However strange it may be, Ghupta is also much more liberal. For example, he wasn’t at all reluctant to invite me, a servant, into the living room when he was entertaining his country’s ambassador and minister of commerce at our house. We all drank Dom Perignon together, the housekeeper Edward along with the millionaires and ministers, and politely engaged in small talk. After we had drunk four bottles, Ghupta called me into the corridor and asked me if I would mind going out to the liquor store for some more or calling them to have it delivered. It was a pleasure for the housekeeper Edward to run out to the liquor store for a man like that. “May I use the limo?” I asked him. The guests had naturally arrived in a limousine that Ghupta hired for them. “Of course, Edward!” he said.
I took my seat in the black lacquered coffin and rode the three blocks to the wine shop. It turned out to be a very pleasant tiling to go for champagne in a limousine. The driver was a Russian, or rather a Jew from Russia, as I immediately deduced from his wooden accent as soon as I started talking to him, although I didn’t tell him I was a Russian too. Why the hell should I? Except for the fact that we had both left Russia, we had nothing in common.
Coming back, I put the champagne in the freezer and sat down again in the living room with Ghupta and his company. Their ambassador in Washington had, as it turned out, been ambassador in Moscow before that; we had something to talk about. True, he had been in Moscow after I left. On top of that, one of the girls invited to entertain the guests, the one in fact who had been invited to entertain Ghupta himself, was a blonde model named Jacqueline who turned out to be acquainted with my ex-wife, and Jacqueline and I talked about the eccentric and from my point of view too well-known ex-Elena.
Gradually the guests and the girls wandered off to other parts of the house and garden, while I, deciding that I had participated enough in the social life of my friend Ghupta, withdrew to my room. But a little later the attentive Ghupta knocked at my door and asked me if I didn’t want to join them again, for which I thanked him, but said no. Whereupon Ghupta, still standing in the doorway, confided to me that he had already fucked Jacqueline more than once and that he intended to fuck her again that night.
I couldn’t even imagine Steven Grey in a situation like that. With Gatsby I always feel out of place. Once, and only once, did he even take me to a restaurant with him after noticing that I was enjoying a conversation with a friend of his, the lawyer Ellis. “Ellis! Edward! Let’s go. You can continue your conversation at the restaurant!” We did continue it, but it was extremely hard to do, since Gatsby wouldn’t let anybody else get a word in, so that it was no longer interesting to me and I swore at myself for agreeing to go with them. Steven Grey loves to be the center of attention and he loves to talk, and everybody else is supposed to listen to him with their mouths hanging open. Uh-uh, that’s not for me!
If I or Ellis or Birnbaum, another friend of Gatsby’s, said anything, I noticed that Gatsby would instantly wilt; he was obviously bored. Maybe his hysterical thoughts were way ahead of us or maybe he just wasn’t interested in what we were saying to him, I don’t know. In principle I agree with him: most people aren’t very interesting, but I consider myself, his housekeeper, a quite unusual personality, and the fact that he’s never really had the slightest curiosity about me, that he hasn’t tried to find out what’s behind the taciturn but apparently friendly Russian who prepares his lunches for him — that fact compels me to hold him in not very high regard. Gatsby was, for example, interested in Efimenkov, who was a Russian too, but then Efimenkov was world famous, and Gatsby is a snob, gentlemen, and what do I want from him anyway? Nothing in particular. For me he’s merely an entertaining personality, even an exceptional one for the circle he moves in. Just as Jenny was an unusual personality for the circle she moved in. And I’m interested in the reasons for things in this world. I’m curious, that’s all.
Ghupta sometimes laughs at Steven. A great admirer of the opposite sex, Ghupta once told me with a sly grin that he wouldn’t be able to get it up for even one of Gatsby’s women, that they’re all so terribly domestic. “I wouldn’t either, Ghupta,” I seconded him with an embarrassed smile, feeling a little awkward about betraying Gatsby that way. It was as if Ghupta and I were the real men, and Steven wasn’t. I was even sorry for the miserable Gatsby. Poor Gatsby, Ghupta and I had first-rate women for whom we could get it up, whereas he had women for whom we couldn’t. For some reason we were confident that Gatsby could get it up for ours.
That Ghupta could get it up for my women I am reminded by one of my jackets, a jacket he gave me the day after he fucked Tatiana. More accurately, Ghupta gave me a jacket from Saks in exchange for my having «given» him a Russian woman named Tatiana, who was somebody’s estranged wife and even the mother of his two children. Tatiana is dark-haired and beautiful; she doesn’t look Russian at all but Spanish. She turned up soon after I succeeded in publishing my long-suffering novel in Russian, a copy of which I immediately sent to Efimenkov — let him enjoy it. Thanks to the novel, Russian girls and women started hovering about me like bees and flies and wasps around something sweet. I had no objection. Tatiana was one of them.
Tatiana speaks in a quiet voice and considers herself very unfortunate. I, Edward, don’t believe that she’s all that unfortunate. She has a slender, sensuous body and a small moist cunt. It’s pleasant to fuck Tatiana; she’s delicate and adores being fucked, and during the act she sobs a little from pleasure. It may be that part of her misfortune, including her last husband, is explained by the fact that she can’t resist a prick.
I had been fucking Tatiana since May, with only a brief respite after she supposedly discovered she’d caught an infection from me, although she hadn’t really, and then she would secretly meet me at a bar on the West Side and sit there in a black shawl and weep and talk to me in a whisper. At first I even liked her crazy behavior and her black outfits and tear-stained eyes, but by September I was sick of her little quirks, which, for example, included paranoia. That’s right, ordinary paranoia — she thought the CIA was after her. She had a certain basis for believing that; one of her lovers had in fact been a CIA special agent, although the distance between having a CIA lover and being followed is, you’ll agree, not inconsiderable. But it’s also quite possible that her lover was following her and possibly even using CIA resources to do so, for all I know. I’ve had enough problems of the detective variety in my own life.
But I was much sicker of Tatiana’s carelessness than I was of her paranoia. A couple of times she failed to turn up at the millionaire’s house when I was expecting her, and several times she turned up when I wasn’t, once even scaring off a young cunt who happened to be staying with me at the time. Which is why I lost my temper with her, and one time when she called, I told her I was going to give the phone to Ghupta, which, despite her indignant protests, is what I did.
Ghupta spoke tenderly to her for a while, pronouncing her name with a Georgian accent for some reason, and managed to arrange a date with her, which was easy; all you had to do was pressure her a little.
Ghupta had seen Tatiana at the house several times and had liked her very much. Which isn’t surprising — she’s beautiful. “I’m tired of my own girls,” he said while cooking up some vegetables for himself in a frying pan; he’s a vegetarian. “American girls are fine, Edward, if you’re going on a picnic with some friends, say; they’re great company, they drink beer right out of the can, and they laugh loudly, but in bed they’re all the same. There is something mysterious about your Tatiana, however, something romantic,” Ghupta sighed hypocritically. It was obvious he wanted Tatiana. As far as I could tell, the majority of Ghupta’s girls weren’t Americans at all. He was fucking Jacqueline, who, despite her French name, was from Finland, and I’d also seen him with a Jamaican girl, so his so-called poverty was just a pretense.
Ghupta’s attitude toward women is tenderly cynical and very practical, and I understand him; if I had a business life as demanding as his, I’d
obviously have the same kind of sexual philosophy.
“All the beautiful girls in New York are actresses and models, Edward,” Ghupta lectured me once, “and eighty percent of them at least use cocaine, which is considered very chic, and buying them cocaine is the quickest and easiest, although unfortunately not the cheapest, way to fuck them and hold on to them. You didn’t know my girlfriend Letitia, did you?” he asked me, immediately answering his own question. “No, you couldn’t have; Jenny saw her a few times. Letitia worked for Elite,” he said, naming one of New York’s best known model agencies, already aware that the interests of the housekeeper Edward were far from limited to the kitchen. “She really suited me and I enjoyed fucking her — you know how hard it is to find a bed partner who satisfies you, Edward. Letitia was, moreover, a very striking girl, and it was a pleasure to go places with her. I got so used to her, Edward, that I even started taking her on business trips with me. Once when we were going through customs, however, they found some cocaine on her. I used to give her money for cocaine, and I even snort it myself on occasion, although not very often,” Ghupta added, “but here in the United States that form of entertainment is merely child’s play, whereas there are countries where it is simply inconceivable, and I didn’t let Letitia take cocaine with her on our trips. It’s a good thing it happened in a country where I could simply pay the customs agents off. If it had happened in my own country, I would have been finished; we have very strict laws and my money wouldn’t have helped, Edward,” he said very seriously, and I sympathized with him. “I broke up with Letitia after that,” he said. “She couldn’t live without the white powder anymore, so what else could I do?” he appealed to me once more.
I think it was in fact for the sake of his girls that Ghupta at one time was obsessed with the idea of buying Isabelle’s house, and it was an idea that was very hard for him to give up. “It’s so impossible to maintain relationships with women,” he complained to me, “and how can I, if I’m only in New York once a month? When I suddenly come back a month later, my women have all made other arrangements.”
Poor Ghupta. I don’t understand what he’s so nervous about. He has so many women in New York, they start calling him a week before he gets back to the city. He uses my telephone number, so I’m the one who gets the calls. Poor Ghupta, his eyes are much bigger than his stomach, and he wants them all.
On one of the following evenings Ghupta fucked Tatiana in our house — in my house, since I live here too. How do I know? I came home around midnight, and the light in the hallway and stairs had already been turned off, something Ghupta usually doesn’t do, since it is Steven’s and my privilege to turn off the hall light. The light was turned off, and from the solarium came the sound of classical music — Tchaikovsky, whom Tatiana adores and whom I can’t stand.
It was obvious from all the signs that somewhere in the depths of the house Ghupta was at that very moment sticking his Burmese dick into Tatiana.
A couple of weeks later I was spending a Saturday evening at home with a large lady named Teresa whom I had been fucking the preceding night and all day Saturday, although without much success. Teresa had just returned to New York after living for more than ten years in Europe. I was seeing her for the second time in my life.
A writer with a very good figure and a face that was rather worn by the storms of life, Teresa was just about to leave, when the front doorbell suddenly rang, sounding, as it does in our house, like Big Ben or the Kremlin carillon. I wasn’t expecting anybody that evening. Opening the door, I found Tatiana, dressed in black as usual and upset and a little overwrought.
I ceremoniously introduced the two ladies to each other, and since Tatiana said she wanted to talk to me about something very important, and Teresa had asked me to accompany her, I left the black apparition in the house and went with Teresa.
I accompanied her and then returned, smoking a cigarette.
When I got back, I couldn’t find Tatiana at first; the house is a large one after all. I called to her, but she didn’t answer. After wandering around the different floors for a while, I eventually found her lying on the bed in the guest room on the third floor. In the dark. For some reason she started telling me the story of her date with Ghupta and how he had fucked her, with all the details. While telling me, she held my hands in the dark and drank some wine, which she knew where to find in the house and had obtained during my absence.
Her hysterical story, told to me first in whispers and then in screams, ultimately came down to the fact that, not having bothered with birth control, this bold but careless Russian woman had of course gotten pregnant from the Burmese.
“Well at least it was nice for you — you enjoyed it, didn’t you?” Edward asked.
“I did,” she brazenly answered. “He’s like an animal and trembled all over while he was fucking me. It was nice. He appreciates women — unlike you, Limonov.”
I lay on my back and started laughing. What a bed of roses life is. After Jenny I had scoffingly decided I wasn’t going to find happiness in love and stopped looking for it. I had served Jenny down to the last drop, a woman I didn’t even love, a woman who in fact was not even to my taste, and who had broken me into little pieces.
I’ve long lived in the world as if in furnished rooms — I don’t arrange it to my liking; I just use whatever happens to be available, women too. I’ve moved way beyond the passionate and crazy Edichka I was four years ago, whom I left to the world.
Tatiana was surprised to find I wasn’t like Edichka at all. She said my book had made her cry, whereas I had, as you see, sold her to Ghupta for a jacket.
“You’re an evil person, Limonov!” she sadly told me on the phone recently after I lost my temper with her over her paranoid delusions and told her that there wasn’t anything between us except fucking and that she was a petite bourgeoise with neither money nor brains. Tatiana doesn’t care about me either. She sees a writer in me, an author of books that make her cry. I interest her, but it’s the interest of a consumer. She uses me to decorate her life. The same way that spices improve the taste of food, I make her life more interesting, a life that would otherwise be insipid. I, however, see Tatiana because I like fucking her, so that we in fact make very good use of each other, only I don’t whine about it; I make jokes and smile and enjoy myself, while she whines and insists that I’m not “like Edichka.” I already know I’m not.
I went to pee. I wasn’t in the bathroom very long, but when I came out, Tatiana wasn’t in the bedroom — one of her little jokes, her style. I called to her, looked for her, walked around the whole house, and then not finding her, I said the hell with it, and went out for a walk. I had almost been in the mood to fuck that unhappy, freshly impregnated woman, pulling up her black dress. She likes to go around in black. It didn’t matter, I’d fuck her next time, or I’d fuck somebody else.
I always take the same route on my walks, going west on Fifty-seventh Street to Madison Avenue and then up Madison. I like rich Madison, particularly since you can always find beautiful women there. I walk without hurrying, gazing at the faces of pedestrians and examining the windows of the expensive stores, so familiar now that I’ve almost memorized them. I look at the faces of the men for the sake of comparison — to see if they’re more interesting than mine. You’ll say that it’s difficult to be objective when comparing anything to yourself, but I try to be — the truth is important to me, and I want to find out if I have many rivals in my struggle. There aren’t many. I see men who are much better looking than I am, but they lack that self-assured hardness, that peremptory decisiveness that appeared on my face around the time that I started working as housekeeper in the millionaire’s house. It’s strange, but the millionaire’s house has given me a sense of assurance. Maybe I’ve been infected by Steven’s nervous self-assurance and have acquired his confident habits — Steven who feels at home anywhere. That one time I went to a restaurant with him, I remember how he was the first to sit down, taking a seat in the
most comfortable corner, the bastard, and putting his elbows on the table, comfortably and firmly in place and not giving a damn about anybody else. Maybe I did get it from Steven? I think, looking at the reflection of my face in a window. Before I was too embarrassed to stop on the street and look at my own face in the window; I was afraid of what other people might say. But now I don’t care what they say, the pitiful failures, the suckers, the whole insecure and timid lot. “Don’t trust anybody,” I remember Linda saying. Don’t worry, Linda, I never will. Why should I?
As you see, the buds of a new man, a new Edward, are urgently forcing their way out of me, pushing aside and supplanting the old one, just as green sprouts force their way into freedom from a potato, consuming it as they grow. Though flesh of my own flesh, a new Edward now walks along Madison Avenue.
The men, my rivals, understand something of this, I’m sure — there’s probably a biological language that hasn’t been forgotten even though it’s been replaced in a way by words and speech. But a language of the body, of the eyes and facial muscles, still exists, doesn’t it? In any case, before people used to ask me things on the street. You know, there’s a special category of people who always want something from the rest of humanity — a quarter, a dollar, how to get to Lincoln Center, or just somebody to latch on to. But now nobody asks me anything; it’s clear to them. My face obviously eloquently expresses everything for me: fuck all of you!
His Butler’s Story (1980-1981) Page 24
