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 sente
nce 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?”
After a moment’s silence, she said, “Edward, that’s ridiculous. Just because you get into trouble, that doesn’t mean I should too. I’ll still love you, I won’t disown you, but,” and then she said the fateful words, “it’s your problem.”
Jenny went on to explain, but I wasn’t listening anymore. I had in an instant managed to secure for myself the moral right to think whatever I wanted of her, had done so because I was serious about life and had asked her in all seriousness, even though I knew she wouldn’t pass the test. I was weighing and planning my future, and I needed people who were real. She wasn’t one of them.
Though the inner distance between us was becoming ever greater, on the surface we lived almost like husband and wife. I would arrive at the millionaire’s house on Friday evening, and begin Saturday morning on the roof, sunning myself and drinking coffee, or pretending that I was sunning myself and drinking coffee, while in fact digging around in the rooms. When there weren’t any guests around, Edward, the housekeeper’s lover, became complete master of the house and liked to be left alone and undisturbed, and of all the rooms in the house he definitely preferred those that belonged to the children.
I was envious. I had never had my own room either as a child or as a youth, although in the best dreams of my boyhood, I had envisioned one in the form of a steamboat cabin — a white, happy childhood with white curtains stirring in the breeze and a gleaming river visible through all the windows, and a colored bed and my own dresser for my clothes, and booklined shelves, and a white washstand with a round mirror.
Our whole family — my father and mother and I — shared a single room. It was the fifties, in a country that had been utterly destroyed by war, and there was a housing crisis. All I had was my own little «corner» where I kept my things — my father’s old knapsack, an old topography textbook of the same age, a few books on foreign lands and plants, and some maps. I was so hampered by the adults and wanted a private place of my own so badly, that, being an energetic boy, I resolved to excavate myself a room. With my characteristic practicality, I immediately set about it, digging a hole in the communal apartment house basement where we and our neighbors stored potatoes and coal. I dug in the evenings by the light of a kerosene lamp and carried the dirt outside in bags which I emptied under the huge elderberry bushes that surrounded the building. In the daytime I covered up the hole with boards on top of which I piled coal. I imagined submachine guns hanging on the walls of my dug-out (from hooks, I think) and bunks for the other “kids,” although I had no clear idea who they might be. I might perhaps have finished my hole and finally enjoyed the privacy of my somewhat strange children’s room (let’s call it a children’s room on the “Russian model”), but our family moved to another building, and I know nothing of the subsequent fate of that vacuum in the heavy Ukrainian clay. I hope nobody fell into it.
While looking over the room belonging to Henry, Steven Grey’s oldest son, I started to feel terribly sorry for myself and my unfinished dug-out. Christ! I thought, you’ve reached the age of thirty-four and have never even once had a decent place to live. I looked in the drawers, stared at the amateur color photographs of happy children, sniffed the crab claw, felt the little Chinese figurine, turned the pages of a vacation book about a bunny rabbit, and jealously examined a cowboy hat from somebody else’s childhood, a huge eraser, modeling clay, and some foil, all those little things that no child can possibly manage without. A piece of old wood stood on a chest and a stuffed owl scowled from a top shelf. The yellow floor, the blue shag rug, the cork wall on which was thumbtacked yet another sunny photograph — green and sky blue, with four children on the grass, one sticking his tongue out, and an azure sea visible through some rocks in the background. It’s been many years now since Steven Grey and his family settled permanently in Connecticut, and the New York house has remained much as it was when they lived here. And the children’s rooms have too. On one wall in an old frame hung a copy of the last issue of a newspaper published, as it turned out, on board the unfortunate Lusitania. The issue was dated May 7, 1915. The headlines were “The Dardanelles,” “The Italian Crisis,” “An Important Japanese Operation,” and “Extensive Use of Gas against the British by the Enemy.” There was also an announcement of an upcoming concert in the ship’s saloon: “Concert in Saloon!” And there was a report by Sir J. French from the European front, written in the unvarying style shared by military communiqués the world over — the attempt to conceal and downplay a fucked-up situation: “The same morning three units carried out a concerted attack on a position in the Bois de Pally recently captured by us. This attack achieved die enemy’s goal of gaining a foothold against our front line, but our counterattack permitted us to retake half of the hill almost immediately…” You’re screwed, Sir J. French, I thought. They’ll throw even more men at you at night, since the main thing is to gain a foothold, and in the morning your front line will become their rear.
Next to the relic from the Lusitania hung a portrait — an old gentleman in a pince-nez and green tie, probably a grandfather or great-grandfather. In another frame on the same wall was a group portrait of some gentlemen who had received the Edison Prize, with Edison himself in the center. The prime movers of progress, so to speak. To a significant degree, it is thanks to these fine-looking gentlemen and their boundless curiosity that the very existence of Homo sapiens is in jeopardy.
On the opposite wall was an art nouveau poster depicting an auburn-haired, bare-shouldered woman who was covered with flowers, who was bedecked with flowers. This lady, unlike the Fausts in their stand-up collars, was completely innocuous and didn’t even have a name.
Hidden behind the door was a surprise — a yellow 1919 newspaper, framed like the other one of course, with a portrait of the same old gentleman in pince-nez and what were evidently his words printed in huge letters underneath: “People want us to be efficient and to provide service of the highest quality. That is i
mpossible without capital investment. There must be an equitable interrelation here. If costs go up, then prices must too!” Golden words from the old gentleman, I thought to myself. He’s right. Prices have been going up to this day and will continue to do so until the entire system collapses. And if it collapses, then everything else will too — both prices and costs, and the portrait of the gentleman in the green tie, and the millionaire’s house, and maybe the whole world.
Then a white children’s bed stood next to the doorway leading to the roof; now it has been replaced by a large adult bed Nancy brought from Connecticut. I have accustomed myself to fucking my women on the adult bed with the door open, so that the sunlight in all its vitality falls directly on the victim’s cunt and on my own organ, which is tremendously stimulating, and heats both cunt and prick to incandescence. Then, however, a children’s bed stood by the door, and next to it (and still there) a manned rocking horse from India embroidered in gold.
I sat on the horse and rocked and quietly thought, Why couldn’t I live here? It would be a fine thing to remain living in this little house for the rest of one’s life, and sleep in the children’s bed, and throw children’s books on the blue shag rug. Thank you, Jenny, I thought as I rocked on the horse, clasping it between my tanned legs. I have no right to be here, none at all. Thank you, Jenny. I’ll have to give her a kiss when I get back downstairs. She doesn’t feel well. Besides her vagina, her back hurts. She sleeps on the other bed, but next to me, obviously creating the illusion for herself of a normal life with a husband. Last night there were light blue sheets with butterflies on our beds. She does everything she thinks she’s supposed to do so that sex will be pleasurable for Edward, and obediently sucks my organ. What can I do? she probably thinks. Edward must have an orgasm, and my vagina hurts me now. She makes an effort for my sake, but doesn’t get any pleasure herself, the angel.
His Butler’s Story (1980-1981) Page 11
