In the spring, my roommate, Joe Adler, gave up his dreams of a free and independent life as an artist after all. His mama had won. She found Joe a well-paying position in Yonkers, and he decided to give up his part of the apartment, and I, mad fool that I am, was suddenly overcome with a desire to take the whole place for myself.
At first Jenny didn't approve. "How are you going to pay for it, Edward?" she reasonably observed when I first told her of my intention. "You don't have a regular job."
Jenny didn't realize that she was in fact going to pay the one hundred and sixty dollars for the other half of the apartment. For I was sure I could easily hook her, so to speak, on the idea of our sharing the apartment together, the apartment serving as a kind of prologue to our shared family life, a place where our children could perhaps play someday. "Our own apartment."
Ours or not, I still had no intention of giving Jenny a key to it. Hell no!
Mama Jenny's maternal heart was of course unable to resist the temptation of having her own nest. Within a few days I had, in addition to my study and bedroom, my own living room with four windows.
My relations with Sarah developed, unfortunately, along the same lines they had with my other girls; that is, she gradually started to irritate me. I was tired of her. When we fucked, I sensed even through my marijuana or alcoholic stupor that she was giving herself to me and was moved by me, which is something I can't stand, in fact. I hate it when other people love me but I don't love them. Looking at her with as unprejudiced and sober an eye as possible, I suddenly realized that she wasn't pretty enough for me. Maybe I understood that earlier too, but the feverish state of mind I was in whenever I grabbed whatever cunt happened to be available just to keep from being alone and masturbating, and suffering the anguish of not having anybody to stick my prick into or take at least a modicum of animal warmth from — that state of mind had passed.
Sarah now seemed to me to be just a crude little slut from Brooklyn — crude and uncultivated, fussy and loud.
She would flop down in my apartment and throw on the floor her trashy boots, underpants, stockings, and other awful things which I turned away from in embarrassment and distaste, just as I had from my mother and her feminine secrets when we lived together in the same room.
Once Sarah appeared at my door in a very agitated state. Rushing in, she immediately demanded bourbon and announced that she was very hysterical that day. She was pretty hysterical every day. Downing the bourbon and pushing her wig back from her forehead, she told me with an insane gleam in her eye that she had gone to see about a job and that the man doing the hiring had made her pull up her skirt and expose more of her bosom.
I said, "I hope he was satisfied; you have nice breasts." And she really did have nice breasts, small and well-formed.
"Really, Edward?" she asked, becoming excited. "You really think I have nice breasts?"
"Yes," I said, "you really do." I didn't add that in my opinion her temperament was too loud and screwed-up; I just said, "Sarah, I'm hungry!" And that was the honest truth too. I didn't have any money and had been dreaming since morning of how nice it would be to have a piece of meat. I could have gone to Jenny's, but I couldn't take that crazy woman with me.
Sarah didn't have any money either, as she happily informed me.
"Let's fuck then," I said, and we went into the bedroom. But it didn't work; Sarah simply radiated craziness that day, and she kept giggling in a silly way. I gave up trying to fuck her and went back into my living room to make myself a drink. When I came back, she was naked and bending over like a monkey to cut her toenails.
"Sarah, it's vulgar to stick out your cunt and cut your nails in front of somebody you love."
"Edward, you're so petit bourgeois!" she retorted, continuing to cut her toenails.
"All right, so what if I am, but you look gross," I said.
She continued to cut her toenails anyway, chattering about something which I stopped listening to, and then she sprawled out on my bed, covering herself up a little, and put her dirty feet on my pillow. I'm not particularly squeamish, but I thought in puzzlement, What the fuck is the little slut lying around here for? What is she doing here? And then I said out loud that I had to meet some friends for dinner and that I couldn't take her with me.
Sarah grew sad and said that she was leaving too, but she had to make a phone call first. "Is that all right?" she asked.
"Of course it is," I said, and sat down at my desk as if I were going to write something…
Despite my indifference to her, Sarah still continued to play a role in my life for a long time. Long after Jenny had left and the traces of other less remarkable girls in my life had grown cold, Sarah still turned up in my bed now and then. Maybe the hope of obtaining me blazed up in her again from time to time. She really tried to win me. Even after I had grown completely insolent and sent her as a sort of living present to a friend of mine who had just arrived from Europe and was living by himself on Madison Avenue and didn't know anybody in New York and didn't have anybody to fuck, Sarah went obediently. I've already said that Sarah was open to any experiment.
We broke up just recently. After supper at P. J. Clark's, we came back to the millionaire's little house and climbed into bed, either to fuck or to sleep. But Sarah was so drunk and stoned that her Brooklyn upbringing started to come out. She accused me of greed (!), of having a middle-class mentality (!), and of other terrible sins as well, and shouted "Shit!" and "Fuck!" and laughed hysterically. She drove me into such a rage with her crazy behavior that I threw her out without fucking her. I am, when it comes down to it, the servant of millionaires. I have rich neighbor-whores living next door to me who sometimes even allow themselves to call up on the phone during parties given by my employer and complain about the noise. I don't much care for noise myself, and so in a fury I hit her naked body and threw her out on the street at three o'clock in the morning. I made her pick up all her rags, and I threw her out without even screwing her. I said, "Get the fuck out of here right now!"
Sarah looked at me with reproachful, sobered eyes and said over and over again, "Edward, aren't you ashamed of yourself! Aren't you ashamed of yourself!" I was ashamed, but I had decided to punish her.
A few days after that episode, I received a letter in the official envelope of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Sarah was working as a photographer. The letter was a remarkable one, and it was obvious that Sarah really did love me, so bitter was her farewell:
You're a big, gaping, empty zero. You're a synonym for permanent failure. You're a failure in friendship, you're a failure in love, and as far as your career is concerned, you're nothing but a self-deluded jerk. You're unlucky in everything you do because all you care about is your own superficial, insensitive personality.
The real reason your book isn't making it in the United States has nothing to do with its so-called controversial theme. The reason nobody will touch your book here is that the United States has much higher standards for literature, and your book just isn't good enough. Carol [her deadly dull, gray friend who works as a drudge at a publishing house] actually told me that your book is self-indulgent and boring, and that she couldn't even think about showing it to her publisher.
In the last analysis, your ideas are all on the surface and don't mean very much at all. You're just a pretentious idiot.
I doubt you have even one friend in this world you could show this letter. Nobody who would laugh at how silly all this is.
Go on living like a servant and moving from one servant's job to another and intoning your clichés.
Nobody will ever be affected by anything you do.
You're a baby with a huge ego. You're masturbating your way through life.
There wasn't any signature.
I broke up with Jenny very unexpectedly, although it was exactly the way I had always wanted to break up. She found herself another guy, got pregnant by him almost immediately, and went to live with him in another city — Los Angeles. God gave her a baby and established her in the life that was most befitting for her; with me she had obviously violated both the divine and the mundane orders of things.
After meeting my ex-wife Elena, Linda said to me, "Edward, I just can't see what Jenny and Elena have in common. Elena is a very stylish woman, but Jenny was almost a peasant." I explained to Linda that Elena had been the wife of the Russian poet Eduard Limonov, whereas Jenny was the girlfriend for a year and a half of another person altogether — a poor, unemployed welfare recipient and tenant of a single-room-occupancy hotel, the New Yorker Edward.
Jenny did the right thing in leaving me, or nature did. She wasn't getting anything new from our relationship, and even though we had started making love again, there were times when she was indifferent to my prick, and she was only very rarely happy; sexually, we just weren't compatible. Occasionally, she would start talking about marriage, and I, attempting to look sad, would say that we couldn't afford to start a family yet, and she would agree and drop the subject for a while.
I don't know if she ever suspected that I was having affairs with other women, or if she believed I was satisfied by the meager diet she provided. I just don't know. She did, I remember, find women's things in my bathroom several times — a little watch, a necklace, a ring — and there were several other times when she found hairpins on my bedroom floor. But either she preferred to believe me when I told her that one friend or another of mine had spent the night there with a girl or when I made up some other, sometimes rather clumsy lie, or perhaps, reasonably enough, she just didn't want to make a scene about it. But I don't think that she ever did suspect just how frantic my sexual life was, so frantic that I even had a little green book in which I wrote down my amorous meetings so I wouldn't get them mixed up. Sometimes I had two or even three different girls in a single day, and I was as proud of my Don Juanism as any adolescent.
Be that as it may, by the time Jenny suddenly left me, I had gotten used to the constant oscillation in my feelings for her between friendliness and gratitude and aversion and irritation. You already know what I had to be grateful to her for, but what irritated me about her was her plebeian manner. For example, whenever she was sitting down with her fat legs spread wide (she had begun to put on weight, gentlemen), so that you could see her cunt, or not her cunt itself, but her underpants with her cunt underneath, she was too lazy to pull down her long skirt or straighten it. She wore long skirts in imitation of Nancy, her employer, who was always arrayed in the same uniform — skirts so long they even dragged in the snow and mud.
I would say to her, "Jenny, what do you dress like an old woman for? You're only twenty-two. (She was already twenty-two! Time had passed.) And why do you have to sit in that vulgar way? Are you too lazy to move your legs?"
She would laugh, but if I continued to insist, she would get irritated and yell her invariable response: "Cut it out, Edward! Cut it out! Stop criticizing me. I'm sitting the way that's natural and comfortable for me, and other people don't have to look if they don't like it!"
Once I drove her to tears that way. It was on a day when she looked particularly disgusting to me — her jaw was swollen from having her wisdom teeth removed and she had another pimple under her nose. She offended my aesthetic sense. That's the sort of person I was then, gentlemen, but really, how could I help it! She was after all a sturdy and likable girl and could have looked a lot better; she could have used a little makeup, say. I told her all that then, and she started crying.
"Why do you keep criticizing me! You act like you're my teacher!" she said. "Instead of encouraging me, you make me feel like a nothing."
I told Jenny that I didn't always do what other people told me either, but I listened to what they had to say and considered it, and if I found something useful in their criticism, then I tried to bear it in mind and change. And that I wasn't criticizing her to humiliate her or show that I was better than she was, but only to make her better, since I cared about her. The crafty liar Limonov.
"And really, Jenny," I said, now completely into my didactic role, "how much longer are you going to waste your time with Martha, Jennifer, and even Bridget, when it comes down to it? You need to spend more time with cultivated people and read more and maybe even go to school somewhere. Even at my age, I've thought at times of studying at Columbia University. You're a smart girl, Jenny, and you aren't going to be Steven Grey's housekeeper forever. The people you go around with now are much less than you are. You're obviously much brighter than they are and much more talented."
Jenny stopped crying and perked up and started making plans. "You're right, Edward, I should go to school," she said enthusiastically, and we began discussing where she could go. But having made her plans, Jenny didn't have the strength to carry them out. She was lazy and given to inertia. She had an innate intelligence and was streetwise the way simple people are, and she was very sarcastic, but God, what did I want from her anyway, that she'd become another Marie Sklodowska Curie and for my sake turn herself into something diametrically opposed to what she actually was? No one can leap higher than their ceiling, and you can't make a lady out of a servant girl. And I didn't. All Jenny would ever be was a mama cow. If only she'd had ambition, but unfortunately no, I never found a drop of it in her, except for a certain pride in me, her boyfriend, if you can call that ambition. Once Jenny told me, "You're a typical poet, Edward, with long wavy hair just like you're supposed to have," and she touched my hair. "Just like Lord Byron." She said this last phrase with pleasure and respect. Yes, perhaps I was her ambition, and she was doing her best to win me, but what if she couldn't, and went down in defeat?
The next day she was sitting barefoot and unkempt in the kitchen of the millionaire's house once again and chattering with her usual Jennifer, Martha, or Bonny, who lived next door, and drinking beer, with her feet so dirty that Linda still remembers it now with horror.
The days and months went by as usual, one weekend replacing another on the roof of the millionaire's house, and then the summer was gone. In August 1978 Jenny took me to California. It was her vacation, and mine too in a way, the first one I'd had in the three years I'd been in America. We had in the meantime tried to put some money aside. "Save your money, Edward," Jenny told me. "Saving money" sounded ridiculous in my case. I had plastered and whitewashed two apartments, the full extent of my earnings for the summer, so that Jenny ended up paying for my part of the trip, which made me sick. Even though she was my girlfriend and I was an opportunist, it still made me sick; it's better to have your own money and not depend on anybody else for anything.
We flew to California with Jenny's friend Martha; it was her vacation too. And there in California, with the participation of Martha and the poet Alyoshka Slavkov, a friend of mine who at the time was living in Michigan and working for a publisher of Russian books, the final act of the story of Jenny's and my romance was played out — a story that had begun by error.
I, who sometimes view my life as the labors of Hercules or the travels of Odysseus, was glad when after several days in gigantic Los Angeles and depressing circumstances in the vast, beautiful home of Isabelle, who had only just moved there with her dogs and Valentine ill with cancer and Chloe and Rudy, we finally went to live in a redwood forest, an arena more fitting for Herculean labors. Jenny's father and mother owned a little piece of warm California land that in its own way was quite wonderful — a redwood grove and a real saloon built a hundred and fifty years before by the first California loggers. The four of us tumbled out of the car and into the saloon one splendid August day and distributed our things in the upstairs rooms that had once belonged to prostitutes. The fact is, the saloon had stood virtually untouched for its whole one hundred and fifty years; nobody had remodeled it, and Jenny's parents only went there once every couple of years. On the first floor, just as in all the saloons I'd seen in the movies, there was a bar and an immense fireplace, to the left of which a wooden staircase led upstairs to the second floor — to the prostitutes' rooms. It's obviously very symbolic that the last time I fucked that peasant angel was in one of those very rooms.
We had picked up Alyoshka Slavkov in Los Angeles and taken him to the forest with us immediately after renting an idiotically uncomfortable beige Toyota that looked like a piece of soap in shape and color and that stank like a toilet inside.