But Susanna is convulsed with a fresh spasm of vomiting. I leave. What else can I do? But never again will she be my enemy. I recall with shame the March night when I tried to open the door of her building and set fire to it. “Den of filth!” I cursed. The door did not open. I broke the heel of my shoe that night. Henceforth Susanna will never be my enemy and will be of no interest.
Sonya… The second time we met was in accordance with a phone call. I had invited her to a birthday party for my friend Khachaturian – an artist and a modernist writer, a man with a formal mind, an inventor of procedures and techniques, who is now buried in uncontrollable formal research under the patronage and leadership of a wicked, sage little wife, who speaks English brilliantly and works at a company that makes scarves. We have come a long way together, they and I. They knew my previous wife, Anna, the one before Elena; they even spent their wedding night on the floor of Anna’s and my apartment. We often fight, they understand me less and less, but that does not prevent us from preserving a semblance of friendship. We are friends.
In short, Sonya and I went. I took a bottle of champagne I had laid in ahead of time, a $10 Soviet champagne, the very bottle Mrs. Rogoff screamed about. There were about ten guests. There’s no point in listing them all, though each of them figures in my life and is part of it to some extent. Sonya talked a lot of bullshit that night, provincial nonsense; I let it go by. I was in a good mood, nothing could spoil that sturdy, rugged good mood. I was pleased with myself, people were giving me compliments, there was lots to drink; company always brings me to life, I enjoy it. “I am a man of the town,” as our Pushkin used to say. “Pushkin, Pushkin, the Pushkin who lived before me,” as Alexander Vvedensky wrote – a modernist poet of the thirties, a brilliant person, like me a native of Kharkov; he was flung under the wheels of a train. So am I a man of the town.
Later, when the festivities were over and we left, I suggested – or she did, I no longer remember – but we decided to keep going and hit the bars. I had some money, and we set off. We drank vodka with a Pole in a bar on the East Side, she made an effort to talk to him in English. She needn’t have bothered, you could tell by looking that he was an obvious type, an aging little man with no place to go; here he was, sitting in a bar at two in the morning. To provoke him I dropped some remark about Great Poland and Kiev. As expected, he got mad. It made me laugh. “Why do that to him?” Sonya asked. “I like to offend national sensibilities,” I replied.
About three o’clock in the morning I effected a change of clothes. Back at my hotel I put on a white blazer instead of the lilac one, and we walked west to Eighth Avenue, which, thank God, I love and have studied thoroughly. I pointed out the prostitutes to her, and then I pulled her pants down, right on the street, and started masturbating her, shoving my finger into her cunt. She was wet and soft there, like all of them.
I convinced myself nothing had happened to them during these months. They still had their thing where it belonged, and if I shut my eyes it was just like Elena’s to the touch – so I told myself, as I continued to run my finger over the genital lips of the young lady from Odessa. She arched foolishly and affectedly, and even when I penetrated her more deeply she was too frightened to come. How could she? She probably thought this was something unnatural. A Ukrainian woman in Kazakhstan killed her Latvian husband because in the second year of their marriage he finally forced her to take his cock in her mouth. She dropped him with an ax. And the artist Chicherin’s wife, Marina, after many years of married life, simply would not let him fuck her from behind, on her knees. A woman who had read Teilhard de Chardin. The wife of an avant-garde Moscow artist.
I wanted very much for Sonya to come – in this ridiculous pose, with her slacks and underpants down around her ankles, a dark little clump of fuzz between her legs, her body contorted with inhibition and incomprehension – so I began to kiss her there. You know what she did? She managed to spoil it all – she began saying over and over in a rapid staccato whisper, “Edik, what are you doing, Edik, what are you doing, Edik, what are you doing?”
I can’t stand it when people call me Edik. “What am I doing, nothing bad, I’m doing something good to you,” I said, “doing something nice to you…”
She stood there dully, leaning back against the wall, with her slacks and underpants down as before. Suddenly angry, but hiding it, I pulled up her clothes and dragged her on.
By now it was getting light and I very much wanted to eat. But it was about four o’clock; all the places on Eighth Avenue had just closed. Finally, after several unsuccessful attempts, I knocked at a little corner restaurant and winked to a young black. Where I learned to wink like that I don’t know, but the black opened the door immediately and let us in. I ordered us each a helping of meat and potatoes. For the two of us it came to about ten dollars…
“Do you have enough money, Edik?” Sonya asked.
“Plenty, plenty, but don’t call me Edik. I don’t like it.”
I was slowly beginning to sober up – no, that’s the wrong word, I hadn’t been drunk all night. The fog around me had begun to lift, and I was seeing her – this homely little philistine with her face tired and old, if you like, at twenty-five – without the fog, which I had brought on myself. Eternal inhibition about sex, oh, there was a lot on that tired yellow morning face. It all began to irritate me. What the hell was I sitting here for? If I needed her as a woman, then why was I wasting time play-acting?
“Let’s go to my place,” I said.
“I can’t,” she said, “I love Andrey.”
Andrey was one of the guys who had been helping Sashka. Maybe he was studying to be a bookkeeper. I don’t remember. What do I care.
“What do I care who you love, Andrey or anybody else. I said I wouldn’t infringe on your freedom – love Andrey, but let’s go to my place now.”
She said nothing and went on gobbling her meat and potatoes, although she had told me she wasn’t hungry. Even here she lied and felt inhibited. This was getting disgusting.
The young black brought drinks. He was very attractive and he smiled at me – I obviously appealed to him, half drunk, with my black lace shirt and elegant white suit, vest, dark skin, high-heeled shoes. Their style. Marat Bagrov, the spiteful Jew, once said to me with characteristic familiarity, “Of course they relate to you, the blacks and coloreds. You’re just like them. You dress the same and you’re every bit as flighty.”
The black put the glasses down and I slowly stroked his arm, glancing at silly uptight Sonya. He smiled and walked off. “Let’s get out of here,” she said. “Let’s,” I said, and we got up. She was afraid I’d go fuck him. Maybe there behind the counter, maybe in the kitchen, who knows. She was obviously afraid.
I gave the black his money and he saw me off with a knowing smile. And another.
We trudged along Eighth Avenue. They were already delivering newspapers. People with early jobs were walking to work, several coffee shops had opened, the prostitutes were no longer around. The night girls had gone to bed, and it was still too early for the day girls.
“Let’s hurry,” she said suddenly. “I have to go to the bathroom.”
If you can help it, never see unloved women in moments like this. There is nothing more disgusting and pathetic, especially the inhibited, uptight ones. And all is flooded with pitiless morning light. It’s like an execution scene, pursuit and murder on deserted streets. We could make a film like that, where a woman is running and she defecates as she runs, it streams out of her, we record with the movie camera the excrement falling from her body. Anguish and horror. Worse than murder.
We ran down Forty-second Street at a pretty good trot all the way from Eighth to Broadway. But then she tore along blundering into every doorway, her face distorted. There was suffering, too much to bear, written all over her short though well-proportioned figure. She can’t do a fucking thing, even piss or shit, I thought spitefully. How would I know which she had to do? She wouldn’t tell.
&n
bsp; I could no longer guide or control her. She didn’t want to squat in the dark empty subway corridor that I pushed her into, she became demoniacal, gnawed her lips, looked like a cornered animal, she all but turned and bit me.
Finally, and this was where my darling Elena had worked, her first American agency, 1457 Broadway – don’t be surprised, do you think I could forget that address? Those addresses are etched in my mind – it was near there, two, maybe three doors away, that I spotted an open door. She struggled, but I went and dragged her in. It was a mess, they were making repairs.
“Go here,” I said. “I’ll stand and wait by the door.” I went out.
Whew! Outside it seemed to be a fresh spring morning, the kind of morning when it’s nice to think about the future, calculate your chances of success, you’re young and healthy; or you look at your sleeping wife and children. There was a fountain nearby, the water was flowing. I wetted my hands, neck, and face…
I waited quite some time for her and still she didn’t come. I began to think something had happened to her. I began to understand what sort of person she was, and it occurred to me that misfortunes always cling to people like her. By now I had made the march from the falling waters to this ill-fated door several times, but she hadn’t shown herself. Lost in conjecture – a woman like that might do anything – I opened the door. She was standing on the stairs with her hands over her eyes. I walked over and said, though not spitefully, “Let’s go. Why the hell are you standing here?”
“I’m ashamed!” she said, keeping her hands over her eyes.
“You fool, let’s go,” I said. “Hey, how can something natural be shameful? Only you didn’t need to make a fuss, you could have gone in the subway.”
She didn’t move. I pulled her by the hand. She resisted. I began to swear. At this slight racket a man emerged from the depths of the repair equipment or from behind some door. An ordinary American man, perhaps fifty years old. In plaid pants, naturally.
“Do you know him?” he said to Sonya, in English, of course.
“Everything’s okay,” I told him. “Sorry.”
I told her in Russian, “Don’t raise a ruckus, you fool, half of Broadway will come running. Let’s go to my place.”
We left, thank God. We walked down the street and turned abruptly east, down Forty-second again. We could perfectly well have passed for a pimp and a Spanish prostitute who had had a little row and then made peace. We walked, and from time to time I hugged her around the waist and thought how unfortunate we all were in this world, how stupidly and disgustingly the world was arranged, how much excess there was in it. I thought that I ought not to get angry, it wasn’t good, I ought to be kind to people, though I forgot all the time. You ought to pity them all, you ought to bring them your love, bring repose, and not think of Sonya as a homely Jewish woman playing at being a girl; there’s no reason to scorn her… You disgusting squeamish aesthete! I cursed myself. To top it all off, I extravagantly called myself a horse’s ass and a punk, then stopped Sonya and kissed her as tenderly as I could on the forehead – nonetheless noticing the wrinkles on it. Well, I can’t help myself. Meanwhile, we had turned on Madison and were rapidly nearing the hotel.
Nothing special happened, except that I fucked her, of course. This was not my most gigantic sexual feat. An easy triumph over a person beneath me, nothing to be proud of. Besides, even considering my current aversion to women, I was still dissatisfied with myself, I didn’t get a good hard-on with her. And I was dissatisfied with her in particular – nothing about her suited me.
It irritated me that she washed and did laundry for a long time in my shower – after all that, she evidently hadn’t gotten her excrement to its destination because she laundered both her slacks and her pantyhose and her underpants.
Everything happening was kind of pathetic, which I can’t stand. For the first time in my life I felt sorry for myself. She puttered in the bath, or rather the shower; I lay on my bed and felt irritated through my drowsiness. Fuck you, ordinary people! I thought. You do everything assbackwards. My Elena would have squatted easily and simply where she had to, she would have laughed till she dropped, and many’s the time she would have aroused me by flashing her poopka and peepka, and maybe, out of mischief, I’d have amused myself by holding my hands under her stream. Next I recalled with pleasure how in springtime, when I was a kid, I used to exhibit my red member to my future wife Anna from the bushes in the cemetery, and how she would go off to one side and piss, and then we’d fuck on a warm gravestone, and the light would slowly fade in the sky.
Whereas this woman… But I recalled again that I must love, even Sonya, and forgive. I forgave her everything, even her fussing with her clothes, but when she came to bed I was even more disenchanted, more and more disenchanted. She had too much hair on her. It was appropriate on her head – beautiful Jewish hair. But it was the same in her armpits, and the same barbed wire on her pubis, and several coarse hairs had found their way to her very large breasts, to her nipples. That’s nothing, I thought, as I tried to get myself and her warmed up. On top of everything else, Eddie-baby, you seem to be anti-Semitic.
I penetrated rather quickly, although it was not the moist and burning place I had expected. Not to the degree I wanted. When I rolled over and lay between her legs in the usual position, she promptly hoisted her legs up on me, which hindered me no matter how I moved. Moreover, she acted the way she thought a woman burning with passion was supposed to act – she tried to clasp me to her as tight as possible, which did not send me into raptures, because it kept me from making love. It was the first time I had come up against such a clumsy person…
“Sonya, open up, don’t clench, I’ll hit you!” I hissed at her.
She didn’t smell of perfume or even soap. Her natural smell was not unpleasant, but I so love perfume, and her smell for some reason reminded me of the smell of Jewish rooms hung with rugs, in the summertime in Kharkov, rooms I had happened to visit. All that was lacking was the dusty ray of light and the crawling flies. Anyway, I somehow got her unclinched from me and began to fuck her more freely. But when my cock stood up properly erect, and I began to thrust my tool into her vigorously, she suddenly writhed in pain. I’m no bawdy Russian epic hero, no Luka Mudishchev, I worship love, but I also know a lot about love – she was not writhing from the size of my member, it’s average. The little idiot had some sort of disease inside.
“You came! I forgot to tell you, I don’t take anything. Everyone says that if you take those pills you can’t have children,” she whispered bleakly.
What made her think I had come? “If only I could come,” I told her, “that would be happiness for me.”
“So you didn’t come!” she said, and began kissing me gratefully.
God! Again I noticed her upper lip. “Don’t you dare scorn her!” someone said in my ear. “You ought to love everyone who’s in trouble, everyone who’s unhappy and has complexes, everyone…” But what could I do – I looked at her and saw a lip exactly like my neighbor Tolik’s, a boy I used to go to school with. Poor kid, he was hunchbacked and stunted, his father was an alcoholic. “Quit it, you swine!” said the voice. “You should be ashamed – you’re the filthy one, she’s kind and good!”
She really was kind and good. Subsequently she often bought me wine and vodka, took me to the cinema and the theater; she would have given me all her money if I had asked her to, I think. That was fine, but she wasn’t much good in bed.
I worked over her for a long time. Finally, by means of all kinds of manipulations I succeeded – having pulled out of her – in dirtying the hotel sheet with my semen. Squalid pleasure, I noted with ennui. She wanted desperately to sleep, but I wouldn’t let her. I wanted to see how she would come. With a foolish grimace, obviously. By now it had turned into a sport. I worked over her until I asked venomously, “Sonya, tell me, have you ever come in your life?”
“Once,” replied honest Sonya.
“I’m going to buy you an
artificial member, and I’m going to fuck you with it until you fall off the bed, until you start to come over and over – until brute stimulation makes orgasm run into orgasm. I’ll do it. And you have to understand that you need it. You need to fuck a lot. With any man, all men, not just me. Otherwise you’ll never be a woman…”
I did not keep my promise, although I am confident that if I had, I would have made a person of her. I did not buy her an artificial member, I very quickly lost all interest in her. The reasons had to do with class, which may be surprising, but it’s so. She proved to be an incorrigible plebeian, and that I could not forgive. What she liked to be in life was shit, dung. She had no illusions or hopes. She hated all the higher manifestations of man – hated the great men of history, hated history itself, hated with the hatred of an ant. Perhaps this was a self-defense against me, I could easily have crushed her, but why would I?
She fell asleep, but I slept barely half an hour. I wanted to fuck, even with her. Later on she did not arouse me at all. One time I wanted so much not to fuck her that I began complaining of a pain in my prick and said I thought I had some sort of venereal disease. This was a couple of days after the night I spent with Johnny, a black guy from Eighth Avenue – to this day I remember his round poopka and beautiful figure under the baggy clothing of a street bum, a habitue of dark alleys. There was a grain of truth in the ailing prick. I think Johnny had overdone it, sucking off my cock; he may have been a little too zealous with his teeth. More about Johnny elsewhere. I told Sonya that I could not take the responsibility of making love to her without going to a doctor first. She left, thank God, and I spent the evening masturbating dreamily on some flowery celestial theme.
Whenever I made love with her it was like the first time, I couldn’t fuck her deep. She demanded – imagine, demanded – that I kiss her on the neck, it was supposed to stimulate her. I couldn’t see that it did. The whole thing was really lousy – she was like an old log, she didn’t get soft. “Be soft,” I demanded. I finally had it, and once when I stayed the night with her at Alexander’s I didn’t listen to any of her claims of pain or anything else. I finger-fucked her rudely and grimly, spreading her cunt open to incredible size – I almost got my hand inside – and she came. And how!
It's Me, Eddie Page 14
