"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 her with 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 becoming American meant appropriating the country's vast floating wealth, a dicey process, to be sure, but not nearly as complex and absolute as this surreptitious body-snatching Vladimir was attempting. For what he really wanted to do, whether he admitted it or not, was to become Manhattanite Francesca Ruocco. That was his tangible ambition. Well-situated Americans like Frannie and the denizens of his progressive Midwestern college had the luxury of being unsure of who they were, of shuffling through an endless catalog of social tendencies and intellectual poses. But Vladimir Girshkin couldn't waste any more time. He was twenty-five years old. Assimilate or leave, those were his options.

IN THE MEANTIME, all the kind attention he had lavished upon Fran must have embarrassed her. She gently removed his nose from her ear. "Let's have a drink," she said.

"Yes, yes, a drink," Vladimir said. They took a cab downtown, and, at a Village sake bar, finished a half-magnum of sake and a thumb-sized plate of marinated squid. The total charge for this little indulgence, Vladimir noticed once the buzz of the liquor had subsided, was U.S.$50. This brought the day's total on his part (including the guayabera shirt and janitor pants) to a little over $200--his allowance for two weeks. Oh, what would Challah say . . .

Challah. The Alphabet City hovel. The cheap spice racks falling off their hooks. The family-sized jars of K-Y lining the hallway. Was she waiting up for him on their sweaty futon, her lubricated baton at the ready? Was it time to go home?

He and Fran were standing outside the sake bar, both reeling a little from the drink and the squid, with Fran somehow steadier on her feet. After a few minutes of silence, she began slapping him playfully about the face and he went to great lengths to pretend he didn't enjoy it. "Ouch," he said in his best Russian accent. "Afch."

"Would you like to sleep over?" she said, as easily as these things could be said. "My parents are making rabbit."

"I'm very fond of game," Vladimir said. And so it was settled.

10. THE FAMILY.

RUOCCO.

AND SO IT was settled for the rest of the summer, a summer Vladimir spent at 20 Fifth Avenue, Apartment 8E, the Ruoccos' grand place overlooking Washington Square Park . . . A park which, if surveyed from the right angle (if you turned your back on the twin slabs of the World Trade Center), would convince you that you were looking at the venerable plaza of a European capital and not the Manhattan of a million opened steam vents and cars backfiring into the night--the grimy and fantastic Manhattan that Challah and Vladimir used to inhabit.

Not to mention the quiet graces of the family that came with this geography: the Ruoccos feasting, constantly feasting from the "gourmet garages" that were taking the town by storm. An avalanche of peppercorns and stuffed grape leaves in handsome containers, resting on real tables (the kind with four legs) on which candles were always lit and above which chandeliers glowed faintly on dimmers.

Within a few weeks, Vladimir was made into an honorary Ruocco. There was not even the hint of an embarrassed smile when the professors found him brushing his teeth in their bathroom at eight in the morning or escorting Francesca to the breakfast table. Yes, clearly the Ruoccos approved of Vladimir for their "developing young daughter" (as Mr. Rybakov would put it). But why? Had the recent fall of the Berlin Wall made Vladimir somehow timely? Did they sniff the swampy air of Petersburg intelligentsia out of his old work shirts? Was that why they begged to dine with his parents, perhaps expecting to break bread with Brodsky and Akhmatova? To their immense consternation, however, Vladimir made sure that this dinner was never to be. Oh, he could imagine it, all right: MR. RUOCCO: So how do you feel about the new Russian literature, Dr. Girshkin?

DR. GIRSHKIN: Now I am only interested 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 daughter along 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 entree 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 behalf. "Where can one find an organic toothbrush in this one-horse town?" He kissed her on the cheek for no reason.

"Chelsea," she said. "Twenty-eighth and Eighth. I think the place is called T-Brush. Minimalist, but definitely organic. But you don't have to go all the way up there with me. Go home and keep my mother company. She's grilling baby squid in its own ink! You love that shit."

"No, no, no!" Vladimir said. "I promised to go toothbrush-shopping with you. I'm a man of my word."

"I think I can handle this all by my lonesome," she said. "I'm sick of dragging you around."

"Please," Vladimir said. "What dragging? There's nothing more I enjoy than doing these little, um, quotidian things with you."

"That I know," she said.

"You know?" he said.

"Vlad, you're too much!" she laughed, poking him in the stomach. "Sometimes," she continued, "sometimes you seem so happy to have a girlfriend. Was this what you dreamed it would be like? Having a New York girlfriend. Shadowing her around town. The devoted boyfriend, so loving, so devoid of any personal interest, just this lovey-dovey, dopey, happy guy. Toothbrush? Don't mind if I do! It's quotidian!"

She said the last word Vladimir-style with its birdlike kvo. Kvo-kvo, said the Vladimir bird. Kvotidian.

"You have a point," Vladimir said. He was unsure of what to say next. Or what she had just said to him. He felt a gurgle in his stomach and tasted something gastric on his tongue. "Very well, then," he said. "No problem." He pecked her farewell. "Ciao, ciao," he croaked. "Good luck with the toothbrush. Remember: medium-soft bristles . . ."

But as he made his way home, the intestinal ill-feeling, the nervousness tickling his insides continued, as if the tired faces of the shish-kebob-sellers and art-book-hawkers of Lower Broadway, the honored citizens of the midsummer city, were assaying him with open disgust, as if the braggadocio of rap issuing out of boom boxes was actually as threatening as it sounded. What was it, this strange stirring?

Back at the Ruoccos', Fran's bedroom was its usual mess of samizdat-like books published by failing presses; heaps of dirty underwear; here and there loose dots of birth control and anxiety medication; the big cat, Kropotkin, prowling about, tasting a little bit of everything, depositing tufts of gray-black fur on panties and literature alike. And the chill in the room . . . The mausoleum effect . . . The windows shut, curtains drawn, the air-conditioner always on, a tiny desk lamp the only illumination. Here was the long winter of Oslo or Fairbanks or Murmansk: the New York summer had no business in this twilight place, this temple to Fran's strange ambitions, the desiccation of early-twentieth-century literature, the education and repackaging of one Warsaw Pact immigrant.

His stomach growled once more. Another wave of nausea . . .

Kvo-kvotidian, said the Vladimir-bird.

Sometimes you seem so happy to have a girlfriend.

Shadowing her around town . . .

Was this what you dreamed it would be like?

And then he realized what it was, this rumbling in his gullet, this internal displacement: He had been unmasked! She knew! She knew everything! How much he needed her, wanted her, could never have her . . . All of it. The foreigner. The exchange student. The 1979 Soviet "Grain Jew" poster boy. Good enough for bed, but not for the organic-toothbrush store.

Toothbrush? Don't mind if I do!

Ah, so that's how it was. She had humiliated him on the sly, while he, the diligent note-taker, had failed his mandate once again. And he had tried so hard this time, had gone to such lengths to please all of them under the rubric "Parents & Daughter: How to Love an American Family." He was the dutiful son the Ruoccos never had. Worshiping Dad's Humor Studies. "Yes, sir, the serious novel has no future in this country . . . We must turn to the comic." Worshiping Mom's fruits de mer. "World's best geoduck clam, Miss Vincie. Maybe just a sprinkle more of vinegar." And, God knows, worshiping Daughter. Worshiping, shadowing, soaking up through osmosis.

And still coming up short . . .

Why?

How?

Because he was all alone in this, this being Vladimir Girshkin business, this being neither here nor there, neither Leningrad nor SoHo. Sure, his problems might seem minuscule to a contemporary statistician of race, class, and gender in America. And yes, people in this country suffered left and right, were marginalized and disenfranchised the moment they stepped out of the house for coffee and a doughnut. But at least they suffered as part of a unit. They were in this together. They were bound by ties Vladimir could barely comprehend: New Jersey Indians loading a giant toothbrush into a station wagon, Avenue B Dominicans playing stoop-side dominoes, even the native-born Judeo-Americans sharing easy laughs at the office.

Where was Vladimir's social unit? His American friends had always consisted of one man--Baobab--and, upon Fran's unspoken orders, Baobab was completely off limits. He had no Russian friends. For all his years at the Emma Lazarus Society, the Russian community was just a dark, perspiring mass that regularly washed up on his shore, complaining, threatening, cajoling, bribing him with bizarre lacquered tea sets and bottles of Soviet champagne . . . What could he do? Go to Brighton Beach and eat mutton plov with some off-the-boat Uzbeks? Call Mr. Rybakov to see if he could attend the baptismal of his youngest fan? Arrange for a date with some Yelena Kupchernovskaya of Rego Park, Queens, soon-to-be graduate of the accounting department at Baruch College, a woman who, if she actually existed, would want to settle down at the fantastic age of twenty-one and bear him two children in quick succession--"Oh, Volodya, my dream is for one boy and one girl."

And what of his parents? Beyond the Maginot Line of the Westchester suburbs, were they faring any better? Dr. and Mrs. Girshkin had arrived in the States in their early forties; their lives had effectively been split into two, leaving only fading memories of the sunny Yalta vacations, the homemade marzipan cookies and condensed milk, the tiny private parties at some artist's flat suffused with moonshine vodka and whispered Brezhnev jokes. They had left their rarefied Petersburg friends, their few relatives, everyone they had ever known, traded it all in for a lifetime of solitary confinement in a Scarsdale mini-mansion.

There they were, driving down to Brighton Beach once a month to pick up contraband caviar and tangy kielbasa, all around them the strange new Russians in cheap leather jackets, women wearing wedding cakes of permed blond hair on their heads, an utterly alien race that just happened to cluck away in the mother tongue and, at least in theory, shared the Girshkins' religion.

Were Vladimir and his parents Petersburg snobs? Perhaps. Bad Russians? Likely. Bad Jews? Most certainly. Normal Americans? Not even close.

ALONE IN THE dark foreign bedroom, a bedroom he had just recently mistaken for his own, Vladimir picked up Kropotkin, the Ruoccos' beloved family cat, and soon found himself crying into the hypoallergenic designer fur. It was soothing. The mischievous fellow, an anarchist like his Russian namesake, felt incredibly warm and tender amid the climate-controlled hell of Fran's room. Sometimes, when he and Fran were in bed, Vladimir spied Kropotkin looking at them with such feline amazement, as if the cat alone understood the magnitude of what was going on--Vladimir's right hand cupping, squeezing, plying, poking, kneading the pale American flesh of his mistress.

There were nights, after Fran had done her reading for the day, after the desk light had been turned off, when she would end up on top of him, her face contorted into the most difficult grimace, grinding down on him with such force that he was lost in her, that the pejorative term "to screw" came to mind--she was literally screwing Vladimir inside of her, as if otherwise he would somehow manage to fall out, as if this is what held them together. And after she was through with him, after the long tremors of her silent orgasm, she would grab his head and press it into the bony ridge between her little breasts, each nipple alert and pointing to the side, and there they would remain for a long time, locked in a postcoital huddle, rocking back and forth.

This was his favorite part of their intimacy: when she was silent and satiated, when he was blissfully unsure of what had just happened between them, when they were holding on to each other as if letting go would mean for each a quick, dry death. Inside the huddle, he would sniff and lick her; her chest would be covered with sweat, not the gamy Russian sweat Vladimir remembered from his childhood, rather American sweat, sweat denatured by deodorant, sweat that smelled purely metallic, like blood. And only when they woke up the next day, only in the first weak light of the morning, would she actually look his way and mutter "thank you" or "sorry," in either case leaving him to wonder "What for?"

Thank you for putting up with me, Vladimir thought as he wept into the softly mewing Kropotkin. Sorry I have to use you and humiliate you. That's what for.

THAT NIGHT, AFTER Vincie's lovely squid had been eaten and two bottles of Crozes-Hermitage swilled, Vladimir took Fran into their bedroom and managed to shock both of them by actually speaking his mind. "Fran, you insulted me today," he told her. "You made light of my feelings for you. Then you laughed at my accent, as if I had a choice in where I was born. It was shocking. You were so unlike yourself, so completely immature. I want . . ." He stopped for a moment. "I would like . . ." he said. "Please, I would like an apology."

Frannie was flushed. Even her lips, purple with wine, were somehow turning red. Against the backdrop of her dark hair and ashen face, they were quite beautiful. "An apology?" she shouted. "Did you just call me immature? What are you, some kind of an idiot?"

"I'm . . . You . . . I cannot believe what you say . . ."

"I do apologize. It wasn't a question. What I meant to say was, and I hope it's not a sign of my immaturity: you are some kind of an idiot. Jesus, what did they do to you at that Midwestern college, that finishing school for Westchester's tender sons?"

"Please . . ." he muttered. "Please don't try to play the class card with me. Your parents are substantially wealthier than mine . . ."

"Oh, you poor immigrant," she said, a touch of spittle crowning her lower lip. "Someone get this guy a grant. A Guggenheim Fellowship for Soviet Refugees Who Love Too Much. It's a midcareer prize, Vladimir. You have to present a substantial body of love. Should I get you an application?"

Vladimir looked down at his feet, brought them closer together, as if Mother had been hovering over the scene all along. "I think maybe I should go now," he said.

"Well, that's just ridiculous." She shook her head, dismissing the idea. But she also walked over and put her freckled arms around him. He smelled paprika and garlic. He felt his knees buckle under her weight, what little of it there was. "Honey, here, sit down . . ." she said. "What's happening here? Where are you going? I'm sorry. Please sit down. No, not on my notebook. Over there. Scoot over. Now tell me what's wrong . . ." She lifted up his downcast chin. She pulled lightly on his goatee.

"You don't love me," he said.

"Love," she said. "What does that even mean? Do you know what that means? I don't know what that means."

"It means you have no regard for my feelings."

"Ah, so that's what love means. What a tricky definition. Oh, Vladimir, why are we fighting? You're scaring me to death. Why are you scaring me to death, sweetie? Do I love you? Who cares? We're together. We enjoy one another. I'm twenty-one."

"I know," he said sadly. "I know we're young and we shouldn't throw around words like 'love' or 'relationship' or 'future.' Russians settle down so early, it's absolutely stupid. They're never ready for it, and then they raise these cretinous kids. My mother was twenty-four when she had me. So I don't disagree with you. But, on the other hand, what you said . . ."

"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm sorry I was so caustic earlier today. I just don't know what to make of you at times. Here is this man, reasonably socialized and sophisticated, who wants to spend a day toothbrush-shopping with me. What does it mean?"

Vladimir sighed. "What does it mean?" he said. "I'm lonely. It means that I'm lonely."

"Well, whatever for? You spend every single evening with me, you've got all these new friends who, by the way, think you're the urban experience nonpareil, and I don't even mean that in a patronizing way . . . And my parents. Talk about settling down, bub. My parents love you. My father loves you . . . Lookee here." She jumped on the bed and started banging the wall separating her bedroom from her parents'. "Mom, Dad, get in here! Vladimir's having a crisis!"

"What are you doing?" Vladimir shouted. "Stop! I accept your apology!"

But after a minute of commotion on both sides of the wall, the parents trooped right into Fran's mausoleum, both professori dressed in matching silk pajamas, Joseph Ruocco still clutching a bedside tumbler of liquor in his hand. "What is it?" Vincie shrieked, blindly trying to survey the scene through her reading glasses. "What happened?"

"Vladimir thinks I don't care for him," Fran announced, "and that he's all alone in the world."

"What nonsense!" Joseph bellowed. "Who told you that? Here, Vladimir, have a shot of Armagnac. It steadies the nerves. You both look so . . . agog."

"What did you do to him, Frannie?" Vincie wanted to know. "Are you having a case of the tempers again? She has these little episodes sometimes."

"A case of the tempers again?" Frannie said. "Mom, are you becoming unhinged again?"

Joseph Ruocco sat down on the bed, on the other side of Vladimir, and put an arm around the mortified fellow. Smelling entirely of alcohol and fermented grape, he nonetheless remained quite steady and assured. "Tell me what happened, Vladimir," he said, "and I will try to adjudicate. Young folks need guidance. Tell me."

"It's nothing," Vladimir whispered. "It's all better now . . ."

"Tell him you love him, Dad," Fran said.

"Frannie!" Vladimir shouted.

"I love you, Vladimir," said Professor Joseph Ruocco, drunkenly but earnestly elucidating each word.

"I love you, too," Vincie said. She made space for herself on the bed, then reached over to touch Vladimir's cheek, pale, entirely drained of blood. The three of them turned to Frannie.