Russian Debutante's Handbook Read Online Free PDF Page B

constellation of beauty marks formed a soup ladle. The ladle lifted and lowered with her breathing, a lock of her orange hair fell into it.
    Vladimir propped himself up on one elbow. In her free time Challah had repainted their bedroom a dentist’s-office mauve. She had arranged overlapping retro posters (condensed-milk advertisements and the like) across the ceiling. She had gone out and bought a squash, which now rotted in the corner. “Why did you close your eyes?” she asked.
    “What?” He knew what.
    “You know what.”
    “Most people close their eyes. I was overcome.”
    She burrowed her head into the middle of a pillow, swelling up the sides. “You were not overcome.”
    “Are you saying I don’t love you?”
    “You’re saying you don’t love me.”
    “This is ridiculous.”
    She turned around but covered herself with her arms and drew in her legs. “How can you say ‘this is ridiculous’? People don’t say things like that unless they just don’t give a shit. How can you be so flippant? ‘This is ridiculous.’ How can you be so detached?”
    “I’m a foreigner. I speak slowly and choose my words with care, lest I embarrass myself.”
    “How can you say that ?”
    “Well, what the hell am I allowed to say?”
    “I’m fat!” she shouted. She glanced around as if looking forsomething to throw, then grabbed a roll of her own flesh, the one that collected beneath her breasts before her stomach began. “Say the truth!”
    The truth?
    “You hate me!”
    No, that wasn’t the truth exactly. Vladimir didn’t hate her. He hated the idea of her, but that was different. Still, it was Vladimir who had invited this big woman into his life, and now there was no recourse but to sift through his meager vocabulary of comforting words, to put together the proper blandishments. You’re not fat, he thought, you’re fully realized. But before he could voice those tenuous thoughts, he noticed a large, complicated insect, a sort of roach with wings, hovering directly beneath the canopy of posters. Vladimir moved to defend his crotch.
    In the meantime, Challah had let go of her roll of flesh, which fell in luxuriously with its grander compatriot, the stomach. She turned back into her pillow and breathed in so deeply that Vladimir was sure she was going to exhale in tears.
    “There’s a strange insect coming down on you,” Vladimir preempted her.
    Challah looked up. “A-a—”
    They scampered off the futon as the beast landed between them. “Give me my T-shirt,” Challah demanded, once again covering herself with her arms as best she could.
    The intruder crawled along the crests and ridges of their bed sheets the way a big-rig truck weaves along a mountain highway, then executed a great leap forward into Vladimir’s pillow. It was really something! In Leningrad the roaches were small and lacked initiative.
    Challah leaned over and blew at the monster hopefully, but its wings began to stir and she drew back. “God, I just want to go to sleep,” she said, putting on her long T-shirt with a childhoodcharacter Vladimir was not familiar with, a comical blue imp. “I’ve been up since six. An assistant DA wanted an entire tea service set up on his back.”
    “You’re not submitting?”
    She shook her head.
    “If some lawyer touches you—”
    “No one’s touching me. They know.”
    He came around the bed and put his arm around her. She pulled away a little. He kissed her shoulder and before he could do otherwise, he started to cry—it happened very easily sometimes, now that his father was not around to object. She held him and he felt himself a very small man in her arms. On the futon, the insect remained in charge, so they went out to the fire escape and smoked cigarettes. She was crying too now with the cigarette in her hand, wiping her nose into her palm so that Vladimir worried her hair would catch fire from the cigarette, and he moved to clean her nose for her.
    They drank a cheap Hungarian