The boy-director and his girlfriend had already undertaken to fulfill their primary responsibilities — they’d started shooting their film. I forgot to mention that they were supposed to shoot an «orgy» scene, a scene, that is, with Faust sunk in debauchery and consuming his life in the company of courtesans in a place (the millionaire’s house?) he has been brought to by Mephistopheles-Henry to be shown the world of pleasure. My stranger was included in the «orgy» scene too, and was among the first to be filmed, with the boy playing the main hero sitting at her feet. The stranger obviously evoked in the youngsters the same timidity she did in me. Later the children put on some of Jenny’s Arab music, and the two girls dressed in something like Arab costumes started twisting like snakes not far from our hookah, for which purpose we were asked to move temporarily. The girls were depicting the houris of paradise, while the boy Faust sat in a lotus position, smoked hashish, and indolently watched them with “languor in his gaze.” They’ll have their film, I thought, but what will I have?
The party gradually started to break down into groups in the way that all parties do — some people left or went out for a while, and other couples started quietly disappearing. I doubt they all went off to fuck in the darker recesses of that house entrusted to me, but many went off nonetheless. My stranger disappeared from the living room for a while, stayed somewhere, and then came back again. Maybe I needed to get away from that damned Oriental poison and the boy in the black stockings with whom I already shared an understanding that was not merely wordless but even motionless — a kind of thought exchange across the distance separating us by means of brain waves — but cowardliness and hashish had me pinned on my back, and I lay there without twitching. Well, what could I say to her, I thought, well what? She already knows I’m a servant — somebody’s probably already told her. I had seen her and Henry and some of the other children talking about something and glancing in my direction. If only she weren’t so stunning, I thought, then I honestly wouldn’t be so afraid. If she were just a little worse and not so gorgeous. In short, I started having more and more of a complex about it and even found myself sitting there by the hookah immersed in melancholy thoughts about how, in comparison to them, I was already old and lonely, and that I didn’t have any connection at all with that crowd of children. None whatsoever. They were separate, and I was separate.
I decided to rouse myself and stood up, casting a glance over the field of battle: the children had significantly diminished in number. Maybe they had gone downstairs, for all I knew. It was the first time I had stood up all evening, and my legs were numb and slow to obey me. It was only when I stood up that I realized how stoned I was.
It was force of habit alone that allowed me to move and not drop off to sleep or start vomiting. I decided I needed to move around and find somebody to drag off to bed. Even if my condition wasn’t the most ideal for lofty philosophical discourse and was even doubtful for normal articulate conversation in any language, including the Russian language, gentlemen, it was for the bedroom quite appropriate and even desirable. And I went downstairs, making the rounds like a night watchman and housekeeper and checking every room along the way.
Everywhere were couples, paired-off teenagers in various stages of intimacy. True, there was only one instance where an indisputable sexual act was in progress, and that in the sanctum sanctorum, Steven’s office, where one of the leather-jacketed beanpoles — I’ve always thought they’re the most gallant — turned his flushed face toward me and grinned. Sticking out from under his arms and hanging on either side of his crew-cut head were the smooth legs of a maiden in high heel spikes. I couldn’t see the young creature’s head, since it had been shoved by the rascal’s prick well into the corner of Gatsby’s green couch, and only a piece of her rumpled skirt and a terribly indecent, very naked maidenly thigh was visible.
My turn around the rooms depressed me even more. It would have been better if I hadn’t made it and had stayed by the hookah with the boy in black stockings who was now fucked up to the point of complete befuddlement, and smoked until I collapsed. More than half the kids had disappeared, and those that remained were energetically abandoning themselves to sin, or were well on the way to doing so, while I shuffled like a foolishly grinning old uncle among the young couples — as I clearly remember seeing myself at the time. Besides, I hadn’t seen any unattached girls, in fact not even one female figure by herself. I’d let the moment slip by and hadn’t used my device for outwitting my own cowardice — hadn’t gone to anyone first. After all, there were a lot of good-looking girls among the children, I swore to myself. Why are you such a blockhead, servant Edward, why didn’t you find yourself a nice little pussy, young and warm? They were friendly enough with you and didn’t treat you like a servant, did they? It was obvious Henry had boasted to his friends that they even had a housekeeper who was a writer. What the fuck were you wasting your time for? I reflected. You’re a weak little soul. A feeble little jerk, and you call yourself an opportunist! I insulted myself mercilessly.
To top it all, as I was about to take the elevator from the first floor back up to the living room, it passed me on its way down to the basement, and to my horror I saw in the elevator’s round little window my stranger and somebody else in a white jacket. My heart sank. They’re on their way down to the basement, I said to myself and then was lost in thought for a few moments, struggling to understand what was happening. Why would a man and a woman go down to the basement? Occasionally for the sake of something exotic, I had fucked a few of my girls in the stuffy warmth of the basement. I had in fact fucked them in all the different parts of the house, in my boss’s bathroom, on the stairs, and once in the TV room while watching late-night horror films on our huge screen. But that’s me. It’s all right for me, I thought. My attitude toward my own sexual activity is easygoing. But it was extremely painful to me for some reason that my stranger — and I considered her mine, my young grace, my girl in chinchilla — was going down to the basement to fuck with the white jacket. I imagined that spectacle as something obscene and awful, which is why I stood pondering a while by the elevator, urgently trying to find a way out of the situation. There wasn’t any, as it turned out; I couldn’t ward off the terrible thing that was about to happen. And what could I have done, anyway? I couldn’t have followed them down to the basement, and even if I had, what could I have said? I imagined how that scene would look, and if they were fucking, then what? He obviously would turn his head toward me and grin the same way the leather jacket in Steven’s office had, and she would do the opposite — she would turn away… No, it would be even worse — that provocative young whore would undoubtedly turn her face toward me and gaze at me in an ironically mocking way while the white-jacketed guy fucked her.
At that instant the elevator passed me again on its way up, and immersed in my thoughts as I was, I didn’t notice whether they, my stranger and the white jacket, were in it, or whether somebody had called the elevator from one of the upper floors and it had gone up empty. Attempting to introduce some clarity into my world, I plodded upstairs and went into the living room, but the only people there were a few remaining Sangria drinkers and the stubborn boy in stockings who was still sucking like a leech on the hookah and lost in smoke. The distraught and angry housekeeper tossed off a couple of glasses of sangria one after the other and sat down with the boy. Exactly, they’re in the basement, I thought, where else could they be? The only hope that the stranger wasn’t down there was provided by the fact that when I went up to the third floor, the elevator wasn’t there anymore. They had either proceeded up or had taken it back down, so that it was possible to think, say, that they had taken it up to the fifth floor and had gone out on the roof. They are standing romantically on the roof holding hands and looking at the stars, I consoled myself. But through the hashish smoke the devil gloatingly whispered to me, “Holding hands, little Russian fool, little Ivan Shitson? They tumbled onto the old mattress in the basement a long time ago, the
one you yourself put in the farthest corner by the window behind the old ironing machine next to the hot water pipe, and the white jacket is fucking her dog-style with his robust prick, and if the children do lack sensitivity sometimes, they aren’t without vigor — adolescents can always get it up…”
Ugh, how stupid! I suddenly thought, coming to my senses. I, a cultivated person who only last night was working by the sweat of my brow on a new book and who is usually possessed of bright, clear thoughts, am sitting here like a suffering piece of meat with some young nymphomaniac on my mind. How fucked up, I thought, losing my temper, and rousing myself once again, I drank some more Sangria and resolved to talk to die boy in black stockings.
I had overestimated myself, gentlemen. I was already in a state of utter weightlessness, and even though I was thinking more or less clearly, albeit not what I should have been thinking about, I was speaking the most complacent rubbish, which I realized at the time, although there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I attempted to present myself to the boy in stockings as someone very important. I told him in confidence that I was not only a housekeeper but… but the bodyguard of Gatsby himself and tonight of Henry as well. It was an invention so extreme that I myself grimaced at its tastelessness, while telling it to the boy in stockings as we dully sat shoulder to shoulder on the floor. But the boy in stockings was in no better condition that I was, thank God, and merely said, “###,” and then fell silent, continuing to suck on his pipe. For all I knew, he was at that moment crossing the desert with Lawrence of Arabia.
“Wealthy people in our time can’t manage without bodyguards,” I continued, talking more to myself than to the boy in stockings. “The many instances of kidnapping that have occurred on the territory of the United States have forced Steven Grey to hire me,” I said, and then to my own surprise added, “I received special training when I was in the Soviet Union,” thereby giving a certain piquancy to my own biography. The boy in stockings could take my words any way he wished — that I had perhaps been a dissident back home in Russia, or perhaps an even more alluring prospect opened before him — that I had graduated from a school for spies…
Completely mesmerized by my own fantasy, I suddenly added right out of the blue in a nervous voice that I had a gun, and then was silent. The boy in stockings nodded off with the pipe in his hands. Perhaps he and Lawrence were now attacking, with sabers bared, somewhere in their Arabia.
Into the room walked a very drunk and, as it seemed to me, very lonely Henry, who informed me in an unsteady voice that he was going to crash. I at once became more lively; remembering that I was his bodyguard, I leapt to my feet, grabbed the unsuspecting Henry, and dragged him off to his father’s bedroom, on the door of which, as on the door to my room, we had a sign reading, “Do not enter! Master bedroom.” I pulled off Henry’s jacket, undid his bow tie, took off his shoes and the rest of his domes, and put him to bed. He muttered something in protest, but I was already overcome by the zeal to serve, and I put him to bed whether he wanted me to or not. I turned off the light in the room and went out, closing the door behind me. Henry plaintively tried to explain something to me in the darkness, but I didn’t listen. Trusty bodyguard that I was, I took my seat by the bedroom door and remained in that position for a while, how long I don’t even know.
When at last I emerged from my confused hashish-induced reverie, I found that the house was quiet. Looking into the living room, I saw that even the boy in stockings was asleep, his head resting on our hard Arabian cushions and the hookah’s snake dropped from his hand. The others had obviously all gone to bed long ago. Like a proper servant, I decided to make a last turn around the house before going off to bed myself, and I went downstairs to the first floor. Several people had fallen asleep right on the floor and on the two couches in the solarium. I quietly passed through to the front door, which of course wasn’t locked. I locked it and turned off the stairway light — one switch turns off all the lights in the hallway and stairs from the first floor to the fifth — and then took the elevator back up to my own fourth floor. Quiet snores and moans came from the fourth-floor guest bedroom.
I turned the knob of the door to my room and stepped into the darkness.
“Don’t turn on the light!” a woman’s low voice said to me. On my bed I made out a dark figure and the dim glow of a cigarette.
Now it already seems to me sometimes that it wasn’t her, but some other girl I hadn’t paid any attention to all evening, but looking into the darkness then, there wasn’t any doubt in my mind. The blinds had been let down, which is something I never do, gentlemen. If I slept with them down, my boss Steven Grey would never get his coffee in the morning. The blinds had been let down of course by that young seeker of adventure.
“Come over here!” she said softly. The coal of her cigarette moved downward and broke into little pieces at the level of my night table. She had put out her cigarette, crushing the butt on the candlestick that stood there. I went over to my bed in the direction of her voice. I already understood what was up, quickly grasping, despite the abundance of hashish and sangria in my system, that this intoxicated young person, having read her share of erotic literature, had undoubtedly decided to broaden her experience, to experience new sensations, and get herself laid by a servant. We all think in clichés. Just as I had unconsciously sought a girl for myself there in classic cliché terms, wishing as a servant to revenge myself on «them» and fuck one of «their» girls and stick my prick into a warm crack belonging to one of “them,” she too was playing out a classical variant. Lords and ladies, after all, had always fucked their servants, young barons traditionally humping their housemaids, and fifteen-year-old girls traditionally gazing with watering mouths at the pants of the butler or gardener. Here’s a bold one, I thought in awe of her, much bolder than me, even though she had pronounced her “come hither” with a super-fluous severity, a little bit too nervously, but a very bold seeker of adventure all the same.
I went over to her. Though her face was hot, her lips were strangely cold — she was, no doubt, very excited, almost breathless, but in spite of her excitement and probably with a sinking heart, she was doing what she wanted to. Finding my face in the darkness, she stroked it with her hand, then moved down to my neck and chest. Cool young hands, I thought. I already knew what she was going to do. In a time when we derive all our knowledge from TV and the movies for the most part, I knew that she was going to unbutton my shirt, and yes, as if obeying my thoughts, she did unbutton it — how many similar episodes had I seen in my life, in both the movies and reality. Anyway, what do you want; it’s impossible to think up something completely new in that realm, especially if you’re only sixteen or seventeen. However interesting a little tart she was, my own experience was a great deal vaster.
While I was reflecting, the young scamp had already unbuttoned the strap on my white jeans and was kissing my belly. Her warm hair tickled my stomach and shut off my thinking mechanism, thank God, and it suddenly became very pleasant and agonizingly suspenseful, since I was anticipating that she would any second touch my prick, with her hand. And then (and the idea was even terrifying) take my prick, which had suffered so much in the course of the evening, into her clean, maidenly little mouth. Where it’s nice and warm, the thought of an old libertine flashed weakly through my mind.
You’re thinking, gentlemen, that the young creature departed just a bit from the TV and movie version? Not at all. She touched my prick with her hand, and she took my organ into her mouth and diligently started sucking it, at the same time stroking and pulling my balls with her other hand as one of her older friends had perhaps taught her to do or she’d picked up from some trashy pornographic novel, the dirty little rich girl. The little tart.
I stood in front of her and writhed with pleasure, holding her for some reason by the ears, by her little warm ears, and from time to time moving her head onto my prick. She helplessly took my prick into her throat, but after two or three deep swallows, she st
arted coughing and had to lick and suck just the head of my organ in order to recover her breath. Cocksucking is a great art, and not many master it. Try, do the best you can, I thought, rhythmically moving her head onto my prick. Her slippery little ears tried to slip out of my hands, but I held on to them by their tips, by their lobes.
She really wanted me to come so she could swallow the pungent semen of a Russian servant. Or whatever kind of pleasure and unbelievable humiliation it was that she was seeking. Maybe to smear my semen all over her beautiful face. And then to record in her secret diary, hidden under the rug far from the sight of mama and papa, that she had swallowed a whole “glass of the semen of an Eastern barbarian,” or something in that spirit — “a glass of fresh semen.” I’d bet an arm and a leg she wrote the episode down.
I didn’t come from her cocksucking, though it did feel incredibly good, her enthusiasm more than making up for what she lacked in technique. Anyway, she smelled so charming, with young perfume of some kind and her bare arms and face gleaming in the darkness, that I was even beginning to find something mystically holy in that scene and imagine it as a kind of religious ritual. I was afraid to extend my thoughts about the two of us, lest I lose my erection, and I didn’t lose it, but I couldn’t come either. Besides the fact that it’s always hard for me to come from cocksucking, I had swallowed so much hashish smoke that an orgasm was simply impossible, and realizing that we agreed to stop. I grasped her tender chin in my hand and stroked her neck, wanting to undress her and lay her down, but suddenly jumping up, she took my hand and said, “Come on!” She said it in a very brazen and merry way; she had calmed down, the little bitch, and now felt comfortable with the fact that she was engaged in sin with a servant. We groped our way out into the hall and got on the elevator, which was dimly lit with a blacklight bulb (!) — Henry had replaced the normal daylight bulb himself; the children wanted to have a real orgy. The young fiend went in first and I followed after her, gently shutting the heavy green steel door behind me, since on the fourth floor it makes a tremendous racket when it’s closed, and we started moving. Where? Down to the basement, of course; where else would the little whore take me? I tried to talk to her in the elevator, and had opened my mouth to begin a sentence, wanting to tell her that I had intended to come to her all evening, but after the first sound of “I,” she covered my mouth with her palm. I submitted.
His Butler’s Story (1980-1981) Page 28
