Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook

The Groundhog leaned in, his expression quizzical, and pointed to himself. “No, no, you’re the Groundhog,” Vladimir whispered reassuringly in Russian. The Groundhog pretended to sigh with relief. Hey, the Hog was a fun fella!

“You’re the top,” Vladimir crackled. “You’re a Waldorf salad. You’re the top. You’re a Berlin ballad…” The waitstaff was trying hard to position a microphone in his direction.

“You’re the purple light of a summer night in Spain… You’re the National Gallery, you’re Garbo’s salary, you’re cellophane.” He wished he could translate one of the lines into German to get an extra kick from the red-faced deutsches Volk, maybe hit them up for a tip or a date. “I’m a lazy lout who’s just about to stop…”

Oh, what a ham you are, Vladimir Borisovich.

“But if baby… I’m the bottom… You-ou-ou’re the top.”

There was a standing ovation greater than at the Joy on poetry night. The Groundhog’s security detail regarded their master uncertainly, as if waiting for the secret code to spring into action and spray the whole room with bullets so that no witnesses to this little musical number would remain. There was cause for alarm, as the Groundhog, doubled over with laughter, slipped under the table like a surfer caught in the undertow, and remained there for some time laughing and hitting his head against the table’s bottom. Vladimir had to coax him out with the lobster claws which, true to the menu, really did sit atop a lime-green spread of kiwi puree.

HE DECIDED TOdate Morgan, the nice girl the crowd had picked up at the Joy.

It wasn’t a political decision and not so much an erotic one, although he was attracted to her form and pallor, and, maybe, just maybe, she would make a good Eva to his Juan Perón. But his romantic stirrings extended even beyond public relations. He was lonely for a woman’s company. When he arose from an empty bed, his mornings seemed strange and disjointed; at night, passing out into the comforter, as soft and licentious as it was, was somehow not enough. It was hard to understand. After all the complications that American women had put him through (and would he even be here in Prava if it weren’t for his Frannie?) he still depended on their company to make him feel like a young mammal—so vital, affectionate, and full of sperm. But this time around he would take charge of the relationship. He was beyond the “appendage” stage of following Fran around and swooning at the mere mention of semiotics. It was time for someone innocent and pliable like this Morgan, whoever the hell she turned out to be.

There were several courtship options for him. A great deal of them involved various permutations of chance meetings in clubs, poetry readings, strolls across the Emanuel Bridge, or during the hours spent queuing up at the town’s only laundromat—a hub of expatriate activity. At each of these venues, he, Vladimir, would prove himself superior in intellect, grace, conviviality, and name-dropping, thereby accumulating enough social points to be later cashed in for a date.

Or he could do things the old-fashioned, proactive way and call her up. He decided (since, according to Alexandra, his social coordinator, everything was set for the Eagle to land) to try the latter and rang her from the car phone. But the Stalin-era telephone exchange would not connect the two lovers-to-be; instead of Morgan he kept getting a venerable babushka who by the fifth call rasped that he was a “foreign penis” and should “fuck off back to Germany.”

And so Vladimir buzzed Alexandra instead. She and Morgan had twice done the “girls night out” thing and were becoming fast friends. From Alexandra, yawning and likely in Marcus’s arms, he got Morgan’s address out in the boonies and a few bon mots concerning a young girl’s virtue. He longed to orient his car’s compass in the direction of Alexandra’s suburbs, and to ask her to the movies or wherever it was people went on dates. But he pressed forward, way beyond the river and the preliminary factoryscape, to a quiet stretch of asphalt and a lone and lonely apartment house which seemed as if it had been blown several klicks downwind from its panelak brethren by some bureaucratic storm.

Morgan lived on the seventh floor.

He took an elevator smelling comfortably of kielbasa, whose iron door required his whole being to open and shut (the exercises with Kostya were already proving useful), and knocked on the door of apartment 714-21G.

There was stirring within, a slight creak of springs set against the quiet jabber of television, and Vladimir was instantly afraid that he had been preceded by some large American boy, which would explain both the creaking springs and the television being on on a Friday night.

Morgan opened the door without asking who it was (the way non–New Yorkers have an appalling tendency to do) and she was, to Vladimir’s welcome surprise, alone. In fact, she was extremely alone, with two dumpy television anchors doing the news roundup in Stolovan; on the coffee table a small pizza from the New Town shop where they piled up such daring combinations as apples, melted Edam cheese, and sausage gravy; and on the windowsill a bored cat, a hefty Russian blue, mewing and scratching at the freedom beyond.

Morgan was sporting a pink starfish-shaped rash on her forehead (a distant cousin of the wine-dark splotch on Gorbachev’s head), which she had slathered with a thick layer of cream, and was wrapped up in a lavender terry-cloth robe several sizes too small, the kind one expects to receive upon being consigned to a cut-rate nursing home. “Hey, it’s you!” she said, her round American face smiling perfectly. “What are you doing all the way out here? Nobody ever comes to visit me.”

Vladimir was caught short. Seeing her as she was, he was expecting several minutes of embarrassment from her over the state of her wardrobe and forehead. Embarrassment which, he hoped, would make him look good by comparison and help him press the case for why she should go out with him and fall in love with him too. But here she was, happy to see him, actually willing to admit that she didn’t get many visitors. Vladimir remembered her unsolicited honesty at the Joy when she had first met the Crowd. Now she was coming through with several more heapings of the stuff. What fresh pathology was this?

“Sorry to barge in unannounced,” Vladimir said. “I was in the neighborhood on some business, and so I thought…”

“That’s all right,” she said. “I’m so glad you’re here. Please, entrez. What a mess. You’ll have to excuse me.” She made her way to the couch, and, with the benefit of the snug bathrobe, Vladimir now noticed that her thighs and backside, while not particularly large in and of themselves, were somewhat larger than the rest of her.

Now, why wasn’t she rushing to change out of that ridiculous bathrobe? Didn’t she want to impress her guest? Hadn’t she told Alexandra that she found Vladimir exotic? Of course, Ravi Shankar was exotic, and how many women of Vladimir’s generation would sleep with him? Vladimir briefly entertained the thought that Morgan was comfortable being who she was in her own house, but then dismissed such outlandishness. No, something else was going on.

She closed the pizza box, then dropped a magazine on top of it. As if that would conceal the damning proof of her solitude, thought Vladimir. “Here,” she said. “Make yourself at home. Sit. Sit down.”

“We’re modernizing a factory near here,” Vladimir said, pointing vaguely to the window where he assumed another factory in need of a tune-up lay in wait. “It’s very dull work, as you can imagine. Every couple of weeks I have to come in and argue with the foreman about cost overruns. Still, they’re good workers, the Stolovans.”