You couldn’t go wrong with a boy who used language like that and probably waved earnestly and said, “Take care, now, hear,” when Uncle Trent took off for the Rotary Club. Accent be damned, you were safe with Vladimir Girshkin.