Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook

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 DRIFTINGthrough 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.

“Nu,” Rybakov shouts to Vladimir. “Ready to jump, Airman?” Beneath the aircraft, a blue grid of urban light is replacing the void of the countryside. The nascent city is bisected by a dark loop of river, illuminated solely by the lights of barges making their way downstream. The word PRAVA, glowing in neon, is spelled in giant Cyrillic characters on the city’s left bank.

“My son is waiting for you…there!” The Fan Man points somewhere between the neon P and the neon R. “You will recognize him right away. He is a substantial man standing by a row of Mercedes. Handsome like his father.”

Before Vladimir can object, the doors of the cargo bay open, and the parachutist is engulfed by the cold night air… The nebulous sensation of plummeting in a dream.

I’m falling to earth! thinks Vladimir.

It is not an unpleasant feeling.

VLADIMIR AWOKE ATnoon in the uptown studio of Francesca’s friend Frank. This Frank, an evident Slavophile, had decorated his room with a half dozen handmade icons of gold crepe, along with a wall-sized Bulgarian tourist poster showing an onion-domed rural church flanked by a terrifically woolly animal (baa?). Vladimir would never find out exactly what happened on that long journey uptown, how he was wheeled in past the doorman, how the apartment was requisitioned for his use, and the other details lost on the inebriated. Quite a first impression Vladimir must have made—five minutes of conversation followed by a light coma.

But then…! But then… On the Swede-made instant-coffee table… what did he find? A pack of Nat Sherman cigarettes to steal, yes… And next to the cigarettes… Next to the cigarettes there was a note. So far so good. And then on the note… concentrate now… in looped middle-class script, Francesca’s last name (Ruocco)… Her Fifth Avenue address and phone number… And, to conclude, a sympathetic invitation to drop by her house at eight and then to a TriBeCa party by eleven.

Success.

With shaky fingers, Vladimir lit a Nat Sherman’s cigarette, a long, brown cylinder tasting of honey and ash. He smoked it in the elevator although this was the kind of newish building where smoke detectors abounded. He smoked it past the doorman, out onto the street, all the way into Central Park. Only then did Vladimir remember his original plan, the drunken plan he had formulated before he boldly took the seat opposite Francesca.