Little Failure (41 page)

Time is speeding up. College is almost upon us. Almost one-fucking-third of our graduating class has submitted research papers in the
Westinghouse Science Talent Search. I, on the other hand, still haven’t been on top, beneath, or behind a woman. One of the few nights that I’m not out drinking and drugging with Ben, Brian, and John, or trying to get with Sara, Jen, Fluffy, et al., I’m lying in my bedroom with colorful American college brochures spread out around me. Downstairs, the
razvod
is looming. Aunt Tanya and her children have come to America. My lithe, pretty cousin Victoria, the ballerina, has been sharing a bed with my mother for more than a year, refugee style, while my father broods in his attic. Both her parents have died, including my mother’s older sister Lyusya, and the twenty-year-old Victoria is stuck with us until she can find her own apartment. My father offers her valuable advice: With her looks, she should work in a strip club. I pass Victoria shyly on the stairs or look at her across the dinner table, scared and confused by her presence, wanting to talk to her but worried about taking sides between my mother and father. It’s a little bit like when we were young and I stared at her across the glass of our French door in Leningrad, unable to touch her because of my mother’s fear of
mikrobi
(microbes). But there’s something else—for the past decade I’ve been working ridiculously hard at becoming an American, and now there’s this Russian girl in our midst, a reminder of who I used to be. In the room she shares with my mother, Victoria listens to country radio because the words spill out slow and easy, and she can pick up some English. “Country music
sucks
,” I tell her, rolling my eyes, ever the urbane, helpful cousin. Ever my father’s emissary.

Because now it is total war. Now my father and his wolfish relatives are suddenly outmatched by the new arrivals. It is time for my parents to engage in a frank exchange of viewpoints.
“Zatkni svoi rot, suka!”
Shut your mouth, bitch.

But in my mind I’m already gone. I read about Cornell’s “old boy, old girl network,” and consider the marvels of a world in which I can be an Old Boy sitting around a fireplace at a university club with other Old Boys and maybe a sexy Old Girl, networking hard. Cornell, of course, is a difficult college to get into, but I have a chance at its School
of Hotel Administration, because Paulie has gotten a bullshit note from one of his friends testifying to the fact that I am one of the finest bellhops at a prestigious Manhattan hotel. The brochure for kindly, progressive Grinnell College in Iowa literally makes me cry. All those morally strong boys and girls, all those international flags hanging amid the Gothic architecture. I curl up in my old Soviet comforter as Mama and Papa launch new fusillades downstairs. What kind of a person would I be if I went to a place like Grinnell? What if I jettisoned all of it, foreigner, Gnu, Gordon Gekko wannabe? What if I started from nothing? Am I crying because of the
razvod
downstairs? Am I crying because I can’t wait to be loved for the little nub inside me, whatever it may contain? Or am I crying because, in a sense, I know I’m about to commit an act of suicide, an act that will take me fully through my twenties and thirties, fully through a decade of psychoanalysis, to complete?

I get into Michigan first. A red Jeep belonging to some rich friends of Ben’s and Brian’s is flying up the West Side Highway with me in the back screaming “Mee-shee-gun!” at the transvestites of the Meatpacking District. Then, my head filled with the lyrics of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” on endless loop, I am puking into a Penn Station wastebasket. Then, having drunkenly taken the Long Island Rail Road’s Port Jefferson line some two hours into Long Island (Little Neck, where my family lives, lies along the Port
Washington
, not Port Jefferson, line), I find myself stumbling down an unknown train platform, until I fall down with my legs dangling over the rails. A bored conductor pulls me out of harm’s way and tells me to get some coffee in me. “Michigan,” I say to him. “I’m-a college gone.”

“Go Blue,” the conductor says.

But I will not be going to the university in Ann Arbor. Nor will I be attending Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration, to which I am shockingly admitted. Over senior year, I have fallen in love yet again.

She is a tiny, book-addicted Jewish girl, red hair out of myth, thin lips, and negligible chin like my own. She is from alternative Queens, the part over which the radio station WLIR runs roughshod with its Depeche Mode and its Cure. Her name is Nadine (it’s not). She is smart and worldly and not a part of our stoner clique. Somewhere I pick up that one of her parents or grandparents is a Holocaust survivor, knowledge I have no idea what to do with. In any case, Nadine is tough and strong and owns that strange combination of boyishness and femininity I so loved in Natasha, my first crush. When she says “Gary” over the phone in her sexy, cigarette-ruined voice, I think how wonderful that my American name isn’t Greg.

Are we going out together? Not really. But we like to hold hands. And we like to sing “I Touch Myself,” the surprise hit song of 1991 by an Australian band called the Divinyls. So here we are walking up and down the lengths of Stuyvesant High School, holding hands, singing “I don’t want anybody else / When I think
about
you / I touch myself.” And this is what I’ve always wanted: someone to hold hands with while we sing about female masturbation, while others watch. Now I’m a real person, aren’t I?

Over at her house we lie next to each other, and I try to kiss her briefly, or I almost accidentally skirt her small breasts through her thick sweatshirt, trying to discern nipple. Or we go see
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
, our hands tensely locked together for 139 minutes (we stay through the credits), and then we walk out into the city heat, still together. Or we go to a bookstore by Penn Station that like so many of them no longer exists, where I shyly pick out something pretentious.

On bad days, Nadine says, “You know you’re depressed when you can’t even make yourself come.”

Nadine is going to an academy for shy people in Ohio named Oberlin, which I recall as once ranking number 3 on the
U.S. News & World Report
list of America’s top liberal arts colleges but lately has been
plummeting down that list. It also has a good creative writing program, and I can double major in political science for law school. Oberlin’s Lowest Average Accepted is about 5 points below my current 88.69, so getting in will be easy, and hopefully there will be enough financial aid not to bankrupt my parents. And if I go to the little school in Ohio, I will have someone to hold hands with when I get there, my sweet nongirlfriend with the sultry voice. I will have a head start.

“I honestly believe that you and Nadine will end up getting married,” a Stuy friend of mine, a handsome swarthy Greek whom I have recently introduced to marijuana (pay it forward), writes in my Stuyvesant yearbook. And then his final assessment of my life chances: “Good luck, Gary. You’ll need it.”

On the left, one of the first days of the author’s Oberlin career. On the right, one of his last
.

O
BERLIN
C
OLLEGE WAS ESTABLISHED
in 1833 so that people who couldn’t otherwise find love, the emotional invalids and Elephant Men of the world, could do so. The college, to its immense credit, was one of the first in the nation to admit African American students and the first to grant degrees to women. In 1970 it made the cover of
Life
magazine by ushering in the age of the coed dormitory. By 1991, I have concluded that of all the colleges before me, Oberlin would allow me to lose my virginity to an equally hirsute, stoned, and unhappy person in the least humiliating way possible.

And, of course, my main reason for choosing Oberlin. Here, I will have someone to hold hands with from day one, my not-exactly-girlfriend Nadine. Just as I once marched into Stuyvesant with an engineering report on my family’s $280,000 Little Neck colonial, at Oberlin my secret weapon will be an emaciated Jewish girl with a sexy burst of red hair and a pack-a-day habit.

My father’s Ford Taurus is crammed to the roof with asthma inhalers and Apple IIc paraphernalia. I have already alerted my future roommate to expect a party animal par excellence who will subject him to the Talking Heads album
Little Creatures
without interruption. The roommate, who will prove to be incredibly square and studious, a double major in economics and German from a quiet suburb of the District of Columbia, will get the true Oberlin experience out of me, one hundred thousand dollars’ worth in 1995 dollars.

The Taurus is winding its way between battle-scarred Little Neck and our appointment at Oberlin’s financial aid office. I talk to my mother or I talk to my father, but they do not talk to each other. There is an unspoken sadness amid the inhalers and the Apple IIc—the sadness of the fact that when they return to New York my parents will definitely get the
razvod
. And so the Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere,” booming out of the Taurus’s dying speaker system, feels about right. Ever since we arrived in America twelve years ago, I have been trying to keep my parents together, but today my diplomacy has come to an end.

As we pass from Pennsylvania, which contains the Ivy League university of the same name, as well as well-regarded Haverford and Swarthmore Colleges, and into the flatlands of Ohio, I can’t help thinking that had I been a better student this
razvod
would not be happening. If Mama and Papa had been more proud of me, they would stick together if only to say, “Our son goes to Amherst, number two top liberal arts college according to
U.S. News & World Report
.”

Nadine and I have chosen to live in the same dorm.