And then the Soviet Union fell.
Suddenly Yulia became the reigning beauty queen of a nonexistent superpower. The once-proud Soviet Union was now a bankrupt nation-state that would go down in the history books as nothing more than a failed experiment in bogus economics and corrupt ideology. So Yulia decided to stay in the United States and become a model. Inna, at the time, was one of the only Russian-speaking bookers in the modeling industry, so she took Yulia under her wing.
There were only two things that now troubled me about Yulia. The first were some references to a man named Igor, who was vaguely connected to Yulia and followed her around, in the shadows; and the second was the fact that Yulia was a KGB agent and Igor was her master. And as far-fetched as it seemed, they hadoriginally come here under the auspices of the Soviet government, hadn't they?
So here I was, five hours later, heading to East Hampton, with a female KGB agent sitting next to me, and the dreaded Igor lurking in the shadows. Igor, I figured, was the least of my worries.
“Anyway,” I said to the beauty queen/KGB agent. “I didn't mean that in a bad way. We all have our sources, you know? I'm sure you have yours too, right, right?” I winked playfully at KGB. “I guess mine are just a little better than most.”
KGB smiled back, seeming to understand. “Yes, you are very good cook.”
“Whuh? What are you talking about? What cook?”
“You say sauces,” said KGB, who apparently had slept through her English classes at the secret KGB training school. “Like this night: You make tomato sauces, on penne.”
I started laughing. “No—not sauces! Sources,with an r.“ I looked KGB in the eye and dragged out sourcesfor all it was worth, so it came out like Sourrrrrrrrrrces.Then I said, “You get it?”
She let go of my hand and began shaking her head in disgust, saying something like: “Bleaha muha, stupido English! Ehhh! It make no sense!” Then she started waving her perfectly toned arms around the car, as if she were swatting imaginary flies. “Souwwwwsses… Sourrrrrrces… Seeeeeeesses…Sowwwwwsses!” she was muttering. “Crazy! Crazy! Crazy…”
After a few seconds, she started giggling and said, “This English make me crazy! I swear—it make no sense. Russianmake sense!” With that, she hit the power-window button and pointed to the side of the road and motioned for me to pull over.
I pulled beneath a large maple tree a few feet off the road, put the car in park, and turned off the lights. The radio was barely audible, but KGB reached over and flicked it off anyway. Then she turned to me and said very slowly: “I… do… speak… English. It is just hard to understand with wind”— the wind—“blowing. I thought you say you make sauces, like tomato sauces, because you make that tonight: tomato sauces.”
“It's okay,” I said, smiling. “You speak English a lot better than I speak Russian.”
“Da,”she said softly, and she turned to face me, leaning her back against the passenger door and crossing her arms beneath her breasts. Over her pink baby-T-shirt she had thrown on a white cotton sweater, a very soft cable-knit, with a very low V-neck, bordered with two thick stripes, one maroon and the other forest green. It was the sort of old-fashioned preppy sweater that you see in old photographs of people playing tennis. She had pushed up the sleeves, revealing wonderfully supple wrists and a very classy watch, the latter of which was thin and understated. It had a pink-leather band and a pearl-white face. Her blond hair looked shiny as corn silk. It rested on either side of the front of her sweater, framing the face of an angel.
She didn't look like a KGB agent, did she? I took a deep breath and looked into KGB's liquid blue eyes and smiled warmly. Try as I might, I couldn't help but compare her to the Duchess. In many ways, they looked very much the same: blond and blue-eyed, broad-shouldered yet thin-boned, perfectly proportioned above and below the waist. And they both stood with that same imperious posture—the eager young cheerleader, with the shoulders pulled back and theirs knees locked out and their perfectly round butts stuck out—that used to drive me so wild.
“You're beautiful,” I said softly to KGB, ignoring my last thought.
“Da,”she said wearily, “krasavitza, krasavitza…. I know this,” and she shook her head with equal weariness, as if to say, “I've been called that a thousand times, so you're going to have to do better than that.” Then she smiled and said, “And you are cutie too, and you like realRussian man! You know this?”
I shook my head and smiled. “No, what do you mean?”
She raised her chin toward my ankle bracelet. “You steal money”—she winked—”like real Russian man!” She giggled. “And I hear you steal a lot!”
Jesus Christ!I thought. Leave it to the damn Russkies! Of course, this was not the moment to alert KGB to the fact that I hadn't stolen quite enough—and that because of that I would not be living on Meadow Lane next summer. Better to cross that bridge when I came to it, I figured.
“Yeah,” I said, forcing a smile, “but I'm not exactly proud of it.”
“When is jail for you?” she asked.
“Not for a while,” I said softly. “Another four years or so. I'm not really sure.”
“And your wife?”
I shook my head back and forth. “Getting divorced.”
She nodded sadly. “She is pretty.”
“Yeah, she is,” I said softly. “And she gave me two great kids. I guess I'll always love her for that, you know?”
“You still love her?” she asked.
I shook my head. “No, I don't.” I shrugged. “I mean, for a while I thought I did, but I think I was just…” I paused for a moment, trying to find words that KGB would understand. In truth, I wasn't really sure how I felt about the Duchess. I loved her and hated her, and I suspected that I always would. But one thing I was certain of was that the only way to get over someone was to fall in love with someone else. “… I think I was just in love with the thoughtof being in love. I wasn't actually in lovewith her anymore. Too many bad things had happened. Too much hurt.” I looked into KGB's eyes. “Do you understand what I mean?”
“Da,”she replied quickly, “I do; this is common.” She looked away for a moment, as if lost in thought. “You know, I am here nine years now.” She shook her head in amazement. “Can you imagine? I should speak better, I think, but I never have American friends. My friends are all Russians.”
I nodded in understanding—understanding far more than KGB probably gave me credit for. There were only two types of Russians I had met so far: those who embraced America, and those who held it in contempt. The former did everything they could to assimilate themselves into the American way of life: they learned the language, they dated American men, they ate American food, and, eventually, they became American citizens.
The latter group, however, did just the opposite: They refused to assimilate. They held on to their Soviet heritage like a dog with a bone. They lived amid Russians, they worked amid Russians, they socialized with Russians, and they refused to master the English language. And at the very heart of this, I knew, was the fact that they still longed for the glory days of the Soviet Empire, when the world marveled at the ingenuity of Sputnik and the courage of Yury Gagarin and the iron will of Khrushchev. It was a heady time to be a Soviet, with the world trembling at the Warsaw Pact and the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Yulia Sukhanova had been a product of all that—no, she epitomized that. She still longed for the days of the Great Soviet Empire and, in consequence, had refused to assimilate. Ironically, this didn't make me respect her any less—in fact, quite the contrary: I felt her pain. I, too, had risen once, to the dizziest heights of Wall Street, becoming a celebrity of sorts, albeit in a twisted sense of the word. Nonetheless, just like Yulia Sukhanova, it had all come crashing down on me. The only difference was that hercrash was through no fault of her own.