in my wife’s hedge fund and Southeast Asian currency splits. Literatura is kaput! For dandies like my son only.
MRS. RUOCCO : Have you heard the Kirov Ballet is coming to the Met?
MOTHER : Yes, yes, the pretty dancing. And what kind of a career have you picked out for Francesca, Mrs. Ruocco? She’s so tall and beautiful, I somehow see her as an eye surgeon.
MRS. RUOCCO : Actually, Frannie says she wants to follow in our footsteps.
DR. GIRSHKIN : But how is possible? Professorship offer no remuneration. Who will put food on table? Who will contribute to IRA? To Keogh? Plan 401(k)?
MOTHER : Quiet, Stalin. If Francesca will not make money, she will force Vladimir into law school to support family. All will be well, see?
MR. RUOCCO ( laughing ): Oh, I can’t quite picture your Vladimir as a lawyer.
MOTHER : Pink-hearted revisionist bastard pig!
Back on the Ruoccos’ planet, Vladimir was straining his ear for proof of Joseph Ruocco’s reputed disdain toward his daughteralong with evidence of his wife Vincie’s stupidity. Neither was forthcoming. Vincie was soft-hearted with the displaced Vladimir, shamed and awkward before the cleaning lady, secretly confounded by her daughter’s intelligence, and, despite the occasional wisecrack, perfectly obeisant to Fran’s father.
As for the Humor Studies savant himself, it was hard to think of Joseph as contemptuous. Sure, he often cut Fran off short by saying “Now, now, have another glass of Armagnac on the house and we’ll call it even.” But this booze-soaked dismissiveness seemed to Vladimir a distinguished scholar’s prerogative, not to mention that older people should be allowed to get away with things at the family table—look at the free rein granted Mother.
Could such small infractions have had repercussions in Fran’s mind? Possibly, given that the single currency considered valuta at the Ruocco hearth was not the awkward Bellovian potato love that gets passed around at so many American tables, but respect. Respect for each other’s ideas, respect for their standing in the world—a world the Ruoccos happily left behind in order to bask in each other’s company.
So who knew why Francesca was so intimidated by her father; why her psychiatrist had prescribed a battery of pink and yellow pills; why on some nights sex between her and Vladimir could be either the gentle and sympathetic Antioch College–type sex—the sex by committee of two, the insertion of the penis first a quarter of the way, then in gradual increments—and why on other nights the blindfold and her father’s tweeds had to come out. Vladimir’s mission, as has been previously established, was to comfort and reassure her, while gaining swift entrée into her classy little world. Let these deeper mysteries be solved in their own sweet time. By his young estimation, they would have all of their lives together.
But then, one day, unwittingly, she did it. She managed to hurt him almost irrevocably.
THEY HAD GONE shopping for a toothbrush. At no time was he happier than when the two of them would embark on these most mundane of missions. A man and a woman can claim to love one another, they may even rent real estate in Brooklyn as a sign of their love, but when they take time out of a busy day to walk through the air-conditioned aisles of a drug mart to pick out a nail clipper together, well, this is the kind of a relationship that will perpetuate itself if only through its banality. Or so Vladimir hoped.
And she was such a thoughtful consumer. The toothbrush, for instance, had to be organic. A dealership of organic toothbrushes did exist in SoHo, but it had chosen this particular day to dissolve into bankruptcy. “Strange,” Frannie said, as a person-sized toothbrush was removed from the vitrine by the bickering members of an Indian family and crammed into a station wagon with Garden State plates. “They had such a following.”
“Oh, what is to be done?” Vladimir moaned on her
MRS. RUOCCO : Have you heard the Kirov Ballet is coming to the Met?
MOTHER : Yes, yes, the pretty dancing. And what kind of a career have you picked out for Francesca, Mrs. Ruocco? She’s so tall and beautiful, I somehow see her as an eye surgeon.
MRS. RUOCCO : Actually, Frannie says she wants to follow in our footsteps.
DR. GIRSHKIN : But how is possible? Professorship offer no remuneration. Who will put food on table? Who will contribute to IRA? To Keogh? Plan 401(k)?
MOTHER : Quiet, Stalin. If Francesca will not make money, she will force Vladimir into law school to support family. All will be well, see?
MR. RUOCCO ( laughing ): Oh, I can’t quite picture your Vladimir as a lawyer.
MOTHER : Pink-hearted revisionist bastard pig!
Back on the Ruoccos’ planet, Vladimir was straining his ear for proof of Joseph Ruocco’s reputed disdain toward his daughteralong with evidence of his wife Vincie’s stupidity. Neither was forthcoming. Vincie was soft-hearted with the displaced Vladimir, shamed and awkward before the cleaning lady, secretly confounded by her daughter’s intelligence, and, despite the occasional wisecrack, perfectly obeisant to Fran’s father.
As for the Humor Studies savant himself, it was hard to think of Joseph as contemptuous. Sure, he often cut Fran off short by saying “Now, now, have another glass of Armagnac on the house and we’ll call it even.” But this booze-soaked dismissiveness seemed to Vladimir a distinguished scholar’s prerogative, not to mention that older people should be allowed to get away with things at the family table—look at the free rein granted Mother.
Could such small infractions have had repercussions in Fran’s mind? Possibly, given that the single currency considered valuta at the Ruocco hearth was not the awkward Bellovian potato love that gets passed around at so many American tables, but respect. Respect for each other’s ideas, respect for their standing in the world—a world the Ruoccos happily left behind in order to bask in each other’s company.
So who knew why Francesca was so intimidated by her father; why her psychiatrist had prescribed a battery of pink and yellow pills; why on some nights sex between her and Vladimir could be either the gentle and sympathetic Antioch College–type sex—the sex by committee of two, the insertion of the penis first a quarter of the way, then in gradual increments—and why on other nights the blindfold and her father’s tweeds had to come out. Vladimir’s mission, as has been previously established, was to comfort and reassure her, while gaining swift entrée into her classy little world. Let these deeper mysteries be solved in their own sweet time. By his young estimation, they would have all of their lives together.
But then, one day, unwittingly, she did it. She managed to hurt him almost irrevocably.
THEY HAD GONE shopping for a toothbrush. At no time was he happier than when the two of them would embark on these most mundane of missions. A man and a woman can claim to love one another, they may even rent real estate in Brooklyn as a sign of their love, but when they take time out of a busy day to walk through the air-conditioned aisles of a drug mart to pick out a nail clipper together, well, this is the kind of a relationship that will perpetuate itself if only through its banality. Or so Vladimir hoped.
And she was such a thoughtful consumer. The toothbrush, for instance, had to be organic. A dealership of organic toothbrushes did exist in SoHo, but it had chosen this particular day to dissolve into bankruptcy. “Strange,” Frannie said, as a person-sized toothbrush was removed from the vitrine by the bickering members of an Indian family and crammed into a station wagon with Garden State plates. “They had such a following.”
“Oh, what is to be done?” Vladimir moaned on her
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