Sometimes Linda is overcome by a kind of neurosis. Her attacks usually coincide with Gatsby’s visits and the insulting things he yells at her, that she’s spending his money like water or that he’s had it as far as she’s concerned, that he’s “fed up” with her and wants her to “get out of the way!” Whenever that happens, Linda unconsciously starts screwing me over, although I’m not supposed to be her subordinate — I have my own things to do. She can always find a pretext to criticize me; it’s very easy in fact, since she hangs around the millionaire’s house eight and sometimes even nine hours a day.
About a month ago, for example, two huge businessmen appeared at the house one evening. I had been warned they were coming and expected them. I warmly showed the husky lads where they would be sleeping, and for their part they asked me what I was writing in my notebook, since I always loaf about the house with a notebook whenever Steven’s away. Gatsby had of course told them I was a writer; I was one of the attractions for his guests. After that we played a crazy computer game on the TV screen for half an hour, they as the representatives of the most advanced technical thought in the world naturally beating me. And then they humped out to dinner somewhere.
The next morning while the gentlemen were still in bed — they had obviously come back from dinner very late — Linda said to me in a businesslike tone, “Edward, describe to me which of them is Mr. Burdell, that is, what he looks like, since I have to give him a personal letter from Steven.”
“One of them has a beard and the other doesn’t. Both of them are tremendously tall, well-built guys at least as big as the boss. They’re about the same age, I think, but I don’t have any idea which one is Burdell,” I told Linda.
“Edward, please be serious about your responsibilities here, and in the future please remember who is who!” Linda said nervously, straightening her jacket, which it’s possible she had put on especially for the two businessmen, for all I know. “Please, Edward, you’ve put me in an awkward position. I have to hand the letter to Mr. Burdell; the other gentlemen is just his subordinate,” she continued. “Always, always ask their names, and ask again if you don’t understand. We could be in real trouble because of your carelessness.”
“Listen, Linda,” I said, “what are you getting so upset about? Give me the letter and I’ll hand it to him. And if I make a mistake, what’s so awful about that? I only saw the gentlemen last night for a half an hour at most, and they never introduced themselves to me. I just opened the door for them, helped them bring their luggage in, and we immediately started talking about something… Let me have the letter and I’ll find some way of handing it to him. I’ve got it, Linda!” it suddenly occurred to me. “I’ll just say something like, ‘Mr. Burdell, I have a letter for you from Steven’ to both of them from a distance, and Mr. Burdell, and not the other guy, will answer and stick out his hand for the letter.”
The whole Burdell business was terribly funny.
But do you know what she did? She didn’t give me the letter but continued to grumble and called San Francisco, where the gentlemen were from, and asked Burdell’s secretary what he looked like: “I’m sorry, dear, but I’ve got a problem here…” Secretaries form a worldwide brotherhood, or rather sisterhood, an international sisterhood that knows no boundaries. Burdell, it turned out, was the one with the beard and the curly hair. Looking at me triumphantly, Linda exultantly put the letter from Steven, which she’d written and typed herself of course, on the very top of the half dozen or so leather portfolios that were lying on her desk.
And when the two big lunks finally appeared in the kitchen, yawning and stretching, Linda with a happy click of her heels walked right up to the one she needed and said, “Mr. Burdell, welcome to Steven Grey’s house. I hope you slept well!”
I almost burst out laughing right there in the kitchen when she handed Burdell the sacred letter. A half an hour later I fished it out of the waste basket. Written on beautiful paper with Gatsby’s name and our address embossed at the top was no more than:
“Hi, Charles! Welcome! I trust you and your companion will be comfortable in my home and your weekend will be a pleasant one. I expect to fly into New York Monday evening at 6:30, and accordingly should be home by 7:00, and we will, I’m confident, have an excellent evening together. I’ll call if I’m held up. Yours, Steven.”
I had at the request of Linda herself conveyed the very same message to the gentlemen the evening before.
But Linda must be given her due. On one of my first days at work, I think, she said to me, “Edward! If I ever start to get on your nerves, or if I get too insistent about telling you how to live, don’t be shy about it; just tell me to fuck off! Work is work,” Linda went on, “and our relationship may get pretty tense at times, but don’t pay any attention to it, just tell me to fuck off, and I won’t be offended.”
And I have told her more than once, and she’s told me, and neither of us has gotten offended. Work is work, and we’re building capitalism, Steven and Linda and I, sometimes successfully and sometimes not so successfully.
Although I do try to slip out of it and am even a little intimidated by it, I like the kitchen. Everybody likes it in fact, including Nancy, who spends the better part of her day there whenever she’s in town, and even Steven, who comes into it quite often. All the other rooms in a sense distract us from the kitchen, its allure being somehow more ancient, a vestige of the caveman’s desire for a hearth, and a kitchen is in fact all anyone needs for life. Everything else is an outgrowth of civilization, and we only waste the precious time on loan to us from chaos in going idly from one room to another and mulling over our inessential, our non-kitchen, objects and affairs.
Once I was sitting in the kitchen next to the window, a servant-philosopher, while outside it was getting dark and two boys were throwing a Frisbee in the street and quietly squealing with pleasure. A sunny fall day was coming to an end. I was drinking a beer and waiting for the boss. Maybe I shouldn’t have waited for him — Linda says I don’t have to — but it was possible Gatsby didn’t have his key with him. That doesn’t happen very often, but it’s always possible, and so it’s better to wait.
I sat and lazily thought about how nice it would be if Steven’s plane went down with him in it. He’s a bright person, no doubt about it, but he takes up too much space in my life; after me, he comes next. We are all engrossed in ourselves, but Steven is the other center around which my life revolves. There’s no reason for that, I thought. It would be a good thing if the plane went down; my life should have just one center — me. I at once felt guilty, however. Did I have the right to such evil thoughts, did I have the right to wish for my boss’s death? But Steven, if he were to find himself in my place by some whim of fate and circumstance, would probably have been thinking the same thing with his crazy temperament, would have been sitting next to the window and waiting for his boss Edward and probably would have wanted him to crash into the Atlantic Ocean too. That thought cheered me up.
Rights, rights, I thought. Who gives anybody the right to do anything? Is it my fault that I was born among the long cold ruins of Christianity, in the middle of this century in a godless country (whether that’s good or bad, I cannot say), and that I’ve retained nothing, not the least little thing, from the Christian code of behavior in this world, or of any other code, and for that reason am compelled to devise my own code and decide for myself whether my actions and thoughts are good or bad? Is that my fault? And as far as Jenny was concerned, should I or should I not have indulged my incomprehensible loathing for her and have thought such bad things about her behind her back and have seen her as bad — as ugly, lazy, and farting? Maybe I needed to close my eyes and not see that, intentionally not see what was bad in her — refuse to notice the bad and see only the help she gave me and simply be grateful to her for everything she did for me, voluntarily or involuntarily? Maybe I didn’t have the right to see her as ugly and shouldn’t have noticed that pimple under her nose?
But how? I thought. I did try to love her, I really wanted to, but in spite of myself I slipped back into my merciless way of noticing the pettiest details, slipped back to my terrible unforgiving sight, to my vile, graphically honest thoughts. That’s the secret, it suddenly occurred to me. I want to be honest with myself; I cannot consent to illusion and falsehood.
And in wishing that Steven would fall into the Atlantic Ocean along with his Concorde, I was also being maximally honest with myself, selfish, but honest. His visits bring me inconvenience, physical weariness, psychological distress, and a general repression in my life. They force me to live differently from my own notion of the way I ought to live, and that’s why I wished him death. Is it really so shameful to wish death on your jailer, even if he’s married and has children? When at eighteen I tried to persuade the paranoid Grisha to kill the orderlies so we could escape from the hospital where they were tormenting me, where they were injecting me with insulin, putting me in a coma, mutilating my psyche, and humiliating me, I was, biologically speaking, entirely in the right. Kill your tormentor!
I didn’t want my boss to crash on land; that would have been too painful. It’s somehow more innocuous and humane for a plane to fall into the ocean. In the ocean is better, I decided… But then it suddenly occurred to me that if Steven were gone, the power would pass to his heirs, and Nancy would inevitably sell the house — exactly, since she prefers living in the country with her horses and cows and had been grumbling to Steven that the New York house is a completely unnecessary luxury — and I’d lose my job and the possibility as a poor man of living on occasion the life of a rich one — a possibility and life unique in their own way. No, I thought, let the boss arrive safely after all. He’s a decent guy, and if he’s a bit hysterical, well what of it? We’ll manage, we’ll get through it somehow.
I’m a realist. Even in little things I sometimes catch myself in the most vulgar realism. Thus I remember altering some pants for a certain old lady and wanting to overstitch the seams — as you’re supposed to do so they won’t fray. I’d already put the right color thread in the machine when I suddenly thought, but why should I; she won’t be using the pants that long. She’s old, and she’ll die before the seams have a chance to fray. And I didn’t overstitch them.
I extend my awful realism to myself too. I’m constantly aware of death now. Before I wouldn’t remember it for as much as a year and lived as if I were going to live forever, deeply absorbed in the problems of the day and never glancing around, and only occasionally stopping to muse with terror and bewilderment. And then I’d forget…
But now I think peacefully and tranquilly about death every day, and remember and count the time left. In essence, I’ve got twenty to twenty-five years of normal, active life before my body deteriorates to the point where it will be more a source of inconvenience than pleasure. Into those twenty to twenty-five years, I must squeeze all of myself — my thoughts, my books, my actions, and my sexual life, fucking the women I dream of fucking, and if (all of a sudden) I should want to kill men and women, I shall have to hurry if I’m going to do that too. If I should want to have children, then I’ll have to conceive them in the middle of that period, and if I should have the lofty dream, say, of founding a party or a state or a religion, then, gentlemen, it must all be done by 2,001 to 2,005 years after the birth of Christ. I’m a corpse in the middle of his vacation. And that vacation is trickling away, gentlemen, and soon it will be back to chaos.
Faster, faster, while there’s still time, and fan whatever delirium or fire there is in you; it’s unimportant what it is, only that you do it while there’s still time — I advise you too, reader. Before your meeting with chaos, before your sunny vacation is over and it’s back to nothingness.
A couple of days after that I found myself sitting in the same place by the kitchen window repairing Steven’s fur coat. He didn’t ask me to. He merely threw the coat down on the chest in the hallway since winter was over and he didn’t need it anymore, and I saw it there and realized the pocket was completely torn and the lining was coming undone at the seam, even though the coat was almost new. I could have sent it to Kaplan’s for repair, or not have bothered about it and hung it up in the closet; yet I was sitting there and mending his fur coat, and taking great pains with it. I’m not moved by my own nobility; I’m just amazed at the different tendencies I find in myself — first wanting Steven’s death, and then, like his mother, mending his coat. Probably that’s as it should be. It may be that I’m capable of mending his fur coat, putting the mended coat on him, and then sending him off to his death. Or maybe it’s just a manifestation of my fondness for order.
Send him off, send him off. It’s what Steven deserves. After all, he’s been terribly rude. Sometimes the instant he comes in the door. Yesterday when he arrived he announced he was going out even before he had a chance to shut the door. To which his servant replied in an ironically distraught voice, “Right away?”
“In fifteen minutes. Do you mind if I rest for a moment in my own house?” he answered, glaring malevolently at his servant.
I didn’t mind. I had no objection. Rest, tired boss, rest, you neurotic old woman, I thought. I didn’t expect him to blow up and start yelling at me. After Efimenkov’s visit my stock has stood very high and solid with him, but I still cut out to my beloved basement where it was quiet, warm, and restful, and where nobody would come unless for wine, and sat down in the corner of the laundry room on a pile of dirty linen. A laundry room or basement is a good place to rest up after an escape from jail in damp and rotten weather, a place where after several weeks in the cold and wet you can cover your head with freshly laundered sheets and sleep and forget all about the rest of the world for a moment and about your own exploits and fame — where you can forget about everything except its slightly stuffy warmth and your own inhuman weariness…
Steven, I thought abstractedly… Nancy… Sometimes, in those moments when I stop looking at my day-to-day life as an inevitable stage in my destiny without which the future simply cannot occur, I think in dismay, Why am I a servant, why did I turn up here? It’s all so ridiculous — Steven, Nancy… the silver, the dirty dishes, how to serve meat and how to make sauce for crab… It’s all so ridiculous and stupid, so what are you doing here, Edward? Long ago in the Soviet school system you read about your present life in the books of pre-revolutionary writers, never thinking that one day that past would suddenly become your own life. It’s as silly as…
Escape from servanthood? Where to? Wouldn’t I end up wasting the minutes and hours I waste on Steven on some other, even more pointless work, on other things I don’t have any fucking use for either?
Thus I sat on the pile of dirty linen thinking about what to do next. After spending about an hour in that state and weighing all the pros and cons, I came to the conclusion that it made sense for me to go to work for Gatsby. What would I have been doing then in my apartment on Eighty-third Street, even supposing I had had the money to pay for it? I’d have been sitting there alone like an owl. At least here I’m surrounded by people, by conversation, language, books, and money, I thought, listing the advantages of the millionaire’s house. Anyway, the whole family’s going to Tunis for three weeks at the end of March, and then Steven’s flying to Japan, I remembered happily, and got up from the pile of linen and went back upstairs.
After hanging around the house not fifteen minutes but an hour, Steven slammed the front door and walked past the kitchen window. But seeing me, he came back, smiled, and waved his hand, obviously ashamed of his rudeness. He’s gone out dressed in nothing but his suit, I thought mechanically. He’s not a bad person, I thought. Maybe someday he’ll invest his money in the destruction of civilization…
For some reason during my first winter and spring at the house, it happened that Nancy had pressing business in New York a couple of times a month, and she came down either alone or with the children or even with her neighbors from the country, usually staying for a few days
and only rarely longer. I calculated that during the first months of my employment in Mr. Grey’s house, Nancy spent much more time there than she had during the whole time I’d been Jenny’s boyfriend. Nancy was clearly checking up on my suitability for the duties of housekeeper, and unaccustomed as I was to being checked on, I got fucking tired of it.
Nancy loves to cook; she’s no mere lady of leisure. She almost always made breakfast herself and for their whole crowd — for her own children and for her country neighbors and their children. My own responsibilities consisted of helping her — hanging around the kitchen with her, getting one thing and another for her, and running to the store. If it turned out, say, that the kind of butter I used wasn’t the same one Nancy used, or if she suddenly decided to make pancakes, and there wasn’t any flour in the house, I slid off my stool and ran out to the store for the butter or flour.
His Butler’s Story (1980-1981) Page 22
