“Yeah, but I’ve been bad, Doctor! I’ve been mixing it up with alcohol, which I shouldn’t do, right?”
“You shouldn’t mix Ativan with alcohol. That’s right.”
“So I’ve been bad!”
Silence. I could almost hear him wiping his tender, doughy nose. He gets allergies in the summer, poor guy—his only weakness. Dr. Levine is in his fifties, but, like many Americans of his social class, he has the boxy chest of an athletic twenty-five-year-old and a tight, if slightly feminine, behind. I am not a homosexual by any stretch, and yet I have dreamed many times of making passionate love to his ass, my big body draped over his smaller one, my hands rubbing his sweet gray-bearded muzzle. “Do you want me to say that you’re bad?” Dr. Levine said evenly into his speakerphone. “Do you want me to hold you responsible for your father’s death?”
“Oh, God, no,” I said. “I mean, in some way I’ve always hoped that he would die…Oh, I see what you’re saying. Oh, shit, right…I’m a bad, bad son.”
“You’re not a bad son,” Dr. Levine said. “I think part of the problem for the past two years is that you don’t really do anything with your time. You don’t spend it profitably, the way you did in New York. And your father’s death obviously doesn’t help things.”
“Right,” I said. “I’m like that Oblomov character who never gets out of bed. How sad for me.”
“I know you don’t want to be in Russia,” Dr. Levine said, “but until you can figure a way out, you have to learn to deal with your situation.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, fiddling with a fresh Ativan bottle.
“Now, remember when you were in New York, you kept telling me how beautiful Moscow is…”
“St. Petersburg, actually.”
“Sure,” Dr. Levine allowed. “St. Petersburg. Well, why don’t you start by going for a walk. Look at some of that beauty you love. Take some time to relax and feel yourself distracted by something other than your problems.”
I thought of spending a day at the pleasant Summer Gardens, eating a stick of ice cream beneath a belligerent-looking statue of Minerva. I should have bought many more ice creams when Rouenna was around, although we did enjoy at least five a day. If only I had treated her better, maybe she wouldn’t sleep with that bastard Jerry Shteynfarb, maybe she would have stayed with me in Russia. “Yes,” I said. “That’s what I must do…Precisely. I’ll put on my walking shorts right away.” Then, before I could stop the transference, I blurted out, “I really love you, Doctor…”
And then I started to cry.
9
One Day in the Life of Misha Borisovich
I didn’t last long in the Summer Gardens. All the shady benches were taken; the heat was abusive; pious grandmothers passing by with their young charges would use me to illustrate four of the seven deadly sins. And my Rouenna, with her zippy bravado and distaste for all things classical (“Some of these statues ain’t got no ass, Misha”), was nowhere to be found.
“To the khui with this,” I said to my Chechen driver, Mamudov, who was keeping me company on a nearby bench. “Let’s see if Alyosha is at the Mountain Eagle.”
“He can’t spend a day without his little mutton kebab,” Mamudov opined sourly of my American friend.
We drove over the Troitsky Bridge, the Neva River eager and playful on a summer day, a panorama of gray swells and treacherous seagulls. Alyosha-Bob was indeed parked behind a rickety wooden table at the Mountain Eagle, chasing a vodka bottle with a plate of pickled peppers, cabbage, and garlic. We embraced and kissed three times in the Russian manner. I was introduced to his companions, both employees of ExcessHollywood, his DVD import-export business: Ruslan the Enforcer, a man with a shaved head and a fatalistic expression who handled security for the company, and the young art director and Web designer, Valentin, a recent graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts.
“We’re drinking to women,” Ruslan said. “Alyosha complains that his Sveta makes fun of his prowess in bed and threatens to leave him if he doesn’t move to Boston and give her a comfortable life in the fashionable Back Bay neighborhood.”
“Sad but true,” Alyosha-Bob said. “Meanwhile, Ruslan tells me that his wife cheats on him with a sergeant in the militia and that he has found stains on her hose and panties.”
“Also, when they k-k-k-k-kiss,” Valentin stammered shyly, “a suspicious manly scent comes from her mouth.”
“And as for our friend Valentin,” Ruslan the Enforcer said, gesturing to the artist, “he is not too young to know of heartache, either. He is in love with two prostitutes who work at the Alabama Father strip club on Vasilevsky Island.”
“Well, to women, then!” we said, clinking our glasses.
As if drawn by our toast, a pretty Georgian girl with furry arms dropped a fresh bottle of vodka in front of me and threw some charred mutton kebabs on our plates. We chewed on the gristle thoughtfully, slivers of onion crackling between our teeth. The sun sailed westward over the canal running past the ramshackle restaurant, past the disturbing city zoo where the once-proud lions of the Serengeti now live no better than our pensioners, and toward the greener pastures of the European Union.
A typical male Russian sadness descended upon us. “Speaking on the subject of women,” I said, “I fear my Bronx girl, Rouenna, may be the quarry of the émigré writer Jerry Shteynfarb.”
“I remember that weasel,” Alyosha-Bob said. “I saw him in New York once after he wrote that Russian Arriviste’s Hand Job. He thinks he’s the Jewish Nabokov.”
Ruslan and Valentin snorted at the idea that such a person could exist. “I don’t think they should expose young people to Shteynfarb,” I said. “Especially at a school like Hunter College, where the students are poor and impressionable.”
We drank to the difficult lives of impressionable poor folk and to the end of American imperialism in the guise of Jerry Shteynfarb. Valentin the artist seemed most roused by such sentiments, knocking his glass over and casting his gaze toward the heavens. He was a lean, sallow fellow with the overearnest expression of the Slavic intellectual. All the distinguishing signs were there: flaxen goatee, bloodshot eyes, porcupine hair, uneven bottom teeth, great big potato nose, thirty-ruble sunglasses from a metro kiosk. “You don’t like American imperialism, eh?” I said to him.
“I’m a m-m-monarchist,” the fellow stammered.
“Now, there’s a popular position for a young man these days,” I said, thinking: Oh, our poor dispossessed intelligentsia, why do we even bother to teach them literature and the plastic arts? “And who’s your favorite czar, then, young man?” I asked.
“Alexander the First. No, wait…the Second.”
“The great reformer. Well, that’s very nice. And who are your whorish friends?”
“They’re a mother-daughter act,” the artist explained. “Some people derive a thrill from watching a mother and daughter touch. They’re from Kursk Province. Very cultured people. Elizaveta Ivanovna plays the accordion, and her daughter, Lyudmila Petrovna, can quote the major philosophers.”
His use of their patronymics was strangely touching—I knew immediately what he wanted to do. After all, it is the only path our young Raskolnikovs can follow. “I will save them!” he said, and I knew immediately that he would not.
“Presumably it is the daughter you fancy,” I said.
“Both are like family to me,” said Valentin. “If you meet them, you see how they cannot live without each other. They are like Naomi and Ruth.”
We drank two shots in rapid succession, one to Naomi and one to Ruth. The mood veered toward belligerence and sentimentality. I floated in and out of several conversations.