The Cosmopolitans by Nadia Kalman Page A

She’d just begun to get her share. You didn’t always have to go to California. Sometimes you could just step out of the wedding room, and there would be the regular, shut-down museum, familiar whales and polar bears, all doing their own things. It was like California had been in the beginning, restful. The floor was clean and cool. It was calm here — why couldn’t it be calm like this everywhere? Everything in the room was asking her to stay.
     
     
     
     
    Roman
     

    Roman couldn’t believe that Katya Molochnik, whom he’d thought was so cool, had just sung disco. That was almost worse than the fact that she’d obviously been high.
    Everyone else at his table of Russians had shaken their shoulders and jutted their necks in time with the disco song. Of course, as soon as Katya Molochnik had left the stage, they were back to business: asking his cousin Leonid what would happen to oil prices if “we” invaded Iraq. You’d think, if Leonid really knew the answer, that he could just point his thumb up or down, and that would be the end of it, but no. Leonid took his glasses off and put them on again, he shook his head, he gazed off into the hopeful future, he talked and talked. The only person besides Roman who wasn’t enraptured by oil prices was a little Polish girl, who kept staring with longing at a table of Americans behind Roman’s left shoulder.
    A shorty in a seeski -squeezing shirt asked Roman whether he was a banker, too.
    “Construction,” Roman said. The shorty looked away as if he were a drug dealer. “Also, DJ. Romin Tha White Russian.” He had recently spun at a teen night at the Jewish Community Center; maybe she had a younger bother or sister who had been there? No, she said.
    “Romin is like Wu-Tang Clan. You know?” She exchanged glances with her friend, and Roman gave up on explaining that, whereas Wu- Tang was about Hong Kong-style martial arts, he was influenced by the ways of the ronin.
    Leonid drained his glass and began describing a recent trip to Singapore, a place both crazy and efficient.
    If all these Molodoj had such great lives, then why did they need to drink? A different girl, one who was almost the bomb, asked whether Leonid might look over her retirement plan. “I’m Audi,” Roman said, and went in search of a place where a man could smoke.
     
     
     
     
    Yana
     

    Yana checked both bathrooms, the coat closet, the locked gift shop (she wouldn’t put it past Katya to break in there), the Eskimo changing room. She walked up and down the hallways, being calm but purposeful, briefly looking people in the eyes, which was the best way to ward off attackers, she’d learned in self-defense class. It didn’t work very well. Her aunts tried to spray her hair. Pratik asked her to dance again. Dancing. When Katya could be dying, or having sex with someone really inappropriate.
    “Yo, yo.” She tried to ignore it, but this voice was attached to a tattooed hand that gripped her arm. It was Roman, the Chaikins’ nephew.
    “Your sister, your little —” he held his hands at waist-height, as if describing a five-year-old.
    “Where? Gde? ”
    He led her to a corner room. The lights were off, and at first, all Yana saw was the walrus family: two parents, two children, heteronormative to the max. A smell of vomit — Katya, eyes open, on the floor.
    Yana dropped to her knees.
    Katya stirred. “Okay,” she said.
    “I slap to wake her,” Roman said.
    “You slapped her?” Yana said. “What the hell?” Katya lifted her neck. “I thought you were just on pot. What is it? What did you take? Was it E?”
    Katya shrugged and almost smirked. Now Yana wanted to slap her, too. “Try to remember, okay? It’s important to remember what you took. Where’s your bag? Let’s go to the bathroom. I hope no one sees us. Can you stand?”
    Katya reached her hand past Yana’s shoulder, to Roman.
    Pulling Katya up, he said, “You will break yourself like Chinese cup with