Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook

They turned down Fifth Avenue and Vladimir squirmed in his seat. Just a minute more. Come on, Lion! The Israeli nimbly cut through the traffic of yellow cabs, leaving raised fists and honking in his wake (just look at that upstart with the Crown Victoria and the Florida license plates). The names on the storefronts were now as familiar as family—Matsuda, Mesa Grill…In a previous lifetime, Vladimir had left a small fortune at each of them.

“ Gonif comes home,” the Lion said, pulling up to the beige Art Deco of the Ruoccos’ building. “Don’t forget to tip,” he said.

Half-dazed and half-civil, Vladimir fished a final fifty-dollar bill out of the torn pocket of his torn shirt and passed it to his driver.

“Keep it,” said the Lion, suddenly avuncular. “And try to live a clean life if you can, that’s my advice to you. You’re very young. You’ve got a Jewish brain. There’s still hope.”

“Shalom,” Vladimir said. His strange adventures with the big Israeli were coming to an end. Closure was an elevator ride away. And there, ambling into the lobby with his unique dinosaur-like gait, was Joseph Ruocco, surviving the heat in his too-colonial-for-comfort khaki ensemble (“Conradian,” Fran had called it). Vladimir was about to surprise him with a shout of “Privyet!,” a familiar Russian greeting he had taught the Ruoccos, when he saw that the professor was accompanied by—

WELL, THAT WOULDN’Tbe accurate. First he heard the voice. No, first he heard the laughter. They were laughing. No, that’s not true either. First he heard the professor’s voice then he heard the bullshit laughter, then he heard the other voice, and then he saw.

A giant hand, gold-cuffed, Florida-brown, and smelling of baby powder was slapping the professor manfully about the shoulders.

A peach car of a familiar make was parked along the sidewalk of 20 Fifth Avenue, its blinkers blinking.

Jordi was making a new friend. One both funny and sad.

“What happened to your shirt?” the young Brazilian doorman started to ask Vladimir, almost loud enough for the professor and Jordi to hear at the opposite end of the lobby.

But before he could finish, the beat-up man before him, this little guy who accompanied the Ruoccos’ daughter every day, and who always seemed to the doorman either too sheeplike or too haughty for his own good…this trembling, barefaced Lothario was out the door, across the avenue, around the corner, gone from sight. He was history, thought the doorman, smiling at the phrase he had picked up from a headline in the Post.

“I’M NOT GOINGto Wichita,” Vladimir said, the word “Wichita” rendered by his accent as the most foreign word imaginable in the English language. “I’m going to live with Fran and it’s going to be all right. You’re going to make it all right.” But even as he was laying down the law, his hands were shaking to the point where it was hard to keep the shabby pay-phone receiver properly positioned between his mouth and ear. Teardrops were blurring the corners of his eyes and he felt the need to have Baobab hear him burst out in a series of long, convulsive sobs, Roberta-style. All he had wanted was twenty thousand lousy dollars. It wasn’t a million. It was how much Dr. Girshkin made on average from two of his nervous gold-toothed patients.

“Okay,” Baobab said. “Here’s how we’re going to do it. These are the new rules. Memorize them or write them down. Do you have a pen? Hello? Okay, Rule One: you can’t visit anyone—friends, relatives, work, nothing. You can only call me from a pay phone and we can’t talk for more than three minutes.” He paused. Vladimir imagined him reading this from a little scrap of paper. Suddenly Baobab said, under his breath: “Tree, nine-thirty, tomorrow.”

“The two of us can never meet in person,” he was saying loudly now. “We will keep in touch only by phone. If you check into a hotel, make sure you pay cash. Never pay by credit card. Once more: Tree, nine-thirty, tomorrow.”

Tree. Their Tree? The Tree? And nine-thirty? Did he mean in the morning? It was hard to imagine Baobab up at that unholy hour.

“Rule Five: I want you to keep moving at all times, or at least try to keep moving. Which brings us to…” But just as Rule Six was about to come over the transom, there was a tussle for the phone and Roberta came on the line in her favorite Bowery harlot voice, the kind that smelled like gin nine hundred miles away. “Vladimir, dear, hi!” Well, at least someone was enjoying Vladimir’s downfall. “Say, I was thinking, do you have any ties with the Russian underworld, honey?”

Vladimir thought of hanging up, but the way things were going even Roberta’s voice was a distinctly human one. He thought of Mr. Rybakov’s son, the Groundhog. “Prava,” he muttered, unable to articulate any further. An uptown train rumbled beneath him to underscore the underlying shakiness of his life. Two blocks downtown, a screaming professional was being tossed back and forth between two joyful muggers.

“Prava, how very now!” Roberta said. “Laszlo’s thinking of opening up an Academy of Acting and the Plastic Arts there. Did you know that there are thirty thousand Americans in Prava? At least a half dozen certified Hemingways among them, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Thank you for your concern, Roberta. It’s touching. But right now I have other… There are problems. Besides, getting to Prava… What can I do?… There’s an old Russian sailor… An old lunatic… He needs to be naturalized.”

There was a long pause at this point and Vladimir realized that in his haste he wasn’t making much sense. “It’s a long story…” he began, “but essentially… I need to… Oh God, what’s wrong with me?”

“Talk to me, you big bear!” Roberta encouraged him.

“Essentially, if I get this old lunatic his citizenship, he’ll set me up with his son in Prava.”

“Okay, then,” Roberta said. “I definitely can’t get him his citizenship.”

“No,” Vladimir concurred. “No, you can’t.” What was he doing talking to a sixteen-year-old?

“But,” Roberta said, “I can get him the next best thing…”

THE TREE WASa rather frail and trampled-upon oak, its gnarly branches shadowing its equally beat-up cousin, the Bench. Tree and Bench existed together, now and forever, in the little park in back of the math-and-science high school where Vladimir and Baobab were issued an academic challenge and where, subsequently, they had failed to meet that challenge, and, instead, had retired to the Bench beneath the Tree. During a particularly upsetting acid trip, Baobab had carved his initials and those of Michel Foucault into the Bench, beneath which, in the style of lower-school girls, he had written, “BFF.” Best Friends Forever.

Vladimir, pining for the simplicity of those wasted days, bent down and traced the initials with one nostalgic finger, then held himself in check: Such nonsense!

A car horn went off behind him.

Roberta was peeking out of a cab door, waving her big yellow boater. “Get in!” she shouted. “They’re trailing Baobab uptown. Move!”

THEY HAD PULLEDup to an old warehouse by the Holland Tunnel. The place was a low-ceilinged affair, its torn parapet floors patched up with strips of linoleum, a sign for Arrow Moving and Storage, the previous tenant, incompletely scraped off the front door. Vladimir was seated with Roberta in the rear section, which was roped off for “Guests of Naturalization Candidates.” The other “guests,” all marvelous actors and dear friends of Roberta, as was explained to Vladimir, looked dressed for a wedding, an Islamabad or Calcutta wedding—the number of turbans and saris among the attendees had reached critical mass. At any rate, gone was the dark-T-shirt-and-tight-trouser uniform germane to the ranks of young unemployed thespians.