And therefore I would, like Lord Byron, have gone off to fight to free the Greeks, or, in my own case, the Palestinians, if I had already made a name for myself, if I had already become known to the world. So that if I were cut down by machine gun fire somewhere among the sandbags and palms of Beirut, I could be sure that the fat New York Times, which always leaves your hands so black that you have to wash them with soap and water after reading it, would come out the next day with my photograph and four lines on the first page (with the rest in the obituary section) — "Died: Edward Limonov, poet and writer, author of several novels, including It's Me, Eddie. Killed in a fire fight in the Moslem sector of Beirut."
But I knew that those lines wouldn't appear anywhere. And that's why I didn't lose control.
I think after that encounter with the Marchioness Houston, I wrote a poem, a ridiculously bitter poem, only part of which I remember, but containing the lines, "You won't make a lady out of a servant,/ Never, never, never…" To be honest, I wasn't trying to; I realized I would have to grit my teeth and endure Jenny and take advantage of the millionaire's house. The typical reflections of an opportunist, I admit, but is that against the law? Who says it is?
It turned out that at home in England the Marchioness Houston lived in a thirteenth-century castle with three hundred servants(!). Not too shabby. I hadn't even suspected that such castles exist. They even had their own zoo, with tigers and bears, as I learned from an illustrated tourist guidebook to the castle. The marchioness had brought a certain number of the guidebooks with her to America to give to friends and acquaintances, and she gave one to Jenny. She also gave Jenny, if I'm not mistaken, two hundred dollars for looking after the young Lord Jesse and serving him breakfast.
I too did a little work for the marchioness — I shortened three pairs of pants for her, one of them yellow and all bought in America. Neither Jenny nor I particularly cared for them; one pair was even made of polyester instead of cotton or wool. The fabric should have been natural — cotton, wool, or silk — as the housekeeper of that advanced and well-to-do American home knew, and as I, her boyfriend, did too. When Bridget came over, we all sat in the kitchen in various postures and condemned the marchioness for her polyester pants, deciding that the English were still very provincial, even the lords.
I too went along with what they were saying, although I was wistfully thinking too about the freshly bathed marchioness and her rather impressive bottom lying upstairs on her bed on the third floor, obviously wearing one of the red night shirts our black Olga had laundered for her.
I had gone into the laundry room and had looked at the marchioness' night shirts — I just couldn't help it. The marchioness is lying in her bed, I thought dreamily to the monotonous chatter of Jenny and Bridget, my eyes half closed… fragrant with the warmth of her body and the odor of her fashionable perfume, a smell like the one the ordinary Soviet cologne White Lilac used to have. Maybe she's stretching and rearranging her pillow…
I'm sitting here in the kitchen with my servant girl and her friend, I thought dejectedly, while my place is upstairs, in bed with the marchioness. Wherever else an opportunist's place is, it is in any case not in the kitchen.
Jenny, of course, couldn't have been aware of my treacherous thoughts, but seeing that I had suddenly grown sad, she got up from the table, came over to me, and bending down low said in a lisping whisper, her governess' whisper intended for children that I found so incredibly irritating, "Silly man. Just be patient, my period will be over tomorrow and you can go inside me then." She thought of course that I was in an agony of desire, that I wanted her. That I craved her insipid charms.
Not likely. It was the marchioness I wanted! The marchioness, wife of a lord, the marchioness who lived in a castle with three hundred servants, a castle where tourists were admitted several days a week from ten until three and where there were pictures by Goya and Velazquez and Titian. What was I put on earth for, if I couldn't fuck the marchioness!
I think the Marchioness Houston liked me. Well of course she liked me; she had mentioned my beautiful hands and my beautiful shoes several times. Obviously it was clear from my face that I wasn't born to be the lover of a servant. Maybe I was born to be the lover of a marchioness? Houston even pitied me for living in a foreign country and outside my natural surroundings. It's unlikely the marchioness was thinking it would be nice to fuck Edward, but running into her on the stairway and in the kitchen, I desired her passionately. But not so much sexually, I think, as socially. I had a social inferiority complex; that's all. If fate had presented me with an opportunity to fuck her then, it would no doubt have been very therapeutic for me. How proud I would have been. But there wasn't any such opportunity. Whenever important guests like the marchioness and her husband stayed at the house, I spent relatively little time there, because then Steven Grey was home a lot. During such periods Steven and his guests relegated Jenny and me to the kitchen, to the servants' quarters, so to speak. I was intimidated.
After the departure of the Marchioness Houston and the young Lord Jesse, Jenny's parents came up from Virginia for several days — her tall, lean, sharp-nosed, dependable, tolerant father, and her thin mother, dark as a grackle. Jenny gave a dinner party for her parents, inviting another couple — a former FBI colleague of her father's, now a New York police official, and his wife — and me. Inspection of the groom.
I arrived a little late for dinner in order to give myself a certain weight in the eyes of Jenny's parents, coming as if from work, although I had no job then of course. I had simply gone to the movies to kill time.
Tall like an awkward tower, the warm, tipsy Jenny met me at the door and immediately started hugging and kissing me and telling me how much she loved me, and then she dragged me into the dining room. She was wearing a flowered crêpe de Chine dress and new black shoes from Charles Jourdain, and her hair was curled, although it was virtually the only time that she ever did anything with her hair.
They had already finished eating and were drinking champagne. Jenny entertained her parents no worse than Steven did his lords and businessmen. Champagne and candles.
After eating the lamb and artichokes left for me, I partook of the champagne and the conversation. The champagne with a vengeance; the conversation with caution.
The three of us — the men — had a lot to drink, and I've forgotten many of the details of our conversation, but I formed one unshakable opinion that evening, which later acquaintance with Jenny's father only confirmed. Both retired FBI men were terribly like my own retired father, an ex-Soviet army officer and employee of the NKVD, MVD, and so on. The same memories of the past and of colleagues and opinions about their subsequent fates, and the same view of life as something that had been entrusted exclusively to them to preserve and protect.
"Where's John now?" father Henry asked.
"Which John, little or big?" the New York policeman asked, seeking clarification.
"Big — you remember, he worked in the diamond department."
"Oh, big John's a wheel now; he's director of security for IVTA."
"Jiminy, he's really up there!" father Henry exclaimed in delight. "That's a giant multinational…"
The wife of one unfortunate had cancer and was slowly dying at home, while the daughter of a certain Nick, nicknamed The Kid, had given him a grandchild — a constant stream of such information came from both rivers.
Just ordinary people, I thought in amazement. I had some more champagne with them, and then started drinking whiskey. The New York cop was an Irishman and a heavy drinker, and when they were finally filled with respect for my manly drinking skill, I told them, for my part, that they reminded me of my Communist and ex-secret police agent father and his friends. I thought it would astonish them, that they would be shocked.
"Probably so," father Henry answered calmly and reflectively. "People who share a profession resemble each other in a certain way. It's easier for you to see, Edward; you've lived both here and there."
"My father was and is a good person, despite all the ill fame of the organizations he worked for," I said.
"And why not?" the New York cop said. "You're a good fellow, as I can see, and Jenny loves you, so why should your father be a bad person?"
Later on the New York cop started asking me about the kind of books I write, and how much writers are paid before they become famous. The policeman and I continued drinking for quite a while after papa Henry had stopped, and I started complaining to the New York cop about how hard it is to make a name for yourself in literature.
"You stick to it," the policeman told me. "Jenny says you're very talented. It's difficult for you now, but be patient, persevere. The beginning is always hard in any profession, but later on your books may become best sellers, and you'll be famous like Peter Benchley, and they'll make a movie in Hollywood…"
A journey of thousands of miles across the white hot desert of the literary business separated me then from a film, as it separates me now, and anyhow I wouldn't want to be a Peter Benchley. I'd like to have his literary agent, the famous Scott Meredith. His agent's a treasure, but Peter Benchley is a shark and marine horror specialist — no, spare me that.
I would have enjoyed talking to the New York policeman some more, but remembering my promise to Jenny not to stay late, I hastened to leave. It was already around one o'clock in the morning.
Jenny walked me to the doorway, where she sighed with relief. "I was afraid you would get drunk," she said. "It's a good thing you didn't; you were very cute tonight. I love you very much," and she kissed me. "Tomorrow I'll tell you what my parents said about you."
Her mama said I was «cute» too, and when I met her Polish grandmother later on, she wanted to know what kind of Russian I could be — Russians are always big, even huge, and have beards, but that even so Jenny should watch out for me; you should never trust Russians. And furthermore they beat their wives.
Jenny wanted a husband. As you've seen for yourself, fucking was a less important need for her than having a man in her life. She was always raving about how strong my body was. I think that despite my strong body I wasn't an ideal object for her purposes. I had neither the money nor, what is more to the point, the desire to build a happy future in the form of that family of ten she was very likely planning after her parents' example, but she liked me, and she indulged her heart in my case, even going against her maternal instincts. Thank you, Jenny.
I fucked her whenever I felt like it, fucked her brutally, without tenderness, preferring the dog position so I wouldn't have to look at her face. I didn't bother about her pleasure at all, leaving it to her to satisfy herself by masturbating if she wanted to have an orgasm. Sometimes I fucked her as many as five times, if I was inspired, but not finding any response to my prick in her body, I grew less and less interested in that activity, so that after I had fucked her a little while, my prick would tire of that meager pleasure and withdraw. Whenever that happened Jenny would start bawling, "Edward, I love you! You're not well. How unhappy we are!"
Edward was in fact as strong as an ox and giving the onceover to the scrawniest whores on the street, but then something strange started happening to Jenny, and once when I tried to stroke her cunt with my hand, to give her at least some kind of pleasure, she suddenly jerked away in pain. That happened at the beginning of August, and after that she complained about discomfort for a couple of weeks, but quietly, and then during one of her regular belly dancing performances, she suddenly doubled over and rushed with a yell to the elevator. When Bridget and I got to her room, she was lying curled up on the bed and groaning, "My vagina! My vagina!"
I didn't understand anything about women's diseases then, nor do I understand anything about them now, but something was clearly wrong with Jenny. I gave up sex with her for a while, and she went to Dr. Krishna, who applied himself to finding out what was the matter with her. We now slept soundly on separate beds, and she changed her refrain a little. "Edward, I love you. We're both not well. How unhappy we are!" she whined, and asked me for such innocent pleasures as remained to us — massaging her back or playing with her hair.
While with one hand I unwillingly stroked her hair and held a glass of wine in the other, she chattered incessantly. "God sent you to me," she said. "I love you because you're nice to me." I can imagine how her usual men must have treated her, I thought to myself, if she regards my almost indifferent attitude toward her as something special.
"Keep stroking my hair, don't stop, I like it," she said, using her lisping tone again, and I stroked her hair some more while sipping my wine, an excellent 1966 Bordeaux. She continued babbling: "As soon as I get better, Edward, we can do it again, but we'll have to take precautions, since we don't have enough money to have a baby — can you imagine you and me and a baby in your hotel?" Jenny spoke the last sentence very seriously. "No," I said. But I could imagine it very well — she and I and the baby covered with shit walking down Broadway, and a bottle of cheap wine sticking out of the pocket of my torn jacket — and it seemed so wildly funny to me that I could barely sip the expensive wine.
"We'll have to take precautions," she repeated.
"Uh-huh," I said, "but I thought you already were taking precautions, that you were taking pills."
"No, that's against my principles." (Abortion was against her principles too.) "I only recognize mechanical means," she said severely.
What kind of mechanical means? I wondered, reviving. What does she mean, a condom maybe? Ugh, how disgusting! I thought. I tried fucking with a condom one or two times in my life — it just didn't work. "All right," I said out loud, "we'll use mechanical means."
"We'll have money someday, Edward," she said enthusiastically. "We've got to!"
But how? thought Edward, the heel. I may have money someday, but live with you, my poor little kitchen angel, is something I will never do. You already bore me, and the prospect of spending my whole life with a woman who has to make such an effort to come doesn't appeal to me at all. I like expensive whores, lascivious kittens who tear you up inside and arouse you. But you're a country girl, a stupid girl with a big fat ass and fat thighs, a twenty-year-old girl. And you don't get under my skin, and you don't smell of perfume.
"I love you very much, Edward!" she whined again.
It was starting to annoy me. She needed to be told off, to be put in her place. I turned off the light and lay down on my back. "Jenny," I said, "I want to ask you something very important."
"What is it, Edward?" Jenny answered in the darkness in a cautious voice.
"You see, Jenny, I want the kind of love in this world where, if they sent me to prison and gave me a life sentence, say — and what the future holds for me is still very unclear — my woman would get herself a submachine gun and free me. Could you love me like that?"