Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook

“And to tell you the truth, it’s not really them I’m upset about,” Fran said. “They were only there for one night. I’ll never see them again. But what does it say about you? About the kind of life you’ve been living? You’re a very smart and unusual man. Well-read, educated, from a different country. How the hell did you end up with that crowd?”

Vladimir sighed. “How do I put it?” he said. He thought of literature. He thought of subtext. In the end his education did not fail him. “You know the Hemingway story ‘The Killers’?” he said. “When the killers are coming to get the boxer, what does the boxer say?”

“‘I got in wrong.’”

“There you go.”

“Now, by quoting Hemingway we’re not actually sanctioning the misogyny and racial condescension that defines his body of work.”

“Of course not,” he said. “Never.”

She ruffled the back of his head with its soft bumps and bony ridges. The warm touch was welcome after the night they had had. It bordered on affection, and as much as he did enjoy the roughhousing, he wanted the sweet stuff as well. “So what are you going to do about it?” she said.

“The misogyny?”

“No, the ‘getting in wrong’ business. Are you just going to settle for this lifestyle?”

“‘Life’ and ‘style’ really fail to describe it,” Vladimir said.

“I’d say.”

She laid down on top of him and put her nose into his neck. Despite its sharp outline, her honker felt sloppy and warm. She whispered into his ear: “Do you know why I like you, Vladimir? Have you figured it out yet? I don’t like you because you’re sweet or kind-hearted, or because you’re somehow going to change my world, since I’ve already decided that no man is ever going to change my world. I like you because you’re a small, embarrassed Jew. I like you because you’re a foreigner with an accent. I like you, in other words, because you’re my ‘signifier.’”

“Ah, thank you,” Vladimir said. Bozhe moi! he thought to himself. She knows me down to the very last. Small, embarrassed, Jewish, foreigner, accent. What more was there to him? This was what it meant to be Vladimir. He pressed himself to her, thinking he was going to die of happiness. Happiness and the dull pain of being somehow insufficient. Of being half-formed.

“Plus,” she continued, “let me say that my friends like you a lot, and my friends mean the world to me. Frank couldn’t stop talking about you all night. And even the way you handled your sad friends was impressive. You didn’t run away, you stayed and bore the brunt of their poor manners.

“Look, Vlad,” she said, “maybe what you need is to get in good for a change. To be around people of your own caliber. I’m not a trained mental-health-care professional, which I think is what you need in the long run, but who knows? Maybe I can help you.”

Actually, in her preppy little cotton T-shirt (a subtle mockery of the preppy class, reasoned Vladimir), her great, demonstrative nose supporting a pair of trendy oversized glasses, and the eyes themselves sleep-starved and black-ringed, she did look like a professional of sorts. An older person. A card-carrying adult. She looked a little like Mother, to tell the truth.

“Yes, I agree,” Vladimir whispered. “People of my own caliber. Above and beyond, that sort of thing. What’s the trick, eh?”

“I’m hungry,” she said.

BENEATH A PAIRof rusting golden lions, on the third floor of a midtown tenement, off of dishes decorated with the green-orange emblem of “The Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka,” they ate a brunch of scorching curry and sweet coconut broth.

“Hold my hand,” Francesca said after the socialist dishes had been cleared and her pasty visage was blushing from the curry and spice tea. He held her hand.

She took him to the Whitney Museum where Vladimir admired a row of three upright vacuum cleaners beneath Plexiglas. “Ah,” Vladimir said uncertainly. “I get it.” He brushed his head against her shoulder and in return got his ear pulled gently, in the same way a playful Napoleon once dispensed his good will.

She took him to a gallery where they admired Kiff’s painting The Poet Vladimir Mayakovsky Invites the Sun to Tea, wherein a smiling sun hops over the horizon to join Mayakovsky for chai and rhyme. “Yes,” Vladimir said, feeling on more familiar ground. “Perfect,” he said, and then declaimed one of the master’s verses in Russian, for which he was duly patted on the rump.

Past the yellow July smog, the variegated layers of New York humidity, past these curtains of heat they walked, she in her stern white T-shirt, perspiring visibly under the arms in the European manner, the outlines of her little body carefully drawn. And how did Vladimir look? Vladimir didn’t care how Vladimir looked. Good enough to be seen with her, obviously (there she was now by his side).

But on that account he was soon proven wrong. In a cramped East Village store, its interior shrouded with incense, he was forced to buy himself a Cuban guayabera shirt, silky and looped with Art Nouveau–type curlicues. It was the same kind of shirt he had once seen the Fan Man wear, only this one cost an improbable fifty dollars. Brown janitor pants from another salon complemented his new outfit. “Blue jeans… What was I thinking?” he said, kicking the dead denim beast on the floor. “Why didn’t anyone stop me?” She kissed him on the lips. He tasted the curry and coriander along with her natural acidity; he felt dizzy and withdrew.

They walked across the wider boulevards, the city suddenly alive with meaning now that he was walking with one of its demigoddesses, and he wondered why he could never walk down the street with Challah just so; his hand in hers, two fashionable, modern people, their conversation by turns warm and breezy, by turns analytic and severe…She drenched him and his new Panama hat with a just-opened bottle of spring water; and then, in full view of the passersby on Fifth Avenue and Nineteenth Street, on a Saturday afternoon (three P.M.), she ran her hands across his sorry chest, traced the full moon of his navel, and, finally, made a motion around his scared penis. “Look up,” she said. “See that? A two-story mansard roof. Atop a cast-iron facade and with marble walls. It’s one of a kind. My grandfather built it in 1875. What say you?”

But before he could answer she ran out into the traffic and brought around a cab for him. They were soon in Central Park, in the thickest parts of the Rambles, where the summer trees concealed without fail each towering skyscraper, each loafing tourist. “Take it out again,” she said.

“Again?” he said. “Already? Here?”

“Silly you,” she said. And when the purple creature was out in the natural light, its single eye blinking, she held it between her thumb and forefinger, and said, “Sure it looks a little small in the daylight, but look how sleek its knob is. Like the hood of a French TGV train.”

“Yes,” Vladimir said, and blushed, for he had never imagined that his blighted little anteater would be so complimented. “Ach! Easy now. There are people over there… By the gazebo. Ach!”

After five minutes at her hands, this cheap pornography was over and Vladimir was zipping up his new janitor pants, sighing happily, looking over the scruffy little flowerbed, which he had inadvertently pollinated.

It took him several self-involved minutes to notice that Francesca was crying quietly into the crook of her own elbow. Oh, no! What was this? Had he failed her already? He grazed her dry hair with his lips. She wiped her right hand on his shirt. “What’s wrong?” he said. “Don’t cry,” he whispered, almost in the same plaintive tone his father had once used with Mother. (“Oh, why are you crying, little porcupine?” he nearly added.)