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 bucket 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.
“This is important information,” Vladimir said. “I don’t know much about sports. For instance, what’s the name of the team here?”
“Oh, boy. You Manhattan kids can be a bunch of queers sometimes. Here they’re called the Dolphins, and back home we’ve got two teams: the Giants and the Jets.”
“I’ve heard of those,” Vladimir said. Could those teams have had any more insipid names? If Vladimir were ever to own a franchise he’d call it something like the New York Yiddels. The Brighton Beach Refu-Jews.
Jordi dictated additional trivia about the Super Bowl, the Dallas Cowboys, and the mythical cow-women who attended to them,
while room service brought up a swordfish, unbearably bland despite the hail of black pepper beneath which it suffocated. Vladimir munched on this mediocrity as Jordi began enumerating his son’s finer points: for instance, he never hit his girlfriend even when circumstances demanded it; and he knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that money didn’t grow on trees, that hard work never killed anybody, that without pain there was no gain. Vladimir worked with these commendable attributes, then suggested some more tangible activities for little Jaume: the boy spent his free time running the Catalan Culture Club at school; he helped old Polish ladies get to their weekly deviled ham at the Church of Saints Peter and Paul; he wrote letters to his local congressperson demanding better lighting for the local softball field (see interest in sports above).
“Here’s to little Jaume looking out for old Polack broads,” Jordi said. “And why aren’t you drinking, sweetheart?”
Vladimir pointed to his bladder then went to the rosy bathroom to relieve himself. When he came out, two representatives of room service—young, pimpled Adam and Eve of the South—were waiting to present him with another bow-tied bottle. “On the house, sir.”
The sun had long since disappeared when Vladimir felt the full giddy nausea of champagne drunkenness and ordered himself to stop. He sat down hard on his bed near the balcony and felt it sway a little in all four directions. Something was askew, and it wasn’t just the physical universe reeling from booze. The idea of appearing in front of a college admissions officer, of impersonating a dullard’s son, suddenly seemed as easy as hunting cows. Yes, an entire alternate moral universe was opening up before Vladimir, an alternate Americana populated with fellow beta immigrants living easy and drinking hard, concocting pyramid schemes like Uncle Shurik, while the other country continued to grind out leather
sofas and Daisy Duck place mats in places as stupid as Erie and Birmingham, as remote as Fairbanks and Duluth. He turned to Jordi, half expecting confirmation of his silent discovery, to find the latter studying Vladimir’s lower half through his champagne goblet, misty with breath. Jordi looked up, his heavy eyelids grown narrow with concentration; he let out three seconds worth of bullshit laughter then said, “Don’t get scared.”
Vladimir felt very scared, as if the Finnish doorlock to the Girshkin fortress was suddenly snapped open by an experienced hand, while the alarm system ceased its wail and the neighbor’s fierce suburban dog turned in for the night. The Fear-Money gland wasn’t even active yet, but the rest of him knew. “Hey, correct me if I’m wrong,” Jordi said, swinging his feet between their two beds, his trunks tight with the outline of his shaft, twisted and constrained by the elastic, “but you fooled around with Baobab before, right? I mean, you’ve been with other boys.”
Vladimir followed the single horrific spot of wetness along the inseam of Jordi’s trunks. “Who, us?” he said, jumping off the bed, so unsure of the fact that he had spoken that he repeated himself. “Who, us?”
“You’re so much like Baobab that way,” Jordi said, smiling and shrugging as if he understood this was something the boys just couldn’t do anything about. “It doesn’t mean you’ve got the homosexual feelings or anything,
coco,
though you could learn up on football a little. It’s just in your constitution. Look, I understand, and you’re not going to read about it in the
Post
tomorrow.”