The Russian Debutante’s Handbook

by Gary Shteyngart

  Yes, he imagined it was all over. It was time to forget the holy trinity of Arousal, Affection, and Normalcy, to forget their little sojourn in the tent, the way she had brushed the thistles off his person, unzipped his janitor pants, hoisted him atop of her, pushed him forward. To forget the way she had handled his weaknesses, with kindness and complicity both.

  Instead, he was left now to mull over a new word, a word that practically annulled the past three months with this woman. The word was “distance,” and as he stirred his espresso and poked at his pear strudel, he was thinking of ways to use it in a sentence. I’m becoming increasingly aware of a distance . . . No, that wouldn’t do.

  There’s a distance between us, Morgan.

  Yes, there certainly was. But even that was an understatement.

  And finally it came to him. The words he couldn’t say.

  Who are you, Morgan Jenson? Because I think I’ve made a mistake.

  Yes. Right. Once again. On a different continent, but with the same blind, stupid vigor, with the same debilitating faith of the Jew-walking beta immigrant.

  A mistake.

  29. THE NIGHT

  OF MEN

  BEFORE THINGS GOT better, they had to get worse. The day after the debacle with the Foot, it was time for an evening of pain and uncertainty, the long-awaited Night of Men—Plank, Cohen, and Vladimir out on the town with their Y chromosomes, facial stubble, and early 90s white-male ennui in tow. Looking for beer.

  In truth, Vladimir was not averse to this manly endeavor. After the previous night of kissing and not being kissed, he wanted, once more, to embrace whatever embraced him back, and at this point the Crowd was it; the last bastion of no surprises. That morning, however, there had been a sign of hope on the Morgan front. After flossing and gargling for work, she had come over to Vladimir (he was sitting glumly in the bathtub sprinkling his chest with soapy water) and kissed his tiny bald spot, whispering “Sorry about last night,” and helping him rub his daily dose of minoxidil into the bare bull’s-eye of his crown. Vladimir, shocked by her unexpected affection, squeezed her thigh a little, even pulled, in a desultory way, a clump of pubic hair peeking out of her robe, but said not a word in response. It wasn’t time for that yet. Sorry, indeed.

  AS FOR THE night of men, the chosen venue, a bar, was Jan’s suggestion and a good one. As Stolovan as the New, Improved & Euro-Ready Prava could get in those days, with tables of thin, pimpled conscripts and off-duty police officers accounting for most of the patronage. All were still in uniform, swilling good beer poured from a row of spouting taps, which had been so well trained in the art of dispensation that even in the “off” position they continued to gush. There was no decor, only walls, a roof, and a minimal outdoor garden where folding chairs were scattered about, creaking under the weight of the military and security organs that occupied them. A plastic statue of a pink flamingo brought back by “the first modern Stolovan to visit Florida,” according to the barmaid, stood watch on one leg over the clinking of mugs, and the cheerful trading of insults.

  Cohen and Plank at first seemed uneasy about the local scene. Vladimir could see them clutching their American Express cards inside their trouser pockets as if they feared being eaten alive by the natives after failing to cover the tab. An understandable fear, as the soldiers looked hungry and the kitchen was closed. But as the tab built, the boys let their shoulders stoop and took their unused hand—the one not handling the mug—out of their pockets, setting it on the bar next to the beer where it tapped along to Michael Jackson’s entire oeuvre as it unfolded from the sound system. He still sounded good after all those years, that strange bird.

  On their own they didn’t get past some perfunctory grunts, and “Boy, this beer is good,” but then the conscripts next to them, a Jan and a Voichek, started passing around German pornography and practicing their English. Quickly the nude women got to Cohen and Plank; they sighed in unison each time a page was turned by the leering Jan or his giggling, younger companion. “She looks just like Alexandra,” they said, and then tried to explain to the conscripts in a combination of English, Stolovan, and Masculinity, that they knew a woman just as gorgeous and desirable as the one on display. Jan and Voichek were greatly impressed.

  “Like this?” they said, pointing at breasts and labias and then looking back awed at the Americans who, at least in the female company they kept, still seemed the citizens of a great world power.

  What amazed Vladimir, who contributed little to the conversation beyond some simulated slobber, was that the German Valkyries in the magazine did not resemble Alexandra in the slightest. The models were blond and impossibly tall, with legs spread out like pincers to expose the uniformly hairless run of pink held open by several fingers. Alexandra, while not short or heavy, was hardly towering, or blond, or paper-thin. Her Portuguese fore-mothers had bequeathed her a healthy Mediterranean fullness of hips, lips, and breasts. The only criteria satisfied by both her and the women in the magazine was that they were all desirable.

  For Plank and Cohen that was enough. Anything would have been enough to get them hot and upset. Soon the particulars of Plank’s and Cohen’s malaise dawned on the conscripts and they excused themselves claiming they had to go pick up their girlfriends “for the prophylactic work.”

  “Okay, gents,” Vladimir said, when standard English had returned to their corner of the bar. “Another round, what do you say?”

  Grunts of approval as enthusiastic as the lowing of cows.

  “All right,” Vladimir said. “Look, I have a thing for Alexandra too.”

  Happy amazement. Him too! A universal dilemma! “But what about Morgan?” Plank asked, scratching at his enormous shaved head.

  Vladimir shrugged. What about Morgan? Could he unbosom himself to the boys? No, it was out of the question. They were too fragile and set in their ways. The news of Morgan’s double life could easily give each a stroke.

  “It is possible to love two women,” Vladimir declared in answer to Plank’s question. “Especially when you only sleep with one of them.”

  “Yes, I believe that’s right,” said the scholarly Cohen, as if these laws were codified and available for perusal at the Rimbaud Institute of Desire. “Although sooner or later things start to fall apart.”

  Vladimir ignored that, pressing on like a concerned den mother: “What you boys need is to chase after someone else. And I mean really chase and not just wait and mope.” There was laughter. “I’m serious. Look at the position you find yourself in: You’re on top of the world here. You’re more respected than you’ll ever be . . .”

  He hadn’t meant it quite so truthfully. “You’re more respected in the context of being young and not yet aware of the full range of your artistic proclivities,” he clarified, although it was not necessary. They knew they were great. “You can have just about anyone you want in this town!” he shouted.

  “Just about,” Cohen said, sadly chewing on his beer.

  “I hear you, brother,” Plank mumbled to Cohen.

  The boys tried to smile and shrug good-naturedly, as senior citizens from the Old World are bound to do when informed that their daily meal of fondue and blood sausages can have repercussions.

  Vladimir, for one, was prepared to spend the whole evening hammering in his message and draining the prodigious taps. Unbeknownst to him, however, there were rumors, broadcast to the whole neighborhood by patrons staggering home, of a group of strangely dressed American dandies loitering in the local watering hole, and these rumors soon yielded a visitor.

  HE WAS A rather striking Stolovan—tall and built, it would seem, from the same millennial bricks that had gone into the Emanuel Bridge. The hair was cropped short and adorned with a cowlick, as was the emerging fashion in Western capitals; and the clothes, a gray turtleneck and a vest of black corduroy, were also close to the latest style. Not to mention that he was in his early forties and men of that age group could be given some leeway as far as their wardrobes were concerned; t
hat is to say, points could be given for effort alone.

  “Hello, dear guests,” he said in an accent so slight it approximated Vladimir’s. “Your glasses are almost empty. Permit me!” He shouted orders to the barmaid. The glasses were filled.

  “My name is František,” he said, “and I am a longtime citizen of this city and this neighborhood. Now allow me to guess where you’re from. I have a natural gift for geography. Detroit?”

  He was not completely wrong. Plank, as has been established before, was indeed from a suburb of the Motor City. “But what about me says Detroit?” the dog-breeder wanted to know with outright indignation.

  “I notice your height, lankiness, and complexion,” František said, unhurriedly sipping his beer. “I deduce from these attributes that your ancestry is of this part of the world. Not exactly Stolovan, but are you, by chance, Moravian?”

  “Partly, I believe,” Plank said. “I like to think of myself as more of a Bohemian.”

  This joke went unappreciated. František continued: “So I think of parts of the States with big concentrations of Eastern Europeans and immediately I think of big Midwestern cities, but, for some reason, not Chicago when I look at you. So . . . Detroit.”

  “Very good,” Vladimir said, already trying to draw a map of their new acquaintance’s social complexion to better account for his remarkable sagacity. “But, in my case, as you can plainly see,” Vladimir said, “my ancestry is not of this part of the world, and hence, it is unlikely that I am from Detroit.”

  “Yes, perhaps you are not from Detroit,” František said, keeping his good form. “But, unless I am a complete fool, which is surely possible, I do believe that your ancestry is from this part of the world, because you look to me a Jew!”

  Cohen bristled at the use of the last word, but František continued: “And furthermore, your accent says to me that it was you and not your ancestors that left this part of the world or, to be more precise, Russia or the Ukraine, for sadly we don’t have any Jews left here except in the cemeteries where they’re stacked ten to a grave. So, then, New York is where you resettled, and your father’s either a doctor or an engineer; and by the looks of your goatee and long hair you are an artist or, more likely, a writer; and your parents are aghast, because they do not consider it a profession; and university is so expensive in the States, but still it is doubtful they would have settled for anything but the most expensive college, since you are likely the only child; obviously so, since most cosmopolitan Muscovites or Petersburgers (is that where you’re from?) have one child, at most, two, in an effort to concentrate meager resources.”

  “You are a professor,” said Vladimir, “or else a traveler and voracious reader of periodicals.” He was not surprised to find himself easily replicating the voice and tone of the Stolovan. He was that infectious.

  “Well,” said František. “I am not a professor. No.”

  “Fine then,” said Cohen, seemingly satisfied that the man was not an anti-Semite. “I’ll get the next beers if you entertain us with the story of your life.”

  “You get the beers and I will buy shots of vodka,” recommended František. “They complement each other perfectly. You will see.”

  So it was done this way, and while the vodka did not go down smoothly at first, the gentle American palate soon adapted, or rather, was bypassed, as inebriation set in. Meanwhile, the Stolovan gentleman related his story with great cheer—it was obvious he relished the opportunity to tell it to young, devil-may-care Americans; older Americans, particularly those not schooled in modern irony, might have been less amused.

  As a youth, the handsome František studied at the faculty of linguistics and was a star pupil, as could be expected. This was almost half a decade after the Soviet invasion of 1969, when so-called normalization had set in nicely and Brezhnev was still waving at tractors from atop the mausoleum.

  František’s father was big at the Interior Ministry, the kind of chipper place where faceless and hairless bureaucrats sent helicopters to hover meters over the open graves of dissidents during their funerals. František’s father was particularly fond of that maneuver. His son, however, had picked up some sense of moral disquietude here or there, most likely at the university, where such things generally lurk. But it was a quiet sense of disquietude, in that while František refused a fast-track career at the Interior Ministry, he nonetheless could not bring himself to sneak around with samizdat pamphlets, attend clandestine meetings in sulfur-smelling basements, or to be reduced to a job as, say, an attendant at a municipal water-closet—the basics of dissident activity.

  Instead, he got himself a job as assistant deputy editor of the regime’s favorite newspaper, the appropriately named Red Justice. There were quite a few assistant deputies, but no matter. František with his talent, towering good looks, and a father in the Interior Ministry soon wangled for himself the enviable position of covering “culture,” which meant traveling abroad on the heels of the Stolovan Philharmonic, the opera, the ballet, and any art exhibits that made it out of Mayakovsky Airport.

  Abroad! “My life revolved around the export calendars of Prava’s better institutions,” František said, turning to stare wistfully in the direction of what used to be the free world, or so one would imagine. “And sometimes even the provinces coughed up something worth sending to London, although [sigh] more often to Moscow or, God forbid, Bucharest.”

  František loved the West like the mistress one gets to see only after her mindful husband gets sent to balance the books in the Milwaukee office. He loved Paris especially, a not-uncommon love affair for Stolovans, whose early-twentieth-century artists had consistently looked to Gaul for inspiration. Once free of the silly commitments at the local embassy and the actual performances, he would roam freely without particular destination in mind, exchanging taxis for the metro, aimless rambles along the Seine for getting totaled in the Montparnasse, all while avoiding the significant Stolovan expatriate community that would likely roast him up along with their carp and dumplings.

  But with actual Westerners he was a big success. After the Soviet invasion there was no shortage of sympathy for “a young, oppressed Stolovan, let out for just a glimpse of freedom, only to be corralled back into his Stalinist pen.” And when the lithe French women begged, and indignant British chaps demanded that he defect, he would wipe his tears and tell them about his mama and papa, the hard-pressed, sooted chimney cleaners, who would surely spend their remaining years in the gulag if he missed his two o’clock flight.

  “If you read writers like Hrabal or Kundera,” František said, while toasting wordlessly in conjunction with a newly arrived round of Polish Wybornaya, “you will see that sex is not unimportant for the East European man.” And then he went into some of this sex that took place in Hempstead Tudors and TriBeCa lofts; and just looking at this healthy, wide-faced buck one could picture him, without too many acrobatics of the imagination, with almost any woman and in nearly any position, but always sporting the same enthralled and determined expression, his body properly soaked and bruised.

  Here Plank and Cohen descended into reverie, staring happily into the depths of their shot glasses as František enumerated his assignations. Vladimir was pleased that they took all this in with a sense of healthy wonderment. Perhaps they weren’t imposing the Alexandra template—the way they had done with the ludicrous German pornography—on Cherice the political activist and Marta the performance artist who had both shared a room in Amsterdam’s Jordaan district only to share František during the world tour of the Prava Children’s Puppet Theater. Who knew what accounted for their budding interest: perhaps Vladimir’s earlier pep talk, or the beer mixed with vodka, or the charm of the former apparatchik gushing over his international delights with, still, a sense of boundless possibility?

  But, of course, the cultural beat wasn’t all Dutch tulips and Godiva. There was also the domestic front, and they watched František take an extended swill of beer in preparation for this portion.
“Oh, how they would come,” he said. “From every region of every district of every goddamn Slavic country . . . ‘Citizens, now we are pleased to present the Stavropol Krai Peasant Chorus!’ All the bloody peasant choruses! All those fucking balalaikas! And always singing about some Katyusha picking boysenberries on the river bank and then the local boys spot her and make her blush. I mean, really! Try writing a review of that minus the cynicism. ‘At the Palace of Culture last night, our socialist brethren from Minsk demonstrated once again the progressive peasant culture that has kept local ethnographers enthralled since the heady days of the Revolution.’ ”

  He reached into his shot glass and sprinkled some vodka in his face. “What can I tell you,” he said, squinting. “That was the hell of it, but then it all fell apart anyway . . .”

  “No more Red Justice?” Vladimir asked.

  “Oh, no, it’s still there,” František said. “Some of the older people still read it. The ones on a fixed income who can’t afford sausages and are getting really pissed on that score, the so-called Guardians of the Foot, you might have heard them wailing by the Big Toe. Yes, they pay me to write something now and then. Or I give a speech on the cultural-glory days of Brezhnev and our first working-class president Jan Zhopka for the geezers at the Great Hall of People’s Friendship. You know, that huge place with the old socialist flag hanging out the window like somebody’s dirty laundry.”

  “Where is that again?” Vladimir asked. “It sounds familiar.”

  “It’s on the embankment facing the castle, right by the most expensive restaurant in Prava.”

  “Yes, I’ve been to that restaurant,” Vladimir said, coloring at the thought of his Cole Porter revue with the Groundhog.

  “But it’s not fair,” Plank said. “You’re so bright and well-traveled. You should write for one of the new papers.”

  “I’m afraid that’s impossible. After our most recent revolution they published a lengthy directory of who did what during the lost years, and it would seem that my family has a whole chapter devoted to it.”