Russian Debutante's Handbook (36 page)

The question was whether or not he was a good person.

“I have to preface this by saying I’m drunk,” he said.

“I’m drunk, too. Just tell the truth.”

The truth. How did it come to this? Just a minute ago he was kissing her alcohol-soaked mouth, feeling under her armpits for the wetness he loved, rubbing himself against her thigh, getting a voyeuristic excitement from the passing beam of his car’s headlights—devoted Jan was keeping an eye on them from the embankment.

“Speaking comparatively, I’m a better person than most I know.” This was a lie. He had only to think of Cohen to know he was lying. “All right, I’m not a great person per se, but I want to be a good person to you. I’ve been good to others in the past.”

What the hell kind of conversation was this? She was leaning against a rotting log next to some kind of sacrificial heap of used Fanta cans and condom wrappers; her hair was tangled with weeds; there was a lipstick smudge on the tiny, retroussé tip of her nose; and Vladimir’s dribble was hanging from her chin.

Was Vladimir a good person? No. But he mistreated others only because the world had mistreated him. Modern justice for the postmorality set.

“You want to be good to me,” she was saying, her voice surprisingly steady, even as she drunkenly tipped back and forth from the slightest breeze.

“Yes,” Vladimir said. “And I’d like to know you better. Unquestionably.”

“You really want to hear about what it was like to grow up in Cleveland? In a suburb? My family? Being the oldest child? The only girl? Um . . . Basketball camp? Can you fathom a girls’ basketball camp, Vladimir? In Medina County, Ohio? What’s more, do you even care? Do you want to know why sometimes I’d rather be out camping than in a café? How I hate reading other people’s poems just because I have to? And how I hate listening to people all the time like your friend Cohen when he starts going on about his damn Paris in the twenties?”

“Yes,” Vladimir said. “I want to know all of it. Absolutely.”

“Why?”

It wasn’t an easy question. There were no tangible answers. He would have to make something up.

While he was thinking, a brisk wind started and the clouds rolled northward, so that when he lifted his head straight up and
ignored the fact that he was at the very epicenter of the city, it was possible to imagine the island afloat and traveling south, navigating the twists and bends of the Tavlata until it finally emerged in the Adriatic Sea. A little more sailing then and they could beach their island ship on the shores of Corfu; frolic amid the rustle of tiny olive trees, the harmonies of the goldfinches. Anything to survive this interrogation.

“Look,” Vladimir said. “You hate it when Cohen starts talking Paris and the whole cult of the expatriate. But I have to say: There is something to it. The most beautiful three lines in literature that I’ve ever read are the very last lines of
Tropic of Cancer.
Now let me lay down the caveats first: By saying what I’m saying, I’m not sanctioning the misogynist, race-baiting Henry Miller as a human being, and continue to cast grave doubts on his abilities as a writer. I am only expressing my admiration for the last few lines of this particular novel . . . Anyway, Henry Miller is standing by the banks of the Seine, he’s been through just about every kind of poverty and humiliation possible. And he writes something like (and excuse me if I’m misquoting): ‘The sun is setting. I can feel this river flowing through me—its soil, its changing climate, its ancient past. The hills gently girdle it about: its course is fixed.’ ”

He wiggled his hand in between her two warm palms. “I don’t know if I’m a good person or a bad person,” Vladimir said. “Perhaps it’s not possible to know. But right now I am the happiest man alive. This river—its soil, its climate, its ancient past—being with you at five in the morning in the middle of this river, in the middle of this city. It makes me feel—”

She pressed his own hand to his mouth. “Stop it,” she said. “If you don’t want to answer my question, then don’t. But it’s something I want you to think about. Oh, Vladimir! Listen to you! Not
sanctioning
some poor Henry Miller as a
human being.
I’m not even sure what you mean, but I know it’s not pretty . . .” She turned
away from him, and he was left to stare into the stern little bun of her hair.

“Look, I like you,” she said suddenly. “I really do. You’re smart and sweet and clever, and I think you want to do right by people. You’ve really brought the community together with
Cagliostro,
you know. You’ve given a lot of people their first chance. But I feel that . . . in the long run . . . that you’ll never really let me into your life. I feel that after spending just one day with you. And I wonder if it’s because you think I’m just this idiot from Shaker Heights, or whether there’s something terrible you don’t want me to know.”

“I see,” Vladimir said. His mind was racing for an answer but there was little he could say that would make her believe him. Maybe, for the first time in a long time, it was best not to say anything.

On the bank opposite the castle, the first touches of dawn were setting light to the gold dome of the National Theater that flared above the black toes of Stalin’s Foot like a holy bunion; a tram full of early workers was crossing a nearby bridge with enough rumble to send tremors through their little isle. And just then the wind turned ugly, conspiring with Vladimir’s plan to wrap his arms around her. Her silk blouse provided poor traction for his embrace, but he could feel her, infinitely warm and solid and smelling of sweat and spent kisses. “Shh,” she whispered, guessing correctly that he was about to speak.

Why couldn’t she make this easy for him? Weren’t his lies and evasions valid enough? And yet, here she was, Morgan Jenson, a tender but unsettling prospect, reminding Vladimir of someone he used to be before Mr. Rybakov stumbled into his life with news of a world beyond Challah’s desperate grasp. A soft and unsurefooted Vladimir, whose mornings were crowned with a double-cured-spicy-soppressata-and-avocado sandwich. Mother’s Little Failure. The man on the run.

HE HAD NEVER
seen such strong legs.

A month had passed since Larry Litvak’s party, but those legs—firm white flesh mottled by young blue veins, each thigh a stanza of socialist realism—continued to thrill and beguile young Vladimir. Waking up in Morgan’s
panelak
apartment at an ungodly seven in the morning, Vladimir saw the aforementioned legs, thick, muscular, perhaps a bit unfeminine to his unenlightened eyes, and, what was the word, springy? She sprang out of bed on those legs, rushed to the bathroom where she scrubbed and rinsed and prepared herself for a long day’s work. These were legs that had been put to the toughest use from early age, and each day of basketball camp had only added to their agility and muscular heft. And now these legs, if the occasion ever warranted, could easily have piggybacked Vladimir across Mount Elbrus.

But instead of Mount Elbrus, the legs we have spoken of, firm like eggplants in a pair of denims and hiking boots, were soon put to use at a Stolovan national park, a basin of green between two rocky cliffs two hundred kilometers to the north of Prava. Surprisingly, the home-loving Vladimir was called upon to accompany her through this wilderness. He had had Jan drop them off at the mouth of the park, and then, with Morgan’s sturdy legs supporting
a foldup tent tethered to her back, they crossed an interminable vista of underbrush-clogged forest, rills expanding into proper streams capped off with foamy waterfalls, a meadow, which served as the home to an unpredictable deerlike animal that peeked out of the tall grass with its dark liquid eyes. Finally, the sweating, grunting Vladimir, holding onto a walking stick with one hand and carrying a little sack of Chinese apples in the other, found himself on a granite ledge overlooking a minilake where fish, frogs, and dragonflies commuted to and from the various mossy shores. Vladimir breathed in the clean air, felt Kostya’s spirit smile approvingly from a nearby tree, and watched Morgan take off her tent-pack and begin to assemble the damn thing.

“Hello, creation!” he shouted, spitting onto a lily pad that bobbed along indifferently. Despite nature’s dictatorial regime, its cult of greenness, he had found himself enjoying their two-hour hike, the way the landscape trembled before him, animals scampering, tree branches giving way, and now came the real payoff—a rare chance to be completely alone with his new friend in a queer and beautiful place.

It was about time. They had barely spent one daylight hour together in the weeks following Larry’s fête. Just as Vladimir had suspected, Morgan worked as an English teacher. She held a ten-hour-a-day job imparting the language to a mostly proletarian audience in the suburbs, aspirants to Prava’s burgeoning service industry who wanted to say, “Here is a clean bath towel,” and “Would you like me to call the police now, sir?”

Teaching English was the standard job for those Americans in Prava who didn’t have full parental backing, and Morgan went about it in her own methodic way—responsibility
über alles
—ignoring all of Vladimir’s attempts to get her to play hooky and spend the day running around with him. Vladimir was sure that all of her male students were in love with her and had asked her out
many times for coffee and drinks in the quick-fire, automatic way of European men trying to seduce American women. He was also sure that she would immediately turn red enough to make all but the most incorrigible lotharios reconsider their attack and would say in her slow, tutorial way: “I have boy friend.”

HE WATCHED HER
dig her heels into the dry autumn soil and then start to hoist the tent canvas over a pair of sticks. Her legs were never as beautiful to Vladimir as when they were folded over her great big bottom, the way they were at present. He felt the stirrings of excitement and pressed a palm against his groin, when he was distracted by that thing with feathers: bird.

“Hawk!” Vladimir cried as the predator circled overhead, its terrifying beak pointed at his person.

Morgan was banging another stick into the ground with a rock. She wiped her forehead and breathed hot breath down her shirt. “A partridge,” she said. “Why don’t you help me set this up? You don’t like to exert yourself very much, do you? You’re sort of a . . . I don’t know how to describe you . . . A chewer of cud.”

“I’m a capital loss,” Vladimir confirmed.
A chewer of cud.
That was clever! She was catching on. The Crowd was working its magic.

He held the tent’s canvas in place, while she worked the rocks and sticks. He watched over her with quiet admiration, trying to picture a brown-haired girl, pretty but not the prettiest in her sixth grade, squashing mosquitoes against her forehead on a back porch; at her feet, a partly deflated rubber toy lying on its side, a dinosaur from a television cartoon; waterlogged cards on the patio table, slimy to the touch, their reds and yellows running together, a diamond knave without a head; upstairs in the master bedroom the last tremors of an inconsequential fight between Mother and Father about some instance of jealousy, a petty humiliation, or
perhaps just the boredom of this particular life with its summer hot dogs, pennant championships, lake effect winds, November democracy, the raising of three children with strong springy legs and big hands that reached out to touch and comfort, that hoisted fat little bodies up elm trees to frighten squirrels out of nests, offered up basketballs to the permanently gray skies, pitched tent stakes into the ground . . .

Here Vladimir stopped. What did he know? What could he know of her childhood? It was poor luck, a sun-blinded stork that had plucked him down at the Birthing House on Tchaikovsky Prospekt and not the famed Cleveland Clinic. Ach, the old questions of the beta immigrant: How did one go about changing one’s warbling tongue, one’s half-destroyed parents, the very stink of one’s body? Or, more personally: how did
he,
Vladimir, end up here, a third-rate criminal in the middle of a crisp European forest, watching a tent going up lakeside, a tough, handsome, and yet entirely unremarkable woman silently building a temporary home for the both of them?

“Are you getting tired?” he asked her with what he thought was real affection, holding on to the canvas with one hand and reaching down to pat her damp hair with the other. She was fussing with a tent pole, a hook, and another implement, and he was touched by the sight of a body more plausible than his, the body of a woman who approached the earth on equal terms; all of her—feet, biceps, kneecaps, spinal column—all of her serving a purpose, whether hopping three trams to the far reaches of Prava, miming down the price of a root vegetable at the Gypsy market, or hacking her way through straw-colored foliage.

Fran, Challah, Mother, Dr. Girshkin, Mr. Rybakov, Vladimir Girshkin, each had invested a lifetime into building a refuge from the world, be it a bed of money, a talking fan, a cordon of books, a rickety basement
izba,
a shelf of half-empty K-Y jars, a shaky
pyramid scheme . . .But this woman, seen here wielding an awl-type thing over a difficult stake, had nothing in particular to run from.
She was on vacation.
She could have been puffing grass in Thailand, biking through Ghana, or snorkeling above that infernal Barrier Reef, but she happened to be here, bopping along to the cultural beat of a failed empire with her powerful legs and good disposition. And at some point her vacation would be over and she would go home. He would be waving her good-bye from the tarmac.

“I’m almost finished,” she said.

She was almost finished, which made Vladimir feel sad, prematurely abandoned, angry, in awe, in love, at a loss—many things that somehow came together and expressed themselves as arousal. Those thick legs again. Denim covered in soil. It was a strange feeling, but oddly natural, elemental. “Good,” he said, reaching down to barely touch a warm shoulder. “That’s good.”

She looked at him. It took her a few seconds to gauge the way he was moving from foot to foot, the frisky eyes, the labored breathing, but then she was instantly embarrassed, a young kind of embarrassment “Oh, boy,” she said and looked away, smiling.