Russian Debutante's Handbook (35 page)

Of course, being under the liberating influence of a meter’s worth of dope quickly added hilarity to the proceedings, setting Vladimir’s mind at ease as he floated above the masses and their babbling and screeching and clucking. Soon his Russian accent emerged in force, lending Count Girshkin an aura of authenticity, which left the fair representatives of Houston and Boulder and Cincinnati twice enamored of the small poet and businessman around whom all of Prava’s expatriate world would now seem to revolve.

He felt Morgan tugging at his sleeve, no longer amused at being marginalized. “Let’s find Alexandra,” she whispered and, whether she meant it or not, touched Vladimir’s ear with her balmy nose.

“Let’s,” Vladimir said, and he put his arm around her and squeezed the broad Ohioan shoulders, so healthy and amenable to squeezing.

They broke through the cordon of well-wishers and arrived at the bergamots which, swaying from the winds of a distant fan, scratched at Vladimir’s face until he stopped to look stupidly at his arboreal assailants as if to say: “Don’t you know who I am?”

Behind the little trees they saw a long, satin couch flanked by similar recliners on which the Crowd had decamped along with several martini decanters and entire carafes of curaçao. They sat laughing and passing judgment without stop at those around them like some hastily assembled Style Council. Occasionally they entertained outsiders who approached with little bundles of paper bearing words or drawings, and sometimes with little computer disks. It seemed that the upcoming first issue of
Cagliostro
had swelled their heads nicely; a frontal assault by Mexican bees would have proved superfluous.

Cohen spotted them amid the shrubbery: “There he is! Vladimir!”

“Morgan!” Alexandra shouted with something like awe, determined to raise the standing of her newfound friend.

The couple approached and a glittering sky-blue divan was rolled out for them as if by the Devil’s command. Alexandra kissed Morgan on both cheeks, while Vladimir shook hands with the boys and sweetly kissed Alexandra on one cheek, and was kissed, in turn, on both.

The boys had outdone themselves, channeling the glam-nerd look into a formal direction: ash-brown sports jackets and shirts of mourning hues with morose little ties snaking down to their bellies. Alexandra wore a new taupe riding jacket, evidently from one of Prava’s more accomplished antique shops, beneath which was her customary black turtleneck and matching tights.

But one was missing from the group. “And where is Maxine?” Vladimir said, biting his tongue as he remembered that the Expat Dating Committee had already slated the Girshkin-Maxine nuptials for early next spring, and here he was, playing the field with Morgan.

Sure enough, as soon as he mentioned Maxine, a look passed over Morgan’s face, the look of a child lost in a crowded train
station, and Larry’s party was, of course, infinitely stranger than any of the world’s train stations and just as crowded. “Maxine’s taken ill,” Alexandra said. “Nothing serious. She’ll be up on her feet tomorrow.”

The “up on her feet” business was evidently meant to discourage Vladimir from attempting any change in the woman’s verticality. Clearly, Alexandra had told Morgan everything she needed to know about Vladimir’s steamy nonaffair with Maxine.

The situation was unwittingly defused by the excited Cohen who hadn’t seen Vladimir in a couple of days and all but jumped on him. “My friend needs to step to the bar,” he shouted, roaring drunk. “You girls talk among yourselves.” Vladimir looked back at Morgan, worried about leaving her behind. Fortunately, the sight of two attractive women, Morgan and Alexandra, chatting with gusto had the effect of keeping potential suitors at bay. The predatory young men of Prava were easily confounded by the phenomenon of women making do without them.

At the bar, a tiny affair jutting out of an oak bookshelf filled with the collected works of Papa Hemingway, the patron saint of the expatriate scene, the irrepressible Cohen attempted to fix Vladimir a gin and tonic by spilling vodka all over his new imported loafers. When informed by the laughing Vladimir that
gin
not vodka went into a gin and tonic, Cohen spilled that on him too.

“So, you’ve been tying one on,” Vladimir said.

“I’ve been tying one on for the past five years,” Cohen said. “I’m what in the liquor industry is called an alcoholic.”

“Me too,” Vladimir said. He had never given the matter much thought, but the words certainly rang true.

“Well, let’s drink to that!” cried Vladimir in an effort to shoo away the approaching discomfort, and they clinked their glasses.

“Speaking of tying one on,” Cohen said, “Plank and I are ready
for a major bout with the bottle tomorrow. To the finish!” He winked in the direction of the bar.

“I see,” Vladimir said. He saw Cohen and Plank as two pugilists duking it out, slow-motion, with a sweating bottle of Stoli in some sort of performance-art piece.

“You care to join us? None of this shit. Just the three of us. The men.” Then, without warning—and when did he ever give warning?—Cohen threw his arms around Vladimir and squeezed hard. By this time the lights had been dimmed to the degree where the two of them looked like yet another couple on the express checkout lane to bed. The frightened Vladimir peeked out from within his friend’s grasp and tried to maneuver an arm free to signal to the crowd and Morgan that this was not his idea of a good time, but he was hard-pressed to think of the appropriate signal. Anyway, Cohen soon let go and Vladimir saw to his welcome relief that a critical mass had been reached in the room and nobody gave much of a damn about anyone else, really. Even unabashed homosexual sex with the accompanying grunts broadcast over the stereo system would probably go unnoticed for several minutes.

“Aww, we miss you, man,” Cohen said. “You’re so busy with work and . . .” He stopped, tired of sounding like a jilted lover.

Across the room Vladimir saw Plank looking disgustedly into his drink as if he had been slipped a diuretic, while on the couch next to him Alexandra and Morgan gestured up a storm of conversation. What was it with these disconsolate young men? Was being the cornerstone of Prava’s elite not enough for them? Did they expect to lead meaningful lives as well? “All right,” Vladimir said. “We’ll go out by ourselves. We’ll have a good time. We’ll drink. We’ll get drunk. All right?”

“All right!” shouted Cohen. Brightening, he reached for a bottle, even as Vladimir saw Morgan glancing his way, pointing discreetly at her watch. Did she want to leave already? With Vladimir in tow?
Was she not having a good time? No one eloped from a Larry Litvak party before the clock struck three in the morning. It was simply good manners.

“So how’s your writing?” Vladimir asked Cohen.

“Pitiful,” said Cohen, his big lips quivering characteristically. “I’m too in love with Alexandra to even write about her anymore . . .”

And there was the crux of the problem—love had come to town and Plank and Cohen had bought time shares in that ever-expanding development. Judging by Cohen’s trembling lips and wet eyes, he was already in Phase III, by the lapping pool and the Jack Nicklaus–designed golf course.

“So don’t write about her,” came a stern, gravelly voice, which Vladimir first imagined might belong to Cohen’s grandfather on his Jewish side, arrived in Prava for the approaching high holy days. He looked about for the source until Cohen pointed downward and said, “I’d like you to meet the poet Fish, also from New York.”

The poet Fish was not a midget but he brushed by that category with little room to spare. He looked like an unwashed twelve-year-old, and his hair was thick and matted, an overturned bowl of ramen noodles; despite all this he had the voice of Milton Berle. “Charmed,” the poet said offering Vladimir his hand as if he expected it to be kissed. “Everyone’s talking about Vladimir Girshkin,” he said. “It was the first thing I heard at the baggage carousel.”

“Stop it!” Vladimir said. To himself he thought:
And what do they say?

“Fish is staying with Plank for a couple of days,” Cohen said. “He’s been published by an Alaskan literary journal.” And then Cohen turned instantly pale as if he had just seen someone across the room, someone who tugged at his memory in a most inopportune way. Vladimir even followed the dim light of his eyes to see who it might be, but then Cohen simply said: “I’ve got to go and retch,” and the mystery was solved.

“So,” Vladimir said, now that Cohen had left the dwarf on his hands (he hoped the little guy at least looked exotic to others). “A poet, huh?”

“Listen here,” the poet said, rising on his tippy-toes to breathe into Vladimir’s chin. “I heard you got a little something going here, this PravaInvest shit.”

“Little?” Vladimir fanned out like a peacock upon sighting his mate-to-be. “We’re capitalized with over thirty-five billion U.S. dollars . . .”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said the poet Fish. “I’ve got a business proposition for you. Ever snorted horse tranquilizer?”

“I beg?”

“Horse tranquilizer. Just how long exactly have you been out of The City?”

Vladimir presumed he meant New York City and was shocked to remember that no matter what they did out here in Prava and Budapest and Cracow, The City—that long grid of blasted streets and no apologies—still remained the bull’s-eye of the galaxy. “Two months,” he said.

“It’s everywhere,” Fish said. “In all the clubs. You can’t be an artist in New York and not snort the horse. Trust me, I know.”

“How’s that?”

“It’s like a frontal lobotomy. It clears your head out when there’s gridlock. You think of nothing. And here’s the best part—it lasts only fifteen minutes per snort. After that you’re back to doing your thing. Some even report having a renewed sense of self. Of course, that’s mainly the prose writers. They’ll say anything.”

“Are there any side effects?” Vladimir asked.

“None. Let’s go out on the balcony. I’ll show you.”

“Let me think—”

“That’s precisely what you don’t want to do. Look, I’ve got this veterinarian near Lyon, he’s on the board of a major pharmaceutical
there. We can corner the Eastern European market with your PravaInvest. And what’s a more likely distribution point than Prava?”

“Yes, well,” Vladimir said. “But is it legal?”

“Sure,” Fish said.

“Why not?” he added, seeing that the matter was not yet put to rest.

“Well, it helps if you own a horse,” he said finally. “I just bought a couple of sickly ones down in Kentucky. Come on already.” And he led him out of the room, as Morgan and Alexandra stared from their couch, alarmed at the strange spectacle of PravaInvest’s executive vice president following intently on the heels of a leprechaun.

The balcony overlooked the bus terminal, which, despite the majestic glint of the full moon, remained a tortured patchwork of cement and corrugated metal.

And then there were the buses:

From the West came the two-story, deluxe models with television screens flickering and air-conditioners tracing their green exhaust against the asphalt. These would disgorge streams of clean, young backpackers from Frankfurt, Brussels, and Turin, who immediately set to celebrating their newfound East Bloc freedom by showering each other with roadside Uneskos, flashing peace signs to the waiting cabbies.

From the East came the appropriately named IKARUS buses: terminally ill, their low, gray frames shuddering to the finish line; the doors opening slowly and obstinately to let out the tired families from Bratislava and Kosice, or the aging professionals from Sofia and Kishinev who held their briefcases close to their sparkling polyester suits as they made their way to the nearby metro station. And Vladimir could almost smell these briefcases, which, like his father’s, likely contained the leftovers of a meaty lunch packed for the road, leftovers that might now serve as dinner—Golden Prava was getting expensive for the average Bulgarian.

But Vladimir’s examination of this unhappy dichotomy, a dichotomy which was in some ways the story of his life, which brought on feelings of both elation and remorse—the elation of having a special, privileged knowledge of both East and West, the remorse of fitting finally into neither—was interrupted by the stinging, crystal-edged horse powder which the poet Fish administered to him nasally and then

not

        much

    happened.

Perhaps that’s an exaggeration. Something, of course, happened, even while Vladimir withdrew into the upper stories of his brain where the thin mountain air was not conducive to the cognitive process. The buses kept arriving and departing but now they were just buses (buses, you know, transport, point A to point B) and Fish rolling up and down the balcony naked, howling, and waving his tiny purple penis at the moon was just a young man with his purple penis, howling.
Nothing much was happening in a big way.
In fact, nonexistence was no longer so unfathomable (and how many times had he, as a morose child, shut his eyes and plugged his ears with cotton, trying to imagine The Void), but rather a fairly natural progression of this goofy happiness. The floating, bottomless joy of anesthesia.

And then the fifteen minutes were up and, like clockwork, Vladimir was noiselessly airlifted into his body; Fish was putting on his clothes.

Vladimir stood up. He sat down. He got up again. Anything for sensory experience. He sliced at his fingers with his business card
for a bit, before presenting it to the poet. Very enjoyable. He was ready to plunge into the Tavlata.

“I’ll send you a starter kit with instructions,” Fish was saying. “And also some of my poetry.”

“I have fallen under the influence of John Donne,” he added, buttoning up his funky elfin tunic.

“
SO
,
ARE YOU
a good person?” Morgan asked.

It was five in the morning. After the party. An island in the middle of the Tavlata, connected to the Lesser Quarter by a single footbridge of uncertain origin; an isle that seemed all but abandoned by Prava’s vague municipal services; an overgrown jumble of mammoth trees and the little shrubs that clung to them the way baby elephants rub up against the feet of their mothers. They were sitting on the grass behind a tremendous oak with its boughs fully leafed despite the advance of autumn; this redoubtable old-timer welcomed in the passing seasons at his own discretion. On the other side of the footbridge, high above them, moonlight fell on the spindly buttresses of the castle’s cathedral, giving St. Stanislaus the appearance of a giant spider which had somehow scampered over the castle walls and settled in for the night.