Death changes people. I had certainly changed since Beloved Papa’s decapitation, but as for Lyuba, she was positively unrecognizable. It’s no secret that Papa treated her like his daughter in many ways—several times she had called him papochka, “little father,” while doing an improvised lap dance at the kitchen table or giving him a supposedly discreet hand job during the Mariinsky Theatre’s mind-numbing performance of Giselle (she thought I had dozed off by the grape harvest scene, but I was not so lucky).
But now that our papochka was gone, Lyuba was handling self-parenting with great aplomb. Her very diction had improved. It was no longer the sloppy New Russian of her idiot friends, a gangster-influenced provincial drawl interspersed with borrowed words like “dragon roll” and “face control,” but a more reserved speech, flattened and depressive, the kind favored by our more cultured, penniless citizens.
I was also inspired by her choice of dress. Gone was her usual Leather Lyuba motif; in its place, a blouse and skirt of dark contemporary denim fastened by an oversize red plastic belt with an enormous faux-Texan buckle. It was very Williamsburg, Brooklyn, circa right now.
“I must wipe your chin,” Lyuba said, scrubbing my double grapefruit with three of her long mustard-scented fingers.
“Thank you,” I said. “I’ve never learned how to eat properly.” Which is the truth.
“You know, I bought an orange comforter from Stockmann,” she said, and turned away to expel her breath. I smelled the freshness of a youthful mouth, a strong British breath mint, and the sulfuric undercurrent of lamb’s tongue. She smiled, her twin cheekbones going off the scale of Eastern European cheekbones and into lovely Mongolian territory, while her pinprick nose stretched itself into nonexistence. Despite the steady drafts of central air-conditioning, your correspondent felt himself becoming warm-faced and a bit untidy beneath the armpits. The denim blouse hugged Lyuba’s frame so that when she turned around, one could see an important crease forming between the cheeks of her zhopa. Meanwhile, the talk of orange comforters both soothed and intrigued.
“Won’t you come and see it?” she said. “It’s in the bedroom,” she quickly added. “I’m worried it’s not the right one.”
“I’m sure it’s fine,” I said, feeling an unexpected jolt of ethical misgiving. This was followed by an image of Jerry Shteynfarb’s authorial goatee burrowing into the heat between Rouenna’s thighs. The ethical misgivings evaporated. I followed Lyuba.
We passed through the main quarters, a kind of gallery devoted to outrageous Italian furniture, enough glossy mirrored surfaces that I could catch the devastating sight of my own deflated posterior and the halo of my small but growing bald spot. My papa’s meter-long oil painting of a wise but grizzled Maimonides with what looked like a ten-ruble note sticking out of his pocket completed the room. Outside the windows, the gracious classical lines of the Twelve Colleges Building suspended over the Neva provided a necessary counterpoint.
“I’m throwing everything out,” Lyuba said, sweeping her hand over the ensemble of buffed mahogany monstrosities possibly entitled Neapolitan Sunrise or something of the sort (there are warehouses full of this shit in New York’s Brighton Beach, in case the intrepid reader is interested). “If you have the time,” Lyuba said, “we can drive down to the IKEA in Moscow, maybe get something in paisley.”
“What you’re doing, Lyubochka, is very healthy,” I told her. “We must all strive to be as Western as possible. That old argument between the Westernizers and the Slavophiles…It’s not much of an argument at all, is it?”
“Not if you say so,” Lyuba said. She opened the bedroom door.
I had to look away at first. Lyuba’s comforter was the most orange thing I have seen this side of the Accidental College library, which was built in 1974, possibly by the American Citrus Growers’ Association. It was…I couldn’t find the right word. An entire sun had exploded in Lyuba’s bedroom, leaving behind its afterglow for us to ponder.
“You’ve become a modern woman,” I said, and heaved myself aboard with a few difficult motions.
“Feel the smoothness,” Lyuba said as she settled in beside me. “It looks like it’s fashionable polyester from the American seventies, but it feels like cotton. I’ve got to find a good dry cleaner. Otherwise they’ll just bleed the orange out.”
“That mustn’t happen,” I said. “You’ve really got something here.” Above her dresser I noticed a framed photograph of Beloved Papa unveiling a tombstone shaped like a giant Nokia mobile phone at his graveyard for New Russian Jews, sacrilegious laughter gathering in his clever eyes.
“But wait, there’s more,” Lyuba announced. She ran into the bathroom and came out with a pair of orange towels. “This is what you and Svetlana were talking about at the Home of the Russian Fisherman!” she said. “See, I listen to everything you say!”
I squinted at the towels, feeling a spectacular headache gathering steam somewhere in my sinuses. “Maybe you should mix the orange with some other Western color,” I suggested. “Lime, maybe.”
Lyuba bit her smooth lower lip. “Perhaps,” she said. She looked doubtfully at the towels in her hands. “It’s hard to know these things, Misha…Sometimes I think I’m such a fool…Ah, but listen to this!” She turned on a little stereo with the flick of one lacquered nail. It didn’t take me long to recognize the Humungous G’s gorgeous urban love ballad “I’m Busting My Nut Tonight.” Lyuba laughed and sang along with the soulful R&B chorus, moving her hands in front of her torso in a sad Russian approximation of slow jamming. “I’m baaaaasting my nut tonight / Your pusseeeee feels so tight,” she sang in a tired but hospitable voice.
“Uhhhh, uhhhh, uhhhh,” I grunted along with the chorus. “Uhhhh, shit,” I added.
“I know you and Alyosha love this song,” she said. “I’ve been playing it over and over. It’s so much better than techno and Russian pop.”
“In terms of popular music”—I spoke now with the authority of a former Multicultural Studies major—“you should listen mainly to East Coast hip-hop and ghetto tech from Detroit. We must reject European music categorically. Even so-called progressive house! Do you hear me, Lyuba?”
“Categorically!” Lyuba said. She looked at me with her soft, vacant gray eyes. She pressed both hands into the formidable ridge of her breastbone. “Mikhail,” she said, using my formal name, which, for as long as I’ve lived, usually means some form of punishment is at hand. I looked up expectantly.
“Help me convert to Judaism,” she said. She plopped down on the orange comforter, pressed her skinny legs into her tummy, and beamed the inquisitive look of youth in my direction. There was some tenderness there, a warmth in my belly, and I could feel it start spreading below. I looked at her beside me—little Lyuba in her too-tight denim dress, the two firm potato dumplings of her zhopa rubbing against my milky outer thigh. I needed to concentrate on the conversation at hand. Now, what was she saying? Jews? Conversion? I had much to say on the matter.