Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook

Here, the din was glaring; a different caste of people swarmed around a tableful of shrimp cocktail, while Francesca stood beneath rows of corrugated-steel cabinets pleasantly overdressed in her royal velvet, laughing at a drunk Indian man—equally dapper in a tuxedo—pounding at her head with a pair of inflatable antlers.

“Hi,” Vladimir said sheepishly to the antlered Indian.

“That’s enough now, Rakhiv,” Francesca said, reaching out to grasp an antler. A dark tuft of hair looked out at Vladimir from her armpit.

The Indian gentleman turned his long face to scowl at Vladimir, then slunk off past the shrimp eaters. So, Vladimir had competition. How exciting. He was feeling like a very competitive entry tonight, although the Indian had a classical face with that popular sad look.

“A drink!” Francesca said. “I’ll make you a Rob Roy. My mother practically birthed me with bitters.” She opened the nearest cabinet and took out a cocktail glass etched with the image of a thoughtful-looking egret swooping down over a small crayfish-like creature bubbling out of the wetlands. She turned to another cabinet for limes and a dusty bottle of Glenlivet. “You have to meet the Libber sisters,” Francesca was saying.

“Maybe we can go for a walk after this drink,” Vladimir suggested.

Her cold fingers smelling of scotch, Francesca patted his cheek, as if to disabuse him of such silly thoughts. “Have you heard of Shmuel Libber, their father?” she said. “He discovered the world’s oldest dreidel.”

On cue, the Libber sisters emerged from behind a ficus plant—two pale, identical beauties with a slightly Asiatic cast—bearing news of an ancient Jewish spinning top.

“I have heard of your father’s work…” Vladimir began, just as Tyson stormed in, ahemed brusquely, and made a show of looking down at his feet.

“Vladimir, some of your friends are here. Could you… please… greet them?”

Vladimir found Baobab in the main room, dressed in his signature colonial khakis, his pith helmet lanced with an ostrich feather, holding on firmly to the little Malaysian student who was bowing politely while pointing with her free hand at an imaginary avenue of escape. “I wear my syphilis like a badge of honor,” Baobab was roaring to her over the television’s strum of sitars. “I picked it up in Paris, straight from the source. The writings of Nietzsche, if you care to know, are, in essence, syphilitic.”

Roberta, resplendent in some kind of Day-Glo leopard nightie and bowler hat, had draped herself over Frank and was squeezing his big cheeks, shouting, “Wubbly, you’ve got a lot of life in you!”

The silenced crowd was tiptoeing away, the contents of the melting pot sluicing back into the kitchen. But their traffic was slow, their gaze affixed to the cause of their eviction—the fat little man in the pith helmet, the near-naked teenager, and… in the corner.

Challah was sitting in the corner, in the same tired bondage gear that Vladimir had found her in eight months ago, looking down at her drink for companionship as the young intellectuals galloped past her, their inflatable antlers shaking in consternation. She caught sight of Vladimir and waved desperately for him to come over.

By this time Vladimir had taken hold of Baobab who was, in turn, losing his grip on the Malaysian woman. “What is this?” Vladimir whispered. “Why did you bring Challah? Why are you behaving like this?”

“Behaving like what? I’m doing you a favor. Where’s the new woman?”

In the kitchen, the deep-timbred sounds of twentysomething commotion were building, with Francesca’s voice an indisputable part of the outcry. Meanwhile, in one corner of the living room, Frank was succumbing to the little huntress in braces and negligee; in another corner, Challah was depositing one warm finger into her drink, watching the rusty sherry undulate.

And Vladimir? Vladimir had maybe twenty seconds to live.

“PLEASE UNTIE MEnow,” Vladimir said.

The handkerchief was unfastened. Vladimir removed the blindfold himself. Rich Fifth Avenue light, healthy and dappled, overwhelmed the pale curtains.

“Sorry about the coitus last night,” Francesca said. “I was too rough. I was acting out.”

“No, it was my fault,” Vladimir said, covering his lower quarters with sheets, rubbing his swollen wrists. “Inviting my friends was an act of aggression.” With a shaky finger, he traced the teeth marks inscribed on his upper thigh. “By physically acting out against me you became both aggrieved and perpetrator. You empowered yourself.” These strange yet familiar words, unheard of since his tenure at the progressive Midwestern college, slipped out of his mouth. He knew he was hunting for that notorious animal, subtext. That Big-foot of the literate world. So what was the subtext here?

He wasn’t thinking, in particular, of the painful role-playing, the thoughtful humiliations she had visited upon him (for a time he was completely naked and she dressed in her father’s classroom turtleneck and tweeds), but of the entire physical package. Two people just two hundred pounds short of nonexistence burrowing into each other, a dangerous and tenuous situation; the scrape of bone and pubis; the distinct lack of odor that more viable animals regularly produce. Oh, the degenerate joy of the lightweighted.

Fran lowered a T-shirt over her arms, and the two tiny breasts, only slightly larger than Vladimir’s soft duo, disappeared into cotton. “Your friends came to that party,” she said, “like young imperialists, like little conquerors. They totally failed to see the integrity of our indigenous academic culture and had to frame it in their own atrophied discourse. It might as well have been Leopold’s troops traveling up the Congo.”

Vladimir felt a pressing need to pull on his underpants; to achieve some kind of parity. (He was starting to feel as if an invisible tennis announcer was constantly shouting off-court: “Advantage: Francesca.”) But he had no idea where his underpants had ended up during the drunken melee that preceded their first coupling. And something told him that his nakedness and meek silence were right. That in the face of smarter women it was best to beat a continuous retreat, to slash and burn one’s own personal convictions before their sure-footed advance.

Yes, he was convinced now that he had misjudged her, that the easy banter of the nights before was just a beachhead for this confident American woman, and what she really wanted from him, whatever this turned out to be, he couldn’t possibly give her.

Because sooner rather than later she would comprehend the limitations of a man who at the ripe age of twenty-five had just been taught how to walk by his mother. What do you do with a man like that? thought Vladimir. You needed the patience of a Challah, or, perhaps, the pathos, and it was rather doubtful that this sleek young woman would have either.

“That fat misogynist fool…” Fran was saying. “Using syphilis as a come-on line. Poor Chandra. And that… The large woman with the Weehawken outfit. What the hell was she about?”

Vladimir shook his head then buried it in one of Fran’s elephantine pillows with their etched scenes of Venetian life. “My friends and I, we’re a pretty open-minded bunch,” Fran was saying, “but we have our limits. Those people were just inexcusable.”

“They grew up watching television,” Vladimir mumbled into the comforting pillow. “They looked for prizes in cereal boxes. They’re a product of the culture, and American culture in the twentieth century is, by definition, imperialist.” But he was apportioning too much blame to his friends, when self-flagellation was the order of the day. He made a note of this.