Taking my cock – which, because of my binge, was not obeying me any too well, first it stood up, then it didn’t, it keeled over and fell – I touched it to her cunt. Again I give her her due: she had a good cunt, a sweet, succulent, ripe cunt… you see all those names. Running my cock along her cunt, which became even hotter at my touch and pleased my cock as it did me, I thrust it into this softness, flow, and succulence. It squeezed its way in there, into this mysterious place. Though taught by bitter experience, I still consider this place mysterious.
I fucked her for quite a while, stimulating and sliding open her sticky canal with my cock. This felt good to me, but even so, because of the six or seven hours I had spent unconscious, my cock did not fill to full strength, my mind and imagination were working much better than my poor flower.
I fucked her awhile, she came, and I hadn’t even been properly aroused. But the cunt, I tell you, was all coated with mucus, soft, sucking my cock in. The cunt was not hysterical like Roseanne, it didn’t get irritated, didn’t shout, it was the cunt of a woman thirty-three or thirty-four years old, a good cunt, which seemed mildly to admonish and soothe. “We shall all die. Be here, here it is warm and moist, burning and tranquil, and only here does a man feel he is where he belongs.” That was what her cunt said, her soft, plump, yielding cunt, and I agreed. What Roseanne herself said was worse. It would have been all right in English, but she said it in Russian; her Russian lovers and her frequent trips to the USSR were making themselves known.
“You can’t come,” she said in Russian, fucking, and panting a little from the rhythm of the fuck. “You’re too nervous, you’re hurrying, don’t hurry, don’t hurry, darling!”
I would have hit her, only she wouldn’t have understood what for. I could not explain to her that her accented Russian had a terrible effect on me, it made me feel as if I were not in bed but in the grim, squalid office of the Russian emigre newspaper with its peeling walls, dust, stink, and garbage. “You came,” she said – “ty koncheel.” At her last thin, misaccented ee-sound, an invisible icy hand gripped my cock, and it fell, it faded, my poor ardent flower, once my pride and often my misfortune. I couldn’t. Couldn’t do anything, anything at all… and didn’t want to.
Well, I whipped myself into a demoniacal frenzy. I can do that when I have to, I wanted her moans and cries and howls. I pulled my unneeded do-nothing out of her and crawled down, spread her legs, stuck out my tongue, now so essential to me, ran my tongue around my own lips, licked myself once, and then ran it around her genital lips. Oh, did her body appreciate this pleasure. It twitched and became quiet. Then I first checked out all the little corners and culs-de-sac of her cunt, this was essential to me, I knew my business, I needed to test where everything lay, and only then could I begin to act.
I tested. I advanced slowly, testing. I love the smell and taste of the cunt. I have no aversion to it, the cunt. I have love for it. But for Roseanne I had no love. In giving her cunt pleasure, I rejected Roseanne. As I ran my tongue ardently and hotly into the soft canal leading to her womb, listened with pleasure to the quiet sobs of another living being – I love this – I was thinking that this was a most perfect wrong thing.
I could not be happy with her, but since I was in the habit of being happy – the last four years I had been utterly happy with my Elena – I sought happiness out of habit, unmindful that most people simply live in the world without having happiness, men and women have the mutual relationship of a prostitute and her client, all is boring and unbearable, and perhaps, Cod forbid, I would simply find no replica of Elena, no duplicate of her, no, nor a new happiness.
Well, when I was fucking her with my tongue, even though I gave no thought to any of this, I conducted myself properly, of course, I immersed myself in what I was doing, immersed myself in her cunt. My mouth and nose and half my face were covered with sticky mucus, this is the compound they secrete for lubrication so that our cocks may enter, nature made them so. With my hands I stroked all the soft and silky forbidden places near her cunt, around it, in order to create an added ambience of tender lassitude and pleasure, accompanying this with powerful sensations from the constant stimulation of her canal by my tongue.
My friends, she came, giving me a certain pleasure with her moans and ahs, inexpressive though they were. But what a difference it makes, boys, whether the woman you fuck is loved or unloved! A world of difference. Here, if you please, was a good cunt, everything was good, she had good legs, maybe even better than Elena, and good hair; I sought out her virtues, she had them, but she was at least thirty-three, boys, she was a crazy hysteric, and upon her, in addition to the eternal sorrow of the Jewish people, lay the mark of her abnormal personal sorrow as well. I do not condemn her: I myself am not particularly normal, I confess, but I didn’t love her, friends, what could I do?
Love turned out to have corrupted me. Love is a kind of sexual perversion, don’t you think? It’s a rare abnormality, and perhaps it belongs in the medical textbooks ahead of sadism and masochism. I am so alone in my perversion it’s hard for me to find a partner.
She came, then I fucked her with my cock, then didn’t fuck her, then fucked her again. That whole night left me with the sensation of a sort of fleshy turmoil. Well, I don’t know, all men are different, someone else might have found it good. Both before my time and after and during, Roseanne had admirers, quite decent-looking fellows. I’ve probably been knocked fucking stupid by love, because several of them, whom I knew quite well, really coveted Roseanne.
At last we lay motionless, sprawled on her yellow sheets in a troubled, awkward, and brief morning slumber. You know what time she woke up? Guess! Six. Enough to drive you fucking crazy. She woke up and lay there, she was angry, then she started to get up.
“Do you know what you did yesterday?” she asked me. For some reason, along with a tormenting desire to sleep, my sense of humor had returned to me. I had never thought the two could be coupled, humor and sleep.
“I don’t remember anything,” I said, wrapping myself up in the red-flowered yellow sheet, wrapping up just a little. To be exact, wrapping only my dick. Even for her, I was not averse to exhibiting my beautiful body once more in a beautiful pose. I loved my body; what do you expect.
“Don’t you remember, you were hugging Lily,” she said passionately. The Chinese girl, it turned out, was named Lily. She really was a lily.
“I hugged Lily!” I said in a shocked voice. “What, is that true, Roseanne? Oh God, how could it happen, how could I get that drunk! You know, there’ve been times in my life when I’ve had terrible pathological intoxications. A few times. Once when I was seeing off my friend Oleg Chikovani, he was leaving the USSR, I drank two glasses of dry wine and didn’t wake up till the next morning. They even rubbed me with snow, but I didn’t come to. And another time I got so drunk that for some reason I made a pass at my best friend’s wife, got my hand up under her skirt,” I went on in the remorseful voice of a great martyr and sufferer, “and I lost my friend forever.”
Of what I told her, the first item was true and the second half true. I had gotten up under the skirt of a certain lady the first time we met, but the lady so loved poets, and her husband didn’t give a damn who got under her skirt. Besides, her husband wasn’t with her, it was my friend Dima, a handsome poet and at that time her lover. He was offended at me, but not for long.
“Don’t be angry at me, Roseanne,” I said passionately, “it’s my misfortune, it’s my disease. Everyone in our family was alcoholic,” I said without a trace of embarrassment. “My uncle the doctor died under the wheels of a train. I hadn’t told you, I’m ashamed to tell, but now I’m forced to. I’m holding my own, but it’s a hereditary disease, sometimes I don’t have the strength to fight it.” Moved by the solemnity of the moment 2nd the secret I was supposedly confiding, I even sat up in bed.
My brazen lie made an impression on her. She looked at me attentively, sighed, and said, “Yes, I thought you had something the matter w
ith you. But I thought you were conscious and wanted to get back at me for not giving you enough attention. I saw you were nervous, but it was a party, there were so many people, one asking where’s the salt, another where’s the pepper, a third where’s something else, I got so tired.
“Lily should have left,” she went on. “Everyone saw you in each other’s arms, that’s bad, why do Russians always get so drunk. We had interesting people, this poet, George, we planned to read some poetry, then we thought you’d read too. But why did your friend get drunk?” she said. “Why are you Russians forever getting drunk? Masha got drunk. We had a drunk Russian poet lying in one corner, a drunk Russian writer in the other.”
“I’ve told you why I got drunk,” I said ruefully. “It doesn’t happen often, only when I’m very nervous. In a calm mood I’m perfectly normal. Often I don’t have the strength to fight my disease,” I concluded, and assumed a bleak, humble expression. “Forgive me, Roseanne,” I added.
Sober Seva, the photographer, later told me that the Chinese girl was fucking terrific, that I had made no mistake, and that although he, Seva, was with his wife, he had nevertheless counted on getting something going with her, but when he was ready to make his move he saw that I was already lying down – lying down, you notice – with my arms around her, kissing her, and saying something, all but making love, in front of everyone.
“And how did she react to it?” I asked Seva.
“She lay there, she felt awkward, of course, there was a crowd of people around, but you could see she was enjoying it, she was giggling. Roseanne chased her out, Roseanne even cried, she was so furious. When you have a girl friend like that, don’t invite her,” Seva concluded philosophically.
Seva reported all this to me later. But even that morning it was clear to me what I had done with Lily. I knew myself well.
“Yes, you were nervous because I wasn’t paying attention to you,” Roseanne persuaded herself. I had begun sinking into a doze, which was about to turn into sweet slumber. You think I fell asleep? Fuck no. She wouldn’t let me. The love of order that she had brought from Germany summoned her to clean the apartment. Since I was in the house, she had to make use of me. Subsequently I was amazed by her ability to use me and evidently everyone else. If I was going out, even after making love, even at two in the morning, she did not forget to hand me a bag of garbage, which I was supposed to stick in the garbage chute on my way. If I came to her penthouse to get a tan, she always thought up some job for me – first I had to help her transplant flowers, then it was some other equally urgent matter…
Even that morning she wouldn’t let me sleep. Instead of lying there, sleeping, waking up, and loving each other – despite all, we had become lovers that night – I was forced to crawl out to the living room, reeling with fatigue and barely propping up my eyelids with my hands to keep my eyes from closing. Then, like sleepy flies, she a spiteful and irritated fly and I an unhappy one submitting to someone else’s will, we had breakfast on the veranda.
It was all in small quantities, but nicely served. I would have preferred to eat without plates, but more of it. She was muttering and practically weeping, kept going to the telephone, having long conversations, not forgetting to report that she had had a party yesterday and the Russians had been very drunk.
I drank from a big jug of wine, I had a splitting headache from the sun. A bright red tomato lay cut open on the table, a little breeze was blowing, there seemed to be all the makings of a good mood and happiness, if it weren’t for Roseanne. I drank wine; people had brought so much that there was a month’s supply left, she had told everyone to bring wine, everyone had obediently done so.
I drank three glasses of California chablis from a gallon jug, dreadful shit. I must say I would have preferred a bottle of beaujolais. I saw Roseanne had five or six bottles of good wine left; why drink shit if you can drink good wine? But she didn’t offer it to me, and I didn’t want to start a conversation about wine with her when she was irritated, she wouldn’t have understood. Subsequently she always gave me bad wine, although she had good wine, French or Spanish, lying right next to it.
The general principle is correct, you know, thrifty. Why waste bad wine. She always asked me, “What, is the wine bad?” But she couldn’t fight herself, she always invariably gave me the bad. Poor girl, what psychic torment I caused her. Sometimes I wanted to bawl, “Yes, the wine’s bad! Bad! Shitty! Give me that one over there, Roseanne, the Spanish one! I know what’s what in wine, why begrudge the good stuff, woman? You don’t buy it, after all, people bring it. So let’s have it! And not in a piddling glass, drag out the bottle!”
Oh, I never did say it. My mama had taught me, and so had my papa – Communist and political instructor, worked in the MVD’s secret police force – they taught me while they could, my parents did: “Don’t throw people’s weaknesses up to them, Edichka, pity them, don’t hurt them. He who has a weakness is already hurt!”
I felt no malice toward her, toward Roseanne. Well, was it her fault if she was stingy by my standards? She had been born in this world, where children were not raised to be carefree idlers and wastrels. The gesture, the display, the overgenerosity that suited us barbarians, us Georgians and Russians – according to one anecdote, a Georgian leaves his overcoat as a tip for the doorman and instead of saying “Keep the change!” says “Keep the coat!” – this was hardly necessary in a young lady from a Jewish family that had emigrated from Germany.
“You’ve come to an alien land, be patient, they have different customs here,” I told myself with anguish, watching the wine in my glass diminish at each swallow. Thank God, while she was on the phone I managed to drain my glass twice more, since it hardly showed on the gallon jug.
“Does she understand that I can view her this way, from such an unexpected angle?” I wondered. “She should have foreseen it; after all, she’s been to Russia.”
Oh, it may be petty, but this was what formed my image of her. I was open, so help me, I was open to people; I stopped at any word on the street; I sought love, wanted love, and could give it myself; but I couldn’t give it when things were this way. All this stuck in my mind, you can’t cast out your petty displeasures. Even when I fucked her I could not forget this pettiness, could not separate her sweet cunt from her stinginess – stinginess in my view, gentlemen, only in my view. To you, perhaps, it’s the rule.
I didn’t thrust my preference on her. But if she had good wine and we were lovers, I simply could not comprehend why she didn’t give it to me. I, after all, begrudged nothing, gentlemen. Such feasts I put on for my guests in Russia, even though a poor man! To celebrate my birthday, for instance, I went to the bazaar with friends and bought fifty pounds of meat, gentlemen, and invited forty people, and bought liquor the Russian way, allowing a bottle of vodka per boy, a bottle of wine per girl. I spent all my money, to my last kopeck, and at times I also borrowed. I had no bank accounts, I cared little what the morrow would bring. “God will give the day, God will give us food,” as my grandma Vera used to say.
Guests at my house ate, drank, and when in their cups often fought with their host. Now I am dirt, a beggar, in an alien land, but even so I’m always having someone over to eat. And I am not the only such exceptional good fellow. My neighbor Edik Brutt feeds everyone too, if he has anything himself. First of all give a man food and drink. Then you’re a friend to him.
In sum, I understood that we were from different worlds, yet I couldn’t help myself. I was demanding that Roseanne fulfill barbarian customs of hospitality. But she was a civilized lady.
After breakfast that day I felt exhausted, sat there lazily sprawled in the chair, and naturally didn’t want to take a cleaning compound to the floor, which had been trampled to mud the day before. I wanted to stare unblinkingly at the water of the Hudson River, and let the breeze cool my forehead, and fall asleep with my arms on the table in this bright apartment, and have Roseanne become the young Elena, the way she used to be.
Sleep, hell. The lady threw a fit of hysterics, as a result of which, almost with tears in her eyes, she darkly posed the issue point-blank: Either I cleaned the apartment or I had to go home. It was also said that if I was sleepy I could go and sleep in her bedroom, but given the tone of voice in which it was said, how could I possibly go and sleep! I didn’t want to quarrel with her; moreover, I felt, despite all, that I was to blame. There was a large element of Russian swinishness in my Bicentennial Celebration behavior. There was, I confess. Since I was to blame, I confess, but I’m poor unlucky Eddie, put yourself in my place.
I washed the floor for her, I vacuumed her wonderful, brightest-in-the-world hallway, her bedroom, and all the other rooms. I did it all, to the ruin of my health. This was the greatest violence I had ever done to myself, the most inconvenient hangover. But for the shitty wine that I had drunk during her long, dreary phone conversations, I could not have coped with the cleaning, I’d have fallen by the wayside. Almost soaring above myself, rising above my own hangover thanks to Roseanne, I suddenly saw that there was strength even beyond the limits of strength.
After a While some neighbors visited her, they lived two floors below. The woman was a mixture of Jew and American Indian, I don’t know which tribe. “They’re like the Russians, their national disease is drunkenness!” Roseanne remarked to me in Russian. “Her father is an alcoholic!”
This exploiter had revived after my heroic feat and looked satisfied. One thing remained unclear: Why hadn’t she cleaned the apartment herself, instead of bitching on the telephone or trailing around with some object in her hands? Why did her apartment have to be cleaned by crazy drunken Eddie on welfare? Who the fuck knows, even now it’s unclear to me. She and I had known each other six days, no more. She may have felt that I was guilty before her and should therefore expiate my guilt through chore duty. But what was I guilty of? I hadn’t even told her I loved her, hadn’t been able to wring the words out.
It's Me, Eddie Page 23
