Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook

“Well, you’ve certainly put me in an awkward position,” Vladimir said. “I’m down here in Florida right now, playing tennis with the director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, begging him to reconsider your case. It’s forty degrees Celsius here and I’m about to have a myocardial infarction. Do you hear me, Rybakov? An infarction.”

“Oi, Volodechka, please, please get me into that hall for the ceremonies again. I’ll behave this time. Tell the director to forgive me that one incident. Tell him that I’m not all well up here.” Nine hundred miles up the coast, Rybakov was surely tapping away at his forehead.

Vladimir sighed the deep sigh of a father coming to terms with his offspring’s limitations. “Fine, I’ll call you once I get into the city. Practice being civil in front of the mirror.”

“Captain, I am following your directives without question! All power to the Immigration and Naturalization Service!”

JORDI LAY ONhis stomach, watching a show about a modeling agency, grunting along as the feeble bon mots flew and negligees slithered to the ground. The remains of his early dinner and two empty champagne bottles were lined up on a little table intended for card games or the like; an additional champagne bottle was afloat in a bucket of melted ice. It was possible to imagine a silver tray from the Lusitania bearing a hastily scribbled champagne bill floating in to join this hedonism in disrepair.

“I like the brunettes,” said Vladimir, sitting down on his bed, shaking sand out of his sneakers.

“Brunettes are tighter than blondes,” Jordi posited. “Do you have a girlfriend?”

“Yes,” Vladimir said, beaming with pride at this admission and feeling even younger than his clean-shaven face.

“What color hair?”

For some reason Vladimir thought of Challah’s reddish curls, but then he caught himself and answered correctly: “Dark, very dark.”

“And how does she take it?” Jordi wanted to know. With sugar or with milk, was that the question?

“She takes it well,” he said.

“I mean how does she… Oh, just drink, boy. You have to be as drunk as me to be my friend!”

Vladimir did as he was told, then asked about Jordi’s son, that big imbecile.

“Ah, little Jaume.” The proud papa sat up and slapped his haunches, businesslike. He turned down the volume on the television, until the models’ squealing was down to the whisper of the waves brushing against the sand outside. “He’s a bright kid, he just can’t do well in a school environment. So maybe you shouldn’t talk like you’re too book-smart, but mention a couple of books if you can. Now, he’s into football although they kicked him off the team last year.” This uninspiring fact seemed to bring about a little reverie on Jordi’s part. “But I blame the coach, the school, and the Board of Ed for not understanding my boy’s needs,” he said at last. “So here’s to my little Jaume, attorney-at-law. With God’s help, of course.” He gulped down most of a champagne bottle in ten incredibly well-spaced swallows, as if a coxswain was coaching him along.

“This is important information,” Vladimir said. “I don’t know much about sports. For instance, what’s the name of the team here?”

“Oh, boy. You Manhattan kids can be a bunch of queers sometimes. Here they’re called the Dolphins, and back home we’ve got two teams: the Giants and the Jets.”

“I’ve heard of those,” Vladimir said. Could those teams have had any more insipid names? If Vladimir were ever to own a franchise he’d call it something like the New York Yiddels. The Brighton Beach Refu-Jews.

Jordi dictated additional trivia about the Super Bowl, the Dallas Cowboys, and the mythical cow-women who attended to them, while room service brought up a swordfish, unbearably bland despite the hail of black pepper beneath which it suffocated. Vladimir munched on this mediocrity as Jordi began enumerating his son’s finer points: for instance, he never hit his girlfriend even when circumstances demanded it; and he knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that money didn’t grow on trees, that hard work never killed anybody, that without pain there was no gain. Vladimir worked with these commendable attributes, then suggested some more tangible activities for little Jaume: the boy spent his free time running the Catalan Culture Club at school; he helped old Polish ladies get to their weekly deviled ham at the Church of Saints Peter and Paul; he wrote letters to his local congressperson demanding better lighting for the local softball field (see interest in sports above).

“Here’s to little Jaume looking out for old Polack broads,” Jordi said. “And why aren’t you drinking, sweetheart?”

Vladimir pointed to his bladder then went to the rosy bathroom to relieve himself. When he came out, two representatives of room service—young, pimpled Adam and Eve of the South—were waiting to present him with another bow-tied bottle. “On the house, sir.”

The sun had long since disappeared when Vladimir felt the full giddy nausea of champagne drunkenness and ordered himself to stop. He sat down hard on his bed near the balcony and felt it sway a little in all four directions. Something was askew, and it wasn’t just the physical universe reeling from booze. The idea of appearing in front of a college admissions officer, of impersonating a dullard’s son, suddenly seemed as easy as hunting cows. Yes, an entire alternate moral universe was opening up before Vladimir, an alternate Americana populated with fellow beta immigrants living easy and drinking hard, concocting pyramid schemes like Uncle Shurik, while the other country continued to grind out leather sofas and Daisy Duck place mats in places as stupid as Erie and Birmingham, as remote as Fairbanks and Duluth. He turned to Jordi, half expecting confirmation of his silent discovery, to find the latter studying Vladimir’s lower half through his champagne goblet, misty with breath. Jordi looked up, his heavy eyelids grown narrow with concentration; he let out three seconds worth of bullshit laughter then said, “Don’t get scared.”

Vladimir felt very scared, as if the Finnish doorlock to the Girshkin fortress was suddenly snapped open by an experienced hand, while the alarm system ceased its wail and the neighbor’s fierce suburban dog turned in for the night. The Fear-Money gland wasn’t even active yet, but the rest of him knew. “Hey, correct me if I’m wrong,” Jordi said, swinging his feet between their two beds, his trunks tight with the outline of his shaft, twisted and constrained by the elastic, “but you fooled around with Baobab before, right? I mean, you’ve been with other boys.”

Vladimir followed the single horrific spot of wetness along the inseam of Jordi’s trunks. “Who, us?” he said, jumping off the bed, so unsure of the fact that he had spoken that he repeated himself. “Who, us?”

“You’re so much like Baobab that way,” Jordi said, smiling and shrugging as if he understood this was something the boys just couldn’t do anything about. “It doesn’t mean you’ve got the homosexual feelings or anything, coco, though you could learn up on football a little. It’s just in your constitution. Look, I understand, and you’re not going to read about it in the Post tomorrow.”

“No, no, I believe there’s been a misunderstanding,” Vladimir began, working off the erroneous middle-class premise that when in trouble it was best to sound educated. “I have mentioned earlier my girlfriend—”

“Yes, good, okay,” Jordi said. “This discussion is over, prince.” Then, in one move, the technicalities of which were lost on Vladimir, he had sprung to his feet and snapped off his shorts, his penis swinging upward then falling into position. Vladimir averted his gaze from it, watching instead the bulbous shadow it cast upon the neatly made-up bed that separated them. Without warning, there was a flurry of motion: Jordi had struck his own head and cried out, “Wait! K-Y!” Vladimir’s instant recall was of the cabinet that contained Challah’s lubricant; quickly that image was discarded as irrelevant. He retreated in the direction of the balcony and the four-story drop, already calculating between the probable death behind him and what was in front of him.