Having started down this road, I might have made her into a convenient object, but as I say, her plebeianism killed me outright. I finished with her on her birthday. Toward the end she turned out to be pregnant by Andrey, she had fucked with him before me – poor guy. She was elated at being pregnant, even though she planned to have an abortion. “It means I can,” she said proudly, “I can have a baby!” “Not after the abortion, you can’t,” I told her cynically.
All the same, on several occasions she did give me pleasure indirectly, in a purely human way. One occasion came at a time when I was worn out at last from my nocturnal rambles on the West Side. The day before I had smoked too much grass and had lain all day in the pond in Central Park, up to my waist in the water. The police came by several times to make sure I was alive. Seeing that I was, they walked on. It was only toward dark that I found the strength to get up and go to the hotel. So I was lying in my room the next morning like a prisoner, dreaming about eating, when she called up and invited me to her parents’ place. She was living there at the time, and she went there every evening, and went back in the night from my place, all the way across town, even though she had to get up at seven o’clock. She was working at some company, I wasn’t very interested which one. In the end she got mugged, a black guy snatched her purse. From that time on she had a bad attitude toward all blacks.
I remember once we were riding on a bus, a stretch of the route lay through Harlem. There were several fire hydrants open – water was pouring noisily over the sidewalks, happy half-naked children were jumping around.
“Just look what your precious blacks are doing,” she said. “Savages! They don’t give a damn that water purification costs a lot of money. They don’t give a damn about anything. They just consume what whites have created, they don’t want to work!”
“You’re a racist,” I said.
“But you’re not, you’re a leftist. I’d like to see what you’d say if you got mugged. My knee still hurts to this day -”
“But why did you hang on to the purse? You should have handed it over, that’s all. Besides, he could have been white. So far as that goes, if fifty percent of all muggers really are black, then fifty-five percent of the mugged are also black. You know I hang out wherever I want to at night, Sonya, I don’t carry a thing, not even a dollar, I go on foot so I don’t even carry a subway token. But even if I did get mugged by blacks, I wouldn’t start howling and projecting my hatred for a bunch of muggers onto the whole race. Idiocy!”
“That’s all theory,” she said furiously. “When they take away money that you’ve earned, you won’t talk like that.”
“When the preelection meeting of the Workers Party was over, I got on a bus with a group of comrades. The meeting was in Brooklyn, in a dark and remote district populated mainly by blacks. While we were boarding the bus, threats and curses rang out from the benches in the shadow of the trees, where the local hooligans were sitting, black hooligans. Then they started throwing bottles at us. I got on last. A bottle hit the bus right by my head. What would you have me do, Sonya? Bear within me hatred toward all blacks? Those guys sitting there on their benches don’t know a fucking thing about the world. I’ve been in their shoes, I was a hooligan and a bandit myself – I know the psychology of these people. It’s not their fault they’re like that -”
“At work they get away with anything,” she went on hotly. “Just try being late if you’re white – once, twice, and you’re out. But it doesn’t affect a black, they’re afraid to touch him, he can accuse them of racial discrimination. They make life impossible -”
“You were indignant at anti-Semitism in Russia, how can you say such revolting things?” I said. “And it’s not just you, that’s what’s so terrible. But you know that America was built mainly by the hands of their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers. They have just as much right to everything here as the whites. It’s only been the last fifteen years that they’ve gotten anything. Do you think they’re happy here in their Harlem? Many of them would rather live on the East Side, but they don’t have the money. Anyway, quit bitching – you don’t know a fucking thing, you talk like a philistine. You should be ashamed…”
This was only one of our skirmishes, and one of the facets of her world view.
Oh yes, I meant to tell about the pleasure she gave me. I arrived very late, had trouble finding their out-of-the-way neighborhood, green and quiet. I was ushered into an apartment that did not even remotely resemble an American one. The door closed behind me and I found myself in Odessa. She served me fried chicken, cucumber and tomato salad, bouillon – a typical south Ukrainian dinner. We ate the same sort of thing in Kharkov, too.
Her mama was like Yura Komissarov’s mama, or the mother of any of my provincial friends. Her pajama-clad father occasionally popped out into the corridor – he was installing a newly purchased air conditioner. Her father was like a provincial Jewish father, all my friends had fathers like him. It’s a safe bet he wore his big underpants around the apartment; his wife and daughter made him put on pajamas because daughter had a guest coming. Maybe he was a bookkeeper like Andrey. Mama solicitously served fruit – pears one minute, watermelon the next. Courteously and respectably, I refused vodka and wine.
Later her parents left to visit a sick aunt in the hospital, and I went and lay down on the couch – if you’re going to rest, then really rest. The provinces… You have to do that, tie on some weight, as they said in the Ukraine. You can show off a bit once without being quite in your element. Sonya played me a record of some Odessa comedians, pupils of the great Raykin; their names were not familiar to me, which genuinely amazed Sonya. “No,” I said, “I don’t know them, alas.” The comedians were boring and were meant for people working in Soviet scientific research institutes. But I listened to them and did not get irritated. A day in Odessa. Never mind, we’ll be patient. Only here in America did I see for myself the huge distance that separated Moscow from the Russian provinces.
“We might go for a walk in the park,” she said. “There’s a castle there. They brought it over from Europe by boat – took it apart brick by brick and reassembled it here.”
“Let’s go,” I said. “Everything here was brought over from Europe.”
We set off, and I felt quiet and calm. It was getting dark, for some reason we had to take an elevator up to the park. We took it. We walked along the deserted lanes, almost without speaking. I was grateful to her for being silent. Still in silence, we arrived at the castle and sat down on a bench.
The castle was not what mattered – it was far less interesting than, for example, Fra Diavolo’s castle, which I had seen in Itri, in Italy. Nothing much, a boring American castle. I could not believe they had brought it over from Europe. Probably a fake.
But from every quarter came the smell of fresh forest and ocean; it was very nice. A quiet, spacious moment. Had I been even a tiny bit in love with her, I would have been completely happy. But even so, this was my first quiet evening mood. I had been running without looking, I’d been running, I was tired, I stopped, I reflected, and the world appeared soft, caressing, an all-forgiving, all-cleansing eternal world.
“Thank you, Sonya,” I told her, softly and sincerely.
Then we rode into the city to my place. The wind was blowing through the bus, a little old black man who had had a drop too much changed a dollar for me, and Sonya didn’t irritate me… I fucked her that night with gratitude, I even tried.
Another time she and I were hanging out in the Village – she fed me octopus on Sullivan Street. It was an Italian holiday, a bride and groom were riding to church, which gave me a little pang. I remembered my own wedding, the crowds of friends, and I hurried to get away from the church. Little Sonya was clicking away with her camera, taking pictures of me from all angles. I could very likely have made her a slave; all I had to do was hint that I hated slacks on women and loved dresses, and the next day she came in a new, specially bought dress. Very likely I cou
ld have made her a slave, but I myself was seeking slavery, slave-girls were not what I needed.
Once she took me to a cinema on Bleecker Street to see some new French films. I was wildly pleased with one of them, about a killer who is commissioned to murder an ex-model, but he falls in love with her even though he’s a homosexual. Sonya kept sighing; it was apparently of no interest to her, but I took it hard. I was enthralled with the man, who trusted the woman at first, but the woman wanted to be uncommitted, alone. I saw in this film a similarity to my own fate: I too loved and wanted to be loved, I did not want to live alone, just for myself, and what did I get – life cast me aside, the woman did not want me.
After that film I changed my hairstyle – I have bangs covering my forehead now. But she was bored in the movie theater; I don’t know what sort of film she would have enjoyed. Perhaps art in general roused her indignation? She was a philistine, only her sexual inadequacy distinguished her from a philistine.
I say “was,” because after her birthday party in a little restaurant in the Village – which continued with a smaller group in Chinatown and ended on the subway with an argument and cursing on political and ethnic themes, including Che Guevara and the Jewish question – after that I did not encounter her again. Toward the end I couldn’t even keep my promise to let her lie down awhile in my room at the Winslow after the abortion. Bastard, I was at Roseanne’s that day.
Roseanne had just appeared in my life – the next stage, the first American woman I fucked. I did not encounter Sonya again. Oh yes, once, coming out of my ex-wife’s – Elena had moved in with Zhigulin by then, and I was bringing her something she had asked for – I caught a glimpse of my little Yid; she must have been eavesdropping. She quickly slunk away. It didn’t even occur to me to follow her, and I turned in the opposite direction.
Where she made love
I found myself there without him, without Jean-Pierre. It was easy, I never dreamed it would be so easy. I had imagined myself kicking the door open and running in, pale, holding a revolver out in front of me and shouting “Bitch!” They would be lying in bed and I would fire at them and blood would come through the blanket. Nothing remarkable; the fantasies of a deceived husband, a man who has been cuckolded. Normal fantasies, right? But in I walked, into Jean-Pierre’s studio, calmly, through the open door, without a revolver, and the characters on stage were not they.
This place is painful to me, this is where it all began, it was here that Elena first betrayed me, here that someone else’s cock destroyed my “I can do anything!” I had been powerless against unlove and chaos. And to experience powerlessness, even once, had been terrifying.
This was in Sonya’s time. Again Kirill was involved. He lives all over New York, first one place, then another, at random, the young idler has no apartment of his own. Jean-Pierre had gone to Paris for the month, leaving Kirill, in return for some favor, to live in his studio, whether for money or for nothing, no money, I don’t know. I feel some semblance of love for the young bastard, fatherly love perhaps. We are eight or nine years apart.
So one dull rainy day I showed up there in a three-piece denim suit – jeans, vest, blazer – a black kerchief at my neck, a walking-stick umbrella in my hand. It was the sixth of June, our poet Pushkin’s birthday, and I had met Elena exactly five years before. I was all atremble with the presentiment of somber impressions awaiting me.
The characters on stage are three: myself, Kirill, and as a finishing touch a certain Slava-David, who is celebrated for the fact that after Elena and I left Russia he lived in our Moscow apartment, which he says my friend Dima had turned into a Limonov museum. Now, in keeping with all the best canons of the mysterious, Slava-David was living with Kirill in the atelier of my ex-wife’s ex-lover, the atelier – sorry, the studio – it’s the apartment, too – of the fisheyed, skewbald Frenchman Jean-Pierre. I realized at once that Slava-David was the instrument of higher forces, although he looked quite ordinary. I think he’ll appear again in that capacity, more than once.
I throw back my head and yell up from the street, as I have promised, “Kirill! Kirill, you motherfucker!” Kirill sticks his shaggy head out the window. Then the aristocrat comes downstairs and opens the door for me, because you can’t get into this building without your host’s assistance. We take the elevator up and enter the studio, not quite by the route I imagined in my fruitless attempts to force my way in. The door that I impotently and tearfully tried to open from the stairway leads into an elevator corridor shared by two studios, not directly into Jean-Pierre’s studio as I had thought. This plunges me into melancholy.
I walk into a large white-walled apartment. To the left the breeze is billowing the lightweight shades at the several windows. And there it stands, what to me is the terrible bed, the love arena, the place of my torment. Here she made love. I walk over, expecting to see my own corpse…
To the right of the door is the kitchen and, not walled off from it, in keeping with American custom, a sort of salon: a couch by the wall, a round table, and armchairs. These are encircled by several pillars.
With quickened heartbeat I walk over to the pillars and begin to examine them closely. Somewhere there have to be marks from the ropes with which she bound the fisheyed owner, beat him, and then fucked him in the anal orifice with a rubber dildo. Little silly, novice hustler, she told me all this herself in boast, while I was still her husband. Of course – she had to share it. Next she turned up with a mask, a black one sewn with feathers and bits of glass, it hid most of her little face. And next she turned up with a shiny studded dog collar. I tried it on my own neck, it barely went round, although my neck is 141/2. That meant she was wearing the collar herself, for greater chic. She boasted that she had a whip, too, but she didn’t keep that or the dildo at home. She very much wanted to conform to the sexy films she had seen. She was doing things right, you see, the silly stringy child from Moscow’s privileged Frunze Embankment. A Moscow girl. She probably affords her current lovers great pleasure, however. She tries hard. The provincial desire to outperform everyone. To be the mostest. But then, I’m the same way.
Yes, here are the marks, obviously rubbed by the rope, or perhaps by a chain, no, a rope for sure. Someone gently but forcefully squeezes my heart. I see them naked, frolicking around the pillars… She and I once hung a basket from the ceiling with ropes and took the bottom out of it; I lay down under it, inserted my cock into her peepka, the twisted ropes untwisted, and she was supposed to twirl around my member. She giggled enigmatically. But it didn’t work very well, precise calculations were needed. Afterward we broke our bed in the usual way. I never had much need of artifice with her, she aroused me in the extreme. Even now, when she’s just a friend, I occasionally go see her and the mere sound of her voice gives me a hard-on. Terrible.
Everything in the atelier is clean, large in scale, equipped to the last detail. Unlike me, the man who lives here respects his own life, values it.
A door off the first salon leads into a huge, clean, bare, light office with two or three of our host’s huge paintings on the walls. A narrow corridor off the first salon leads into a third salon, you wouldn’t call it a room, it’s so huge. There, evidently, he paints, daubs his masterpieces. And there in the corner stands a bed, with Slava-David’s clothes lying around, and a stack of pornographic magazines, belonging to Jean-Pierre, in which women copulate with pigs and horses. All things considered he is what is called in Russian a yobar, a cunt-chaser. The reason such men become artists is that a liberated profession makes it easier for them to drag a woman to bed.
No, his quarters in no way resemble the poor artist’s studio she had told me about.
During all my further perambulations both Kirill and Slava-David are present, later it will be only Kirill, though Slava-David will come back again late at night, but in this instance there is no need to take note of them, for I am plunged into a mood that I have long awaited and feared, I am on the spot where it happened, I am where she made love
. I move from object to object, sniffing, and illuminating them with my terrible tension. I am waiting for them to answer.
At intervals I eat, drink a lot of beer, I smoke marijuana, but absolutely none of this plays any role; therefore I mention these “events” only lightly, in passing.
The pillars lead me to cruel and melancholy recollections of the traces of semen in her panties, which I discovered more and more often in the last months of our life together. There was semen even on her pantyhose. Once the whole inside of her black slacks was doused with semen, white by morning, crusted dry, so revolting that there was no longer any doubt, and then it was that I first raised a row with her. That was the end of my happy days, of the boundless happiness I had experienced for the four and a half years since the day I met her.
At the mention of my happy days, our love, our wedding, I am convulsed with disgust and shame. I was so stupid. I loved, trusted, but they fucked me over, smeared me with another man’s semen, bound me with the elastic from his underpants, daubed my shapely and delicate body with vulgarity.
I grimace wildly, remembering the pines in the yard at her dacha, and her in a translucent, angelic dress, a little girl with a crooked front tooth. Little squirrel, little silly, little bitch – I remember her swollen genital lips the time I flew in from California in a frenzy, trying to save it all. I flew in at night, she showed up in the morning. She sat in the bathtub, the skin on her back striped with cuts, fine little cuts, from what, a whip? And those rosy genital lips.
It was enough to make me push her head underwater, she had no idea how near she was to death. I urged her to come back and live, if only for a year, six months… She sat in the tub and overexcitedly discoursed on the fact that I did not know how to enjoy myself. She had absolutely no taste. She was incapable of understanding that I was all but dead and that right now it was ignoble, at the very least, to boast to me about how easily she could find a partner to fuck with… She discoursed, and I sat on the bathroom floor and stared dully at her swollen peepka. That I know about, it means she’s been fucking, she’s fucked all night… Okay, but why not me, why am I… I had hoped – had thought – as whores, adventurers, prostitutes, what you will, but together all our lives.
It's Me, Eddie Page 15
