There are special moments in life that are much more deeply inscribed in the memory than others. It is that day that I remember Jenny, although there were many other episodes in the garden, and we spent two summers, two springs, and one fall there together. Still stupefied with grass, I sat in the garden with her and felt an extraordinary tenderness toward her. A tenderness toward her cheek, and her little hands. A tenderness toward her friends and those others close to me who were sharing with me my time on earth. Tenderness toward her as one of them.
Her combs were the same color as her eyes. And the embroidery on her East Indian dress and her shoes with their long straps tied around her ankles were the same color too. There were little mirrors sewn on her dress, a great many mirrors sewn on by the Indians, and when Jenny moved, rays of sunlight were scattered in every direction. How young she is! I thought.
Then we had supper on the terrace, steaks that Jenny had prepared, and drank red wine. Wasps circled the food, and everybody was intimidated by them, even the punk rocker Douglas — everybody except me. Bridget and Douglas admired my intrepidity and presence of mind in the face of the clear and present wasp danger, and Jenny snidely remarked, obviously making fun of me, that I had been as steadfast as a real revolutionary. She followed that with caustic remarks about bourgeois society, wondering how we could ever coexist, she being so bourgeois herself. I couldn't even answer — I was still stoned — and merely grinned sheepishly.
Bridget and Douglas got ready to leave, since they were supposed to come back to the party that evening. Jenny walked them to the door. "I'll make a speech when I return," she said in a tipsy voice. "I need another glass of red wine."
After she came back, we uncorked another bottle and sat down in the kitchen.
"You talk about inequality, Edward, about the rich and the poor," she began seriously. "But God, Edward, God loves everyone. And I, if you want to know, am happier than my boss. Whenever people come here, to my kitchen, I'm happy that I can feed them. God commands me to help people. My father is not a rich man. He was a naval officer in the war, and then served for twenty-eight years as an FBI special agent. He did his duty — he worked in order to raise and feed and educate us, his ten children. And we had everything. If you work, then you can have everything. But you want to destroy that peaceful life!" she surprised me by exclaiming. During all this we had been kissing and embracing each other from our chairs. But at that point she freed herself.
"Right now, right this minute, I'm going to show you something!" she suddenly cried and dashed out of the kitchen. She came back with a large-format book. "This is my favorite book," she said, and started quickly turning the pages. "Come over here and look," she demanded.
I moved to the chair next to Jenny and looked. There wasn't any text, just pictures. In picture after picture the artist showed the successive destruction of mankind by war until there was nothing left but a man and a woman and a flower. And then life began again and once again revolutionaries and soldiers appeared, and war again destroyed the whole world, except for a man and a woman and a flower.
"Here!" Jenny said, slapping the book shut and extending it to me. "I give it to you. So you'll remember how it all ends. If I have a baby, I want him to be happy," Jenny exclaimed. "But you, Edward..!" and she jumped up and started pounding her fists on my back.
Thus we talked and fondled each other, and then after eight the guests started to arrive. The party was a definite success. Many of the more than thirty people who had been invited had never tried Russian food before, and for them it was very exotic. Each guest drank a shot of vodka with me. I turned nobody down, and obviously got drunk as a result, since I couldn't remember later on how the party had ended.
Coming to, I didn't understand at first where I was. Only after looking around for a few minutes did I realize that I was in Jenny's room. You never know the time in the houses of the rich, or what season of the year it is. The air conditioner had been on all night and had made the room so cold that it felt like winter. The room was dim, since the blinds were down, and only the light of an unknown season showed through the crack. Then I remembered and scowled in disgust.
I've always been poor, ugly, and short. In any case not the sort that women throw themselves at. And now my prick won't stand up either, I thought pitilessly. Probably a little too pitilessly and a little too certainly, but honestly nonetheless.
An unsuccessful morning after an unsuccessful night. And now my prick won't stand up either, I repeated to myself and scowled again. "You ought to go to a doctor. I want to take you to my doctor," Jenny's words came back to me.
The next day after her dance lesson, her belly dancing lesson, that is, she went to her doctor and probably said to him, "I have a boyfriend. I like him, but he can't get an erection." That took place at 2:30 or 3:00 in the afternoon. And then she told the doctor my "case history" — what she knew about me. "His mother left him when he was a child. He was raised by soldiers until he was fifteen. His first wife was a prostitute. The last two years he has had sex only with men. He won't say how old he is, but I think he's about thirty."
From her bed I heard noises resembling the smacking of parched lips. She was waking up. And she had been awake several times during the night. That does her credit, even though she hadn't touched me or in any way tried to break down the wall that had arisen between us after my one unsuccessful attempt to fuck her. Or if she had tried to, it had been very tentative.
Actually, I did remain a few minutes in her "womb," as that place is pompously termed, or even more idiotically, her «vagina» (continue the sequence, if you like: "angina," "regina"…). I entered it, yes, but I didn't remain very long. Nothing lewd or particularly exciting — a twenty-year-old girl with a clean, slightly heavy body equipped to bear children and love a husband. Fresh young breasts, a long beautiful neck, everything fresh and smooth. And a cunt that was probably a bit wider than necessary…
And I, that twisted monster who had been lying next to her, had woken up in another bed, although one close to hers. A feeble monster. My body wasn't twisted; on the contrary, it was dark and spare, but inside… My God, inside it was a pathological jumble of nerves and terror…
Thus I quietly lay there, despondent yet at the same time thinking, But what about Rena, the Rumanian dancer? How am I to explain then my bestial, hour-long fucking with her? Of course, it had been several months since I'd quit fucking her. Maybe something had happened to me in the meantime? I didn't believe there was anything wrong with me. Probably it was something else, say a temporary aversion to Jenny. Or that I wasn't used to her yet? Yes, that's what it was. I was still getting used to her.
I didn't succeed in reassuring myself but returned very awkwardly that morning to my hotel — retreated to my hole, ashamed to even look at Jenny. You know, masculine pride. There is nothing more painful than wounded masculine pride. A prick that won't stand up or one that's too small are devastating discoveries for a man. Even a small child's first discovery of the existence of death doesn't compare in horror. I was crushed. My prick wouldn't stand up! And I have to say that no sensible references to bestial fucks with Rena or other beings of the female sex more remote in time could reassure me, although they did help to salve the wound a bit.
An old man was riding up on the elevator with me, and I glanced at him and shuddered. His ear was a bloody abscess covered with scabs, and there were ulcers on his cheek too. His nose was half rotted away. Why on earth do they let such creatures walk around on the streets and in hotels? I wondered. And then I had a sudden ironic thought: His probably stands up every time like a stick. I even broke out laughing at my own black humor.
I didn't call Jenny for two days. She called me herself.
"Come over, I have a surprise for you," she said to me in her usual voice, or even, I thought, in a slightly mischievous one. I went. Another wouldn't have, but I always go, even if disgrace awaits me. I'm brave, or maybe stupid, but I go.
A surprise. The surprise turned out to be a questionnaire from Dr. Krishna consisting, if you can imagine it, of about three hundred questions; I'm not exaggerating. The Indian quack wanted to know everything about his patient, the better to devise his Indian-Gypsy tricks later on. After you'd already forgotten what you'd written down on the questionnaire, he would suddenly but gently announce, looking into your soul with his piercing eyes, "Well, sir, your mother's uncle was an alcoholic or your grandmother on your father's side was insane…" Despite the shitty state of my affairs, I had a good laugh while reading the questionnaire, as did Jenny, although she still declared in a severe tone of voice that we would start filling out the questionnaire the very first thing next morning.
There wasn't any food in the house from Jenny's point of view, and so we went to a restaurant. From my point of view, the refrigerator was full, and it would have been possible to live for a good several weeks on the food that was there. But I didn't argue with her. Hers was the consciousness of an American girl, mine that of a foreign writer struggling with poverty.
In the restaurant, Jenny suddenly started feeling bad and complained about a pain in her back, and we returned home immediately. Aware of my own guilt, I offered my unfucked girlfriend a massage by way of compensation, and we went up to her room, I in terror, to tell you the truth.
By morning Jenny had forgotten all about the questionnaire, as had I, because by then I had fucked her, three times at least. "What's happened to you, Edward?" she asked happily on her way to the shower mat morning. Nothing; I had simply gotten beyond my usual tangle of feelings.
She sang happily in the shower, and I listened to her voice while lolling on the bed like a kind of lazy person, one leg hanging over the side, and reckoned up my feelings. The reckoning wasn't very comforting. I suddenly realized distinctly and clearly for the first time that I didn't love Jenny (I don't love Jenny), and that I never would.
I wanted very much to fall in love, wanted it, I realized, more than anything. I liked Jenny, but she didn't even suit me physically. She didn't know how to fuck, and would just lie there like a big unhappy dummy, a female animal waiting for sperm to be deposited in her. There are men, no doubt, who like specimens of that kind and find them exciting, but I unfortunately do not. She was patently a mama, and I even felt something a little like shame in fucking her, as if I were fucking my own mother. Maybe she was my mother in my last incarnation?
Although I had fucked her a rather long time all three times, I don't think she had an orgasm even once. Licking her cunt would have been no problem for me of course, and she would probably have come if I had, but if you're going to lick a cunt, you at least have to feel like it, but with her I didn't. Even though I have more than once in my life risked licking the cunts of prostitutes.
Jenny wasn't the least erotic. She was a healthy animal, healthy despite her continual indispositions and complaints about a pain in her back, or in her stomach, or in her "vagina," as she would say. But if Martha must bear children and bake bread, they will go to Mary Magdalene to fornicate.
Thus I lay and drowsily mused. Jenny came out of the shower. "Lazy boy!" she said in the lisping voice she had probably used with children when she was a governess and a babysitter. "It's time to stop idling and get up. I'm going down to the kitchen now to make us some coffee and an excellent breakfast. Do you like bacon and pancakes with maple syrup? I'll make bacon and pancakes with maple syrup and you get up and take a shower."
Jenny was obviously in a good mood. Later on I became convinced that the knowledge she was "making love" was more important to her than any pleasure she got from the act itself. How nice! I'm doing it. I'm making love just like all the other girls! she probably thought. Her God, and she had gone to Catholic school, no doubt encouraged her to feel that way. Well, it doesn't matter if I don't enjoy it; Edward does.
I was sure she would later tell her girlfriends in detail how her new boyfriend had fucked her three times, and how afterward "we drank coffee and had delicious whole wheat pancakes with an extra cup of barley flour; the pancakes turned out really well. And maple syrup… It's hard to get real maple syrup now, but Nancy brought some from Connecticut. She got it herself — you know, they make holes in the bark." Jenny was fond of all the pleasant little details.
I'm not making fun of her; I still respect Jenny, and there aren't many people that I do. But, good Lord, she was such a little Martha that she would regularly bake her own bread! Various kinds: unleavened, sweet, raisin, and even with zucchini or whatever else she could think of. Incredible homemade bread that even Steven would proudly serve his guests now and then. She ground the flour from grain herself; that tells you something, doesn't it? In a real flour mill given to her by her friend Isabelle.
We had breakfast on the roof, where we had taken a small folding table, and we sat across from each other and drank coffee out of red ceramic cups and poured maple syrup over our pancakes. Then Jenny brought a cassette player up to the roof and a cold bottle of champagne, and we took our places in lounge chairs, drank the champagne in the blazing sunshine, and listened to music.
The tape was called "After the Ball," the name of one of the songs included on it. They were old popular songs: "I've Got Rings on My Fingers," "Good Bye, My Lady Love," and "Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May?"
Those melodies both then and now evoke in me a kind of festive melancholy. Perhaps because they really are about our lives in this world — my life and Jenny's and the lives of other people who lived before us — about our private little stories and tragic mistakes, our whims and our passions. The song "After the Ball" tells how at a ball «he» mistook her brother for her lover, and so foolishly lost his happiness, and how «she» soon caught cold and died. "After the Ball." I'm writing this too after the ball.
I'm very ashamed to admit it, but I gradually came to hate her, quietly and feebly. Maybe it was the hatred of an adventurer for an escapade that hadn't lived up to his expectations, that hadn't come off, an irresolvable subconscious bitterness at the fact that she was a servant and not the lady of the house. I don't know. One thing is certain; along with the gratitude I felt to Jenny, I also detected in myself the first twinges of antipathy for her. She had revived a corpse, and the corpse, having come back to life, at once resumed its nasty little tricks, as you see, and instead of gratitude, concealed a bitterness toward the girl who had found him on her doorstep.
The first time I remember being ashamed of Jenny was when she and I were sitting in the kitchen and I was introduced to a young woman who had unexpectedly walked in holding the hand of a blond boy of about five.
"The Marchioness Houston… Edward Limonov, my boyfriend," Jenny said proudly, introducing us.
The nicely perfumed and beautifully coiffured marchioness, obviously no older than I, smiled benignly and extended a cool hand to me. To say that "we exchanged a few words" would be an exaggeration, since, like an idiot, I said nothing and stupidly gawked at the guest from across the sea. It wasn't that the marchioness was particularly beautiful — after all, I had once been married to a very beautiful woman, Elena — but that she was a lady from head to toe. I glanced at my girlfriend, who unfortunately was sitting in the kitchen barefoot, with her hair uncombed and a mess and a white pimple breaking out under her nose. She stubbornly refused to squeeze out her pimples, letting them burst by themselves since she was afraid of blood poisoning. She was wearing a blue skirt I had made for her, and not very well either — it was my first attempt, and the skirt stretched across Jenny's fat stomach, emphasizing it, and the wide ruffles, which were inappropriate for such heavy material, made her backside look so heavy that she seemed to me at that moment to resemble nothing so much as a large goose.
Looking at Jenny and comparing her with the Marchioness Houston, I returned from the realm of dreams and the petty everyday details of my struggle to the harsh reality of today. I was the lover of a servant. The full wretchedness of my situation loomed before me in the guise of the unkempt Jenny, and there in the kitchen, responding to the unaffected questions of the Marchioness Houston, to the simple courtesy of a well-bred lady, while Jenny was giving the little Lord Jesse a glass of milk, I swore to myself that I would leave Jenny that day and never return.
Fortunately I didn't keep my word. The fact is that I had nowhere else to go except back to what I had known before. And returning to Central Park to read and dream was something I simply could not do. Madame Margarita, the fairy Volodya, and the superstar Sashenka Lodyzhnikov hadn't accepted me as one of them. They might have, but on terms that would have been humiliating to me, and I didn't want that; I wanted to be treated as an equal and with respect. And anyway they didn't interest me.
My casual sexual relations had been a passing thing, and I had no wish to prolong them. I had derived something from them, a certain kind of knowledge, but the main thing, gentlemen, is that my partners were all poor homeless creatures like myself who had been cast out into the huge city either by their own volition or against it, but poor! Like me, they had their own struggles, on a much lower level, but struggles. For a good job, for success in their own narrow area of life, or perhaps for a better lover. Often I was a lucky find for my partners, but they never were for me. I didn't want to associate with poor people; they depressed me. I needed a psychologically healthy atmosphere. That was the secret.
More than Jenny, it was the millionaire's house I needed. I loved the house; it was good for me, it and its carpets and pictures, its parquet floors and thousands of books, its huge leather folios with drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, its garden, and its children's rooms — they were what I needed. Both nature and instinct had shown me the way, for the only means of getting into the house, the key to it, was Jenny. Not even through Steven Grey could I have gained entrance to it and lived there, unless he had been gay, but he wasn't.
I know what you're thinking; go ahead and ask: "Why didn't you, Limonov, who prattle so much about world revolution and the necessity of wiping a whole civilization off the face of the earth, why didn't you take even one step in that direction? Why have you been so busy with your dick, as we've seen, and with every other kind of thing, some even directly opposed to your 'goal'? Why didn't you join a revolutionary party, for example, since they exist, even in America?"
I'll tell you why I didn't. In the first place, those puny little parties would only have taken me as a minor little member, a mosquito, and I would have been handing out little newspapers and tracts on the street and going to petty little meetings, and maybe after about twenty years of party discipline and demagoguery, I would have become, say, a provincial Trotskyite boss. And then what?
And in the second place, I want action. Not one American leftist party has any chance of success now, and I don't play games that are already lost. My life is running out; I can feel it in my bones.
And then, gentlemen, you've obviously got me mixed up with somebody else. I have my own ideas, you see, and the well-fed face of the proletarian is no less unpleasant and repugnant to me than the well-fed face of the capitalist.