Russian Debutante's Handbook by Gary Shteyngart

crying, little porcupine?” he nearly added.)
    She took a square of aluminum foil from her pocket from which were unfolded several pills. These were expertly swallowed without water. “Here, a tissue . . .” he muttered. Inwardly he was worried that his member’s smallness had made her cry, and he pressed her to him all the more violently.
    “What’s the matter, hm? What’s this all about?”
    “I’ll tell you a little secret,” she said, hiding her face in his scruffy guayabera. “A secret which you can never repeat. Promise?”
    He promised.
    “The secret is . . . Ah, but don’t you know it already? I was afraid you might have guessed it by now. What with the way I was carrying on about those vacuum cleaners at the Whitney . . .”
    The concerned Vladimir was in no mood for frivolity. “Please,” he said, waving his arms. “What is the secret?”
    “The secret is: I’m really not too bright.”
    “You’re the smartest woman I’ve ever met!” Vladimir shouted.
    “But I’m not,” she said. “Why, in some ways I’m worse off than you are. At least you have no tangible ambitions. All I am, on the other hand, is the very obvious product of two hundred thousand dollars spent on Fieldston and Columbia. Even my father says I’m stupid. My mother would confirm it, only she’s an idiot herself. It’s the curse of the female Ruoccos.”
    “Your father would never say that,” Vladimir said, quickly forgetting the bit about himself having no ambitions. “Look at you. You’re only an undergraduate, but already you have such clever academic friends. And they think the world of you.”
    “It’s one thing to be social, Vladimir. Or even to be smarter than average. And, entre nous, how frightening what passes for average these days. But to be brilliant like my father! Vladimir, do you know what he’s doing at City College?”
    “He’s teaching history,” Vladimir said brightly. “He’s a history professor.”
    “Oh, no, he’s so much more than that. He’s starting a whole new field. Evolving a whole new field, I should say. It’s called Humor Studies. It’s better than brilliant, it’s thoroughly unexpected! And he has New York’s two million Jews at his disposal. The perfect population, you guys are both funny and sad. Meanwhile, look at me. What am I doing? Attacking Hemingway and Dos Passos from a feminist perspective. It’s like hunting cows. I’ve no originality, Vladimir. I’m washed out at twenty. Even you, with your uncluttered intellectual life, probably have more to say.”
    “No! No! I don’t!” Vladimir assured her. “I have nothing to say. But you . . . You . . .” And for the next half hour he comforted herwith all the charm at his disposal: stooping his shoulders in deference of her love of small men; accentuating his accent to seem ever the foreigner. It was slow going, especially since at the Midwestern college he had dined solely on meat-and-potatoes Marxism, whereas she had at her disposal a sexy postmodernism which would be held in regard for the next six years. But in the end, he noticed her smiling throughout his litany and absentmindedly kissing his hand, and he thought: Yes, I will devote my time now to making sure she feels good about herself and continues her studies and achieves her dreams. That is my mission. My tangible ambition, as she put it. I shall exist for no other.
    Ah, but he was lying to himself. His thinking was hardly that generous. The immigrant, the Russian, the Stinky Russian Bear to be precise, was already taking notes. Love was love, it was exciting, and hormonal, and sometimes even overwhelmed him with the strange news that Vladimir Girshkin was not entirely alone in the world. But it was also a chance to steal something native, to score some insider knowledge, from an unsuspecting Amerikanka like this woman, whose cauliflower ear he was nuzzling with his nose.
    Perhaps Vladimir was not so different from his parents. For them