Children of eleven, twelve, and thirteen are exceptionally different in size and form. On the same team were giants and dwarves, men and babies. All of them took their turn at bat and struck at the ball thrown by the opposing team’s best pitcher, and when they swung and missed, the crowd roared and whistled indignantly, but when a lucky batter swung and hit it and threw down his bat and took off round the bases, the crowd roared and whistled in delight. I was afraid for the catcher the whole time, since I was sure one of the kids would hit him between the eyes with the bat or knock his brains out — the bat was a serious weapon — and spoil the whole game, but the kids were up to it and didn’t hurt him.
A fat blonde, her tanned shoulders bared and the straps of her bra and pink undershirt cutting into her ample flesh, shouted to her son, a small blond boy with his hair cut in bangs just like Prince Valiant’s, “Bobby, be aggressive! Be aggressive!” And Bobby was, insofar as his size and strength permitted, and he hit the ball well, and took off around the field, while his mama grabbed hold of the fence in raptures and screamed, “Bobby-y-y-y!”
I looked at the Jackson clan. Papa Henry at the far end of the bench was yelling something and slapping his hands on his knees, Debby had stuck two fingers in her mouth and was whistling, and even the usually morose Betsy was yelling too, although in the general uproar it was impossible to tell what she was saying. But when Kevin came up to bat, we all started wildly applauding and yelling, “Kev-in!” as if shouting encouragement to our own champion in single combat — me too, as I suddenly realized to my own astonishment. Our man did no worse than Bobby had — he was even better, thanks to the fact that Robert had coached him for several hours before lunch by throwing a ball to him. He was in good form, our champion, and he hit the ball brilliantly, and we all started shouting again, I don’t remember what, and whistling, and in my enthusiasm I struck Jenny on the shoulder with my hand and screamed something else along with all the others, and then we applauded our Kevin while he circled the bases.
When I finally recovered from that collective paroxysm, I heard Jenny choking with laughter and pointing at me and shouting, “Look at Edward! Look at how Edward’s screaming and waving his hands! Ha, ha, ha!”
Jenny was obviously very happy about my sudden manifestation of normal human feelings. Maybe she was thinking that Edward, like all normal men, like our American men, likes baseball too and gets carried away and starts yelling, and despite his eccentricity and aloofness, he’ll be a good husband for me. And we’ll have children, and we’ll get in the car just like Mom and Dad do and take our whole family to baseball games, and Edward will write his books and make money with them, and it doesn’t matter if it isn’t very much at first, as long as he’s doing what he likes. And he’ll soon stop raving about the destruction of civilization and forget about all that, and I’ll be a good wife to him, and on weekends I’ll bake bread and the children will play in the yard, and we’ll have lots of flowers — Edward likes flowers.
Probably that was what she was thinking, and I could understand her. I didn’t hate her there in that American town; she suited me much better there where there weren’t any Marchioness Houstons or sweet-smelling and fancily dressed and painted whores to compare her to. There Jenny had the advantage of being on her own ground, where the electric lights they had turned on at the baseball field worked to her benefit, as did the fragrance of the nearby grass and trees and even the smell of the pipe of the portly gentleman sitting next to me and of Debby’s and Robert’s cigarettes.
And it was then, on that field, that I suddenly realized that I didn’t hate Jenny, but rather something much bigger, maybe the very arrangement of the world, or maybe nature itself for what it had given me at birth, for that enormous and eternally dissatisfied ambition that was in my blood and that wouldn’t let me stop and catch my breath — wouldn’t let me stop and live with Jenny on a farm and be happy and perhaps mow hay and maybe even write books, but different books, books full of tranquility and happiness rather than anxiety and the need to escape. Jenny was someone I could have been happy with, and maybe it was just that which made me hate her?
I had looked for love for so long, had wandered in chaos trying to find it, to find Jenny. And now that I had found her, and with all that was genuine and false in me had made her fall in love with me and had won her, I was going to reject her and turn away and tell her I didn’t want her or need her. Or even more monstrously, that I hated her. And hated her because she was an ideal, the girl I had in fact dreamed of for two years while lying alone in my filthy hotels and choking on my own hysterical sobbing or fucking with prostitutes or other men… It was she I had been seeking in all those bodies, thinking that this is the one, that here she is, or even that here he is. And now I had found her.
The Yellow Socks lost to the Tigers that evening six to eight, but what difference did that make? Jenny had lost to me on her own ground, but then I was somebody who didn’t play by the rules.
Chapter Five
They still hadn’t caught Son of Sam then, and sometime around the beginning of August at three o’clock in the morning he again wounded two victims, the girl later dying in the hospital, the guy surviving. The city was overcome with terror, not so much in Manhattan as in the Bronx or Queens, where the Son of Sam “worked,” but the streets of Manhattan too emptied earlier than usual, and it would happen that coming from or going to Jenny’s at night, I would suddenly find myself completely alone. Even the number of ordinary crimes diminished, die thieves and robbers probably afraid that the insane murderer might shoot them down too “by mistake,” after silently appearing out of the darkness as he always did, so that you wouldn’t even have time to defend yourself or shout that you were a robber, although it was unknown whether he had a sense of solidarity.
I walked in those legendary times through the sticky, spectral city, at first a little frightened myself, but then seeing that nothing had happened to me, I got bolder and even took my usual route through Central Park. The air was fresh there, not as hot and much nicer for walking than the foul West Side, but the main thing is that it was more direct. I didn’t even walk into the park, but jumped over a fence into its green darkness and strode through the trees toward the East Side. I came out of the park in the neighborhood of the Metropolitan Museum, and I often brought Jenny fragrant branches or flowers as evidence of my bravery. True, I still took off my glasses, so I wouldn’t look like an intellectual in case I encountered some lowlife, and I also carried a knife with me, and sometimes even two — one in my boot and the other in my pocket.
We lived quietly then. Jenny sucked my cock and tried to cure her vagina. The story of the curing of her vagina (it really is an awful word, isn’t it?) is interesting and instructive, and I shall therefore permit myself to dwell on it.
You have to pay for everything, gentlemen, one way or another you have to pay. It’s an undeniable truth. I didn’t want to be merely an idle boyfriend for Jenny, and so the honorable and hard-working Limonov himself volunteered to sew her some rags and alter a few things from her vast wardrobe of skirts, blouses, dresses, and pants.
Once when I was in the house alone, with neither Steven nor his guests around, thank God, and had been rooting in Jenny’s things for several hours at least, humming something to myself as I did the alterations, Jenny and Jennifer arrived. They had just come from the quack Krishna, with whom they were both studying homeopathic medicine. Even more pimply than usual, Jennifer disappeared to make a phone call, and Jenny, after sitting down on the bed in the room where I was seated at the sewing machine with her skirts strewn about me, suddenly announced, “You’re going to get very mad, Edward, but both you and I have gonorrhea. Dr. Krishna finished his examination of me this morning.”
I have of late become a very even-tempered man — very cool. I therefore continued to press on the pedal of the electric sewing machine, and its speed didn’t even waver. I kept on sewing; what could I say to such an idiotic statement?
&n
bsp; “Why don’t you say anything?” Jenny asked irritably.
Making a wry face and pulling her skirt out of the clutches of the machine, I said, “I’ll kill you at five.”
“Why at five?” she asked in puzzlement.
I didn’t say anything, but thought to myself, Well, gonorrhea then. It’s even fair — I have to pay the price, don’t I, for living here and fucking Jenny and having the pleasure of seeing the children’s room and not having to suffer the heat thanks to the air conditioner… and for the expensive French wine she brings me from the cellar, and for the garden and the other pleasures? Obviously I have to pay the price…
“You’ll have to see a doctor,” Jenny said.
“Uh huh,” I answered, and pressed down on the pedal again, stitching the next seam.
“You’re not being serious, Edward,” she said.
“What am I supposed to do?” I said, turning toward her for the first time in the whole conversation. And really, what did she want from me? Gonorrhea is just gonorrhea; nobody dies of it, and if they do, so what?
And I left her to go to the bathroom — there was a bathroom in every bedroom in the millionaire’s house. I pissed, and afterwards washed my cock in the wash basin while standing on tiptoe and stretching, and then wiped it with satisfaction on a face towel. “You get it too!”
Jenny didn’t say anything to me after I came back to the room, and we went downstairs to the kitchen to get something to eat. Another friend of Jenny’s had come over too — Martha, a stocky blonde just as pimply as the others. I knew from Jenny that she was pregnant and was planning to have an abortion soon. I sat down with them and ate some shchi I had made a couple of days before, and they had some too. I sat there and fumed. The shchi was very hot; even the potatoes in it were overcooked and falling apart.
If you’re going to infect me with gonorrhea, at least don’t overcook the shchi. Why the fuck was it left on so long! She forgot about it, the cunt! I thought to myself.
I was sitting at the table with three defective sluts and dreaming about how I’d like to chase them all out, the pimple-faces. Jennifer was particularly disgusting — pug-nosed, with a rose in her hair. She had on a yellow skirt that day too. She had her feet up on the air conditioner; they all went around in their bare feet. They were drinking beer. Fat. And then they complain in The Hite Report about what a poor job men do of fucking them, I thought resentfully. What kind of man would you have to be to get it up for a fat, pimply creature like that?
As soon as I finished eating, I went upstairs to Henry’s old room without saying anything, opened the door to the roof, and sat down in the doorway. A few minutes later Jenny came in.
“If you won’t go to my doctor, I’ll never fuck you again and I won’t see you anymore,” she said angrily.
Go fuck yourself, I thought. She gave me gonorrhea, and now it’s my fault too. I’m fed up with your fucking house, you servant, and this whole musty summertime story. You peasant cunt! And I walked out, saying, “I’ll come back when you calm down.”
Neither Jenny nor I could hold out in proud solitude for very long. Two days at most. During that time I managed to make the rounds of the darker Broadway dives and visit two prostitutes. There was never any doubt in my mind that I didn’t have gonorrhea, and if I had, the prostitutes would probably have detected it, since they always carefully examine the client’s penis before setting down to work. After rolling in the mud a little, I at once felt better and freer, and in two days was again sleeping on “the other bed,” while Jenny groaned in her sleep nearby — the air conditioner was on, and it was cold.
Autumn came. I remember peering out the window at the wet terrace and its wet chairs with the usual autumn thoughts going through my mind, as if looking timidly out at chaos from the comfortable nook I had wrested from life — the millionaire’s town house. Sometimes I would open the door to the terrace and stand confidently on the threshold, while chaos whistled around my feet. Looking at it from the millionaire’s little house, it didn’t scare me — it wasn’t intimidating but defeated, not what it had been from my hotel. Seen from the hotel, it was a genuine, epic, old-fashioned, invincible chaos. But in the town house I just poured myself a shot of cognac, put a slice of lemon and a piece of Camembert on a red breakfast tray, sat down in the solarium with some quiet music on and maybe a book in my hands, and gazed into die rainy garden undismayed.
You see, the rich have over us poor not only the advantages of property; they are also freer from the onslaughts of chaos. It mounts its attacks, but the rich man merely lights a fire in his fireplace or orders somebody else to do it (I light Mr. Grey’s fires for him), and sits down, warms his hands, lights his pipe, and puffs a pleasant tobacco. Chaos is frightened away by the fireplace and the pipe. And it’s frightened away most of all by beautiful women. Whereas all the poor man can do is hang around the streets, so that whenever the weather is bad, his whole life comes to pieces.
So my life was sweet. My only duty was maintaining good relations with Jenny. And, as you see, I did maintain them, upsetting them only occasionally, but never seriously. Whenever she started in on her favorite topic — the children she wanted to have with me — I nodded with enthusiasm, “Sure, sure, Jenny, of course we’ll have children.” But at the same time I thought that to merge my sperm with her ovum, or whatever it’s called, would be contrary to nature.
It was during this time that Dr. Krishna finally had the sense to examine Jenny thoroughly — I don’t think it was his idea alone; somebody had obviously suggested it to him — and a huge tumor was discovered in her vagina. So much for obscurantism. You can believe in whatever you want, in forms with three hundred questions or in gonorrhea, and never have the sense to conduct a simple medical examination, to look inside her cunt. In any case, Jenny now thought she had cancer (!) and was undergoing treatment. Whatever sexual relations I had with her came to an end. She didn’t feel like sucking my cock anymore. First, we were already pals; second, how could a person do that if she had cancer?.. It wouldn’t have bothered me.
I really wanted to fuck, but I did my best to sublimate, to transfer my sexual energy to some other domain. I became furiously active, and after several setbacks finally found a literary agent with Madame Margarita’s help, or more accurately, a female literary agent, and she agreed to work with me. Unfortunately, Liza’s still working with me, and the book that so delighted Efimenkov remains unsold…
I also did all the things the classic failure’s supposed to do. I wrote long letters to the newspapers and magazines, on political topics mostly, and I even sent a letter to President Carter, which nobody answered of course. The newspapers and magazines didn’t answer either. I used Jenny to check my clumsy translations into English, and she either laughed or got mad, but she still helped me. In exchange I got some patterns and made her skirts with ruffles, which she had grown increasingly fond of. I have no illusion the skirts I made were masterpieces of the tailor’s art, but Jenny liked them and they made her happy. So, as you see, we worked together excellently in life, even if not in bed.
From time to time Jenny would buy me presents. Knowing, say, that I liked beautiful boots and that my own were starting to wear out, she would with a smile suddenly hand me a box — “Surprise!” — containing just the kind of boots I wanted to replace my old ones with. Once she bought me several pairs of jeans and some sweaters all at once, which, given the dilapidated state of my wardrobe, were very much to the point. In general she took care of me like a mother.
At that time I was still going to Madame Margarita’s to make piroshki and pelmeni, although less and less often. Unfortunately, die very good cook and gay man of letters Volodya and the enthusiast Madame Margarita turned out to be poor businessmen, or rather, not poor businessmen, but unable to devote all their time to piroshki and pelmeni. Volodya was writing a book about ballet and seeking and rejecting new lovers and in the evenings going either to gay baths or to the parties of the rich. Madame Margarita w
as busy with Lodyzhnikov’s business… You need to be a harassed little person who knows that if he doesn’t sell a certain number of piroshki and pelmeni each day, his family won’t have anything to eat. Then the business will succeed. After shuffling through their papers, and counting and recounting, and adding, multiplying, and dividing, but mainly subtracting, they decided to quit.
But as so often happens, another way of making money suddenly appeared on the horizon, this time in the form of one of Madame Margarita’s friends, the French woman Christine, who already owned one restaurant that gave her an appreciable income, and who had decided to open another on the corner of Fifty-seventh and Third Avenue with a Russian evening bar serving appetizers. Volodya, who had already squandered the advance on his ballet book, planned to go to work there as the head chef, taking me on as a cook, to which I agreed, although not without reservations, to be honest, but I still agreed, having decided at the same time to get off welfare. The fact is, I really wanted some sign of visible progress in my life, and I wanted it soon. What made up my mind was the fact that we would be expected to work evenings, from five until one in the morning, so I would have my days free and could still write. But the restaurant still wasn’t open, and on my way to and from Jenny’s, I would peer into its chalked-over windows at the workmen rushing urgently about.
On one of the last days of my pelmeni-making I got involved in spite of myself in a heated political argument with Madame Margarita and Volodya. I didn’t really want to argue, but I lost my head. Somehow they egged me on imperceptibly, to the point where their placid philistinism irritated me so much that I jumped in. Basically our positions were these: Madame Margarita and Volodya believed that only Russia was shit, while the rest of the world, and the United States in particular, was beautiful. Whereas I said that the whole world was shit, the United States being no exception, and that our civilization deserved to be destroyed, since it had enslaved man and deprived him of himself, of his sense of freedom. “We, the whole world, have been living in Orwell’s 1984 for a long time, only we don’t realize it,” I said.
His Butler’s Story (1980-1981) Page 13
