Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook

“Because they’re monkeys.”

“I see.”

“But take a peach Caddy without the tinted windows and the fat tires, and you got yourself a classy car, correct? I’ll tell you something: I rent four hundred of these a year. Everyone who works for me—New York, Miami, Côte d’Azur—everyone’s got a peach Caddy. Don’t like my style, work for someone else, barrada. Pendejo. Subject closed.”

Meanwhile, the trashy motels of the north were giving way to the dignified Art-Deco facades of South Beach, and Jordi told Vladimir to keep a lookout for the New Eden Hotel & Cabana, which Vladimir remembered from his past journeys through South Beach as a tall, somewhat crumbling resort next to the modernistic loop of the Fountainebleau Hilton, the flagship of the mink-stole era.

The New Eden’s vertical, once-opulent lobby was built around a meticulously scrubbed chandelier careening several stories down to a circular arrangement of fraying velvet recliners. “Elegance never goes out of style,” Jordi said. “Hey, look at all these good folks!” He waved to a gaggle of retirees with such gusto that Vladimir assumed they had all come from the old country together. But, to Jordi’s disappointment, there was hardly a stir from the New Eden gang, its members enjoying a splendid afternoon’s torpor. For those awake, Bunny Berrigan was playing over the speakers, vegetarian liver was being served in the Green Room—too many distractions to notice the arrival of Jordi and Vladimir, an unusual duo by anyone’s standards.

Jordi returned from the reservations desk with some further bad news: “My secretary screwed up our reservations, the cow,” he said. “Would you mind splitting a room with me, Vladimir?”

“Not at all,” Vladimir said. “It’ll be like a slumber party.”

“Slumber party. I like that. That’s a good way to put it. Why do little girls get to have all the fun?” Why? There was a very good reason why little girls, and only little girls, got to have all the fun at slumber parties. But Vladimir was going to have to find out for himself.

VLADIMIR PUT DOWNJordi’s grimy little electric shaver and looked at various angles of his scrubbed and itching face in the bathroom’s three-sectional mirror. What a disaster. The sickly Vladimir of Leningrad looked back at him, then the scared Vladimir of Hebrew school, and finally the confused Vladimir of the math-and-science high school: a triptych of his entire lusterless career as a youngster. What a difference a little merkin-like hair made around his thick lips.

“Well?” Vladimir stepped out into the sunlit bedroom smothered in an endless assortment of floral patterns and wood, a New England bed-and-breakfast motif strayed way past the Mason-Dixon Line. Jordi looked up from his paper. He had sprawled out on one of the matching beds, dressed only in his swimming trunks. His body was loosely organized like a booming sunbelt city, suburban rivulets of fat spilling out in all directions.

“All of a sudden an attractive young man appears before me,” he said. “What a difference a little shave makes.”

“Is the interview tomorrow?”

“Hm?” Jordi was still appraising Vladimir’s virgin face. “That’s right. We’ll go over what you have to say. But later. Now go out and play in the sun, tan your chin so that it don’t stick out. And help yourself to some of this expensive champagne. You won’t believe how much it costs.”

Vladimir took the elevator down to the exit marked “cabana and pool.” Outside, one could see why the deck chairs were empty and the beefy cabana boys loafing: Florida off-season in three-digit temperatures was a scary proposition.

Despite the misery, Vladimir toasted this stretch of coast with his champagne flute. He said, “Vashe zdorovye,” to the seagulls screeching above. The whole setup felt like home to Vladimir. In his youth, the Girshkins used to descend on the pebbly beaches of Yalta each summer. Dr. Girshkin had prescribed a daily dose of sun for the ailing Vladimir. Mother would park him for hours beneath that blinding yellow orb to sweat and cough up phlegm.

He was not allowed to play with other children (his grandmother had branded them spies and informants), nor was he allowed a dip in the Black Sea, as Mother feared that a ravenous dolphin would eat him (several bottlenosed specimens could be seen disporting along the coast).

Instead, she had devised a game for them to play. It was called Hard Currency. Each morning Mother would have tea with an old friend of hers who happened to be a clerk at the Intourist Hotel for Foreigners and would brief Mother on the latest exchange rates. Then she and Vladimir would memorize the figures. They would start: “Seven British pound sterling equals…”

“Thirteen dollars American,” cried Vladimir.

“Twenty-five Dutch guilders.”

“Forty-three Swiss francs!”

“Thirty-nine Finnish markka.”

“Twenty-five Deutsche marks!”

“Thirty-one Swedish krona.”

“Sixty… Sixty-three… Nor wegian…”

“Wrong, my little dope…”

The penalty for failure (and the reward for success) was a paltry Soviet kopek, but one day Vladimir managed to rack up an entire five-kopek coin, which Mother sadly fished out of her purse. “Now you can afford a Metro ride,” she said. “Now you will get on the Metro and leave me forever.”

Vladimir was so shocked by this pronouncement that he started to cry. “How can I leave you, Mamatchka? ” he whimpered. “Where will I take the Metro all by myself? No, I will never ride the Metro again!” He cried all afternoon, suntan lotion dribbling down his cheeks. Not even a masterly display of acrobatics on the part of the man-eating dolphins could cheer him.

Ah, childhood and its discontents. Feeling much older and happier, Vladimir decided to mail Fran a postcard. The New Eden gift shop had an impressive selection of naked rumps dusted with sand, the manatee begging to be saved from extinction, and close-ups of plastic pink flamingoes roosting in Floridian front yards. Vladimir settled on the last of these as being perfectly representative. “My dear,” he wrote on the back. “The immigrant-resettlement conference bores me to no end. How I hate my work sometimes.” The conference had been a stroke of genius on his part. He even told Fran he was presenting a lecture based on his mother: “The Pierogi Prerogative: Soviet Jews and the Co-optation of the American Marketplace.”

“I practice shuffleboard and mah-jongg whenever I can,” he wrote to Fran, “just to get a leg up on you in time for our golden years. But before you don your babushka and I slip into a nice pair of bright-white slacks, let us, sometime soon, travel across this entire nation, and you can fill me in on your life from day one. We could be like tourists (i.e., bring a camera, look a certain way). I don’t know how to drive, but am willing to learn. Can’t wait to see you in three days and four hours.”

He posted the card, then paid a visit to the Eden Roc bar, where he was duly interrogated about his age before the barkeep finally caved in on account of his receding hairline and gave him a lousy beer. That hairless chin of his, jutting out like a little boiled egg, was already becoming a liability. Two beers later, he decided to face up to his one other New York responsibility, this one a matter of duty not pleasure.

An irritated Mr. Rybakov came on the line immediately: “Who? Devil confound it. Which hemisphere is this?”

“Rybakov, it’s Girshkin. Did I wake you?”

“I don’t need sleep, commandant.”

“You never told me you hit Mr. Rashid during the naturalization ceremony.”

“What? Oh, but I’m in the clear on that one. My God, he was a foreigner! My English is not so good, but I know what the judge told me: ‘To protecting country… against foreigner and domestic enemy… I am swearing…’ Then I look to my left and what do I see? An Egyptian like the one at the newsstand who always overcharges me five cents for the Russian paper. Another foreigner trying to defraud the workers and the peasant masses and convert us to his Islam, that lousy Turk! So I did what the judge told to do: I defended my country. You don’t give an order to a soldier and expect him to disobey. That’s mutiny!”