At the end of April Henry came down from Connecticut accompanied by a dozen other boys and girls, his mother, Nancy, having called beforehand to warn me of their arrival and ask the butler Edward to look after the young people. As it turned out, there was going to be a children's costume party at our house to celebrate the end of the school year. Henry planned to shoot at the party, the final scene of a movie he was producing and in which he had one of the main roles. As you see, Henry was playing at being his father: Papa had been a producer once, and Henry had turned to the art of film too.
The children arrived as if on elephants in several large cars daubed with paint, and cheerfully started dragging their stuff into the house: costumes, a movie camera, bags, candles, blue lights, colored paper… Along with all the other stuff there was even a large lemon tree in a tub. Henry ceremoniously introduced me to the other children — he was a polite boy. Their girls, the housekeeper remarked to himself, might easily have been mine. Some of them were even very pretty, and inasmuch as they all went to an exceptionally privileged and expensive private high school, they were all obviously from very good families; their faces were cultivated. Their school had been founded by the famous arms manufacturer Mr. X in order to atone to humanity for his sins. It would be interesting to count the number of people who perished from his primitive but reliable death machines before he was suddenly overcome with remorse and the desire to make amends. I've always been touched by innocent monsters like Mr. X, whose number includes the inventor of dynamite, Mr. Nobel, and the great altruist Mr. Sakharov, one of the fathers of the Soviet hydrogen bomb.
Apologizing with elegant good manners, the well-bred Henry told me his mama had said he could invite ten people or so to the party, "but we started counting, Edward, and there will be about fifteen or maybe even more, since if you don't invite somebody they'll be offended for the rest of their lives. I realize that means extra responsibility and work for you, Edward, but we'll be very quiet and afterward we'll pick up the whole house. Only please don't tell Mother, all right?"
Well, whatever I am, I'm not an informer. Seeing their rather meager supplies of alcohol, I even gave them a box of Corvo ripped off from Steven, and a couple of bottles each of whiskey, gin, and vodka, for which they were extremely grateful. I had the key to the wine cellar, and although the cellar is never locked, this time I locked it — the kids might get drunk and break all the expensive bottles.
To be honest, I looked forward to their party with great impatience. The fact is, I'd taken into my head the usual servant's desire — to fuck one of their girls. A little high-school girl, a blonde. To smoke some grass and then fuck her. A desire that was, if you think about it, more social than sexual. Taking one of their girls was the same as taking something from the world of my employer, as stealing something that didn't belong to me, a servant — as revenging myself, so to speak. Sex, as you've probably already guessed, gentlemen, was the only means of revenge available to me. I thought that in the confusion of the party, where, at a minimum, there would be twenty or more girls, I'd be able to get myself one of them. I was a man who knew what he wanted after all, whereas the most that boys of sixteen or seventeen would dare would be to grab a girl's ass, and so the evening would pass. Even boys of their generation — they weren't from the South Bronx or even Brooklyn, but the children of wealthy parents — were undoubtedly more «spoiled» in words than in action. So that while helping them set the table and make Sangria and screw in their blue light bulbs (they didn't ask for my help; I offered it in order to ingratiate myself with them), I was beginning to get excited and looked forward to the evening with impatience.
Henry diplomatically asked me if I planned to go out that evening. "No," I said, "I prefer to stay at home. If somebody calls the police, Henry — not that they will — there will at least be one adult here with you." Henry said in a sincere tone that he would be glad to have me to join them, and maybe he was sincere.
And then the children-guests began to arrive. And what sort of guests didn't Henry have: sullen beanpoles twice my size in leather jackets with safety pins stuck in their ears and the faces of murderers, and polished boys with depraved faces and painted lips who were dressed in frock coats, bow ties, and top hats and carrying walking sticks — several such boys arrived together — and ironical young intellectuals in sweaters and glasses. One very beautiful boy came dressed in a wig, a black dress, and black stockings. And there were very solid and hefty round-headed lads in sturdy shoes and ties, in whom I saw large but unimaginative businessmen twenty years later — the owners, say, of supermarkets, or at least something connected with food. There was also a rosy-cheeked, red-haired fop in black patent leather shoes, striped trousers, and a broad white tie under an exceptionally lively and comic face, on whose arm affectedly reclined a slender, dark-haired little beauty wearing what were obviously her mother's furs.
To my dismay almost all the children arrived at the beginning in couples, boy and girl, but a half hour later what were simply noisy groups began to show up, and among them I was pleased to see several girls who apparently didn't belong to anybody. I had a strange feeling in that crowd, which seemed to grow and grow, so that even though there were already a lot more than fifteen people there, the flow of guests still didn't end. I felt that they weren't adolescents or children at all. I certainly didn't feel that they deserved to have any kind of allowance made for them — this was the normal world, and they were normal people. And just as in our adult world, they had their own hierarchy which duplicated our adult one precisely.
The guests were met outside the door by two guards, two large, powerful guys. Henry had dressed them in gold embroidered Persian vests which they wore directly over their naked torsos. Henry had found the vests in the basement, where we have dressers taking up an entire wall for storing old things. The muscular fellows were Henry's bodyguards, so to speak, and he ordered them around in every possible way and called them "my slaves," which they permitted without batting an eye. As you will see later on, "my slaves" were part of the setting of the movie they were making and connected with Henry's role in it — he was playing a certain Mostello, a modern Mephistopheles from die state of Connecticut. But apart from the film, those two guys with their simple faces really were his slaves and bodyguards and at his beck and call. I don't know whether they were from poorer families, or whether Henry simply lorded it over them thanks to his intellect and refinement, but I was present for one very unattractive little scene, gentlemen. Before the party actually started, it became clear they didn't have enough sugar for the sangria, mine already having been used up, since they were making an immense vat of it. Henry was paying for everything of course. Taking some money out of his wallet, he dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the floor, on purpose as it seemed to me. Instead of bending over to pick it up himself, he carelessly said to the older of his two bodyguards, "Pick it up!" and the latter obediently picked up the money and ran out to get the sugar dressed in nothing but his pants and Persian vest, from which his powerful shoulders bulged like stones.
Henry-Mephistopheles was playing his papa. He of course didn't have Papa's brutality — Papa humiliated people right and left. He used his wife's lover, the meek opportunist Carl, virtually as a chauffeur, and once in the kitchen in Linda's and my presence had irritably refused to drop Carl, who was sick with a cold, off at his house, although it was on his way. Carl, even though he didn't feel well, had just raced over with a car at Gatsby's request — had driven over one hundred miles with a temperature in order to bring an automobile to his employer and benefactor. The twenty-dollar bill dropped on the floor by Henry completely corresponded in the children's world to the adult situation that had also taken place in the kitchen.
The children gradually spilled into all the crevices and rooms in the house. On the door of my room the farsighted Henry had hung a sign with the words, "Edward's room! Do not Enter!" I circulated among the youths dressed in white sailor's jeans, a black shirt, and boots, and anxiously looked around. I wanted to pick out a girl ahead of time, or even better, several objectives, however tentative, so that after having had something to drink and smoke (in the living room several enthusiasts were delightedly adjusting the hookah which hangs on the wall there), I would then know which target, or targets if there were several, to aim for. I finished my preliminary survey in half an hour, visiting all the rooms and standing for a while among various groups of our merry and lively American youth, but with depressing results, I'm sorry to say.
No, I can't take that one, I thought to myself while looking over a rather pretty girl dressed as a nineteenth-century American lady and even carrying a lace parasol in her hands. A tow-haired guy in a musketeer's outfit kept putting his arm around her waist possessively… And not that one either, I thought, transferring my gaze to another objective, a ridiculously skinny girl-cameraman, who looked like Jenny's sister Debby and had come with the boy who was to be their director. They had slept together the night before, I think, and came into the kitchen in the morning in their pajamas, blushing and ridiculous — sixteen-year-old lovers. That one? A perfect woman of the highest class, well-bred, mysterious, with her dark hair piled up above a beautiful clear face whose features resembled those of the young In-grid Bergman, was looking directly into my eyes with a brazen and provocative gaze. How did this miracle turn up at an adolescent ball? I thought. Is she really only fifteen to seventeen like all the others? That can't be. She not only looks more grown up; she is — a young woman and not a stump, not a pimply American female teenager swollen on doughnuts and sweet rolls or a big-chested, big-assed, and leggy cheerleader, the class beauty, but a young woman in fact, the kind they show in films about the English aristocracy. The stubborn, mad, and willful youngest daughter of the family, the one who reads philosophy books and wildly races around in fast cars. You see, reader, what vulgar stereotypes I think in, what banal myths nourish my servant's imagination.
I was intimidated by the stranger. Cold sweat even broke out on my servant's brow — she seemed so terribly unattainable to me — and the most frightening thing was that I realized she belonged to the same breed as the girl in chinchilla! Around the stranger, who had only just arrived, swarmed all the best of their boys. Even Henry himself came downstairs in a tuxedo and bow tie, and opening his arms wide like his daddy, greeted her and enclosed her in an embrace — behavior and gestures copied to the last detail from Gatsby the elder. I'd like to be in Henry's place and cover her in embraces myself, I thought enviously. Henry greeted her in French, if you can believe it, and the stranger answered him in French too in a voice that was strangely deep for someone so young. Fucking aristocrats.
My spirits sank. Just as they had when I was the same age they were now — a loss of strength and resolve in the face of beauty. Most often those attacks of uncertainty and stupefaction had happened at school dances. I always wanted the very best girl at the dance, naturally, and of course I always stood in the darkest corner of the hall, leaning against the wall and tormenting myself over my cowardice. No, I knew my value, I knew I was "good looking" — the girls had told me. But beauty plunged me into a condition of stupor and numbness. When I finally overcame it, it was already too late — some insolent clod with a budding moustache had already taken my girl by the hand and was telling her inspired lies. Neither then nor now did I doubt for a moment that I was far more interesting and alive than the young or adult clods who make up at least ninety-five percent of the masculine society of any dance, but what difference did that make? It's true that now, aware of the shameful sin of cowardice in myself, I have devised certain measures to overcome it. Thus, I'm fully aware that beautiful women plunge not only me into terror and stupor, but many others, and that they fall to only the boldest, usually the first of the boldest, and I therefore try to be the first. I usually cross the hall or living room with my eyes closed and in a state of utter terror, the main thing being to approach, to overcome the distance between you, and then as soon as I open my mouth, everything falls into place. It doesn't make any difference what you talk about in such a situation — the main thing is simply to emit friendly noises, since in essence we're just highly organized animals. Dogs sniff each other in situations like that or wag their tails.
The swine Henry didn't even introduce me. He had introduced me to a mass of completely useless girl-goblins, but he led that treasure upstairs to the living room without even a glance in my direction to get her some sangria. Walking past, the stranger continued looking at me in the same brazen way — no, no, it didn't just seem to me that she was looking at me; she actually was, which isn't surprising really, I being an adult man and she, despite her age, an adult woman, and the two of us face to face in that crowd of children. As she climbed the stairs, her young ass flexed under her black dress like the prancing rear of a fine young horse — forgive me for this cavalryman's comparison, gentlemen, but that's the way it really was.
After hanging around on the first floor a while for decency's sake, I made my way upstairs after Henry and the stranger. I was sure nobody was watching my behavior, so why the silliness? It was my natural cowardice before beauty that made me linger; when I'm afraid, you see, I immediately remember the proprieties. God knows what was going on upstairs. The children were sitting on the floor around the hookah and on the couches in a Frankensteinian blue and green light cast by the blue and green light bulbs they had screwed into Papa Gatsby's numerous lamps. Despite the fact that the living room in Gatsby's house is exceptionally large, it was covered end to end with a layer of adolescent flesh. They looked very happy, with contented faces all around, and why not — there weren't any adults at the party.
"Edward! Edward! Come on over here!" the children sitting around the hookah called out to me. Among them were several youths who had come down by car with Henry from Connecticut, and they already knew me, especially the boy-director and his ridiculous girlfriend. The general attention of the group fell on me for a moment when they called out. Stepping over torsos and bodies and across the legs and arms of the youths, the housekeeper made his way to the hookah where the children moved closer together to make a place for him on the floor. Someone stuck the flexible tube with a pipe stem at its tip into my hand. The smoking master was the same boy in the wig and dress and black stockings.
I inhaled with pleasure. Their hashish wasn't bad, not bad at all, and after taking his drag, the housekeeper grasped the pipe stem in his hand and passed it on to the person sitting next to him in the circle. Nearby the same mocking eyes were gazing at me. She was sitting on one of our rocking chairs, and ensconced at her feet was a handsome red-haired lad, the boy-actor who had the lead role in their film, the schoolboy Faust who is tempted by Mephistopheles-Henry. The kid was the very image of sleepy insolence and was hugging one of the young legs of my stranger and stroking it. A "youthful libertine," I thought with hatred, and passing her the stem and its hose, I smiled slightly at her from down on the floor. She smiled back — not too energetically, but mysteriously from a distance, a fleeting smile…
Events hurtled on at a catastrophic pace after that, or, to continue the equine comparisons, like lathered steeds. Actually, there weren't any particular events to speak of. The housekeeper smoked the gratis hashish to the point where he lost all sense of reality, but they were all stoned without a doubt. These were wealthy children, gentlemen, and they didn't run out of hashish that night. The boy in black stockings tirelessly took out one piece after another from a little metal box. He was already chronically stoned and in a good state, sitting with his dress pushed up nearly to his armpits and his legs spread wide the same way that Jenny used to spread them while sitting, and you could easily see his quite impressive organ. He was a large boy, and from time to time I looked at his organ with dull interest. The stranger and I–I didn't know her name since no one had introduced me to her — passed little smiles back and forth, though somebody later squeezed in between us, and then somebody else's shoulder in a green tunic got in the way — it was a costume ball, remember — and I saw her, or more accurately I saw part of her dress, only through the spaces between other people's torsos and heads. Three boys were sitting at her feet now like pages at the feet of a Beautiful Lady, to which devotion she was in fact entitled.
"Our hookah crowd," as I came to think of it, continually changed form, with new faces turning up and leaving and then returning again, but its nucleus remained stable: the boy in the wig and black stockings, the boy director, the smaller of the two slaves, and me. We were only a small part of the noisy and excited sea of children-youths. Near the gigantic punch bowl of sangria (if only Jenny could have seen what a vessel of sin we made of the proper, domestic ceramic bowl she usually mixed her bread dough in) was its own group, a very active one — much more active than ours. They had, I believe, ultimately poured into their sangria all the whiskey and vodka I'd given them and added even more sugar — children, like the elderly, are fond of sugar. Later, after the party was over, Olga tried but was unable to restore that part of the floor; the sugary spots on it had apparently eaten through the parquet.
It was impossible to make out anything coherent in all that noise, smoke, and semi-darkness. The conversations all came down to something like, "Well, how do you feel, man?" "Great, man, incredible, I never felt better in my life!" "Nice hash, man!" "Yeah, great hash!" followed by pointless laughter and various observations that weren't funny to bystanders but that left us rolling on the floor. You must be stoned yourself to appreciate the pointless gaiety of people who've been smoking hashish or marijuana. "Great hash!" The well-to-do children around me spoke with the intonation and slang of the residents of the Hotel Diplomat, or at least they tried to.
The boy-director and his girlfriend had already undertaken to fulfill their primary responsibilities — they'd started shooting their film. I forgot to mention that they were supposed to shoot an «orgy» scene, a scene, that is, with Faust sunk in debauchery and consuming his life in the company of courtesans in a place (the millionaire's house?) he has been brought to by Mephistopheles-Henry to be shown the world of pleasure. My stranger was included in the «orgy» scene too, and was among the first to be filmed, with the boy playing the main hero sitting at her feet. The stranger obviously evoked in the youngsters the same timidity she did in me. Later the children put on some of Jenny's Arab music, and the two girls dressed in something like Arab costumes started twisting like snakes not far from our hookah, for which purpose we were asked to move temporarily. The girls were depicting the houris of paradise, while the boy Faust sat in a lotus position, smoked hashish, and indolently watched them with "languor in his gaze." They'll have their film, I thought, but what will I have?
The party gradually started to break down into groups in the way that all parties do — some people left or went out for a while, and other couples started quietly disappearing. I doubt they all went off to fuck in the darker recesses of that house entrusted to me, but many went off nonetheless. My stranger disappeared from the living room for a while, stayed somewhere, and then came back again. Maybe I needed to get away from that damned Oriental poison and the boy in the black stockings with whom I already shared an understanding that was not merely wordless but even motionless — a kind of thought exchange across the distance separating us by means of brain waves — but cowardliness and hashish had me pinned on my back, and I lay there without twitching. Well, what could I say to her, I thought, well what? She already knows I'm a servant — somebody's probably already told her. I had seen her and Henry and some of the other children talking about something and glancing in my direction. If only she weren't so stunning, I thought, then I honestly wouldn't be so afraid. If she were just a little worse and not so gorgeous. In short, I started having more and more of a complex about it and even found myself sitting there by the hookah immersed in melancholy thoughts about how, in comparison to them, I was already old and lonely, and that I didn't have any connection at all with that crowd of children. None whatsoever. They were separate, and I was separate.
I decided to rouse myself and stood up, casting a glance over the field of battle: the children had significantly diminished in number. Maybe they had gone downstairs, for all I knew. It was the first time I had stood up all evening, and my legs were numb and slow to obey me. It was only when I stood up that I realized how stoned I was.
It was force of habit alone that allowed me to move and not drop off to sleep or start vomiting. I decided I needed to move around and find somebody to drag off to bed. Even if my condition wasn't the most ideal for lofty philosophical discourse and was even doubtful for normal articulate conversation in any language, including the Russian language, gentlemen, it was for the bedroom quite appropriate and even desirable. And I went downstairs, making the rounds like a night watchman and housekeeper and checking every room along the way.
Everywhere were couples, paired-off teenagers in various stages of intimacy. True, there was only one instance where an indisputable sexual act was in progress, and that in the sanctum sanctorum, Steven's office, where one of the leather-jacketed beanpoles — I've always thought they're the most gallant — turned his flushed face toward me and grinned. Sticking out from under his arms and hanging on either side of his crew-cut head were the smooth legs of a maiden in high heel spikes. I couldn't see the young creature's head, since it had been shoved by the rascal's prick well into the corner of Gatsby's green couch, and only a piece of her rumpled skirt and a terribly indecent, very naked maidenly thigh was visible.
My turn around the rooms depressed me even more. It would have been better if I hadn't made it and had stayed by the hookah with the boy in black stockings who was now fucked up to the point of complete befuddlement, and smoked until I collapsed. More than half the kids had disappeared, and those that remained were energetically abandoning themselves to sin, or were well on the way to doing so, while I shuffled like a foolishly grinning old uncle among the young couples — as I clearly remember seeing myself at the time. Besides, I hadn't seen any unattached girls, in fact not even one female figure by herself. I'd let the moment slip by and hadn't used my device for outwitting my own cowardice — hadn't gone to anyone first. After all, there were a lot of good-looking girls among the children, I swore to myself. Why are you such a blockhead, servant Edward, why didn't you find yourself a nice little pussy, young and warm? They were friendly enough with you and didn't treat you like a servant, did they? It was obvious Henry had boasted to his friends that they even had a housekeeper who was a writer. What the fuck were you wasting your time for? I reflected. You're a weak little soul. A feeble little jerk, and you call yourself an opportunist! I insulted myself mercilessly.
To top it all, as I was about to take the elevator from the first floor back up to the living room, it passed me on its way down to the basement, and to my horror I saw in the elevator's round little window my stranger and somebody else in a white jacket. My heart sank. They're on their way down to the basement, I said to myself and then was lost in thought for a few moments, struggling to understand what was happening. Why would a man and a woman go down to the basement? Occasionally for the sake of something exotic, I had fucked a few of my girls in the stuffy warmth of the basement. I had in fact fucked them in all the different parts of the house, in my boss's bathroom, on the stairs, and once in the TV room while watching late-night horror films on our huge screen. But that's me. It's all right for me, I thought. My attitude toward my own sexual activity is easygoing. But it was extremely painful to me for some reason that my stranger — and I considered her mine, my young grace, my girl in chinchilla — was going down to the basement to fuck with the white jacket. I imagined that spectacle as something obscene and awful, which is why I stood pondering a while by the elevator, urgently trying to find a way out of the situation. There wasn't any, as it turned out; I couldn't ward off the terrible thing that was about to happen. And what could I have done, anyway? I couldn't have followed them down to the basement, and even if I had, what could I have said? I imagined how that scene would look, and if they were fucking, then what? He obviously would turn his head toward me and grin the same way the leather jacket in Steven's office had, and she would do the opposite — she would turn away… No, it would be even worse — that provocative young whore would undoubtedly turn her face toward me and gaze at me in an ironically mocking way while the white-jacketed guy fucked her.
At that instant the elevator passed me again on its way up, and immersed in my thoughts as I was, I didn't notice whether they, my stranger and the white jacket, were in it, or whether somebody had called the elevator from one of the upper floors and it had gone up empty. Attempting to introduce some clarity into my world, I plodded upstairs and went into the living room, but the only people there were a few remaining Sangria drinkers and the stubborn boy in stockings who was still sucking like a leech on the hookah and lost in smoke. The distraught and angry housekeeper tossed off a couple of glasses of sangria one after the other and sat down with the boy. Exactly, they're in the basement, I thought, where else could they be? The only hope that the stranger wasn't down there was provided by the fact that when I went up to the third floor, the elevator wasn't there anymore. They had either proceeded up or had taken it back down, so that it was possible to think, say, that they had taken it up to the fifth floor and had gone out on the roof. They are standing romantically on the roof holding hands and looking at the stars, I consoled myself. But through the hashish smoke the devil gloatingly whispered to me, "Holding hands, little Russian fool, little Ivan Shitson? They tumbled onto the old mattress in the basement a long time ago, the one you yourself put in the farthest corner by the window behind the old ironing machine next to the hot water pipe, and the white jacket is fucking her dog-style with his robust prick, and if the children do lack sensitivity sometimes, they aren't without vigor — adolescents can always get it up…"
Ugh, how stupid! I suddenly thought, coming to my senses. I, a cultivated person who only last night was working by the sweat of my brow on a new book and who is usually possessed of bright, clear thoughts, am sitting here like a suffering piece of meat with some young nymphomaniac on my mind. How fucked up, I thought, losing my temper, and rousing myself once again, I drank some more Sangria and resolved to talk to die boy in black stockings.
I had overestimated myself, gentlemen. I was already in a state of utter weightlessness, and even though I was thinking more or less clearly, albeit not what I should have been thinking about, I was speaking the most complacent rubbish, which I realized at the time, although there wasn't anything I could do about it. I attempted to present myself to the boy in stockings as someone very important. I told him in confidence that I was not only a housekeeper but… but the bodyguard of Gatsby himself and tonight of Henry as well. It was an invention so extreme that I myself grimaced at its tastelessness, while telling it to the boy in stockings as we dully sat shoulder to shoulder on the floor. But the boy in stockings was in no better condition that I was, thank God, and merely said, "###," and then fell silent, continuing to suck on his pipe. For all I knew, he was at that moment crossing the desert with Lawrence of Arabia.
"Wealthy people in our time can't manage without bodyguards," I continued, talking more to myself than to the boy in stockings. "The many instances of kidnapping that have occurred on the territory of the United States have forced Steven Grey to hire me," I said, and then to my own surprise added, "I received special training when I was in the Soviet Union," thereby giving a certain piquancy to my own biography. The boy in stockings could take my words any way he wished — that I had perhaps been a dissident back home in Russia, or perhaps an even more alluring prospect opened before him — that I had graduated from a school for spies…
Completely mesmerized by my own fantasy, I suddenly added right out of the blue in a nervous voice that I had a gun, and then was silent. The boy in stockings nodded off with the pipe in his hands. Perhaps he and Lawrence were now attacking, with sabers bared, somewhere in their Arabia.
Into the room walked a very drunk and, as it seemed to me, very lonely Henry, who informed me in an unsteady voice that he was going to crash. I at once became more lively; remembering that I was his bodyguard, I leapt to my feet, grabbed the unsuspecting Henry, and dragged him off to his father's bedroom, on the door of which, as on the door to my room, we had a sign reading, "Do not enter! Master bedroom." I pulled off Henry's jacket, undid his bow tie, took off his shoes and the rest of his domes, and put him to bed. He muttered something in protest, but I was already overcome by the zeal to serve, and I put him to bed whether he wanted me to or not. I turned off the light in the room and went out, closing the door behind me. Henry plaintively tried to explain something to me in the darkness, but I didn't listen. Trusty bodyguard that I was, I took my seat by the bedroom door and remained in that position for a while, how long I don't even know.
When at last I emerged from my confused hashish-induced reverie, I found that the house was quiet. Looking into the living room, I saw that even the boy in stockings was asleep, his head resting on our hard Arabian cushions and the hookah's snake dropped from his hand. The others had obviously all gone to bed long ago. Like a proper servant, I decided to make a last turn around the house before going off to bed myself, and I went downstairs to the first floor. Several people had fallen asleep right on the floor and on the two couches in the solarium. I quietly passed through to the front door, which of course wasn't locked. I locked it and turned off the stairway light — one switch turns off all the lights in the hallway and stairs from the first floor to the fifth — and then took the elevator back up to my own fourth floor. Quiet snores and moans came from the fourth-floor guest bedroom.
I turned the knob of the door to my room and stepped into the darkness.
"Don't turn on the light!" a woman's low voice said to me. On my bed I made out a dark figure and the dim glow of a cigarette.
Now it already seems to me sometimes that it wasn't her, but some other girl I hadn't paid any attention to all evening, but looking into the darkness then, there wasn't any doubt in my mind. The blinds had been let down, which is something I never do, gentlemen. If I slept with them down, my boss Steven Grey would never get his coffee in the morning. The blinds had been let down of course by that young seeker of adventure.
"Come over here!" she said softly. The coal of her cigarette moved downward and broke into little pieces at the level of my night table. She had put out her cigarette, crushing the butt on the candlestick that stood there. I went over to my bed in the direction of her voice. I already understood what was up, quickly grasping, despite the abundance of hashish and sangria in my system, that this intoxicated young person, having read her share of erotic literature, had undoubtedly decided to broaden her experience, to experience new sensations, and get herself laid by a servant. We all think in clichés. Just as I had unconsciously sought a girl for myself there in classic cliché terms, wishing as a servant to revenge myself on «them» and fuck one of «their» girls and stick my prick into a warm crack belonging to one of "them," she too was playing out a classical variant. Lords and ladies, after all, had always fucked their servants, young barons traditionally humping their housemaids, and fifteen-year-old girls traditionally gazing with watering mouths at the pants of the butler or gardener. Here's a bold one, I thought in awe of her, much bolder than me, even though she had pronounced her "come hither" with a super-fluous severity, a little bit too nervously, but a very bold seeker of adventure all the same.
I went over to her. Though her face was hot, her lips were strangely cold — she was, no doubt, very excited, almost breathless, but in spite of her excitement and probably with a sinking heart, she was doing what she wanted to. Finding my face in the darkness, she stroked it with her hand, then moved down to my neck and chest. Cool young hands, I thought. I already knew what she was going to do. In a time when we derive all our knowledge from TV and the movies for the most part, I knew that she was going to unbutton my shirt, and yes, as if obeying my thoughts, she did unbutton it — how many similar episodes had I seen in my life, in both the movies and reality. Anyway, what do you want; it's impossible to think up something completely new in that realm, especially if you're only sixteen or seventeen. However interesting a little tart she was, my own experience was a great deal vaster.
While I was reflecting, the young scamp had already unbuttoned the strap on my white jeans and was kissing my belly. Her warm hair tickled my stomach and shut off my thinking mechanism, thank God, and it suddenly became very pleasant and agonizingly suspenseful, since I was anticipating that she would any second touch my prick, with her hand. And then (and the idea was even terrifying) take my prick, which had suffered so much in the course of the evening, into her clean, maidenly little mouth. Where it's nice and warm, the thought of an old libertine flashed weakly through my mind.
You're thinking, gentlemen, that the young creature departed just a bit from the TV and movie version? Not at all. She touched my prick with her hand, and she took my organ into her mouth and diligently started sucking it, at the same time stroking and pulling my balls with her other hand as one of her older friends had perhaps taught her to do or she'd picked up from some trashy pornographic novel, the dirty little rich girl. The little tart.
I stood in front of her and writhed with pleasure, holding her for some reason by the ears, by her little warm ears, and from time to time moving her head onto my prick. She helplessly took my prick into her throat, but after two or three deep swallows, she started coughing and had to lick and suck just the head of my organ in order to recover her breath. Cocksucking is a great art, and not many master it. Try, do the best you can, I thought, rhythmically moving her head onto my prick. Her slippery little ears tried to slip out of my hands, but I held on to them by their tips, by their lobes.
She really wanted me to come so she could swallow the pungent semen of a Russian servant. Or whatever kind of pleasure and unbelievable humiliation it was that she was seeking. Maybe to smear my semen all over her beautiful face. And then to record in her secret diary, hidden under the rug far from the sight of mama and papa, that she had swallowed a whole "glass of the semen of an Eastern barbarian," or something in that spirit — "a glass of fresh semen." I'd bet an arm and a leg she wrote the episode down.
I didn't come from her cocksucking, though it did feel incredibly good, her enthusiasm more than making up for what she lacked in technique. Anyway, she smelled so charming, with young perfume of some kind and her bare arms and face gleaming in the darkness, that I was even beginning to find something mystically holy in that scene and imagine it as a kind of religious ritual. I was afraid to extend my thoughts about the two of us, lest I lose my erection, and I didn't lose it, but I couldn't come either. Besides the fact that it's always hard for me to come from cocksucking, I had swallowed so much hashish smoke that an orgasm was simply impossible, and realizing that we agreed to stop. I grasped her tender chin in my hand and stroked her neck, wanting to undress her and lay her down, but suddenly jumping up, she took my hand and said, "Come on!" She said it in a very brazen and merry way; she had calmed down, the little bitch, and now felt comfortable with the fact that she was engaged in sin with a servant. We groped our way out into the hall and got on the elevator, which was dimly lit with a blacklight bulb (!) — Henry had replaced the normal daylight bulb himself; the children wanted to have a real orgy. The young fiend went in first and I followed after her, gently shutting the heavy green steel door behind me, since on the fourth floor it makes a tremendous racket when it's closed, and we started moving. Where? Down to the basement, of course; where else would the little whore take me? I tried to talk to her in the elevator, and had opened my mouth to begin a sentence, wanting to tell her that I had intended to come to her all evening, but after the first sound of "I," she covered my mouth with her palm. I submitted.
We emerged into the darkness and stuffy warmth. I know my basement perfectly, and so I gropingly drew her toward the side where the mattress was, without turning on the light, but to my surprise she resisted and pulled me in the other direction. To the left of the elevator is a door leading to a small room containing the elevator drive with its dangerously turning cogged wheels behind a grating, but if you pass through that room to the other side, you enter another room heaped with old furniture, the most remote room of all, the same one where after my first and last argument with Gatsby I hid out and drank soda water.
The kid dragged me in there. It was very dark in the room, although a little evening light did penetrate from outside through a dirt-streaked basement window. We stumbled against things of every conceivable kind that had been piled on the floor there — boards, jars of paint, and parts of chairs. The lady pulled me all the way over to the window, where she came to a halt and then started moving about, releasing my hand. The place stank of old wood, with a slightly moldy smell given off perhaps by the cold, bare stone, not brick, with which the walls had been constructed. I finally realized what she was doing — she was getting undressed, and had taken her panties off herself, stepping out of them while hopping lightly on one leg and holding on to me and using her other hand to pull them off, since they had caught on her shoe. Her excitement had obviously returned, and giggling nervously she turned her back to me and bent over, resting her breasts on top of something and sticking her bottom out in my direction, and with a sudden movement flipped up the hem of her dress from behind and pulled it off, thereby revealing her unexpectedly large maidenly ass, which gleamed before me in the darkness with her legs descending like columns below.
I was even a little abashed by the brazen speed with which she did it all, until I remembered witnessing a similar scene in a porno film. True, that scene hadn't taken place in a basement and hadn't involved a servant, and the heroine hadn't suddenly assumed that position herself, but had been placed in it by somebody else. I glanced at what she was leaning on; it was a highchair — you know, a chair for infants with a special tray to keep them from falling out and hold the dish with their food. So there she was resting her breasts on that little chair, flattening them out on that childhood object and serendipitously using it for her own nymphomaniacal purposes. Bravo!
I of course use the term «nymphomaniac» ironically, gentlemen, for she was unquestionably a Seeker of Adventure, a wild and untamable spirit of the kind that's sometimes implanted in a woman, and let those around her beware! She won't leave anybody in peace for another forty years, a nymphomaniac by birth and conviction, I thought as I inserted my organ into her little crack. To top it all, her twat was prickly — she had shaved it, if you can imagine that. She had probably shaved herself clean that very morning.