Title : Did I ever tell you about the time I had dinner with a beautiful Russian spy?
link : Did I ever tell you about the time I had dinner with a beautiful Russian spy?
Did I ever tell you about the time I had dinner with a beautiful Russian spy?
My first inclination was to work up an irate response to the pseudopresident's inane tweet about Carter Page. Fortunately, many others have taken up that task.My second inclination was to publish a piece about Melania -- a bit of investigation that has been a-brewing behind the scenes for a while. But that one will have to wait.
Being in a nostalgic mood, I'd like to commit to cyber-ink a memory that comes to mind whenever we see stories about Maria Butina (like this one). Did I ever tell you about the time I had dinner with a beautiful Russian spy?
Her name was Natalya; I met her circa 1981-82, just after the Reagan election ignited Cold War II, which always threatened to morph into McCarthyism 2.0. She wasn't interested in me; I was an inconsequential would-be commercial artist. (I am now an inconsequential failed commercial artist.) The object of her attention was my friend Colin, whom a few long-time readers may recall from this 2009 post.
Colin, a professional student, was still at UCLA; if he had his druthers, he'd probably be there to this day. At the time, he exemplified the cliche of the college-aged Marxist destined to become a middle-aged reactionary. While taking a Russian language class -- out of a love for Dostoevsky, not because he had any interest in visiting the USSR -- Colin ran into Natalya, an attractive "student" in her mid-to-late twenties, making her a touch older than us.
Not being privy to the early stages of the relationship, I'm not sure how they met or how they started to date. Frankly, by this time, I was starting to distance myself from Colin. My own "career" at UCLA having ended ignominiously, I had embarked on a series of unspeakably horrid jobs, invariably getting fired within a couple of weeks. Colin's insufferable Marxist pretensions (which everyone who knew him knew to be a phase) had ceased to be charming, as had his incessant need to prove himself the smartest guy in any room he walked into.
Nevertheless, Colin called me to discuss the Natalya situation. She attracted him and frightened him. He wanted me to meet her. Weirdly, he wanted me there, playing the "third wheel" role, the next time he met her for a meal. Well, why not? Anything beat spending time in my wretched one-room apartment.
Natalya was married to a rather nervous British man who didn't seem to mind when Colin and I showed up to take out his wife. She was lovely indeed. In her home country, she had been an artist and an art restorer; she showed us examples of ancient icons she had worked on in her studio -- icons she had transported via public transportation.
I accompanied Natalya and Colin on a few of their "dates," or at least the meal portion thereof. I was no cold warrior and certainly no Reaganite, and I had not yet developed an interest in the history and mysteries of espionage. Still, it was clear to me that she had to be some sort of spy.
Colin disputed this assessment, buying into Natalya's cover story, the details of which I forget. (It was all pretty flimsy.) He felt desperate to convince himself of a narrative he secretly knew to be false, the way Trump supporters now do on a daily basis.
A collegiate flirtation with Marxism was one thing, but dating a Russian spy...? That was real. Scary.
No. Can't be. She can't be.
Yet I knew that she was. I knew it by the way she acted toward Colin. He clearly annoyed her, no matter how valiantly she tried to hide her feelings. Frankly, she seemed more interested in me than in him, a preference expressed by no other female of our acquaintance. She and I had a love of art in common, and she could hold her own in a discussion of technical materials, a topic of interest to no woman (or man) I've met since.
She clearly couldn't stand Colin's ostentatious displays of hyperintellectual one-upsmanship, his most irksome characteristic. He could also be very funny, but the "class clown" side of his personality didn't compensate for the annoyances -- at least not in her eyes. Although her English was very good, some of his wordplay probably went over her lovely head.
Why the hell is she interested in him? I kept asking myself.
One night, he subjected her to a showing of avant-garde short subjects -- two hours of works which prefigured the nonlinear narratives of Webdriver Torso. "Why can't you ever take me to a real movie?" she spat.
Why the hell is she interested in him? I kept asking myself.
At dinner that night, she asked if I, like Colin, had read Marx. I told her that I liked the middle part of Capital -- the compelling descriptions of 19th century working class conditions -- but the economic theory in the first third (the labor theory of value and so forth) was turgid and unendurable, at least in the original. But I got the gist of the argument from summaries. My bottom line: No sale. Worse, I saw no practical replacement for capitalism; Marx was great at identifying problems but was weak on solutions. No, I told her, I was an FDR/JFK liberal, and always would be.
She nodded. You can tell that she wanted to signal approval.
Colin rushed to Uncle Karl's defense, reminding me that Capital had three sequels which he, of course had read. He had also read everything by a latter-day Marxist named Ernest Mandel, whose very name could cause Colin to erupt in a volcano of polysyllables, which overflowed the restaurant and forced a partial evacuation of Santa Monica Boulevard.
"And don't get me started on the Grundrisse...!"
We knew better than to do so. Natalya rolled her eyes. Even though I wasn't much to look at, she clearly would have preferred going home with me.
So why the hell was she pretending to be interested in him? Obviously, duty called.
I can now see why Colin may have been considered a worthwhile prospect. He was brilliant, he attended a good school, and his family had some money. If he applied himself, he could have found a position in government, even in the CIA.
But it was also obvious that Natalya had wasted her time. Colin may have been a genius, but he was also a screw up. Always would be. He always found a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Decades later, his politics did the inevitable 180 and he became an intellectual cheerleader for the Iraq war and other neocon misadventures. For a while, his name became fairly well-known in those circles. And even though right-wing think tanks and media outlets love to toss money at guys like that, he even screwed up that segment of his life.
In 1982 -- and this is the God's honest -- I started to tell people that the USSR was doomed. Why? Natalya and Colin, that's why. If the Russians were so dense that they saw possibilities in him, we obviously didn't have a goddamned thing to worry about.
(They, um, seem to have gotten better at spotting talent.)
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