Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook

“Idiot, I told you we’re filming tonight. See, if you ever actually listened to me, I wouldn’t have to spend half the day banging out critiques and denunciations.”

Vladimir smiled. One had to give points to this youth willing to carry on a fight dressed in Baobab’s gamy boxers, jeans draped around the ankles.

“Laszlo!” Baobab shouted. “You’re filming with Laszlo, am I right?”

“Peasant!” she shouted back, slamming a bathroom door behind her. “Sicilian peasant!”

“What? Come again?” Baobab turned in the direction of the kitchen and the breakables. “My grandfather was a parliamentarian before Mussolini! You Staten Island whore!”

“Okay, okay,” Vladimir said, taking hold of one approaching Popeye arm. “Now we go, we have a drink. Come, Garibaldi. Here are your cigarettes and your lighter. We go, we go.”

THEY WENT. Acab was hailed to haul them to Baobab’s favorite bar in the meat-packing district. A few years hence this tattered part of downtown would catch the eye of the barbarian hordes from Teaneck and Garden City, and later become a bona fide hipster playground, but for now it was all but abandoned at night—a fitting locale for Baobab’s favorite bar.

The Carcass had an authentic pool of blood at the entrance, courtesy of a neighboring hog-slaughtering outfit. One could still see the conveyor belts that transported the heifers of yesteryear running along the length of the Carcass’s ceiling. Below one could also be as anachronistic as needed: put some Lynyrd Skynyrd on the jukebox, whip out a stick of beef jerky, ruminate out loud on the contours of the waitress, or watch a trio of emaciated graduate students standing around the pool table with their cue sticks at attention, as if waiting for funding to appear. The usual crowd.

“So?” They had both asked the question. Bourbon was on the way.

“This Laszlo person is a problem?”

“Damn Magyar poser’s trying to screw my baby girl,” Baobab said. “Weren’t the Hungarians part of the Great Tatar Horde originally?”

“You’re thinking of my mother.” Mongolka!

“No, I assure you, this Laszlo’s quite the barbarian. He has that international odor. And his personal pronouns are a mess… Yes, of course I know how I sound. And if I was a girl aged sixteen and had the opportunity to tango with some putz who had groomed Fellini’s dog, or whatever Laszlo’s claim to fame is, I’d sign up in a Budapest minute.”

“But has he actually made any movies?”

“The Hungarian version of The Road to Mandalay. Very allegorical, I hear. Vlad, have I ever told you that all love is socioeconomic?”

“Yes.” Actually, no.

“I’ll tell you one more time then. All love is socioeconomic. It’s the gradients in status that make arousal possible. Roberta is younger than me, I’m more experienced than her, she’s smarter than me, Laszlo’s more European than her, you’re more educated than Challah, Challah’s… Challah…”

“Challah’s a problem,” Vladimir said. The waitress was arriving with the bourbons, and Vladimir looked to her pleasant figure—pleasant in the Western sense, meaning: impossibly thin, but with breasts. She was clothed entirely in two large swatches of leather, the leather fake and shiny in a self-mocking way, absolutely correct for 1993, the first year when mocking the mainstream had become the mainstream. Also, the waitress had no hair on her head, an arrangement Vladimir had warmed to over the years, despite his fondness for rooting his nose through musty locks and curls. And finally, the waitress had a face, a fact lost on most of the patrons, but not on Vladimir who admired the way one overdone eyelash stuck miserably to the skin below. Pathos! Yes, she was a high-quality person, this waitress, and it saddened Vladimir that she wouldn’t look at him in the least as she served the bourbons.

“Perhaps these… Oh, I will not succumb to your lingo. Okay, fine, perhaps these gradients in status between Challah and myself are no longer enough to arouse me.”

“You’re saying you’ve come too close together. Like a marriage.”

“That’s precisely what I’m not saying! There, you see how your nonsense gets in the way of conversation? I’m saying I don’t know what the hell’s going on in her head anymore.”

“Not much.”

“That’s not very nice.”

“But it’s true. Look, you meet her, you’re fresh out of your Midwestern collegiate disaster with that lean, mean Vlad-eater, what was her name? You’re back a confused little eeemigrant in New York, the little Girshkie-wirshkie, woo-choo-choo, Girshkie-wirshkie…”

“Asshole.”

“And then, whoosh! A casualty of the American Dream, par excellence. She gets whipped for a living! For God’s sake, there’s not even the need for symbolism. Enter Girshkie, his compassion, his broken heart, his twenty-thousand-dollar-a-year salary waiting to be shared, and off we go from submission to dominance, and let’s not forget hugs, talks, walks—my God, this guy just wants to help. But what’s in it for the Good Samaritan, huh? Challah’s still Challah. Not terribly interesting. Kinda large there—”

“Now you’re resigned to being mean to make yourself feel better.”

“Not true. I’m telling you what you already know inside. I’m translating it from the Russian original.” But he was being mean to make himself feel better. It was Baobab, after all, who had introduced Challah to Vladimir. The meeting took place at Bao’s Righteous Easter Party, an annual event lousy with students from City College, where Baobab was a lifetime scholar and purveyor of Golden Moroccan hashish.

Challah was sitting in a corner of the host’s bedroom on a beanbag, staring first at her cigarette and then into her ashtray and then back at her disintegrating conversation piece. Baobab’s bedroom being a fairly large (although windowless) affair, the guests had crammed themselves neatly into the corners, leaving plenty of open space for guest appearances.

So, in corner number one there was Challah, alone, smoking, ashing; in corner number two we have a pair of engineering students, a heavyset and demonstrably gay Filipino practicing hypnosis on a very loud and impressionable man half his age (“You are Jim Morrison…I am Jim Morrison!”); corner number three—Roberta, who had just entered Baobab’s life, being purposefully rubbed down by Bao’s history professor, a ruddy Canadian hoser; and, finally, corner number four, our hero Vladimir trying to have an intelligent discussion with a Ukrainian exchange student on the topic of disarmament.

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?”