Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook

This was already Vladimir’s third year of living apart from his parents but the exhilaration of having escaped their tender clutches simply would not cease. He was acquiring a homeowner’s mentality. He dreamed of someday cleaning house, of turning the gap between the kitchen and the bedroom, which was now referred to as the “living room” into a personal study.

And what would Vladimir study in his study? Vladimir was partial to short fiction—brief, thoughtful stories where people suffered quickly and acutely. For instance, the Chekhov story where the horse-cab driver tells all his fares that his son has died the other day and nobody cares. Terrible. Vladimir had first read that one in Leningrad, lying as he always did in his sick bed, while Mother and Grandmother fussed in the next room, concocting bizarre Russian folk cures for his bronchial illnesses.

The driver story (“Heartache” its simple name) was shorthand for the young Vladimir’s melancholy existence, the growing sense of the bed as his true home. A home away from the sepulchral Leningrad cold, where once he had played hide-and-seek with his father beneath the giant bronze feet of the Lenin statue, its sooty outstretched arm pointing ever upward to the brilliant future. Away from the primary school, where the few times he was deemed well enough to strap on his bright, creaseless uniform and make an appearance, children and teacher alike stared at him as if he was a cosmonaut stricken with the Andromeda Strain, erroneously released from quarantine. And away from Seryozha Klimov, the overfed hooligan—his parents had already given him a crash course in the social sciences—who would come up to him during recess, and gleefully yell, “Jew, Jew, Jew…”

So, you see, young Vladimir had been more than willing to accept the loss of his freedom and formal education, if only he would be left alone with his warm feather bed and his Chekhov and his good friend Yuri the Stuffed Giraffe. But Mother and Grandmother and Father, when he returned from work at the hospital, would not leave him in peace. They fought his bronchial asthma without respite and with the entire Soviet Medical Encyclopedia and several less reliable tracts at their disposal. They would roll Vladimir’s pale body into hourly rubbing alcohol compresses, hold his face within centimeters of a boiling pot of potatoes, and practice the surreal ritual of “cupping”: A set of small glass cups was painfully attached (after a lit match was used to create a vacuum inside each vessel) across the length of Vladimir’s back in order to suck out the phlegm that rumbled through the invalid’s body. The Stegosaurus Effect, Dr. Girshkin called the wretched rows of glass assembled on his son’s back.

NOW THE HEALTHY,older Vladimir paced the length of his imaginary study, in which his childhood volume of Chekhov would share pride of place with newer acquisitions: a martini shaker from the Salvation Army, a biography of William Burroughs, a tiny cigarette lighter cleverly embedded within a hollowed pebble. Yes, the inside of the apartment was becoming too cluttered for Chekhov—there were Challah’s batons and whips and jars of K-Y to consider, not to mention the cheap Fourteenth Street spice racks that kept falling off their hooks, and the numerous buckets of cold water Vladimir kept around the kitchen and bedroom so that he could dunk his head when he could no longer stand the temperate status quo. But still, what a pleasure to be alone. To talk to oneself as if to a best friend. His actual best friend, Baobab, was still down in Miami, being venal and unsavory.

AND THEN ITwas time. Challah was at the door fighting the locks. Vladimir closed his mind, worked himself up an erection, and went out to greet her. There she was. But even before he took in her workday face—the lipstick, mascara, and blush melting down in the heat, drawing a second ethereal face a notch below her all-too-real one—she was embracing him and whispering “happy birthday” in his ear, for unlike every other well-wisher of the day, Challah wanted to say it quietly.

Dear Challah with the warm, flat nose, the enormous eyelashes tickling his cheeks, the heavy nasal breathing—queen of everything musky and mammal-like. Soon she noticed what Vladimir had been preparing for her below, the aardvark’s tubular snout poking out from within its wiry hedge, and said, “Goodness,” in perfect mock surprise. She began unlatching the safety pins that kept together the swatches of black fabric she wore to the Dungeon but Vladimir said, “No, I must do it!”

“Be careful,” she said. “Don’t rip anything.” She made sure he remained erect while he undressed her; the undressing went on for some time. When she was done, only the iron crucifixes remained against her heavy breasts, reminding Vladimir of artillery pieces scattered about a plain. Finally, with her crosses jangling, and his member in hand, Challah took Vladimir into the bedroom.

On the futon, he recalled his mandate: be thorough. He kissed, rubbed his nose against, tugged with his teeth, pinched between thumb and middle finger, poked with what Challah had termed the Girshkin Gherkin, every part of her, even parts that he had grown weary of with the passage of time: the folds that collected on top of her hips, her arms, thick and pink, that pressed him to her not lustfully but the way he envisioned a mother would grasp her child at the approach of an avalanche.

Finally, when he felt a full gathering of steam between his legs, he went between hers, and for the first time, looked into her face. Dear Challah, dear American friend, with that crimson look of arousal, but also with the restraint to keep Vladimir from biting into her neck or plunging into her mouth, just so she could look into his eyes when they were this close.

So Vladimir closed his eyes. And had a vision.

DRESSED IN LIGHTWEIGHTcotton chinos and tunic, a brown Nat Sherman’s cigarette implanted in his mouth, his hair fashionably cut short and continuously waved over to one side by a playful summer wind, Vladimir Borisovich Girshkin issued directives into a cellular phone as he walked along an airstrip. Granted, it was a lousy airstrip. There was not even a plane. But a series of properly spaced white lines etched into the cracked concrete could only mean an airstrip (or else a provincial highway, but, no, that couldn’t be).

While in bed, the blind, naked Vladimir was keeping up his hump hump with Challah in a desperate bid to orgasm, his fashionable doppelganger in the vision was making progress against the substantial length of the airstrip, beyond which a half-circle of the setting sun, bloated and patchy like rotting fruit, peeked out from the confluence of two gray mountains. Vladimir could clearly see the new Vladimir, his purposeful gait, his agitated face spanning the range of ill humor, but he could not understand precisely what he was saying into the cellular, why the airstrip was isolated by scrub fields on all sides save for the mountains, why he could not daydream himself a plane, fabulous companions, and a set of filled champagne flutes…

And then, just as the coital Vladimir was to reach his elusive target with Challah, the imaginary Vladimir heard a rumble, a boom, a sonic displacement directly above him. A hawk-nosed turbo prop was skirting the runway, headed directly for our hero, flying low enough for him to see the lone figure in the cockpit, or at least the lunatic glimmer in the pilot’s eye that could only have belonged to one man. “I’m coming for you, boy!” Mr. Rybakov was shouting into Vladimir’s cellular. “Away we go!”

HE OPENED HISeyes. His face was sandwiched in between Challah’s shoulder blades where a constellation of beauty marks formed a soup ladle. The ladle lifted and lowered with her breathing, a lock of her orange hair fell into it.