I open a little box. Lying in it are dark grains and fragments, and on top two fat, homestyle marijuana cigarettes, a far cry from the skimpy joints made to be sold for a dollar apiece on Forty-second Street or in Washington Square.
Then I poke around on the shelves, where his lithographs lie neatly interleaved with paper. They do not interest me. I am looking for something else. At last I see what I’m looking for – photographs of her. Enlargements, she didn’t skimp, she was giving a present to her dear friend. Not to me – to him. Photographs done by little-known photographers, they are imitations of the works of well-known masters, or rather, imitations of their formal execution. They are not Avedon, of course, or Francesco Scavullo, or Horowitz, or… Imitative photographs. Elena smeared with something shiny, her hair slicked down; Elena in a highly improbable, unnatural pose; Elena with her face painted like an Indian mask…
Alas, it’s all pretty feeble. The fact is, the photographs are all whorish and no good. My darling isn’t getting very far with her career. But her career was what she talked about, proud girl. “I love nobody, my career is all that interests me.”
I look at photographs of this woman’s body, now alien to me, and I see before me the whole system. The chic profession of the photographer. I know how photographers knock themselves out for decades trying to make it here. My friend Lyonka Lubenitsky, who recently had a photo on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, really feels beat when he comes to my hole at night. Hard times, can’t make any money.
Thousands of photographers work in New York. Tens of thousands of people are involved in photography. They all dream of the glory and riches of an Avedon or a Eugene Smith, but few of them know how hellishly hard Avedon works. Lyonka Lubenitsky knows, he worked for over a year as an assistant at Avedon’s for $75 a week. The models all dream of the career of a Verushka or a Twiggy. Tens of thousands of girls report to their agencies every day, and then set off in taxis and on foot to different addresses, knock at studio doors. Elena is one of them. Her chances are slim.
I turn page after page. The photographers toy with her body like a ball, the body of the girl from the Frunze Embankment. Her little nipples, shoulders, poopka flip past, I remember one photograph she had, it was left behind in Moscow. Elena is four or five years old; she stands with her mother, making a face and looking away. It’s already all there, in that photograph. All her life she has looked away.
I am seeking an answer, I have to kill the Why, kill it through understanding, otherwise it will kill me, may kill me, and therefore I peer at these photographs so hard it hurts. Part of the answer may be there. But what’s there is a lie. The lie of the untalented, the third-rate. The only truthful thing in them, rising from their depths, bursting through their gloss, is the thirst to live, at the price of any mistake, to accept as life anything at all, anything that moves, and to live, to lie underneath someone, be photographed, ride someone else’s horse, love someone else’s house, someone else’s studio, someone else’s objects and books, but to live.
I was not life, in her understanding, not at all. I did not move, she detected no signs of movement in me. I was, in her opinion, an unmoving object. The squalid apartment on Lexington – she thought that was me. She wanted to live. Physical, material life, that was the only thing she understood. She didn’t give a damn about the values of civilization, history, religion, morals. She hardly knew of them. Instinct – I think she understood that. A poetess, besides; too powerful an imagination. Didn’t I tell you she wrote poetry? Sorry, I forgot, but that is very important.
Presently she will sober up a little, Jean-Pierre’s studio will no longer seem to her a fairytale palace, nor he the kindly doctor from her childhood. Presently he will demand the $100 she borrowed for the trip to Milan. That’s normal, they no longer sleep together – so pay back your debt.
Rummaging in his papers, I see some neat columns of figures. The purposes for which the money was spent are noted at the side. Too bad I can’t read his writing, I might encounter Elena’s name here too. He has complained several times to Kirill that Elena was bilking him, she cost too much.
I turn his list over and over in my hands. I am unused to this sort of thing, I don’t condemn it but I’m unused to it. Their very method of keeping their earnings in a bank develops qualities in them that are negative from the viewpoint of a Russian, and especially a typical bohemian like me, I think as I continue to rummage through his papers. Thriftiness, a pedantic tidiness with money, isolation from other people…
I’m used to other foreigners, fun-loving and friendly people who throw currency around openhandedly, sometimes uproariously. In Moscow every one of us had an American acquaintance, not all of them were openhanded but many were. Perhaps because the dollar was actually worth a great deal in Moscow. Colonial, dependent Russia…
In New York I came up against normal Americans. “Them.” Lately I’ve developed an inescapable feeling that I’m not Russian, was not fully Russian even in Russia, national traits are very approximate; still, I shall permit myself to speak of something I dislike. I often hear “them” use the expression, “That’s your problem.” It’s just an expression, but it irritates me greatly. One time, God knows where, my butcher friend Sanya the Red picked up the expression Tebe zhit – “It’s your life!” He used it apropos of everything, where it was necessary and unnecessary, uttering it with the gravity of a philosopher. Even so, “It’s your life!” is much warmer. These words are used when another person has refused friendly advice: Well then, see for yourself, I tried to help you, you don’t want advice, I yield, it’s your life.
“That’s your problem!” is used in order to dissociate oneself from other people’s problems, set a boundary between oneself and bothersome people trying to worm into one’s world. I heard this expression from Monsieur Jean-Pierre during the ghastly February days when, as I lay in bed dying, knowing that Elena had left him too, or so I thought, I called and asked him to meet me for a drink. So help me Cod, I had no evil in mind. But he said to me, “That’s your problem, yours and Elena’s. That’s not my problem.” Didn’t say it maliciously; no, indifferently. And he was right, who am I to him? Foolish me, why did I bother him with my tribal, barbarian social habits?
Oh, he has so many financial papers! I can’t tell whether all these are sums that he’s supposed to pay or that someone is supposed to pay him. I’m sick of his papers, and I stuff them all back into the desks and up on the shelves, but neatly, not roughly, trying to put each one where it was before. No reason at all for the owner to know that someone has been checking on him.
Jean-Pierre, Jean-Pierre – for an artist he’s extremely cautious. But weren’t there some like him in Russia? There were. Why carp at him! Don’t carp at your wife’s lover, Limonov. You’re compensating yourself for the insult he inflicted. All the same, he’s a bit of a coward, cautious. Later this will be confirmed: when he learns about my demonstration against the New York Times he will warn me, with wary friendliness, that they can refuse citizenship, they can deport one from America. He is amazed at Elena’s lively, extravagant, devil-may-care behavior, her lack of concern for the future; like Susanna, he says of her, half in delight, “Crazy!” My indifference toward citizenship likewise amazes him. American citizenship! Of course, in his eyes I too am crazy. He is rather tame.
He does not interest me. But for Elena, it would not occur to me to notice him if I met him at a party somewhere. He belongs to a definite caste of men, who are scattered throughout the world. I knew lots of them in Russia. They feel they were born to live to the fullest and enjoy themselves. Having “lived,” that is, having slept with women to their hearts’ content, they grow old and die without leaving a shadow or trace on the earth. A species of philistine, that’s all. Back in Kharkov they were named Bruk or Kuligin, in Moscow they were named something else; they arrived and disappeared; now and then I took an interest in them, sometimes they became my friends for a short while, but I never dreamed that E
lena would leave for their world. In Russia she would not have left for these vulgarians, she had chosen Limonov. Was it because American cunt-chasers, with their much wider opportunities for a dissolute life, were of a better quality than Russian ones? Or did she not recognize them in their American aspect, did she decide that these men were different – loftier and more interesting? I don’t know. The Why? would have vanished immediately had Elena left for an American Limonov. But for these men?
Jean… Jean received Elena for nothing, for free, as a gift of fate. A lucky man. In point of fact, he is far beneath her. But I had wrested her from fate, my Elena. True, he didn’t get her for long… We all have pricks, they hang between our legs; and balls, these unlucky balls, whose touch to a woman’s body is so glorified in cheap, sexy books; but, my sweet, we are not all alike…
I walk out of the office. Kirill is still making phone calls. I ask who he’s talking to, he mutters something in my direction. He has firmly decided that what he and I lack for our complete happiness is a bottle of vodka, and he wants to get that bottle from someone. Today is Sunday, and the gambit of borrowing money and making a last-minute purchase at the liquor store is out. That means we have to go visiting. Everything is just as at my place in Moscow or his in Petersburg, except for the coffee shop sign burning outside the windows. But there’s no need to look out the window. The usual situation – we haven’t had enough to drink. The only difference is that we hardly know anybody here.
Tearing himself away from the telephone, Kirill requisitions a couple more cans of beer from Slava-David’s supply – he is always well provided – and we polish them off immediately. There is already a whole bag of empties lying in the corner.
Meanwhile, between what I’ve drunk and what I’ve seen, I am slowly going into an ecstasy. In its physical routine this whole day has been an exact repetition of many another day after a binge, and a binge is what I had yesterday. Now at the stage of “ecstasy!” I request what is currently my favorite Beatles record, “Back in the USSR!”
The record is not in Jean-Pierre’s collection. Without asking me, Kirill puts on his own records, which are lying there in the common heap. First comes Vertinsky.
The sense of rhythm characteristic of all poets awakens in me. It is in our blood. I begin to dance around. I execute rhythmic figures. Kirill, although he carries on with his phone conversations, does not forget to change the records – according to his own whim, however. The Alexandrov soldiers’ chorus is succeeded by “Dark Eyes,” then come revolutionary songs, and “Dark Eyes” again…
I begin to experience the feelings of my people. My dance takes me past a mirror. It is large; they may have looked at themselves in it more than once, together and naked, but the thought slips by and disappears. The music drives it out. I dance insane dances, I dance away from the mirror toward the kitchen, pass close to the telephoning Kirill, and in an intricate rhythmic pas I dance around “those” pillars. As in Eliot, I think: “Here we go round the prickly pear Prickly pear prickly pear Here we go round the prickly pear At five o’clock in the morning.” My erudition delights me. Then and there I repeat Eliot’s lines in Ukrainian.
I leap and dance, and Kirill smiles. Oh that Eddie, that crazy Eddie! I love Kirill because he never acts surprised at me. If I do surprise him, he pretends that that’s as it should be and that if he, Kirill, is not a pederast himself, he’s a liberated man in any case and can understand everything. Even if he’s only pretending, that’s fine too.
Now he breaks off his conversation, and in the blinding light of all of Jean-Pierre’s lamps we dance to “Dark Eyes.” The music of our native Russia, it has made the rounds of all the taverns in the world. At one time danger-loving officers in uniform used to howl this wild piece in the taverns, weeping drunkenly, like me, Eddie. What anguish, and anguish-destroying exultation, there is in these doleful Asiatic sounds with their sudden outcries. Ah, but nothing binds me to humanity except Welfare, which I take from them. And my nationality is nagging me to death. “A machine gun, oy, give me a machine gun, my dears!” I scream hysterically, to Kirill’s delight.
No doubt I am overplaying it a little. But didn’t I want to embrace her fucking corpse? Didn’t I write suicide notes and then try to strangle her? Or was that a fantasy? No, it happened, the “dark eyes” are not lying, and I am not lying about myself.
The pandemonium of the dance lasts a very long time. Russian records are succeeded by French ones. I dance to Brel, Piaf, and Aznavour. I dance in an ecstasy, and although I feel as if the whole world were watching, the “day after” is always like this by nighttime. In reality, even Kirill has left again, to torment the telephone receiver with his English talk, not realizing that although he’s a dear boy no one fucking needs either him or me, tonight or any other night.
With a wild dance on the spot where she betrayed me, with beer and marijuana – this is how I mark the fifth anniversary of our acquaintanceship. Like a tame member of society. I don’t set any fires, don’t smash everything, don’t howl, don’t even weep.
After a while I cool off. The “depression” stage begins, I go and collapse on the bed with my nose in the blanket and lie there for a while, sniffing the bed. Maybe it smells of her? No, it smells of Kirill. I turn over on my back and lie staring at the ceiling, not moving, for maybe a whole thirty minutes. I think about her, about him, about myself. Shadows chase across the ceiling, the shade flaps, and the world enters into night, in order then to enter into day.
A natural desire to make peepee forces me to get up. I walk into the bathroom, and there I continue to think, reason, and listen to myself. I examine afresh the pathetic drawings hung over the toilet. I peer into the drawers – again, hundreds of names of objects. I am struck by the staccato pettiness of his existence, surrounded as it is by such a quantity of details, and it hurts my eyes, they begin to hurt. There is cotton here too, she may have used it, and what they stick in the peepka during menstruation, Tampax. A well-provided monsieur.
In the first years of our love we invariably fucked when she was menstruating, we couldn’t wait out those four days. We would begin as if in play, rub against each other and kiss, and then we would fuck after all, trying not to go too deep. When we came, and we almost always did together, I would pull out my member all bloody. That was gratifying both to me and to her, and we’d gaze at it a long time.
I look again at the woman opening her cunt as she sits down on the cock. I have just made peepee and am wiping my member with a tissue. At the touch of the toilet paper my delicate member shudders, something in me begins to stir, my member slowly grows into a cock. Almost unconsciously I begin to fondle the head of my cock, knead it and stroke it, all the while thinking that they fucked here too, in the bathroom – she and I fucked in all our bathrooms, that means she and he fucked here too – and I move my palm along my member and begin masturbating urgently.
Darling Eddie!
I simply cannot get anywhere. I stand up and sit down, my erection does not go away, but I cannot come. I always have trouble the “day after,” even with a woman. But I want so much to be connected to this house and what they did here, to splash out my semen where his semen too has flowed, into the tub or into the toilet. His semen flowed there out of her, of course, out of her peepka.
Darling Eddie!
Forty minutes went by; someone had phoned Kirill, some other fan of late-night gab, and he was talking with renewed strength, briskly and joyfully. Perhaps he was getting somewhere. I was getting nowhere with my cock. At length I despaired, and lowered the curtain on my cock by hiding it in my pants.
I hid the yellow hell of the bathroom by extinguishing the obsessive light, shut the door, and went out to my drinking companion.
“We may be going to a party at twelve,” said the joyful young idler, “they’ll call us back. But now let’s go have coffee at the bar on the corner of Spring Street and West Broadway. It’s a very famous spot. They’ve always got very nice women artists and
bohemians there. We might pick someone up,” Kirill said.
I wanted no one and nothing. I hadn’t even managed to come. Poor Eddie. I was tired and wanted to go home. If we couldn’t drink, I should take off. The party’s over, don’t overstay my welcome.
But the aristocrat had no wish to be alone. He needed me so that he wouldn’t have to sit in the bar alone, so that he would be seen by the young or not-so-young women artists not as a lonely, horny cunt-chaser but as a respectable man who had come with a friend. The jerk, he didn’t realize that together we would look like two pederasts, and he would be even less likely to achieve his goal…
He pestered the fuck out of me. I very much wanted to go home, but he grumbled and raged so much that I finally walked him the hundred meters to this establishment, and then there was no help for it, I went inside with him. A coffee-colored darkness reigned; every spot was taken, and people were standing in line waiting, too. Everyone wanted to mix, talk, and of course get acquainted and fuck. Women artists and women nonartists, pretty ones and dogs in homespun dresses and jeans, they were all there.
He had $5 and that was it. All I had was a subway token. We might have gotten a table, but what we wanted was coffee. We trudged back and began making our farewells at the door of the Frenchman’s building. By dint of extravagant mutual compliments we had reached the point of parting, when I suddenly remembered the cigarettes in Jean-Pierre’s drawer.
“If you were a good boy, I’d tell you where to find two marijuana cigarettes in Jean-Pierre’s house,” I announced brazenly.
“Edichka, what are you doing in other people’s cupboards and desks?” he said.
It's Me, Eddie Page 17
