What did I talk to her about? I suddenly realized that in spite of myself, I wanted to make her feel sorry for me, and I remember that in telling her about my life, I mentioned my second wife, Anna, who had gone crazy, and my last wife, Elena, who had left me here because I didn't have any money. "Because of money" made an impression on Jenny; she even started blinking very fast and angrily muttered, "The bitch!" Inspired, and sensing in my bones that there wasn't very much time left and that if I didn't succeed in getting her interested in the next hour or so, I probably wouldn't have another chance like that again in my life, I informed her with fateful resolve that no one had ever loved me in my whole life, that my mother hadn't lived with me, but had left my father and me when I was only two, and that I had lived among soldiers until I was fifteen and had been raised by them. I sat there and told inspired lies about myself while looking out into the garden, where it was green and deserted and where a child's swing was swaying slowly and temptingly in the breeze. It's a good thing my super-decent mama couldn't hear, my mother who in almost forty years of living with my father had probably spent not even a single evening outside the house. Forgive me, Mama, but you wouldn't have wanted your son to perish, would you?
Mechanically staring into the garden, I clumsily struggled to pronounce the difficult English words, hurrying and stumbling over them, and wishing I had a glass of wine, some vodka, a joint — anything that would have relaxed me and helped me to make up even more and better stories. Watching her face, I had the sense that it wasn't working, that I was boring her, since she had grown very quiet and thoughtful, and was sitting there without moving, leaning back on the green sofa and lightly pulling with one hand at the strands of her chestnut hair parted on the side, her carefully washed chestnut hair. And she was moving her foot a little too — she was barefoot, and why not, with such soft carpets and such brilliantly polished parquet. I thought it wasn't working, but I was in fact saying then the full one hundred percent of what she needed to hear, she, Jenny Jackson, an American girl with English, Irish, and Polish blood in her veins. The point is, gentlemen, that she was unbelievably softhearted. But I only found that out later. I didn't know it then, and that's why those first hours with her have remained so painful a memory.
I blurted out all those admissions and then was suddenly quiet, physically aware, sensing it instinctively, that the sky in the garden was turning a dark blue. There was so much sky in her garden. And it was turning a dark blue and then graying and darkening.
Jenny sat half-turned toward me, wearing that evening the dress that I came to prefer over all her others, a dress with a little hood and narrow, very narrow gray-black stripes, a wide skirt that reached down below her knees, and a tight-fitting bodice — very pretty. She sat half-turned toward me and said nothing. Then suddenly she whispered, "Poor thing!" and faced me. A tear was rolling down her cheek.
Success! During the pause I had managed to conceive a hatred both for her mansion and for her "rich and idle" person, and in the infinite despair of my thoughts in that moment had already consigned the house and the garden to wholesale pillage, filling the place with my mythical comrades-in-revolution — I could already hear their footsteps and voices and the clank of their weapons.
"Poor thing." Even though I had lied about some things, it still referred to me. But wasn't I a "poor thing" in fact? I was. That meant she understood, that meant she was a human being, however unexpected and strange that was.
But poor Edward wasn't able to rejoice in his victory; he was too exhausted from an effort that had exceeded his strength. I remember dropping my arms to my knees and staring at the green rug, never imagining that more than once in the future I would have to vacuum it and even from time to time fuck members of the opposite sex on it when I was too impatient to go to my room… And not long ago I happened to find on that same green rug the doming, watches, bracelets, rings, and undergarments of a certain lady and my boss, Steven Grey, but not the owners themselves… That all happened much later, however. On that May evening, as we were sitting there, the tear still rolling down Jenny's cheek, the doorbell rang, or rather it chimed, and sniffing like a baby, she said, "That's my sister," and went to open the door.
Sister Debby had brought a saxophone with her; she played the saxophone, as it turned out — little sister Debby, that is. The saxophone was placed on its legs there in the solarium next to a barrel organ and a music box — in the music corner. Sister Debby didn't resemble sister Jenny at all. She was very slender, with short black hair and olive skin, and thanks to her gaudily painted lips and eyes, she looked like a hoodlum and older than her seventeen years. Sister Debby had come up from Virginia, where the whole family lived, as it turned out — the first reliable information I got then. It also turned out that besides Debby, Jenny had three other sisters and five brothers.
"God," I said. "You're like Latin Americans; they're the ones who're supposed to have such big families."
"Ten children is really good," Jenny said. "You have somebody to play with when you're little and somebody to share your troubles with. An only child is always unhappy and lonely. You left Russia, Edward, and now your parents are all by themselves." Saying this, Jenny looked at me significantly and then continued. "If they had had more children, they wouldn't be so lonely now." Jenny was very sensible, it turned out.
That evening the three of us went out together. "Let's go somewhere for a drink," Jenny said carelessly. "Debby's tired of Virginia; she wants to go out."
"Of course, let's go out," I said, although inwardly I was terrified about what I would do if I didn't have enough money. But it was impossible to refuse, even though I would gladly have bought a bottle and drunk it there at home; that's what I always did.
And so we went out. The slender and insolently vulgar Debby put on a gray poncho, and I had on a checked jacket that the above-mentioned Tolya had once given me for nothing and that I had shortened and taken in, and a black cap from Paris I was very proud of that still had the label "Enchanted Hunter" in it. I had bought it for $1.25 at a used clothing store on the Lower East Side. Over her pretty little dress Jenny wore a long knitted cardigan with little knitted balls dangling from strings.
Once outside I took Jenny by the hand, and she walked along obediently without removing her hand, although she was in fact leading the way, not I. As a resident of the Upper West Side, I didn't know very much about their wealthy East. After we had looked into several small restaurants, our attention was drawn, I remember, to a crowded out-of-the-way place paneled in old wood where, however, a famous old harpist performed. We took our seats next to the stage, from which die harpist, who had a good figure but also the look of an outright lesbian and sadist, gazed amiably at the sisters from time to time. It was then that I learned of the existence of the drink called "tequila sunrise," which the sisters ordered, while I drank my customary J & B, a habit I'll probably keep until the end of my days. You have to have something to fall back on when people say, "What will you have?" and you're supposed to have a favorite drink. Well, I drink J & B.
Naturally the harpist started talking to the girls during the intermission, while a lanky, though suspiciously cultivated and considerate waiter addressed a few silly remarks to me I don't remember anymore. We eventually drank a fair amount there, and after Jenny and I had sufficiently stroked and squeezed each other's hands, and nudged each other with our knees under the table, and exchanged other displays of affection of the sort that are appropriate in public places, and the harpist had started to cover her harp with its case, Debby announced that it was time to leave, as indeed it was, and we tumbled out onto the street. I had enough money; the sisters didn't want to eat, thank God — or thanks to them, since maybe they just pretended not to.
For some reason we all laughed a lot on the way home, and Jenny ran away from me down the street, her cardigan flying behind her, and when I caught her, the little knitted balls on the strings were all rapidly swinging. I tried to kiss her, but she moved away from me, yelling something about Russians and how shameless her Polish grandmother said they all were, but she didn't move away very far. Debby, who was following behind, smiled a grown-up smile at all the commotion we were making.
After we got back to the house, Debby immediately went off to bed, while I sat with Jenny for another hour or so, kissing her again and putting my hands under her dress and taking hold of her legs, her belly, and her panties…
She wouldn't let me. She wouldn't give in. I wasn't very insistent. I realized with Jenny it was better not to hurry; it would all happen in time. Of course, I would have preferred to fuck her then — I really wanted to — but I was afraid of pressuring her even a little; she might get scared and not want to see me anymore. But I left in excellent spirits, happy and exhilarated — the adventurer after a successfully concluded operation.
I called her the next day. Not too early, though I woke up very early myself and wanted to call her at once. I didn't have anything else to do anyway. My sole occupation then was to get up at eight after sleeping badly, collect my things — books and notebooks — in a plastic bag, and set off for Central Park to lie in the sun and read, given the fact that the park was only a few short blocks away. Lying there on the grass in my underpants among people as unlucky or crazy as I was, I tortured myself with books, teaching and coaching myself by reading my first English books with a dictionary. The selection was very strange: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, which had just come out in paperback, and a book with a green cover by Che Guevara called Episodes of the Revolutionary War, which I'd swiped from somebody. I still have those books, and when I leaf through them on occasion, I unfailingly find tufts of dried grass between the pages, since I didn't lie quietly but turned over, presenting first my chest to the sun and then my back, while dreaming of my future, of my brave and glorious future, and of the ways I might bring it about.
I had been lying in Central Park since March and the loneliness was beginning to make me a little crazy. I usually went back to my hotel around five or six and cooked dinner on a hotplate — something quick, macaroni with hot dogs or chicken soup — and then after eating it, and maybe a brief nap, I rolled out onto the streets again.
As you see, it was a bleak and soldierly life, and its diversions were pretty much reduced to grass, which I regularly bought then for thirty-five dollars an ounce, obtaining another portion as soon as I'd smoked up the first, and one-night stands, which usually took place in a state of extreme intoxication from grass and alcohol.
I didn't attach much importance to the one-night stands, my drunken imagination easily endowing my partners with their merit, although as a rule not one of them survived the test of morning, or turned out in the light of day to be of any value to my life. But in the period I'm describing here, even those affairs had virtually ceased. The longest to hold out was Rena, an extremely ugly but incredibly horny middle-aged Rumanian Jew who lived near the Museum of Natural History and who taught ballet, I believe. I would always remember her unexpectedly somewhere on the street in the middle of the night, call her up, go over to her place, walk in, and start fucking her right in the doorway. I would simply step over the threshold, lift up her skirt, and, since her cunt was always moist and ready, brutally fuck her.
It was necessary to end that illicit affair, however, since she had unfortunately fallen in love with me. I was beginning to catch adoring looks in my direction, and I realized I'd better get out before it was too late. Vile aesthete and conceited animal that I was, aspiring to the best women in the world, how could I allow myself to go out with an ugly little hawk-nosed Rumanian Jew? Even granting that she was much better, more noble, and more spiritual than I, as in fact was probably the case, I still preferred in that time of extreme need to suffer without a cunt rather than suffer from an inferiority complex at showing myself in broad daylight with Rena. The last straw was her obsessive desire to meet Lodyzhnikov after I had carelessly let slip that I knew him.
So you can imagine how great was my need for Jenny. She of course had no idea of the role I had prepared for her, that I expected her to be my woman, my friend, my language teacher, and to support me, and that I had also decided to move in with her in time, since I still didn't realize, dolt, who she was.
But when I finally called on that May morning, having as a precaution first turned myself for three hours or so on the grass in Central Park, she told me to my surprise that she was busy and that we couldn't see each other. The "music teacher" Steven's sister from California was staying at the millionaire's house at the time. Imagine how disappointed I was. Who wouldn't have been? An annoying obstacle on my way to the top. I was in a hurry; I needed to prove to everybody just what sort of person it was they were neglecting. The rich Jenny and her house were substantial evidence.
She has guests, I thought bitterly. The cunt. As if there were anybody more important to her than me. Guests. I would have gone over and joined her guests, but Jenny didn't invite me. Maybe she's afraid to be alone with me. She wants to but is afraid; that happens sometimes, I reflected.
I went back to my hotel earlier than usual that day. I didn't feel much like reading. A black neighbor from my floor named Ken was sitting on a bench with a group of alcoholic friends, all black, in the dusty strip of greenery that separates the two opposing streams of Broadway traffic and drinking something. When he saw me, he jumped happily to his feet and shouted "Baby!" and beckoned to me. But I didn't go; I only waved to him from a distance and strode into the hotel's stinking maw.
It was probably a week before I saw Jenny again. She responded to my calls by saying that she was busy since Steven's sister was still there, and that she didn't feel well. I suspiciously thought she wasn't telling the truth, and lay in my hotel. Going to the park would have been silly anyway; the muggy spring rains had started. Even the sheets were unpleasantly damp, and I lay naked on the bed and gave myself up to despair, as only I, the psychopath Edward Limonov, am capable of doing. I even started crying. And from idleness, I also had a tremendous desire to fuck, and a dull feeling in my head. I even remember once howling quietly and mournfully for a whole evening, while I tossed and turned in bed and recalled Jenny's large legs, her long neck, her soft breasts, and her rather fat belly, which I had held in my hands. But I couldn't allow myself to masturbate; I don't know exactly why, but I couldn't. It was as if I felt some obligation to Jenny or to myself. I wanted to be a man, and not a pitiful masturbator.
Finally after the week had passed, Jenny called me herself. We had been talking about ten minutes, when she suddenly surprised me by saying, "Edward, I want to say something important to you."
Put on my guard, I answered, "Yes, of course, Jenny. What is it?"
"I have to tell you, Edward, that you're a very good, very educated, and very sensitive person, but I haven't 'fallen in love' with you." She was silent for a moment. I was silent too. "I like you," she resumed, "but I'm selfish. Very selfish. Very. If you want to be my friend, that's fine. But not love."
I had the presence of mind to agree with her. I said: "All right, we'll be friends. Can I come over in half an hour? We'll have a drink."
"Come over," she consented. "I have some company, Debby and her boyfriend, and some girlfriends of mine, if they won't bother you."
"No, they won't bother me," I said.
I left the hotel and set off through Central Park to the East Side, bitterly thinking to myself about her and about me and about how I would obviously never have any luck in life and about how foolish it was of her to reject me. Central Park after the week's rain was deserted, luxuriant, utterly beautiful, fresh-smelling, and without end, the way it is in May. It had just stopped raining, and I walked through that verdant paradise completely alone with the trees and plants; New York's tireless bicyclists still hadn't come out, nor had the drug pushers taken up their usual places.
By the time I emerged from the park on the East Side, I had already calmed down. Well, all right, what does it matter? I thought brightly. I'll find another way out, I'll still climb out of this shit. I'll still find a way out of it, even if Jenny won't be my springboard. There'll be other chances. Cheer up, Officer Limonov, I told myself, and even walked more energetically, firmly striking my heels on the pavement. Ah, what a fool Jenny is not to want to try somebody as unique as me.
Thus I walked along reasoning to myself, and when I had almost gotten to her house, I suddenly thought, Listen, Limonov, she's only twenty years old. Don't take what she says too seriously. Let her say whatever she wants to, and you try to change it. Have you actually forgotten Catullus? Remember the lines, "What a woman says to her ardent lover/should be written in wind and running water…" That's exactly the sort of thing she said over the phone to you, and you came unglued.
Catullus cheered me up immediately, and when Jenny opened the door dressed in a belly dancer's costume — in a bra embroidered in bugles and shiny thread that had originally been made for Debby, as I later found out, and in very wide Moslem pants set low on her hips, I said, "Hi, Jen," and merrily kissed her. She looked suspiciously at me, sniffed my breath, and asked, "Have you been drinking, Edward?" I said I hadn't.
They were all sitting out on the terrace in the garden when the officer Limonov came in. Besides Debby and her Japanese boyfriend, Michael, there was a tall, slim Irish girl named Bridget, with auburn hair, as befits Irish girls, and unbelievably fair skin, as also befits Irish girls. After answering my «Hi» with her own, the first thing Bridget asked me was, "Do you have any grass?" I didn't have any with me; I knew Jenny had just given it up. She was allegedly suffering from back pain which she attributed to smoking marijuana since she was eleven. It wasn't her idea; she'd gotten it from her Indian homeopath, Dr. Krishna. And maybe the doctor was right. During the period in question Jenny was fascinated with homeopathy and went to Dr. Krishna regularly not only as his patient but as his disciple.
I later calculated that Jenny changed enthusiasms about every six months. During the year and a half we were together, homeopathy was replaced by jogging — onward to health! — and jogging by the health food fad. Jenny, like tens of millions of other Americans, took up whatever was foisted on her by America's popular culture and its advertising machinery, eagerly exchanging enthusiasms as the popular culture dictated and, like every other victim, readily believing that they were her own. The roller skating epidemic fortunately took over the United States after we had split up, or I would certainly have been in on her smashed knees and broken arms.
I had to disappoint Bridget; I didn't have any grass. She kept her head, however, and very quickly got drunk.
When I arrived they were engaged in sporadic searching for the little bronze finger cymbals used in belly dancing. Jenny called them "zilts," or something. She had put her costume on and was all set to start dancing — the stereo was already scattering clouds of Middle Eastern music through the house — when the cymbals had suddenly disappeared and there wasn't anything to mark the rhythm with. Jenny got mad and started whining, while the rest of us looked in the drawers and moved the books on the shelves and finally found them, thank God.
Jenny danced several numbers, first wrapping herself up in a piece of Indian cloth I assume Dr. Krishna had given her, then unwrapping herself. I suspected then that the handsome, graying, seventy-two-year-old Dr. Krishna was sleeping with her, but he wasn't. I wasn't very far from the truth, however. Although Krishna wasn't sleeping with Jenny, he was sleeping with another of his patients and disciples, with that same girlfriend of Jenny's I had met on my first evening in the millionaire's house — with Jennifer. And she was only nineteen.
We know these doctors, I thought. Covered with the unearned glory of the hermits and gurus of old India, they come to the United States and put together whole fortunes, the swindlers, by relying on the naïveté of young Americans and their natural attraction to everything astonishing and unusual. At the same time, they don't forget to fuck the prettier and younger of their admirers and disciples, if such be at hand.
Jenny wrapped herself up in the cloth and then unwrapped herself, but I never did find out whether Krishna had given it to her. She danced very well, I thought; she had just the fat belly needed for that Arabo-Turko-Persian show. It moved exactly the way it was supposed to, twitching like a jackhammer. I tried it later on, but I couldn't do it; that kind of automatic abruptness of movement is possible only after years of training, and then only if you have the gift.
I only thought Jenny was a bit big for belly dancing. Those Eastern women with their fat bottoms and bellies who regale the eyes of Eastern men immediately after the hot mutton has been devoured are small, intentionally small. Jenny would probably seem awkward and clumsy to some Eastern men. Her other shortcoming was her chestnut hair. A belly dancer's hair should be jet black, as should her cunt hair. I noticed long ago, by the way, that cunts with black hair are always red, that is, of vivid hue. The cunts of blondes, on the other hand, are paler in color, pastel, so to speak. The black-haired cunt should be more appealing to Eastern men; it's red like the mutton they've just eaten.
But it's quite possible I'm wrong, very possible in fact, since Jenny was even invited to dance nightly at The Oasis, an expensive Middle Eastern restaurant where you can watch women's fat bellies gyrating while you're eating your dinner. That means her dancer's art was worth something. It often happened later that when Jenny lost her temper with Steven the "music teacher," she would threaten to quit her job and go to The Oasis, where she could make lots of money. "A lot of money, every night!" she would say angrily. "I'll manage!" she would add with conviction. I too thought she'd manage. She had worked as a babysitter for about ten years and was already out on her own when she was sixteen.
Everything was proper enough in the beginning, but then we all got drunk. There was as much wine as you could want, and "hard drinks" too, as in the best liquor store.
Jenny had apparently forgotten all about our phone conversation, or else her expressed desire to remain just friends had been only a passing whim or was perhaps merely her way of flirting.