Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook

She looked at him. It took her a few seconds to gauge the way he was moving from foot to foot, the frisky eyes, the labored breathing, but then she was instantly embarrassed, a young kind of embarrassment “Oh, boy,” she said and looked away, smiling.

They climbed into the perfect little tent and he quickly pressed himself against her, his hands sunk into her natural roundness and he squeezed and he squeezed, gasping for joy, praying he was going to make good with all this squeezing. And then it occurred to him… One word.

Normalcy. What they were doing was inherently normal and right. The tent was a special zone in which desire existed as a normal urge. Here you took off your clothes and your partner did likewise and there would be, hopefully, a great deal of arousal mixed with tenderness. This idea, as clear as the lake glistening outside their tent, scared Vladimir almost to the point of impotence. He squeezed Morgan all the harder and felt dryness in his throat, a sudden need to urinate.

“Hi there,” he said awkwardly. This was becoming a favorite phrase. It made him feel romantic in an informal kind of way, like they were already best friends as well as near-strangers about to get naked.

“Hi there,” she replied in kind. He mechanically pawed at her chest for a few minutes, while she stroked his neck and quivering throat, lifted up his shiny nylon shirt and squeezed his pale stomach, all the while looking him over with an expression that was, if anything, tolerant, attentive, engaged in the problem of Vladimir Girshkin. In the shallow light of the Stolovan sun suffusing the tent with a tawny yellow, she looked older to him, the flesh on her face raw and kneaded, her eyes narrowing gradually in what could have been a flash of tiredness passing for arousal (Vladimir was keen to interpret it as kindness, even a state of grace). There was a jolt of static when he touched her forehead and she smiled sadly for him, at the way her body was electrically charged against his and whispered “ouch” on his behalf.

The repetitive stroking motion was making her listless. She propped her head up on one hand, brushed some thistles off of Vladimir, assayed the situation, realized she had to take charge, unzipped and removed Vladimir’s janitor pants, squeezed out of her own jeans, her freckled, soft skin coloring the air with the earthy aroma of the hiker, and helped Vladimir climb atop of her.

“Hi there,” Vladimir said.

She touched his face absentmindedly and looked away. What was she thinking? Only yesterday she had seen Vladimir and Cohen practically horsewhipping that poor Canadian club owner, that unfortunate Harry Green, over some aspect of the nascent Yugoslav war, and now here he was, Vladimir the conqueror, shivering in the tent’s autumnal chill, rubbing up against her stomach as if he didn’t know quite how to conjoin with a woman, this man who could not put up a tent, who by his own admission could not do much of anything, really, other than talk and laugh and wave his tiny hands and try to be liked by others. She took hold of him and tweaked him with a familiar up-and-down motion, a little rough twist now and again that he seemed to enjoy. He closed his eyes, coughed dramatically, the deep rumble of phlegm echoing through the tent, then issued a kind of moan: “Ma-hum,” Vladimir said. “Aaf,” he concluded.

“Hi there, strange fellow,” she said. It just came out that way, and by her awkward smile Vladimir knew that she immediately wanted to retract it, for she must have felt pity, a halo of sympathy that could also have been a long ray of the voyeuristic sun worming its way between them; but, no, definitely it had been sympathy… Ah, if only he could tell her… Dear Morgan… She had been asking the wrong questions that night in the middle of the Tavlata. He was neither a good or a bad person. The man lying on top of her, goose bumps dotting his chest, little brambles of facial hair pointing in the four major directions, eyes pleading for some sort of release, wet trembling hands cupping her shoulders—this was a wrecked person. How else could someone be so clever and yet so stumped? How else could someone shudder so terribly, so earnestly before an unassuming woman like herself?

He was preparing to address her at length, but just then she lifted him up, took his member off her stomach, guided it where it needed to go. He opened his mouth, and she must have seen bubbles forming at the back of his throat, as if he was struggling to breathe underwater. He stared at her with incredulity. He looked ready to mouth the words “Hi there” one more time. Perhaps to forestall this eventuality, she took hold of his ass and plunged him onward, filling the tent with his happy roar.

THEY WERE DOINGwell.

Alexandra had taken charge of their relationship from the outset. A kind of free-floating modern yenta, she would call both Vladimir and Morgan every day to make sure everyone’s emotional passport was in order. “The situation looks positive,” she wrote to Cohen in a confidential communiqué. “Vladimir is increasing Morgan’s range of reference, her cynicism is slowly peaking, she no longer looks at the world from a position of middle-American privilege, but at least partly through the eyes of Vladimir, an oppressed immigrant facing systemic barriers to access.

“V, for his part, is learning to appreciate the need for a hands-on dialogue with the physical world. Whether spotted making out with M on the Emanuel Bridge early morning or discreetly patting her down at the premiere of Plank’s cinema-verité extravaganza, this is a side of Vladimir we’re more than happy to acknowledge! What’s next for them, Cohey? Living in sin?”

Morgan’s flat certainly had plenty of space for cohabitation, two tiny bedrooms of a sort and one mysterious room, which was sealed up with duct tape and barricaded by a sofa. A picture of Jan Zhopka, the first Stolovan “working-class president” under the communists, hung over the door to the banned room. Zhopka’s face, a big purple beet with several functional holes for sniffing out bourgeois sentiment and singing agit-prop ditties, was further insulted by a crudely drawn Hitler-cropped mustache.

Vladimir had always wanted to ask about Morgan’s views on the strange times they lived in, the collapse of communism after Reagan’s sucker punch in the mid-80s, but he worried her response would be too typical, reactionary, Midwestern. Why put up an anti-Zhopka poster when all the cool kids were going after the World Bank? He decided to ask her about the sealed room instead.

“The roof is leaking something terrible in there,” Morgan explained the situation in her informal English. They were on the living-room couch, Morgan sitting on top of him, henlike, trying to keep him warm (like most Russians of a certain class, Vladimir had an unnatural fear of drafts). “The landlord sends this guy over every few weeks to patch things up,” she said, “but that room is still a no-go.”

“Europa, Europa,” Vladimir muttered, shifting Morgan from thigh to thigh to keep her warmth circulating. “Half the continent’s under repair. Speaking of, there was some Stolovan guy, a Tomash, I believe, buzzing up yesterday. He kept yelling ‘To-mash is here! To-mash is here!’ I told him I wasn’t interested in any Tomashes, thank you. This neighborhood is full of freaks, by the way. You shouldn’t be out here alone. Why don’t I get Jan to drive you around?”

“Vlad, listen to me!” Morgan turned around and grabbed him by the ears. “Don’t ever let anyone in the apartment! And don’t go near that room!”

“Ai, please, not the ears!” Vladimir squealed. “They’ll be red for hours. I have to officiate at the Vegan Olympics tonight. What’s wrong with you?”