We sat on the balcony, I mean on her terrace, and she asked would these people have some sausages, and would I have sausages. I said yes. “How many?” she asked. “Two? Three?” She didn’t say “four” or “five.” I said three. I could have said not a one, but man is weak, I was hungry, couldn’t resist, I said three. “He eats so much!” she told them, by way of a joke. After that occasion, proud and morbidly touchy Eddie ate at her house only when she had guests. I always refused to eat when we were alone; I felt uncomfortable for her, didn’t want to put her in an awkward position. Moreover, her food didn’t fill me up, yet I could not say that two or even three sausages (which was obviously the height of gluttony in her opinion) weren’t enough for me, that I didn’t even consider this to be food. I stopped eating at her house, and she doesn’t suggest it anymore.
Everything I observed in her was extremely interesting to me. Thanks to her I became familiar with several definite, though not very vividly manifested, character traits of Western woman. I can’t say that I studied her on purpose; in the beginning I thought that by making some concessions to myself I might even come to like her a little. To this end I imagined that she was unhappy, and began to pity her. The illusion of her unhappiness didn’t last long. She was a schiz, yes, but she was a demanding and practical schiz.
As the sun went down that day, she read my book We Are the National Hero to the visiting couple, in English; since the manuscript consisted of short pieces, it could be read in one sitting. The book had been lying around her house for quite a while, and to judge by the interest with which she read, she was reading it for the first time. I listened, my face was indifferent and ironic, but inwardly I was very angry. “How can she be so incurious?” I thought. After all, she found me interesting, she was calling me two or three times a day, inviting me over, and in the end she had fucked me, and wanted to, until I presently put a stop to it myself because of my obvious lack of need to do it with her. And she hadn’t found the time to read my book. This was the whole thing, this was the solution to the calm riddle of this woman. She needed me, as she needed others in this world, only to the extent that I could be useful to her, to Roseanne. She couldn’t give me even the small fraction of her time, even the thirty or forty minutes, required to read my book. Could she really have no interest in what he wrote, this Russian (or Japanese, Chinese, Indian) who was fucking her now?
No, she had no fucking interest. Everyone wants to be loved. We all want it, from the street bum who spends the night on benches to the holder of a huge fortune. And no one wants to do the loving himself. True, there is love in me, a useless love for a woman who does not need me, for Elena. But, frankly speaking, I sometimes have a suspicion even about myself. Were I not now a destitute man on welfare – suppose a wealthy lover were to show up tomorrow, a man or woman who would suddenly fall in love with me – in my new situation of love and wealth I might forget Elena. Not all at once, gentlemen, but gradually, might I not forget? But I have had no chance to test my suspicions, and never will have. Fate offers only one solution.
Sometimes Roseanne was rather sweet. When she looked at herself in the mirror, trying on a dress, she was always free of grimaces. Nearly all the rest of the time there was a nervous grimace present on her face, a kind of tic. It made her simply ugly. I have already said that I loved sitting in her living room at the table by the long glass wall, all the windows of the hallway and living room looked out on the Hudson River; I loved to sit and be silent. Darkness came on, and a little breeze blew on my face, and the lights burned in New Jersey on the other shore, and my heart felt so strange in my utter loneliness, and although Roseanne would say something sometimes about what good friends we were and how nice it was that we were friends, or she would complain, why had I forgotten that I was her friend… I heard little of it and looked at the water and was intimate with the breeze.
Ten days or so after the Fourth of July I fucked her again, this time with greater success, but also, as it were, in shame that I wasn’t justifying her hopes, wasn’t fucking her. In the line of duty, so to speak. I fucked her, and naturally went on lying in her bed; she was sleepy from her medicines but was still tossing and turning.
Suddenly I remembered a story of Slava-David’s, about a certain New York girl who had hysterically chased him out after passionate lovemaking, because, you see, she couldn’t sleep with men, wasn’t used to it. Love is love, but sleep must be sterile, deep, calm.
Remembering this, and respecting the freedom of the individual – I was not, after all, in the USSR – I asked sleepy, tossing Roseanne if she wouldn’t like to be left alone; even though it was late I wouldn’t mind going home. My ulterior motive was to escape from the morning, from her jumping up at six o’clock and the whole hysterical morning environment.
But now she rose to the occasion. Yes, she was unaccustomed to sleeping in the same bed with anybody, she had slept alone all her life, but it was already late, I would wait a long time for the subway, therefore I should stay.
I felt sincerely sorry for Roseanne for having lived all her life like this, in desultory fucking. She fucked rather a lot, I think, but had never known the incredible happiness of sleeping entwined in one mass with a loved one, of feeling, in the middle of the night, the sleepy breath of another living creature on one’s own shoulder. Even when Elena and I no longer made love we slept together, and at times, in her sleep, she put her arm around me, and I would lie awake holding my breath all night, afraid to stir lest that little arm disappear, go away. Tears would flow down my cheeks, not from any fucking weakness but from love. Ah, poor crazy Roseanne. I felt sorry for her.
Morning came. The pale dawn of a cloudy day penetrated the bedroom, and I discovered myself fucking Roseanne from behind, having set her on her knees. Gripping her butt, I thought: Lord, how boring it all is this way, without love, the morning is boring and the dawn is gray, how uninteresting it all is, I’ve even lost my hard-on.
The people who gathered at her place were defective. Once a man came who was sick with an incurable venereal disease. The disease would go away temporarily but then reappear. I had never heard of such a case, but here before me sat a live specimen. Roseanne, like a good tour guide, told me about the details of his disease, about the fact that his wife had now left him. Despite my own inglorious situation, my habit of ridicule was so deeply entrenched that I guffawed inwardly, admiring our company. He, sick with this crud; I, sick with love; and she, too, sick with her own disease. The three sickies went to a film and then to a little restaurant where, even though I was hungry, I did not eat, only drank a glass of rose. The venereal paid, and I was obliged to thank him. “Thanks,” I said to him, because I had no money. Roseanne told me to: “Thank him,” she said. I thanked him.
Gradually I reached the conclusion that I had no fucking need of her. Except that I kept up the relationship with her for the sake of having at least some sort of involvement in American life, seeing at least some sort of people. This was soothing to me. It’s not true that I thought ill of her, I thought well of her; that morning it was just that I thought I wanted a sweet young girl, naive, touching, and beautiful, not a fully formed monster. But life didn’t offer me any such girl, I had only two or three people to serve as my entrees into this world, and in order to find such a girl or man – as I have said, by now it was all the same to me – I had to meet her or him somewhere.
Where? My friends the Glickermans had obviously turned their backs on me because of my attempt to strangle Elena. A man like that, they thought, might do anything at all. I called Tatyana perhaps five times that spring, wanting to get together, but each time she postponed my visit under some pretext, until I understood clearly that I couldn’t fight my way in there. And why should I! I spoke badly, wasn’t a fascinating conversationalist, why should I go to their parties. I, a welfare recipient, ought to associate with people like myself, and not go social-climbing among artists and writers, not fill up the Glickermans’ living room with my pres
ence, not hobnob with Avedon and Dali. I stopped calling them.
My other acquaintances, too, obviously did not hold me in the highest repute because of my strangling Elena. That barbarian and scoundrel Eddie really had turned out to be an utter nobody in this world. As you see, I had no place to get appropriate acquaintances, I was stifling without a milieu, and that was another reason I didn’t break off with Roseanne. I too was calculating to the best of my abilities.
I say “was,” but I might as well say “am.” This period is not over, I am in it, in this period, even at the present time. This period of my life is characterized by an unconscious new habit of mine, a completely unconscious saying. Often when in my room or walking along the street at night, I have caught myself maliciously pronouncing one and the same phrase, sometimes aloud, sometimes to myself or in a whisper: “You can all go straight to hell!” Sounds good, doesn’t it? “You can all go straight to hell!” Good. Very good. That applies to the whole world. And what would you say if you were in my shoes?
Roseanne was working on a dissertation, I think she wanted to get her Ph.D. in philology. My feeling was, and still is, that nobody fucking needs those dissertations except for the people who defend them, as I declared to Roseanne with all lack of ceremony back in the early days of our acquaintanceship, at which she took offense. She was obsessed with her dissertation, but she was doing it slowly and in my view spent more time bitching on the phone than writing the dissertation. Nevertheless, she always talked about her work, mentioned that she was working, and anyone who didn’t know her might have thought she was a very businesslike person. Having lived here, I am convinced that people here generally work not more but less than in Russia, yet they are very fond of talking about their work and how much they work. In the USSR it’s the other way around: the nation traditionally considers itself an unbusinesslike nation, but in reality many people work much harder and more productively than American gentlemen. Maybe I’m unjust. But of course I am, and I don’t want to be just. I told Roseanne about it, told her that you Americans are very fond of making a big deal out of your work and how busy you are. Roseanne was offended on behalf of the American people and her dissertation, but it was so.
Whereas I could write in one morning, between eight and twelve or one o’clock, an average of five to ten pages, she barely eked out two, she said. I wrote my articles for Russkoe Delo, when I worked there, in two or three hours, and published more than twenty of them in six months. By now it’s autumn, and to this day she has not been able to write, as that same Charles of the Village Voice requested, a background article on the open letter Alexander and I wrote to the editor of the New York Times. It has to be done well, she says, she can’t hurry it, and she does nothing. But she and I are equally sick, I perhaps more so.
I stopped making love with her, I don’t know how she felt about this, she didn’t stop calling me. No, she considers me her friend, and I feel awkward telling her it’s not so. I have nobody, I can’t spit on her, turn around and leave. Especially since I’m beginning to think that she’s the only person who for some reason needs me. She has already called me several times at moments when I was very low. I am needed, you see, but only by a crazy woman. She herself says, “I’m paranoid.” On the wall in her study hangs a saying of Bakunin’s: “I shall remain an impossible person until such time as all possible persons cease to be so.” This saying, on a poster, is a remnant of her stormy youth, her participation in the struggle against the Vietnam war, her college teaching, student meetings, little leftist newspapers.
As it happens she really is an impossible person in this world, but to what degree am I, then, an impossible person? I must be a monstrously impossible person. I was an impossible person even there, in the country that gave birth to Bakunin; here my nonconformism is merely more colorful, more shrill, and takes more loathsome forms.
Ah, fuck it. Once Roseanne was having company. She asked me to come a little late, as if I had dropped by accidentally. The whole group was sitting on the terrace when I burst in. There were her new lover, Joe; Joe’s friend, a boastful photographer, with his wife; and some German guy that Roseanne, who spoke German fluently – it was the language of her childhood – had picked up on the street.
Joe was a very common-looking man in a red shirt. He talked very rapidly and somehow harshly. I thought he might have been in prison, he bore some imprint. In the USSR I had observed the same thing in Daniel – you’ve probably heard about the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel. Well, I once observed Daniel drunk. After spending six years in prison, when he got drunk he resembled a drunken criminal. Not that he behaved badly in any way, no, he was merely drunk, didn’t insult anyone, didn’t harass anyone. But his face, his manners, the way he gesticulated, the set of his body, made him a drunken criminal. Joe was the same way that night, he struck me as a drunken criminal. And it turned out he really was. Sometime later Roseanne called me and said Joe had confessed to her that he had done time for dealing in drugs. I was proud of my perspicacity, though the whole world lives by the same laws and it’s not surprising that I, who was already thirty, knew those laws.
Roseanne and Joe were fucking; if I had felt even a flicker of displeasure over this fact… nothing of the kind, shit, I was glad for her that someone was fucking her. It was nice he was fucking her, why not? Now she seems to have gotten tired of Joe and parted company with him, she didn’t want to go away with him for the weekend. “He’ll get me upset,” she said. She doesn’t want to get upset, doesn’t give a shit about other people’s problems. Besides, he drinks all the time. He’s a sculptor, this Joe; maybe I’ll have to see his sculptures sometime. He had in mind a rather crazy scheme to show his slides on the surface of the World Trade Center downtown, only I don’t know whether it was the first tower or the second.
I wasn’t at all antagonized by them, I listened attentively to the conversation, but didn’t find it interesting to sit with them. They didn’t argue about anything, didn’t focus critically on anything, they bypassed all the critical places, laughed without apparent reason, the whole conversation was built up out of little anecdotes, out of tiny particles – funny incidents or funny words. I find it hard to say whether it’s only they, “the Americans,” who are uninteresting, or whether people in general have become uninteresting to me. I think it’s that people in general have become uninteresting to Eddie, the ones who are only for themselves, about themselves, unto themselves. Russians are even more uninteresting to me than Americans. I’m in a lousy situation, really bad.
Roseanne is plain as day to me, so well defined that she irritates me. As you see, I can’t even use her as a woman. I can’t force myself even to that.
Sometimes I even seem proud of my satiety and the fact that I can calmly not use a sweet cunt. This circumstance, engendered of course by my tragedy, separates me from those who get for themselves, love themselves, live for themselves. If I knew that Roseanne needed me, that I could save her, help her, make her different, I would give myself; in essence, it doesn’t matter to me now where I throw myself, if only I could give myself completely. But I can no longer help her. No one can.
She and I are drifting ever farther apart, chance acquaintances who met a few times on her yellow sheets. Eddie-baby carries away with him only the soft breeze from the Hudson River, the lights of New Jersey on the other shore, and a piece of Debussy’s that she used to play.
I make money
One morning I was awakened by a call from John. “Come on down, Ed!” he said in English. Two minutes later I was downstairs and into the cab of the truck that stood by the entrance.
I was off to make myself some money. Anytime anyone offers me work, I don’t turn it down. These times are few, and in practice my sole source of work is John. He is my boss and the only person I know at the renowned Beautiful Moving Company.
John – formerly Ivan – is a fascinating person. A seaman who defected from a Soviet fishing vessel in the straits of Japan. In an inflatable rub
ber boat, riding the current off the Japanese coast, he survived a gale and was picked up by Japanese fishermen. From Japan he applied to go to the States.
John is a manly-looking guy, tall and strong, slightly snubnosed, the same age as Eddie. A Jack London character. He speaks English exclusively. The words are horribly mispronounced, with a dreadful wooden accent, but it’s English. He still condescends to speak Russian with me; he’s more severe with others. This version of the “man of the people” is very familiar to me; the desire not to be Russian, the scorn for Russia, for its people and language, are also familiar. My friend Paul, though with certain deviations, was almost the same type. His story is less successful than John’s but even more colorful.
God knows where Paul contracted his Francomania. Born Pavel Shemetov, the son of ordinary working parents, he lived in a small private house on the outskirts of Kharkov. During his four years in the navy, where he served as a seaman (John was navy too!), Pavel learned die French language down to the last detail. At the time I became acquainted with him his French was very sophisticated, he could speak with a Marseilles, Paris, or Breton accent at will. The French tourists who now and then passed through Kharkov on their way south – we picked them up, on Paul’s initiative, in order to drink vodka with them by the fence of the Metropolitan’s house, on a hill overlooking Kharkov, and barter goods with them – honestly took him for a repatriate, there had been many repatriates to the USSR from France.
It's Me, Eddie Page 24
