“I think it would be good for him to have an affair.” Well, roll out the red carpet, why don’t you? If the narrator of Vladimir wants to hook up with the title character, she could not be on more of a glide path: The man’s own wife is behind the idea. “I wish Vlad would fuck other people,” Cynthia tells the professor, calling her husband “a pinched-ass prude.” They apparently have no sex life to speak of, and this would at least be proof of life in that department. Of course, there’s a difference between saying all this while bullshitting with a friend and actually endorsing a real-life affair with that same friend. We’ll see where Cynthia stands if and when the rubber meets the, uh, road.
The professor’s own husband, meanwhile, is fully aware of exactly who his wife is into, and he has no problem with it. In fact he cracks jokes about it, playfully busting her chops about wearing pumps to work. “You look pretty,” John tells her as she prepares for a meeting with Vladimir she plans on turning into their first sexual encounter. “Careful. You always care too much and screw it up.” The professor takes her underwear off the moment John leaves, so I’m not sure she’s taken his advice to heart.
There are a couple of interesting reversals from the norm at work here. Obviously there’s the fact that both Vladimir and the professor have spouses who more or less endorse them stepping out.. But on top of that, only one of the two marriages involved can even be said to be unhappy. Vladimir and Cynthia are struggling, but John and the narrator are basically rock solid.
Even through his scandal and suspension, she’s on his side, as both a practical matter and a matter of principle. She and John clearly love each other — and lust for each other, however horny they are for other people — and want each other to be happy. Their marriage is open, not on the rocks. That’s not a dynamic you often see explored in TV shows about extramarital affairs. (The bit where she slashes the deer net protecting his precious vegetable garden out of frustration is a bit more of what you’d expect.)
No matter how John, Cynthia, and the professor feel about it, though, Vladimir will need to get on board at some point. His conduct remains flirtatious enough to keep him front and center in her sexual fantasies, including during sex with John. She even wears her special red masturbation pants to a faculty meeting so she can surreptitiously get off while staring at him across the conference table.
But despite coming on strong, his sexting game leaves a lot to be desired. When he’s forced to cancel the subcommittee meeting she’d hoped to attend — a subcommittee she inspired him to form so that he can work his way toward tenure, a process about which he is at first rudely ambivalent — he instead sends her a sexy selfie of him finally cracking open her book. She texts him back like a giddy schoolgirl, and gets him going about how he likes to “read”: “Slowly…closely….with great attention to detail…” Then closes things with a truly baffling emoji that calls the whole double-entendre read of his response into question.
Even so, she’s on firmer ground with this flirty prude than she is with the disciplinary committee. The professor steals the file on her ex-student Lila’s scholarship application from the department chair’s office to see how things look for her. Everyone who reads it — herself, John, their new legal advisor Sid, even Cynthia — agree that it clears her of any wrongdoing, and that she declined to give the student the scholarship on the merits, not to retaliate for her affair with John. She’d better hope it looks that way to everyone, though, since it’s the only aspect of the whole case that crosses the line into illegality.
So she does something equally illegal. With Cynthia’s encouragement, she burns the entire file, good bad or indifferent. The funny thing is that the professor could squash the whole thing simply by apologizing to Lila, as Sid advises her to do over and over. Gee, I can’t imagine destroying evidence instead, with the help of the woman whose husband you plan to fuck no less, will come back to bite you in the ass!
But as Vladimir becomes a bigger and bigger feature of her mental landscape, other things start falling by the wayside. We’ve already seen how she blew off multiple desperate phone calls from Sid. Now she keeps forgetting to write an important letter of recommendation for Edwina, the student she’s advising. Add in the burglary and evidence tampering, and that’s a pattern of poor decision-making, quite aside from the affair itself. Suddenly, the ropes and chains don’t seem so far outside the realm of possibility.
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.
