The Russian Debutante’s Handbook

by Gary Shteyngart

  “Baobab, I need money,” Vladimir changed the subject.

  He gave an overview of his problems in a Baobabian way.

  “It certainly sounds like the class struggle to me,” Baobab agreed. “Why don’t you just tell this Frannie how poor you are? It’s not shameful. Look at you . . . You have the bearing of an emancipated serf. Some women find that sexy.”

  “Baobab, have you been listening? I’m not going to ask her for a handout.”

  “All right,” Baobab said. “Can I talk simply?”

  “Please,” Vladimir said. “I’m a face-value kind of guy. I read headlines and weep.”

  “Okay, simply put, then. Jordi, my boss, is a very nice guy. Do you take my word for it?”

  “No drugs.”

  “He’s got a son, twenty years old. An idiot. A nullity. Wants to go to this huge private college near Miami. Yale it’s not, but they still have a selection process of sorts. Jordi paid some Indian to take the kid’s college boards. The Hindustani did really well, which doesn’t really explain how it took the kid six years to finish high school. The college wants to interview the kid. So we’ve got to send someone down who could talk impressively.”

  “You?”

  “That was our thinking. But, as you can see, I’m white as a sheet. You got that olive-skinned thing going, and with that facial hair you look like a young Yasir Arafat.”

  “But I’m not quite . . . Jordi’s what . . . Spanish?”

  “Don’t ever call him Spanish. Jordi’s fiercely Catalan.”

  “And what happens when the kid shows up next year? Or do I have to go to college for him too?”

  “The place is so gargantuan the interviewer will never see this kid again. Trust me, it’s foolproof, and I don’t even think it’s terribly illegal. Impersonating a high school kid: not exactly the crime of the century, just a lame thing do. But for twenty thousand . . .”

  “How now?” Vladimir said. Two sets of numbers floated through the stale downtown air. They didn’t resolve themselves immediately, but it was clear that $20,000, when subtracted from the needed $32,200, left a fairly workable sum. “How much money?”

  Baobab put his wet palms on Vladimir’s little shoulders and shook him. He pulled down Vladimir’s snap-brim until it was tight enough to hurt. He breathed his sour breath all over Vladimir and smacked his face, only half good-naturedly. His nose was getting even fleshier and he was looking and perspiring like a man twice his age and with a heart condition too. “You better start valuing our friendship,” he said. And then he added something straight out of Girshkinland, or perhaps straight out of any familial relationship: “You fall in love with a woman, you fall out of love with a woman, but your best friend Baobab is always there, even if he’s not always the most attractive guy to have around. You just never know when you’re going to need old Baobab.”

  “Thank you,” Vladimir said. “Thank you for that.”

  15. THE SEARCH FOR

  MONEY IN FLORIDA

  A PEACH CADILLAC.

  Vladimir had never seen one before, but he knew these vehicles once played an important part in the cultural development of the United States. This particular peach Caddy was idling by the curb of the Miami International Airport and belonged to a man who, along with most Mongolians and Indonesians, went by only one name; in this case, Jordi.

  Jordi had amiably carried Vladimir’s enormous duffel bag stuffed with collegiate attire through the airport maze and was remarking on how Vladimir had had the good sense to come prepared, though he would have gladly taken Vladimir shopping for a tweed jacket and rep tie. “That’s what I like about you immigruns,” he was saying. “You’re not spoiled. You work hard. You sweat rivers. My father was an immigrun, you know? He built up our family’s business with his own hands.”

  Built up his business? With his own hands? No, Jordi neither sounded nor resembled the drug dealer out of central casting, which Vladimir was expecting with some dread. He wasn’t even Picasso-looking, which, Vladimir imagined, was the semblance to which all Catalan people aspired. He looked like a middle-aged Jew with a textile business. Middle-aged but closer to retirement than the glory days: his wide face burrowed with the wrinkles of over-tanning; his gait was brisk and yet he took the time to swagger in his glowing ostrich-skin loafers like a man with accomplishments behind him. “I have often dreamed of visiting Spain,” Vladimir told him.

  “Si ma mare fos Espanya jo seria un fill de puta,” Jordi said. “Do you know what that means? ‘If my mother was Spain I’d be a son of a bitch.’ That’s what I think of the Spanish. White spics, that’s all.”

  “I would only visit Barcelona,” Vladimir assured the Catalonian.

  “Eh, the rest of Catalunya ain’t bad either. I fucked some little lady in Tartosa once. She was like some kind of dwarf.”

  “Small women can be nice,” Vladimir said. He wasn’t thinking of anyone in particular.

  “We’ll have to take off the goatee,” Jordi said, once they were in the chilled car. “You look too old with the goatee. We’re sending the kid to college, not to law school. Law school comes later.”

  What a coincidence: Jordi and Mother had similar plans for their progeny. Perhaps an introduction was in order. But how terrible that Vladimir would lose his prized goatee, which made him look five years older and ten years wiser. Fortunately, the very same hormones that were skimming off the top of his head were already sprouting hair efficiently most places below. And then there was the matter of the twenty thousand dollars. “I’ll shave right away,” Vladimir said.

  “Good boy,” Jordi said, reaching over to squeeze Vladimir’s shoulder. His hands smelled like baby powder; the rest of his smell, as circulated by the gale-force air-conditioning, consisted of nine parts citrus-based cologne, one part male. “There’s some soda in the cooler if you want,” he said. He had that quaint working-class Queens pronunciation which turned “soda” into “soder,” “tuna” into “tuner,” and the U.S. into a mythopoetic land called “Ameriker.”

  Around them swirled the blightscape of motels with German and Canadian flags, crappy chain restaurants with electrified cows and lobster tails, and, of course, the ubiquitous palms, those dear old friends of the temperate Northeasterner. “This is a nice car,” Vladimir said, by way of conversation.

  “It’s a little too niggered up, don’t you think? Tinted windows, oversized tires . . .”

  Ah, a little racism before lunch. Time to put your progressive instincts to work, Vladimir. The Girshkins spent a hundred thousand dollars a year on your four-year socialist powwow in the Midwest. Don’t let the alma mater down. “Mr. Jordi, why do you think people of color prefer tinted windows and the like? I mean, if that really is the case.”

  “Because they’re monkeys.”

  “I see.”

  “But take a peach Caddy without the tinted windows and the fat tires, and you got yourself a classy car, correct? I’ll tell you something: I rent four hundred of these a year. Everyone who works for me—New York, Miami, Côte d’Azur—everyone’s got a peach Caddy. Don’t like my style, work for someone else, barrada. Pendejo. Subject closed.”

  Meanwhile, the trashy motels of the north were giving way to the dignified Art-Deco facades of South Beach, and Jordi told Vladimir to keep a lookout for the New Eden Hotel & Cabana, which Vladimir remembered from his past journeys through South Beach as a tall, somewhat crumbling resort next to the modernistic loop of the Fountainebleau Hilton, the flagship of the mink-stole era.

  The New Eden’s vertical, once-opulent lobby was built around a meticulously scrubbed chandelier careening several stories down to a circular arrangement of fraying velvet recliners. “Elegance never goes out of style,” Jordi said. “Hey, look at all these good folks!” He waved to a gaggle of retirees with such gusto that Vladimir assumed they had all come from the old country together. But, to Jordi’s disappointment, there was hardly a stir from the New Eden gang, its members enjoying a splendid afternoon’s torpor.
For those awake, Bunny Berrigan was playing over the speakers, vegetarian liver was being served in the Green Room—too many distractions to notice the arrival of Jordi and Vladimir, an unusual duo by anyone’s standards.

  Jordi returned from the reservations desk with some further bad news: “My secretary screwed up our reservations, the cow,” he said. “Would you mind splitting a room with me, Vladimir?”

  “Not at all,” Vladimir said. “It’ll be like a slumber party.”

  “Slumber party. I like that. That’s a good way to put it. Why do little girls get to have all the fun?” Why? There was a very good reason why little girls, and only little girls, got to have all the fun at slumber parties. But Vladimir was going to have to find out for himself.

  VLADIMIR PUT DOWN Jordi’s grimy little electric shaver and looked at various angles of his scrubbed and itching face in the bathroom’s three-sectional mirror. What a disaster. The sickly Vladimir of Leningrad looked back at him, then the scared Vladimir of Hebrew school, and finally the confused Vladimir of the math-and-science high school: a triptych of his entire lusterless career as a youngster. What a difference a little merkin-like hair made around his thick lips.

  “Well?” Vladimir stepped out into the sunlit bedroom smothered in an endless assortment of floral patterns and wood, a New England bed-and-breakfast motif strayed way past the Mason-Dixon Line. Jordi looked up from his paper. He had sprawled out on one of the matching beds, dressed only in his swimming trunks. His body was loosely organized like a booming sunbelt city, suburban rivulets of fat spilling out in all directions.

  “All of a sudden an attractive young man appears before me,” he said. “What a difference a little shave makes.”

  “Is the interview tomorrow?”

  “Hm?” Jordi was still appraising Vladimir’s virgin face. “That’s right. We’ll go over what you have to say. But later. Now go out and play in the sun, tan your chin so that it don’t stick out. And help yourself to some of this expensive champagne. You won’t believe how much it costs.”

  Vladimir took the elevator down to the exit marked “cabana and pool.” Outside, one could see why the deck chairs were empty and the beefy cabana boys loafing: Florida off-season in three-digit temperatures was a scary proposition.

  Despite the misery, Vladimir toasted this stretch of coast with his champagne flute. He said, “Vashe zdorovye,” to the seagulls screeching above. The whole setup felt like home to Vladimir. In his youth, the Girshkins used to descend on the pebbly beaches of Yalta each summer. Dr. Girshkin had prescribed a daily dose of sun for the ailing Vladimir. Mother would park him for hours beneath that blinding yellow orb to sweat and cough up phlegm.

  He was not allowed to play with other children (his grandmother had branded them spies and informants), nor was he allowed a dip in the Black Sea, as Mother feared that a ravenous dolphin would eat him (several bottlenosed specimens could be seen disporting along the coast).

  Instead, she had devised a game for them to play. It was called Hard Currency. Each morning Mother would have tea with an old friend of hers who happened to be a clerk at the Intourist Hotel for Foreigners and would brief Mother on the latest exchange rates. Then she and Vladimir would memorize the figures. They would start: “Seven British pound sterling equals . . .”

  “Thirteen dollars American,” cried Vladimir.

  “Twenty-five Dutch guilders.”

  “Forty-three Swiss francs!”

  “Thirty-nine Finnish markka.”

  “Twenty-five Deutsche marks!”

  “Thirty-one Swedish krona.”

  “Sixty . . . Sixty-three . . . Nor wegian . . .”

  “Wrong, my little dope . . .”

  The penalty for failure (and the reward for success) was a paltry Soviet kopek, but one day Vladimir managed to rack up an entire five-kopek coin, which Mother sadly fished out of her purse. “Now you can afford a Metro ride,” she said. “Now you will get on the Metro and leave me forever.”

  Vladimir was so shocked by this pronouncement that he started to cry. “How can I leave you, Mamatchka?” he whimpered. “Where will I take the Metro all by myself? No, I will never ride the Metro again!” He cried all afternoon, suntan lotion dribbling down his cheeks. Not even a masterly display of acrobatics on the part of the man-eating dolphins could cheer him.

  Ah, childhood and its discontents. Feeling much older and happier, Vladimir decided to mail Fran a postcard. The New Eden gift shop had an impressive selection of naked rumps dusted with sand, the manatee begging to be saved from extinction, and close-ups of plastic pink flamingoes roosting in Floridian front yards. Vladimir settled on the last of these as being perfectly representative. “My dear,” he wrote on the back. “The immigrant-resettlement conference bores me to no end. How I hate my work sometimes.” The conference had been a stroke of genius on his part. He even told Fran he was presenting a lecture based on his mother: “The Pierogi Prerogative: Soviet Jews and the Co-optation of the American Marketplace.”

  “I practice shuffleboard and mah-jongg whenever I can,” he wrote to Fran, “just to get a leg up on you in time for our golden years. But before you don your babushka and I slip into a nice pair of bright-white slacks, let us, sometime soon, travel across this entire nation, and you can fill me in on your life from day one. We could be like tourists (i.e., bring a camera, look a certain way). I don’t know how to drive, but am willing to learn. Can’t wait to see you in three days and four hours.”

  He posted the card, then paid a visit to the Eden Roc bar, where he was duly interrogated about his age before the barkeep finally caved in on account of his receding hairline and gave him a lousy beer. That hairless chin of his, jutting out like a little boiled egg, was already becoming a liability. Two beers later, he decided to face up to his one other New York responsibility, this one a matter of duty not pleasure.

  An irritated Mr. Rybakov came on the line immediately: “Who? Devil confound it. Which hemisphere is this?”

  “Rybakov, it’s Girshkin. Did I wake you?”

  “I don’t need sleep, commandant.”

  “You never told me you hit Mr. Rashid during the naturalization ceremony.”

  “What? Oh, but I’m in the clear on that one. My God, he was a foreigner! My English is not so good, but I know what the judge told me: ‘To protecting country . . . against foreigner and domestic enemy . . . I am swearing . . .’ Then I look to my left and what do I see? An Egyptian like the one at the newsstand who always overcharges me five cents for the Russian paper. Another foreigner trying to defraud the workers and the peasant masses and convert us to his Islam, that lousy Turk! So I did what the judge told to do: I defended my country. You don’t give an order to a soldier and expect him to disobey. That’s mutiny!”

  “Well, you’ve certainly put me in an awkward position,” Vladimir said. “I’m down here in Florida right now, playing tennis with the director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, begging him to reconsider your case. It’s forty degrees Celsius here and I’m about to have a myocardial infarction. Do you hear me, Rybakov? An infarction.”

  “Oi, Volodechka, please, please get me into that hall for the ceremonies again. I’ll behave this time. Tell the director to forgive me that one incident. Tell him that I’m not all well up here.” Nine hundred miles up the coast, Rybakov was surely tapping away at his forehead.

  Vladimir sighed the deep sigh of a father coming to terms with his offspring’s limitations. “Fine, I’ll call you once I get into the city. Practice being civil in front of the mirror.”

  “Captain, I am following your directives without question! All power to the Immigration and Naturalization Service!”

  JORDI LAY ON his stomach, watching a show about a modeling agency, grunting along as the feeble bon mots flew and negligees slithered to the ground. The remains of his early dinner and two empty champagne bottles were lined up on a little table intended for card games or the like; an additional champagne bottle was afloat in a bu
cket of melted ice. It was possible to imagine a silver tray from the Lusitania bearing a hastily scribbled champagne bill floating in to join this hedonism in disrepair.

  “I like the brunettes,” said Vladimir, sitting down on his bed, shaking sand out of his sneakers.

  “Brunettes are tighter than blondes,” Jordi posited. “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  “Yes,” Vladimir said, beaming with pride at this admission and feeling even younger than his clean-shaven face.

  “What color hair?”

  For some reason Vladimir thought of Challah’s reddish curls, but then he caught himself and answered correctly: “Dark, very dark.”

  “And how does she take it?” Jordi wanted to know. With sugar or with milk, was that the question?

  “She takes it well,” he said.

  “I mean how does she . . . Oh, just drink, boy. You have to be as drunk as me to be my friend!”

  Vladimir did as he was told, then asked about Jordi’s son, that big imbecile.

  “Ah, little Jaume.” The proud papa sat up and slapped his haunches, businesslike. He turned down the volume on the television, until the models’ squealing was down to the whisper of the waves brushing against the sand outside. “He’s a bright kid, he just can’t do well in a school environment. So maybe you shouldn’t talk like you’re too book-smart, but mention a couple of books if you can. Now, he’s into football although they kicked him off the team last year.” This uninspiring fact seemed to bring about a little reverie on Jordi’s part. “But I blame the coach, the school, and the Board of Ed for not understanding my boy’s needs,” he said at last. “So here’s to my little Jaume, attorney-at-law. With God’s help, of course.” He gulped down most of a champagne bottle in ten incredibly well-spaced swallows, as if a coxswain was coaching him along.