It was obvious from all the signs that somewhere in the depths of the house Ghupta was at that very moment sticking his Burmese dick into Tatiana.
A couple of weeks later I was spending a Saturday evening at home with a large lady named Teresa whom I had been fucking the preceding night and all day Saturday, although without much success. Teresa had just returned to New York after living for more than ten years in Europe. I was seeing her for the second time in my life.
A writer with a very good figure and a face that was rather worn by the storms of life, Teresa was just about to leave, when the front doorbell suddenly rang, sounding, as it does in our house, like Big Ben or the Kremlin carillon. I wasn't expecting anybody that evening. Opening the door, I found Tatiana, dressed in black as usual and upset and a little overwrought.
I ceremoniously introduced the two ladies to each other, and since Tatiana said she wanted to talk to me about something very important, and Teresa had asked me to accompany her, I left the black apparition in the house and went with Teresa.
I accompanied her and then returned, smoking a cigarette.
When I got back, I couldn't find Tatiana at first; the house is a large one after all. I called to her, but she didn't answer. After wandering around the different floors for a while, I eventually found her lying on the bed in the guest room on the third floor. In the dark. For some reason she started telling me the story of her date with Ghupta and how he had fucked her, with all the details. While telling me, she held my hands in the dark and drank some wine, which she knew where to find in the house and had obtained during my absence.
Her hysterical story, told to me first in whispers and then in screams, ultimately came down to the fact that, not having bothered with birth control, this bold but careless Russian woman had of course gotten pregnant from the Burmese.
"Well at least it was nice for you — you enjoyed it, didn't you?" Edward asked.
"I did," she brazenly answered. "He's like an animal and trembled all over while he was fucking me. It was nice. He appreciates women — unlike you, Limonov."
I lay on my back and started laughing. What a bed of roses life is. After Jenny I had scoffingly decided I wasn't going to find happiness in love and stopped looking for it. I had served Jenny down to the last drop, a woman I didn't even love, a woman who in fact was not even to my taste, and who had broken me into little pieces.
I've long lived in the world as if in furnished rooms — I don't arrange it to my liking; I just use whatever happens to be available, women too. I've moved way beyond the passionate and crazy Edichka I was four years ago, whom I left to the world.
Tatiana was surprised to find I wasn't like Edichka at all. She said my book had made her cry, whereas I had, as you see, sold her to Ghupta for a jacket.
"You're an evil person, Limonov!" she sadly told me on the phone recently after I lost my temper with her over her paranoid delusions and told her that there wasn't anything between us except fucking and that she was a petite bourgeoise with neither money nor brains. Tatiana doesn't care about me either. She sees a writer in me, an author of books that make her cry. I interest her, but it's the interest of a consumer. She uses me to decorate her life. The same way that spices improve the taste of food, I make her life more interesting, a life that would otherwise be insipid. I, however, see Tatiana because I like fucking her, so that we in fact make very good use of each other, only I don't whine about it; I make jokes and smile and enjoy myself, while she whines and insists that I'm not "like Edichka." I already know I'm not.
I went to pee. I wasn't in the bathroom very long, but when I came out, Tatiana wasn't in the bedroom — one of her little jokes, her style. I called to her, looked for her, walked around the whole house, and then not finding her, I said the hell with it, and went out for a walk. I had almost been in the mood to fuck that unhappy, freshly impregnated woman, pulling up her black dress. She likes to go around in black. It didn't matter, I'd fuck her next time, or I'd fuck somebody else.
I always take the same route on my walks, going west on Fifty-seventh Street to Madison Avenue and then up Madison. I like rich Madison, particularly since you can always find beautiful women there. I walk without hurrying, gazing at the faces of pedestrians and examining the windows of the expensive stores, so familiar now that I've almost memorized them. I look at the faces of the men for the sake of comparison — to see if they're more interesting than mine. You'll say that it's difficult to be objective when comparing anything to yourself, but I try to be — the truth is important to me, and I want to find out if I have many rivals in my struggle. There aren't many. I see men who are much better looking than I am, but they lack that self-assured hardness, that peremptory decisiveness that appeared on my face around the time that I started working as housekeeper in the millionaire's house. It's strange, but the millionaire's house has given me a sense of assurance. Maybe I've been infected by Steven's nervous self-assurance and have acquired his confident habits — Steven who feels at home anywhere. That one time I went to a restaurant with him, I remember how he was the first to sit down, taking a seat in the most comfortable corner, the bastard, and putting his elbows on the table, comfortably and firmly in place and not giving a damn about anybody else. Maybe I did get it from Steven? I think, looking at the reflection of my face in a window. Before I was too embarrassed to stop on the street and look at my own face in the window; I was afraid of what other people might say. But now I don't care what they say, the pitiful failures, the suckers, the whole insecure and timid lot. "Don't trust anybody," I remember Linda saying. Don't worry, Linda, I never will. Why should I?
As you see, the buds of a new man, a new Edward, are urgently forcing their way out of me, pushing aside and supplanting the old one, just as green sprouts force their way into freedom from a potato, consuming it as they grow. Though flesh of my own flesh, a new Edward now walks along Madison Avenue.
The men, my rivals, understand something of this, I'm sure — there's probably a biological language that hasn't been forgotten even though it's been replaced in a way by words and speech. But a language of the body, of the eyes and facial muscles, still exists, doesn't it? In any case, before people used to ask me things on the street. You know, there's a special category of people who always want something from the rest of humanity — a quarter, a dollar, how to get to Lincoln Center, or just somebody to latch on to. But now nobody asks me anything; it's clear to them. My face obviously eloquently expresses everything for me: fuck all of you!
Behind Steven's confident appearance stand his millions. Behind mine is my newly discovered self. I don't need anybody; that's what I've discovered — not a mama, not Elena, not Jenny, not anybody. I'm strong enough to live proudly by myself. And there's no bitterness in my solitude, only joy.
I still look for the girl in chinchilla. If I should meet her on Madison, I won't recognize her of course, unless she's dressed the same way, but that doesn't matter. I'm looking for a type — that youthful charm, mystery, and inaccessibility, that alluring mixture of expensive prostitute and young girl, our civilization's highest achievement. When I write "prostitute," it's not at all judgmental; on the contrary. How many speeches have our kitchen mothers in aprons and slippers recited to us all with their hands on their hips, drumming into our heads over and over again the great value of gray, decent, virtuous women like themselves, of the kitchen slave, whom we at a certain time would have to, indeed were obligated to, bring into our lives. But I, thank God, have never believed in virtue and have never understood the value of those gray creatures. I have from childhood always been fond of holidays and have continually found myself in conflict with humdrum everyday life. As a child I would ask my mother, "Mama, why isn't it Christmas all the time?" So why don't you all go stick it, mama and papa, and neighbors in Kharkov and Moscow, and friends and companions, and residents of New York and London and Paris, and all of you who strain yourselves to the limits of your strength to support that heavy, gray, shapeless moral clod. Fuck all of you! I want to love whatever is beautiful, brilliant, sweet-smelling, and young. I don't want the decent, modest, and noble goose Jenny and those like her; I want the girl in chinchilla!
When I'm in a very bad mood, instead of Madison, I walk along Central Park South, where our city's most expensive hotels are drawn up in a line. In the spring or fall when it's raining, especially when it's raining, the entrances of the expensive hotels and restaurants present an unusual spectacle. Huge elegant automobiles drive up one after the other out of the mist, their chauffeurs obsequiously leaping out with big umbrellas, while absent-minded and imposing gentlemen assist their ladies from the dark warmth of the cars and fastidiously open their wallets to give the doormen a tip. Friends meet friends — they all know each other, these wealthy people — and at once kiss the little hands of their ladies there on the street, while a sudden breeze lifts the white scarf of one of die participants in that scene and carries to me, a modest passerby, the smoke of an expensive cigar and with it, the faint fragrance of warm feminine perfume.
I have in the millionaire's house the most expensive cigars and wines, wines that couldn't even be found, perhaps, in the cellars of the restaurants they frequent, and if I wish, I can open a bottle of Château Lafite Rothschild 1964 and drink it. But I'm a servant, and not one of their race. I know that sooner or later they'll accept me under the name of writer — it's inevitable. They won't be able to withstand my strength, and I'll descend on them and fuck their women, and their women will be wild about me and my masculinity and wickedness. That's right, my masculinity, for a wave of masculinity has for the first time in my life emerged on my face with its prominent cheekbones and taken it over. But how to survive the day and its humiliations; that's the hardest thing. I will endure it all, I think stubbornly, while examining the decked-out crowd around the Plaza — no, you won't have that pleasure, I won't go crazy and buy a Beretta from a pimp I know on Times Square, a little black instrument of death just like his, and bump off a congressman out of bitterness and hatred — a disgusting swine-faced congressman for all my sufferings, for all the sufferings of the pitiful failure Edward. No, I won't give you that pleasure. I will survive, survive and endure a great many more rejections from publishers, and many more years of empty evenings like this, and thousands of walks like today's. I will survive them and join you on the pinnacle as the most intelligent and malevolent. And not for your company, which I'm sure will be only a bit more amusing than that of Jenny and her friends, and not even for your women, but for myself. I want to prove to myself that I can. The main thing is that I respect myself.
Returning to my refuge in the millionaire's little house, I realize that for many years I've wanted somebody to be waiting for me at my door. And I carefully glance ahead, seeking the doorway of our house in the darkness to see if perhaps somebody might be sitting there and waiting for me. But there's no one there. And that is yet one more small proof of the fact that in this world nobody cares about the servant. But then I don't have to care about them either, the servant thinks.
Tatiana turned up again several days later under the pretext of needing to talk to me. Her usual story. I immediately stuck a large gin and tonic in her hand, since she's much easier to deal with after she's had something to drink.
"You're the one who did this to me, Limonov," Tatiana said. "You did it on purpose so I'd get pregnant."
Such a declaration came as a surprise even from her. "Wait a second, how old are you, girl? You're thirty-one and you've fucked a lot of men, or at least you say you have, and you enjoy it, don't you?" I said. Tatiana was silent. I continued. "How can you screw around without taking birth-control pills or any other precautions, hm? It's dumb. It's idiotic. And doesn't it seem a little abnormal to you to blame me because you're pregnant by another man? Would I blame you if I got some girl pregnant, the village idiot, say?"
Tatiana looked at me with her Spanish eyes and said stubbornly, "It's still your fault. I didn't want to go out with him, so why did you give him the phone?"
"In the first place, you always said you wanted me to introduce you to a rich man. Didn't you? Why did you ask then? And in the second place, if you didn't really want to go out with him, all you had to do was say 'no, " I said.
"But he was so sneaky about it, the animal," Tatiana continued, sipping her gin and tonic. "I had no idea he would attack me. We came back from a movie and he told me he wanted to take a shower and change and we would go to a restaurant, and then he took advantage of the moment and jumped on me. And he came inside me, the Burmese animal."
Thus did Tatiana lament, and I laughed uncontrollably. In the first place, I wasn't at all convinced she was pregnant. And I was also beginning to realize that getting into scrapes, both big and small, was for Tatiana a way of life.
"Tell me, where does he live?" she started asking me.
"Of course," I said, "I'll tell you right now; come on," and I took her by the hand up to my room on the elevator, and in spite of all her «noes» took her clothes off and started fucking her. At the height of that process, the phone rang, of course. Another time I wouldn't have picked it up for anything, but I was expecting a guest at the house, a Polish artist-friend of the boss's, and it could have been him calling from the airport. It wasn't. It was my boss, Steven, calling from God knows where to ask me to record a film about Vietnam on video tape for an elderly woman neighbor of his in Connecticut whose son had died in Vietnam. "It already started five minutes ago," the boss said in an apologetic tone.
Fuck the mother and her dead son! Why reopen old wounds? I thought, pulling my prick out of the warm Tatiana, putting on my pants and black shirt, and running downstairs to turn on the tape machine. They won't even let you fuck in this house! I inserted a sixty-minute cassette, pressed the record button, rode back upstairs on the elevator to fuck some more, and once again plunged my prick into the only slightly cooled cunt of Tatiana, who was almost in tears and kicking and howling something about the CIA and the KGB.
"And the CIA and KGB are all the same as you; they just sit there, the scum, and won't let me live either!" she screamed, although thanks to the action of my prick she soon quieted down and merely moaned, while I laughed and softly and derisively said to her, "What's that, you pregnant whore, what did you say?"
When Tatiana's fucking she has an enchanting look about her, and her body, though slender, is very soft and what's called well-fucked in Russian. An hour later, after coming on her eyes and forehead, and in her mouth, I ran downstairs again to change the cassette. I got there just in time — it was down to the last few feet. I put on a new one, pressed the record button again, and then went down to the kitchen for a drink. Sitting in the kitchen was Gatsby's step-brother Mr. Richardson with a couple of guests, I don't remember who. I drank a glass of vodka, and after asking Mr. Richardson to turn the television off in an hour — the film about Vietnam was exactly two hours long, and I could hear explosions and machinegun fire coming from it — I took the elevator back upstairs and grabbed Tatiana again. The pregnant whore lazily told me that she had just that minute come again after masturbating while I was downstairs. "You didn't think I was going to wait for you, did you?" she asked insolently.
"All right," I said, "that means you're still hot," and pulling her bottom to me — she was lying on her side — I stuck my prick into her crack, which was already beginning to dry. When after a little while we were both starting to enjoy it again, the abominable intercom buzzer sounded, the same one that Efimenkov had used to wake me up in the middle of the night. What the fuck is it now? I thought without climbing off of Tatiana. The buzzer didn't go off again, but there was soon a knock at the door.
"Edward, somebody's ringing die front doorbell," Richardson's voice said.
"Well, could you see who it is?" I yelled angrily.
So they wouldn't even let me fuck. I went downstairs a few minutes later — they'd upset my rhythm anyway and dragged me away from the excellent fountain inside that crazy woman — I went downstairs and met the new guest, Steven's artist-friend Stanislaw, gave him an extra key to the millionaire's house, and told him he would be staying in one of the children's rooms, the other rooms already being occupied. I even had some vodka with him, and then went back to my room, where I rolled and lit myself a joint — the crazy Tatiana didn't smoke — and then grabbed her again in earnest. I remember almost crushing her large soft breasts, which she was usually ashamed of, and angrily thrusting my prick into her. We didn't stop till five o'clock the next morning. And she didn't say anything more about being pregnant or about Ghupta and the CIA.
The first time I heard about Stanislaw was from Gatsby, and I remembered that unusual evening very well. Gatsby was sick and had decided to stay home — probably the only time in his whole life that the stubborn Gatsby actually gave in and stayed home. He'd been sick for a long time before that, three weeks maybe, and was coughing so badly that I had no doubt that he was in the final stages of tuberculosis and that very soon I'd be without an employer. He was dying but stubbornly holding on to his insane mode of life — drinking Scotch with five ice cubes, running outside without a coat on even though it was winter, and so forth. By that evening he was at the end of his rope. The antibiotics he'd been taking weren't doing any good, and he had stayed home and was sitting red-nosed and miserable in the kitchen clad in his warmest robe and in warm pajamas under the robe and eating some of my chicken soup — Nancy had called from Connecticut with the special request to eat soup without fail — and panting for breath he told me one thing and another. I was sitting across from him; for the first time he hadn't sent for anybody, since he was obviously embarrassed about his illness, but he still needed somebody to talk to. A peaceful kitchen scene.
Why did we start talking about Stanislaw? I had asked the boss what I should do with the picture that had been standing in the TV room since Jenny's time. Should I hang it there in the kitchen? Gatsby objected to that, to hanging the picture in the kitchen, since Stanislaw, the author of that, in my opinion, ugly work, or at least one that overwhelmed me with boredom whenever I looked at it (a moon over mountains — abstract, a mere howl), might suddenly turn up, and it would be awkward for him, for Steven, that is, if the author found his gift hanging in the kitchen. Okay. I didn't say any more about moving the picture, but Mr. Grey didn't want to drop the subject, and he told me about Stanislaw. Mr. Grey was amazed by him.
"He's such an old goat, it's unbelievable!" said Gatsby. "He even tried to grab Nancy once, Edward, if you can believe that! What an old goat!"
I could believe it. Gatsby hadn't said what, what part of Nancy's body, Stanislaw had tried to grab — maybe it was awkward for him to tell his butler that Stanislaw had tried to grab his wife's ass? Or had in fact grabbed it, for what else could "tried to grab" mean? That he was merely thinking about it? How could Gatsby know what Stanislaw was thinking?
"He was visiting me in Connecticut, and he tried to grab Nancy," Gatsby continued delightedly. It was obvious that even if he didn't like what had happened, Stanislaw's audacity was very much to his taste. I didn't ask Gatsby how he reacted — did he pretend he hadn't noticed the satyr? I don't think he would have been reluctant to punch Stanislaw in the jaw, but he did have a certain respect for audacity in other people.
"He even went after Jenny," Gatsby continued, "and she complained to me about it. I said to him, 'Stanislaw, please, don't terrorize my employees. "
Steven obviously used the word «employees» for my benefit. Telling the story to someone else he would probably have said "my servants."
"He's one of the Polish mafia," the boss continued. "You know, all those Polanskis and Kozinskis…"
"And Brzezinskis," I added, and Gatsby laughed.
"An unbelievable old goat!" Gatsby summed up.
After such a testimonial, I was eager to make Stanislaw's acquaintance and observe him in action whenever he came to our house.