Jenny's brother Robert was the only one living at the saloon when we got there; I had met him, you'll recall, at their parents' house in Virginia. This young man lived an easygoing and carefree life, accumulating an immense quantity of trash in black plastic bags. The only reason he didn't have problems with rats is that the raccoons would probably have gobbled them up if they had come. The raccoons had chewed through the bags which were heaped in a pile under a tree next to the kitchen, and the whole area around the saloon looked like a dump.
Robert's morning began at six. At least whenever I would get up very early myself, I would find the young man sitting in the kitchen next to the already lit iron stove, his morning joint gaily glowing between his lips. As the day progressed, he smoked more and more, and when evening came, he would cook himself up on the same stove a stinking paste of hallucinogenic Mexican mushrooms. Sometimes his friends would come to visit him from the nearby college campus in old cars, and they would all sit out on the veranda and take turns scraping out mushrooms from the pot with an aluminum spoon. What Robert was trying to do remains a mystery to me. The only food he ever ate in front of me was carrots. He was a vegetarian, and there was always an inexhaustible supply of carrots in the refrigerator, which Robert and his friends and Jenny and Martha made juice with, and then drank. They must, I think, have consumed dozens of pounds of carrots. Jenny claimed that Robert ate our vegetables too, our vegetables and our bread, since he didn't have any money of his own — or so she said. But it's also possible she was exaggerating.
The skinny, likable Robert, with his utterly vacant, ethereal gaze, was the mildest of creatures. True, the only time he was capable of grasping anything, in my opinion, was in the morning. Whenever I opened the refrigerator to get my morning can of beer — which is how I started my own day, since Alyoshka and I were drinking heavily — Robert would always ask in amazement, "Beer at eight o'clock in the morning, Edward?" and grin and shake his head. And I, motioning at his invariable joint, would say, "A joint at eight o'clock in the morning, Robert?" and shake my own head. He was a very "cool dude," this Robert, and later on, when Jenny and I started having our arguments and disagreements, he couldn't understand at all why we weren't getting along with each other.
"What are you arguing about?" he said to me one morning. "Jenny and you, Edward, are getting upset over nothing. You should take it easy; after all, you don't have anything to argue about. I eat my mushrooms, and then everything's fine with me. The world's really beautiful, you know… Do you want some mushrooms, Edward? They're cheap — five dollars a bag. You can even order them by mail…"
For us Robert was something like God's own representative in the redwood forest. He had a calming effect on us, but of course not even he could keep us from dividing into two camps.
Sometimes it seems to me that if it hadn't been for Alyoshka, I might not have lost Jenny then, but it's possible it only seems that way. I realized even in Los Angeles that with the four of us in one car the trip wasn't going to be an easy one. We could never agree about anything. If Alyoshka and I wanted to spend the day at the beach, the girls wanted to go to a restaurant and then to a movie, and so on. If you also add to our continual disagreements the fact that Martha was a complete stranger to Alyoshka and that during the whole trip he never had, as far as I could tell, the slightest desire to fuck her, as well as the fact that Jenny's and my sexual relations weren't giving us any pleasure, then you can imagine how we, a group of strangers irritated with each other, felt in that tin can of a car. Jenny, moreover, did all the driving. Alyoshka still didn't know how to drive then, I wouldn't have trusted myself with the car, and Martha didn't drive either for some reason, and so Alyoshka and I found ourselves completely at the mercy of their coalition.
Once enclosed in that small space, we discovered that we were all very different. And not just because Alyoshka and I were Russians and the girls were Americans — no. After all, Alyoshka's English was excellent and he was moreover already enrolled in a graduate program, while I myself had in fact forgotten more of Russia than I remembered. But the girls had their own interests, and we had ours.
Health food, for example. Alyoshka and I laughed heartily at their passionate faith in health food and made fun of it every chance we got. Whenever we stopped at a health food store, and there are a great many of them in California, I tried to find out from Jenny how she knew that the food — shitty tomatoes, the famous carrots, and rotten onions — had in fact been grown without the use of chemical fertilizers. And what if they had? Jenny got mad when I laughingly maintained that the owners of all the health food stores were crooks, and that they bought spoiled produce from the supermarkets around the corner and sold it to her as wholesome food. I would have kept quiet if the shitty health food hadn't cost twice as much as the much more wholesome-looking «normal» food.
The girls also had huge jars full of various kinds of vitamins with them, which they would constantly bring out during the trip and share with each other. "Do you want to try some B-2, Jenny?" or, "Why don't you give me some C with A-6, Martha!" So went their little conversations.
I might have put up with the girls better by myself, much better — I wouldn't have paid any attention to them, but Alyoshka and I continually egged each other on, and since we were speaking Russian, we unfortunately had the fatal ability to say whatever we wanted about our opponents in their presence. If we had had only one common language, we would necessarily have restrained ourselves and spoken less, instead of spinning a web of hysteria together.
The girls' conversation was little more than gossip. They chattered incessantly about Steven and his lovers, about Nancy and her love affairs, and about their own mutual acquaintances and their love affairs, but never about books or politics.
Alyoshka and I discussed Russian and English and world literature for three days or so until we got tired of it. I'm not saying our conversations were more interesting than theirs — you can chatter boringly about literature, too, and I in fact talk less and less about it now than I used to — but only that our conversations were of no interest to them, whereas to Alyoshka and me theirs were merely the primitive babbling of servant girls. Yet the fact remained that we were divided into two hostile factions, and that I was in the worst position of anybody, since both Jenny and Alyoshka came to me whenever they were unhappy about anything at all, and Alyoshka moreover told me whatever was on his mind in a language the girls didn't understand, thereby implicating me in his hysteria too.
He said that they were stupid country girls, but I already knew that they were simple and dumb and boring. But I couldn't tell Alyoshka in so many words that those girls were in fact just what we deserved then — if we had deserved any better, we would in fact have been traveling with them. That was something I had always understood very clearly; it was an objective reality. Just as the fact that I was traveling at Jenny's expense was an objective reality.
In short, I had several fallings out with Jenny because of Alyoshka, during which she screamed that it was her first vacation in almost four years and that she had the right to rest in whatever way she liked, even if it only meant not being criticized every minute. "I don't care about your literature! Fuck your literature and politics!" she screamed. And for the first time in my life I heard her say, "I'm paying!"
I told her that there that was no question about her right to rest any way she liked, and that, yes, she was paying, but since she had taken me with her — I hadn't imposed myself on her — I had certain rights too…
We couldn't reach any agreement and drifted further and further apart. In the evenings, Alyoshka and I sat by the fire, and I made ukha, or Russian fish soup, and drank vodka from a huge bottle, while Jenny and Martha made a point of going to restaurants in town, first Japanese and then something else. We were virtually enemies.
Seeing the state of affairs, Alyoshka decided to go back to Los Angeles and stay there with a friend for a while, especially since he was also finding our health food diet expensive — he was a student, remember. Once more I found myself caught between two fires. I understood Alyoshka, who was complaining that he was running out of money too fast — I myself had scraped by for several years, and many of my more impoverished friends got by on very small amounts of money, so that it was possible to understand him. The standard of living of the millionaire's housekeeper was much higher than that of the student Alyoshka. But I could also understand Jenny's point of view when she complained to me that Alyoshka hadn't given her enough money, and that he obviously expected her and Martha to feed him at their own expense. If I hadn't known Jenny, I would have thought she was cheap, but she wasn't. It was just that we had all driven each other to the point of hysteria while rolling along the highways of California inside that tin can. We should never have gotten together in one group, or at least we shouldn't have taken Alyoshka with us. Then I would have been able to take an ironic tack with the girls and we wouldn't have become enemies…
I breathed a sigh of relief when we deposited Alyoshka on one of Los Angeles' little green streets. I embraced him, and he trudged away. The girls too were much happier when I got back to the Toyota, and I hoped the remainder of our trip would be more pleasant.
And so it was for a while. After leaving part of our things at the saloon in the redwood forest, we turned the nose of our Toyota northward and set off for the town of Carmel, where an automobile "concours d'élégance" was supposed to take place. Steven Grey and his whole family were there — he was an exhibition sponsor, of course.
God, how some people in the United States live! Racing along the Seventeen-mile Drive on our way to Carmel, I saw green golf courses with men and women dressed in linen golf clothes taking aim at the ball with their clubs or crossing the greens in little white electric cars. And I saw buildings surrounded by virtual fortress walls, one as big as the Mauritanian Citadel or the Novodevichy Convent in Moscow and perched on a cliff, so that it would have been possible to jump from the windows of that little house into the crashing Pacific below. Everywhere were walls of flowers, palm trees, grape arbors, and then again along the road the extraordinary dwellings of the rich receding into the distance.
The exhibition had been organized on the grounds of a very expensive hotel, on an unnaturally green golf course, one edge of which came unexpectedly and abruptly to an end right above the ocean. A happily murmuring, well-dressed crowd surrounded the automobiles, and as it moved the crowd changed its form, composition, and color from moment to moment like a kaleidoscope turned by the skillful hand of a child. The white, pink, and light blue summer dresses of the women, the white pants of the men, the handsome, respectable judges sitting at a table covered by a white tablecloth with the beard of Steven Grey flashing among them, the extraordinary automobiles themselves passing in front of the judges' table before returning once again to their assigned places at the exhibition — all of those things and people, that whole palette, struck me at once. I was lost in wonderment in much the same way, probably, that Robert was from his hallucinogenic mushrooms. I knew that it was that world that I belonged to, and not the world of our vulgar Toyota and Jenny and Martha, or even of the student Alyoshka.
Steven Grey's oldest son, Henry, came over to us, a tall boy dressed in white linen pants and white shirt and a dark blue club blazer and a tie of the same color, and wearing delicate glasses and a name tag with the word «sponsor» on it — tall, cultivated, and happy. I very quickly attached myself to him and followed him away, leaving my girls, who had suddenly grown much less sure of themselves, somewhere behind.
I walked among the cars and admired them. All around shimmered the hot California midday. Sitting in a white Rolls-Royce that according to its placard had been made in 1906 was, to my very great astonishment, a tall, erect, completely gray woman in an old-fashioned white dress, lace hat, and gloves reaching to her elbows. With the infrequent golden spokes of its wheels and its bicycle tires, the Rolls-Royce looked exactly like the carriage that took Cinderella to the king's ball. Its body was made of wood and painted white, and its doors and fenders were edged in gold.
Following my Virgil — Henry, that is — I walked through the exhibition grounds, passing by the most unbelievable structures, some more reminiscent of mausoleums and parthenons than contemporary automobiles, and others gleaming in gilt and lacquer and sometimes the size of small Victorian living rooms. Some of those extraordinary cars even seemed to have parts of churches or public buildings attached to them, and one marvel produced at the beginning of the century even had columns!
Standing nearby a cylinder-shaped racing car of the thirties under a gorgeous tree whose species I didn't recognize, and next to a small white table containing only two sweating glasses with a few ice cubes and the dregs of something rose-colored on the bottom, was a couple — a well-groomed man in a white linen suit who looked like a spoiled writer or actor, and a girl. The girl was like a creature come to me from one of my dreams — in a white hat with a black veil, and behind the veil a young, beautiful, shining face made uneasy by something. Pink stockings, a dress whose black skirt was covered by a transparent white one, and furs of some absurd kind — several little beasts, chinchillas perhaps, hanging from die upper part of her body, although I can't say whether they were actually hanging from her dress or stitched to her wrap — fool that I am, I just don't remember. Her outfit was obviously from the twenties, and the girl, nervously young and bold, belonged to that rare order of young women whom I liked unconditionally and had dreamed about in all my hotels and shabby apartments. She was the one I dreamed about, and not Jenny…
At that very moment Jenny herself touched me on the sleeve. I pretended I was looking at the ocean. The girls had found me all the same. They had, as it turned out, already said «hello» to Steven — the reason Jenny had come to Carmel in the first place. And they led me from the exhibition like a prisoner or some doomed person back to our vulgar Toyota and took me away, although I would have preferred not to go, would have preferred to stay there forever.
Sitting in the car I closed my eyes from time to time and tried to visualize the "girl in chinchilla," as I called her, although I wasn't at all sure that the little beasts she was wearing were in fact chinchillas — I had had no more chance in my life to learn to distinguish among furs than the majority of the population of India, poor people, has had to distinguish among the different kinds of meat — lamb from pork, say? — without ever tasting either one or the other.
The girl in chinchilla. Good Lord, I thought, how has it happened that I'm already thirty-five and have only twenty years or so left, and that I've got to fit into those twenty years all my pleasure and delights, and all the books I still have to write, and all my women? I don't have the girl in chinchilla! Even if she's mean, even if she is disgustingly silly, it doesn't matter, because she's beautiful and out of a fairy tale, and if I don't have her, then what am I? Nothing! I bowed down to beauty then, gentlemen. I was ready to fall down on my knees before beauty. Where did I, a boy from the ugly and boring outskirts of Kharkov, contract that infection, that love of beauty which makes life in this world a hundred times more difficult? Do you actually think it was easy for me with my love of beauty to live at the Hotel Diplomat, where the best-looking faces, or at least the healthiest, were the faces of pimps? Do you think that abasing myself before beauty as I did it was easy for me to fuck the Rumanian dancer Rena with her monkey face, or to ride in the Toyota with those crude girls?
I know, gentlemen, that you will immediately start vying with each other to tell me all about spiritual beauty and to explain to me that that very Jenny, the one driving the Toyota, possessed a beauty of the spirit, which I, miserably ambitious person that I am, as you'll say, don't understand. I do understand, but there was nothing, absolutely nothing I could do about it. Before physical beauty I was and am ready to fall down in the dirt and let it walk over me — its little feet won't soil me. Beauty makes the tears well up in my eyes. It's awful! I place beauty higher even than talent, for talent is given for the world's benefit, is it not? Talent is a sort of applied thing, whereas beauty is endowed at birth both for the world to admire and to be adorned by.
Then the last act began. In Los Angeles, a place I had no desire to go (but who pays the piper calls the tune, and Jenny was paying), we stayed with a certain Mark, who was a childhood friend of Jenny's older brother Donald. Mark was a large, slightly heavyset guy who always went around dressed in checked shirts and jeans. He had, in my opinion, not so much a California look as that of somebody from deep in the American hinterland, from the middle states, conservative and landlocked. Mark was the owner of a printing shop. He had, in other words, a certain affiliation with culture, and dreamed of opening his own publishing house someday. May God grant that he does.
Martha was at that time obsessed with the idea of moving to Los Angeles and was looking for a job, something I was required to take part in too. From morning on, Martha, Jenny, and I would set out on a tour of the city's hotels, trying to find Martha something at one of them. We went on like that for three days during a tremendous heat wave, and those drives around the hot, sweltering city among the crowds of people tremendously irritated me, as did the fact that we were staying with Mark and sleeping on the floor in sleeping bags. By the fourth day I couldn't take it any longer and in spite of my desire to remain on good terms with Jenny, I suggested returning to die redwoods. If, however, they wanted to stay on in Los Angeles instead, I would go back to New York, since I was tired of sleeping on Mark's floor and couldn't see any reason for it and was uncomfortable and bored.
To my amazement, Jenny agreed to go back to the redwoods again, but in order to thank Mark for his hospitality, the girls decided to have a party. The girls were so lackadaisical and tedious that even the sight of them plunged me into a deep depression, but it was in a California supermarket where we had gone to buy food and alcohol for the party that it finally dawned on me for the last time, so that I was left without the slightest doubt, just how great the distance separating us was. It's only in California that you find such vast supermarkets, so large that your friend at the other end of the hall looks like a tiny point. It was there in the supermarket that I suddenly saw myself in a huge mirror and was astonished to discover just how alienated and strangely isolated from them I looked.
Fat-assed with big calves and both dressed in skirts with ruffles that I myself had made (Jenny had lent Martha one of her skirts to wear), the two girls laughed and gesticulated crudely while waddling like geese down the aisle and loading the cart up with chickens and whole sections of greasy lamb ribs. Butchers' or bakers' wives? I thought to myself. I, on the other hand, dressed in a checked summer jacket, a cap (the same one from Paris with the label "The Enchanted Hunter"), white pants, fine boots, and glasses, and with an astonished look on my face, didn't fit with them at all, but looked like a creature from another movie perhaps, if you imagine that huge supermarket mirror as a motion picture screen. Precisely as if an editor in that same Hollywood, say, had in his haste mistakenly spliced into a sedate, realistic family movie about the American Midwest a few frames from a European existentialist film about an outsider. An editor who was drunk.
The party took place that evening, the guests arriving gradually. The first to appear was Jenny's older brother Donald. He obviously couldn't wait; a romance was apparently developing between him and Martha. The second person to arrive was another relative, Mark's brother, his younger brother John. It was clear that the exclusive source of their parents' imagination was the Bible, since they had given their children the names of the famous evangelists. I didn't ask them where Matthew and Luke were, but I wanted to. The last to arrive was a certain Peter, an aging failure whose life was brightened only by his recollections of the 1969 student disturbances at Berkeley. Whatever he was talking about, he would sooner or later make his usual leap into the past: "…whereas when I was at Berkeley…" or, "in Berkeley we had…" Peter reminded me of our own Solzhenitsyn with his eternal camps. Fuck you and your Berkeley, I thought angrily. You can't live on memories all the time. Do I start bullshitting every five minutes about "Russia… Now when I lived in Russia…"?
They all had their Berkeleys. Jenny's brother Donald, who was already about thirty, was trying to become a rock star — the world of the music business, the unjust, treacherous, sinister Berkeley of music. Brother John, short and stocky with a dark beard, was stuck on reincarnation. After we had smoked some grass, of which brother Michael had more than enough — he was as the owner of a printing shop the most successful among us — younger brother John sat down next to me and started methodically ramming reincarnation up my ass. If he wants his soul to transmigrate so he can once again waste his life in arguments about trashy ideas that two million Americans have lifted from glossy mass-market paperbacks, then he needs no better reincarnation than he has now, I appealed both to Nature and to God. I trust they heard me.
Later on there was dancing in the living room. I stuck my head out of the kitchen to take a look. Martha was lovingly intertwined with the lanky Donald. My Jenny was dancing with Mark of the invariable checked shirt, and both had taken off their shoes and were in their stockinged feet. I glanced out of the kitchen for just a moment, and although I'm sure that Jenny didn't see me, I did notice that the two of diem, Jenny and her brother's friend, were very well-suited to each other. Her face even had an entirely different expression than it did in my presence — completely calm and self-assured and cheerful. They stamped their feet in unison whenever that was called for, and no less harmoniously they stepped to the side or forward, whenever the music required them to do that. For some reason they reminded me of a painting by Brueghel — dancing peasants, I thought. And although Mark looked like a complete hick to me, his printing shop notwithstanding, I was still a little envious of the way they fitted together.
I went back into the kitchen, where Peter and John at once fell on me again with their Berkeley-reincarnation jumble, and since I haven't known for a long time what to do at parties, and was altogether lost at that one, the only recourse available to me was to get drunk, which is what I did, and with the addition of a goodly quantity of grass managed to get through the evening.
The next morning, suffering from a terrible hangover and the slowness of the girls — who weren't in any hurry to pack their stuff, whereas I, in proper soldierly fashion, had already quickly gotten mine together — I sat dully in the living room and examined Mark's books, the only thing there that interested me even remotely, and quietly bickered with Jenny and Martha. With equal bitterness on both sides, we climbed into the Toyota around noon and set off.
Once on the road, they chattered for hours on end about Mark, John, and Donald, and even about Peter, of whom in my opinion there was nothing to say except that he was an old loser. "And then Donald, Donald goes… Ha-ha-ha… And John, John comes over to me and he goes… Ha-ha-ha…" came to me in the back seat.
God placed you among simple people, Limonov, even though you have fled them your whole life, I thought, pushing myself into a corner and suffering from my hangover. "God!" I appealed to Him. "You saw how I tried to save Jenny from her friends, from the warm bog she's grown accustomed to, but she simply refuses to understand what's going on, and is boldly and resolutely going down the drain with her peasant friends. Even though she's better than they are, their society is swallowing her up," I said to God. To which God replied that all human beings are equal in His sight, and that He didn't appreciate my snobbish little jokes — that if Jenny spent her life in the company of Martha and Jennifer as a housekeeper or as a mama cow, that was for Him, God, no different than a life in which she became terribly intellectual and read every possible book and spoke with Alyoshka Slavkov about literature for six hours straight, in the end driving him into a corner — an intellectual Jenny peering derisively at Alyoshka through recently acquired glasses: "What was that, Alyoshka?"
"No, no," I said to God, "that's not what I meant. I know it's a primitive idea, but I still think that man makes his appearance in the world for just a short time, that he is, as a philosopher once said, a corpse on vacation, so that it's probably necessary to try to do your utmost and be exceptionally vigorous."
"Listen!" said God. "You go ahead and be vigorous — you're ambitious — but Jenny has a different agenda. If it doesn't interest you, it still interests her. And anyway, she tried to be vigorous. She has lived with you almost a year and a half, and you yourself know what a difficult person you are — I don't need to tell you that — and I just don't think she should try anymore. It's all clear now — actually it was all quite clear to Me at the very beginning, although not to you, of course: The two of you just don't make a couple. You've had your rest and regained your strength. Now it's time to give Jenny her freedom. She deserves it."
I didn't give Jenny her freedom; she took it herself. Haven't I been saying that she was a strong girl? We stayed in the redwoods for a while, reemerging every other day to go to the beach, and although the girls irritated me, we got along somehow. Remembering my conversation with God in the Toyota, I was lenient with them. In addition to everything else, a whole family of farmers had taken up residence in the saloon, real peasants this time — a high school friend of Jenny's and her husband and their two children. The husband, however, didn't refuse to sit around the fire with me in the evenings and drink, beer for him and vodka and beer for me, and we talked about crops, land improvement techniques, Soviet grain purchases, fishing, and horses…
I endured it all and looked forward to the day when we would finally have to leave: we had bought round-trip tickets with a specific return date. Cheap tickets. But early one morning, Jenny informed me with a yawn that after discussing it, she and Martha had decided to stay for another week, and that she had called Linda in New York the day before and warned her she would be delayed, and did I want to stay on with them too?
Good old honest Jenny. I could tell by her face and eyes that she was weary of me, that she wanted to stay on without me, and be free of me and my ironical, intellectual look that judged and criticized everything, of my spying look that made her uncomfortable, and spend the week at her own simple peasant amusements — in conversations about nothing at all, in gossiping and sitting with her legs spread as wide as she pleased, in dancing and prancing and gobbling down health food, in drinking her gallons of carrot juice along with handfuls of vitamins A, B, C, and D, and the like.
And so I said, "No thanks, Jenny, I need to get back. I've got unwatered plants at home, and I've got to finish my Diary of a Loser," the book I was working on then. And Lenya Kosogor, a friend of mine who was repairing X-ray machines for the B & B company, had promised to take me on as his assistant. I needed the money; my rent was coming up soon.
Jenny and Martha took me to the airport. It turned out there weren't any economy seats left on the plane, and they put me in first class for the same price with my beloved and hated big brothers. "Lucky man!" Jenny said, and I kissed her and then, like one caviar grain among the rest, I resolutely took my place in the dark passenger mass.
In the seat next to me was a large, sturdy, well-groomed fellow with his tie loosened who looked like Steven, and who spent the whole five hours of the flight shuffling through some obviously very important papers bound in a dark leather folder with a gold imprint — the image of a lady tenderly feeding breakfast to a huge cat through a doorway — while I read a greasy copy of Interview the whole time and bitterly thought that someday they'll have to do an interview with me, and their Bob Colacellos or even Truman Capotes can go fuck themselves — I'm still more interesting than the people they interview.
Jenny arrived in New York not a week but about ten days later. She didn't call me; I called her, or rather I called Linda to find out whether she had heard anything from California, and got Jenny instead. It seemed odd to me that she hadn't let me know immediately that she was back, and I even got upset about it. "But why," you ask, "why, Edward? You, an opportunist, got upset because your servant girl didn't call you when she got back from vacation?" I'm a live human being, gentlemen, and not an opportunist from a psychiatry textbook case. Besides, we opportunists and ambitious people are just as sensitive and egoistic as anybody else, and we suffer from life even more keenly than normal people do, and get nervous and depressed, only we still find the strength to take action when we need to.