Russian Debutante's Handbook Read Online Free PDF

took inher workday face—the lipstick, mascara, and blush melting down in the heat, drawing a second ethereal face a notch below her all-too-real one—she was embracing him and whispering “happy birthday” in his ear, for unlike every other well-wisher of the day, Challah wanted to say it quietly.
    Dear Challah with the warm, flat nose, the enormous eyelashes tickling his cheeks, the heavy nasal breathing—queen of everything musky and mammal-like. Soon she noticed what Vladimir had been preparing for her below, the aardvark’s tubular snout poking out from within its wiry hedge, and said, “Goodness,” in perfect mock surprise. She began unlatching the safety pins that kept together the swatches of black fabric she wore to the Dungeon but Vladimir said, “No, I must do it!”
    “Be careful,” she said. “Don’t rip anything.” She made sure he remained erect while he undressed her; the undressing went on for some time. When she was done, only the iron crucifixes remained against her heavy breasts, reminding Vladimir of artillery pieces scattered about a plain. Finally, with her crosses jangling, and his member in hand, Challah took Vladimir into the bedroom.
    On the futon, he recalled his mandate: be thorough. He kissed, rubbed his nose against, tugged with his teeth, pinched between thumb and middle finger, poked with what Challah had termed the Girshkin Gherkin, every part of her, even parts that he had grown weary of with the passage of time: the folds that collected on top of her hips, her arms, thick and pink, that pressed him to her not lustfully but the way he envisioned a mother would grasp her child at the approach of an avalanche.
    Finally, when he felt a full gathering of steam between his legs, he went between hers, and for the first time, looked into her face. Dear Challah, dear American friend, with that crimson look of arousal, but also with the restraint to keep Vladimir from bitinginto her neck or plunging into her mouth, just so she could look into his eyes when they were this close.
    So Vladimir closed his eyes. And had a vision.
    DRESSED IN LIGHTWEIGHT cotton chinos and tunic, a brown Nat Sherman’s cigarette implanted in his mouth, his hair fashionably cut short and continuously waved over to one side by a playful summer wind, Vladimir Borisovich Girshkin issued directives into a cellular phone as he walked along an airstrip. Granted, it was a lousy airstrip. There was not even a plane. But a series of properly spaced white lines etched into the cracked concrete could only mean an airstrip (or else a provincial highway, but, no, that couldn’t be).
    While in bed, the blind, naked Vladimir was keeping up his hump hump with Challah in a desperate bid to orgasm, his fashionable doppelganger in the vision was making progress against the substantial length of the airstrip, beyond which a half-circle of the setting sun, bloated and patchy like rotting fruit, peeked out from the confluence of two gray mountains. Vladimir could clearly see the new Vladimir, his purposeful gait, his agitated face spanning the range of ill humor, but he could not understand precisely what he was saying into the cellular, why the airstrip was isolated by scrub fields on all sides save for the mountains, why he could not daydream himself a plane, fabulous companions, and a set of filled champagne flutes . . .
    And then, just as the coital Vladimir was to reach his elusive target with Challah, the imaginary Vladimir heard a rumble, a boom, a sonic displacement directly above him. A hawk-nosed turbo prop was skirting the runway, headed directly for our hero, flying low enough for him to see the lone figure in the cockpit, or at least thelunatic glimmer in the pilot’s eye that could only have belonged to one man. “I’m coming for you, boy!” Mr. Rybakov was shouting into Vladimir’s cellular. “Away we go!”
    HE OPENED HIS eyes. His face was sandwiched in between Challah’s shoulder blades where a