“Or, no, Armenian!” he pursues. “I know just the place.” He tells me he’ll take me to the most prikol’ny spot in my neighborhood. By the time I arrive at my hotel, he’s listed off a couple more places we can go, demonstrating his expertise in the local cuisine and hinting at his personal knowledge of the chefs. For a moment I wonder if he’s forgotten who he’s talking to and thinks I’m a client. Then again, maybe it’s all to remind his old papa what an undislodgeable native—what a Muscovite—he’s become.
Within an hour I’m out of my steaming, sanitized hotel shower, toweling off and preparing to meet my son for our late dinner. Outside, the air is warm, pleasantly intimate, as if a sea is lurking somewhere behind all those blazing pastel fa?ades. Tverskaya Street is immaculately groomed, almost Swiss in its cleanliness. Not a stray cigarette butt about, even though every person who passes me seems to be smoking his little heart out. The mood is almost—how can I say it?—festive enough to make me regret my earlier cynical thoughts about Lenny. His manic enthusiasm on the phone was probably just a sign that he’s pleased to see his dad. For all my son’s muddled allegiances, he has always been sincere about wanting everyone around him to be happy. Only, tonight he has no idea about the bucket of ice water that I’m obligated to toss on his variety show. In my briefcase, I’m carrying ten pounds of glossy paperback GMAT textbooks—a present from Lenny’s mother, who’s told me I shouldn’t bother coming home until I’ve convinced our son to do the “only reasonable thing.”
I console myself that I’m only following orders while I inhale the flatulence of car exhaust, the faint reek of wet varnish, the after-scent of spilled beer, which remind me that I am in a city that I know far better than my son does. In the course of my visits I’ve started to think of Moscow as a complicated woman I was closely entwined with in my youth, but who, in our late-life encounters, has surprised me by not aging gracefully (as I have) but instead rejuvenating herself with a succession of increasingly more expensive face-lifts. Each time we meet, I notice some new augmentation: A Canali boutique where once stood a pharmacy. Gaudy casino lights in place of a familiar pawnshop. Even the glass pyramid atop the mayor’s new office, which I spied on my drive here, is as obscenely radiant as a marquise-cut diamond on the finger of an oilman’s dame. Tverskaya in particular was so collagened and siliconed that I’ve long stopped thinking of her as the Gorky Street of my youth. Tonight I pass whole blocks under renovation, girdled by scaffolds, corseted and draped in jade-colored nets beneath which all sorts of nips and tucks are being discreetly performed.
I’m the first to arrive at the restaurant, a cheerily domestic, half-empty Armenian joint. A furry-browed waiter leads me in and hands me, inexplicably, a second menu in English.
Lenny arrives, looking freshly shaved and ten pounds heavier than I remember. I point to the English menu. “What gave me away? I don’t look or sound any more foreign than the ma?tre d’.”
“Look around you,” says Lenny. “Who else asks to be seated in the nonsmoking section?”
He’s right! We’re the only ones in our dungeony corner of the dining room. Which is probably for the best: At the other end of the hall is a noisy party of six trunk-necked gentlemen, their banquet table looking like it’s about to snap under the weight of a forest of bottles. Across the room I can hear one of them pursuing some pointless slurring story about a time he boxed a kangaroo.
“You look good,” I tell my son, not entirely truthfully.
“I’m trying to stay fit,” he says, to my surprise.
“Oh yeah?”
“Been playing a little tennis.”
I take his word for it, though he looks more like a tennis ball than a tennis pro. Also, he’s let his hair get too long at the neck, combing it back like a pimp’s. A shame. Lenny is a good-looking guy when he takes care of himself. “So what’s your plan for the week?” he says.
I tell him: I’m here just until Monday, together with my boss, Tom, who’s arriving tomorrow. We’re reviewing bids for shipping contractors. “We’re looking for a charter company to pilot some shuttle tankers from the Nanatz coast to a terminal near Murmansk.” I’m surprised Lenny doesn’t remember. “It’s the joint venture I was telling you about, with L____ Petroleum.”
He cocks his eyebrow. “L-Pet? You’re in business with them? Those guys are the Kremlin’s lapdog. They’re practically a branch of the FSB.”
“We don’t get involved in their politics. This should be pretty straightforward.”
Then, just to remind me how much better he knows this place than I do, he says, “Nothing here is straightforward.”
There’s a vitreous crash at the other end of the dining room. “Now look what you’ve done, Sava,” says one of the bald gentlemen, a gorilla in a lavender shirt. The waiter is called in to clean up while poor Sava tries to finish his kangaroo story. He doesn’t have a chance. The lavender-clad gospodin announces he’s tired of the whole circus and tells the others to “clean him up.”
“How is Katya?” I ask while Sava is dragged out of the room between sets of oak-sized arms.
Lenny makes a sucking breath. “It’s over. More or less.”
I try to do a good impression of looking upset by his news. Katya is a perfectly nice girl. I’ve even gotten used to the little baptismal cross she is never without, and her affection for interpreting dreams and reading the future in the dregs of her Turkish coffee. Ever since he’s moved to Moscow, I’ve given up on a woman of character for Lenny. But is it too much to ask for someone whose perspective on twentieth-century history is not that “the monstrosity of Soviet communism was a curse delivered on the Russian people for the crime of slaying their tsar”? Yes, my son is dating a monarchist.
“So which is it?” I say. “More, or less? Has she moved out?”
“No, but we’ve agreed to see other people.”
“Now, how does that work? Does one of you take the couch while the other has a date?”
He looks more upset by this joke than I think is called for. “She’ll move out as soon as I can help her get her own place.”
“Well, that shouldn’t be too hard,” I say encouragingly. “It’s a big city. Plenty of apartments.”
“You kidding? The rents here are worse than in New York.”
I study his face for a moment. “Lenny, you haven’t told her that you’ll be paying her rent. Right?”
He recites once more the story of how Katya “abandoned” her family and job in St. Petersburg to move to Moscow for him. She can’t afford to live on her own and can’t go back to Peter because her mother’s lover has recently moved into the family apartment. “Everything’s become very complicated.”
“Complicated for her, not for you.”
“You don’t understand how it’s done.”
“Is there a protocol?” I inquire. “I mean, for paying the rent of a woman you don’t want to live with anymore? Are you a don who needs a goomah to shtup once a week? Even that I might understand. At least it’s logical. But what I’m hearing is you don’t want this person at all.”