The Russian Debutante's Handbook

6. THE RETURN OF BEST FRIEND BAOBAB

SEVEN YEARS AFTER graduating from an elite math-and-science high school along with his best friend Vladimir Girshkin, Baobab Gilletti looked very much the same. He was a pale redhead of admirable physique, although the demise of a teenager’s metabolism had left him with a new coat of fat, which he constantly tugged at, not without a sense of pride.

Tonight, having returned pink and glowing from his Miami narco-adventures, Baobab was educating Vladimir about his sixteen-year-old girlfriend Roberta. How she was so young and promising. How she wrote avant-garde film scripts and acted in and around them. How she was doing something.

The boys were sitting on a broken mohair couch in the living room of Baobab’s Yorkville tenement, watching little Roberta squirm into a tight pair of jeans, her bare legs as veined as a newborn’s, her mouth full of braces and Wild Bordeaux lipstick. It was too much adolescence for Vladimir, who tried to look away, but Roberta waddled up to him anyway, her jeans around her ankles, and shouted, “Vlad!” kissing his ear and deafening him with her pucker.

Baobab examined his girlfriend’s salaciousness through an empty brandy snifter. “Hey, what’s with the jeans?” he said to her. “You’re going out? But I thought…”

“You thought?” Roberta said. “Oh, you must tell me all about it, Liebschen!” She rubbed Vladimir’s grizzly cheek with her own, watching with pleasure as the young man giggled and tried, unconvincingly, to push her away.

“I thought you were staying home tonight,” said Baobab. “I thought you were writing a critique of me or a response to my critique.”

“Idiot, I told you we’re filming tonight. See, if you ever actually listened to me, I wouldn’t have to spend half the day banging out critiques and denunciations.”

Vladimir smiled. One had to give points to this youth willing to carry on a fight dressed in Baobab’s gamy boxers, jeans draped around the ankles.

“Laszlo!” Baobab shouted. “You’re filming with Laszlo, am I right?”

“Peasant!” she shouted back, slamming a bathroom door behind her. “Sicilian peasant!”

“What? Come again?” Baobab turned in the direction of the kitchen and the breakables. “My grandfather was a parliamentarian before Mussolini! You Staten Island whore!”

“Okay, okay,” Vladimir said, taking hold of one approaching Popeye arm. “Now we go, we have a drink. Come, Garibaldi. Here are your cigarettes and your lighter. We go, we go.”

THEY WENT. A cab was hailed to haul them to Baobab’s favorite bar in the meat-packing district. A few years hence this tattered part of downtown would catch the eye of the barbarian hordes from Teaneck and Garden City, and later become a bona fide hipster playground, but for now it was all but abandoned at night—a fitting locale for Baobab’s favorite bar.

The Carcass had an authentic pool of blood at the entrance, courtesy of a neighboring hog-slaughtering outfit. One could still see the conveyor belts that transported the heifers of yesteryear running along the length of the Carcass’s ceiling. Below one could also be as anachronistic as needed: put some Lynyrd Skynyrd on the jukebox, whip out a stick of beef jerky, ruminate out loud on the contours of the waitress, or watch a trio of emaciated graduate students standing around the pool table with their cue sticks at attention, as if waiting for funding to appear. The usual crowd.

“So?” They had both asked the question. Bourbon was on the way.

“This Laszlo person is a problem?”

“Damn Magyar poser’s trying to screw my baby girl,” Baobab said. “Weren’t the Hungarians part of the Great Tatar Horde originally?”

“You’re thinking of my mother.” Mongolka!

“No, I assure you, this Laszlo’s quite the barbarian. He has that international odor. And his personal pronouns are a mess… Yes, of course I know how I sound. And if I was a girl aged sixteen and had the opportunity to tango with some putz who had groomed Fellini’s dog, or whatever Laszlo’s claim to fame is, I’d sign up in a Budapest minute.”

“But has he actually made any movies?”

“The Hungarian version of The Road to Mandalay. Very allegorical, I hear. Vlad, have I ever told you that all love is socioeconomic?”

“Yes.” Actually, no.

“I’ll tell you one more time then. All love is socioeconomic. It’s the gradients in status that make arousal possible. Roberta is younger than me, I’m more experienced than her, she’s smarter than me, Laszlo’s more European than her, you’re more educated than Challah, Challah’s… Challah…”

“Challah’s a problem,” Vladimir said. The waitress was arriving with the bourbons, and Vladimir looked to her pleasant figure—pleasant in the Western sense, meaning: impossibly thin, but with breasts. She was clothed entirely in two large swatches of leather, the leather fake and shiny in a self-mocking way, absolutely correct for 1993, the first year when mocking the mainstream had become the mainstream. Also, the waitress had no hair on her head, an arrangement Vladimir had warmed to over the years, despite his fondness for rooting his nose through musty locks and curls. And finally, the waitress had a face, a fact lost on most of the patrons, but not on Vladimir who admired the way one overdone eyelash stuck miserably to the skin below. Pathos! Yes, she was a high-quality person, this waitress, and it saddened Vladimir that she wouldn’t look at him in the least as she served the bourbons.

“Perhaps these… Oh, I will not succumb to your lingo. Okay, fine, perhaps these gradients in status between Challah and myself are no longer enough to arouse me.”

“You’re saying you’ve come too close together. Like a marriage.”

“That’s precisely what I’m not saying! There, you see how your nonsense gets in the way of conversation? I’m saying I don’t know what the hell’s going on in her head anymore.”

“Not much.”

“That’s not very nice.”

“But it’s true. Look, you meet her, you’re fresh out of your Midwestern collegiate disaster with that lean, mean Vlad-eater, what was her name? You’re back a confused little eeemigrant in New York, the little Girshkie-wirshkie, woo-choo-choo, Girshkie-wirshkie…”

“Asshole.”

“And then, whoosh! A casualty of the American Dream, par excellence. She gets whipped for a living! For God’s sake, there’s not even the need for symbolism. Enter Girshkie, his compassion, his broken heart, his twenty-thousand-dollar-a-year salary waiting to be shared, and off we go from submission to dominance, and let’s not forget hugs, talks, walks—my God, this guy just wants to help. But what’s in it for the Good Samaritan, huh? Challah’s still Challah. Not terribly interesting. Kinda large there—”

“Now you’re resigned to being mean to make yourself feel better.”

“Not true. I’m telling you what you already know inside. I’m translating it from the Russian original.” But he was being mean to make himself feel better. It was Baobab, after all, who had introduced Challah to Vladimir. The meeting took place at Bao’s Righteous Easter Party, an annual event lousy with students from City College, where Baobab was a lifetime scholar and purveyor of Golden Moroccan hashish.

Challah was sitting in a corner of the host’s bedroom on a beanbag, staring first at her cigarette and then into her ashtray and then back at her disintegrating conversation piece. Baobab’s bedroom being a fairly large (although windowless) affair, the guests had crammed themselves neatly into the corners, leaving plenty of open space for guest appearances.

So, in corner number one there was Challah, alone, smoking, ashing; in corner number two we have a pair of engineering students, a heavyset and demonstrably gay Filipino practicing hypnosis on a very loud and impressionable man half his age (“You are Jim Morrison…I am Jim Morrison!”); corner number three—Roberta, who had just entered Baobab’s life, being purposefully rubbed down by Bao’s history professor, a ruddy Canadian hoser; and, finally, corner number four, our hero Vladimir trying to have an intelligent discussion with a Ukrainian exchange student on the topic of disarmament.

The guest appearance was Baobab’s. He came in dressed like the Savior, did a little number with his crown of thorns, some indecent exposure courtesy of his loincloth, got some good laughs out of everyone including Challah who was wrapped into herself in the corner, a huddle of dark cloth and Satanic jewelry. Then he fondled Jim Morrison and, in turn, his hefty hypnotist friend, tried to extricate Roberta from the clutches of the academy, and finally sat down next to Vladimir and the Ukrainian. “Stanislav, they’re making toasts out in the kitchen,” Bao said to the Ukrainian. “I think they need you.”

“That’s Challah, a friend of Roberta’s,” Baobab said after the Ukrainian had left.

“Challah?” Vladimir was thinking, of course, of the sweet, fluffy bread served on the eve of the Jewish Sabbath.

“Her father’s a commodities trader, lives in Greenwich, Connecticut, and she works as a submissive.”

“She could play Magdalene to your Christ,” sneered Vladimir. Nonetheless, he went over to introduce himself.

“Hello,” Vladimir said, plunking himself down in her beanbag nest. “Do you know I’ve been hearing your name all night?”

“No,” she said. Only she didn’t say it in mock modesty, such as done with a flourish of the arms and a stretch of the word: “Naaaaaawh.” Instead, it was just a quiet syllable, perhaps one could even read some plaintiveness into it, which surely Vladimir did. Her “no” meant that no, he hadn’t been hearing her name all night. Hers was not a name like that.

Is it possible: Love at first word? And with the first word being “No”? Here one should suspend disbelief and answer affirmatively: Yes, in post–Reagan/Bush Manhattan with its youth pierced, restless, weaned on flashing image and verbally disinclined, it is possible. For with that one word, Vladimir, who had been out of love with himself ever since his ignominious flight from the Midwest, recognized a welcome substitute for self-love. After all, here was a woman who was alone and apart at parties, who worked as a submissive, who, he suspected, allowed herself extravagance only in dress, but otherwise knew that her world had limits.

In other words, he could love her.

And even if his suspicions proved wrong, he was still—it is necessary to admit this—aroused by the thought that foreign hands were upon her body, intent on hurting her, while at the same time wondering what kind of sex they could have together, and what he could do to change her life. And she looked cute, baby fat and all, especially in that unholy get-up. “Okay,” he said, knowing to tread lightly. “I just wanted to meet you, that’s why I came over.” Oh, Vladimir, gentle pick-up artist!

But meet her he did. Clearly it had been a while since a man had talked to her at length and with a minimum of intimidation (Vladimir the foreigner was himself intimidated). The next nine hours were spent talking, first in Baobab’s bedroom, then in a nearby diner, and finally in Vladimir’s bedroom, about their twin escapes—Russia & Connecticut—and within twenty-four hours they were discussing the possibility of further escape, together, into a circumstance where they could at least provide each other with dignity (that exact word was used). By the time Vladimir was ready to kiss her it was already ten in the morning. The kiss was meager yet affectionate, and following the kiss they fell asleep on top of each other, sleeping well into the next day.

BACK AT THE carcass, Baobab was still going on about Vladimir’s problems in his Baobab way. But Vladimir had just one more thing to say on his own behalf: “Is it true that it could be over with Challah? Can I really end it on my own?” He answered the question himself. Yes, yes. To end it. It had to be done.

“Yes, the break-up,” Baobab said. “If you want my expert help, if you want me to write an essay or something, just ask. Or better yet, let Roberta handle it. She can handle anything.” He sighed.

“Yes, Roberta,” said Vladimir, bent on imitating the cadence of Baobab’s speech. “I’m beginning to see, Bao, that just as I must solve my problems by myself, so you must be a man and do something about the Roberta situation.”

“Something manly?”

“Within reason.”

“Challenge Laszlo to a duel? Like Pushkin?”

“Can you be more successful than Pushkin? Can you see yourself using a side arm, accurately shooting the Tatar, hmm…?”

“Vlad! Are you volunteering to be my second? That’s awfully white of you. Come, let’s kill that bastard.”

“Paff!” Vladimir said. “I won’t take part in this insanity. Besides, you said we were going to drink the night away. You promised me early liver failure.”

“Your friend is reaching out to you, Vladimir,” Baobab said, putting on his crumpled fedora.

“I’m useless in a confrontation. I’ll just be an embarrassment to you. In fact—”

But Baobab cut him off by executing a low bow and heading for the door, the ill effects of his battered hat now visibly compounded by his stupid engineer boots. Poor guy. “Hey! Promise me no fisticuffs,” Vladimir shouted to him.

Baobab blew him a kiss and was gone.

It took a full minute for Vladimir to register the fact that he had been abandoned, left without a drinking partner on a boozy Sunday night.

Without a drinking partner, Vladimir continued drinking. He knew many Russian songs about drinking alone, but the tragicomic import of their stanzas could not dissuade him from a volley of bourbons and the single gin martini that managed to sneak in, its three crisp olives tinkling in a shapely glass. Tonight we drink, but tomorrow…a long stretch of sobriety in which Vladimir would wake up with a clear head and deal knowingly with immigrants. Such fascinating people. How many of his contemporaries, for instance, got to meet the likes of Mr. Rybakov, the Fan Man? And how many could inspire his confidences?

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 trying 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 loved 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.

WHEN LOOKING BACK at the summer, which Vladimir would do microscopically in the restless years to come, it could all be said to have come together in that one evening, although that evening was not terribly different from the evenings that would follow. It was simply the first. It set the tone. First the lovely, interested parents. Then the lovely, interested daughter. Then the lovely, interested friends. And then, once again, the lovely, interested daughter à la carte, off to bed still lovely and interested.

Lovely? Not a catalog beauty: her nose slightly hooked, her paleness might have been passing for sickly in an era where everybody seemed to have at least some color, and also there was an inelegance about the gait, the unsteady way in which the foot met the ground, as if one was shorter than the next and she kept forgetting which. That said, she was tall, her hair was long and draped her shoulders like a cape, her eyes were small and as perfectly oval as Fabergé miniatures, their gray the sobering shade of a Petersburg morning above Master Fabergé’s workshop; and, from Vladimir’s vantage point that first evening, there was that minimalist velvet dress that showed off her small, round shoulders, almost luminous under the sharp Fifth Avenue streetlamps (not to mention the smooth straight white of her back, crossed by two velvet straps).

FINALLY, the lovely and interested friends. They were found that evening amid a spread of black light and loud jazz, the uppermost floor of a TriBeCa loft building. Before it was cleaned the place must have looked like a cattle car traveling cross-country, since now it was all but empty—a couple of couches, a stereo, uncapped bottles of booze that had to be stepped around or picked up and used.

They were a savvy-looking bunch, clothed in the new Glamorous Nerd look that was fast becoming a part of the downtown lexicon. One specimen in a tight, square, wide-collared, polka-dotted shirt was shouting above the rest: “Did you hear? Safi got a European Community grant to study leeks in Prava.”

“Fucking Prava again,” said another, clad in brown geek pants and penny loafers loaded with actual pennies. “Nothing but a tabula rasa of retarded post-Soviet mutants, if you ask me. I wish the Berlin Wall had never come down.”

Vladimir looked on sadly. Not only had he spent his entire life without winning a single European Community grant, but every pathetic piece of clothing he had been trying to shed since he emigrated was now a prêt-à-porter bonanza! Penny loafers! How insufferable. And how old these glam-dorks made him feel, him with nothing but a lousy goatee and the affixed title of Immigrant to temper his protosuburban wardrobe.

He skulked off to another room to meet Francesca’s friend Frank the Slavophile. Frank was a man as short as Vladimir, and even thinner. But from this sticklike figure there billowed a head as tumescent as poori bread—a Rudolphine red nose, bulbous chin, cheeks so slack the skin above was creased from their weight. “I’m dragooning the whole gang into reading Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Sketches this summer,” Frank informed Vladimir while pounding a Dry Sack of sherry into Dixie cups with only partial success. “No man, no woman can claim to be kulturni without having read the Sportsman’s Sketches. Tell me I am wrong! Tell me there is another way!”

“I have read the Sketches many times,” said Vladimir, hoping his childhood excursions to the Kirov Ballet and the Hermitage had made him kulturni enough for his new friend. In truth, the one time Vladimir had skimmed the Sportsman’s Sketches had been a decade ago, and the one thing he could remember was that they were mostly set outdoors.

“Molodets!” said Frank, meaning “good fellow,” a term often used by older men to congratulate those younger. How old was this Frank anyway? His closely cropped hair was at stage two of male-pattern baldness, the stage where two hairless half-moons are scalloped out at the temples, as opposed to the little crescents that were indented into Vladimir’s hairline. So, twenty-eight, twenty-nine then. And likely a graduate student.

Could it be that they were all graduate students and only Francesca was still in college proper? It could be. The age bracket fit. So did the way they got their jollies—a gaggle of them crowded around a television showing an Indian movie where the romantic principals went through the motions of love but never kissed. And as they touched lightly and coquetted to the sound of sitars and bangles—this dark Romeo and Juliet of the subcontinent—the crowd shouted “more!” and “lip action!” This was in one part of the loft…

In another was Tyson, a Montana Adonis, six feet tall with a leftward-pointing isosceles of blond hair, speaking to a small woman dressed in a sheer sarong and embroidered flip-flops. Speaking in Malay, of course.

The celebrated Tyson quickly took Vladimir aside. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you,” he said, lowering his head to Vladimir’s level—a most natural motion, like the swing of a boom. He must have had many short friends, such as that ethereal young woman from Kuala Lumpur. “And a pleasure for Frank… We’ve always been trying to find a nice Russian speaker for Frank.”

“It’s good to be here,” Vladimir said out of gracious instinct.

“Here? America?”

“No, no. The party.”

“Oh, the party. That. May I speak frankly, Vladimir?”

Vladimir reached up on his toes. Tyson’s mouth, a large, jutting affair, was ready to expel something frank. What could it be? “Frank’s in a terrible state,” Tyson said. “He’s nearing nervous collapse.” They turned to the Slavicist who was actually looking pretty good there, surrounded by many attractive bespectacled women with lots of laughter and sherry between them.

“Poor man!” said Vladimir, and he meant it. For some reason, this Turgenev business did not seem a good portent.

“He had a disastrous relationship with a Russian woman, a young lawyer from a very predatory family. It went from bad to worse. First, she ended things. Then he was hounding her in a Brighton Beach restaurant where the waiters took him out back and attacked him with skillets.”

“Yes, it happens,” Vladimir said, and sighed on behalf of his temperamental ilk.

“You know how much all things Russian mean to him?”

“I’m starting to draw a picture for myself. But I should tell you right away that I have no Russian women relatives worth noting.” Well, there was Aunt Sonya, that Siberian tigress.

“Then perhaps you can take him out for a walk every once in a while,” Tyson said, squeezing both of Vladimir’s shoulders, in a way that reminded Vladimir of the friendly, well-bred denizens of his progressive Midwestern college; the long, stoned rides in his Chicagoan ex-girlfriend’s People’s Volvo; the nights spent drinking himself unconscious with humane scholars who cared. “You could talk in the mother tongue,” Tyson continued. “Of course, it would be better if it were winter, then you could both don those nice furry hats… What do you say?”

“Ah!” Vladimir looked away, that’s how flattered he was. Half an hour into the party and already they were asking him to help a friend in need. Already he was a friend. “This is possible,” Vladimir said. “I mean, I’d love to.”

Following those words, those right-felt, inspiring words, Vladimir was crowned with a halo. Why else would the whole party suddenly abandon the far reaches of the loft and crowd around him, asking him questions and at times gently holding on to his arm? The inquisitive wanted to know: What was his prognosis for Russia following the Soviet Union’s collapse? (“Not good.”) Was he bitter about the new unipolar world? (“Yes, very.”) Who was his favorite Communist? (“Bukharin, by a kilometer.”) Was there any way to stop creeping capitalism and globalization? (“Not in my experience.”) What about Romania and Ceauşescu? (“Mistakes were made.”) Was he going out with Francesca, and if so, how far had he gotten?

At that point Vladimir wished he had been drunk already so that he could be charming and giddy with these pretty men and women in their Islamabad University T-shirts. Instead he managed a few shy gurgles. Oh, how he wished he had been in possession of a fur hat, a real Astrakhan shapka. For the first time in his life he was aware of the following useful axiom: It is far better to be patronized than to be ignored. Before he could act further on that impulse, Francesca summoned him from the kitchen.

Here, the din was glaring; a different caste of people swarmed around a tableful of shrimp cocktail, while Francesca stood beneath rows of corrugated-steel cabinets pleasantly overdressed in her royal velvet, laughing at a drunk Indian man—equally dapper in a tuxedo—pounding at her head with a pair of inflatable antlers.

“Hi,” Vladimir said sheepishly to the antlered Indian.

“That’s enough now, Rakhiv,” Francesca said, reaching out to grasp an antler. A dark tuft of hair looked out at Vladimir from her armpit.

The Indian gentleman turned his long face to scowl at Vladimir, then slunk off past the shrimp eaters. So, Vladimir had competition. How exciting. He was feeling like a very competitive entry tonight, although the Indian had a classical face with that popular sad look.

“A drink!” Francesca said. “I’ll make you a Rob Roy. My mother practically birthed me with bitters.” She opened the nearest cabinet and took out a cocktail glass etched with the image of a thoughtful-looking egret swooping down over a small crayfish-like creature bubbling out of the wetlands. She turned to another cabinet for limes and a dusty bottle of Glenlivet. “You have to meet the Libber sisters,” Francesca was saying.

“Maybe we can go for a walk after this drink,” Vladimir suggested.

Her cold fingers smelling of scotch, Francesca patted his cheek, as if to disabuse him of such silly thoughts. “Have you heard of Shmuel Libber, their father?” she said. “He discovered the world’s oldest dreidel.”

On cue, the Libber sisters emerged from behind a ficus plant—two pale, identical beauties with a slightly Asiatic cast—bearing news of an ancient Jewish spinning top.

“I have heard of your father’s work…” Vladimir began, just as Tyson stormed in, ahemed brusquely, and made a show of looking down at his feet.

“Vladimir, some of your friends are here. Could you… please… greet them?”

Vladimir found Baobab in the main room, dressed in his signature colonial khakis, his pith helmet lanced with an ostrich feather, holding on firmly to the little Malaysian student who was bowing politely while pointing with her free hand at an imaginary avenue of escape. “I wear my syphilis like a badge of honor,” Baobab was roaring to her over the television’s strum of sitars. “I picked it up in Paris, straight from the source. The writings of Nietzsche, if you care to know, are, in essence, syphilitic.”

Roberta, resplendent in some kind of Day-Glo leopard nightie and bowler hat, had draped herself over Frank and was squeezing his big cheeks, shouting, “Wubbly, you’ve got a lot of life in you!”

The silenced crowd was tiptoeing away, the contents of the melting pot sluicing back into the kitchen. But their traffic was slow, their gaze affixed to the cause of their eviction—the fat little man in the pith helmet, the near-naked teenager, and… in the corner.

Challah was sitting in the corner, in the same tired bondage gear that Vladimir had found her in eight months ago, looking down at her drink for companionship as the young intellectuals galloped past her, their inflatable antlers shaking in consternation. She caught sight of Vladimir and waved desperately for him to come over.

By this time Vladimir had taken hold of Baobab who was, in turn, losing his grip on the Malaysian woman. “What is this?” Vladimir whispered. “Why did you bring Challah? Why are you behaving like this?”

“Behaving like what? I’m doing you a favor. Where’s the new woman?”

In the kitchen, the deep-timbred sounds of twentysomething commotion were building, with Francesca’s voice an indisputable part of the outcry. Meanwhile, in one corner of the living room, Frank was succumbing to the little huntress in braces and negligee; in another corner, Challah was depositing one warm finger into her drink, watching the rusty sherry undulate.

And Vladimir? Vladimir had maybe twenty seconds to live.

9. GENDER AND IMPERIALISM

“PLEASE UNTIE ME now,” Vladimir said.

The handkerchief was unfastened. Vladimir removed the blindfold himself. Rich Fifth Avenue light, healthy and dappled, overwhelmed the pale curtains.

“Sorry about the coitus last night,” Francesca said. “I was too rough. I was acting out.”

“No, it was my fault,” Vladimir said, covering his lower quarters with sheets, rubbing his swollen wrists. “Inviting my friends was an act of aggression.” With a shaky finger, he traced the teeth marks inscribed on his upper thigh. “By physically acting out against me you became both aggrieved and perpetrator. You empowered yourself.” These strange yet familiar words, unheard of since his tenure at the progressive Midwestern college, slipped out of his mouth. He knew he was hunting for that notorious animal, subtext. That Big-foot of the literate world. So what was the subtext here?

He wasn’t thinking, in particular, of the painful role-playing, the thoughtful humiliations she had visited upon him (for a time he was completely naked and she dressed in her father’s classroom turtleneck and tweeds), but of the entire physical package. Two people just two hundred pounds short of nonexistence burrowing into each other, a dangerous and tenuous situation; the scrape of bone and pubis; the distinct lack of odor that more viable animals regularly produce. Oh, the degenerate joy of the lightweighted.

Fran lowered a T-shirt over her arms, and the two tiny breasts, only slightly larger than Vladimir’s soft duo, disappeared into cotton. “Your friends came to that party,” she said, “like young imperialists, like little conquerors. They totally failed to see the integrity of our indigenous academic culture and had to frame it in their own atrophied discourse. It might as well have been Leopold’s troops traveling up the Congo.”

Vladimir felt a pressing need to pull on his underpants; to achieve some kind of parity. (He was starting to feel as if an invisible tennis announcer was constantly shouting off-court: “Advantage: Francesca.”) But he had no idea where his underpants had ended up during the drunken melee that preceded their first coupling. And something told him that his nakedness and meek silence were right. That in the face of smarter women it was best to beat a continuous retreat, to slash and burn one’s own personal convictions before their sure-footed advance.

Yes, he was convinced now that he had misjudged her, that the easy banter of the nights before was just a beachhead for this confident American woman, and what she really wanted from him, whatever this turned out to be, he couldn’t possibly give her.

Because sooner rather than later she would comprehend the limitations of a man who at the ripe age of twenty-five had just been taught how to walk by his mother. What do you do with a man like that? thought Vladimir. You needed the patience of a Challah, or, perhaps, the pathos, and it was rather doubtful that this sleek young woman would have either.

“That fat misogynist fool…” Fran was saying. “Using syphilis as a come-on line. Poor Chandra. And that… The large woman with the Weehawken outfit. What the hell was she about?”

Vladimir shook his head then buried it in one of Fran’s elephantine pillows with their etched scenes of Venetian life. “My friends and I, we’re a pretty open-minded bunch,” Fran was saying, “but we have our limits. Those people were just inexcusable.”

“They grew up watching television,” Vladimir mumbled into the comforting pillow. “They looked for prizes in cereal boxes. They’re a product of the culture, and American culture in the twentieth century is, by definition, imperialist.” But he was apportioning too much blame to his friends, when self-flagellation was the order of the day. He made a note of this.

“And to tell you the truth, it’s not really them I’m upset about,” Fran said. “They were only there for one night. I’ll never see them again. But what does it say about you? About the kind of life you’ve been living? You’re a very smart and unusual man. Well-read, educated, from a different country. How the hell did you end up with that crowd?”

Vladimir sighed. “How do I put it?” he said. He thought of literature. He thought of subtext. In the end his education did not fail him. “You know the Hemingway story ‘The Killers’?” he said. “When the killers are coming to get the boxer, what does the boxer say?”

“‘I got in wrong.’”

“There you go.”

“Now, by quoting Hemingway we’re not actually sanctioning the misogyny and racial condescension that defines his body of work.”

“Of course not,” he said. “Never.”

She ruffled the back of his head with its soft bumps and bony ridges. The warm touch was welcome after the night they had had. It bordered on affection, and as much as he did enjoy the roughhousing, he wanted the sweet stuff as well. “So what are you going to do about it?” she said.

“The misogyny?”

“No, the ‘getting in wrong’ business. Are you just going to settle for this lifestyle?”

“‘Life’ and ‘style’ really fail to describe it,” Vladimir said.

“I’d say.”

She laid down on top of him and put her nose into his neck. Despite its sharp outline, her honker felt sloppy and warm. She whispered into his ear: “Do you know why I like you, Vladimir? Have you figured it out yet? I don’t like you because you’re sweet or kind-hearted, or because you’re somehow going to change my world, since I’ve already decided that no man is ever going to change my world. I like you because you’re a small, embarrassed Jew. I like you because you’re a foreigner with an accent. I like you, in other words, because you’re my ‘signifier.’”

“Ah, thank you,” Vladimir said. Bozhe moi! he thought to himself. She knows me down to the very last. Small, embarrassed, Jewish, foreigner, accent. What more was there to him? This was what it meant to be Vladimir. He pressed himself to her, thinking he was going to die of happiness. Happiness and the dull pain of being somehow insufficient. Of being half-formed.

“Plus,” she continued, “let me say that my friends like you a lot, and my friends mean the world to me. Frank couldn’t stop talking about you all night. And even the way you handled your sad friends was impressive. You didn’t run away, you stayed and bore the brunt of their poor manners.

“Look, Vlad,” she said, “maybe what you need is to get in good for a change. To be around people of your own caliber. I’m not a trained mental-health-care professional, which I think is what you need in the long run, but who knows? Maybe I can help you.”

Actually, in her preppy little cotton T-shirt (a subtle mockery of the preppy class, reasoned Vladimir), her great, demonstrative nose supporting a pair of trendy oversized glasses, and the eyes themselves sleep-starved and black-ringed, she did look like a professional of sorts. An older person. A card-carrying adult. She looked a little like Mother, to tell the truth.

“Yes, I agree,” Vladimir whispered. “People of my own caliber. Above and beyond, that sort of thing. What’s the trick, eh?”

“I’m hungry,” she said.

BENEATH A PAIR of rusting golden lions, on the third floor of a midtown tenement, off of dishes decorated with the green-orange emblem of “The Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka,” they ate a brunch of scorching curry and sweet coconut broth.

“Hold my hand,” Francesca said after the socialist dishes had been cleared and her pasty visage was blushing from the curry and spice tea. He held her hand.

She took him to the Whitney Museum where Vladimir admired a row of three upright vacuum cleaners beneath Plexiglas. “Ah,” Vladimir said uncertainly. “I get it.” He brushed his head against her shoulder and in return got his ear pulled gently, in the same way a playful Napoleon once dispensed his good will.

She took him to a gallery where they admired Kiff’s painting The Poet Vladimir Mayakovsky Invites the Sun to Tea, wherein a smiling sun hops over the horizon to join Mayakovsky for chai and rhyme. “Yes,” Vladimir said, feeling on more familiar ground. “Perfect,” he said, and then declaimed one of the master’s verses in Russian, for which he was duly patted on the rump.

Past the yellow July smog, the variegated layers of New York humidity, past these curtains of heat they walked, she in her stern white T-shirt, perspiring visibly under the arms in the European manner, the outlines of her little body carefully drawn. And how did Vladimir look? Vladimir didn’t care how Vladimir looked. Good enough to be seen with her, obviously (there she was now by his side).

But on that account he was soon proven wrong. In a cramped East Village store, its interior shrouded with incense, he was forced to buy himself a Cuban guayabera shirt, silky and looped with Art Nouveau–type curlicues. It was the same kind of shirt he had once seen the Fan Man wear, only this one cost an improbable fifty dollars. Brown janitor pants from another salon complemented his new outfit. “Blue jeans… What was I thinking?” he said, kicking the dead denim beast on the floor. “Why didn’t anyone stop me?” She kissed him on the lips. He tasted the curry and coriander along with her natural acidity; he felt dizzy and withdrew.

They walked across the wider boulevards, the city suddenly alive with meaning now that he was walking with one of its demigoddesses, and he wondered why he could never walk down the street with Challah just so; his hand in hers, two fashionable, modern people, their conversation by turns warm and breezy, by turns analytic and severe…She drenched him and his new Panama hat with a just-opened bottle of spring water; and then, in full view of the passersby on Fifth Avenue and Nineteenth Street, on a Saturday afternoon (three P.M.), she ran her hands across his sorry chest, traced the full moon of his navel, and, finally, made a motion around his scared penis. “Look up,” she said. “See that? A two-story mansard roof. Atop a cast-iron facade and with marble walls. It’s one of a kind. My grandfather built it in 1875. What say you?”

But before he could answer she ran out into the traffic and brought around a cab for him. They were soon in Central Park, in the thickest parts of the Rambles, where the summer trees concealed without fail each towering skyscraper, each loafing tourist. “Take it out again,” she said.

“Again?” he said. “Already? Here?”

“Silly you,” she said. And when the purple creature was out in the natural light, its single eye blinking, she held it between her thumb and forefinger, and said, “Sure it looks a little small in the daylight, but look how sleek its knob is. Like the hood of a French TGV train.”

“Yes,” Vladimir said, and blushed, for he had never imagined that his blighted little anteater would be so complimented. “Ach! Easy now. There are people over there… By the gazebo. Ach!”

After five minutes at her hands, this cheap pornography was over and Vladimir was zipping up his new janitor pants, sighing happily, looking over the scruffy little flowerbed, which he had inadvertently pollinated.

It took him several self-involved minutes to notice that Francesca was crying quietly into the crook of her own elbow. Oh, no! What was this? Had he failed her already? He grazed her dry hair with his lips. She wiped her right hand on his shirt. “What’s wrong?” he said. “Don’t cry,” he whispered, almost in the same plaintive tone his father had once used with Mother. (“Oh, why are you crying, little porcupine?” he nearly added.)

She took a square of aluminum foil from her pocket from which were unfolded several pills. These were expertly swallowed without water. “Here, a tissue…” he muttered. Inwardly he was worried that his member’s smallness had made her cry, and he pressed her to him all the more violently.

“What’s the matter, hm? What’s this all about?”

“I’ll tell you a little secret,” she said, hiding her face in his scruffy guayabera. “A secret which you can never repeat. Promise?”

He promised.

“The secret is… Ah, but don’t you know it already? I was afraid you might have guessed it by now. What with the way I was carrying on about those vacuum cleaners at the Whitney…”

The concerned Vladimir was in no mood for frivolity. “Please,” he said, waving his arms. “What is the secret?”

“The secret is: I’m really not too bright.”

“You’re the smartest woman I’ve ever met!” Vladimir shouted.

“But I’m not,” she said. “Why, in some ways I’m worse off than you are. At least you have no tangible ambitions. All I am, on the other hand, is the very obvious product of two hundred thousand dollars spent on Fieldston and Columbia. Even my father says I’m stupid. My mother would confirm it, only she’s an idiot herself. It’s the curse of the female Ruoccos.”

“Your father would never say that,” Vladimir said, quickly forgetting the bit about himself having no ambitions. “Look at you. You’re only an undergraduate, but already you have such clever academic friends. And they think the world of you.”

“It’s one thing to be social, Vladimir. Or even to be smarter than average. And, entre nous, how frightening what passes for average these days. But to be brilliant like my father! Vladimir, do you know what he’s doing at City College?”

“He’s teaching history,” Vladimir said brightly. “He’s a history professor.”

“Oh, no, he’s so much more than that. He’s starting a whole new field. Evolving a whole new field, I should say. It’s called Humor Studies. It’s better than brilliant, it’s thoroughly unexpected! And he has New York’s two million Jews at his disposal. The perfect population, you guys are both funny and sad. Meanwhile, look at me. What am I doing? Attacking Hemingway and Dos Passos from a feminist perspective. It’s like hunting cows. I’ve no originality, Vladimir. I’m washed out at twenty. Even you, with your uncluttered intellectual life, probably have more to say.”

“No! No! I don’t!” Vladimir assured her. “I have nothing to say. But you… You…” And for the next half hour he comforted her with all the charm at his disposal: stooping his shoulders in deference of her love of small men; accentuating his accent to seem ever the foreigner. It was slow going, especially since at the Midwestern college he had dined solely on meat-and-potatoes Marxism, whereas she had at her disposal a sexy postmodernism which would be held in regard for the next six years. But in the end, he noticed her smiling throughout his litany and absentmindedly kissing his hand, and he thought: Yes, I will devote my time now to making sure she feels good about herself and continues her studies and achieves her dreams. That is my mission. My tangible ambition, as she put it. I shall exist for no other.

Ah, but he was lying to himself. His thinking was hardly that generous. The immigrant, the Russian, the Stinky Russian Bear to be precise, was already taking notes. Love was love, it was exciting, and hormonal, and sometimes even overwhelmed him with the strange news that Vladimir Girshkin was not entirely alone in the world. But it was also a chance to steal something native, to score some insider knowledge, from an unsuspecting Amerikanka like this woman, whose cauliflower ear he was nuzzling with his nose.

Perhaps Vladimir was not so different from his parents. For them becoming American meant appropriating the country’s vast floating wealth, a dicey process, to be sure, but not nearly as complex and absolute as this surreptitious body-snatching Vladimir was attempting. For what he really wanted to do, whether he admitted it or not, was to become Manhattanite Francesca Ruocco. That was his tangible ambition. Well-situated Americans like Frannie and the denizens of his progressive Midwestern college had the luxury of being unsure of who they were, of shuffling through an endless catalog of social tendencies and intellectual poses. But Vladimir Girshkin couldn’t waste any more time. He was twenty-five years old. Assimilate or leave, those were his options.

IN THE MEANTIME, all the kind attention he had lavished upon Fran must have embarrassed her. She gently removed his nose from her ear. “Let’s have a drink,” she said.

“Yes, yes, a drink,” Vladimir said. They took a cab downtown, and, at a Village sake bar, finished a half-magnum of sake and a thumb-sized plate of marinated squid. The total charge for this little indulgence, Vladimir noticed once the buzz of the liquor had subsided, was U.S.$50. This brought the day’s total on his part (including the guayabera shirt and janitor pants) to a little over $200—his allowance for two weeks. Oh, what would Challah say…

Challah. The Alphabet City hovel. The cheap spice racks falling off their hooks. The family-sized jars of K-Y lining the hallway. Was she waiting up for him on their sweaty futon, her lubricated baton at the ready? Was it time to go home?

He and Fran were standing outside the sake bar, both reeling a little from the drink and the squid, with Fran somehow steadier on her feet. After a few minutes of silence, she began slapping him playfully about the face and he went to great lengths to pretend he didn’t enjoy it. “Ouch,” he said in his best Russian accent. “Afch.”

“Would you like to sleep over?” she said, as easily as these things could be said. “My parents are making rabbit.”

“I’m very fond of game,” Vladimir said. And so it was settled.

10. THE FAMILY RUOCCO

AND SO IT was settled for the rest of the summer, a summer Vladimir spent at 20 Fifth Avenue, Apartment 8E, the Ruoccos’ grand place overlooking Washington Square Park… A park which, if surveyed from the right angle (if you turned your back on the twin slabs of the World Trade Center), would convince you that you were looking at the venerable plaza of a European capital and not the Manhattan of a million opened steam vents and cars backfiring into the night—the grimy and fantastic Manhattan that Challah and Vladimir used to inhabit.

Not to mention the quiet graces of the family that came with this geography: the Ruoccos feasting, constantly feasting from the “gourmet garages” that were taking the town by storm. An avalanche of peppercorns and stuffed grape leaves in handsome containers, resting on real tables (the kind with four legs) on which candles were always lit and above which chandeliers glowed faintly on dimmers.

Within a few weeks, Vladimir was made into an honorary Ruocco. There was not even the hint of an embarrassed smile when the professors found him brushing his teeth in their bathroom at eight in the morning or escorting Francesca to the breakfast table. Yes, clearly the Ruoccos approved of Vladimir for their “developing young daughter” (as Mr. Rybakov would put it). But why? Had the recent fall of the Berlin Wall made Vladimir somehow timely? Did they sniff the swampy air of Petersburg intelligentsia out of his old work shirts? Was that why they begged to dine with his parents, perhaps expecting to break bread with Brodsky and Akhmatova? To their immense consternation, however, Vladimir made sure that this dinner was never to be. Oh, he could imagine it, all right:

Back on the Ruoccos’ planet, Vladimir was straining his ear for proof of Joseph Ruocco’s reputed disdain toward his daughter along with evidence of his wife Vincie’s stupidity. Neither was forthcoming. Vincie was soft-hearted with the displaced Vladimir, shamed and awkward before the cleaning lady, secretly confounded by her daughter’s intelligence, and, despite the occasional wisecrack, perfectly obeisant to Fran’s father.

As for the Humor Studies savant himself, it was hard to think of Joseph as contemptuous. Sure, he often cut Fran off short by saying “Now, now, have another glass of Armagnac on the house and we’ll call it even.” But this booze-soaked dismissiveness seemed to Vladimir a distinguished scholar’s prerogative, not to mention that older people should be allowed to get away with things at the family table—look at the free rein granted Mother.

Could such small infractions have had repercussions in Fran’s mind? Possibly, given that the single currency considered valuta at the Ruocco hearth was not the awkward Bellovian potato love that gets passed around at so many American tables, but respect. Respect for each other’s ideas, respect for their standing in the world—a world the Ruoccos happily left behind in order to bask in each other’s company.

So who knew why Francesca was so intimidated by her father; why her psychiatrist had prescribed a battery of pink and yellow pills; why on some nights sex between her and Vladimir could be either the gentle and sympathetic Antioch College–type sex—the sex by committee of two, the insertion of the penis first a quarter of the way, then in gradual increments—and why on other nights the blindfold and her father’s tweeds had to come out. Vladimir’s mission, as has been previously established, was to comfort and reassure her, while gaining swift entrée into her classy little world. Let these deeper mysteries be solved in their own sweet time. By his young estimation, they would have all of their lives together.

But then, one day, unwittingly, she did it. She managed to hurt him almost irrevocably.

THEY HAD GONE shopping for a toothbrush. At no time was he happier than when the two of them would embark on these most mundane of missions. A man and a woman can claim to love one another, they may even rent real estate in Brooklyn as a sign of their love, but when they take time out of a busy day to walk through the air-conditioned aisles of a drug mart to pick out a nail clipper together, well, this is the kind of a relationship that will perpetuate itself if only through its banality. Or so Vladimir hoped.

And she was such a thoughtful consumer. The toothbrush, for instance, had to be organic. A dealership of organic toothbrushes did exist in SoHo, but it had chosen this particular day to dissolve into bankruptcy. “Strange,” Frannie said, as a person-sized toothbrush was removed from the vitrine by the bickering members of an Indian family and crammed into a station wagon with Garden State plates. “They had such a following.”

“Oh, what is to be done?” Vladimir moaned on her behalf. “Where can one find an organic toothbrush in this one-horse town?” He kissed her on the cheek for no reason.

“Chelsea,” she said. “Twenty-eighth and Eighth. I think the place is called T-Brush. Minimalist, but definitely organic. But you don’t have to go all the way up there with me. Go home and keep my mother company. She’s grilling baby squid in its own ink! You love that shit.”

“No, no, no!” Vladimir said. “I promised to go toothbrush-shopping with you. I’m a man of my word.”

“I think I can handle this all by my lonesome,” she said. “I’m sick of dragging you around.”

“Please,” Vladimir said. “What dragging? There’s nothing more I enjoy than doing these little, um, quotidian things with you.”

“That I know,” she said.

“You know?” he said.

“Vlad, you’re too much!” she laughed, poking him in the stomach. “Sometimes,” she continued, “sometimes you seem so happy to have a girlfriend. Was this what you dreamed it would be like? Having a New York girlfriend. Shadowing her around town. The devoted boyfriend, so loving, so devoid of any personal interest, just this lovey-dovey, dopey, happy guy. Toothbrush? Don’t mind if I do! It’s quotidian!”

She said the last word Vladimir-style with its birdlike kvo. Kvo-kvo, said the Vladimir bird. Kvotidian.

“You have a point,” Vladimir said. He was unsure of what to say next. Or what she had just said to him. He felt a gurgle in his stomach and tasted something gastric on his tongue. “Very well, then,” he said. “No problem.” He pecked her farewell. “Ciao, ciao,” he croaked. “Good luck with the toothbrush. Remember: medium-soft bristles…”

But as he made his way home, the intestinal ill-feeling, the nervousness tickling his insides continued, as if the tired faces of the shish-kebob-sellers and art-book-hawkers of Lower Broadway, the honored citizens of the midsummer city, were assaying him with open disgust, as if the braggadocio of rap issuing out of boom boxes was actually as threatening as it sounded. What was it, this strange stirring?

Back at the Ruoccos’, Fran’s bedroom was its usual mess of samizdat-like books published by failing presses; heaps of dirty underwear; here and there loose dots of birth control and anxiety medication; the big cat, Kropotkin, prowling about, tasting a little bit of everything, depositing tufts of gray-black fur on panties and literature alike. And the chill in the room… The mausoleum effect… The windows shut, curtains drawn, the air-conditioner always on, a tiny desk lamp the only illumination. Here was the long winter of Oslo or Fairbanks or Murmansk: the New York summer had no business in this twilight place, this temple to Fran’s strange ambitions, the desiccation of early-twentieth-century literature, the education and repackaging of one Warsaw Pact immigrant.

His stomach growled once more. Another wave of nausea…

Kvo-kvotidian, said the Vladimir-bird.

Sometimes you seem so happy to have a girlfriend.

Shadowing her around town…

Was this what you dreamed it would be like?

And then he realized what it was, this rumbling in his gullet, this internal displacement: He had been unmasked! She knew! She knew everything! How much he needed her, wanted her, could never have her… All of it. The foreigner. The exchange student. The 1979 Soviet “Grain Jew” poster boy. Good enough for bed, but not for the organic-toothbrush store.

Toothbrush? Don’t mind if I do!

Ah, so that’s how it was. She had humiliated him on the sly, while he, the diligent note-taker, had failed his mandate once again. And he had tried so hard this time, had gone to such lengths to please all of them under the rubric “Parents & Daughter: How to Love an American Family.” He was the dutiful son the Ruoccos never had. Worshiping Dad’s Humor Studies. “Yes, sir, the serious novel has no future in this country… We must turn to the comic.” Worshiping Mom’s fruits de mer. “World’s best geoduck clam, Miss Vincie. Maybe just a sprinkle more of vinegar.” And, God knows, worshiping Daughter. Worshiping, shadowing, soaking up through osmosis.

And still coming up short…

Why?

How?

Because he was all alone in this, this being Vladimir Girshkin business, this being neither here nor there, neither Leningrad nor SoHo. Sure, his problems might seem minuscule to a contemporary statistician of race, class, and gender in America. And yes, people in this country suffered left and right, were marginalized and disenfranchised the moment they stepped out of the house for coffee and a doughnut. But at least they suffered as part of a unit. They were in this together. They were bound by ties Vladimir could barely comprehend: New Jersey Indians loading a giant toothbrush into a station wagon, Avenue B Dominicans playing stoop-side dominoes, even the native-born Judeo-Americans sharing easy laughs at the office.

Where was Vladimir’s social unit? His American friends had always consisted of one man—Baobab—and, upon Fran’s unspoken orders, Baobab was completely off limits. He had no Russian friends. For all his years at the Emma Lazarus Society, the Russian community was just a dark, perspiring mass that regularly washed up on his shore, complaining, threatening, cajoling, bribing him with bizarre lacquered tea sets and bottles of Soviet champagne… What could he do? Go to Brighton Beach and eat mutton plov with some off-the-boat Uzbeks? Call Mr. Rybakov to see if he could attend the baptismal of his youngest fan? Arrange for a date with some Yelena Kupchernovskaya of Rego Park, Queens, soon-to-be graduate of the accounting department at Baruch College, a woman who, if she actually existed, would want to settle down at the fantastic age of twenty-one and bear him two children in quick succession—“Oh, Volodya, my dream is for one boy and one girl.”

And what of his parents? Beyond the Maginot Line of the Westchester suburbs, were they faring any better? Dr. and Mrs. Girshkin had arrived in the States in their early forties; their lives had effectively been split into two, leaving only fading memories of the sunny Yalta vacations, the homemade marzipan cookies and condensed milk, the tiny private parties at some artist’s flat suffused with moonshine vodka and whispered Brezhnev jokes. They had left their rarefied Petersburg friends, their few relatives, everyone they had ever known, traded it all in for a lifetime of solitary confinement in a Scarsdale mini-mansion.

There they were, driving down to Brighton Beach once a month to pick up contraband caviar and tangy kielbasa, all around them the strange new Russians in cheap leather jackets, women wearing wedding cakes of permed blond hair on their heads, an utterly alien race that just happened to cluck away in the mother tongue and, at least in theory, shared the Girshkins’ religion.

Were Vladimir and his parents Petersburg snobs? Perhaps. Bad Russians? Likely. Bad Jews? Most certainly. Normal Americans? Not even close.

ALONE IN THE dark foreign bedroom, a bedroom he had just recently mistaken for his own, Vladimir picked up Kropotkin, the Ruoccos’ beloved family cat, and soon found himself crying into the hypoallergenic designer fur. It was soothing. The mischievous fellow, an anarchist like his Russian namesake, felt incredibly warm and tender amid the climate-controlled hell of Fran’s room. Sometimes, when he and Fran were in bed, Vladimir spied Kropotkin looking at them with such feline amazement, as if the cat alone understood the magnitude of what was going on—Vladimir’s right hand cupping, squeezing, plying, poking, kneading the pale American flesh of his mistress.

There were nights, after Fran had done her reading for the day, after the desk light had been turned off, when she would end up on top of him, her face contorted into the most difficult grimace, grinding down on him with such force that he was lost in her, that the pejorative term “to screw” came to mind—she was literally screwing Vladimir inside of her, as if otherwise he would somehow manage to fall out, as if this is what held them together. And after she was through with him, after the long tremors of her silent orgasm, she would grab his head and press it into the bony ridge between her little breasts, each nipple alert and pointing to the side, and there they would remain for a long time, locked in a postcoital huddle, rocking back and forth.

This was his favorite part of their intimacy: when she was silent and satiated, when he was blissfully unsure of what had just happened between them, when they were holding on to each other as if letting go would mean for each a quick, dry death. Inside the huddle, he would sniff and lick her; her chest would be covered with sweat, not the gamy Russian sweat Vladimir remembered from his childhood, rather American sweat, sweat denatured by deodorant, sweat that smelled purely metallic, like blood. And only when they woke up the next day, only in the first weak light of the morning, would she actually look his way and mutter “thank you” or “sorry,” in either case leaving him to wonder “What for?”

Thank you for putting up with me, Vladimir thought as he wept into the softly mewing Kropotkin. Sorry I have to use you and humiliate you. That’s what for.

THAT NIGHT, AFTER Vincie’s lovely squid had been eaten and two bottles of Crozes-Hermitage swilled, Vladimir took Fran into their bedroom and managed to shock both of them by actually speaking his mind. “Fran, you insulted me today,” he told her. “You made light of my feelings for you. Then you laughed at my accent, as if I had a choice in where I was born. It was shocking. You were so unlike yourself, so completely immature. I want…” He stopped for a moment. “I would like…” he said. “Please, I would like an apology.”

Frannie was flushed. Even her lips, purple with wine, were somehow turning red. Against the backdrop of her dark hair and ashen face, they were quite beautiful. “An apology?” she shouted. “Did you just call me immature? What are you, some kind of an idiot?”

“I’m… You… I cannot believe what you say…”

“I do apologize. It wasn’t a question. What I meant to say was, and I hope it’s not a sign of my immaturity: you are some kind of an idiot. Jesus, what did they do to you at that Midwestern college, that finishing school for Westchester’s tender sons?”

“Please…” he muttered. “Please don’t try to play the class card with me. Your parents are substantially wealthier than mine…”

“Oh, you poor immigrant,” she said, a touch of spittle crowning her lower lip. “Someone get this guy a grant. A Guggenheim Fellowship for Soviet Refugees Who Love Too Much. It’s a midcareer prize, Vladimir. You have to present a substantial body of love. Should I get you an application?”

Vladimir looked down at his feet, brought them closer together, as if Mother had been hovering over the scene all along. “I think maybe I should go now,” he said.

“Well, that’s just ridiculous.” She shook her head, dismissing the idea. But she also walked over and put her freckled arms around him. He smelled paprika and garlic. He felt his knees buckle under her weight, what little of it there was. “Honey, here, sit down…” she said. “What’s happening here? Where are you going? I’m sorry. Please sit down. No, not on my notebook. Over there. Scoot over. Now tell me what’s wrong…” She lifted up his downcast chin. She pulled lightly on his goatee.

“You don’t love me,” he said.

“Love,” she said. “What does that even mean? Do you know what that means? I don’t know what that means.”

“It means you have no regard for my feelings.”

“Ah, so that’s what love means. What a tricky definition. Oh, Vladimir, why are we fighting? You’re scaring me to death. Why are you scaring me to death, sweetie? Do I love you? Who cares? We’re together. We enjoy one another. I’m twenty-one.”

“I know,” he said sadly. “I know we’re young and we shouldn’t throw around words like ‘love’ or ‘relationship’ or ‘future.’ Russians settle down so early, it’s absolutely stupid. They’re never ready for it, and then they raise these cretinous kids. My mother was twenty-four when she had me. So I don’t disagree with you. But, on the other hand, what you said…”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry I was so caustic earlier today. I just don’t know what to make of you at times. Here is this man, reasonably socialized and sophisticated, who wants to spend a day toothbrush-shopping with me. What does it mean?”

Vladimir sighed. “What does it mean?” he said. “I’m lonely. It means that I’m lonely.”

“Well, whatever for? You spend every single evening with me, you’ve got all these new friends who, by the way, think you’re the urban experience nonpareil, and I don’t even mean that in a patronizing way… And my parents. Talk about settling down, bub. My parents love you. My father loves you… Lookee here.” She jumped on the bed and started banging the wall separating her bedroom from her parents’. “Mom, Dad, get in here! Vladimir’s having a crisis!”

“What are you doing?” Vladimir shouted. “Stop! I accept your apology!”

But after a minute of commotion on both sides of the wall, the parents trooped right into Fran’s mausoleum, both professori dressed in matching silk pajamas, Joseph Ruocco still clutching a bedside tumbler of liquor in his hand. “What is it?” Vincie shrieked, blindly trying to survey the scene through her reading glasses. “What happened?”

“Vladimir thinks I don’t care for him,” Fran announced, “and that he’s all alone in the world.”

“What nonsense!” Joseph bellowed. “Who told you that? Here, Vladimir, have a shot of Armagnac. It steadies the nerves. You both look so… agog.”

“What did you do to him, Frannie?” Vincie wanted to know. “Are you having a case of the tempers again? She has these little episodes sometimes.”

“A case of the tempers again?” Frannie said. “Mom, are you becoming unhinged again?”

Joseph Ruocco sat down on the bed, on the other side of Vladimir, and put an arm around the mortified fellow. Smelling entirely of alcohol and fermented grape, he nonetheless remained quite steady and assured. “Tell me what happened, Vladimir,” he said, “and I will try to adjudicate. Young folks need guidance. Tell me.”

“It’s nothing,” Vladimir whispered. “It’s all better now…”

“Tell him you love him, Dad,” Fran said.

“Frannie!” Vladimir shouted.

“I love you, Vladimir,” said Professor Joseph Ruocco, drunkenly but earnestly elucidating each word.

“I love you, too,” Vincie said. She made space for herself on the bed, then reached over to touch Vladimir’s cheek, pale, entirely drained of blood. The three of them turned to Frannie.

Fran smiled weakly. She picked up the passing Kropotkin and rubbed his fat stomach. The cat looked up to her expectantly. Indeed, they were all waiting for her to render a verdict. “I care about you a lot,” she told Vladimir.

“You see!” Joseph cried. “We all love Vladimir, or care about him a lot as the case may be… Listen, Vlad, you’re very important to this family. I got a daughter here, my only daughter, I’m sure your parents must know exactly what that feels like, to have an only daughter… And she’s a brilliant daughter… Don’t blush, Frannie, don’t shoo me away, I know when I speak the truth.”

“Daddy, please,” she whispered, not entirely in reproach.

“…But brilliance carries a price, I don’t have to cite precedent for Vladimir, he’s marinated in our culture long enough to know where the American intelligentsia stands on the totem pole. He knows that people marked for greater things are often the least happy of all. And God knows where the hell I’d be today if it wasn’t for Vincie. I love you, Vincie. I might as well say it. Before I found Vincie, well… I could be abrasive, let’s just say. There weren’t many takers. And Frannie…”

“Dad!”

“Let’s be truthful, honey. You’re not the easiest person to be with. I’m sure whatever you said to Vladimir today was wildly inappropriate.”

“Wildly,” Vincie said. “That’s exactly the right word to use.”

“Thank you, Vincie. My point is: There aren’t too many people who can handle our Frannie. But you, Vladimir, you’re imbued with this patience, this superhuman ability to abide… Maybe it’s a Russian trait, queuing for sausages all day long. Ha ha. I’m kidding. But I’m also serious. We know you can live with Frannie’s genius, Vladimir, maybe even stoke the embers now and then. I’m not saying get married. I’m saying… What am I saying?”

“We love you,” Vincie said. She reached over and kissed him on the lips allowing Vladimir a taste of many things. Medicine. Balm. Squid. Booze.

BUT THE RUOCCOS had said it all. The kissing was almost superfluous. They had been honest with him.

He finally understood the dynamic.

It had involved some singular foresight on their part, but after six weeks of living with Vladimir, here’s what they had in mind.

They would be a family. Not terribly different from a traditional Russian family, really. Living in the same communal apartment, two generations separated by one flimsy wall, the sound of the young ones’ lovemaking reassuring the old ones of their continuity. He would accept his place by Fran’s side. Their life would be uneven and strange, but not much stranger, and certainly not as awful, as the life that preceded this one. At least, with the Ruoccos, his lack of ambition was a virtue, not a vice. At least he could Jew-walk to his heart’s content. He could spread his feet left and right, he could wear clown’s shoes if he so desired, flip-flopping his way to their marital bed, sipping from a glass of nocturnal Armagnac, and nobody would care.

To quote Vincie’s kitchen wisdom, they all had bigger fish to fry.

And that would be the compromise, not bad as compromises go. He would never be lonely in America. He would never need turn to the Girshkins for their dubious parental comforts, never have to spend another day as Mother’s Little Failure. At the age of twenty-five, he would be born into another family.

He would have reached, all by himself, the final destination of every immigrant’s journey: a better home in which to be unhappy.

THAT NIGHT, AFTER the professors had gone back to their bedroom, after calm had been restored, after the organic toothbrush had been removed from its hand-stitched pouch and its gentle fibers brushed against their gums, Fran wrapped him up in a blanket, tucked his favorite extra-fluffed pillow beneath his head, and kissed him good night. “Just relax,” she said. “We’re going to be okay. Dream of something nice. Dream of our trip to Sardinia next year.”

“I will,” he said. He hadn’t heard of their trip to Sardinia, but that was all right. He had to accept these things on faith.

“Promise?” she said. “Promise you don’t hate me.”

“I don’t,” he said. He didn’t.

“Promise you won’t leave me… Just promise.”

“I won’t,” he said.

“And we’ll go have a drink with Frank tomorrow. Now there’s one person who loves you like crazy.”

“Okay,” Vladimir whispered. He closed his eyes and lapsed into a dream immediately. They were on a beach in the very south of Sardinia, the skies so cloudless he could almost see the belfries of Caligari in the distance. They were lying naked on a beach blanket and he was erect, wildly erect, to use Joseph’s parlance, wildly erect and entering Fran discreetly from the back, amazed at how dry she was inside, how she made no sounds of either protest or passion. He spread the dimpled white cheeks of her tiny ass with two hands and slowly, with great difficulty, maneuvered himself inside her brittle womb. As he was doing so, she licked her index finger, turned a page of the nameless journal she was reading, and, yawning, scribbled her lengthy comments at the margins. Flamingos watched them with Sardinian disinterest, while, nearby, beneath a beach umbrella stenciled with the name of their pensione, Vincie Ruocco was fellating her husband.

11. VLADIMIR GIRSHKIN’S DEBUTANTE BALL

IN THE MEANTIME, Frannie was right. Slavophile Frank did love him like crazy. And he wasn’t alone.

Beyond the walls of his new family’s bastion, its terraced loggia surveying the Gotham plain, Vladimir had attracted a loyal cadre of downtown libertines, louche, mostly white folk with improbable names like Hisham and Banjana, and the occasional expatriate from the working class, some poor Tammi Jones. These round-the-clock hipsters, basting in their own suavity and the heady funk of extreme youth, had such a terrific demand for him that Vladimir soon found that his workday was now only an extension of his sleeping hours; real life began as soon as the last refugee was promptly thrown out of the Emma Lazarus Immigrant Absorption Society at 4:59.

HE REGULARLY SAW Slavophile Frank. They would take walks from Frank’s apartment, the house that St. Cyril built, along windswept (even in late summer) Riverside Drive, conversing only in the great and mighty mother tongue. Sometimes they made it as far down as the Algonquin, where Fran awaited them. The Algonquin was a part of the Old New York that Fran so adored, a nostalgia that Vladimir gamely understood, given his own for the sepia-toned Russia of his parents—a sooty and uncomfortable universe, but one with charms of its own. They sat where Dorothy Parker’s round table used to be, and Vladimir would buy Frank a seven-dollar martini. “Seven dollars,” Frank would cry. “Merciful heavens! People do care about me.”

“Seven dollars!” Fran said. “You spoil Frank more than you spoil me. It’s… homoerotic.”

“Perhaps,” Frank said, “but don’t forget that Vladimir has an expansive Russian soul. Money is not his concern. Camaraderie and salvation, that’s his game.”

“He’s a Jew,” Fran reminded them.

“But a Russian Jew,” Frank said triumphantly, slurping at his free drink.

“All things to all people,” Vladimir whispered. Yet upon sight of the bill his expansive Russian soul shuddered within his body’s hairy cage. Truth was that in the thirty-one days of August, Vladimir had expended nearly U.S.$3,000.00, a money trail that blazed across Manhattan as follows:

By August’s end, he was broke. A shameful credit card (the first card ever to bear the Girshkin family name) was winging its way north from the usury capital of Wilmington, Delaware. A depressing thought had flitted through Vladimir’s mind. Perhaps he could ask Frannie’s father for a little handout… Say U.S.$10,000. But then wasn’t he already imposing on the Ruoccos for room and board? Not to mention the family’s lavish hugs and open-mouthed kisses? To ask for pocket money besides…? What hubris.

Yet it was still a mystery to Vladimir how his new friends—theoretically all were starving students—never worried about picking up a round of drinks at the Monkey Bar or buying a Mobutu-style leopard hat on a whim. The Ruoccos, of course, had inherited a half dozen turn-of-the-century cast-iron fortresses around the city, while Frank’s family owned several states tucked away in America’s vast interior. And yet they all looked at Vladimir as the rich working man—the grant-toting, philanthropic professional.

But why shouldn’t Vladimir spend money for the first time in his life?

Just look at him! There he is at some Williamsburg art opening, sneering, scoffing, sniping, pretending to suffer, subtly insulting the gallery owner (a failed conceptualist), while across the room a radiant Francesca is waving for him to come over, and the drunk Adonis Tyson is urgently bleating his name from beneath a wine cart, trying to confirm Bulgakov’s exact patronymic.

It’s been thirteen years since the Leningrad sickbed, since that lifetime of reading Tolstoy’s descriptions of Winter Palace balls while spitting snot into a handkerchief. Finally, it would seem, Vladimir has found his way out into the world. Finally, our debutant is playing Count Vronsky for the downtown nobility in their checkered bowling pants and burnished nylon finery. The reports from the New World were true: In America the streets are paved with gold lamé.

BUT HE COULDN’T abandon Challah completely. Namely, he couldn’t abandon his share of the rent, else Challah would be homeless. It wasn’t as if she could crash with friends, after all. She had none. Meanwhile, two months had passed since he had stayed at his legal address on Avenue B. Alphabet City was becoming something of a memory now that its romantic poverty no longer warmed the heart.

The next day Vladimir found himself on Avenue B, sitting at the kitchen table filling out an application for a second credit card. Somewhere outside a piece of chicken was being barbecued, and when he closed his eyes and cleared his ears of the urban cacophony Vladimir could almost imagine that he was nine commuter railstops into Westchester, grilling weenies with the Girshkins.

And then Challah came in.

She might as well have bubbled up from Atlantis, this strange outsized woman with the dark makeup and the exposed midriff showing yet another self-mutilation: a navel piercing, from which a heavy silver crucifix dangled on its way to her crotch. Leave it to Challah not to realize that, while small nasal piercings were sanctioned, a crotch-to-navel crucifix absolutely screamed “Connecticut.”

Vladimir was so shocked to see her, he rose automatically from his credit card application, noticing now the full effect of his surroundings: the harness, the leash, the K-Y, the den-o’-vice motif which would have given Dorian Gray a prompt heart attack. So this had been his home! Perhaps Mother had been right about some things.

Challah, on the other hand, did not appear shocked. “Where’s the money?” she said. She stepped over a mysterious jumble of faux fur that blocked the way to the kitchen and then turned on the faucet to wash her hands.

“What money?” Vladimir said. Money, money, he was thinking.

“The rent money,” came the answer from the kitchen.

That money. “I have two hundred,” he said.

Immediately she was back from the kitchen, her arms akimbo. “Where’s the other two hundred?” He had never seen this posture (which was such a crucial part of her job) projected at his person before. Who did she think he was? A client?

“Give me a few days,” he said. “I’m having a cash-flow problem.”

She took a step toward him, and he took a step back to the fire escape, the place he distinctly remembered as their prime cuddling ground, now more plausible as an actual escape route. Fire escape. Yes, it made sense.

“No few days,” she said. “If I don’t pay by the fifth of the month, Ionescu’s going to charge an extra thirty dollars.”

“That bastard,” Vladimir said, hoping for solidarity.

“Bastard?” she said. And then paused as if weighing the heft of that word. Vladimir put his hands out in front of him. He was getting ready to deflect the full force of a comparison between himself and the bastard. Challah spoke instead. “I should be looking for a new roommate, shouldn’t I?” she said.

So he had been downgraded to roommate status. When did all this happen? “Sweetheart,” he said, rather unexpectedly.

“You bastard,” she said finally, but the emotion had clearly been exhausted from that sentiment over the past weeks. Now it was but a statement of fact. “Don’t speak to me until you have the rest of the money.” She stepped aside to indicate that Vladimir could leave.

As he went past her, he felt a change in temperature; her body was always in deep negotiation with the atmosphere around it, and it made him want to reach out with a comforting arm, the arm he had cultivated for the past month with Francesca. Instead he said: “I’ll have the money by tomorrow. I promise you that.”

Outside, it was Sunday, the first of September. He was homeless in a certain way, but the heat clothed him in several layers, and, of course, Francesca and his new family were only six avenues to the west. Ah, humiliation. It always left him with a vaguely vinegary taste in his mouth, and, when dispensed by a woman, made him long to see his father, who had a singular appreciation for the ego’s lacerations.

Challah had become proficient at her craft.

And he needed money.