No, I do not remember my happy days, I don’t remember a rucking thing, but when I do, I feel like vomiting, as if I’d gorged myself or something or had a stomach upset.
Meanwhile, I find myself near a shelf of his books. His books… Oh, he has everything, lovingly collected, in sets, he has Lautreamont, Andre Gide, Rimbaud – familiar great names – all in his native French. In much the same way you’ll find whole sets of The Poet’s Library or World Literature in the homes of Russian intellectuals.
I have never collected books in sets. I’ve had my individual favorite books, but there have been so many moves in my life, from apartment to apartment, city to city, country to country, and I have divided my books – my only valuables – with my wives so often, that nowadays I glance unkindly at the three dozen or so volumes remaining to me and think maybe I should chuck those too. Jean-Pierre is a cultured man. Converting to Russian norms, the ordinary library of the average intellectual.
On the whole, as I study his home, I come to the conclusion that the Frenchman is a very pedantic person. Follow me and you will see. First the paintings. They are very large oil canvases, most of them painstakingly ruled. Usually a black or a dark background, traversed by numerous, often pulsating lines. The art of a bookkeeper – straight lines, checks, squares. Not bad; it’s a pleasant little world this man has – lines, rectangles, squares. But here are pictures of another sort.
By the bed and in the bathroom, pencil drawings. A girl licking somebody’s cock, you can’t see whose. She looks like my wife, which of course affords me no special pleasure. I twitch my shoulders convulsively. With this ordinary movement anguish is gone, anger is back. Try it.
Other drawings: two genital organs, a man’s and a woman’s, in waiting position. The woman has opened her cunt with her fingers and is carefully sitting down on someone’s cock. Being somewhat knowledgeable about art, especially contemporary art and this brand of drawing, I can say that the Frenchman’s drawings are dilettantish – too labored, no line at all. Far better are the similar drawings in public toilets. There, moved by the unconscious, submitting to Papa Freud’s laws, anonymous artists easily and swiftly achieve expressiveness through exaggeration, hyperbolization, and simplification. Here, we have the details, but that makes the drawings far dirtier. They reek of intellectual long Johns, there is something senile about them, they reek of semen – that’s obvious – and it is obviously the semen that was in my wife’s panties.
I am a soldier from a defeated regiment. The army has marched on; the battlefield is deserted, and I have come to inspect it. I wander in the underbrush, climb to high ground, try to determine the cause of the defeat. Why, in the end, did they beat us?
Outwardly I am in complete contact with Slava-David and Kirill. I may be joking or telling some story. But only outwardly. In reality, I am trying to solve a problem that I can never solve: Why? I was looking for the answer long before I met Elena. In my poem-cycle “Three Long Songs,” written in 1969, you can see this ominous, sullen Why? hanging over little Eddie’s world.
On the sixth of June I wrestled all day and all night, like Jacob, with this enigmatic Why? And in the morning I left. And we did not vanquish one another…
Yes, after our grim and beggarly little apartment on Lexington this studio is a fairytale palace. A studio bathed in romance, in the Village, on Prince Street. I hate that word now, “prince.” She phoned me from outer space at eleven o’clock, I sat in that Lexington Avenue squalor and said from my writing desk, “Little one, when will you be home? I’ve been worried!” “We’re still shooting,” she said, and I could hear music in the background.
And now I know where the music components are set up at Jean-Pierre’s and where the telephone instrument is – the one and a second and a third.
A lover of the luxurious life, which she had never really seen, a poetess, a girl from the Frunze Embankment in Moscow, after a year of tears and failures, of wanderings through Austria, Italy, and America, through luxurious capitals where we lived on potatoes and onions and got one shower a week (she wept so much that year), Elena no doubt rested, here.
I found a poem in her notebook (her poems always delineated her mood to me more graphically than she could have imagined): “From the festive streets a scent…” I no longer remember it, but there was something about the romance of the Village streets and bars, about a man with a beard (Jean-Pierre), and her sexual feeling toward him was likened to a teenage girl’s attitude toward a doctor – likened to childhood.
This was right; she had a right to rest, lie on this bed of his, relax, think of nothing and watch the shades flap… He fucked – no, it’s crude to talk like that even in regard to your ex-wife’s lover – he caressed her, she could hide here until she grew strong and insolent, hide from that apartment on Lexington and from me, who was for her a part of the world of destitution and tears. Alas! I believe she was happy here. I have a little wisdom, and I know: A thing that is likened to childhood cannot be a lie.
To her he was the doctor from her childhood, and she was drawn to him without shame. Bearded and half gray, he seemed to her a defense. “Into his tender hands,” as they say. She took him into her and shared with him the shudders that had formerly belonged only to me.
And I? Come now, she considered herself far above me. She would not tolerate the idea that I was a more talented and prominent person than she. She felt she had the right to act according to her own whim. She suspected I loved her sincerely, she knew it would be unbearable to me, perhaps I would do away with myself – she knew that too, the possibility was there – but what was I to her?
A ridiculous little Ukrainian, silly little Eddie, hassling her with his love. I think she saw weakness even in my love for her and scorned me for it. Long ago, back in Moscow, I remember, I was supposed to go to Ivanovo and I couldn’t tear myself away from her, couldn’t get up and leave. How she yelled that time!
Here in America she considered me incapable of moving up. I remember how spitefully she screamed at me when we first visited the woman who was to become her lover, the lesbian Susanna, when I cautiously remarked that Susanna and her friends were uninteresting: “But I want pleasure! Even if it’s with them! Through them I’ll meet others. Play the aristocrat and you’ll just keep on sitting there on Lexington Avenue in that filthy apartment! And die there!”
I memorized it all, my memory is revoltingly clear. And now, as I squeamishly poke at Jean-Pierre’s blanket with the tip of my umbrella and peer under his bed in the hope of spotting something interesting, I remember her during our last days.
“Excuse me,” I said to her, “but I’m the reason you’re free. You took a lover because I shielded you from the necessity of working. I went to work at that dreadful absurd newspaper above all for you, and so that we could survive, you and I. But you -”
“Yes,” she said with hysterical challenge, “and so what if I’m free because you’re not! So what? That’s the way it’s supposed to be…”
I was ready to shoot her. If I had had any chance of buying a revolver then, I would never have had to see Jean-Pierre’s studio, never have had to walk the deserted battlefield. But I had almost no connections, I had no money, and no strength.
She treated me with no consideration, merely because by then she thought me capable of nothing. She developed for herself a life plan in which I was merely a stage, since she had outgrown her ex-husband Victor, moved on and left him behind, she calculated that it would be the same with me. Here she was mistaken, it’s always dangerous to develop plans. Real life is more complicated, and merely by existing I think I’ll provide her with considerable grounds for reflection. I don’t know about regret, but reflection, yes.
Once she had recovered a little and felt at home, she still looked up to Jean but also began looking around. By my calculations this happened several months later. She began inventing things with him – whips, binding – she was the initiator, of course. She was curious. I had taught her a few
things too, not just fucking with the naked cock. These were revelations to her at the time – oh, I whipped her on the peepka with a thong, and… all sorts of things, we even made a half-joking attempt at group sex. Well, with him she wanted to go further. She did.
She lay on this bed, resting after the act, and smoked. She likes to smoke in the intervals. Sometimes she falls silent and looks off somewhere into emptiness, into the unknown. It’s a way of hers. I always asked her, “Little one, what are you thinking, where are you?” “Mmh?” she would say, coming to. Did he ask her what she was thinking? Her eyes would go glassy with abstraction.
Probably we all seem the same to her – I, Victor, Jean-Pierre, some other man. Does she make any distinction between me, the man who had sex with her for over four years, who loves her, and a man who fucks her once, on a drunk? I don’t know. She probably does, and I doubt it’s in my favor.
This grudge of mine. It is the melancholy grudge of one animal against another.
So, she did right. But what can Eddie do, Eddie-baby who loved her, Eddie with his very delicate sensibilities, his morbid reaction to the world, he who slashed his own veins three times in his rapture over that world, he who, mad and passionate, was wedded to her in church, who snatched her from the world, who had sought her so many years and is convinced to this day that she is the one, yes, she, the only woman for him – what happens to him, little Eddie? The Eddie who wrote lyrics and poem-cycles about her, who has never been understood by her, what about him? Where has he disappeared to in this story?
What happened to Elena is clear enough, she escaped from the Lexington Avenue tragedy, fled, took off without a backward glance, but what about Eddie? She’s a free woman, but weren’t you always at one with each other?
“Both the woman and the man have the right to murder,” proclaims Chapter One of the never-written code of man-woman relationships.
Eventually she tired of Jean-Pierre too, although she did not immediately leave him. The three of them went on living together – he, she, and Susanna. America had a bad influence on her. She filled up on Flossy, The Story of O, The Story of Joanna, and vulgar films of that ilk. Those syrupy sex concoctions with handsome gray rich men who don’t know where to put their pricks, those castles and bedrooms, that cinematic beauty and bullshit – that was what drove her mad. She took the films seriously. And she tried hard to be like the sexy heroines. The young model in The Story of O served as her example, I think, she raved about that film many times.
Elena went to sex parties where you fucked whomever you pleased. In the photographers’ and models’ milieu where she found herself, partners for any sort of experiment were easy to come by. She had women lovers, and one who fucked her for a long time was Susanna, a frigid woman who derives satisfaction only from someone else’s orgasm.
Elena… My Elena… Where is the tearstained Elena with the white poodle black with the mud of Moscow’s February thaw, the Elena who came to live with me upon leaving Victor, her forty-seven-year-old husband. Came to me, who had nowhere to live, nothing to live on, but whom she apparently loved. How did it happen, the transition from that Elena, from the wedding candles to the dildo with which she fucked Jean, and with which, evidently, he more than once fucked her.
The spiral candles of the Orthodox wedding… I gave them back to her. Tossed them into her suitcase. I gave back the icons that had been our wedding gift. I don’t want to look at the silly old mockeries. I gave back her dog collar, which I had stolen. What was I trying to prevent by taking her dog collar? The mask, I confess, I had long since torn up. Along with his pictures.
I love her very much. I understand her provinciality, I see that here in America she had accepted the very worst – marijuana, underworld jargon, cocaine, the constant “fuckin’ mother” after every word, the bars, the sex accessories. Even so, I love her very much – she is typically Russian, throwing herself headlong into the very thick of life without reflection; I’m the same way myself, I love her daring, but I don’t love her stupidity. I forgave her betrayal of Eddie, but I will not forgive her betrayal of the hero. “As whores, prostitutes, adventurers, but we could have been together,” I whisper.
I am thinking all this as I move through Jean-Pierre’s studio, peering into his drawers and shelves. What else can I do? I realize this is bad, but since when have I done nothing but good? My curiosity is all from that sinister Why.
The kitchen. Hundreds of little boxes: spices of every variety and hue, tea, herbs, pepper, this and that. Every necessary kitchen appliance. Everything… They’re people… and what am I… down and out. At thirty I don’t have a thing, and never will. But that’s not what I was seeking. How many years has he lived on this street? Ten years? Twelve? The only place I’ve lived for more than a year is one apartment in Moscow.
My God! The past is so disgusting, and there’s so much of it. I have more of it than most – yet I haven’t amassed any things. And I do not foresee having things in the future. Shall I ever have all these little boxes, labels, tags… Never, I’m sure. I amass the immaterial…
The fact is, here in America she found me uninteresting. She meant what she told me that time, February 13; I have a revolting memory: I lay there wanting to starve myself, I wanted so badly to die, and she spoke the ghastly word to me over the telephone. “You’re a nobody.”
Sadly I swing a coffee can back and forth in my hand. A “nobody” – and I had thought I was a hero. Why a “nobody”? Because I had not become the lascivious, rich, gray owner of a castle, exactly like the men in sexy films. I was supposed to do it in six months – she was in a hurry – and I didn’t. I smile sadly.
Alas! I couldn’t. Unfortunately, my profession is to be a hero. I always thought of myself as a hero, and I never hid it from her. I even wrote a book by that name back in Moscow: We Are the National Hero.
But I’m a nobody because I don’t even have a studio like Jean-Pierre’s, all these little jars and boxes; I don’t paint bookkeeperlike pictures. Logic did not interest her, it did not occur to her that Jean-Pierre had lived here all his life, while I had arrived yesterday. She didn’t trouble herself with logic.
What was I here? Only a journalist who now had a scandalous reputation among the Russian emigres of Europe and America as a leftist and a Red. Who gives a fuck about that! Who needs these Russian scandals here in America, where you have live Warhols and Dalis walking around. And who cares that I am one of Russia’s greatest living poets, that I am writhing in agony as I live out my heroic fate. You have herds of rich men here, you have bars on every corner, and literature is reduced to the level of a professorial game. Shit if I’d go to your fucking Arlington or Bennington or whatever it is, to teach your zhlobby children Russian literature. I did not refuse to be bought in the USSR merely in order to sell myself cheap here. And please note – membership in the Soviet Writers’ Union is a much better honor than a professorship, even at a university of yours.
The “nobody” walks slowly from object to object. He has already drunk many cans of beer, smoked a couple of joints with Kirill, and everything is therefore turning black in his world, turning dark, becoming harsh and extreme. Kirill has gone off to make phone calls. His world is much brighter and purer than mine. Like a child he wants a Rolls-Royce and money, but he cannot do anything to get them. A baby. In his case it’s not even tragic. Suppose his dream does get smashed to smithereens? He’s young, he’ll think up a new one, there’s no harm in that. When the conversation turns to my “leftist” views, Kirill yaps like a puppy and defends the system. He feels obliged to do that because he thinks he belongs with the people in this world who fuck the world and everyone in it, not with those who get fucked.
In some ways Kirill is like Elena. The same desire to jump, run, participate in the games of this world, go to parties, sleep till three in the afternoon, and not work. He is very lovable, although he has no character whatsoever. For all our dissimilarities he’s a cultured young man, not a plebeian, I en
joy him more than any of the other Russians. Sometimes he and I go out for a stroll, or take a bottle of cheap California champagne and go to Central Park…
I slip into Jean-Pierre’s office. Two desks placed back to back, as in a business office or a Soviet institute. Some of the drawers are locked, others not. If Kirill weren’t here, and if it were two or three hours from now, I would open the locked ones, the most interesting things are sure to be in those. Alas, I have to be satisfied with the open ones.
Unhurriedly I go through his things – unhurriedly, but not calmly. How could I be calm… Letters from Paris, from a girl or woman with a Czech or Polish surname, these letters I find in quantity in various desk drawers… but here’s something more interesting – a little envelope of hair, little blond hairs obviously from the pubis, and these hairs have got to be my Elena’s. The envelope of hair makes me break out in a cold sweat all over, a symptom of utmost agitation. Perhaps I should find comfort in the fact that she isn’t living with him. He’s the one who doesn’t want it, however. So they tell me; I don’t know.
The drawers hold nothing more interesting than the little envelope. Writing pads, notebooks, extra erasers, vast numbers of slides of his works. I patiently look through all his slides in the hope of seeing photographs of her. A secret little voice whispers, “in indecent poses.” Indecent poses, hell! I merely want to know more than I do, and perhaps to overwhelm the Why? But the slides are only his – slides of his works. More letters, business cards from people and organizations. All this is diluted in a vast quantity of financial documents, a vast torrent of bank bills, all sorts of things; I can’t tell what they are.
It's Me, Eddie Page 16
