Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook

On that particular night the dance floor is hogged by the new arriviste crowd, Prava’s temporary “it” thing by dint of their impressive numbers and some sort of media-publishing party connection they share in New York–Los Angeles, with a stopover in London–Berlin. There they are: white people in chamois lounge suits and bug-eyed sunglasses, falling apart on the dance floor to the thumpa-thumpa of MC Paavo and the whirl of his techno fog. One gets up, another falls down. One takes off his shirt to reveal himself flabby and old, just as his girlfriend, sweaty and young, is waking up and putting on her bra: a miscommunication. Now they’re crying and hugging. Soon enough they’re waving to the captain’s table, shouting, “Vladimir! Alexandra!”

At the captain’s table the wave is returned. “Sure, I wouldn’t want to risk sending any of our men to Sarajevo right now,” Harold Green is shouting to Vladimir over MC Paavo’s twenty beats per second. Harry’s webbed face is further creased with concern as he is likely thinking about PravaInvest’s “bright and eager young specialists” dodging enemy fire behind the rump of a U.N. armored personnel carrier.

“Have another drink, Harold. We’ll talk Bosnia tomorrow.”

Speaking of Bosnia, there’s Nadija. She’s from Mostar or thereabouts, her face as chiseled as a constructivist bust of Tito, her body as long and purposeful as that of a socialist-worker heroine, the mother of a nation. There she goes, leading by the chin a small, bearded liberal-arts specimen with an eager hamster expression, a pouf of red hair, and a tragic limp. She’s not taking him to the Ministry of Love, though. Its twenty bunkbeds, truncheons, and prized Israeli water cannon are for a different, later part of the night. No, first, the pale gentleman must do away with modern malaise: It’s time for a visit to Grandmother Marusya’s Infirmary, where there’s borscht for colds, opium for headaches, and horse tranquilizer for overactive imaginations.

BACK AT THEinsecuritorium… At the Captain’s Table, is that… Could it be? Alexandra and Cohen necking? Yes! Marcus the rugby runt, Alexandra’s ex-boyfriend, is gone—Daddy stopped wiring him funds, so it’s “back to naffing England for me, mate.” A closer look reveals Alexandra looking great tonight, formal in a spaghetti-strap dress and with her hair up. But the pouches under her eyes have the texture of leather, and then there’s the red swelling around her nostrils, a swelling from which sprout dark little hairs as thick and straight as dry grass. Someone’s been grazing at the horse stables one time too many.

But just look at her new beau. Cohen’s taken a beautiful old Armani sports jacket and roughed it up so that it is no longer a tool of oppression. He’s trimmed his beard and hair so that he looks five years older, with a doctoral thesis in the hopper. And now he’s wrapped his big arms around Alexandra and is telling her to calm down, that it’s all right, that she can drop her nightly dosage in the toilet, they’ll go to Crete next week to dance among the sheep, to drink mineral water and talk about themselves until it all makes sense. It’s hard to hear him above the bird squawks and jackhammer noises slipping off of MC Paavo’s turntable, but one can be sure that Cohen’s telling her that he loves her and he always has.

AND WHAT ABOUTVladimir? At the other end of the Captain’s Table, there he is, watching Cohen neck with Alexandra, as Harold Green begins his latest series of mind-bending lectures on his Soros Foundation in the sky. Vladimir takes a long look around the Metamorphosis, this terra incognito that he and František and MC Paavo have wrought in the biblical span of forty days. It’s a late hour, much too late for a Monday—and it’s usually around this time that Vladimir starts to ask himself the questions that cannot be answered with a healthy application of horse tranquilizer or a sip of one of the U.S.$5.50 Belgian lagers that have made the Metamorphosis so hip and solvent.

For instance: What would Mother think of his clever new venture? Would she be proud? Would she consider his little pyramid scheme a cheap alternative to an MBA? Has he inadvertently created something that will please her? Come to think of it, is there really any difference between Mother’s corporate colossus and his scrappy PravaInvest? And was it true what they said, that childhood was destiny? That there was no escape?

Finally, the one question Vladimir Girshkin has been trying to avoid all night by waxing nostalgic about Mother and fate and greed and his own strange, inglorious path from victim to victimizer:

Where was Morgan?

MORGAN WAS HOME.

Morgan was home a lot. Or she was teaching. Or she was wrestling with crazy old ladies. Or she was fucking Tomaš. It was hard to say. They didn’t talk much, Morgan and Vladimir. Their relationship had entered the stable, mutually dissatisfying stage of an old marriage. They were a bit like the Girshkins, each devoted more to their own tiny personal joys and vast private terrors than to each other.

How could they live like this?

Well, as we have seen, Vladimir, for the past month or so, has been working overtime to make PravaInvest the pyramid scheme to end all pyramid schemes forever. As for Morgan, she asked few questions about Vladimir’s flourishing bizness and she never made it out to the Metamorphosis either, claiming she wasn’t one for ear-popping Drum N’ Bass, and that she found Vladimir’s new pal František “a little creepy” and the whole horse tranquilizer scene deeply disturbing.

Fair enough. It was.

Now as for their intimacy, it continued. Prava is a fairly warm place in the fall and spring, but by mid-December the temperature inexplicably drops to Siberian levels, and members of the populace like to “get down” with one another—people of advanced age making out fearlessly in the metro, teenagers rubbing their butts together in the Old Town Square, and, in the freezing panelak s, to be without a partner blowing warm, beery breath up your crevices could mean a certain death.

So they pressed against each other. As they were watching the news, Morgan’s nose would sometimes be parked in between Vladimir’s nose and cheek, a particularly tropical place as Vladimir’s feverish body averaged 99.4 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale. And sometimes, on a cold morning, he would warm his hands between her thighs, which, unlike her cold cheeks and icicle ears, seemed to retain most of her warmth; by Vladimir’s calculations, a polar winter could pass quite comfortably with his various extremities lodged between her thighs.

As for sweet nothings, the words “I love you” were said exactly twice in the course of five weeks. Once, inadvertently, by Vladimir after he had climaxed into her hand and she was casually wiping herself with a sandpapery Stolovan tissue, her expression peaceful and generous (remember the tent!). And once by Morgan after she had unwrapped Vladimir’s thoughtful Christmas present, Vaclav Havel’s collected works in Stolovan, with an introduction by Borik Hrad, the so-called Stolovan Lou Reed. “I guess it’s important to believe in something,” Vladimir had written on the title page, although his own shaky handwriting left him unconvinced of that sentiment.

So, as implied, along with jealousy, there was coitus. Why? Because for Vladimir, the possibility that Morgan might have been sharing her afternoons with Tomaš, while maddening in its own right, only increased his vigor in bed. Much as with Challah during her dungeon days, he was inspired by the idea that the woman he wanted also wanted to be with others. It’s a simple equation that exists between many lovers: He could not have her and so he desired her.