ME And ThE BeAUtY QuEEN
I teach this rich guy.
He's a very flamboyant New Russian type; rich and not afraid to show it or tell stories about it. We've known each other for a while now so he's comfortable telling me about all of his mistresses and all the other girls he bangs.
He tells me lots of stories about the good old days of the 90's, when he and his rich friends used to rent private planes and load them up with models and beauty contest winners, fly them to Moscow, and rent out the most expensive hotels in town for huge parties and orgies.
I brought up, a few weeks ago, a subject I'd been wanting to ask him about. Yet that I somehow dreaded hearing about, too.
The Beauty Queen.
When I mentioned her, it was the first time I've ever seen him taken aback.
* * *
I first saw her in the winter of early 2002, coming out of the office at the school I almost bumped into her coming around a corner. She was as tall as me -- six feet or so -- with bobbed blonde hair and two huge bright blue eyes. She wasn't a teenager, clearly -- 23, as it turned out. She looked a bit like Charlize Theron (pre-MONSTER of course.) She was wearing a floor length coat of white sable. I'd assume it cost more than I make in a two or three years.
Maybe five or six years.
Our eyes met as we almost collided, and I mumbled "excuse me" and walked around her. I wasn't too impressed by good-looking women anymore -- two years in Russia had cured me of that -- but she was beautiful.
But, I thought, obviously a rich bitch and out of my league.
I was preparing my lesson when the translator / office manager came into my room and asked me if I minded doing an extra private lesson the following Monday.
"With who?" I asked. "What level?"
"The girl who was coming into the office as you went out."
"Hoo - hoo. She's rich, hmm?"
The translator rolled her eyes. "Her boys are rich."
I came into school the following Monday, trudging through a heavy snowstorm, to get ready for the lesson. But when I arrived the translator said, "Sorry, she just called and said she can't come today. She had a problem."
I found out later that she had hit a child with her car. The child lived. She avoided prosecution through massive bribes from one of her rich boyfriends.
But that was much later, when I found that out.
Months passed. I saw her around the hallways of the school occasionally in May and June. I smiled and nodded, and she'd smile back.
One day I was in the office and saw her being dropped off by a large black Mercedes with tinted windows. I commented on it to the translator.
"Do you know her well?" I asked.
"A bit."
"She seems to have an interesting lifestyle."
She rolled her eyes again. "Her boys have an interesting lifestyle."
Summer came. In July I began doing an intensive course composed of six students. She walked in about five minutes after the class began, radiant blonde in white miniskirt and blue spaghetti-strap t-shirt. "Hello," she said warmly.
"Hi," I said.
After class I walked outside into the bright Russian summer afternoon. She was out there smoking a cigarette with another girl from the class. She approached me, smiling girlishly, and said hello.
"So where do you go in the evening, English Teacher X?"
"Well, in the summer, usually down to the river."
"Which cafe?"
I told her.
"Are you going there tonight?"
"Yes, I think so."
"What time?"
I told her.
"Let's meet there."
"Okay." She said goodbye and headed off with the other girl from the class.
I think I was grinning stupidly by this time, but again let me repeat; I had been in Russia long enough not to be too impressed by beauty, and to know that everybody was usually working an angle. So maybe she wanted free English lessons.
I can think of worse ways to spend my time.
We met at the cafe -- she was there with the other girl from the class, I was there with my two colleagues, English Teacher M and English Teacher L. The riverside promenade was the usual chaotic mess -- drunk teenagers, low-level gangsters and businessmen drinking beer, rollerbladers and sauntering beauties looking for men with some money. The sun was setting bloodily on the river.
I went to get a beer and she immediately came up to me, still smiling girlishly and batting her eyes, and offered to help me.
I think she didn't take her eyes off me the whole night.
She asked me if I had a girlfriend. Thinking of Crazy Angel, who I'd met in April and who had disappeared completely in late June, I said no. I asked her if she had a boyfriend. She said she had a boyfriend but she saw him only about once a month. She went to Moscow most weekends to see an old friend of hers, however. He used to be her boyfriend, she said, but now they were only friends.
Less cynical about Russian women at that time, I took the story at face value.
She wasn't bad to talk to. Certainly not stupid. A bit of a sense of humor. Was pleasant enough to my friends (admittedly not always an easy task.)
After she left, English Teacher L's girlfriend commented on it. "She looks like such a bitch, but she's actually very nice."
"Yeah," I said, worriedly.
"Man, she likes you. You lucky bastard," said English Teacher L.
I sighed. "The other day I saw her being dropped off by a big black Mercedes. Have you got a big black Mercedes?"
"No, can't say that I do," replied English Teacher L.
"'Cause I don't have a big black Mercedes."
But her attentions didn't wane. The next week she asked if I wanted to go to a new Italian restaurant with her after class. My colleagues came along, as did her friend, but they all ended up going home and leaving us to walk alone together by the river afterwards.
That's when I found out she'd been runner-up in the Miss Russia pageant a few years before, and had won our regional beauty contests.
She told me about what a difficult and scary world it really was, how all the money and attention could make you crazy.
"Kind of like being an English teacher," I suggested. "Except for the money, of course."
We walked and talked for about an hour. We held hands. We made arrangements that she would give me some lessons in Russian.
She kissed me goodnight when she got to the flat she shared with her mother -- not a big kiss, but big enough to suggest there would be more where that came from.
The next night I met her for our Russian lesson. We did it in a small park near my house. Mostly she just laughed at my pronunciation and helped me practice a thing or two. I asked her in Russian, "What do you have in your purse?"
She laughed. "Makeup, my keys, a knife, and a condom."
"Wow, you are ready for anything," I said.
Then walking home she suggested we sit down on a bench outside her flat. The street was dark and completely deserted.
The next day English Groupie M called me.
"Did you kiss her last night?"
"Yeah. If it had been a film, the guys in the audience would have been saying, 'Damn it! What are you waiting for! Kiss her!' but finally, yeah, we did."
"Congratulations! How was it."
"Pretty good."
"Anything else happen?"
"Well, you know. The usual stuff."
I remember my first kiss with her well. I wasn't a young man -- I'd recently turned 32, to her 23 -- but the sort of romantic feelings that I managed to have then have since been stomped out of me by a series of opportunistic, amoral women who use sex the way Conan the Barbarian uses his battle axe.
I wonder if I'll ever have such innocent feelings again. Sure as hell not in Russia.
So began my brief relationship with The Beauty Queen.
There were things that made me nervous. Her phone rang constantly, and though I didn't speak much Russian the tone of her voice suggested intimacy. (In fact, she had two mobile phones, one for Moscow and one for Vodkaberg. At that time I didn't have a phone at all. That speaks volumes, I think.)
She wouldn't let me take her to any high-profile restaurants or nightclubs. She'd simply shake her head and frown. "I know too many people there." Without elaborating.
I never inquired deeply about her boyfriends. She did mention that she was living with her mother because her new flat was still in the process of being redecorated -- it had been purchased for her by an acquaintance from Dubai.
"Dubai. Wow.."
"He wanted to marry me. But the divorce laws in that country are not so. . . good, for women," she said.
She still went to Moscow or St. Petersberg every weekend, too. And she wouldn't let me take a picture of us together, which I thought was a bit strange.
But in general I enjoyed being around her. She was surprisingly sweet and affectionate. She certainly wasn't after ME for my money -- she had a hell of a lot more than I did. (I remember going with her to buy a plane ticket one and she had about six hundred-dollar bills in her wallet, which was a months' wages to me.)
Our dates were generally very simple. Pizza, trips to the beach, sitting in parks drinking beer. We made out on the street a lot. She commented once on the fact she probably hadn't kissed anybody on the street since she was fifteen. "I'm sorry," I said. "My place is such a mess, I feel embarrassed about taking you there."
"Don't be sorry," she said, "I didn't say I didn't like it."
After all our romantic kissing and groping on the street, sex was a terrible anti-climax, probably more for her than for me. In bed she was immediately all business. She wouldn't let me go down on her. Not that I'm crazy about doing that or anything, but when a girl tells you something is "too personal" it doesn't exactly make you feel romantic.
After-sex romance was cut short by her getting up to smear some kind of anti-biotic chemical all over her privates, something she even turned on the light to do. "It kills all major STDs" she informed me rather clinically. "Put it 2mm into your urethra."
"But I wore a condom," I said.
"Doesn't matter." She assisted me in putting the nozzle of the dispenser 2mm into my urethra, with all the skill of an army nurse, without so much as a giggle.
She proved to be rather insecure, too, which seems a little surprising in a Beauty Queen. One time we were at a cafe and three drunk teenage English Groupies of my acquaintance showed up. When I lit a cigarette for one of them, the Beauty Queen got very angry and left soon after.
She was also terribly jealous about the other tall leggy blonde in my last class of the day, the one who drove me home.
"I've known that girl a long time," she explained. "We have the same . . . background."
I was almost afraid to ask what she meant by that.
"Her boyfriend liked me when we were 17. Very tall and handsome man. But he was a drug addict," she mimed injecting something in her forearm. "He offered my boyfriend $20,000 to take me as his girlfriend."
I was horrified. "And that didn't offend you, being sold like a second-hand car?"
She shrugged.
At that time I was a bit less familiar with that type of thing than I am now. Being a "sponsored" girl was considered one of the better jobs for an attractive young lady during the 90's.
Jobs in general were hard to come by in the late 90's, and jobs for women were extremely low-paying. A teacher made, and still makes, about $75 a month if she's lucky. Doctors and nurses make similar pittances. They have ways of making extra money, sure -- none of them as lucrative as sleeping with a rich man, of course. One of the best jobs for a woman is bookkeeper, where she can make maybe a few hundred dollars a month. Being a waitress or a shopkeeper have the advantage of being able to steal a bit of extra money, but you might work something like twelve hours a day.
In the early-nineties, an entire culture sprung up of women looking for boyfriends willing to provide them with a decent quality of life. Informal networks developed. But somewhere along the line "decent quality of life" began to be redefined to include Gucci sunglasses and trips to Egypt and Malta, and then to include mink coats and BMWs.
Prostitutes? Not exactly. Whores? Most likely.
But the thing it took me a while to understand is: only I would think any of this was strange. To them, it was just another fact of life.
And I appreciate that now. Only if you come from a wealthy country do you have the luxury of excess morality.
But at that time it was hard to deal with, and the more I found out about her life, the more my Inner Puritan was screaming, "WHORE! WHORE! WHORE!"
The end came after the third week.
One night we went to a local Mexican restaurant that has a dance floor -- it was one of the first trendy restaurants in the city, and at that time anyway the local gangsters and businessmen still congregated there. We were with a couple of my other students.
I was in a bad mood about something, but I don't remember what. (Maybe about her being a whore.) She was getting pretty drunk on tequilla. I didn't feel like dancing, but she did.
Then a group of steroid-pumped shaved-head thugs came in. She went and greeted them cheerfully, and started dancing with one.
"She's very beautiful isn't she," said one of the students, about the Beauty Queen.
"Yeah, but I'm not too impressed by that fact anymore."
"Those are guys from my old job," she said when she came back. She'd graduated from a law university -- or rather, a degree had been purchased for her from a law university. And she'd had a job as a lawyer at a large company. She couldn't ever tell me much about what she had actually done there, though. "Make contracts? Research things? See clients?"
"See clients, yes," she confirmed.
As we left she went and got the phone number of the largest of the thugs, saving it on her telephone. Her Vodkaberg phone, not her Moscow phone.
In the car on the way back, we stopped to get a bottle of Campari to take to one of the student's apartment to drink.
I considered getting out of the car and running while they were in the shop. I was in over my head here, nothing good could come of it. I desperately longed to be back with the equally immoral yet also common, vulgar and predictable girls of the Degenerate Bar. My foul-mouthed Crazy Angel, for example. If some rich guy tried to buy or sell her for $20,000, she'd kick him in the balls.
After the party, the Beauty Queen asked me to stay with her, there in the friend's flat, but I said I had to go, saying I had an early class the next day, and made a quick exit.
After the twenty-five minute walk home, the phone was ringing when I got in.
It was the Beauty Queen.
"Why did you go," she asked, flatly and sullenly. Drunkenly. "Come back."
"I can't. It's too late." It was three a.m by that point.
She made a sound like a sob and hung up.
I was somewhat moved by that, actually, and called her early the next day to try to apologize.
She was clearly extremely hungover, however, and didn't want to talk.
Nor did she want to forgive. Being rejected by some punk English teacher was bad enough, but to be rejected in front of a friend?
I went to America for two weeks in August, and though she called me when I got back she said she was too busy to see me.
I called her once more and asked her if I was ever going to see her again.
"Maybe," was her answer.
"Okay, take care of yourself," I said.
I hung up, called some of my poor, trashy friends and got drunk and went to the Degenerate Bar. I saw The Beauty Queen twice more, at the school, where she was studying in English Teacher L's class, and that was it. She left the school over a disagreement about having to switch off her mobile phone in class.
And I never even heard anything about her, until a few weeks ago.
The rich guy revealed to me that The Beauty Queen was, and remains, one of the highest-paid and most famous professional mistresses in Russia. She's dated politicians, gangsters, and even oligarchs -- the billionaires who control so much of Russia's economy. We'd joked, at the time, about her gangster boyfriend -- he revealed that she had, indeed, been going out with one of the more famous gangsters in the city at that time.
He'd had a short fling with The Beauty Queen himself -- in October of 2002, shortly after I'd stopped seeing her. (Funny to think of him taking my sloppy seconds, but it sounds like I was getting sloppy seconds from a good number of gangsters and politicians.)
He said that he'd given her $5000 after he slept with her the first time.
I'm still astounded by that fact. I sat in the park drinking beer with a $5000 a night hooker.
The question of what she wanted from me is probably a complex one -- certainly not just a shot at an American passport -- when you're in that league, you can get a visa pretty much anywhere you feel like. While I'm not a bad-looking guy, it remains an understatement to say she could have her pick of pretty boys. Free English lessons? You're getting warmer.
But I think, on some level, she did actually enjoy getting away from that flashy and glamorous yet assuredly stressful and difficult world of the New Russians. And she could talk with me about stuff that she couldn't talk to other people about, namely her fears and doubts about her future. Maybe she really liked me?
Well, like Hemingway said: "Wouldn't it be pretty to think so?"
My rich guy says he hasn't seen her for a year or so, but he still hears of her occasionally -- she's still in Vodkaberg, still going out with rich guys. She was engaged to be married to an Italian millionaire, but that ended badly and she came back.
I wonder if she ever thinks of me, while she's earning a small fortune on her back in luxurious penthouse apartments and the VIP rooms of the most expensive restaurants and nightclubs in the world.
I wonder. . .
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