Russian Debutante's Handbook (34 page)

She squinted at her tiny watch and tapped it purposefully, as if she was on a tight schedule which Vladimir had rudely thrown off-kilter with his dreams of cinema and maybe one of his skinny arms around her shoulders. “I haven’t seen a movie since I got here,” she said.

She scooped up the latest
Prava-dence,
and leaned toward Vladimir to hold the paper aloft for them both. Despite her being disheveled and marooned on a Friday night, a clean smell emerged
from the crux of her uplifted arms. Was there ever a time when American women weren’t so extraterrestrially clean? He really wanted to kiss her.

According to the paper, Prava was awash with Hollywood movies, each stupider than the next. They finally settled on a drama about a gay lawyer with AIDS, which was apparently a big hit in the States and was approved by many of that nation’s sensitive people.

Morgan excused herself to the bathroom to change (finally!) while Vladimir took in her room, lovingly filled with mass-manufactured knickknacks from both the New World and the Old, which lined several plywood “instant” shelves: a fading charcoal drawing of Prava’s castle, a tiny moss-green mermaid statue from Copenhagen, a cracked beer stein from some place called the Great Lakes Brewing Company, a blown-up photo of a fat, disembodied hand dangling a striped bass (Dad?), a framed flyer advertising an industrial noise band named “Marty and the Fungus” (old boyfriend?), and a copy of Dr. Seuss’s
Cat in the Hat.
The only incongruous item was a large poster illustrating the Foot in all its Stalinist glory leaning precariously over the Old Town Hall. Beneath it, a Stolovan slogan:
“Graždanku! Otporim vsyechi Stalinski çudoviši!”
Vladimir could never be sure of the funny Stolovan language, but translated into normal Russian this could be an exhortation along the lines of “Citizens! Let us take the ax to all of Stalin’s monstrosities!” Hm. That was a little unexpected.

He closed his eyes and tried to take all of her in—the warm round face, the serious gaze, the awkward little mouth, the soft body bundled in terry cloth, the harmless errata on her shelf. Yes, there were probably quirks and inconsistencies in her personality with which Vladimir would eventually have to contend, but, at present, she certainly made for a wonderful demographic. Vladimir, too, could make himself into a pretty good demo: his recent income ranked him in the upper ten percent of U.S.
households, and he believed in monogamy with a sad kind of romantic fierceness that would certainly put him ahead of most men in the polls. Yes, the numbers were right; now the magical American love thing had to happen, which it usually did when the numbers were right.

And then he noticed that she was out of the bathroom and talking to him about something . . . What was it? The Foot? He had been looking at the Foot poster. What was she saying? Down with Stalin? Up with the people? She was definitely saying something about the Foot and the long-put-upon Stolovan nation. But despite her insistent tone, Vladimir was too busy thinking about a strategy to make her love him to hear the particulars of what she was saying. Yes, it was time for the love thing to happen.

WELL
,
SHE DID
look good after her makeover! She was dressed in a little silk blouse which, she must have been aware, defined her contours closely, and had her hair completely up, save for a few stray wisps that fell out of the bun adorably, after a fashion he had seen in contemporary New York subway ads. Perhaps later he could take her to Larry Litvak’s cocktail party—to which he had been invited by phone, postcard, and several gooey encounters with the man himself—and, once there, show her exactly where Vladimir Girshkin was lodged in Prava’s social firmament.

The theater was in the Lesser Quarter, meters from the Emanuel Bridge and close enough to the castle to be in audible range of the bells of its cathedral. Like all real estate of its caliber the theater was crammed with young foreigners, the bulk of them wearing black-and-orange down jackets and baseball caps with logos of American sports teams worn backward. This was the year’s fall fashion-statement for that hideously sterile human mass expanding via satellite from Laguna Beach to Guangdong Province—
the
international middle class
—and it made Vladimir yearn for winter and heavy overcoats and the end of the tourist season, as if there would ever be an end.

On the plus side, the global men all stared at Vladimir’s date as if she was the living embodiment of the reason they slaved away night and day at their engineering textbooks and accounting software, and the looks they reserved for
him,
that goateed shrimp of a poet, were enough to demonstrate for those of a Catholic disposition envy’s place among the seven deadly ones.

As for the women, bah! all those jangling gold bracelets and tight V-neck sweaters were for naught—no one, not the Bengali heiress nor the lawyer from Hong Kong wore her finery with such confidence and familiar grace as the candidate from Shaker Heights, Ohio. (During the anxious ride into the center, he had learned the name of the particular Cleveland suburb where Morgan grew tall and fair.)

Right! No matter which gender he encountered that night it certainly seemed that this whole enterprise, this date, had gotten off on the right foot, and to celebrate Vladimir bought at the concession stand a minibottle of Becherovka, the hideous Czech liqueur that tasted of burnt pumpkin. And for the lady, a little flask of the Hungarian booze called Unicom, which, despite its lingual similarity to a United Nations relief agency, was the source of innumerable atrocities to the stomach and its sensitive lining.

“Cheers!” They clinked their drinks and, predictably, Morgan gagged and coughed as would any mortal this side of the Danube, while Vladimir comforted her with improvised manliness, even touched her sweaty hand a little, out of concern, and wanted for a brief second to live forever in such circumstances (i.e., being manly; being envied; touching her, if only at the extremities). But then the lights went down and the mating ritual, such as it was, became a bit murky for Vladimir since there was little opportunity
for him to try out his witticisms and even less occasion to put on the moves. How could he, after all, with half the audience sniffling and bawling as the attractive hero on the screen became more and more emaciated with the progression of the awful disease, eventually to lose his hair then pass away by the closing credits?

What a scene there was then! By the time the curtains went down noses were trumpeting throughout the theater as if the castle walls outside belonged to ancient Jericho. But Morgan’s face was placid, if a little glazed over, and they stumbled wordlessly to the exit sign and into the street. They stood, still silent, watching the Fiat taxis being commissioned by departing moviegoers while the first drunken processions of Italian university students loudly made their way past the ominous shadow of an adjacent powder tower to some disco wonderland beyond.

Vladimir couldn’t wait to vent. “I hated it!” he shouted. “Hated it! Hated it!” He did a little dance in the shadows of the flickering street lamps, as if to demonstrate the primordial force of his hatred. But it was time for some kind of intellectual breakdown, so he said: “How trite. How revoltingly simple-minded. To turn AIDS into yet another courtroom drama. As if the only way Americans can express anything anymore is through legal proceedings. I’m so utterly underwhelmed.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I think just making this movie was a good thing. So many people have issues. Especially where I come from. My little brother and his friends can be such homophobes. They just don’t know any better. At least, this movie talks about AIDS. Don’t you think that’s important?”

What? What the hell was she quacking about? Who gave a fuck what her brother thought about queers. The point was the movie failed as a work of art! Art! Art! Weren’t the Americans here in Prava for art? Why the hell was
she
here? A little reasoned rebellion before grad school? A chance to show off to the suburban losers in
Shaker Heights: “That’s me and my Russian ex-boyfriend in front of the hotel where Kafka took an important crap in 1921. See that plaque by the door? Pretty nifty, huh?” He hadn’t even bothered to ask Morgan what she was doing here in Prava, but the sad alternatives—teaching American English to local businessmen or waitressing the breakfast shift at Eudora’s—were all too obvious. Oh, there was so much he needed to show her. So much she needed to know about the society in which she had landed. Yes, he would go the extra kilometer for this sweet Cleveland cutie. Those hale little cheeks. That nose.

“Well,” he said after a little while had passed and a weak-willed burst of rain had made them a little wet. “I certainly need a drink after that turkey.”

“How about Larry Litvak’s cocktail party?” she said.

So she had been invited, damn it! Now the burning question of our times was: Why, earlier, had she been by herself in her
panelak
watching television with the cat? Perhaps she was getting ready—the shower, the bathrobe, the ointment on the forehead. Or, worse yet, she didn’t even care about Larry Litvak’s party.
Devil confound it all!
thought Vladimir to himself in Russian, a phrase that floated in angry and unannounced whenever his worldly disequilibrium mounted to truly Dostoyevskian proportions.

“I also know of a little out-of-the-way club,” he ventured. “No one’s ever heard of it, and there’s plenty of actual Stolovans.” But she insisted on the cocktail party, and now there was nothing to do but go. As if to underscore the situation, Jan and the Beamer pulled up stealthily behind them and started flashing their headlights for attention. The evening was set.

BUT ALL WAS
not lost, not by a long shot. When they opened the door to Larry’s pad, the multitudes did let loose with a
tumbler-shaking “VLAAAAD!” and, of course, cried out nothing to the barely known Morgan, although surely she was admired in a silent way.

Larry Litvak lived, per his astronaut story, in the Old Town, actually on the outskirts of the Town, bordering Prava’s sprawling bus terminal, which, like all bus terminals, exuded nothing but rankness and ill-health, and was populated by a cast of characters fit for a television exposé.

The lights were down, way down, reminding Vladimir of college parties where the less one could discern of one’s companions, the more distant beds would rumble by the early morning’s light. Still, Vladimir could see that this was a spacious flat, built in the booming interwar period when Stolovans were still expected to live in apartments larger than their dachshunds’ quarters. In fact, the ceilings were so high, the place could have been mistaken for a SoHo loft, but reality abounded in the scary, socialist furniture—the squat, utilitarian divans and easy chairs outfitted in the kind of furry, worsted material that the
babushka
s enjoyed wearing on cold days. As if to accentuate his furniture’s prickly quality, Larry had installed three bergamots in the center of the main room and had placed miniature floodlights beneath them so that their craggy branches spread unsettling shadows against the ceiling and walls.

“It’s quite a place,” Vladimir shouted to Morgan over the din, with the implied knowledge of having been there many times before. Morgan looked to him in incomprehension. Things were happening too fast: there were hands being thrust at Vladimir from left and right, some already wet and reeking of gin, not to mention the frequent hugs and mouth-to-mouth kisses Vladimir received from impassioned well-wishers. Clearly, the young lady wasn’t used to a Girshkin-sized social persona. Did she have any choice now other than to love him?

They were carried by the crush of people into a kitchen
smoothly lit with candles where Larry was situated, his bong working overtime, and several of Prava’s more hippielike denizens swaying to Jerry Garcia, their expressions blank, their bodies loose and loafy like palm trees caught in the wind. “Hey, man,” said Larry, dressed in a transparent black kimono, which revealed in its entirety his sinewy but muscular frame—the show-off. He hugged Vladimir tightly until the latter could feel every part of him.

“Hey, man,” he kept repeating, and Vladimir fondly recalled his high school days when he and Baobab and the rest of them were always stoned and would spend the day mumbling: “Hey, man . . . don’t eat that
thing,
man . . . that
thing
is for later, man . . .” Oh, the innocence of those days, that brief period in the Reagan/Bush era when the sixties had returned to American high schools in force. The stooped posture, the half-closed eyes, the hundred-word vocabulary. Oh.

The hippies were introduced, their names sliding in and out of memory. The pièce de résistance, the bong almost a meter in length, was wheeled around for the guest of honor. Larry bent down to light it while Vladimir sucked on the rancid mouthpiece, then passed it to Morgan who tackled it like a good sport.

SATISFIED
,
VLADIMIR TOOK
her arm and they floated back into the main room, scarcely remembering to tell the “we’ll be right back” party lie to Larry Litvak and company. Here, there was another crush around Vladimir and his date, this one consisting entirely of tall, elegant men in chinos, wire-rims, and nose rings plying Vladimir with drinks, mentioning by name
Cagliostro
and (surprisingly) PravaInvest, then cheerfully prodding their women friends into the foreground for brief introductions. This whole setup was reminiscent of a nineteenth-century ball in the Russian provinces, when the local society men had spotted the general
arrived fresh from Petersburg and then closed in on him full of platitudes and talk of business, toting their beautiful wives behind them as a sign of their own rank and good breeding.

The year 1993? Well, such anachronisms could have been a sign of the much-discussed Victorian revival. And while it was shocking for Vladimir to meet these non-Bohemians who wore their nose rings out of fashion and not rebellion, it struck an old, aristocratic chord in him (for in the early twentieth century the Girshkins had owned three hotels in the Ukraine) and he responded with a mounting sense of noblesse oblige: “Yes, pleased to meet you . . . Of course, I’ve heard of you . . . We ran into each other at the Martini Bar at the Nouveau . . . Such pleasant circumstances . . . This is Morgan, yes . . . And you are? . . . And this is? . . .”