Gary Shteyngart - The Russian Debutante's Handbook

“You’re a beautiful man, Vladimir,” Morgan said.

“Oh, fuck you, Morgie. What’s the project? You’re going to blow up the Foot or something? There’s dynamite in that sealed room of yours? You and Tommy are going to light the fuse during the May Day parade? Dead babushka s as far as the eye can see…”

Morgan threw her empty soda can at Vladimir where it momentarily stung his left ear and rattled off one tinted window. “Boy and girl, please be good to expensive car,” Jan remarked from the driver’s seat.

“What the hell was that?” Vladimir hissed at her. “What the hell did you do that for?” Morgan said nothing. She stared out her window at the pyrotechnics of an overturned oil truck in the middle of the highway, firemen in Day-Glo jackets waving Jan onto a side road. “Are you fucking crazy?” Vladimir said.

Morgan remained silent and this silence made Vladimir both enraged and a little giddy. “Oooh, was I right?” he taunted, scratching his offended ear. “You gonna blow up the Foot, eh? Little Morgan and her platonic buddy Tommy gonna blow up the Foot!”

“No,” Morgan said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“No,” she said once more. But the “No” repeated twice would be her undoing.

No, Vladimir thought. What the hell did that mean? He took her first “No” at face value, then he added the second “No” and then he threw in her long silence plus the brutal attack with the soda can. What was he thinking now? But it couldn’t be. Death to the Foot? No. Yes? No. But how?

“Morgan,” Vladimir said, suddenly serious. “You’re not going to blow up the Foot, are you? I mean that would just be…”

“No,” Morgan said for the third time, still looking away. “It’s nothing like that.”

“Jesus Christ, Morgan,” Vladimir finally said. Sealed room. Crazed babushka s. Semtex? That one clichéd word announced itself uninvited. “Semtex?” Vladimir said.

“No,” Morgan whispered, still looking outside her window at the dregs of urban Prava, an abandoned railroad station, a television tower lying on its side, a socialist-era swimming pool filled with dismantled tractors.

“Morgan!” Vladimir said, reaching over to touch her but deciding otherwise.

“You don’t understand anything,” Morgan said. She covered her face with her hands. “You’re just a little boy,” she said. “An oppressed immigrant. That’s what Alexandra calls you. What the hell do you know about oppression? What do you know about anything?”

“Oh, Morgan,” Vladimir said. He couldn’t help but feel a swift and ambiguous sadness. “Oh, Morgan,” he repeated. “What have you gotten yourself into, honey?”

“Give me your mobile…” Morgan said.

“What?”

“You want to meet him… Is that what you want? Mr. Vladimir Girshkin. Criminal laureate. I can’t believe what you just put me through at that dinner. That poor stupid woman. ‘Okh! Okh! Okh!’ I can’t believe any of you people… Give me your phone!”

AND SO ITwas done. A connection was made. Two hours later. Half past midnight. Back at Morgan’s panelak. He came with a partner. “This is my friend,” Tomaš announced. “We call him Alpha.”

Waiting for the Stolovans, Vladimir had helped himself to several vodka shots and was on the verge of becoming boisterous. “Hey there, Alpha!” he shouted. “Are you part of a team? Like Team Alpha? Oooh… I love you guys already.”

“I have no money,” Tomaš said to Morgan. “Taxi is waiting outside. Could you…” Without a word Morgan ran off to pay the taxi.

“How about I fix you a drink, Tommy,” Vladimir said. “Alpha, what are you having?” Vladimir was recumbent in his usual place on the sofa, while the two Stolovans remained standing across the room, their postures hunched and guarded as if Vladimir was a wild ocelot that might attack at any moment.

“I’m not a drinker,” Tomaš said, and by Vladimir’s estimation he wasn’t much of anything. A slight man with pink, scaly patches of psoriasis on his cheeks and a thicket of receded yellow hair that formed a natural mohawk, he was dressed in an old trench coat with thick glasses that verged on safety goggles, and a bright shirt, possibly of Chinese origin, which peeked out of his coat. Alpha looked rather similar (both had their hands jammed into their coat pockets and were blinking a lot), except Tomaš’s sidekick was entirely missing a set of eyebrows (industrial accident?) and had a telephone cord tied around the waist of his trench coat. Without knowing it, the two gentlemen were actually on the cutting edge of fashion, wearing what in New York would soon be called “Immigrant Chic.”

“I thought, or rather, I am thinking now,” Tomaš declared, “that I am to blame for problems here. I should have come to you forthly. Yes? Forthly? Excuse my English. In affairs between man and woman, honesty must be the lodestar by which we navigate.”

“Yeah,” Vladimir said as he loudly sucked on a lemon. “Lodestar. You said it, Tommy.” Now why was he being so mean to this unfortunate man? It wasn’t exactly jealousy over Tomaš’s affair with Morgan. It was… What? A sense of overfamiliarity? Yes, in some way, this pockmarked Tomaš was like a long-lost landsman. What a thought: for all his posturing, very little separated Vladimir from his ex-Soviet brethren, from the childhoods spent lusting after cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, drinking endless cups of homemade yogurt for dubious health reasons, and dreaming of someday bombing the Americans into submission.

Tomaš, for his part, ignored Vladimir’s remarks. “I was privileged,” he said, “to be Morgan’s companion from 12 May 1992 through 6 September 1993. On the morning of 7 September, she ended our love relationship and we have been since then steadfast friends.” He looked imploringly toward Vladimir’s vodka bottle and then down to the pair of broken moccasins on his feet. As soon as he spoke with those awkward gooey lips, his red ears flapping along to the sound of each consonant, Vladimir knew it was true: Tomaš was no longer in the running. Poor guy. There was something indubitably unsettling about having to confess one’s failure as a lover. Then again, Vladimir tried to picture the little Stolovan with the big flattened nose and ruined skin on top of Morgan and immediately felt all the more sorry for her. What the hell was she thinking? Did she have some sort of a fetish for Eastern European sad sacks? And if so, where did that leave Vladimir?

“What do you think of all this, Alpha?” Vladimir asked Tomaš’s partner.

“I have never known love,” Alpha confessed, tugging at his telephone cord. “Women do not think of me as this type of guy. Yes, I am alone, but I do many things to keep busy… I am very busy with myself.”

“Wow,” Vladimir said sadly. Being with these two made him feel lost and disoriented, as if his traditional outsider’s place in the social hierarchy had been completely usurped. “Wow,” he repeated, trying to imbue the word with a kind of empty Californian inflection.

Morgan came back into the flat, averted her eyes from her lover and ex-lover, and busied herself with taking off her snow-covered galoshes. “You know, I’m actually starting to like your friends,” Vladimir told her. “But I still can’t believe that you and Tomaš here once shared a bed… He’s not exactly…”

“To you I am so-called drip,” Tomaš said plainly. “Or, perhaps, nerd or bore.” He bowed a little as if to show how comfortable he was with his identity.

“Tomaš is a wonderful man,” Morgan said, taking off her sweater, dressed now only in the famous silk blouse. The three Eastern Europeans paused to examine her silhouette. “There’s a lot you could learn from him,” Morgan continued. “He’s not an egoist like you, Vladimir. And he’s not even a criminal. How about that!”