Resolved: Vladimir’s an okay kind of guy. Vladimir toasted to himself with his fifth bourbon, and showed his laminated teeth to the waitress who actually smiled back a little, or at least opened her mouth. “S . . .” Vladimir began to say (the completed word would have been “So”), but the waitress had already left with a tray of drinks for the graduate students at the billiards table. They drank wild fruity things, the scholars.
Another hour of this, and Vladimir was genuinely debilitated. Nothing could be said in his favor. His image, as seen in a nearby martini decanter, showed a Russian pyanitsa, a drunken lout with his thinning hair slicked down by sweat, the buttons of his shirt opened beyond what was desirable. Even his laminated teeth—the pride of the Girshkins—had somehow attracted a gritty element along the bottom row.
The grad students were still shooting pool, maybe he could wave at them, do a drunken wave, that’s allowed when you’re drunk. He could be a character . . .
He quaffed the new bourbon down in no time. There was a woman sitting alone at a table no bigger than an ashtray at the end of a row of such tables leading up to the door and the street. How long had she been there? There was something of the pyanitsa in her appearance as well—her head was tilted to one side as if her neck muscles had failed her, her mouth was wide open, her dark hair dried and matted. Also noticeable through Vladimir’s haze was (starting from the top and working down) paleness, dark eyes, a blank gray sweatshirt, more paleness in the hands, and a book. She was reading. She was drinking. If only Bao had left him one of his books, but what for? So they could read at each other across a bar?
He took out a cigarette and lit it. Smoking made our Vladimir feel dangerous, made him think of running through Central Park at this late hour, sprinting to the sound of urban cicadas, zigzagging left and right like a soccer player, fooling death that lurked in the shadows between the park lights.
It was a plan.
He got up to leave, and the woman looked up at him. As he walked toward the door to outwit death in the park, she was still looking at him. She was right in front of him now and she was still looking at him.
He was sitting in the chair opposite her. Something must have tripped him, or else he just found himself sitting down on the warm plastic. The woman looked about twenty, her forehead developing an interstate of life’s first creases.
“I don’t know why I sat down,” Vladimir said. “I’m going to get up now.”
“You scared me,” the woman said. Her voice was deeper than his.
“I’m getting up now,” he said. He put one hand on the table. The book was Manhattan Transfer. “I love that book,” he said. “I’m leaving now. I didn’t mean to sit down.”
Again he was on his feet with the unsteady landscape around him. He saw the doorknob approaching and stuck out an anticipatory hand.
There was a chuckle behind him. “You look like Trotsky,” she said.
Good God, thought Vladimir, I’m going to have an affair.
He tasted the bourbon coating his tongue. He tweaked his goatee, pushed up his tortoiseshell glasses, and turned around. He walked back to her, making sure to bend his feet inward so that they wouldn’t flop Jewishly to the side, firmly plowing his instep into the American soil (“Stamp the ground with your feet as if you own it!” Mother had instructed him).
“It’s only when I’m drunk,” he said to the young woman, letting the last word dangle, as if to illustrate. “I look more like Trotsky when I’m drunk.” One could do better with introductions perhaps.
He slumped back into the chair. “I can get up and go. You’re reading a good book,” he said.
The woman put a napkin into her book and closed it. “Where you from, Trotsky?” she said.
“I am Vladimir,” said Vladimir in a tone that made him want to add, “and I journey far and wide on behalf of Mother Russia.” He restrained himself.
“A Russian Jew,” the observant woman said. “What do you drink?”
“Nothing anymore. I’m all drunk and broke.”
“And you miss your country,” said the woman, trying to match his sadness. “Two whiskey sours,” she said to a passing waitress.
“You are so kind,” Vladimir said. “You must be from another place. You go to NYU and hail from Cedar Rapids? Your parents work the land. You have three dogs.”
“Columbia,” the woman corrected him. “Manhattanite by birth, and my parents are professors at City. One cat.”
“What can be better?” Vladimir said. “If you like Chekhov and social democracy, we can be friends.”
The woman stuck out a long, bony hand which felt surprisingly warm. “Francesca,” she said. “So you come to bars alone?”
“I was with a friend, but he left,” Vladimir said, and then judging by her name and appearance added: “He was an Italian friend.”
“I’m flattered,” Francesca said.
She then performed a very innocuous gesture—moved an errant twirl of hair upward and over her ear. In doing so, she exposed a ribbon of white skin which the summer sun had been unable to reach. It was the sight of this skin that lifted the drunken, swooning Vladimir up and over the rickety wooden fence beyond which infatuations are kept, grazing off the fat of the heart. Such a thin, translucent membrane, this stretch of skin. How could it ever guard the intellect from the suffocating summer air outside? Not to mention falling objects, perching birds, persons intent on doing harm. He thought he was going to cry. It was all so . . . But the childhood admonitions of his father were clear: no crying. He tried squinting instead.
“What’s wrong?” Francesca said. “You look troubled, dear.” Another round of whiskey sours had come out of nowhere. He reached out a trembling hand in the direction of the drink, its maraschino cherry blinking at him like a landing light.
And then a cozy darkness descended, just as a helpful arm was wrapped around his elbow . . . They were out on the sidewalk and through a blurring of vision he saw a taxi swing past her pale cheek. “Taxi,” Vladimir mumbled, trying to stay on his newly christened feet.
“Yes, boy,” Fran encouraged him. “Taxi.”
“Bed,” Vladimir said.
“And where,” she asked, “does Trotsky make his bed?”
“Trotsky make no bed. Trotsky rootless cosmopolitan.”
“Well, this is your red-letter day, Leon. I know of a nice couch up on Amsterdam and Seventy-second.”
“Seductress . . .” Vladimir whispered to himself.
Before long they were in the cab, headed uptown, past a familiar deli where Vladimir had once gotten something, a roast beef that didn’t work out. Next time he looked they had slipped onto the speedy terrace of the West Side Highway, and they were still headed up, uptown.
And to what end? he thought before passing on to the Land of Nod.
7. VLADIMIR
DREAMS OF . . .
. . . AN AIRPLANE DRIFTING through eastern European clouds rolled together, pierogi-style from the layered exhaust of coal, benzene, and acetate. Mother is yelling to Mr. Rybakov over the roar of propellers: “I remember the semifinals so vividly! Little Failure takes rook, loses queen, scratches his head, check and mate . . . The only Russian boy not to make it to the state championship.”
“Chess,” the Fan Man snorts, tapping the altimeter gauge. “A pursuit for idiots and layabouts. Don’t even talk to me about chess, Mama.”
“I’m just making an example!” Mother yells. “I’m drawing parallels between the arenas of chess and life. Remember, it was I who taught him how to walk! Where were you when he was hobbling around like a Jew? Ah, but it’s always left to the mother. Who make them their Salad Olivier? Who gets them their first job? Who helps them with their college essays? ‘Topic Two: Describe the biggest problem you have ever faced in your life and how you overcame it.’ Biggest problem? I walk like a Yid and I don’t love my mother . . .”
“It would be better if you shut your mouth,” Rybakov says. “Mamas are always meddling, always tryin
g to give their boys the teat . . . Suck! Suck, little one! And then they wonder why their sons turn out cretins. Besides, he’s my Vladimir now.”
Mother sighs and crosses herself in her new fashion. She turns around to smirk at Vladimir chafing away in the cargo bay, the straps of the parachute kit burning the delicate white meat of his shoulders.
“Nu,” Rybakov shouts to Vladimir. “Ready to jump, Airman?” Beneath the aircraft, a blue grid of urban light is replacing the void of the countryside. The nascent city is bisected by a dark loop of river, illuminated solely by the lights of barges making their way downstream. The word PRAVA, glowing in neon, is spelled in giant Cyrillic characters on the city’s left bank.
“My son is waiting for you . . .there!” The Fan Man points somewhere between the neon P and the neon R. “You will recognize him right away. He is a substantial man standing by a row of Mercedes. Handsome like his father.”
Before Vladimir can object, the doors of the cargo bay open, and the parachutist is engulfed by the cold night air . . . The nebulous sensation of plummeting in a dream.
I’m falling to earth! thinks Vladimir.
It is not an unpleasant feeling.
8. THE PEOPLE’S VOLVO
VLADIMIR AWOKE AT noon in the uptown studio of Francesca’s friend Frank. This Frank, an evident Slavophile, had decorated his room with a half dozen handmade icons of gold crepe, along with a wall-sized Bulgarian tourist poster showing an onion-domed rural church flanked by a terrifically woolly animal (baa?). Vladimir would never find out exactly what happened on that long journey uptown, how he was wheeled in past the doorman, how the apartment was requisitioned for his use, and the other details lost on the inebriated. Quite a first impression Vladimir must have made—five minutes of conversation followed by a light coma.
But then . . . ! But then . . . On the Swede-made instant-coffee table . . . what did he find? A pack of Nat Sherman cigarettes to steal, yes . . . And next to the cigarettes . . . Next to the cigarettes there was a note. So far so good. And then on the note . . . concentrate now . . . in looped middle-class script, Francesca’s last name (Ruocco) . . . Her Fifth Avenue address and phone number . . . And, to conclude, a sympathetic invitation to drop by her house at eight and then to a TriBeCa party by eleven.
Success.
With shaky fingers, Vladimir lit a Nat Sherman’s cigarette, a long, brown cylinder tasting of honey and ash. He smoked it in the elevator although this was the kind of newish building where smoke detectors abounded. He smoked it past the doorman, out onto the street, all the way into Central Park. Only then did Vladimir remember his original plan, the drunken plan he had formulated before he boldly took the seat opposite Francesca.
Vladimir ran through the park. A happy run interspersed with a hop, a skip, and a jump. What beautiful feet he had! What wonderful Russo-Judeo-Slavo-Hebraio feet . . . Just right for sprinting down this bike path. Or for a grand entrance at Francesca’s Fifth Avenue apartment. Or for setting down on a coffee table at a TriBeCa loft party. Ah, how thoroughly, consistently, delightfully wrong Mother was about everything, about the whole country, about the happy possibilities for young immigrant V. Girshkin. Wrong! wrong! wrong! Vladimir thought as he ran across the Sheep Meadow dotted with unemployed sunbathers on a lazy Monday afternoon, the midtown skyscrapers looking down on them with corporate indifference. Mother, in fact, was serving time in one of those smoked-glass monstrosities built before the last recession: a corner office draped with American flags and a framed photo of the Girshkin Tudor, minus its three inhabitants.
And what a day for a run, too. Cool as early spring, gray and drizzly—the kind of day that felt like playing hooky from school, or, in Vladimir’s case, from work. And the kind of day that reminded him of her—Francesca—the grayness, the ambivalence, the supposed intelligence that abounded in wet English days; plus the weight of the surrounding dampness brought to mind the way he had been cradled in her neck in the taxi. Yes, here again was a kind person, and, so far, Vladimir had only been involved with kind women. Perhaps to love Vladimir required a certain kindness. In that case, what good luck!
The run, however, ended after one muddy slope as Vladimir’s lungs—genuine handiwork of Leningrad—let themselves be known, and the sprinter was forced to seek a rain-soaked bench.
HE MADE IT to work around two. It was Chinese Week at the Emma Lazarus Society and the Chinese lined up behind the China Desk, spilling over into the waiting room where there was tea and a stuffed panda. The few Russians that came out of the wet afternoon giggled at the stream of Asians and tried to emulate the quiet buzz of their conversations with a barrage of “Ching Chang Chong Chung.” Fights almost broke out.
Although Vladimir was taught to foster multiculturalism, he looked blankly into the sneering faces of his countrymen, stamping his way through their mountains of documents. Who could think of immigrants on a day like this?
“Baobab, I just met someone. A woman.”
There was confusion on the other end of the line. “Sex? What?”
“No sex. But we were in the same bed, I think.”
“You’re a slave to prophylaxis, Girshkin,” Baobab tittered. “All right, tell us everything. What’s she like? Thin? Rubenesque?”
“She’s worldly.”
“And Challah’s reaction when she found out?”
Vladimir considered this unhappy scenario. Little Challah Bread. Little Bondage Bear. Ditched once again. Uh-hum. “So how did it go with Laszlo?” Vladimir ventured. “Did you give him the worker’s fist?”
“No worker’s fist. Actually, I’m enrolled in his new seminar: ‘Stanislavsky and You.’ ”
“Oh, Baobab.”
“This way I can keep tabs on Roberta. And meet other actresses. And Laszlo says he might get us into this new production of Waiting for Godot in Prava next spring.”
“Prava?” The edges of a strange dream skirted Vladimir’s memory; in kaleidoscopic succession he saw Mother, the Fan Man, an empty parachute falling out of the sky. “What nonsense,” muttered Vladimir. “I must stop thinking of this Rybakov and think only of my Francesca!” And to Baobab he said, “You mean the Paris of the 90s?”
“The SoHo of Eastern Europe. Exactly. Say, when are you going to introduce me to your new friend?”
“There’s a party tonight in TriBeCa. It starts at . . . Hey! What? You, sir. You in the kaftan . . . Put that chair down!” A small but lively race riot was underway by the fax machine. Vladimir’s Haitian colleague was already there, deploying security personnel with gusto, as if she were back on her deposed father’s estate in Port-au-Prince. Vladimir was summoned to fetch the agency bullhorn.
“I’M FROM LENINGRAD,” he said, bowing his head in gratitude as Francesca’s father, Joseph, squeezed a glass of Armagnac into his hand.
“St. Petersburg,” said her mother, Vincie, with undue authority and then laughed loudly over her own overbearing nature.
“Yes,” Vladimir admitted, although he could never picture the city of his birth—where Lenin’s munificent visage peeked out of every kiosk and water closet—going by any other name. He told them the story of how he was born with such a big forehead that the director of the maternity ward personally congratulated his mother on giving birth to the next Vladimir Ilyich.
Her parents cackled up a mixture of genuine laughter and politeness. With a few more Armagnacs, guessed Vladimir, it would settle on the former.
“That’s wonderful,” said Joseph, mindlessly layering his industrial-gray hair. “And you still have a tremendous forehead!”
Before Vladimir had a chance to blush, Francesca (blushing herself) entered the book-lined living room in a black velvet dress that clung to her like a second skin. “Why, Frannie,” Vincie brayed, adjusting her enormous pinkish eyeglasses. “Look at you! Where did you say you were headed tonight, dear?”
“Just to a little party,” Francesca smirked at her mother. Vladimir presumed she didn’t like being called Frannie, and he lo
ved it—another item for her burgeoning file, along with the contact-lens solution he spotted in the bathroom (and why not glasses?).
“So what do you do, Mr. Girshkin?” Joseph said with exaggerated gravity, as if to suggest that he was not about to take himself seriously, although Vladimir certainly could if he wanted to.
“Leave him alone, Dad,” Francesca said, and Vladimir smiled inwardly at this happy American word: Dad. There was something awkward and demeaning, he had always felt, in the Russian papa.
“Sometimes your Happy Hegemon act is just a little too convincing,” Francesca told her father. “How would you like it if we had lost the Cold War and not Vladimir’s country?”
Yes, Vladimir liked the Ruoccos, there was no doubt. Both were City College professors, and Vladimir had met his share during his tenure at the math-and-science high school, where professorial offspring herded together to form an intellectual elite. All the welcoming signs were there: a copy of the New Left Review on the coffee table; an unlimited supply of booze in the kitchen; their unabashed feeling of pleasant surprise at meeting an intelligent young person after the long days of lecturing to hundreds of sleeping bodies, only to be confronted by overeager Baobab-types during office hours.
“I resettle immigrants,” Vladimir said.
“That’s right, he speaks Russian,” Vincie said, a self-congratulatory smile on her cracked lips.
“We better go soon,” Francesca said.
“Another shot of Armagnac won’t hurt anyone,” said Joseph, shaking his head at his daughter and her prudery.
“Oh, you’ll get them smashed before the party!” laughed Vincie. She held out her own glass for a refill.
“And what do your parents do?” Joseph said, overfilling Vladimir’s glass. Vladimir raised his eyebrows and folded his arms—a gesture performed reflexively whenever his family was mentioned—until Joseph was visibly worried that he had struck a sensitive nerve, and Francesca looked ready to disembowel him, or at least use the word “hegemon” again. But then Vladimir revealed the Girshkins’ exclusive professions, and everyone smiled and toasted to the foreigners.
The Russian Debutante’s Handbook Page 6