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.