Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook

MR. RUOCCO: So how do you feel about the new Russian literature, Dr. Girshkin?

DR. GIRSHKIN: Now I am only interested in my wife’s hedge fund and Southeast Asian currency splits. Literatura is kaput! For dandies like my son only.

MRS. RUOCCO: Have you heard the Kirov Ballet is coming to the Met?

MOTHER: Yes, yes, the pretty dancing. And what kind of a career have you picked out for Francesca, Mrs. Ruocco? She’s so tall and beautiful, I somehow see her as an eye surgeon.

MRS. RUOCCO: Actually, Frannie says she wants to follow in our footsteps.

DR. GIRSHKIN: But how is possible? Professorship offer no remuneration. Who will put food on table? Who will contribute to IRA? To Keogh? Plan 401(k)?

MOTHER: Quiet, Stalin. If Francesca will not make money, she will force Vladimir into law school to support family. All will be well, see?

MR. RUOCCO ( laughing ): Oh, I can’t quite picture your Vladimir as a lawyer.

MOTHER: Pink-hearted revisionist bastard pig!

Back on the Ruoccos’ planet, Vladimir was straining his ear for proof of Joseph Ruocco’s reputed disdain toward his daughter along with evidence of his wife Vincie’s stupidity. Neither was forthcoming. Vincie was soft-hearted with the displaced Vladimir, shamed and awkward before the cleaning lady, secretly confounded by her daughter’s intelligence, and, despite the occasional wisecrack, perfectly obeisant to Fran’s father.

As for the Humor Studies savant himself, it was hard to think of Joseph as contemptuous. Sure, he often cut Fran off short by saying “Now, now, have another glass of Armagnac on the house and we’ll call it even.” But this booze-soaked dismissiveness seemed to Vladimir a distinguished scholar’s prerogative, not to mention that older people should be allowed to get away with things at the family table—look at the free rein granted Mother.

Could such small infractions have had repercussions in Fran’s mind? Possibly, given that the single currency considered valuta at the Ruocco hearth was not the awkward Bellovian potato love that gets passed around at so many American tables, but respect. Respect for each other’s ideas, respect for their standing in the world—a world the Ruoccos happily left behind in order to bask in each other’s company.

So who knew why Francesca was so intimidated by her father; why her psychiatrist had prescribed a battery of pink and yellow pills; why on some nights sex between her and Vladimir could be either the gentle and sympathetic Antioch College–type sex—the sex by committee of two, the insertion of the penis first a quarter of the way, then in gradual increments—and why on other nights the blindfold and her father’s tweeds had to come out. Vladimir’s mission, as has been previously established, was to comfort and reassure her, while gaining swift entrée into her classy little world. Let these deeper mysteries be solved in their own sweet time. By his young estimation, they would have all of their lives together.

But then, one day, unwittingly, she did it. She managed to hurt him almost irrevocably.

THEY HAD GONEshopping for a toothbrush. At no time was he happier than when the two of them would embark on these most mundane of missions. A man and a woman can claim to love one another, they may even rent real estate in Brooklyn as a sign of their love, but when they take time out of a busy day to walk through the air-conditioned aisles of a drug mart to pick out a nail clipper together, well, this is the kind of a relationship that will perpetuate itself if only through its banality. Or so Vladimir hoped.

And she was such a thoughtful consumer. The toothbrush, for instance, had to be organic. A dealership of organic toothbrushes did exist in SoHo, but it had chosen this particular day to dissolve into bankruptcy. “Strange,” Frannie said, as a person-sized toothbrush was removed from the vitrine by the bickering members of an Indian family and crammed into a station wagon with Garden State plates. “They had such a following.”

“Oh, what is to be done?” Vladimir moaned on her behalf. “Where can one find an organic toothbrush in this one-horse town?” He kissed her on the cheek for no reason.

“Chelsea,” she said. “Twenty-eighth and Eighth. I think the place is called T-Brush. Minimalist, but definitely organic. But you don’t have to go all the way up there with me. Go home and keep my mother company. She’s grilling baby squid in its own ink! You love that shit.”

“No, no, no!” Vladimir said. “I promised to go toothbrush-shopping with you. I’m a man of my word.”

“I think I can handle this all by my lonesome,” she said. “I’m sick of dragging you around.”

“Please,” Vladimir said. “What dragging? There’s nothing more I enjoy than doing these little, um, quotidian things with you.”

“ That I know,” she said.

“You know?” he said.

“Vlad, you’re too much!” she laughed, poking him in the stomach. “Sometimes,” she continued, “sometimes you seem so happy to have a girlfriend. Was this what you dreamed it would be like? Having a New York girlfriend. Shadowing her around town. The devoted boyfriend, so loving, so devoid of any personal interest, just this lovey-dovey, dopey, happy guy. Toothbrush? Don’t mind if I do! It’s quotidian!”

She said the last word Vladimir-style with its birdlike kvo. Kvo-kvo, said the Vladimir bird. Kvotidian.

“You have a point,” Vladimir said. He was unsure of what to say next. Or what she had just said to him. He felt a gurgle in his stomach and tasted something gastric on his tongue. “Very well, then,” he said. “No problem.” He pecked her farewell. “Ciao, ciao,” he croaked. “Good luck with the toothbrush. Remember: medium-soft bristles…”

But as he made his way home, the intestinal ill-feeling, the nervousness tickling his insides continued, as if the tired faces of the shish-kebob-sellers and art-book-hawkers of Lower Broadway, the honored citizens of the midsummer city, were assaying him with open disgust, as if the braggadocio of rap issuing out of boom boxes was actually as threatening as it sounded. What was it, this strange stirring?

Back at the Ruoccos’, Fran’s bedroom was its usual mess of samizdat- like books published by failing presses; heaps of dirty underwear; here and there loose dots of birth control and anxiety medication; the big cat, Kropotkin, prowling about, tasting a little bit of everything, depositing tufts of gray-black fur on panties and literature alike. And the chill in the room… The mausoleum effect… The windows shut, curtains drawn, the air-conditioner always on, a tiny desk lamp the only illumination. Here was the long winter of Oslo or Fairbanks or Murmansk: the New York summer had no business in this twilight place, this temple to Fran’s strange ambitions, the desiccation of early-twentieth-century literature, the education and repackaging of one Warsaw Pact immigrant.

His stomach growled once more. Another wave of nausea…

Kvo-kvotidian, said the Vladimir-bird.

Sometimes you seem so happy to have a girlfriend.

Shadowing her around town…

Was this what you dreamed it would be like?

And then he realized what it was, this rumbling in his gullet, this internal displacement: He had been unmasked! She knew! She knew everything! How much he needed her, wanted her, could never have her… All of it. The foreigner. The exchange student. The 1979 Soviet “Grain Jew” poster boy. Good enough for bed, but not for the organic-toothbrush store.

Toothbrush? Don’t mind if I do!

Ah, so that’s how it was. She had humiliated him on the sly, while he, the diligent note-taker, had failed his mandate once again. And he had tried so hard this time, had gone to such lengths to please all of them under the rubric “Parents & Daughter: How to Love an American Family.” He was the dutiful son the Ruoccos never had. Worshiping Dad’s Humor Studies. “Yes, sir, the serious novel has no future in this country… We must turn to the comic.” Worshiping Mom’s fruits de mer. “World’s best geoduck clam, Miss Vincie. Maybe just a sprinkle more of vinegar.” And, God knows, worshiping Daughter. Worshiping, shadowing, soaking up through osmosis.