“Our Zoya is ashamed of us,” Mama announces over the supper their Zoe has agreed to share with her, Baba, Deda, and Balissa, in exchange for Mama calling a cease-fire in the argument to get Alex to do the same. Mama collects the empty soup plates while Baba brings out the roast chicken and potatoes powdered with dill, clucking as usual. “I do not understand this, in Odessa, we buy one chicken, it lasts a week. Here, one chicken, one meal and it is gone!”
“I’m not ashamed of you.” Zoe sighs.
“Then why will you not invite your young man to visit with us?” Mama persists. “We can help you, Zoyenka, to evaluate if he is appropriate person. We have much life experience. Better to make decisions than you youngsters.”
“Did Baba and Deda think my father was the appropriate person?” Mama pretty much told Zoe the answer to this while they stood in front of her father’s house. But Zoe’s goal here is not to get information. It’s to deflect attention.
Baba opens her mouth. Deda cuts her off. “I did not.”
It’s the most definitive thing he’s ever said on the subject.
“Why not?” Zoe asks, stunned.
Baba interrupts, “What difference does it make now? What happened is what happened, no going back for anyone. What’s the point of combing through the past? That’s not the direction time moves in. My mama and papa loved,” Baba puts heavy emphasis on the next word, “this one.” She flaps her hand in Deda’s direction. “I had no choice but to marry him.”
“Because I am so wonderful,” Deda chortles.
Baba ignores him. “So that is that, too.”
While they’ve been talking, Balissa has been nibbling, ladylike, at her chicken wing. Once she’s done, she dabs at her lips with a napkin, sets the napkin down next to her plate, and lifts the now licked clean bone, snapping it in half and gracefully inserting the jagged ends into her mouth. She is sucking out the marrow.
When Zoe was little, any ill table manners were greeted with the query, “Would you eat in front of the Queen of England like that?”
Zoe suspects Her Majesty frowns on marrow sucking. But just like they insist sunburns lead to good health, Balissa can’t surrender her Soviet conviction that marrow sucking is the prime way to get iron.
“Sometimes”—she slides the cracked bone out of her mouth—“no choice is the best choice.”
Instead of a family supper, which Zoe doesn’t mention, for their next date, Alex escorts her to the Guggenheim Museum for a reception honoring New York City’s most dynamic 30 Under 30. Is it supposed to inspire her, or make Zoe feel guilty for not being among them? On the one hand, Alex makes her feel like she could be. On the other, he seems to be chastising her for not doing enough to make it happen. Just like at home!
Everywhere Zoe looks, they’re surrounded by tuxedos and cocktail dresses; outside, a red carpet with photographers, and inside, towering art that nobody understands but everyone pretends to. She whispers to Alex as they breeze by the indifferent-to-them paparazzi, “Will Oz the Great and Powerful rear up in flames and throw me out for being Dorothy the Small and Meek?”
Her reference is to the movie, though Zoe first came to the story via a Russian translation of the book, where the heroine’s name is Ella, and her slippers aren’t ruby but gold.
Alex squeezes Zoe’s hand reassuringly. “You belong here.”
That should have answered Zoe’s earlier question.
It leaves her feeling only more confused.
Alex is so confident, Zoe suspects now wouldn’t be a good time to reveal she’s never been to the Guggenheim before. Not that her family is uncultured. They’ve hit the symphony, the ballet, the opera. But they prefer that culture come to them. Operas, ballets, and symphonies tour. Museums stay put. Baba does remember visiting the Vatican while they were emigrating. Seeing Catholic splendor, on the heels of Soviet deprivations, made such an impression that now, when the Pope makes declarations regarding the evils of capitalism, conspicuous consumption, and how we should do more for the needy, Baba informs the TV, “When the Holy See sells off their mansions and their paintings and their helicopters, and hands over their profits to the poor, then I will listen to what he has to say about me giving away my things.”
Zoe tried to fill in the gaps of her New York City cultural education. She’s been to the Met, MoMA, the Whitney. But the Guggenheim never appealed to her. Maybe because it looks like an upside-down planter. Maybe because there’s usually a line to get in. As Balissa says about any line, “That’s not what we came to America for.”
Or maybe it’s because, as Zoe promptly learns, the place is petrifying. Not the art. That’s just confusing. The layout. The interior is a huge spiral, a giant’s DNA strand. The barriers come up only as far as her elbow. She gets vertigo whenever she looks down. She tries to fight it by looking straight ahead, but then she sees taller people, and on them the barrier comes up only to their hips. She imagines them tumbling over, which prompts her stomach to roil like a plummeting elevator. She clutches Alex’s arm even tighter until they’re back on solid land.
Alex pats Zoe’s hand reassuringly, if distractedly, looks around, and spots one of the 30 Under 30 honorees, a man who, according to the program Zoe skimmed, runs a nonprofit that opposes child labor, or one that creates jobs for at-risk youth.
“Harris!” Alex greets him as if they were friends. By the man’s confusion, it would appear they are not. Nonetheless, when Alex proffers his name along with an outstretched hand, it’s in the form of a subtle memory jog. “Alex Zagarodny. Good to see you again!”
“You, too,” Harris says politely, then smiles at Zoe, wondering if she’s also about to claim familiarity.
“This is Zoe Venakovsky.”
“Nice to meet you,” Zoe says, and Harris relaxes at not having to pretend to know her, too. He shakes Alex’s hand, then crosses his arms and eyes them warily. When you have a last name for a first name, you’re used to being accosted by strangers.
Alex asks Harris, “You’re an Old Boy, aren’t you? Zoe works for Derek Webber. His sons go to St. Bernard’s, too.”
School of tiny blue blazers? Zoe remains confused, until she realizes that mentioning it has spurred Harris into believing he and Alex are friends, after all. He uncrosses his arms and sticks his hands casually in his pockets. He and Alex commence chattering away about people they know; who is summering where; and, yes, it is a travesty the Community Board keeps refusing permission to build a helicopter landing pad on the Upper East Side. It would make the Hamptons commute so much more convenient. If only Amazon hadn’t given up on Long Island City . . .
Zoe gazes at Alex in awe. Here he is, a curly-haired, big-nosed, skinny guy who comes up to this titan’s waist, a Brooklyn kid who most certainly did not wear a blue blazer to school or take a helicopter to get there, and he’s talking to Upper East Side money (in the form of a person; like how a corporation is legally a person) as if they’re equals. Zoe wonders what the WASP word is for chutzpah.
As the conversation goes on, Zoe hears Alex’s speech begin to mimic Harris’s cadence and vocabulary. She watches him mirror the taller man’s body language, hands also in his pockets, rocking back on his heels, head cocked to his side. It’s mesmerizing and inspirational.
It’s also, after ten indistinguishable minutes, rather boring. Zoe never knew the three sensations could occupy the same space at the same time, but physics be damned!
A quarter of an hour in, Gideon shows up. Zoe hadn’t realized she’d been waiting for him. How could she? She didn’t know he was coming. And yet, the moment she saw him, Zoe realized she’d been waiting for him. To rescue her from all this. It’s the way she feels when Baba and Mama argue with each other and take a break from criticizing Zoe. It’s the way she hopes to feel when she triumphantly presents them with Alex. Like a problem has been permanently fixed.
Gideon crosses the room and exchanges words with the bartender in the corner, who laughs and hands him a drink.
“Excuse me, please,” Zoe says to Alex and Harris, both of whom bob their heads like the gentlemen they are and/or are pretending to be, before resuming talking business.
Zoe walks over to Gideon. “Hey.”
“Yo” is his response. He takes a sip of his drink, compliments the bartender, then indicates Zoe’s date. “Alex being Alex?”
“To the Alexest degree.”
Gideon marvels, “Like watching an artist at work.”
“This is the place for it.” Ha. Museum humor.
“I’m supposed to be networking,” Gideon says, making no move to do any such thing.
Zoe isn’t sure what she’s supposed to be doing. Which makes it as good of a time as any to ask Gideon, “Do you ever get the feeling that, when Alex looks at you, he’s seeing the person he wants you to be, not the person you actually are?”
“Twenty-four seven,” Gideon confirms.
That’s good. At least she’s not going crazy. But it’s also not good. “So would you say Alex is dating me, or dating the Zoe he’s conjured up in his head?”
“Which one do you want it to be?”
“Oh, definitely the one in his head. She’s a much better model.”
Gideon grins. “I know the feeling.”
He does? Based on what Zoe saw at the comic-book store, Gideon is as comfortable in his skin as Alex is in his. It never crossed her mind that he might be feigning it the same way she is. Or, in Zoe’s case, trying to. She’d have expected the realization to disappoint her. Instead, it makes her respect Gideon more. It’s one thing to be born confident. It’s another to fake it so convincingly. If Gideon can do it, there’s hope for Zoe the Impostor yet!
“You’re not afraid of not living up to Alex’s expectations of you?” she double-checks.
“What goes on in Alex’s head is Alex’s business,” Gideon says. “I don’t worry about things I can’t control.”
“You’re not even a little bit Jewish, are you?”
Gideon laughs. “I grew up in New York and I’m an engineer. Does it get any more Jewish than that?”
There’s a circumcision joke in there somewhere, but that would be classless. Thinking it, though, makes Zoe blush.
Gideon picks up on her discomfort and gallantly moves to defuse the situation.
“Come on.” He downs his drink, returns the glass to the bar alongside a generous tip, then gestures with his head toward the canvases and sculptures on the horizon. “Alex is doing his thing. Let’s go look at art.”
Looking at art requires getting back on the spiral walkway. Gideon positions his body so Zoe is on the inside, making it easier for her not to peer down and freak out. He runs commentary on the pieces they pass, like what happened during the movie, forcing Zoe to look up, rather than down. That one, he says, looks like a broken kaleidoscope; this one is the napkin Jackson Pollock used to wipe up his breakfast. In the Impressionist room, they muse that since a musical based on Seurat’s painting was called Sunday in the Park with George, they should expect Picasso’s Lobster and Cat as a children’s show, and Manet’s Before the Mirror as a reality beauty pageant.
They stop in front of Maurizio Cattelan’s eighteen-karat-gold toilet, installed in a public bathroom and open for visitor use. A docent lurking at the door explains that it requires steam cleaning and special wipes to keep it pristine, and that it was created in order to give patrons a unique, personal, and up-close experience with a work of art. It symbolizes equal opportunity and the American dream.
Zoe thinks of Baba using a community toilet in her courtyard and washing once a week at a public bathhouse. She thinks of Balissa shivering in a cattle car with no bathroom facilities beyond a hole in the floor. And Balissa’s mother squatting over a fetid chamber pot in the same room where they cooked and ate, cleaning it out by hand every morning and every evening.
All previous wisecracks suddenly feel woefully inadequate.
“God bless America,” Zoe says at long last.
“There you guys are!” Alex catches up with Zoe and Gideon on the ground floor, when the other guests are on their way out. “I was looking all over for you.” He slips one arm around Zoe’s waist in a move that might be romantic, possessive, or merely practical, Alex’s way of not losing track of her again. To nudge it toward the former, Zoe leans into him, resting her head against his shoulder. He doesn’t need to worry about losing track of her. She’s right here. He’s got her. She’s not going anywhere with anyone else.
Alex startles, but goes with the flow. “What’ve you two been up to?”
“We saw a golden toilet,” Zoe says, because she still can’t get over it.
“Great. Perfect place to scope out prospects. Everyone’s got to go eventually. Why I always ask for a seat at the back of the plane, where the bathrooms are. Gives me access to everybody by the time the flight is over.”
There’s something you don’t learn in an MBA program. Alex could teach a course in doing your business while . . . doing your business.
“Listen, Alex, speaking of something everyone’s got to do”—Zoe leaps on the closest thing to a smooth transition she can think of on the fly, straightening up to face him—“I’ve got to go see my family this weekend. They’ve invited you, too.”
“Aw, Zoe, no. I haven’t got time to schlep out to my own parents’, much less get interrogated by someone else’s.”
“You don’t have time not to go,” Gideon corrects before Zoe can concede Alex’s point, a touch relieved by the opportunity to put off the judgment from her family’s first contact with Alex. Even if, as far as Zoe can tell, he’s everything they’ve ever dreamed of, Baba will find something to nitpick.
“If you don’t let Zoe’s family give you the third degree, they’ll keep calling her, texting her, distracting her. We’re ironing out long-term funding. You want nonsense getting in the way of a check getting cut?”
“That won’t happen,” Alex says, but he doesn’t sound quite as self-assured now. He knows the power of Repeated Calls from Brooklyn. And Gideon is one of the few people he listens to.
“Not if you break bread with these people and satisfy their curiosity. Give ’em the Awesome Alex Premier Condensed Package, and they’ll get off Zoe’s back.”
“I don’t have time to go to Brooklyn,” Alex repeats.
Zoe shoots Gideon a grateful look for trying, especially since this isn’t his fight.
“But if your family wants to come to Manhattan . . .” Wait, what’s this? “I don’t have time for dinner, either,” Alex rushes to clarify before Zoe gets too excited. “I know how important this is to them, and how they can get if we don’t give them something to talk about, let them get their shots in.” Alex says the words, but he sounds confident he can deflect anything they throw his way. “Your family can come by the office. How’s that?”
Zoe exhales in disbelief—and relief of a different kind. She won’t be compelled to keep having this conversation with Mama and Baba. She can rip off the Band-Aid and get it over with. Zoe shudders at the thought of what’s to come, yet pastes on a smile. “Thank you.”
She’s speaking to Gideon. Alex assumes she’s speaking to him.
He’s so busy accepting accolades for his massive sacrifice that he doesn’t even notice Zoe is looking at Gideon.
Or that his friend is mouthing, “You’re welcome.”
With a wink.
That manages to both reassure Zoe . . . and throw her off balance.