Russian Debutante's Handbook (7 page)

The guest appearance was Baobab’s. He came in dressed like the
Savior, did a little number with his crown of thorns, some indecent exposure courtesy of his loincloth, got some good laughs out of everyone including Challah who was wrapped into herself in the corner, a huddle of dark cloth and Satanic jewelry. Then he fondled Jim Morrison and, in turn, his hefty hypnotist friend, tried to extricate Roberta from the clutches of the academy, and finally sat down next to Vladimir and the Ukrainian. “Stanislav, they’re making toasts out in the kitchen,” Bao said to the Ukrainian. “I think they need you.”

“That’s Challah, a friend of Roberta’s,” Baobab said after the Ukrainian had left.

“Challah?” Vladimir was thinking, of course, of the sweet, fluffy bread served on the eve of the Jewish Sabbath.

“Her father’s a commodities trader, lives in Greenwich, Connecticut, and she works as a submissive.”

“She could play Magdalene to your Christ,” sneered Vladimir. Nonetheless, he went over to introduce himself.

“Hello,” Vladimir said, plunking himself down in her beanbag nest. “Do you know I’ve been hearing your name all night?”

“No,” she said. Only she didn’t say it in mock modesty, such as done with a flourish of the arms and a stretch of the word: “Naaaaaawh.” Instead, it was just a quiet syllable, perhaps one could even read some plaintiveness into it, which surely Vladimir did. Her “no” meant that no, he hadn’t been hearing her name all night. Hers was not a name like that.

Is it possible: Love at first word? And with the first word being “No”? Here one should suspend disbelief and answer affirmatively: Yes, in post–Reagan/Bush Manhattan with its youth pierced, restless, weaned on flashing image and verbally disinclined, it is possible. For with that one word, Vladimir, who had been out of love with himself ever since his ignominious flight from the Midwest, recognized a welcome substitute for self-love. After all, here was a
woman who was alone and apart at parties, who worked as a submissive, who, he suspected, allowed herself extravagance only in dress, but otherwise knew that her world had limits.

In other words, he could love
her.

And even if his suspicions proved wrong, he was still—it is necessary to admit this—aroused by the thought that foreign hands were upon her body, intent on hurting her, while at the same time wondering what kind of sex they could have together, and what he could do to change her life. And she looked cute, baby fat and all, especially in that unholy get-up. “Okay,” he said, knowing to tread lightly. “I just wanted to meet you, that’s why I came over.” Oh, Vladimir, gentle pick-up artist!

But meet her he did. Clearly it had been a while since a man had talked to her at length and with a minimum of intimidation (Vladimir the foreigner was himself intimidated). The next nine hours were spent talking, first in Baobab’s bedroom, then in a nearby diner, and finally in Vladimir’s bedroom, about their twin escapes—Russia & Connecticut—and within twenty-four hours they were discussing the possibility of further escape, together, into a circumstance where they could at least provide each other with dignity (that exact word was used). By the time Vladimir was ready to kiss her it was already ten in the morning. The kiss was meager yet affectionate, and following the kiss they fell asleep on top of each other, sleeping well into the next day.

BACK AT THE
carcass, Baobab was still going on about Vladimir’s problems in his Baobab way. But Vladimir had just one more thing to say on his own behalf: “Is it true that it could be over with Challah? Can I really end it on my own?” He answered the question himself. Yes, yes. To end it. It had to be done.

“Yes, the break-up,” Baobab said. “If you want my expert help, if
you want me to write an essay or something, just ask. Or better yet, let Roberta handle it. She can handle anything.” He sighed.

“Yes, Roberta,” said Vladimir, bent on imitating the cadence of Baobab’s speech. “I’m beginning to see, Bao, that just as I must solve my problems by myself, so you must be a man and do something about the Roberta situation.”

“Something manly?”

“Within reason.”

“Challenge Laszlo to a duel? Like Pushkin?”

“Can you be more successful than Pushkin? Can you see yourself using a side arm, accurately shooting the Tatar, hmm . . . ?”

“Vlad! Are you volunteering to be my second? That’s awfully white of you. Come, let’s kill that bastard.”

“Paff!” Vladimir said. “I won’t take part in this insanity. Besides, you said we were going to drink the night away. You promised me early liver failure.”

“Your friend is reaching out to you, Vladimir,” Baobab said, putting on his crumpled fedora.

“I’m useless in a confrontation. I’ll just be an embarrassment to you. In fact—”

But Baobab cut him off by executing a low bow and heading for the door, the ill effects of his battered hat now visibly compounded by his stupid engineer boots. Poor guy. “Hey! Promise me no fisticuffs,” Vladimir shouted to him.

Baobab blew him a kiss and was gone.

It took a full minute for Vladimir to register the fact that he had been abandoned, left without a drinking partner on a boozy Sunday night.

Without a drinking partner, Vladimir continued drinking. He knew many Russian songs about drinking alone, but the tragicomic import of their stanzas could not dissuade him from a volley of bourbons and the single gin martini that managed to sneak in,
its three crisp olives tinkling in a shapely glass. Tonight we drink, but tomorrow . . .a long stretch of sobriety in which Vladimir would wake up with a clear head and deal knowingly with immigrants. Such fascinating people. How many of his contemporaries, for instance, got to meet the likes of Mr. Rybakov, the Fan Man? And how many could inspire his confidences?

Resolved: Vladimir’s an okay kind of guy. Vladimir toasted to himself with his fifth bourbon, and showed his laminated teeth to the waitress who actually smiled back a little, or at least opened her mouth. “S . . .” Vladimir began to say (the completed word would have been “So”), but the waitress had already left with a tray of drinks for the graduate students at the billiards table. They drank wild fruity things, the scholars.

Another hour of this, and Vladimir was genuinely debilitated. Nothing could be said in his favor. His image, as seen in a nearby martini decanter, showed a Russian
pyanitsa,
a drunken lout with his thinning hair slicked down by sweat, the buttons of his shirt opened beyond what was desirable. Even his laminated teeth—the pride of the Girshkins—had somehow attracted a gritty element along the bottom row.

The grad students were still shooting pool, maybe he could wave at them, do a drunken wave, that’s allowed when you’re drunk. He could be a character . . .

He quaffed the new bourbon down in no time. There was a woman sitting alone at a table no bigger than an ashtray at the end of a row of such tables leading up to the door and the street. How long had she been there? There was something of the
pyanitsa
in her appearance as well—her head was tilted to one side as if her neck muscles had failed her, her mouth was wide open, her dark hair dried and matted. Also noticeable through Vladimir’s haze was (starting from the top and working down) paleness, dark eyes, a blank gray sweatshirt, more paleness in the hands, and a book. She
was reading. She was drinking. If only Bao had left him one of his books, but what for? So they could read at each other across a bar?

He took out a cigarette and lit it. Smoking made our Vladimir feel dangerous, made him think of running through Central Park at this late hour, sprinting to the sound of urban cicadas, zigzagging left and right like a soccer player, fooling death that lurked in the shadows between the park lights.

It was a plan.

He got up to leave, and the woman looked up at him. As he walked toward the door to outwit death in the park, she was still looking at him. She was right in front of him now and she was still looking at him.

He was sitting in the chair opposite her. Something must have tripped him, or else he just found himself sitting down on the warm plastic. The woman looked about twenty, her forehead developing an interstate of life’s first creases.

“I don’t know why I sat down,” Vladimir said. “I’m going to get up now.”

“You scared me,” the woman said. Her voice was deeper than his.

“I’m getting up now,” he said. He put one hand on the table. The book was
Manhattan Transfer.
“I love that book,” he said. “I’m leaving now. I didn’t mean to sit down.”

Again he was on his feet with the unsteady landscape around him. He saw the doorknob approaching and stuck out an anticipatory hand.

There was a chuckle behind him. “You look like Trotsky,” she said.

Good God, thought Vladimir, I’m going to have an affair.

He tasted the bourbon coating his tongue. He tweaked his goatee, pushed up his tortoiseshell glasses, and turned around. He walked back to her, making sure to bend his feet inward so that
they wouldn’t flop Jewishly to the side, firmly plowing his instep into the American soil (“Stamp the ground with your feet as if you own it!” Mother had instructed him).

“It’s only when I’m drunk,” he said to the young woman, letting the last word dangle, as if to illustrate. “I look more like Trotsky when I’m drunk.” One could do better with introductions perhaps.

He slumped back into the chair. “I can get up and go. You’re reading a good book,” he said.

The woman put a napkin into her book and closed it. “Where you from, Trotsky?” she said.

“I am Vladimir,” said Vladimir in a tone that made him want to add, “and I journey far and wide on behalf of Mother Russia.” He restrained himself.

“A Russian Jew,” the observant woman said. “What do you drink?”

“Nothing anymore. I’m all drunk and broke.”

“And you miss your country,” said the woman, trying to match his sadness. “Two whiskey sours,” she said to a passing waitress.

“You are so kind,” Vladimir said. “You must be from another place. You go to NYU and hail from Cedar Rapids? Your parents work the land. You have three dogs.”

“Columbia,” the woman corrected him. “Manhattanite by birth, and my parents are professors at City. One cat.”

“What can be better?” Vladimir said. “If you like Chekhov and social democracy, we can be friends.”

The woman stuck out a long, bony hand which felt surprisingly warm. “Francesca,” she said. “So you come to bars alone?”

“I was with a friend, but he left,” Vladimir said, and then judging by her name and appearance added: “He was an
Italian
friend.”

“I’m flattered,” Francesca said.

She then performed a very innocuous gesture—moved an errant twirl of hair upward and over her ear. In doing so, she exposed a ribbon of white skin which the summer sun had been unable to reach. It was the sight of this skin that lifted the drunken, swooning Vladimir up and over the rickety wooden fence beyond which infatuations are kept, grazing off the fat of the heart. Such a thin, translucent membrane, this stretch of skin. How could it ever guard the intellect from the suffocating summer air outside? Not to mention falling objects, perching birds, persons intent on doing harm. He thought he was going to cry. It was all so . . . But the childhood admonitions of his father were clear: no crying. He tried squinting instead.

“What’s wrong?” Francesca said. “You look troubled, dear.” Another round of whiskey sours had come out of nowhere. He reached out a trembling hand in the direction of the drink, its maraschino cherry blinking at him like a landing light.

And then a cozy darkness descended, just as a helpful arm was wrapped around his elbow . . . They were out on the sidewalk and through a blurring of vision he saw a taxi swing past her pale cheek. “Taxi,” Vladimir mumbled, trying to stay on his newly christened feet.

“Yes, boy,” Fran encouraged him. “Taxi.”

“Bed,” Vladimir said.

“And where,” she asked, “does Trotsky make his bed?”

“Trotsky make no bed. Trotsky rootless cosmopolitan.”

“Well, this is your red-letter day, Leon. I know of a nice couch up on Amsterdam and Seventy-second.”

“Seductress . . .” Vladimir whispered to himself.

Before long they were in the cab, headed uptown, past a familiar deli where Vladimir had once gotten something, a roast beef that didn’t work out. Next time he looked they had slipped onto
the speedy terrace of the West Side Highway, and they were still headed up, uptown.

And to what end? he thought before passing on to the Land of Nod.

 . . . 
AN AIRPLANE DRIFTING
through eastern European clouds rolled together, pierogi-style from the layered exhaust of coal, benzene, and acetate. Mother is yelling to Mr. Rybakov over the roar of propellers: “I remember the semifinals so vividly! Little Failure takes rook, loses queen, scratches his head, check and mate . . . The only Russian boy not to make it to the state championship.”

“Chess,” the Fan Man snorts, tapping the altimeter gauge. “A pursuit for idiots and layabouts. Don’t even talk to me about chess, Mama.”

“I’m just making an example!” Mother yells. “I’m drawing parallels between the arenas of chess and life. Remember, it was
I
who taught him how to walk! Where were you when he was hobbling around like a Jew? Ah, but it’s always left to the mother. Who make them their Salad Olivier? Who gets them their first job? Who helps them with their college essays?
‘Topic Two: Describe the biggest problem you have ever faced in your life and how you overcame it.’
Biggest problem? I walk like a Yid and I don’t love my mother . . .”

“It would be better if you shut your mouth,” Rybakov says. “Mamas are always meddling, always trying to give their boys the
teat . . . Suck! Suck, little one! And then they wonder why their sons turn out cretins. Besides, he’s my Vladimir now.”

Mother sighs and crosses herself in her new fashion. She turns around to smirk at Vladimir chafing away in the cargo bay, the straps of the parachute kit burning the delicate white meat of his shoulders.