—
UNDER A SKY TURNING from champagne to magenta, Lenny slouched onward in the direction of the front gates, the tacky, sweet odor of burnt grill fat leaving in its wake an odd nostalgia. It made him recall his two years of college fraternity life at Rutgers—the lawn cookouts watched enviously by the unaffiliated freshmen and sophomores. He hadn’t stayed in touch with his “brothers” or particularly missed them. What he missed was the fact of affiliation itself, its code of loyalty. It was the promise he had seemed to rediscover in Moscow. In their own way, he and his expat friends had formed a kind of fraternity. The familiar haunts—Bourbon Street, Molly’s, Mishka Pub—the all-night benders, the instant friendships over shots, the inexhaustible supply of willing girls, all of it had the same collegiate flavor of life moving fast and yet somehow placed on hold. And, with a bit of maturity and a little money in his pocket, he had at last been able to enjoy it. He had always assumed that he and his American friends in Moscow shared this code of loyalty. When had everything changed? When had guys like Austin started taking Sasha’s side? Or was it possible—and this terrified him most of all—that he had been wrong about it from the beginning? That he’d been alone on the lawn all along?
At the front gates, Lenny found Noah bumming a cigarette off some strangers, even though, Lenny was sure, he had a pack of his own somewhere on his body. “Where the hell have you been?” Noah said, gesturing threateningly with the smoke. “You told me five minutes.”
“I’m sorry. Are the girls here?”
“They left!”
“I’m out of the WCP deal.”
“We’re both out of luck, then. Damn it, boy, I hate throwing back my catch.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re always sorry. Make it up to me with some food. My stomach’s turning from this cafeteria slop.”
—
IT WAS NOAH’S IDEA to take them to Night Flight to lift Lenny’s spirits, though a day of stuffing himself on oily hot dogs and soggy corn had not left Lenny in a gustatory mood for rosemary reindeer or elk carpaccio in truffle sauce. Nor was he in the proper state of mind to fend off the coercive friendliness of a roomful of model-level chicks throwing him kittenish glances. For the past twenty minutes, one auburn-headed seductress in the corner had been giving him sad little twists of the smile that only you and she can understand. A year ago this might have worked its magic, but these days all Lenny ever felt around a hooker were vague guilty stirrings and an overwhelming desire to save her. That so many impossibly proportioned beauties should have to ply their trade in a restaurant catering to saggy-breasted middle-aged foreign fatsos also attested, in his mind, to a deep flaw in the world’s balance of justice.
“Cheer up,” said Noah, sawing a knife into his elk flank.
“Why did we have to come here? There’s plenty of legitimate restaurants we could have gone to.”
“This is a legitimate restaurant. It’s got a website!”
“It’s a brothel attached to a restaurant.”
“A five-star restaurant with one of the best Scandinavian chefs in the world. And the girls here are all independent. No pimps threatening to blade their face. I’ll have you know that some of them have even gone home with me for free.”
“I’m glad you’re proud of it.”
“I am proud, and I’ll tell you why—because it speaks to my powers of persuasion. I told you three months ago, when you had your hands on that Actophage deal, to go to Zaparotnik and tell them all you were walking out unless they made you a partner. And what did you do? You took it like a woman and let them pay you in compliments. You were thinking corporate—keep everyone in the loop, share the bounty, get a little reciprocal action down the line, right? And where did that get you? That doesn’t even work in America. And with guys like Zaparotnik, forget it! These people haven’t believed in the collective spirit since Collectivization.”
“Thank you for the lecture.”
“Na zdorovye.”
“It’s not just Zaparotnik. It’s this whole place. I remember when it used to be exciting. And now it’s become so”—Lenny groped for the words—“pissily bourgeois. Maybe it’s time I went back to the States.”
“And do what—paste numbers from financial statements onto a spreadsheet for twelve hours a day? Make cold calls while you wait for a corner office?”
“My mom’s pushing grad school.”
“Of course she is. All immigrant parents want their children to be second-generation nobodies with framed degrees on the wall. It’s a stagnant pond over there, my friend. They just don’t want to face it.”
“I don’t know. I was walking home the other night, and suddenly I’m in this pack of dogs, all these scary stray bitches with their six tits, jumping up and barking at me, baring their teeth like I stole their last piece of ham. I swear to God, Noah, that’s never happened to me before. Either this city has become overrun with them or they can smell the weakness on me.”
Noah waited until Lenny was finished talking, then glanced up with one eye from his respectful position of nodding at the table. “Look, Misha Fridman’s got friends putting together some interesting deals. I’ll ask around, see who’s hiring. But before we venture so deep into Sartre Land, can we just agree tonight to relax? I am having a very good cut of meat, and there is a beautiful, vibrant woman on the other side of this room who is flashing me a ‘glaze-my-face-like-a-doughnut’ smile.” Noah now took a moment to glance over Lenny’s shoulder and wink.
“Great. Now she’s going to come here and sit with us, and we’ll have to buy her dinner.”
“Don’t worry, cheapskate, this one’s on me.”
“I’m sorry if I don’t feel like spending the evening chatting up a hooker.”
“These ladies are not ‘hookers.’ Hookers are what you find on the side of the Leningradskoye Shosse with a bunch of Dagestanians lining up for blow jobs. These are inviting, mysterious creatures making use of their bankable advantage in life. Or would you rather be sipping on a faggy daiquiri in a strip club where every chick has a copy of the club’s rules tattooed on her ass? Now, behave yourself, because she’s coming over.”
“Dobriy vecher,” the girl said, smiling, and then, more formally in English, “May I join you?” Noah gestured gallantly to the chair, then stood and pulled it out for her. She lowered herself onto it like a snake coiling back into a charmer’s clay pot. She wore snug black pants, a colorful butterfly pendant, and a backless, shoulderless top that looked like a pool of mercury held up by threads of silver.
“My friend wants to guess your name,” said Noah as Lenny made denying headshakes. “Come on.”
“Vika.”
“No.”
“Zhana.”
She shook her head.
“I give up.”
“You are warm.” She patted Lenny’s hand in an encouraging way. “Yana.”
It could not be denied that Yana was indeed stunning. She had light-brown eyes and a small aquiline nose, as well as a snaggletoothed smile that lent a sweet, slutty twist to her otherwise pneumatic beauty.
Noah gestured for the waitress to bring an extra menu for their guest. Barely looking at the offerings, Yana picked two starters and a glass of one of the better wines, dispatching her order with unsettling familiarity. “Yana, my friend Leonard and I were just discussing the stray dog population in this city. I always think better of a city when its stray animal population is cats rather than dogs.”
“Is that so?” said Lenny.
“Yes. It speaks to a more refined culture.”
What in the world was Noah doing? An hour ago he’d been leching up two teenagers, and now he was playing his worldly gentleman act? To impress whom? A paid escort?
“They’re a fucking nuisance either way,” Lenny heard himself say, just to cut the shit-thick air of pretension.
“Watch your mouth.”
“All of them ought to be shot so they don’t go around biting people.”
&nbs
p; Yana’s face assumed a beautiful look of horror. “No, it is the other way! Dogs are good, it is people who are cruel. There was a dog, he lived in the metro, very friendly. The people fed him and gave him name Mal’chik—like, ‘little boy.’ And famous fashion model was walking with her dog, who started biting Mal’chik. This was many people watching,” Yana said with adorable insistence. “And this model, she took out knife and—phoof!—into Mal’chik’s back!”
“You mean she stuck a knife in the dog’s back?” Lenny exchanged frightened looks with Noah.
“Yes, yes, yes! Then she ran away from Russia! And many people, they were angry. Actors and important personages, they asked metro administrators to make a sculpture to Mal’chik.”
“A monument, for the dog?”
“Statue of the Fallen Mongrel,” Noah said.
“Yes, they shown it on the television.”
“Wow,” said Lenny. “If this city has enough money to put up sculptures to stray dogs, why don’t they neuter a few, do us all a favor?”
Once again Yana regarded him as if he were deranged. “Neuter, like,” she turned to Noah and made a snipping gesture to make sure she understood. “Uzhas! If they neutered a man, he would not anymore be a real man! If they neuter a dog, he is no more a real dog.”
Noah’s eyes were dancing. It was evident to Lenny that Yana’s line of reasoning was making him ever more enchanted with her. He proposed they take the conversation somewhere more comfortable, such as his château, and motioned for the check. Yana, smiling in agreement with this idea, told them to wait a minute while she went downstairs to get her things.
On the rain-slicked neon street, trying to flag a gypsy cab, Lenny saw that by her “things” Yana had meant not a dainty purse but a much larger object that, from the look of its hard case, appeared to be a violin.
—
WASHING ONE’S HANDS AFTER a piss in Noah’s bathroom proved to be a difficult task. The sink, a giant piece of hand-blown art glass, was cleft by a giant crack. “Your sink’s broken!” Lenny hollered over the flushing sounds.
“So use the one in the kitchen!” Noah called back. Lenny shook his head and wiped his hands on his jeans. Noah’s proclivity for pretentious novelties always struck him as absurd. And still there was little comfort in the thought, as Lenny walked into the kitchen, that if he had Noah’s money he would put it to better use. Rinsing his hands in the kitchen sink, he watched Noah and Yana through the open bar. They were seated on the couch, comparing the sizes of their palms, Noah concupiscently gushing over the delicacy of Yana’s hands while Yana bemoaned how she had been diagnosed at age six with fingers too short to play the piano and therefore had taken up the violin. “And my mother—she would not let me go outside and play with my friends, or with balls, because my fingers would break.”
“Poor Yana.” Noah frowned sympathetically. “Poor, poor Yanochka.”
“I think I’m gonna take off,” Lenny announced.
Noah looked up. “No, stick around! Yana’s going to play for us.”
“Yes!” Yana said, briskly pulling back the fine exposed muscles of her shoulders as she stood up from the couch.
“I will be right back.” Noah left them alone while he went to fix drinks.
Yana was standing by the wall-sized window, admiring the view of Tsvetnoy Boulevard below. Her fingers, which did not look at all short to Lenny, touched the cold glass.
“Klass!” she said, somewhat blandly. “This is best view I see of Moscow.”
Briefly, Lenny let himself wonder how many such views she had to compare it with. “Where are you from?” he said.
“Voronezh.”
“Voronezh is nice.”
Yana turned and leveled him with a sarcastic look. “Ochen’.” As if. Her sudden switch to Russian had the effect of puncturing the low-key mood of urbanity and intimacy. How did they always know, Lenny wondered? Even when he hadn’t spoken a word of Russian to them, these girls could always tell he was from the old country.
“What do you do? I mean, during the day?” he said idiotically.
“Student. Gnesinka.” She pointed to the violin case.
“That’s a very impressive school.”
“Yes, very.”
“Do you want to be a concert musician—like, play in the Bolshoi Orchestra?”
Yana gave him an inscrutable look. She didn’t appear pleased with the familiarity and seriousness this conversation was taking. “As we say here, the colonels have their own children. And so do the musicians, as it happens.” She shrugged and turned back to the window.
Jesus, what was wrong with him? Why did he always try to chat up these birds of paradise and drag them down to the level of ordinary girls? Yana looked relieved when Noah waltzed back into the room with a tray of three cognac glasses and said, “Let the concert begin!”
—
WHEN YANA WALKED BACK into the living room, she wore her butterfly pendant and four-inch heels and nothing else. Her hair hung like Lady Godiva’s over two hard little tits, and she was guarding her lower half humbly with the polished violin. At her thigh, the bow swayed back and forth in her hand like a riding whip. “I will play for you Dvořák,” she announced, and in a single motion lifted the violin to reveal a prim, slender isosceles. She set her small chin down on the saddle and, with a quick intake of breath and a gaze out at the enormous city night, began to play.
In all his life, Lenny felt he had never heard such music. Snatches of high-pitched chords cut the silence and disappeared, radiantly, violently, like lightning punishing the earth. The music seemed to take possession of her body—rising from Yana’s painted toes up through her bent, pale leg, where a tender brown bruise bloomed. It vibrated up her long, slim torso before being released by her taut wrist to unlock the violin’s resonant moan. Only Yana’s face stayed pinched and vacant as her playing gathered momentum and shifted, with each turn of the bow, from wild defiance to something proud and almost scornful, to unfathomable sadness. She swayed on her teetering heels like a bridge, and from time to time her knee did a little gallop, as if to keep her from pitching forward. Her pale breasts, the pencil-eraser nipples pointing bashfully away from each other, bobbed along with her flushed performance.
Noah shook his head. “State of the fucking art,” he whispered. “I can’t tell if these chicks are sent from heaven or from hell.”
Lenny wished he’d shut up. He was battling both unspeakable heartache and a budding boner, all of which only added to the exquisite shame and loneliness he’d been feeling all afternoon. He watched as Yana—if that was even her name—attacked the violin. A sheen of sweat had formed above her lips and between her heartbreaking breasts. Lenny let his eyes fall shut and concentrated on each wailing phrase as it stacked up into a ladder of sound that went all the way up, up….To where? He wanted to follow the notes to their highest and thinnest abyss and dwell there forever. God, he hated this city. Yet he couldn’t bear the thought of leaving. Where else on earth could he ever find so much mercy?
My plane touches down just before eight in the evening. Moscow’s sky is still lucent, the undersides of the copper clouds catching the last of the long day’s sun.
I call Lenny from my cab. He’s spirited in his usual way as we talk about where to meet for dinner. “You like sirloin, Pop? Good, good. Or maybe Italian, pasta ’n’ clams?”
Great, I say, leaving out the fact that I’m never hungry after a long flight.
“Or, no, Armenian!” he pursues. “I know just the place.” He tells me he’ll take me to the most prikol’ny spot in my neighborhood. By the time I arrive at my hotel, he’s listed off a couple more places we can go, demonstrating his expertise in the local cuisine and hinting at his personal knowledge of the chefs. For a moment I wonder if he’s forgotten who he’s talking to and thinks I’m a client. Then again, maybe it’s all to remind his old papa what an undislodgeable native—what a Muscovite—he’s become.
Within an hour I’m out of my ste
aming, sanitized hotel shower, toweling off and preparing to meet my son for our late dinner. Outside, the air is warm, pleasantly intimate, as if a sea is lurking somewhere behind all those blazing pastel façades. Tverskaya Street is immaculately groomed, almost Swiss in its cleanliness. Not a stray cigarette butt about, even though every person who passes me seems to be smoking his little heart out. The mood is almost—how can I say it?—festive enough to make me regret my earlier cynical thoughts about Lenny. His manic enthusiasm on the phone was probably just a sign that he’s pleased to see his dad. For all my son’s muddled allegiances, he has always been sincere about wanting everyone around him to be happy. Only, tonight he has no idea about the bucket of ice water that I’m obligated to toss on his variety show. In my briefcase, I’m carrying ten pounds of glossy paperback GMAT textbooks—a present from Lenny’s mother, who’s told me I shouldn’t bother coming home until I’ve convinced our son to do the “only reasonable thing.”
I console myself that I’m only following orders while I inhale the flatulence of car exhaust, the faint reek of wet varnish, the after-scent of spilled beer, which remind me that I am in a city that I know far better than my son does. In the course of my visits I’ve started to think of Moscow as a complicated woman I was closely entwined with in my youth, but who, in our late-life encounters, has surprised me by not aging gracefully (as I have) but instead rejuvenating herself with a succession of increasingly more expensive face-lifts. Each time we meet, I notice some new augmentation: A Canali boutique where once stood a pharmacy. Gaudy casino lights in place of a familiar pawnshop. Even the glass pyramid atop the mayor’s new office, which I spied on my drive here, is as obscenely radiant as a marquise-cut diamond on the finger of an oilman’s dame. Tverskaya in particular was so collagened and siliconed that I’ve long stopped thinking of her as the Gorky Street of my youth. Tonight I pass whole blocks under renovation, girdled by scaffolds, corseted and draped in jade-colored nets beneath which all sorts of nips and tucks are being discreetly performed.
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