Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook

Vladimir propped himself up on one elbow. In her free time Challah had repainted their bedroom a dentist’s-office mauve. She had arranged overlapping retro posters (condensed-milk advertisements and the like) across the ceiling. She had gone out and bought a squash, which now rotted in the corner. “Why did you close your eyes?” she asked.

“What?” He knew what.

“You know what.”

“Most people close their eyes. I was overcome.”

She burrowed her head into the middle of a pillow, swelling up the sides. “You were not overcome.”

“Are you saying I don’t love you?”

“You’re saying you don’t love me.”

“This is ridiculous.”

She turned around but covered herself with her arms and drew in her legs. “How can you say ‘this is ridiculous’? People don’t say things like that unless they just don’t give a shit. How can you be so flippant? ‘This is ridiculous.’ How can you be so detached?”

“I’m a foreigner. I speak slowly and choose my words with care, lest I embarrass myself.”

“How can you say that ?”

“Well, what the hell am I allowed to say?”

“I’m fat!” she shouted. She glanced around as if looking for something to throw, then grabbed a roll of her own flesh, the one that collected beneath her breasts before her stomach began. “Say the truth!”

The truth?

“You hate me!”

No, that wasn’t the truth exactly. Vladimir didn’t hate her. He hated the idea of her, but that was different. Still, it was Vladimir who had invited this big woman into his life, and now there was no recourse but to sift through his meager vocabulary of comforting words, to put together the proper blandishments. You’re not fat, he thought, you’re fully realized. But before he could voice those tenuous thoughts, he noticed a large, complicated insect, a sort of roach with wings, hovering directly beneath the canopy of posters. Vladimir moved to defend his crotch.

In the meantime, Challah had let go of her roll of flesh, which fell in luxuriously with its grander compatriot, the stomach. She turned back into her pillow and breathed in so deeply that Vladimir was sure she was going to exhale in tears.

“There’s a strange insect coming down on you,” Vladimir preempted her.

Challah looked up. “A-a—”

They scampered off the futon as the beast landed between them. “Give me my T-shirt,” Challah demanded, once again covering herself with her arms as best she could.

The intruder crawled along the crests and ridges of their bed sheets the way a big-rig truck weaves along a mountain highway, then executed a great leap forward into Vladimir’s pillow. It was really something! In Leningrad the roaches were small and lacked initiative.

Challah leaned over and blew at the monster hopefully, but its wings began to stir and she drew back. “God, I just want to go to sleep,” she said, putting on her long T-shirt with a childhood character Vladimir was not familiar with, a comical blue imp. “I’ve been up since six. An assistant DA wanted an entire tea service set up on his back.”

“You’re not submitting?”

She shook her head.

“If some lawyer touches you—”

“No one’s touching me. They know.”

He came around the bed and put his arm around her. She pulled away a little. He kissed her shoulder and before he could do otherwise, he started to cry—it happened very easily sometimes, now that his father was not around to object. She held him and he felt himself a very small man in her arms. On the futon, the insect remained in charge, so they went out to the fire escape and smoked cigarettes. She was crying too now with the cigarette in her hand, wiping her nose into her palm so that Vladimir worried her hair would catch fire from the cigarette, and he moved to clean her nose for her.

They drank a cheap Hungarian riesling that spelled “headache” after the third glass. They held hands. The lights were going out at the Garibaldi nursing home across the street, a five-story residence built in the sixties to prove how closely a building could resemble Formica. The Jamaican record store on the first floor, three Bob Marley records and a lot of dope for sale, was gearing up for the night’s business, the volume of the reggae constrained by the whims of the sleepy Garibaldi denizens across the street. Along with the cops, they had reached a sort of negotiated settlement, Alphabet City style, with the profitable Rastafarians. Everyone left everyone alone, the music stayed low.

“Hey, in three months I’ll be twenty-five,” she said.

“It’s no big deal, turning twenty-five,” Vladimir said. Immediately he felt bad. Maybe it was a big deal to her. “I just got a thousand dollars from a client,” Vladimir said. “Maybe we can go to a nice French restaurant for your birthday. The one with that famous plat de mer. I read about it in the paper. Four kinds of oysters, a very special crawfish—”

“A client gave you a thousand dollars,” Challah said. “What did you have to do to him?”

“Nothing!” Vladimir said. He shuddered at the implication. “It was just a tip. I’m helping him get his citizenship. Anyway, this plat de mer… ”

“You know I hate those slimy things,” Challah said. “Let’s just go out for a really good hamburger. Like at that fancy diner. The one we went to for Baobab’s birthday.”

Hamburger? She wanted to eat a hamburger on her twenty-fifth birthday? Vladimir remembered his parents upcoming barbecue, an event replete with many hamburgers. Could he invite Challah? Could she wear something decent? Could she pretend she was attending medical school where Vladimir had discreetly placed her in the Girshkin family imagination?

“That fancy diner sounds perfect,” Vladimir said, kissing Challah’s peeling lips. “We’ll get Caesar’s salads for everyone, gourmet relish, pitchers of sangria, the works…” And the next time they had sex he would keep his eyes open. He would look into her eyes directly. This is what one did to keep a relationship going. These were the desperate measures. Vladimir knew the drill. Preserving his fief, no matter how meager, this is what it meant to be an older, wiser Vladimir.

THE WEEKEND FOUNDDr. Girshkin sweating beneath the midday sun, his bald spot browning like a flapjack on the griddle, as he gestured about with a giant beefsteak tomato. “It is the biggest tomato in New York State,” he told Vladimir as he showed it off from every angle possible. “I must write to the Ministry of Agriculture. Maybe they have a prize for someone like me.”

“You’re a masterful gardener,” whispered Vladimir, trying to hustle some encouragement into his faltering voice.

It wasn’t easy. Having spent this strange June morning watching oversized radishes bask in the suburban haze, Vladimir had noticed a new and disturbing fact about his father: His father was old. He was a short, bald man, not unlike Vladimir when it came to his slight frame and dark oval face. And although his chest remained firm from the constant fishing and gardening, the black carpet of hair covering it had recently turned gray, his perfect posture had deteriorated, and his long aquiline nose had never looked so frail and thin, the skin around it so sun-wrinkled.

“You know, if the dollar collapses, and we’re all reduced to an agrarian lifestyle,” Vladimir said, “this one tomato can be an entire entrée.”

“Why, sure,” the doctor said. “A big vegetable can go a long way. There were times during the war when one carrot would feed a family for days. For instance, during the siege of Leningrad, your grandma and I, well…if truth be told, we were nowhere near Leningrad. We fled to the Ural Mountains at the start of the war. But there was nothing to eat there either. All we had was Tolik the Hog. A big fellow—we ate him for five years. We even bartered jars of lard for yarn and kerosene. The whole household ran off that hog.” He looked sadly at his son as if he wished he had saved a tailbone or some other memento. Then he had another idea.