My cock felt so engorged with blood and so rigid that I thought its head was going to burst at the seams like an overripe banana. I had the delicious sense of having reached a limit, and when I roughly pulled her ass, well-fed on her mama's and papa's capitalist bread, toward me, moving it onto my prick, I felt that I'd gone as far as I could, that I'd reached one of life's limits, one of its most extreme manifestations — that warm, white flesh crammed onto me, embracing every inch of my prick.
I fucked her and fucked her, never doubting I would come inside her, and would even have killed her probably, if that was the only way I could have reached orgasm. I needed to hurl my seed deep inside her slippery depths, deep inside her little pink folds, somewhere near her heart perhaps, but I also wanted to reach the state where I wouldn't be able to stand it anymore and my whole prick would almost break off inside her.
I came inside her with such force that it seemed to me that despite the fact that that young whore had no doubt taken the world's best and most up-to-date birth-control pills, or whatever the very latest invention in that area was, my sperm would break through all the barriers and she would bear my child. A horse or a centaur perhaps, but definitely something hooved and proud.
We remained stuck together like that for a while, panting heavily, until I thought I would fall down, that my strength would all at once desert me, since my legs were suddenly in tremendous pain and cramping nearly to the point of convulsions. She and I had trampled my white jeans underfoot, almost tearing them apart, and they shone dimly on the floor…
Somehow we separated, and she slipped off the highchair and made her way over to the wall and leaned against it. We groped at each other in the dark, reaching out our hands toward each other, each pulling the other closer, and kissed each other on the lips for the first time, and then stood embracing, still breathing heavily, and feeling very close to each other, she and I. I liked her unutterably, that desperate girl, oh how I liked her.
She was the first to start moving. "Go on upstairs to your room," she said hoarsely. "I'll be up in a minute." And then, in answer to my unspoken question, "Where are you going?" she added, "I have to get my things out of the kitchen; I don't want the other guys to know I'm still here." And gracefully putting her panties back on, she slipped out of one darkness into an even greater one. I groped my own way back to the elevator.
I didn't even ask her if she knew how to find the kitchen from the basement. Most likely she did.
I waited for her in my room exactly ten minutes, gentlemen, and when she didn't come, I went back downstairs, although to be frank, I didn't at all expect to find her there. It was perfectly clear: I had been fucked and discarded. Used like a servant and then thrown away.
Naturally she wasn't in the kitchen, how else? I was going to start checking the other rooms, and had gone into the TV room, where some of the kids were still asleep on the floor, but then I gave up that idea as useless and poured myself a glass of vermouth, dropped a couple of ice cubes in it, and went back upstairs to my room. I sat down at my desk, an old one that had once belonged to Linda and that I'd dragged up from die basement a day or so after I'd cleared out the last of Jenny's things from the room. A servant has no need of a desk, of course, but a writer does, and it has stood in my room by the window ever since. I raised the blinds, sat down at the desk, and gazed out the window. It was getting light in the garden, a rosy April dawn, and in the distance you could see the tip of Roosevelt Island, and beyond that a lighthouse on a rock and a foggy, open expanse of water.
All right, I thought, I had my pleasure too, if it comes to that, and what pleasure it was! But however much I tried to convince myself that my own pleasure had been at least as great as hers, that arithmetic was of little use, and I was still depressed. The mere fact that she had been capable of such an adventure, the bold little whore, made her hopelessly attractive to me. Moreover, she had during the act been as passive as she could be, yielding to me and moving backwards onto my prick. My girl exactly, I continued my sad thoughts. She didn't make even one extra movement the whole time. It was all the way it was supposed to be, the way you feel it should be. And to lose a specimen like that!
And covering my eyes with my yellow comforter, with our yellow comforter, that is, I somehow dropped off into troubled sleep.
Naturally the next morning the house looked as if it had been turned upside down. Actually, after looking it over, I didn't find that any particularly serious damage had been done, except for one thing. Some jerk had tried to put his cigarette out on our TV projection screen, and a long and nasty hole gaped at its center. What can I do? I'll have to tell Nancy about it, only later — on Monday after Linda comes, I thought. I was, after all, concerned that morning with a problem of much greater significance to me — how to find out from Henry who that young creature had been, what her name was, and what she did, and maybe where she lived. I needed her, and nobody else.
Finding an opportunity as if in passing, I asked Henry who the girl in the black dress and bare arms had been, the very beautiful and mature one who had been sitting next to me in the living room when we were smoking hashish, and whom I'd been fucking in the basement, although I obviously wasn't able to mention the last part. Henry asked, "Which one do you mean, Edward? I seem to remember there were several girls in black dresses." I started explaining to him, but we got mixed up, since he, not surprisingly, couldn't remember who had been sitting next to me in the living room when I'd been smoking hashish. When I reminded him then how he had greeted her with open arms and then gone upstairs with her, he seemed to remember something, or at least his face looked like the face of somebody about to remember something, "Renée?" he asked, looking condescendingly at me, as it seemed to me. "The one who left with Gregory?" Henry was obviously getting bored with the conversation, but as a well-bred boy, he patiently explained that Gregory was the younger son of a senator from the state of X. "He came after everybody else," Henry said, "a tall blond guy in a white jacket."
For the first time in my life there wasn't anything I could do; it was beyond my power to unravel that story. If my stranger had been Renée, and she had left with the guy in the white jacket, and Henry confirmed that he'd seen them leaving together, then it followed that they had done so before I had put Henry to bed. But if she had left, then how did she manage to turn up in my room an hour or two after she'd gone? After pondering the question for a while, I realized that she could quite easily have come back, and even have done so without being noticed. The door had in fact been unlocked; I myself released the catch on it while shutting everything up. Door locks, as you know, have a safety catch on them, one position allowing the lock to be used in its normal way, and the other allowing the door to be opened from the outside by simply turning the knob. Whenever the eternally hurrying Gatsby runs outside to meet or accompany his guests, he always sets the lock in the second way. He doesn't want to be bothered with taking his key out of his pocket, which I certainly understand, but he almost always forgets to release the catch, so that it frequently happens that we sleep the whole night with the door unlocked. Anyone passing by could, if he felt like it, simply turn the handle of the door on the street and walk in.
I continued to struggle for a while against my fate, attempting to get «her» phone number from Henry, although obviously without asking him for it, but by pinching his notebook from his pocket. It was easy to do; Henry was even more absent-minded than Gatsby was. I took the notebook down to the basement, to my hideout there, and after a long search, since his notebook was extraordinarily chaotic, with first and last names and addresses running together, I found Renée's name and number but not her address. I had already begun to doubt that it was in fact Renée who had fucked me and dumped me; maybe it was another girl. I'd been stoned and drunk, and all the places we'd been together had been infernally dark. The only place where I had seen her "in the light" had been the elevator, if you consider that black, orgiastic lamp to be light. And in that moment, which lasted no more than a minute probably, since we could hardly have spent more time than that on the elevator, I didn't look very closely at the stranger. I had left my glasses in my room and was in any case occupied with something else, with my prick and my desire, and was kissing her on the neck, I think.
I called Renée, but her line was busy, gentlemen. My heart, my poor heart, was pounding. I started thinking hurriedly about what I would say to her. I couldn't just say, "Well then, my little adventuress, what did you run away for?" or "What's up, my little whore?" I called again a little while later, but nobody answered. And I called again that evening, once more without success. I've gradually accumulated my own list of grievances against telephones and have grown to hate them more and more. My call the next morning was answered by a maid. First she wanted to know my name and who I was. I lied that I was a friend of Renée's. Everybody tells me that my voice sounds very young. "Renée has gone to Europe with her parents and won't be back until October." And the maid mentioned the name of the town, in the south of France, I think.
I probably never would have been able to find her, if she hadn't wanted me to. And even if I could get her on the phone, what would I say to her, and even if I were able to summon up the audacity to remind her gently of what had apparently taken place between us, she would simply tell me I was a crazy, insolent servant. And if she wanted to say more, she would call me a sex maniac and hang up. She could even make a lot of trouble for me, if she wanted to. She could call Gatsby and tell him that his housekeeper had lost his mind and was imagining… "Can you imagine, Steven, that I..?" She wouldn't say "fucked him in the basement," of course, but she could say that I was sexually deranged and pestering her. Gatsby would in that event probably kick me out, and not even Efimenkov would be able to help, not with something like that.
She had unquestionably read all the books and seen all the porno flicks, which she'd probably gone to after putting on some old rags and making herself up to look like some impossible version of a whore. She went and probably even expected that somebody would fuck her there. She sat and trembled in fear while gazing at the backs of the men sitting by themselves, expecting that the owner of one of those backs would sit down next to her and put his hand on her knee or right on her cunt. It's unlikely though that she would permit anyone to do anything to her there, even if they did sit down. I understand her fear; you really can stumble onto who the fuck knows what there, even a psychopathic murderer. With me it was absolutely safe; she wasn't in a porno theater open to any creep who walks in, but in the house of a friend, a friend whose servant I was. She had probably heard something about me from Henry or from a couple of his friends, and even if she hadn't heard anything, it was clear enough from my appearance that I was a harmless but still healthy creature. "Cute," as Jenny and other women and girls have told me.
That case is closed, as far as I'm concerned; I never found die perpetrator. Or rather, excuse me, I never found the perpetratrix. To my great and everlasting regret.
My whole life over the last several years has been a yearning for "action." If, and this is something I long for, our civilization should in the next couple of decades begin to collapse, I would of course at once find myself an opportunity, and would probably be not the least among the bold and reckless of this world. For the time being, however, the only things that remain for me are sex and writing, the only two spheres in which a man, if he has the nerve, is still more or less free to show himself. All the other spheres have long been patrolled by civilization down to the least little byways and dead ends. Writing and sex have been placed in thrall too, and are under the control of civilization and social life, but there are still a few chinks in the machinery. Either there still are, or there already are. In any case, they still don't know how to control our thoughts; their geniuses in white coats still haven't found out how to read what's inside our brain cases. They've been listening for a long time to our telephone conversations and rummaging in our papers, but they still can't read our thoughts. Although I'm absolutely sure that feverish work is already under way in that area, and that the geniuses in white coats will eventually reach their goal — I have faith in human ingenuity. God grant I die before that glorious discovery is made, because after that you won't be able to write shit and you can fuck freedom goodbye.
Steven Grey's housekeeper hasn't been making very much progress with the writing part of it. The American publishers have one after another refused to publish my book. Maybe they've reached an agreement with my former girlfriend Sarah? Although I have long felt the itch to move on, although I have the ambition to proceed to the next rung in my life, I'm still compelled to remain here in service, and my life in the millionaire's little house, having now entered its second year, has in a way come full circle. It's all routine now and no longer interesting, and I've been looking around to see where I, the indefatigable Mr. Limonov, Edward, will turn up next. All those I started out with way back then have made their peace, some in jail and others with families, but in any case have come to a halt. Even Elena has grown tired apparently, and is married to her own European aristocrat, and only very occasionally permits herself little love adventures. But not I.
The publishers answer Liza in much the same way, with something like, "Mr. Limonov's novel is too threatening, and his hero too negative." Inside, deep in my heart, I believe they're right in refusing to publish my novel. I'm really their enemy, and books like mine destroy, if not civilization, then at least faith in it, so that it's logical not to publish them. But the struggle is the struggle, and I therefore try with all my strength to win. I haven't reacted emotionally to their rejections in a long time. My agent just methodically sends the book off to those publishers who haven't been terrorized by it yet, and if Liza gets tired of the job, I won't die of a broken heart. I'll just find myself another agent and start over from the beginning. They're greedy when it comes to money, and they'll buy me in the end. I'm persistent. But unfortunately I'm also oversensitive, as my girlfriend Jenny once observed, and sometimes it all makes me sick to my stomach, and then, like a madman, I run off to the first place I think of, and more often than not I look for relief in sex.
The last time I got sick of it all happened quite recently, after the business with Natashka and the blood in the bathroom. And I got myself to a brothel. The reason didn't have anything to do with Natashka, and in fact there wasn't any particular reason for my mental upset, or at least no explicit reason. I obviously just needed to escape from my routine and from my struggle, which wasn't giving me any satisfaction. Maybe it was a full moon. My flight ended in a brothel.
Yes, I licked the cunt of a prostitute. But does that make me any less of a man? No. The cunt, when spread wide, turned out to be pink, and before giving it to me, she washed it while standing in front of a sink and raking water into it with her palm. Actually, «cunt» sounds crude. Paula didn't have a cunt, she had an Italian… what? I don't know; there don't seem to be very many affectionate or deferential terms for the female sex organ. In Paula, that place resembled an almost scarlet butterfly with its wings spread open. The scarlet area extended high and wide between her legs. It was probably irritation caused by her work, a sort of industrial trauma.
I hadn't been looking for Paula in the beginning. What I needed was a skinny blonde. But it isn't that easy to find skinny blondes on Eighth Avenue. Paula, who had herself stopped me, did not upon learning that I needed a skinny blonde betray the slightest astonishment, but only went to the edge of the sidewalk, put her hands to her mouth and, in her attempt to be heard over the rumble and roar of the cars, shouted, "Elsa!" And from the other side of the street came Elsa, maneuvering against the traffic. Her name clearly didn't suit her, and she didn't suit me either. She was small and skinny, and yes, she was a blonde, but not even a vulgar one, which would have been just right, but of die simple country-girl type. Her thin curly hair irritated me, a head of hair like a permanent, and so I said I'd look for another girl, and walked away. Apparently offended by my lack of interest, Elsa hurled after me, "He wants a skinny blonde! I weigh eighty-seven pounds! What are you planning to do, throw your skinny blonde up in the air and catch her on your prick or what?!"
After wandering around for another half hour and still not finding a skinny blonde, I returned to Paula on the corner of Forty-fifth Street and Eighth Avenue and settled with her. We went around the corner to a hotel. I had in fact invited her to the millionaire's house, but she turned me down, as they almost always do. There are a good many creeps wandering around Eighth Avenue.
Paula was a brunette of Italian descent. She was pretty, but in comparison with the rest of her body, her ass was a little bit plump.
On the gray but clean sheets in the room lay the little circle of a condom. On the ceiling a thin fluorescent circle glowed with a meager and foolish light. We got undressed, I lay down on my back, and Paula began licking and sucking my cock, after giving it a careful preliminary examination. That alone cost me thirty dollars, in addition to the ten dollars I had already paid to get into the room. I don't know how to haggle with them.
Though poor the room was clean, and as usual reminded me more of doctor's office in a poor Soviet village than a room in a hotel-brothel. Yes, it was both a hotel and a brothel. Coming in Paula and I had met a black mother and child in the hallway. I didn't feel sorry for that child living in a brothel; rather, I envied him — an interesting experience. Besides, when he grows up he won't have all those pitiful superstitions that have cost me so much effort to get rid of. The best thing is to be abandoned in this world, knowing neither your mother nor your father, so that you can then make of yourself whatever you want — vicious, without any looking over your shoulder… In a word, it's a fine, liberating thing. And what a complex he'll have, I thought enviously. A person without a complex is like a new car they forgot to put the motor in. You can push it through life, of course, but it's incapable of propelling itself.
I stayed with Paula a long time, not having any place I needed to rush off to, and I paid her some more and we talked. I really laughed when Paula, obviously wishing to be amiable, suddenly picked up my Italian boots and said, "What beautiful boots you have, Edward!" — naturally, I'd introduced myself to her, how else? I recalled that the Marchioness Houston had once given me the same compliment. The Marchioness will, I hope, be pleased to learn that she and a prostitute have the same, the same… how shall I put it? The same grasp of the external world, or the same taste in men's footwear.
I told Paula I envied her profession. And I really did envy it. In addition to the fact that the work was interesting, and with people, Paula probably earned as much in an evening as I earned at the millionaire's house in two weeks, and maybe a lot more. I alone had given her a hundred dollars in all. Not everybody's as crazy as I am, and goes to a prostitute to soothe his mind, but even those who go to appease their flesh pay too, and so with her everything was just fine. She looked like a serious girl, neither an alcoholic nor an addict, and she was probably saving her money. I was neither a priest nor an intellectual jerk, and so I naturally didn't preach to her that her profession was sinful or even tell her that to live the way she was living was unhygienic, and I didn't try to persuade her to change her profession and stop selling her body. We simply smoked and chatted while sitting naked on the bed. Decent women also trade in their bodies; they also sell their cunts, although theirs usually go for a great deal more than a prostitute's does, especially in the first days and weeks of your acquaintance. You go to a nice restaurant, taking a taxi, and before that there are tickets for a show or you have to take the girl to a disco afterwards, and only then can you go to bed. And if you buy the girl cocaine, as Ghupta suggests, a gram alone costs one hundred to one hundred and fifty dollars, people! What's a prostitute next to a decent woman! When it comes to the art of robbery, decent women are much more professional and much better qualified than prostitutes are… I'm not judging anybody, since my own is hardly the most virtuous of lives; I'm merely looking at life and turning it in my hands, and taking an interest in it and comparing it and analyzing it. I'm not satisfied with the verities of old books that call prostitutes fallen creatures. What's so fallen about this Paula, I thought, why she's more stable than I am.
I wrote down my phone number for Paula and then went back outside with her. I had gotten little sexual satisfaction from her, and in fact I don't really understand what sort of idiot you have to be to go to a prostitute for sexual satisfaction. You can get the same kind of satisfaction going to a urologist; he'll touch your prick for you too. But I did get spiritual satisfaction, as we may conventionally call it, from my visit to Paula, in the same way that a little hoodlum, suffering all day from idleness and boredom, is soothed only by doing mischief, by hanging a cat in the garden, say, or swiping his father's revolver from his desk and shooting his sister in the leg… I was pretty sure Paula wouldn't call me — those girls are very cautious — even though I temptingly told her I was very rich and lived in my own house in Manhattan.
I walked back to my house, crossing Broadway and several other streets until I reached Fifth Avenue, where I went up as far as Fifty-seventh Street. Thickly inscribed with a black felt-tip pen on the wall of a bank on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street was the proud invitation, "Rob me!" This is our special form of New York patriotism. Our New York robbers had been going to banks in record numbers those days. They'd robbed more banks than anybody else in the country, and so far that month they'd robbed more banks than they had all last year.
Go to it, guys! I thought. Let's make a real effort! We'll double the number of bank robberies! We'll double and triple it! I wasn't the only fan. Everybody in New York was keeping track; everybody was excited. The press was keeping a count, and we New York patriots were keeping one too. Thirteen bank robberies today, and more tomorrow, God willing, even if it's only fourteen. What excitement! Our bank robbers are the best and the boldest. Some of them are even women.
I walked calmly past the bank. No, I wasn't going to rob it; I've learned to keep my passions under control. Being a writer is much more profitable than being a bandit. I only have to be patient, to wait, and I'll get my piece and do my great deed. I'll be patient, although there's no doubt that inside I'm a bandit — what else? I'm no housekeeper or writer; I'm a bandit! That's my true profession, I thought wickedly.
The boss was home. Five people from Kuwait were sitting in the living room. They had been sitting there for three hours.
The five Kuwaitis arrived in a limousine dressed in suits of Western cut and not at all in the Bedouin burnooses I had expected. "The four of them," said the boss's stepbrother and business associate, Mr. Richardson, as he skipped into the kitchen rubbing his hands together, "the four Kuwaitis are worth more than two billion, Edward!" Two billion dollars! That was a figure more appropriate to astronomy. A million I could still comprehend after a fashion, but two billion and even more? Only four of them were worth that, since the fifth, even though he was a Kuwaiti too, was a pauper and wasn't worth anything — he was only an interpreter. The interpreter, as I saw it, was a servant too, and so he didn't particularly interest me, but I was all eyes for the possessors of the two billion, and I tried to go into the living room as often as possible, pretending to be attentive.
When I'm attentive, I frequently overdo it. And I overdid it with the Kuwaitis and blew it. I put out alcohol in the living room, although not on the main table that Steven and his guests were sitting at, the mirrored one with the birds that Gatsby had cut out of a wall in Iran, but on a little table in the corner — some whiskey and rum and a few glasses. Even though I knew theoretically that people from Arab countries don't drink alcoholic beverages since it's forbidden by Muslim law, and that offering them something to drink is a great insult to them, or at least tactless. It was only by accident that I didn't shove the alcohol right under their noses on the mirrored table. There fortunately wasn't any room to do so, since I'd just put out coffee and tea for them. Luckily for me I'd only been able to squeeze in our ridiculous leather ice bucket and in the process had seen Gatsby's face fall right before my eyes. He probably would have lashed out at me at once in the most obnoxious terms, if it hadn't been for the Arabs sitting around the table and for Efimenkov, my guardian angel, whom I think he kept constantly in mind, although only Gatsby himself knows that for certain. I left off what I was doing, naturally, although I didn't immediately realize what the problem was until Mr. Richardson came running in to me from the living room and worriedly informed me of my error. As soon as I got a chance, I took my bottles of alcohol away, and it's possible that not even all the Kuwaitis saw them, since most of them were sitting facing the other way. It occurred to me in the hallway that if I had made a mistake like that two or three hundred years ago, it would have cost me my housekeeper's and butler's life. Three hundred years ago a barbarian lord would have hanged me from the large tree in the garden next to the swings, although afterward he would perhaps have pitied his loyal butler, the victim of his wrath.
The Kuwaitis had been sitting all that time working on a deal with the boss and Mr. Richardson and two other businessmen of lesser rank. True, they took a break, during which they went down to the first floor to the solarium to examine and try out… well, what do you think? A machine for instantly determining the composition of gold alloys. The machine had been brought to the house two days before in a large case carefully packed in quilts, since it was one of only two or three such machines in existence, and our businessmen were very concerned about it. Externally, the machine looked like a small lathe with an electronic control panel from which various wires stuck out and a black box containing a screen and numerous indicators with needles.
After their break was over, and the Arab-American mob had returned to the living room with its Persian carpets and cushions to chat some more and rustle papers, I stole down to the solarium to get a closer look at the machine. Lying on it were about a dozen oblong objects that looked like crudely made pastries. I picked up one of the pastries, and it felt abnormally heavy. Gold. It's gold, real gold! I said to myself while tossing the ingot into the air.
For some reason I was very happy. The weight of the gold was attractively pleasant. I thought for a moment how nice it would be to rake all the ingots into a bag, and I had just the one, and take off for distant lands. But how much gold could there actually be, how much was it worth? I weighed the pile of ingots with a glance. Not enough for me. Too little for me to give up my unpublished books and my agent, Liza, and abandon my struggle halfway. I often go to the bank to get cash for Gatsby, that being one of my duties, sometimes even several thousand dollars at a time, and occasionally the thought flashes through my mind to take off for Hong Kong or Las Vegas. But the difference between the big crook and the petty thief is precisely the fact that you can trust the former with even a hundred thousand. But don't trust him with just a million, Gatsby!
After returning the ingot to its place, I remained standing over the machine for a while shaking my head in amazement. That machine and the Kuwaitis and the house and my boss and the situation that day all reminded me of an episode from the adventures of Agent 007. The Kuwaiti-Gatsbian group looked like something taken from the silver screen, something right out of Goldfinger, and the only thing lacking was James himself. Actually, I could quite easily have played the role of James. Even mama Jenny had found it amusing to imagine I really was a Russian spy, and had suggested I open a Russian restaurant in New York and call it The Spy.
The Kuwaitis sat a little while longer and then at last went downstairs, shaking our already wobbly banister like masters of the house, and took their places in their limousine. I was grateful they had come between lunch and dinner, at a neutral time, so that I didn't have to make lunch for ten. Otherwise, I'd have been panting with exhaustion.
And then their asses were gone. After taking the fastest shower of his life, the boss at once disappeared after them; obviously he was running over to see Polly, his permanent New York woman. Does he have girlfriends in other cities in the world too, just like a deep-sea sailor? I wondered. Actually, I'm not so sure he did tear off to Polly's. That morning a van with the name "Tudor's Flowers" on it brought seven vases of flowers and plants, including a rubber plant. I almost sent them all back, since neither Linda nor I had ordered them. Fortunately Gatsby appeared in the doorway at that moment and with a sly smile suggested that they were a gift and that he had an idea from whom. Maybe he ran off to the woman who had sent the plants? To see the rubber plant lady, as I instantly named her? Most likely that was it.
All Gatsby did was smile and leave, whereas I wasted over an hour trying to find places in the house to put the flowers and plants and then taking them to different rooms. The full-grown rubber plant was particularly heavy; it was in fact a tree! I installed it in the living room, and the negotiations with the Kuwaitis had in fact been conducted underneath the rubber tree. Complain or not, it was my job.
Linda took off as soon as Gatsby went up to the bathroom; it was already after eight. I remained in the house alone, although I didn't feel free. I never do as long as Gatsby's in New York. I fixed myself a Scotch on the rocks and sat down in the kitchen and looked out the window.
Instead of the holiday life once promised me, I'm sitting in the kitchen, I thought bitterly. A man by a window. Outside, the Mystery of the Evening Dog Walk was in progress. I was interested in the women and the girls, not the dogs. My old girlfriend Jenny used to call dogs shit-producing machines. I share her point of view; it is, you'll agree, a practical one for a housekeeper or caretaker. Is it nice to have shit outside your window even if the dog's owner cleans it up? Bowing his legs outside my window, a big dog strained to push a large, dark turd out of himself.
At that moment my favorite appeared, although I of course had no idea who she was: a large yellow-haired woman with a ginger-colored dog on a leash. She was dressed in a slightly old-fashioned suit — a jacket and long skirt — and for some reason it was indecently charming.
That's what I need, a maiden wife with a yellow head, a big healthy girl like that, I thought. Then I'd be happy. And what's so good about my life anyway? All I do is sit in the kitchen by the window all the time or serve, while my employer goes off to restaurants.