His Butler’s Story (1980-1981)

by Edward Limonov

  Thus I remember myself that winter standing in the brightly lit kitchen early in the morning like the sleepy servant boy Vanka Zhukov in Chekhov’s story, and setting the table for a dozen people, and putting out the napkins, and pulling back the chairs, all before the sky had had a chance even to turn gray — Nancy and her friends are residents of the country and get up at the crack of dawn.

  Helping and being ready to run errands was a lot worse than cooking breakfast for them myself would have been; personally I prefer to cook. Nancy undoubtedly knows how to do everything and she’s a deservedly celebrated hostess. At home in Connecticut she sometimes bakes insanely large cakes for a hundred people in the shape of a ship or a church or City Hall, and every time, the cakes are mentioned in the cooking section of The New York Times. The cakes are devoured by Mr. and Mrs. Grey’s guests in the open air in a Connecticut forest meadow to the accompaniment of a symphony orchestra. I’ve already said they’re fond of showing off; they may not eat, that little family, but they will show off.

  Mrs. Grey cooked the breakfasts, for which I thank her, but after one of her forays, my kitchen looked like a peaceful little Jewish village after a pogrom. The fact is that she used as many dishes as she deemed necessary — three times as many as I would have. In Connecticut she had six servants to clean up after her, whereas here there were only Olga and I to form a living conveyor between the sink and the dishwasher, Olga rinsing the remaining food from the dishes, and I putting them into the dishwasher. After lunch, I had to clean up everything by myself.

  Once Nancy noticed I was rinsing the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher.

  “You don’t have to do that, Edward,” she said patronizingly, obviously amazed by my stupidity or ignorance. “That’s what we have the dishwasher for — to wash the dishes.”

  I said, “I’m sorry, Nancy, but the specialist who repaired the dishwasher about a month ago told me to, and so I’m doing it.”

  “Why?” Nancy said. “I have exactly the same kind of dishwasher in Connecticut and I never rinse the dishes before putting them in.”

  I shrugged my shoulders, while Nancy put the dirty breakfast dishes with egg yolk spread all over them into our unhappy dishwasher. Forty minutes later they all came out clean, except for the egg yolk, which was still stuck to them. She then sat down, her skirt spread out on the floor next to the dishwasher, and pushing her sleeves up, started digging around in it. She unscrewed several nuts, removed several pieces, and tinkered with the machine for a long time, repeating over and over again, “Why?” The stubborn and inquisitive Nancy. Then she was joined by a guest, one of her country neighbors, an extremely thin banker in his stockinged feet, who sat down next to the dishwasher and sank his hands into it too…

  From time to time I discreetly nudged Olga, who was present for that whole scene, and smiled ironically. We people from technologically underdeveloped countries don’t stick our noses into areas we don’t understand. The meticulous Nancy and the banker fiddled with the machine for about an hour and a half, however, getting greasy water and food fragments all over themselves, but with zero results — 0. To this day we rinse the food off the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher, having been ordered to do so by His Highness the Specialist, a red-haired guy in overalls — the god of dishwashing machines.

  I would earnestly ask Nancy how to do things, pretending I really was interested in how she made mayonnaise with dill or some other culinary crap. I asked her and even wrote down what she said, gentlemen. If you want get in good with somebody, be diligent, or at least pretend to be. I pretended with a vengeance. Nancy may not actually have believed I was interested in kitchen arithmetic and mechanics, but she didn’t have to — we were playing our respective roles, she the mistress and I the housekeeper, and it all worked out very well. For some reason, I know how to make a superb chicken soup that is much better than Nancy’s, which not only Linda has noted but Steven too. Many people in fact have told me that my chicken soup is the best they’ve ever had. Could it be that I make the best chicken soup in the world? I think Nancy respected me for my chicken soup and also for the fact that I didn’t show off but accepted the rules of the game: I made an effort to seem diligent. And that’s why she gave up her raids in the end and came to New York only when she actually needed to. Then in March of last year, as if summing up the results of her inspection, she said to me, “Well, Edward, you’re doing just fine. The house is spotless. You have my thanks.”

  Now we live in peace, harmony, and tranquility. Although it is in fact my feeling that the master and mistress only track dirt into the house and aren’t really of much use — a housekeeper’s point of view. After the raids by the wild bunch from Connecticut, now infrequent, thank God, Olga and I gradually put the house back in order. The children’s rooms are particularly messy of course. During their short visits the inquisitive American children manage to accomplish a great deal: They glue together model airplanes and boats, cut up paper into small pieces, which they then spread all over the house, run on the roof, thereby making all the glass in the house vibrate, and tie ropes and wires around the banisters… It would be impossible to describe the full extent of the havoc wreaked by the children; suffice it to say that each one of their visits costs Olga and me several days of labor after they’re gone. The most offensive thing is that we are in fact cleaning up after the neighbors’ children, since only the youngest of the Grey children is capable by age of participating and in fact does participate in these outrages. But I’m always so happy when the mistress at last takes off for home, that the consequences of her visits are unable to dim my joy.

  Sometimes Nancy leaves somebody to stay at the house for a few days. Or else her Connecticut banker neighbor has some business in the city and he stays for a couple of days, or Nancy’s lover, Carl, comes and stays. According to my agreement with Steven, however, I am not obligated to these people in any way. I may give them coffee in the morning if they come down to the kitchen, or anything I happen to have in the refrigerator, but help yourselves, dear guests. It’s self-service.

  Carl always turns up at the house within half an hour after Nancy arrives. The first thing she does, after parking her jeep in front of the kitchen window and leaving me and the older children to unload it, is to phone Carl. Carl is a youngish, rapidly balding man obviously about my age or even younger, but unlike me he has made a career for himself in the last four years. After starting out as the bookkeeper of a provincial yacht club in some remote corner of Connecticut, he quickly climbed up the social ladder, skipping two or three rungs thanks to Nancy’s good offices, and now occupies the position of president of one of the largest of the computer subsidiaries that make up Gatsby’s empire.

  Learn, Edward, I tell myself every time I see Carl sitting with Nancy in the kitchen and talking with her in a cultivated way about nothing at all. He’s an opportunist, the genuine article — unlike you.

  Nancy is forty and a very attractive woman, tall, with a good figure. The only thing you can reproach her or nature with is that, like Jenny, she is the most perfect of mothers, the sort whose affectionate lap it’s good for a child injured by life to curl up in. Regardless of the things that have happened to me, even in the most difficult times in my life, I’ve never felt the need to have a good cry in my mother’s lap or on her breast. What I need are capricious and whorish young girl-pals, haughty and painted and perfumed, and have never had dreams of myself as a timid little creature descending into a gigantic cunt — I’m not Steven and I’m not Carl, and Nancy doesn’t appeal to me. Even though I did, like a true opportunist, have thoughts about the boss’s wife in the beginning, after considering all the pros and cons, I realized she wasn’t my cup of tea. It is, of course, another question entirely whether she would have been interested in me, although I doubt that she would have been. There wasn’t even one point of contact between us, though there wasn’t any antipathy either. Moreover, I think that Nancy and I are the same type of people: w
e’re both self-assured, enterprising, and given to action, and I’ve always taken my women under my protection and been a papa to them, even when they were older than me. That may in fact be the reason why Jenny and I never really got on together. She wasn’t a tempting girl-daughter for me, but mama Jenny, and we didn’t need a mama Jenny — no. I myself am a papa Limonov; I myself like to be the one in control.

  Carl the opportunist is a quiet person, and when he stays at the house, he’s neither seen nor heard. Sometimes in the morning I find him in the kitchen reading the book on etiquette by Amy Vanderbilt, obviously a kind of handbook for opportunists — who else would need it? Gatsby has no need of books like that; he already knows a little, and in any case his wealth and self-assurance place him above any etiquette. Gatsby is a representative of the upper classes and not a bourgeois like the former bookkeeper Carl. It’s right for Carl to read a book on etiquette, and he reads it. Nevertheless, they share the same woman.

  How odd that nature sticks different types of people wherever it can, not worrying in the least about the bodies, using the first one that comes along. And so here is the robust fellow Steven Grey, six feet two inches tall, and inside him the vulnerable soul of a little boy who seeks a mother in all his women and who chooses the mother — Nancy and Polly, for example, and several of his other women as well, all of whom give off a maternal aura. Whereas I, Edward Limonov, five feet eight and with the face of a child, have — just imagine! — the habits of a papa. I remember that only once during the whole of my life with Jenny, at a time when I was sick with a fever, did I play the child with her, and in that instant everything suddenly assumed its proper place for her: She pressed my head against her breast and stroked my hair, obviously not even aware that she was doing it, and started muttering affectionately to me. The next day she told me sadly, “How sick you were last night, Edward, but at least you were human. It’s the first time since I’ve known you.”

  Whenever I see the severe Nancy kneeling in the garden in her long dress, her face tanned and without any makeup and her hair pulled back in a bun, as she concentrates on transplanting an azalea bush from a pot, I feel a certain masculine superiority over my employer. Because he needs the protective caresses of this strong woman, while to this day I still sigh in anguish every night and toss and turn in my bed remembering the unbalanced child Elena, who could drive me to a frenzy with her whorishness, that child who had grown completely wild. Elena had run away from her papa Edward and was doing shocking things — fucking bad men and behaving in whatever hoodlum way she pleased, instead of living like a good daughter the way her papa wanted her to. What could I do — nature made me that way. If I had been able to, I would with pleasure have rested my head on some woman’s large breast — like a poor, tired little boy.

  Oh, I would give a great deal to enter Steven Grey’s bedroom and see how he does everything with his women. It’s only the curiosity of an investigator, gentlemen, only the curiosity of an investigator — nothing dirty, no sexual thoughts whatsoever. I would just like to see who dominates and how. Steven and his girlfriends, by the way, use not only the master bedroom but also the guest bedroom next door. Either he and Polly hump each other on his bed, and then she goes to sleep in the guest bedroom (in which case I’ve had it with these spoiled WASPs), or else Gatsby feels it would somehow be unethical to fuck in the family’s master bedroom with its photograph of the naked Nancy holding an equally naked baby — Henry, his first-born. I don’t know what the answer is, but Olga, the black woman from underdeveloped Haiti, has more work to do thanks to the strange scrupulousness of our lord and master. And the yellow half-Tatar Edward has yet another excuse for grins and reflections.

  Chapter Eight

  Just a few days after I became the millionaire’s housekeeper, or butler as Gatsby says, the energetic bureaucrat Linda put together a curious document for me, a very long document on which she had obviously spent a great deal of time. In order to give you an idea of the kind of semi-military order that prevails in our house, I cite it here.

  Edward:

  Attached is a list of Steven’s friends and business colleagues, with which you must carefully acquaint yourself.

  “P” after a name indicates a personal friend, and «B» indicates a business colleague. If nothing is indicated, then the person in question belongs to both categories. The countries following certain names indicate principal places of residence in the event that it isn’t the United States.

  This is by no means a complete list but includes only the most important people. Please try to become familiar with these names and their correct spelling, and so on, so that if they call, you can more accurately understand the tone of the message. By this I mean that it may not be necessary every time to track down Steven wherever he is on the globe, but that every message definitely deserves to be written down and given to both of us, that is to me and to Steven if he happens to be in the city. Please pay particular attention to messages coming from people who are going to be in New York only a short time while Steven’s in the city.

  I have another suggestion for you as well — that from time to time you look at my card file and gradually familiarize yourself with the names there. If someone calls who isn’t on the attached list, a basic rule is that if you can find his name in the card file, he’s entitled to have his message written down.

  Two requests: Always tell me, please, if you give a message to Steven, in case he can’t immediately answer the call himself and asks me about it later.

  Don’t trust people if they say the message isn’t important, and please try to get their names and telephone numbers in all cases where that isn’t all there is to the message. It may be a call for me about something I happen to be working on at the time.

  IF YOU DONT UNDERSTAND SOMETHING, ASK ME ABOUT IT REGARDLESS OF HOW TRIVIAL IT MAY SEEM TO YOU!!!

  L.

  P.S. If you can’t find a name in the card file, it may be because it’s listed under the name of the caller’s company. For example, Carl Fink’s name can also be found under “Norse Electronics.” Thus, if it’s not a personal call, you may feel free to ask for the name of the company the caller works for.

  A list of about two hundred names followed. And the countries in which all those P’s and B’s lived really were scattered all over the globe.

  Ghupta is a “P,” that is, a personal friend of Gatsby’s. Linda explained to me that he’s worth around forty million dollars and works in the areas of oil and atomic energy. Ghupta is from Burma but received his education in England, although he’s a citizen of the world, with homes in Rangoon, Kuala Lumpur, London, and in Texas, where he hangs out most of the time, close to his oil. Whenever he comes to New York he always stays with us at Steven’s house, despite the fact that he has a permanent suite waiting for him at the Waldorf-Astoria. He’s just more comfortable with us, you see.

  Ghupta is about my height, maybe a little taller, and has about the same build. His dark Burmese skin may be the main reason he’s a little more human than the other wealthy people around Steven, since at first sight, without looking into his pockets, he’s just Ghupta, a colored man. In the Great United States extending from sea to shining sea, that fact still means something.

  I’m even fond of Mr. Ghupta in my own way, maybe because we’re both Asiatics, or maybe because he’s the only one of all the “P’s” and “B’s” who notices me. That is, he’s not merely distinguished by die courtesy of wealthy people — the two or three meaningless questions; he actually has conversations with me in which he sometimes gets very interested. Of course he’s a cunning Oriental fox with sugary speech and very strong paws — I know that — but the very first time we met, when I was still Jenny’s lover, Ghupta suddenly told me after a ten-minute conversation in die kitchen during which we laughingly discussed the wedding page of The New York Times, “Edward, I have no doubt you will be very successful.” Even if he was merely flattering me, and Orientals like to be on good terms with everyb
ody (even the housekeeper’s lover — just in case), I still very much needed to be flattered then. I needed support. And I made a point of remembering him and told myself, Here’s somebody who’s alive. Maybe not a friend, maybe a completely different class of person, but enjoyable to be with.

  Besides, Ghupta is somehow more with it. He dresses in a much more contemporary way than Steven does. He’s capable of wearing, say, the best silk jacket from Saks Fifth Avenue with cotton pants bought on sale at the Gap store on Lexington for ten dollars — I’ve shortened quite a few pairs of such pants for him. He’s right to get out among people and make friends; after all, I proved useful to him, and not merely as a tailor, as you will see. Ghupta has taught me practicality: He once took me to a sale at Saks and showed me how to buy expensive things at half the price. I learn with pleasure, and thanks to him, I now have a small but very impressive wardrobe of designer rags which I would never in my life have allowed myself to buy at the regular price. An opportunist should be well dressed.

  He always gleams, my friend the millionaire Ghupta; he’s always decked out like a schoolboy on the first day of vacation — white socks, a red knit alligator shirt, loafers, and cotton pants that are always of a light color. At his office, and he has one in New York too, Ghupta wears suits and ties of course, but they aren’t the same suits and ties my boss, Steven Grey, wears. Ghupta somehow gives the impression of enjoying himself, although I am in complete agreement with Linda when she says that working for Ghupta is far from a piece of cake, and that he makes his bed soft but lies hard in it and has completely worn out his secretary. Yes, I say, but with Ghupta it’s more fun; he may exploit you even more than Steven does, but I prefer the even-tempered, cunning, Oriental slyness with which Ghupta squeezes the juice out of his employees to the hysterical outbursts of Gatsby. Linda is an unconscious admirer of Gatsby’s, but the best thing of all is to be your own boss and not have to serve anybody. Furthermore, Ghupta, who doesn’t spend all that much time in New York, has hung around the kitchen with me a lot more than Gatsby has, and he’s my boss. Judging from what I know about Ghupta’s affairs, he’s far from being the sort of person who pisses his time away, and is an even more successful businessman than my employer is, and much better at getting results. It follows that the puritan severity of Gatsby is quite unnecessary.