Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook

But before she could be embarrassed, the conversation instantly shifted toward the topic of the lead piece, and L. Litvak brazenly put forth his Yuri Gagarin space odyssey, when Cohen turned to him and said, “But how can we even consider passing up Vladimir’s poem for the top spot?”

Everyone hushed. Vladimir searched Cohen’s face for sarcasm, but it looked tempered, not so much resigned as perspicacious, understanding. With the empty beer bottles in front of him and a smudge of hummus in the fluff of his pseudobeard, Vladimir took a mental snapshot of Cohen as he had pretended to have taken a picture of Mother in the nonexistent Chinese restaurant. Friend Cohen getting wisdom, catching on.

“Yes, of course, Vladimir’s poem,” said the awakened Plank.

“Of course,” Maxine said. “It’s the most redeeming piece I’ve heard since I’ve come here.”

“By all means, Vladimir’s poem!” shouted Alexandra. “And Marcus can decorate it. You can draw something, honey.”

“Then you can put my story right after it,” Larry said. “It’ll act as counterbalance.”

Vladimir picked up a glass of absinthe. “Thank you, everyone,” he said. “I would like to take the credit for this work myself, but, sadly, I can’t. Without Perry’s mentorship, I could have never cut to the heart of the matter. I’d still be writing the adolescent crap, the shaggy-dog poems. So, please, a toast!”

“To me!” Cohen smiled his “Sunrise, Sunset” elderly papa smile. He reached over to pat Vladimir’s head.

“You know…” Morgan was saying after the ripples of the toast had subsided and no one had anything else to say. “You people. This reading. This is all so new to me. Where I come from… Nobody… This is sort of how I pictured Prava. This is kind of why I came here.”

Vladimir’s jaw dropped at the sound of this unsolicited honesty. What the hell was she doing? You don’t just admit these things, no matter how true they are. Did Young Beauty (with the long brown hair) need an introductory course in poseurdom? Self-invention 101?

But the Crowd soaked it right in, punching each other’s shoulders in jest. Yes, they sort of kind of knew what she was talking about, this sweet, dazzling newcomer in their midst.

They took Morgan with them after they left the Joy. Later, when Alexandra got the chance to be alone and personal with her in a decaying Lesser Quarter ladies’ room, she found out that Morgan had found Vladimir’s poetry “brilliant” and Vladimir himself “exotic.” So maybe there was hope for her, after all.

BUT VLADIMIR PUTher out of his mind. There was serious work to do. Phase Two had gone off without a hitch; bad poetry had carried the day; the checkbooks were out and ready. He looked to Harold Green, generously making his way past the supplicants at the Carrot Bar, each begging for one of the Joy’s hefty artist-in-residence grants. By the looks of him, Harold was on the most important mission of his life. Destination: Girshkin.

No doubt about it, Phase Three’s time had come.

The suckling phase.

WAKE UP, SHOWER,and get to church. Vladimir did as his pebble-sized Judeo-Christian conscience told him. He swallowed vitamins and drank glasses of water. His new alarm clock was still howling. He put on his one and only suit bought on a whim from the new German department store for tens of thousands of crowns and realized that it was meant for a person twice his size. “ Dobry fucking den’, ” he said to himself in the mirror.

In the side lot by the opium garden, his car was idling along with Jan. The sky was a desolate bleached-out blue with patches of russet clouds as thick as bark on which, it seemed, advertisements could be placed and sailed above the city. Kostya was doing some nature stuff with a rose bush, pruning it, perhaps; the gardening lessons imparted by Vladimir’s father had long lost their relevance.

“Good morning, Tsarevitch Vladimir,” Kostya said upon seeing him. He looked more dignified than ever today—no nylon, just khakis, brogues, and white cotton shirt.

“Tsarevitch?” Vladimir said.

Kostya ambled over and snapped the shearlike things at Vladimir, missing him by centimeters. He seemed all too happy at the prospect of a Russian Orthodox Sunday. “The check cleared from the Canadian!” he shouted. “What’s his name? Harold Green. The club owner.”

“The full quarter million? You mean… Heavenly God… Are you saying that…?” Was he saying that U.S.$250,000.00, the equivalent of fifty years of wages for the average Stolovan, had gushed into the Groundhog’s kitty like the Neva River melting in the spring? And all through Vladimir’s free-market treachery? No, it could not be. The world rested on sounder poles: north and south; the Dow Jones and the Nikkei; the wages of sin and the minimum wage. But to sell two hundred and sixty shares of PravaInvest at U.S.$960.00 a pop… That was out there in Loop-de-Loop Land where Jim Jones, Timothy Leary, and Friedrich Engels rode their unicorns up and away into the pink-purple sky.

True, Vladimir did recall Harry drunk and delusional at the Nouveau’s Martini Bar, his head in his hands, his pate, bald and moist, gleaming like the martini decanters arrayed above the bar. Slobbering, weeping: “I have no talent, my young Russian friend. Only off-shore accounts.”

“Get out of here!” Vladimir barked without warning, surprising even himself. This was the tone of Mother addressing one of her native-born underlings, some poor accountant with a state school education. Was Vladimir drunk? Or was he more sober than ever? It felt like a little bit of both.

“What?” Harry said.

“Get out of this country! Nobody wants you here.”

Harry pressed his drink to his chest and shook his head without comprehending.

“Look at you,” Vladimir continued bellowing. “You’re a little white boy in a big white man’s body. Your father and his capitalist cronies destroyed my nation. Yes, they fucked the peace-loving Soviet people right and proper.”

“But, Vladimir!” Harry cried. “What are you saying? What nation? It was the Soviets who invaded the Stolovan Republic in 1969—”

“Don’t start with your cozy little facts. We do not bow to your facts. ” Vladimir suspended his diatribe for a minute and took a deep breath. We do not bow to facts? Hadn’t he seen that slogan once, in his youth, on a communist propaganda poster in Leningrad? Just what the hell was he becoming? Vladimir the Heartless Apparatchik?

“But you’re wealthy yourself,” Harry protested through his tears. “You have a chauffeur, a BMW, that nice felt hat.”

“But that is my right!” Vladimir bellowed, ignoring the kindly impulses his better organ—his heart—was pumping through the left ventricle along with the liters of frothy type-O blood. There would be time to indulge Mr. Heart later… This was war! “Have you not heard of identity politics?” Vladimir shouted. “Are you daft, man? To be rich in my own milieu, to partake in the economic rebirth of my own part of the world, why, if that’s not part of my narrative, what the hell is?” At this point, Vladimir himself almost became misty-eyed as he pictured Francesca, the woman at whose feet he had learned the ways of the world, walking in through the gilded doors of the Nouveau’s Martini Bar, smiling wanly as Vladimir beheaded this sorry creature in the same way she used to castrate the politically challenged masses in New York. Oh, Frannie. This is for you, honey! Let greatness and beauty prevail over baldness and nullity…

“My narrative!” Vladimir resumed screaming. “It’s about me, not about you, you imperialist American swine.”