Russian Debutante's Handbook (12 page)

“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.

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:

BAR TABS
: $875.00

TRADE PAPERBACKS & ACADEMIC JOURNALS
: $450.00

WARDROBE OVERHAUL
: $650.00

RETRO LUNCHES, ETHNIC BRUNCHES, SQUID & SAKE SUPPERS
: $400.00

TAXI TARIFFS
: $350.00

MISCELLANEOUS
(Eyebrow waxing fees, aged balsamic vinegar for the Ruoccos, bottles of Calvados brought to parties): $275.00

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.”