"His Butler’s Story (1980-1981)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Limonov Edward)

Chapter Three

I've already mentioned how soft-hearted Jenny was. I often had the sense later on that she was studiously playing the role of my mother, despite me and possibly despite herself as well. It wasn't her fault; nature made her do it, and nature is unyielding. The effect was often comical, although fifteen years younger than me, almost young enough to be my daughter in fact, she took me under her wing. It may be that Jenny became attached to me because that was what she needed — her nature required her to worry about somebody, to feed him and buy him clothes and press medicine and vitamins into his mouth. In that sense, I was a real find for her, the little mama!

I had, however, been neither very close nor very communicative with my real mother, and cut out on my own the first chance I got, cut out to wherever it was more interesting. I remember that I never even kissed my mother and was considered surly and unaffectionate, and was always being compared with the boy Valya Zakharov, who was not only affectionate with his own mother, but with mine too, and always came to kiss her whenever she visited his family. Where are you now, model boy Valya Zakharov? And really, where do all those model boys go?

By the time I was three, I had, according to my mother's accounts, already ceased to trust her, and once, as she was carrying me home from a hospital in Kharkov after a bout with the measles and we had to cross some railroad tracks, I started screaming in a terrible voice, begging her not to throw me under a train which just happened to be racing past. A hysterical child, you say? Yes, maybe I did grab hold of my mother's neck not out of love but in the same way a drowning man grabs on to the neck of the one who's drowning him. Fifteen years after the episode with the train, my lack of faith in my mother was fully vindicated: She betrayed me.

There isn't much to tell. We'll pass over the reasons, but in the fall of 1962 I found myself locked in anguish and terror behind the walls of a neuropsychiatric institution. Like any energetic and lively youth who has suffered several weeks in the torture chambers of the «violent» ward, I made up my mind to escape. I called a meeting of my pals, my band of hoodlums, and they brought me the necessary equipment — a hacksaw blade and some clothes. In a couple of evenings I had managed to saw out two bars in the window grating, and then, after changing clothes, I jumped out, and disappeared into the darkness. And it was then, I remember, that I learned what an incredible pleasure it is to disappear into the darkness. Nothing can compare with it.

I made my escape alone; the several other «lunatics» who had planned to go with me got frightened at the last moment, although thank God they didn't turn me in. It was my mother who did that the next morning. And from the best of impulses, from concern about me, as it turned out. "I really thought you were sick. The doctors told me that you were."

My mother took the hospital orderlies and the police around to every one of my friends until, on what I think was the seventh of those visits, they finally found me sound asleep. I could have gotten away even then. As that gang escorted me downstairs, my mother walked along beside and assured me that although they were taking me back to the hospital, it was just to fill out the documents for my release. I looked down the flight of stairs and realized that if I suddenly jumped over the railing, the orderlies and the police wouldn't be able to catch me, and that once I was downstairs, they would never find me, since I knew all the backyards and blind alleys and empty lots. But I trusted my mother, for which I paid with another three months of horrors and insulin shots, and was driven to such a state of rage and genuine insanity that I talked a giant, the handsome seventeen-year-old paranoid Grisha, who always went around naked out of reverence for his body, into killing the orderlies and escaping. Which Grisha agreed to do.

If you woke up every morning from the wheezing of a catatonic lying next to you who was being fed liquids through a hose into his belly and from the howls of a naked red-haired Bulat who kept screaming, "I'm the chief Soviet whale! I'm the chief Soviet shark!" then your faith in your mother, or anybody else for that matter, would soon perish. Probably my misfortune was that I had managed to land inside a psychiatric hospital at a still very tender age. My mother, of course, had never in her life been committed to a psycho ward, and so I made no attempt to tell her what I had seen there. I just kept silent. What was there to tell her? Like everyone else, she had her own life to live and was looking out for herself, mother or not. When the orderlies knock somebody down at the foot of your bed and start beating him until he's bloody, then you do what's necessary and draw your own conclusions about the world and mankind. I drew them.

And so when I saw Jenny's motherly little ways, my feelings were mixed. On the one hand, I needed Jenny's help and concern and company, and on the other, her mothering irritated and intimidated me, and I felt uncomfortable whenever I encountered it. In the beginning that happened rarely; after all, we'd only just become friends.

It was only a month after we first met that I finally learned that Jenny was the housekeeper — that it was her job to keep the house in order, that she had been living there for four years, and that she began as a live-in sitter for the "music teacher" Steven's children. The "music teacher" grew from his initial innocuousness into something on the order of God the Father looming over our cloudless life in the millionaire's little house and capable of ending it with a single word. Watch out, Edward!

And now that I am myself his housekeeper and servant, I find that my life is in a sense divided. One life I lead while Steven's away, and the other I lead when Papa Steven's at home. He's only five years older than I am, but the sense never leaves me that he's my father. When he's not around, I commit "illicit acts" and carry on a "dissolute and sinful life," which I carefully conceal from him out of fear of punishment. But when Steven's at home, I go around with my lips pursed, an exemplary servant, and I retire early, don't drink, and get up at seven, before he does, in order to have time to make him coffee.

Not only king, count, lord, and "master," but also father, as in the Middle Ages. Not only tsar but father too. In his office, where you make your appearance every morning along with a throng of the other members of your trade, the boss hardly seems like a father, yet Steven Grey, someone to whom I am linked by a complex system of particularly intimate «employer-servant» relations, is necessarily a father too. And that's why I fear his comings and tremble in panic. Terrible is the wrath of the father Abraham.

I can't remember anymore exactly how I found out that Jenny was a housekeeper, a servant. Maybe she even told me herself, since she certainly didn't conceal it from me — that she was mistress of the house was something I imagined on my own. Externally I didn't react; my expression remained unchanged, but internally I was dismayed. "Edward is the 'lover of a governess. " Or more accurately, the admirer. I remember that the words "housekeeper's lover" and "servant's lover" made a deep impression on me, and that henceforth I thought of myself as such, sometimes with bitterness and despair and sometimes with the defiant pride of an outcast. The pride of an outcast, in my view, can be even more passionate than that of an aristocrat or lord, however the hell ancient his family.

I later met European aristocrats in Steven's house. Some of them traced their genealogies back to the times of Saint Louis and the Crusades. Just recently Lord Charley stayed with us, a likable alcoholic, one of whose ancestors had in some way distinguished himself at the Battle of Hastings. During his visit at the house, I made an instantaneous improvement in my knowledge of how Scotch whisky is made and of the various ways it may be employed. To start with, the lord rebuked me for drinking it with ice. Scotch, it seems, should at the most be mixed with a couple of drops of water. The lord mixed his one drop with his finger. He started drinking in the morning.

So now, having seen my share of aristocrats close up, I believe myself to be much prouder, morbidly proud in fact. But for me, as a proud man, there was also a kind of distinction to be found in the acknowledgment that "Edward is the lover of a housekeeper." Well, all right, go fuck yourselves, so she's a housekeeper, what of it? I still needed Jenny. And I stayed.

By the end of May I finally succeeded, patient pilgrim, in reaching her cunt. In the solarium toward morning after one of the usual bashes at her house, when she and I were both very drunk, I pulled off her pants and started fondling her pussy. A nice pussy to touch. Actually, in Jenny's case it would be more accurate to call her organ a cunt. Jenny was a large girl, and she had a cunt, a childbearing organ, whereas pussies are found on girl-women, flat-chested and debauched androgynies who look like Olympia in the famous painting by Manet — you recall. My ex-wife Elena had a pussy. Jenny had a cunt. For me, unfortunately, it was somehow second-class. There's a vast difference between a pussy and a cunt.

At first Jenny resisted, twisting and whimpering, but then, after turning on her side and raising her leg in what I have to say was a most indecent way and holding it there, she started to help me. Almost simultaneously with the appearance of a rosy strip of sky in the garden, she had an orgasm, during which she sobbed quietly like a rabbit. And at that moment I sincerely pitied her, a big baby, sick and drunk with a fat ass and thighs and that hole, that wound torn in her for some reason.

I don't know why, but I didn't stick my prick in Jenny that dawn; either I didn't want a cunt but a pussy, or more likely I was simply too drunk to get it up. In any case, I didn't even try to lodge it in her. After it was completely light, we stood up without speaking, like utter strangers, without even a kiss, and I went back to my hotel, not even wondering what it meant. The supermarket near me on Broadway was open, and I bought some beer and sausage that desolate morning, took it home and ate it, and then crashed.

I was awakened by the telephone ringing. "Yes!" I said in my usual way.

"Did you call me?" Jenny asked.

"No," I answered, "I didn't call."

"Linda said somebody asked for me, a man who, spoke English with an accent. Linda thought it was you."

"With an accent?" I mockingly asked. "That's all I have. I don't have the language, but I do have the accent," I said.

"You speak pretty well, Edward," Jenny objected, and added, "Debby and I are on Broadway not far from your hotel. We're coming over, all right?"

She had never visited me at the hotel before. I was alarmed. My room really was so dirty, dismal, and poor. And glancing about my wretched little abode with its stained red bedspread, its peeling walls covered here and there with posters and drawings, and its hot plate on the windowsill, I thought, What will be will be! and I asked Jenny if she would give me half an hour.

"Why half an hour?" she asked, a little offended. "We're right nearby."

"My… translator, Bill, is here," I lied. "He was passing through on his way from Massachusetts… We've been working on a translation, and we're almost finished. He's leaving in about half an hour."

"All right," Jenny answered, satisfied. "We'll be there in half an hour."

I rushed out to the store for some wine. I didn't have any food either, but I didn't have enough money to buy that, too. I had just enough for two bottles of wine, and then only the cheapest. And of course I didn't know very much about wine then. It's only now, after living in a house with probably the finest wine cellar on the whole East Coast of the United States, that I've become such a specialist, but then I didn't know anything.

I had barely managed to return with the alcohol, had only just taken the bottles out of the paper bag, when the sisters arrived. I heard Jenny's laughter coming down the corridor and the almost boyish voice of Debby, and I opened the door before they got there. They were smiling broadly and Jenny was shaking her head disdainfully.

"Somebody offered to sell us heroin on the elevator. Very cheap. When we said no, he offered us angel dust. 'Very nice, ma'am, the best in town, ma'am, said this black guy without a shirt."

'"Whatever you want, ma'am, " Debby continued. "And then he put his mouth right up to Jenny's ear and quickly whispered, 'Wanna good fuck, mama? "

The sisters laughed. The black slang sounded very natural in their imitation, as they drawled and sang the words. I could imitate the blacks, but I was a long way from their skill.

"So this is the way you live, Edward," Jenny said, taking in my room with a mockingly squeamish look. "We had to wait fifteen minutes for the elevator, and in all that time we didn't see one white person. Are you the only one here?"

Jenny sat down on the edge of my bed, on the red bedspread. On the wall above the bed was a huge slogan from Bakunin that I had written with a thick felt-tipped pen on separate sheets of paper and glued there: "Destruction is Creation!"

"Well, no," I objected to Jenny, "I'm not the only white here. There's an old Chinese man on my floor, and there are several old white women on Social Security, and our manager is white."

I was even a little embarrassed that there were so few whites at our hotel. I offered the sisters some wine.

"Yes, we want some wine," Jenny said, and stretched out on my couch, kicking off her shoes. "Give us some wine, Edward. We've come to visit you."

Jenny made a face at the wine but drank it. We all sat on my bed, and after finishing the first bottle of wine, we opened the second and started arguing about revolution. The seventeen-year-old Debby took my part when I pronounced Steven an exploiter and declared my disagreement with inheritance laws that made it possible for idiots and half-wits of every kind to live in luxury and get on in the world just because their fathers and grandfathers were talented people. "I don't object to people who've made their own way, who have gotten rich on their own — I even respect them," I said, "but their children should start from zero like everybody else."

Jenny said that Steven was neither an idiot nor a half-wit but a talented person in his own right and even a liberal.

I said that I didn't mean her boss when I had been talking about half-wits, since I didn't know Steven, but the system itself. "We need to completely reorganize society, our whole civilization; we need a world revolution, and the new history of man should start from zero," I told the sisters.

"A revolution means blood and killing people," Jenny said with conviction.

"What?" I said. "Read the history of any revolution carefully, Jenny. They all begin with flowers and fresh hopes, in a festive atmosphere, and it's only counterrevolution that makes it necessary for a revolution to take up arms!"

Then we all started yelling and interrupting each other and lighting cigarettes, until Debby and I somehow finally managed to convince Jenny. She admitted that her boss had very specialized talents, such as, for example, a talent for obtaining money to invest in his companies, but that he himself, without his inheritance, would never have been able to acquire a house and garden like that by the time he was forty, or his estate in Connecticut and all his millions of dollars.

"Even his grandfather was a millionaire," I said heatedly, "but I'd like to see how he would have done if he had had to start out here at the Hotel Diplomat. Would he have survived or not!"

We all started laughing, and Jenny suggested getting out of the Diplomat and going somewhere for coffee.

"Then you'll have to lend me some money, because I haven't got a cent," I said.

"Don't worry about it," Jenny said. "It's our treat."

We sat for a long time on some cardboard boxes waiting for the elevator. Dirty and squeaky though it was, it was the only one in all three wings and nine floors of the Hotel Diplomat.

We set off down Broadway, and they didn't like it or anything it had to offer. Finally, after going almost as far as Lincoln Center, we took our seats in a little restaurant called "La Creperie." I ordered something to eat and drank some wine, while the sisters had dessert and coffee. I ate while Jenny sat beside me and stroked my knee, which she had never done before. Something had clearly changed in her attitude toward me. The ice had broken somehow. Maybe the sight of my room and my awful slum hotel had persuaded her that I was real. I was just as honest as my hotel was. And just as straightforward.

Most likely that's just what it was. She had seen that all my bullshit about revolution wasn't entirely baseless, and she had seen my books and the typewriter and the sheets of paper. It was clear that I really was struggling, and that I had never had a fucking thing in life.

All three of us came out of the restaurant with our arms around each other, feeling very close. It was a warm evening, and the idle stoned were wandering up and down Broadway. Everybody wants to make that one life slipping continually through his fingers more beautiful and interesting, even if it's only in marijuana dreams. We have only one life, after all, and there's always less of it.

We walked along, and I could feel Jenny's warm, living body next to mine and her large hip, and my prick started to rise, and I took her by the breast with one hand like a country lad, embarrassed neither by Broadway nor by Debby. Jenny laughed.

Debby left us at Columbus Circle and started looking for a taxi, and I said to Jenny, "You realize of course that I want you very much."

"Yes," she said, "and I really, really want you. And you'll have me, but not now."

"Why not now, Jenny? When?" I asked.

She pretended to get angry and said, "I have to explain to this Russian ten times that I have a vaginal infection and that it hurts me."

"Is it dangerous?" I asked.

"Not for you," she said, "but it's painful for me."

I didn't remember her telling me about an infection. Maybe it was the night before, or when I was drunk. Probably it was when I was drunk.

"How long have you had the infection, how much time?" I asked.

"Eight months," she answered in embarrassment.

"When will you get over it?" I asked in dismay.

"Maybe I already have," Jenny said. "I'll find out tomorrow. I'm going to the doctor's."

Before getting into the taxi she patted me on the cheek and then suddenly took my hand and kissed it. And then they drove off, and I remained standing on Columbus Circle. Then I went back to the hotel — where else was there to go? My mood was pensive. She's a good girl, I thought. We could buy a farm and have children. We could live… I could become an American…

Back at the hotel I discovered I was out of cigarettes and I badly wanted to smoke. Usually in such circumstances I went down to the street where without any trouble along the edges of the sidewalk I found thick butts or even whole cigarettes lost by some goof or drunk. This time for some reason I didn't feel like waiting to take the elevator down and then back up again. My window was open, given the fact that it faced not the courtyard but open space, open all the way to Central Park in fact, since the buildings in that direction were all lower than the Diplomat. In the room above me they were stamping and yelling something to repetitious music, and so I went to close the window.

At that moment, carried by a gust of wind from an upper floor, a thick butt touched with lipstick plopped heavily on my windowsill. It wasn't even a butt, but a barely smoked cigarette. Oh, these women! I burst out laughing, picked up the butt, lit it, and while pacing around the room, sang:

I was then supplementing my welfare checks by making piroshki and pelmeni, or Russian ravioli, for Madame Margarita. Madame Margarita spoke beautiful Russian, lived on Park Avenue, and was manager, secretary, and mommy to Sashenka Lodyzhnikov. For nothing, mind you — he didn't pay her.

Madame Margarita, God bless her, paid me three dollars an hour — a bit more than an illegal immigrant. I and another man of letters, the haughty homosexual snob Volodya, made the piroshki and pelmeni in her kitchen, narrow as a pencil box. I, however, was the only one working for three dollars an hour. Volodya was Madame Margarita's partner. They sold what we made to private clients, usually rich old ladies from Park and Fifth Avenues, and to the snack counter at Bloomingdale's.

Volodya had the highest regard for the manuscript of my first novel, the same one that had knocked Efimenkov out, and although he called me an "underground man" and was a little afraid of me, I think, he treated me very cordially. While we made the piroshki and pelmeni, a tediously mechanical activity, Volodya would, when he was in the mood, recite poetry to me, sometimes for hours on end.

Occasionally Lodyzhnikov would drop by for a little bite of something good to eat, say a meat patty with mushrooms, since he lived nearby. To Madame Margarita, he was dearer than if he had been her own son. The only thing I didn't understand was why she had chosen Lodyzhnikov for a son and not some obscure youth — me for example. And really, why not? Especially considering the fact that before Lodyzhnikov, Yakovlev had been Madame Margarita's son for a while, as had the just recently emigrated Bulgakov, along with his entire family. Sashenka became her favorite and the most prominent of her sons. Moreover, Madame took care of all his affairs for him, so that Sashenka was the spoiled child of the family. "Don't eat the cherries, boys; they're for Sashenka. Sashenka loves cherries. And the patties in the refrigerator are for him too." Madame Margarita took sweet tea in a thermos and cherries to him at the theater.

Sashenka's a nice boy, I thought, while I made the fucking pelmeni. He dances. But Limonov is mean and bad. He's not entitled to cherries. Limonov makes pelmeni for three dollars an hour.

A few days after Jenny's sudden visit to my hotel, I took a great quantity of pelmeni I'd made by myself from Madame Margarita's to the millionaire's little house — Jenny was going to have a party with Russian food and had invited all her friends. Besides the pelmeni, I also made a huge pot of shchi, or Russian cabbage soup. I tried to make a fruit kisel for dessert using Madame Margarita's recipe, but I botched it and it wouldn't set for some reason. I still don't know how to make it. Jenny was obviously planning to introduce her new boyfriend to her friends. That meant she had finally accepted me.

I arrived from Madame Margarita's with the pelmeni, and as usual Jenny had company. Sitting in the kitchen with the blinds down were Bridget and her boyfriend Douglas, a drummer with a very well-known New York rock group, and Jenny, who was rolling them a joint(!). She had no intention of smoking it herself, but she couldn't deny herself the modest pleasure of at least rolling it.

Jenny didn't care much for Douglas. "From beating his drums for so many years, he's turned into a complete dummy; he's started to rattle his brain," she said and laughed. She and Bridget had been friends since high school, however, and for Bridget's sake Jenny put up with Douglas in "my kitchen," as she said with pride.

Bridget was sarcastic and cynical. Jenny was sarcastic too, but not nearly as much as Bridget. Bridget thought the whole world was shit and never had anything good to say about anybody. She was even planning to write a book about her life entitled Shit.

I had the sense that Bridget respected me for some reason. Perhaps because I didn't care too much for people either and made fun of them. Or maybe she believed in me, to put it in more pompous terms. I don't know, it's always an elusive thing. Some people like you; others don't.

They started smoking, and I took a drag too whenever my turn came. After a few joints we were all doing just fine and starting to laugh a lot, and then we went out onto the terrace in the garden. And we laughed there too. The stout Mr. Robinson was walking past us from the river to his house with several guests, and he looked at us in alarm. After Robinson had disappeared into his house, Jenny said, laughing, "Mr. Robinson doesn't think servants should use the garden." It should be said in Steven's favor that he didn't check up on or in any way forbid anything either to Jenny or, later on, to me, but whether that was from indifference or a genuine respect for liberty, I am unable to say.

Two children, a boy and a girl dressed in white, suddenly ran into the garden, ran into it as if out of a newsreel at the beginning of the century, clad in wide pants reaching to their knees and wide shirts the same shade of white, and started turning somersaults on the grass. They were about ten, no more. Later on another boy came out, a bit older than the others, slender and handsome, with long dark hair, but dressed in the same white clothes…

"Isabelle's children," Jenny said to me. "She's the only friend I have in this neighborhood. That house over there belongs to her," and Jenny pointed to a four-story townhouse partly hidden by a huge magnolia tree.

The children hurtled past like phantoms from the beautiful life back into their house and then returned with little orange plastic rattles which they started beating each other with as if they were clubs. Jenny and Douglas got involved in the mayhem too, and the garden was filled with squeals and laughter.

Out from behind the magnolia tree in response to the laughter came a woman dressed in a lilac smock patterned with crimson flowers tightly girded with a broad flowered belt, and wide lilac silk trousers and spike heels. "A beautiful Jewess," as our Pushkin would have said. A very beautiful Jewish woman. She walked over to us and stood next to a flowering azalea bush on the terrace, on purpose probably, and to very good effect.

Jenny introduced us: "Isabelle, my neighbor and friend! Edward, a Russian poet!" Jenny pronounced "Russian poet" with pride, it seemed to me. Isabelle and I lightly shook hands. Her hand was covered in gold and jewels. A small hand.

Then, calling the children over, Isabelle introduced them to me:

"Edward, this is my daughter Chloe." The plump but graceful Chloe held out her hand, then withdrew to the grass and started spinning the wheel of a toy — showing me that she knew how. Silently.

"This is my son Rudy," said Isabelle, showing me a plump boy with a provocatively insolent face who firmly shook my hand like an adult.

"And this is my oldest son, Valentine."

The oldest boy was gentler, slenderer, and more delicate than die others. He had large, sad black eyes, perhaps just like his Portuguese father's. I liked Valentine best — he was independent, like me, although he seemed to take part in all their games. And, as I later found out, he liked me too.

"Valentine said, 'Edward's a very good person, " Jenny told me later on, adding, "and he doesn't say that about everybody. I have a lot of respect for his opinion; he's very smart."

I think that I'm not a very good person, or that I was a good person, but I stopped being one from being worn out by people who forced me to live by their rules. Or maybe I never was a good person either. I'm capable of being good, but I'm also very capable of being mean. Valentine, however, died not very long ago, surviving to the day before Christmas. He was thirteen years old, and he died of cancer. Neither chemotherapy nor the best doctors in the world could save him. "Whom the gods love dies young."

A year after that scene in the garden, he suddenly didn't feel good, and after tests and a check-up, the doctors discovered that he had cancer, and the family moved to California, to a climate better than New York's. They treated Valentine, and one hope was replaced by another, and it seemed that there was still reason to hope, and then he died.

Did I pity the boy? Yes. The usual horror of life. Valentine was unlucky.

I'm still alive for the time being. If there is "another world," Valentine and I will meet there and we'll be friends. We were kindred spirits.

But then, standing and sitting in the flowering garden, we suspected nothing. All the trees were in bloom, every one of them, except for the magnolia, which had already finished. Isabelle was saying that she planned to come to the party that evening too and would bring the children with her and something Russian to eat, some caviar and vodka she had bought. "I'm always by myself," she said, neither to Bridget nor to Douglas but to me. "I don't go anywhere, only to my neighbor Jenny's when she has a party." She said it, and then went sadly back along the path to her house.

There are special moments in life that are much more deeply inscribed in the memory than others. It is that day that I remember Jenny, although there were many other episodes in the garden, and we spent two summers, two springs, and one fall there together. Still stupefied with grass, I sat in the garden with her and felt an extraordinary tenderness toward her. A tenderness toward her cheek, and her little hands. A tenderness toward her friends and those others close to me who were sharing with me my time on earth. Tenderness toward her as one of them.

Her combs were the same color as her eyes. And the embroidery on her East Indian dress and her shoes with their long straps tied around her ankles were the same color too. There were little mirrors sewn on her dress, a great many mirrors sewn on by the Indians, and when Jenny moved, rays of sunlight were scattered in every direction. How young she is! I thought.

Then we had supper on the terrace, steaks that Jenny had prepared, and drank red wine. Wasps circled the food, and everybody was intimidated by them, even the punk rocker Douglas — everybody except me. Bridget and Douglas admired my intrepidity and presence of mind in the face of the clear and present wasp danger, and Jenny snidely remarked, obviously making fun of me, that I had been as steadfast as a real revolutionary. She followed that with caustic remarks about bourgeois society, wondering how we could ever coexist, she being so bourgeois herself. I couldn't even answer — I was still stoned — and merely grinned sheepishly.

Bridget and Douglas got ready to leave, since they were supposed to come back to the party that evening. Jenny walked them to the door. "I'll make a speech when I return," she said in a tipsy voice. "I need another glass of red wine."

After she came back, we uncorked another bottle and sat down in the kitchen.

"You talk about inequality, Edward, about the rich and the poor," she began seriously. "But God, Edward, God loves everyone. And I, if you want to know, am happier than my boss. Whenever people come here, to my kitchen, I'm happy that I can feed them. God commands me to help people. My father is not a rich man. He was a naval officer in the war, and then served for twenty-eight years as an FBI special agent. He did his duty — he worked in order to raise and feed and educate us, his ten children. And we had everything. If you work, then you can have everything. But you want to destroy that peaceful life!" she surprised me by exclaiming. During all this we had been kissing and embracing each other from our chairs. But at that point she freed herself.

"Right now, right this minute, I'm going to show you something!" she suddenly cried and dashed out of the kitchen. She came back with a large-format book. "This is my favorite book," she said, and started quickly turning the pages. "Come over here and look," she demanded.

I moved to the chair next to Jenny and looked. There wasn't any text, just pictures. In picture after picture the artist showed the successive destruction of mankind by war until there was nothing left but a man and a woman and a flower. And then life began again and once again revolutionaries and soldiers appeared, and war again destroyed the whole world, except for a man and a woman and a flower.

"Here!" Jenny said, slapping the book shut and extending it to me. "I give it to you. So you'll remember how it all ends. If I have a baby, I want him to be happy," Jenny exclaimed. "But you, Edward..!" and she jumped up and started pounding her fists on my back.

Thus we talked and fondled each other, and then after eight the guests started to arrive. The party was a definite success. Many of the more than thirty people who had been invited had never tried Russian food before, and for them it was very exotic. Each guest drank a shot of vodka with me. I turned nobody down, and obviously got drunk as a result, since I couldn't remember later on how the party had ended.

Coming to, I didn't understand at first where I was. Only after looking around for a few minutes did I realize that I was in Jenny's room. You never know the time in the houses of the rich, or what season of the year it is. The air conditioner had been on all night and had made the room so cold that it felt like winter. The room was dim, since the blinds were down, and only the light of an unknown season showed through the crack. Then I remembered and scowled in disgust.

I've always been poor, ugly, and short. In any case not the sort that women throw themselves at. And now my prick won't stand up either, I thought pitilessly. Probably a little too pitilessly and a little too certainly, but honestly nonetheless.

An unsuccessful morning after an unsuccessful night. And now my prick won't stand up either, I repeated to myself and scowled again. "You ought to go to a doctor. I want to take you to my doctor," Jenny's words came back to me.

The next day after her dance lesson, her belly dancing lesson, that is, she went to her doctor and probably said to him, "I have a boyfriend. I like him, but he can't get an erection." That took place at 2:30 or 3:00 in the afternoon. And then she told the doctor my "case history" — what she knew about me. "His mother left him when he was a child. He was raised by soldiers until he was fifteen. His first wife was a prostitute. The last two years he has had sex only with men. He won't say how old he is, but I think he's about thirty."

From her bed I heard noises resembling the smacking of parched lips. She was waking up. And she had been awake several times during the night. That does her credit, even though she hadn't touched me or in any way tried to break down the wall that had arisen between us after my one unsuccessful attempt to fuck her. Or if she had tried to, it had been very tentative.

Actually, I did remain a few minutes in her "womb," as that place is pompously termed, or even more idiotically, her «vagina» (continue the sequence, if you like: "angina," "regina"…). I entered it, yes, but I didn't remain very long. Nothing lewd or particularly exciting — a twenty-year-old girl with a clean, slightly heavy body equipped to bear children and love a husband. Fresh young breasts, a long beautiful neck, everything fresh and smooth. And a cunt that was probably a bit wider than necessary…

And I, that twisted monster who had been lying next to her, had woken up in another bed, although one close to hers. A feeble monster. My body wasn't twisted; on the contrary, it was dark and spare, but inside… My God, inside it was a pathological jumble of nerves and terror…

Thus I quietly lay there, despondent yet at the same time thinking, But what about Rena, the Rumanian dancer? How am I to explain then my bestial, hour-long fucking with her? Of course, it had been several months since I'd quit fucking her. Maybe something had happened to me in the meantime? I didn't believe there was anything wrong with me. Probably it was something else, say a temporary aversion to Jenny. Or that I wasn't used to her yet? Yes, that's what it was. I was still getting used to her.

I didn't succeed in reassuring myself but returned very awkwardly that morning to my hotel — retreated to my hole, ashamed to even look at Jenny. You know, masculine pride. There is nothing more painful than wounded masculine pride. A prick that won't stand up or one that's too small are devastating discoveries for a man. Even a small child's first discovery of the existence of death doesn't compare in horror. I was crushed. My prick wouldn't stand up! And I have to say that no sensible references to bestial fucks with Rena or other beings of the female sex more remote in time could reassure me, although they did help to salve the wound a bit.

An old man was riding up on the elevator with me, and I glanced at him and shuddered. His ear was a bloody abscess covered with scabs, and there were ulcers on his cheek too. His nose was half rotted away. Why on earth do they let such creatures walk around on the streets and in hotels? I wondered. And then I had a sudden ironic thought: His probably stands up every time like a stick. I even broke out laughing at my own black humor.

I didn't call Jenny for two days. She called me herself.

"Come over, I have a surprise for you," she said to me in her usual voice, or even, I thought, in a slightly mischievous one. I went. Another wouldn't have, but I always go, even if disgrace awaits me. I'm brave, or maybe stupid, but I go.

A surprise. The surprise turned out to be a questionnaire from Dr. Krishna consisting, if you can imagine it, of about three hundred questions; I'm not exaggerating. The Indian quack wanted to know everything about his patient, the better to devise his Indian-Gypsy tricks later on. After you'd already forgotten what you'd written down on the questionnaire, he would suddenly but gently announce, looking into your soul with his piercing eyes, "Well, sir, your mother's uncle was an alcoholic or your grandmother on your father's side was insane…" Despite the shitty state of my affairs, I had a good laugh while reading the questionnaire, as did Jenny, although she still declared in a severe tone of voice that we would start filling out the questionnaire the very first thing next morning.

There wasn't any food in the house from Jenny's point of view, and so we went to a restaurant. From my point of view, the refrigerator was full, and it would have been possible to live for a good several weeks on the food that was there. But I didn't argue with her. Hers was the consciousness of an American girl, mine that of a foreign writer struggling with poverty.

In the restaurant, Jenny suddenly started feeling bad and complained about a pain in her back, and we returned home immediately. Aware of my own guilt, I offered my unfucked girlfriend a massage by way of compensation, and we went up to her room, I in terror, to tell you the truth.

By morning Jenny had forgotten all about the questionnaire, as had I, because by then I had fucked her, three times at least. "What's happened to you, Edward?" she asked happily on her way to the shower mat morning. Nothing; I had simply gotten beyond my usual tangle of feelings.

She sang happily in the shower, and I listened to her voice while lolling on the bed like a kind of lazy person, one leg hanging over the side, and reckoned up my feelings. The reckoning wasn't very comforting. I suddenly realized distinctly and clearly for the first time that I didn't love Jenny (I don't love Jenny), and that I never would.

I wanted very much to fall in love, wanted it, I realized, more than anything. I liked Jenny, but she didn't even suit me physically. She didn't know how to fuck, and would just lie there like a big unhappy dummy, a female animal waiting for sperm to be deposited in her. There are men, no doubt, who like specimens of that kind and find them exciting, but I unfortunately do not. She was patently a mama, and I even felt something a little like shame in fucking her, as if I were fucking my own mother. Maybe she was my mother in my last incarnation?

Although I had fucked her a rather long time all three times, I don't think she had an orgasm even once. Licking her cunt would have been no problem for me of course, and she would probably have come if I had, but if you're going to lick a cunt, you at least have to feel like it, but with her I didn't. Even though I have more than once in my life risked licking the cunts of prostitutes.

Jenny wasn't the least erotic. She was a healthy animal, healthy despite her continual indispositions and complaints about a pain in her back, or in her stomach, or in her "vagina," as she would say. But if Martha must bear children and bake bread, they will go to Mary Magdalene to fornicate.

Thus I lay and drowsily mused. Jenny came out of the shower. "Lazy boy!" she said in the lisping voice she had probably used with children when she was a governess and a babysitter. "It's time to stop idling and get up. I'm going down to the kitchen now to make us some coffee and an excellent breakfast. Do you like bacon and pancakes with maple syrup? I'll make bacon and pancakes with maple syrup and you get up and take a shower."

Jenny was obviously in a good mood. Later on I became convinced that the knowledge she was "making love" was more important to her than any pleasure she got from the act itself. How nice! I'm doing it. I'm making love just like all the other girls! she probably thought. Her God, and she had gone to Catholic school, no doubt encouraged her to feel that way. Well, it doesn't matter if I don't enjoy it; Edward does.

I was sure she would later tell her girlfriends in detail how her new boyfriend had fucked her three times, and how afterward "we drank coffee and had delicious whole wheat pancakes with an extra cup of barley flour; the pancakes turned out really well. And maple syrup… It's hard to get real maple syrup now, but Nancy brought some from Connecticut. She got it herself — you know, they make holes in the bark." Jenny was fond of all the pleasant little details.

I'm not making fun of her; I still respect Jenny, and there aren't many people that I do. But, good Lord, she was such a little Martha that she would regularly bake her own bread! Various kinds: unleavened, sweet, raisin, and even with zucchini or whatever else she could think of. Incredible homemade bread that even Steven would proudly serve his guests now and then. She ground the flour from grain herself; that tells you something, doesn't it? In a real flour mill given to her by her friend Isabelle.

We had breakfast on the roof, where we had taken a small folding table, and we sat across from each other and drank coffee out of red ceramic cups and poured maple syrup over our pancakes. Then Jenny brought a cassette player up to the roof and a cold bottle of champagne, and we took our places in lounge chairs, drank the champagne in the blazing sunshine, and listened to music.

The tape was called "After the Ball," the name of one of the songs included on it. They were old popular songs: "I've Got Rings on My Fingers," "Good Bye, My Lady Love," and "Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May?"

Those melodies both then and now evoke in me a kind of festive melancholy. Perhaps because they really are about our lives in this world — my life and Jenny's and the lives of other people who lived before us — about our private little stories and tragic mistakes, our whims and our passions. The song "After the Ball" tells how at a ball «he» mistook her brother for her lover, and so foolishly lost his happiness, and how «she» soon caught cold and died. "After the Ball." I'm writing this too after the ball.