Russian Debutante's Handbook (8 page)

“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.

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.