Jenny arrived in New York not a week but about ten days later. She didn’t call me; I called her, or rather I called Linda to find out whether she had heard anything from California, and got Jenny instead. It seemed odd to me that she hadn’t let me know immediately that she was back, and I even got upset about it. “But why,” you ask, “why, Edward? You, an opportunist, got upset because your servant girl didn’t call you when she got back from vacation?” I’m a live human being, gentlemen, and not an opportunist from a psychiatry textbook case. Besides, we opportunists and ambitious people are just as sensitive and egoistic as anybody else, and we suffer from life even more keenly than normal people do, and get nervous and depressed, only we still find the strength to take action when we need to.
The next day was Saturday, the day I was supposed to clean the millionaire’s house. I vacuumed and waxed and polished the floors, and didn’t cut corners then as I do now, but did what I was supposed to honestly, working by the sweat of my brow for eight hours, and during that whole time suppressing the vague anxiety I was feeling. After washing the kitchen floor and thereby finishing my work, since that was always the last thing I did, I sat down in the kitchen with Jenny and had a drink. I tried to persuade her to have something too, but she refused for a long time, until I forced her. I was in an alert state of mind and sensed that something had happened to her.
After a few drinks — lemon and rum toddies with cinnamon sprinkled over the top of the steaming drink; there’s nothing better than that awful mixture if you want to get drunk — I said to her, “All right, Jenny, let’s have it. What happened?”
“Nothing special,” she said timidly, obviously trying to keep her composure. “Martha and I have decided to move to Los Angeles to live. Martha found a job at a hotel, and I’ll make batik. You remember when I gave Isabelle that dress, Edward? It turned out really well, didn’t it? Well, I’m going to make dresses or blouses like that and sell them to a store. Isabelle knows somebody who has a women’s clothing store and she promised to introduce me to her.”
“When did you decide to move?” I asked, sipping my hot elixir. The steaming rum entered my nose, making it hard for me to drink.
“In January,” Jenny said and paused. “Right after New Year’s,” and she was silent again, not saying anything else, not asking me if I wanted to go with her or how I felt about her decision. I didn’t say anything either and drank my rum, and when I had finished it, I stood up and walked over to our huge kitchen stove, poured myself some hot water and more rum, took her empty glass and poured her hot water and rum into it too and added a slice of lemon to each glass, and then sat down again. Without saying anything. We drank our two toddies, and then I said to her, “Well, if you really do want to go, who do you have waiting for you there?”
“Well, who do you think?” Jenny asked, making an effort and looking not at me, but out the window.
“Mark, who else?” I said, not looking at her either.
And then she burst into tears and fell down on her knees in front of me and begged me to forgive her, and said she had hurt me, as well as a lot of other things you’re supposed to say in such situations. To which I calmly replied, patting her on the head and in fact exulting in the vileness of human nature, that nothing had happened, that it was normal, and that she shouldn’t take it so hard. The noble Limonov.
We poured ourselves some more rum, no longer bothering to mix it, just plain, incredibly strong dark Meyer’s rum from Jamaica, and before we drank it, Jenny proposed a toast in a quiet, piping voice:
“To the greatest guy in the world!”
I wondered who that might be, since she couldn’t be so tactless as to drink to Mark in my presence.
But no, thank God, the toast was for me. “To you, Edward!” Jenny added fervently. And then she asked me what I thought about him — about Mark. I answered something to the effect that I thought they would make a good couple, which in fact was what I thought; you remember my thinking as they were dancing together in Los Angeles that they were well-suited. She shed a few more tears, and we agreed to be friends, the best of friends, of course we would be friends, and I kissed her and went home.
I walked along and thought. What had happened was of course no great tragedy, but it was very unpleasant and even painful for me, gentlemen. I thought dejectedly of the fact that this one too had betrayed me, this Jenny whom I had sometimes called a saint to myself and whom I had finally begun to trust, so that it would never have occurred to me that she, that Jenny would betray me. I walked up York Avenue, repeating some lines of Apollinaire’s to myself: “Even she who is ugly/ May cause her lover pain,/ She’s the daughter of a constable,/ Who serves on the island of Jersey…”
And for some reason I also remembered the time my mother betrayed me, and the medical orderlies took me away as if to be executed, and then, when I was eighteen and already a completely different person and still wobbly from an insulin injection they’d just given me, my return home from the mental hospital with my military father. And as I walked the thirty blocks back to my Eighty-third Street, I remembered too that cruel, hopeless New York winter when Lena had betrayed me, and I recalled all the grudges I had against people; I remembered them all and tallied them up and drew my conclusions.
Go your own way, I told myself; don’t trust anybody. People are crap. It’s not that they’re bad, but weak, feeble, and pitiful. They betray more out of weakness than from malice. Go your own way. Strong creatures hunt by themselves. You’re not a jackal; you don’t need a pack.
And then, as I was already nearing home, I suddenly discovered in the midst of my pain joy that I had been betrayed — it was, ultimately, proof of my solitariness, my specialness, and, if you like, of a kind of success. Before I had had the sense that Jenny was somehow superior to me. Now, thanks to what had happened, she was just like all the other girls and women. In itself, the fact that Mark was fucking Jenny meant little to me. Only that Saint Jenny no longer existed. And that was good. Order once more reigned in my world. It’s terribly hard to live with saints. It’s better to live with prostitutes; they’re more honest. It’s better to live with bandits; you can defend yourself from them with a knife in your boot, or even better, a pistol stuck in your belt under your T-shirt. The hardest thing is to defend yourself from people who are good.
You will say that I’m not being objective, since I myself had in fact betrayed Jenny with numerous other women, and even hated her, and was planning to leave her at the first opportunity. Exactly, I was planning to, but what if I wouldn’t actually have done it? What if it was all just empty talk and bravado?
Thus was I betrayed by my servant girl, my peasant angel.
The next day I did something I would never have expected of myself. And you too will probably be just as surprised to find out what the next turn of events was. I went to the millionaire’s house and proposed to Jenny — asked her, Jenny Jackson, to marry me. She started crying, but she turned me down, although she respected me tremendously for it and said, “Thank you, Edward!” and kissed my hand. And then I left, breathing a sigh of relief.
I walked back up York Avenue again on my way home to the plants and the bookcases and the tables and chairs that Jenny had dragged in to build a nest that was never to be, and as I walked, I thought once more, Go your own way, Edward. Strong animals hunt by themselves. You don’t need a pack, Eddie baby, you don’t need one.
I spent the next two weeks almost continuously fucking and hash smoking with a poetess named Diane at her dark, many-roomed labyrinth on Third Street crammed with idiotic furniture and hung with pictures painted by her own hand, since before becoming a poet, she had been a painter. We woke up every morning to an awful rumbling and roaring just outside our window: the street was the headquarters of the Hell’s Angels, or at least of their New York chapter, or whatever they call it. At any time of day or night there would always be dozens of motorcycles drawn up on the street in ranks, with the Hell’s Angels themselves sitti
ng in the building doorways with cans of beer in their hands. In the mornings they warmed up their bikes, or something.
Only once, in the company of Diane, who swayed like a sleep-walker and had painted her fingernails with black lacquer and was wearing a short coat just as black from under which her skinny legs stuck down like two sticks, did I take the subway back to my place to water my plants. For some reason we preferred fucking at her place, to the roar of the Hell’s Angels’ motorcycles while lying under a huge portrait of a headless half-man, half-woman. Diane had for a long time been the girlfriend of a certain punk rock star who was either insane or merely pretended to be, and although she was only twenty-five, she was ready for the scrap heap.
After two weeks, having sufficiently recovered my self-esteem, I summoned my strength, and leaving Diane alone with her headless portrait, I returned to a normal life. I called Jenny to inquire about the state of affairs at the millionaire’s house and to find out if I still had my job as cleaning man, even though I’d missed two days of work.
“Of course you have, Edward. Don’t worry about it, everything’s fine,” said the decent Jenny over the phone. “You haven’t lost your job, and you’ll still get your eighty dollars for those two Saturdays. I told Linda you did the cleaning, and anyway, she only notices the rug in her office, which Olga vacuumed.”
Jenny also said that Madame Margarita had been looking for me. But she didn’t ask me where I’d been for the last two weeks, not wanting to pry into my private affairs.
I called Madame Margarita and heard her perpetually cheerful voice say: “Limonchik! I’m glad you called me. I’ve got masses of work for you to do. Only I’ll tell you beforehand that the work is very hard — you’ve got to dig in the ground and do a lot of other kinds of construction things. I’ve just started remodeling my house in the country, and I’ve hired a contractor who has his own local workers, but then I remembered you and that I had promised you some work,” Madame Margarita said, very proud of herself, “and the contractor has agreed to take you on. I’m going up there tomorrow. It’s in upstate New York, and if you like I can take you along with me.”
It turned out later that she hadn’t just happened to remember me. It was simply that one of the hired workers had made off with a goddamn antique clock of hers, and she’d hired me to replace him. But everybody likes to seem like a benefactor. When after living in America for five years, I finally obtained a green card, four people immediately told me that it was because of their efforts that I got it.
I packed my bag and went. They promised forty hours a week at four dollars an hour. One hundred sixty dollars. I went — I didn’t have any other work.
I spent two months in a town near the Hudson River working as a common laborer and bricklayer and returned to New York at the end of November, there being no more work for me to do in the country.
The whole month of December I spent doing clothing alterations for rich ladies on Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue — skirts and pants. I charged them five dollars an hour for the sewing and cheated a little on the time, so that I started to pick up some money — at least, I was able to make my rent and live after a fashion, but I was bored. I was alone once more.
Once after sewing all day, I was sitting and eating and mechanically watching television, trying various stations, and irritably thinking, How long will I have to keep doing alterations on all their old shit? I’d spent the whole day repairing a torn coat with a fur lining of the sort that any bum would wear, although it belonged to a lady who lived next door to the Guggenheim Museum. Who would have believed that these rich ladies would be so cheap and have their old coats altered or have me patch their husbands’ old trousers? I thought. And then on one of the programs I suddenly saw the sweet little face of Lodyzhnikov, so that instead of switching stations, I lingered for a moment, whereupon I was afforded the opportunity of beholding Drosselmeier himself — my former lover Leshka Kranets. Tall and imperious, Leshka strode about the stage in a huge black batlike cloak. The lead. Leshka was a drunk with a heart of gold. He not only slept with you, but worried about whether you were satisfied, or drunk enough, or whether you needed something to wear. As brief as our romance was, he still managed to give me some gold cuff links and to send me money in beautiful envelopes with the tenderest of inscriptions and anticipations and apologies, lest I be offended by the money, which was intended as a gift. But my prick takes me to those who don’t love me, which of course is why I remained neither with Jenny nor with Leshka or Sarah, nor with any of the other, by no means bad people, with whom a generous fate has brought me into contact.
At that moment, Leshka happened to be tying a scarf around the neck of the nutcracker. You remember the part where the head comes off? I started smiling and then burst out laughing. Leshka had always been a healer and a doctor, and it had been my lot from time to time to feel the benefit of his healing organ in the days when I still considered myself bisexual.
But who will heal me now? I thought. Jenny was leaving on the fifth of January and already had her ticket. The millionaire’s little house had provided me with a great deal of healing, and now I wouldn’t be seeing it anymore. And then it suddenly occurred to me, why in fact shouldn’t I see it again? Why shouldn’t I offer to take Jenny’s place? She had tried to find somebody, but hadn’t been able to. I would have my favorite garden again, and the house with the children’s room where I could take refuge from calamity, and a reliable income — every week. Let’s look into it, I thought. I still wasn’t ready then to live on my own.
And turning off the television, I erased Leshka from the screen and called up Jenny.
Chapter Seven
You can reproach Steven Gatsby with probably just about anything you like, including the lack of a sense of humor, but he does enjoy showing off, and his snobbery is something you won’t take away from him. Therefore, when Jenny arranged an interview for me with Gatsby in the same long-suffering solarium three days before she left, she was certain he wouldn’t take me, but I understood her boss better than she did. We looked each other over, chatted for ten minutes, and I knew I could work for him as long as I wanted to. A housekeeper-writer was something he required the same way he required bread, and I believe that my sojourn in his house will in time inevitably take its place in his family chronicle.
Jenny finally rolled out of the house on the fifth of January, 1979, taking with her a heap of cardboard boxes and other assorted trash, and accompanied by virtually the whole Jackson clan, by the timid Martha, who hadn’t left for Los Angeles yet, by Bridget and the weeping Linda, and by numerous other tertiary figures — friends and acquaintances of Jenny’s — as well as by the shrieking of children and an otherwise indescribable bustle. Jenny’s friends also managed to pilfer a number of other absolute essentials, including a fair quantity of alcohol, which she let them haul out of the basement and stick in among the clothing and furniture that did in fact belong to her. I didn’t intercede on behalf of «our» alcohol at the time; I didn’t want to ruin her leave-taking.
I was genuinely happy that she was going. She was actually moving only her body to Los Angeles; her mind and thoughts had already been there for a long time with the proprietor of the printing shop. She was an appalling sight the last days before she left, her pregnancy having made her even more animal-like and bovine. Like any real American girl raised on mass culture, Jenny, as you already know, firmly believed that everything natural was healthy, and behaved accordingly, burping, letting out mooing sounds, and unfortunately even smelling bad. I’m ashamed even to pronounce the word, but, yes, she did that too, although it’s true she first gave a warning, saying, “I’m going to fart,” although the warning didn’t in fact change anything. In short, she really let herself go after she got pregnant.
How is Mark going to put up with her? I thought. “Goodbye, Jenny Jackson,” I said at the door.
“Goodbye, Edward Limonov,” she replied with a smile. Nobody asked me to go to the airport, and so I d
idn’t. The door shut behind her.
Only then, gentlemen, did I realize how lucky I was that Jenny was gone from my life. It’s good, I thought, when your whole future is open to you, wide open again, and you can do whatever the hell you want. For a start I went up to her former room, now mine, and thoroughly washed it and threw out everything I thought should be thrown away, with a firm hand clearing away all her trash and her dirt. I worked on that project for the next two days — Saturday and Sunday. As I’ve been saying, Jenny hadn’t done anything for the last several months, except read books on babies and how to raise them.
On Monday Linda arrived and my working life began.
“Edward,” she said, “the basic thing you need to know about Steven is that he’s not a detail person. He pays other people, people like you and me, to work out the details for him. He only gives general instructions, and he likes you to anticipate his thoughts.”
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll anticipate his thoughts.” I didn’t have any idea then how I was going to do that, and I still don’t, but I was already well beyond that other Edward, the naive Russian, and was saying “Yes!” to everything, and somehow it has worked out. It’s an easy thing to say “yes,” and it doesn’t cost you anything. And so I said, “Yes,” “Of course,” and “I’ll do it.”
“The fact Steven hired you means you’re more than halfway there, but were you aware that Nancy wanted to hire Marilyn,” Linda said, lighting a cigarette, “a girl who used to work for her on the farm in Connecticut? She’s taken Marilyn under her wing, and Steven hired you against her wish. Just between us,” Linda continued, “that’s the main reason he took you. Nancy wanted a spy in the house, but Steven can’t stand Marilyn — she’s fat, ugly, and pimply — and he won’t have a spy in his home; he wants to keep his personal life private.”
His Butler’s Story (1980-1981) Page 19
