All three of us came out of the restaurant with our arms around each other, feeling very close. It was a warm evening, and the idle stoned were wandering up and down Broadway. Everybody wants to make that one life slipping continually through his fingers more beautiful and interesting, even if it’s only in marijuana dreams. We have only one life, after all, and there’s always less of it.
We walked along, and I could feel Jenny’s warm, living body next to mine and her large hip, and my prick started to rise, and I took her by the breast with one hand like a country lad, embarrassed neither by Broadway nor by Debby. Jenny laughed.
Debby left us at Columbus Circle and started looking for a taxi, and I said to Jenny, “You realize of course that I want you very much.”
“Yes,” she said, “and I really, really want you. And you’ll have me, but not now.”
“Why not now, Jenny? When?” I asked.
She pretended to get angry and said, “I have to explain to this Russian ten times that I have a vaginal infection and that it hurts me.”
“Is it dangerous?” I asked.
“Not for you,” she said, “but it’s painful for me.”
I didn’t remember her telling me about an infection. Maybe it was the night before, or when I was drunk. Probably it was when I was drunk.
“How long have you had the infection, how much time?” I asked.
“Eight months,” she answered in embarrassment.
“When will you get over it?” I asked in dismay.
“Maybe I already have,” Jenny said. “I’ll find out tomorrow. I’m going to the doctor’s.”
Before getting into the taxi she patted me on the cheek and then suddenly took my hand and kissed it. And then they drove off, and I remained standing on Columbus Circle. Then I went back to the hotel — where else was there to go? My mood was pensive. She’s a good girl, I thought. We could buy a farm and have children. We could live… I could become an American…
Back at the hotel I discovered I was out of cigarettes and I badly wanted to smoke. Usually in such circumstances I went down to the street where without any trouble along the edges of the sidewalk I found thick butts or even whole cigarettes lost by some goof or drunk. This time for some reason I didn’t feel like waiting to take the elevator down and then back up again. My window was open, given the fact that it faced not the courtyard but open space, open all the way to Central Park in fact, since the buildings in that direction were all lower than the Diplomat. In the room above me they were stamping and yelling something to repetitious music, and so I went to close the window.
At that moment, carried by a gust of wind from an upper floor, a thick butt touched with lipstick plopped heavily on my windowsill. It wasn’t even a butt, but a barely smoked cigarette. Oh, these women! I burst out laughing, picked up the butt, lit it, and while pacing around the room, sang:
On the deck the sailors
Were smoking cigarettes,
And pauper Charlie Chaplin,
He gathered up their butts…
I was then supplementing my welfare checks by making piroshki and pelmeni, or Russian ravioli, for Madame Margarita. Madame Margarita spoke beautiful Russian, lived on Park Avenue, and was manager, secretary, and mommy to Sashenka Lodyzhnikov. For nothing, mind you — he didn’t pay her.
Madame Margarita, God bless her, paid me three dollars an hour — a bit more than an illegal immigrant. I and another man of letters, the haughty homosexual snob Volodya, made the piroshki and pelmeni in her kitchen, narrow as a pencil box. I, however, was the only one working for three dollars an hour. Volodya was Madame Margarita’s partner. They sold what we made to private clients, usually rich old ladies from Park and Fifth Avenues, and to the snack counter at Bloomingdale’s.
Volodya had the highest regard for the manuscript of my first novel, the same one that had knocked Efimenkov out, and although he called me an “underground man” and was a little afraid of me, I think, he treated me very cordially. While we made the piroshki and pelmeni, a tediously mechanical activity, Volodya would, when he was in the mood, recite poetry to me, sometimes for hours on end.
Occasionally Lodyzhnikov would drop by for a little bite of something good to eat, say a meat patty with mushrooms, since he lived nearby. To Madame Margarita, he was dearer than if he had been her own son. The only thing I didn’t understand was why she had chosen Lodyzhnikov for a son and not some obscure youth — me for example. And really, why not? Especially considering the fact that before Lodyzhnikov, Yakovlev had been Madame Margarita’s son for a while, as had the just recently emigrated Bulgakov, along with his entire family. Sashenka became her favorite and the most prominent of her sons. Moreover, Madame took care of all his affairs for him, so that Sashenka was the spoiled child of the family. “Don’t eat the cherries, boys; they’re for Sashenka. Sashenka loves cherries. And the patties in the refrigerator are for him too.” Madame Margarita took sweet tea in a thermos and cherries to him at the theater.
Sashenka’s a nice boy, I thought, while I made the fucking pelmeni. He dances. But Limonov is mean and bad. He’s not entitled to cherries. Limonov makes pelmeni for three dollars an hour.
A few days after Jenny’s sudden visit to my hotel, I took a great quantity of pelmeni I’d made by myself from Madame Margarita’s to the millionaire’s little house — Jenny was going to have a party with Russian food and had invited all her friends. Besides the pelmeni, I also made a huge pot of shchi, or Russian cabbage soup. I tried to make a fruit kisel for dessert using Madame Margarita’s recipe, but I botched it and it wouldn’t set for some reason. I still don’t know how to make it. Jenny was obviously planning to introduce her new boyfriend to her friends. That meant she had finally accepted me.
I arrived from Madame Margarita’s with the pelmeni, and as usual Jenny had company. Sitting in the kitchen with the blinds down were Bridget and her boyfriend Douglas, a drummer with a very well-known New York rock group, and Jenny, who was rolling them a joint(!). She had no intention of smoking it herself, but she couldn’t deny herself the modest pleasure of at least rolling it.
Jenny didn’t care much for Douglas. “From beating his drums for so many years, he’s turned into a complete dummy; he’s started to rattle his brain,” she said and laughed. She and Bridget had been friends since high school, however, and for Bridget’s sake Jenny put up with Douglas in “my kitchen,” as she said with pride.
Bridget was sarcastic and cynical. Jenny was sarcastic too, but not nearly as much as Bridget. Bridget thought the whole world was shit and never had anything good to say about anybody. She was even planning to write a book about her life entitled Shit.
I had the sense that Bridget respected me for some reason. Perhaps because I didn’t care too much for people either and made fun of them. Or maybe she believed in me, to put it in more pompous terms. I don’t know, it’s always an elusive thing. Some people like you; others don’t.
They started smoking, and I took a drag too whenever my turn came. After a few joints we were all doing just fine and starting to laugh a lot, and then we went out onto the terrace in the garden. And we laughed there too. The stout Mr. Robinson was walking past us from the river to his house with several guests, and he looked at us in alarm. After Robinson had disappeared into his house, Jenny said, laughing, “Mr. Robinson doesn’t think servants should use the garden.” It should be said in Steven’s favor that he didn’t check up on or in any way forbid anything either to Jenny or, later on, to me, but whether that was from indifference or a genuine respect for liberty, I am unable to say.
Two children, a boy and a girl dressed in white, suddenly ran into the garden, ran into it as if out of a newsreel at the beginning of the century, clad in wide pants reaching to their knees and wide shirts the same shade of white, and started turning somersaults on the grass. They were about ten, no more. Later on another boy came out, a bit older than the others, slender and handsome, with long dark hair, but dressed in the same white clothes�
�
“Isabelle’s children,” Jenny said to me. “She’s the only friend I have in this neighborhood. That house over there belongs to her,” and Jenny pointed to a four-story townhouse partly hidden by a huge magnolia tree.
The children hurtled past like phantoms from the beautiful life back into their house and then returned with little orange plastic rattles which they started beating each other with as if they were clubs. Jenny and Douglas got involved in the mayhem too, and the garden was filled with squeals and laughter.
Out from behind the magnolia tree in response to the laughter came a woman dressed in a lilac smock patterned with crimson flowers tightly girded with a broad flowered belt, and wide lilac silk trousers and spike heels. “A beautiful Jewess,” as our Pushkin would have said. A very beautiful Jewish woman. She walked over to us and stood next to a flowering azalea bush on the terrace, on purpose probably, and to very good effect.
Jenny introduced us: “Isabelle, my neighbor and friend! Edward, a Russian poet!” Jenny pronounced “Russian poet” with pride, it seemed to me. Isabelle and I lightly shook hands. Her hand was covered in gold and jewels. A small hand.
Then, calling the children over, Isabelle introduced them to me:
“Edward, this is my daughter Chloe.” The plump but graceful Chloe held out her hand, then withdrew to the grass and started spinning the wheel of a toy — showing me that she knew how. Silently.
“This is my son Rudy,” said Isabelle, showing me a plump boy with a provocatively insolent face who firmly shook my hand like an adult.
“And this is my oldest son, Valentine.”
The oldest boy was gentler, slenderer, and more delicate than die others. He had large, sad black eyes, perhaps just like his Portuguese father’s. I liked Valentine best — he was independent, like me, although he seemed to take part in all their games. And, as I later found out, he liked me too.
“Valentine said, ‘Edward’s a very good person, ” Jenny told me later on, adding, “and he doesn’t say that about everybody. I have a lot of respect for his opinion; he’s very smart.”
I think that I’m not a very good person, or that I was a good person, but I stopped being one from being worn out by people who forced me to live by their rules. Or maybe I never was a good person either. I’m capable of being good, but I’m also very capable of being mean. Valentine, however, died not very long ago, surviving to the day before Christmas. He was thirteen years old, and he died of cancer. Neither chemotherapy nor the best doctors in the world could save him. “Whom the gods love dies young.”
A year after that scene in the garden, he suddenly didn’t feel good, and after tests and a check-up, the doctors discovered that he had cancer, and the family moved to California, to a climate better than New York’s. They treated Valentine, and one hope was replaced by another, and it seemed that there was still reason to hope, and then he died.
Did I pity the boy? Yes. The usual horror of life. Valentine was unlucky.
I’m still alive for the time being. If there is “another world,” Valentine and I will meet there and we’ll be friends. We were kindred spirits.
But then, standing and sitting in the flowering garden, we suspected nothing. All the trees were in bloom, every one of them, except for the magnolia, which had already finished. Isabelle was saying that she planned to come to the party that evening too and would bring the children with her and something Russian to eat, some caviar and vodka she had bought. “I’m always by myself,” she said, neither to Bridget nor to Douglas but to me. “I don’t go anywhere, only to my neighbor Jenny’s when she has a party.” She said it, and then went sadly back along the path to her house.
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 p
rick 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…
His Butler’s Story (1980-1981) Page 9
