Volodya smirked, which only made me madder.
“Thanks to the training and education the Soviet government gave you, and gave you for nothing, by the way,” I said to Volodya, “you occupy a privileged position here. Just as you did there, in fact. You wrote and published books on ballet there, and you write and publish them here.”
“And who stops you from publishing your books?” Volodya said maliciously. “Haven’t found a publisher for your pornography yet?”
“No, I haven’t,” I said. “You know perfectly well how hard it is for me to find a publisher, and you know why… Maybe I’ll never find one.”
“Limonchik,” said Madame Margarita with inimitable calmness, “what can you do; it was your bad luck to be born in the Soviet Union and come to America too late. All the places are taken now. If you had come here in the thirties, it would all have been different. Maybe your children will be happier. Certainly they’ll be happier,” she concluded sympathetically.
“Can you imagine that?” I answered. “What am I supposed to do now, lie down and die?”
Madame Margarita shrugged.
“Maybe I should wait for rebirth?” I asked sarcastically. “It’s my ‘bad luck. But I don’t believe in rebirth. I know everything is happening now. There’s nothing ahead but a dark pit. And there isn’t anything in it. It’s just a pit!” I was silent for a moment. “To nobly make piroshki, and haul somebody else’s furniture and paint somebody else’s walls, and live in the Diplomat, and drink and grow old and merely accept it,” I continued, “while all around you is the odor of money, and expensive cars are speeding by, and morsels of young female flesh are displayed in the picture magazines. No thank you. I’m much too passionate and ambitious for that. I don’t know how, but I’ll be successful here. Me, and not my children, whom I don’t intend to have anyway,” I said angrily to Madame Margarita. “If I have to kill, then that’s what I’ll do!” I added in a facetiously calm voice.
“You’re a typical Soviet, Limonchik,” Madame Margarita said, “a typical Soviet…”
Madame Margarita is very smart, and in her youth was very, pretty; I’ve seen photographs. She had once been married to a wealthy businessman — had engaged, in short, in the usual business of females and sold her cunt for a profit. And not very long ago she had a millionaire among her lovers, a publisher. She still lives alone in a beautiful apartment on Park Avenue and doesn’t have to go to work, having already earned everything with her cunt. Her only work now is going down to the bank, and whatever she does for Lodyzhnikov, or the pelmeni and piroshki, she does for her own pleasure and not for money. I’d make the same bargain with the world too. And of course it wasn’t unpleasant for her cunt either. Pleasurable and practical.
I walked from Madame Margarita’s up the broad expanse of Park Avenue, past the doormen in full dress uniform, and swore in two languages. “Limonchik, what can you do, it was your bad luck,” I bleated, parodying the sympathetic voice of Madame Margarita. Ah, you whores, I thought. You’re all members of the same gang — Gatsby and Efimenkov and Stella Makhmudova, and Volodya and Solzhenitsyn, and Madame Margarita and Lodyzhnikov and the poet Khomsky, and Rockefeller and Andy Warhol, and Norman Mailer and Jackie Onassis, and all the designers and hairdressers and blue bloods and party secretaries, whether they live in a country pompously calling itself the “leader of the free world” or in another that no less vulgarly pretends to have a monopoly on the “bright future of mankind.” You all make up a cruel international mafia, a union of strength and capital with learning, art, and intellect. And the millions and billions of us simple people are required to submit to your cruel whims, to your games of the mind and imagination, to your caprices which cost us so much, since from time to time you push us into war. Fucking Big Brothers!
I reached the millionaire’s house and complained about the Big Brothers to Jenny.
“Edward,” she said, “don’t pay any attention to the fucking politicians. They’re the same everywhere, in all countries, and no doubt they’ll push us all over the edge someday!” And then she started making soup, the most peaceful activity imaginable.
Life is an indistinct affair, utterly diffuse and formless, and it is only those principles that you yourself introduce (or that are introduced for you by others) that give life whatever order it has and a kind of purpose and coherence. Jenny was of course a very important stage in the process of “my struggle,” as I envisioned it, the struggle of Edward Limonov against the world and everybody in it. Yes, that’s the way I conceived it — as one against all, and it was a struggle in which I had no allies. I just recently happened to overhear my employer Gatsby shouting in his office during one of his regular fits of hysteria, “You’re all against me! The whole world’s against me!” I was astonished to find that he perceives the world exactly the same way I do.
I lived invisible to everyone but Jenny. And I lived intensely; I was in a hurry. Unfortunately, nobody else was. I badly wanted to get ahead. Onward! I shouted to myself in an agonized voice. But the world held me back with a firm grip, not wishing to let me leap with such sudden ease into the next category of life, or, if you like, to climb up onto the next rung of the social ladder. Up, I’m sorry to say, from the very bottom. There weren’t any rungs below me. Unless it was jail.
I wanted to get out of the hotel and move somewhere else. I sensed from everything that I needed to get the fuck out of the Diplomat, that the time had come to move. If for no other reason than just to move.
My first attempt proved a false start. After one of my arguments with Jenny, I decided to strike out on my own, and tried to find myself an apartment. The ballet writer Volodya rummaged through his vast circle of acquaintances and introduced me one day to a little twat named Mary Ellen. This dwarfish little bag of bones lived in a two-room apartment near Lincoln Center and was studying ballet for the fun of it. Mary Ellen had a rich homosexual dad who lived in Washington, D.C., and who paid for both her apartment and her two two-hour classes a day. “Mary Ellen’s apartment is too expensive for her and she’s looking for a roommate,” Volodya told me. “Talk to her. If she likes you, she’ll take you and you’ll pay her something. Or you won’t have to pay her anything,” added the cynical Volodya, “if you start fucking her; then you can live there for nothing. In my opinion, she doesn’t so much need a roommate as a prick,” and he laughed in distaste.
Mary Ellen did in fact need a prick. The first time we met, she looked very intently and significantly at me, and passionately informed me of her desire to learn Russian. Her apartment was spacious, in a huge modern building with mirrors in the lobby and several doormen who used special televisions to watch what was happening on every floor. The lobby even had its own newspaper stand.
I liked the building and I liked the apartment, but I didn’t much care for the circumstance that I’d have to sleep on a little couch in the living room. And write there too, for when I asked Mary Ellen where I would work, it turned out I’d have to do that in the living room too on the only table in the apartment. The upshot was that I would be renting a «corner» of her apartment, as they say in my native land, and not a room. Naturally, if I start fucking her, I thought, then I’ll sleep in the bedroom with her and work wherever I see fit. But after looking at her gray, sunburned, bony little arms with their skin strangely cracked like crude leather, I had no desire whatever to fuck her. That is, I wasn’t excluding the possibility of occasional copulations with her, once a month say, after I’d had something to drink or smoked a couple of joints, but to become dependent on her wasn’t something I wanted to do.
After spending about an hour with her at her place and drinking several cups of instant coffee without sugar, since Mary Ellen didn’t offer me anything else, I took my leave, solemnly promising to think about her offer and decide during the week. I also recommended that she think about it too and make her own decision. Riding down on the elevator with a well-dressed elderly woman and listening to the soft music emitted fr
om somewhere in its ceiling, I talked myself into moving in with Mary Ellen, citing to myself the example of the “real opportunist.” A real opportunist, Edward, I said to myself, would move in with Mary Ellen without hesitating, and fuck her with his eyes closed. And so must you!
I called Mary Ellen several days later and told her I was ready to move in if she hadn’t changed her mind. “As a roommate,” I emphasized diplomatically.
“Fine,” she said. “You can move in anytime from tomorrow morning on, or any other day.” I said tomorrow, of course; I was impatient, and immediately went back to my hotel and started getting my things together, books for the most part. I only had one suitcase, so I packed the books in shopping bags with handles.
I must have looked like a bag lady when I climbed onto the bus going down Broadway the next morning with two of my sacks, both very heavy. But what could I do — I didn’t have any money for a taxi, nor anyone who could have helped me move, so I was forced to move my things piecemeal by bus.
Carrying my shopping bags, I made my way past the self-important doormen in braid with a timidly defiant expression on my face and went upstairs to Mary Ellen’s floor. To my floor, I thought proudly, as I pressed the buzzer. She didn’t answer for a long time, but then she finally opened the door. Her face was sleepy and, it seemed to me, a little guilty.
“Did something happen?” I asked, already aware of what it was.
“I’m terribly sorry, Edward. My father just called from Washington and said you can’t stay here; he’s against it. I called you at the hotel, but you’d already left…”
I stood in the doorway like an idiot with my shopping bags. I didn’t even lose my temper, since I’ve grown quite used to fate’s little tricks. I just borrowed five bucks from her, left my shopping bags, telling her I’d be back for them later, and hopped onto the elevator. She called after me that she was sorry about it and apologized and something else, but I couldn’t hear anymore. Outside it was a blindingly sunny autumn day and the wind was blowing some flags, although, since I was in a hurry to find a bar, I don’t remember exactly what kind they were — whether the flags of countries or just for decoration.
I had to call Jenny from the bar several hours later, since I was drunk and didn’t have any money with me. Jenny arrived in a taxi with Bridget, and they took me away. “Bad boy!” Jenny said several times with a maternal smile. The bartender was pleased it had all worked out without his having to call the police, and I felt like my relatives had come for me. It really is a good thing to have relatives, and know they won’t leave you in the lurch, even if you have been a “bad boy.” And as we rode in the taxi back to the millionaire’s house, the sun was still out, and the wind was still blowing the flags, whatever they were.
In order to compensate for my failed attempt at moving, I soon afterward resolved to get off welfare. As I say, I was anxious for evidence of my progress in life. I remember with what astonishment and delight the clerk at my welfare center on Fourteenth Street looked at me — as if I were somebody who had just come back from the dead — when I informed her of my intention to give up welfare assistance, since I had found a job and was now able to support myself. That probably didn’t happen very often. The black clerk shook my hand and wished me luck in my new life, and I gazed for die last time at the immense sea of my now ex-comrades in misfortune sitting in the large hall waiting for their appointments. Goodbye, comrades! I thought cheerfully, as I strode out the door.
Okay, I thought, we’re on the next level now. I was the only one who realized it of course; the people on Fourteenth Street carrying on their unruffled trade in plastic sandals, polyester dresses, and suspiciously large cans of tomato sauce certainly had no idea that I was already on the next level, that I had climbed up a little bit from the bottom where I had been. I couldn’t even share my happiness with Jenny — I’d concealed the whole welfare business from her.
Is that something I should do on the next level? I wondered, passing by a porno theater. It was, and I went in and watched a porno film. Even on the new level I still had some of my old bad habits. The porno film turned out to be shitty.
It’s always the way that either nothing happens, or if something does, then the first event is immediately followed by a second and then a third; obviously they come in batches. A couple of weeks later Jenny and I went to Southampton for Jennifer’s and Dr. Krishna’s wedding. Not only was he a crazy Indian for marrying a twenty-year-old girl, but a rich one as well, and the wedding therefore took place in a large restaurant with an ocean view.
Looking back at that momentous occasion from the present, I can see that the wedding was one of the most boring, but at the time it seemed to Limonov, with his then great yearning need for throngs of people, to be grandiose and significant. I even managed to be, if not at the center of attention, then at least on its periphery, since I was by no means the least attractive man in that crowd and could actually dance better than anyone else, which earned me the attention of the ladies and I suppose the bitter resentment of the men. I was dressed, I remember, in my white suit. The day was sunny and warm, fortunately, although I had in fact been following the weather reports for a week, afraid it would turn cold and I wouldn’t be able to wear it, the only impeccable item in my wardrobe. The lively, smiling Limonov, surrounded by ugly girls and women, and as breathless from dancing as a young virgin at her first ball — you know, Natasha Rostov. “Are you a designer perchance?” asked a fifty-year-old-lady, puffing away at her cigarette and rendered even happier and more interested when I told her I was a writer. Another lady of the same venerable age took me for a ballet dancer; obviously, such ladies think that all Russians living in the United States are ballet dancers.
What can I say? I was flattered by their attention, and although it would have pleased me even more to be surrounded by a flock of young actresses and models rather than by a motley crowd of slightly crocked married women jealously watched by their paunchy and sullen better halves sitting at their tables with loosened ties, or by a crowd of Jenny’s pimply friends selected as if for their complexions, a gaggle of twenty-year-old girls of various sizes, even those groups stimulated me somehow, although I realized it was all very silly. This is silly, Edward, really silly! I thought to myself, and then grabbing my next partner, I rushed onto the dance floor, desperately seizing from life whatever it was capable of giving me that day, and in fact did give me. The orchestra (certainly Krishna had hired an orchestra) was a jazz ensemble, with saxophones, drums, and a piano — what else; I couldn’t expect him to invite Richard Hell and his group, could I? The orchestra liked me too, and even started to accompany me, keeping time to my movements.
I used to have a Polaroid picture taken that day by Raj, a relative of Krishna’s, in which I am sitting at a restaurant table in my white suit with the sea behind me and a happily romantic expression on my face. I later gave that picture to Elena, who no doubt has lost it, which would be a pity. Behind me you can make out the head of a woman, or her hair at least; mat’s Andrea, the girl I danced with the most that evening and who won me, having prevailed over all her rivals. That is, I fucked her, or more accurately, she fucked me, or even more accurately, we fucked each other a few days later. I was at the wedding with Jenny, after all, and had come in the same car with her, which she drove. Besides, I had no intention of abandoning her that evening or of hurting her; I still cared about her, and anyway it was enough that I had hardly danced with her that day. Andrea and I merely exchanged phone numbers.
Despite my expectations, the bride and groom, or rather the husband and wife, didn’t look all that incongruous, didn’t seem like grandfather and granddaughter. Even though Jennifer was only twenty, she was stocky, robust, and swarthy, with a coarse blunt nose, and looked older than she was; I would have said she was thirty. Krishna, on the other hand, was just the opposite: he looked much younger than his years, and was tall and well-built for his age, without any wrinkles to speak of on his tanned face, so that I
would have given him fifty-five instead of his seventy-two. And so they looked quite normal together — nothing particularly shocking.
Among the guests was a whole clan of Indians: men, women in saris, and even Indian children, and not one of them got drunk, and I noticed too that the men danced, but the women didn’t. It also seemed to me, as I looked at the Indian women, that Jennifer very much resembled an Indian girl — it was no accident I’d mistaken her for a Turk the first time I’d met her. Her face was of a generally Eastern type, and if you had taken off her clothes, she would have looked like one of those squat women with fat thighs you see held on the pricks of their grinning Indian rajas or non-Indian sultans, those well-built women sitting or lying in various positions, sometimes very uncomfortable ones, on the pricks of their rajas in Indian colored miniatures tinted in red and in gold. Who knows, it may have been that very resemblance that tempted Krishna into thinking they would be happy together in bed.
Andrea and I met again only a few days after the wedding, both of us waiting a bit, as if out of decency, although we both knew what we wanted. Finally, after a phone call, I went down to her place on Chambers Street in an unfinished loft which she had bought with several friends. Each of them had a separate bedroom but shared a huge kitchen and a gigantic hall, empty and uncluttered, which they planned to use for concerts and dance performances and for teaching and studying dance. Andrea was in fact a student of modern dance, and I soon had my fill of sweaty youths and girls in tights or wide pants and T-shirts portraying snakes or a Chinese theater or whatever while rolling on the floor with significant expressions on their faces — which all seemed so second-rate to me. Nevertheless, during the months I spent fucking Andrea, I posed as a passionate admirer of modern dance, and even went to some of her performances. Andrea was either the seventh or the fifth dancer in “The Silences of the Night,” or maybe it was the “The Scream of Day” — I don’t remember exactly what, although it had a pretentious title and reminded you of something halfway between therapeutic group gymnastics and a theater for the deaf and dumb.
His Butler’s Story (1980-1981) Page 14
