Jenny didn’t seem to pay attention to the poem then; she skimmed through it and put it aside, and I had already decided she was indifferent to art, which offended me a little, but very late that night she called me at my hotel after I had gone to bed and asked me to recite my poems to her. I explained that the poem I’d given her was the only one that had been translated into English, but unperturbed she answered: “It doesn’t matter. Read them in Russian, Edward.”
The funny part is that she liked it. She listened over and over for half an hour at a time without understanding a single word, and after that she would call me up in the middle of the night and ask me to recite to her.
Sometimes when she was barely awake.
But we didn’t sleep together or make love. Often we would lie on the grass in the garden for hours after dark, hardly speaking, but caressing each other like infatuated adolescents. Then, in the summer of 1977, I thought that there were times when I was in love with her in the most sincere way; I didn’t have to pretend. But maybe I wasn’t so much in love with her as with the empty green garden, the passing ships, the gray water of the East River, and the big house filled with books and elegant things, eh, “Comrade Limonov”? — as the manager of the Hotel Diplomat used to called me.
But I did fuck her soon after the first and last time she visited me at the hotel. That completely unexpected visit was to play an important role in our relationship.
Chapter Three
I’ve already mentioned how softhearted Jenny was. I often had the sense later on that she was studiously playing the role of my mother, despite me and possibly despite herself as well. It wasn’t her fault; nature made her do it, and nature is unyielding. The effect was often comical, although fifteen years younger than me, almost young enough to be my daughter in fact, she took me under her wing. It may be that Jenny became attached to me because that was what she needed — her nature required her to worry about somebody, to feed him and buy him clothes and press medicine and vitamins into his mouth. In that sense, I was a real find for her, the little mama!
I had, however, been neither very close nor very communicative with my real mother, and cut out on my own the first chance I got, cut out to wherever it was more interesting. I remember that I never even kissed my mother and was considered surly and unaffectionate, and was always being compared with the boy Valya Zakharov, who was not only affectionate with his own mother, but with mine too, and always came to kiss her whenever she visited his family. Where are you now, model boy Valya Zakharov? And really, where do all those model boys go?
By the time I was three, I had, according to my mother’s accounts, already ceased to trust her, and once, as she was carrying me home from a hospital in Kharkov after a bout with the measles and we had to cross some railroad tracks, I started screaming in a terrible voice, begging her not to throw me under a train which just happened to be racing past. A hysterical child, you say? Yes, maybe I did grab hold of my mother’s neck not out of love but in the same way a drowning man grabs on to the neck of the one who’s drowning him. Fifteen years after the episode with the train, my lack of faith in my mother was fully vindicated: She betrayed me.
There isn’t much to tell. We’ll pass over the reasons, but in the fall of 1962 I found myself locked in anguish and terror behind the walls of a neuropsychiatric institution. Like any energetic and lively youth who has suffered several weeks in the torture chambers of the «violent» ward, I made up my mind to escape. I called a meeting of my pals, my band of hoodlums, and they brought me the necessary equipment — a hacksaw blade and some clothes. In a couple of evenings I had managed to saw out two bars in the window grating, and then, after changing clothes, I jumped out, and disappeared into the darkness. And it was then, I remember, that I learned what an incredible pleasure it is to disappear into the darkness. Nothing can compare with it.
I made my escape alone; the several other «lunatics» who had planned to go with me got frightened at the last moment, although thank God they didn’t turn me in. It was my mother who did that the next morning. And from the best of impulses, from concern about me, as it turned out. “I really thought you were sick. The doctors told me that you were.”
My mother took the hospital orderlies and the police around to every one of my friends until, on what I think was the seventh of those visits, they finally found me sound asleep. I could have gotten away even then. As that gang escorted me downstairs, my mother walked along beside and assured me that although they were taking me back to the hospital, it was just to fill out the documents for my release. I looked down the flight of stairs and realized that if I suddenly jumped over the railing, the orderlies and the police wouldn’t be able to catch me, and that once I was downstairs, they would never find me, since I knew all the backyards and blind alleys and empty lots. But I trusted my mother, for which I paid with another three months of horrors and insulin shots, and was driven to such a state of rage and genuine insanity that I talked a giant, the handsome seventeen-year-old paranoid Grisha, who always went around naked out of reverence for his body, into killing the orderlies and escaping. Which Grisha agreed to do.
If you woke up every morning from the wheezing of a catatonic lying next to you who was being fed liquids through a hose into his belly and from the howls of a naked red-haired Bulat who kept screaming, “I’m the chief Soviet whale! I’m the chief Soviet shark!” then your faith in your mother, or anybody else for that matter, would soon perish. Probably my misfortune was that I had managed to land inside a psychiatric hospital at a still very tender age. My mother, of course, had never in her life been committed to a psycho ward, and so I made no attempt to tell her what I had seen there. I just kept silent. What was there to tell her? Like everyone else, she had her own life to live and was looking out for herself, mother or not. When the orderlies knock somebody down at the foot of your bed and start beating him until he’s bloody, then you do what’s necessary and draw your own conclusions about the world and mankind. I drew them.
And so when I saw Jenny’s motherly little ways, my feelings were mixed. On the one hand, I needed Jenny’s help and concern and company, and on the other, her mothering irritated and intimidated me, and I felt uncomfortable whenever I encountered it. In the beginning that happened rarely; after all, we’d only just become friends.
It was only a month after we first met that I finally learned that Jenny was the housekeeper — that it was her job to keep the house in order, that she had been living there for four years, and that she began as a live-in sitter for the “music teacher” Steven’s children. The “music teacher” grew from his initial innocuousness into something on the order of God the Father looming over our cloudless life in the millionaire’s little house and capable of ending it with a single word. Watch out, Edward!
And now that I am myself his housekeeper and servant, I find that my life is in a sense divided. One life I lead while Steven’s away, and the other I lead when Papa Steven’s at home. He’s only five years older than I am, but the sense never leaves me that he’s my father. When he’s not around, I commit “illicit acts” and carry on a “dissolute and sinful life,” which I carefully conceal from him out of fear of punishment. But when Steven’s at home, I go around with my lips pursed, an exemplary servant, and I retire early, don’t drink, and get up at seven, before he does, in order to have time to make him coffee.
Not only king, count, lord, and “master,” but also father, as in the Middle Ages. Not only tsar but father too. In his office, where you make your appearance every morning along with a throng of the other members of your trade, the boss hardly seems like a father, yet Steven Grey, someone to whom I am linked by a complex system of particularly intimate «employer-servant» relations, is necessarily a father too. And that’s why I fear his comings and tremble in panic. Terrible is the wrath of the father Abraham.
I can’t remember anymore exactly how I found out that Jenny was a housekeeper, a servant. Maybe she even told me herself, since sh
e certainly didn’t conceal it from me — that she was mistress of the house was something I imagined on my own. Externally I didn’t react; my expression remained unchanged, but internally I was dismayed. “Edward is the ‘lover of a governess. ” Or more accurately, the admirer. I remember that the words “housekeeper’s lover” and “servant’s lover” made a deep impression on me, and that henceforth I thought of myself as such, sometimes with bitterness and despair and sometimes with the defiant pride of an outcast. The pride of an outcast, in my view, can be even more passionate than that of an aristocrat or lord, however the hell ancient his family.
I later met European aristocrats in Steven’s house. Some of them traced their genealogies back to the times of Saint Louis and the Crusades. Just recently Lord Charley stayed with us, a likable alcoholic, one of whose ancestors had in some way distinguished himself at the Battle of Hastings. During his visit at the house, I made an instantaneous improvement in my knowledge of how Scotch whisky is made and of the various ways it may be employed. To start with, the lord rebuked me for drinking it with ice. Scotch, it seems, should at the most be mixed with a couple of drops of water. The lord mixed his one drop with his finger. He started drinking in the morning.
So now, having seen my share of aristocrats close up, I believe myself to be much prouder, morbidly proud in fact. But for me, as a proud man, there was also a kind of distinction to be found in the acknowledgment that “Edward is the lover of a housekeeper.” Well, all right, go fuck yourselves, so she’s a housekeeper, what of it? I still needed Jenny. And I stayed.
By the end of May I finally succeeded, patient pilgrim, in reaching her cunt. In the solarium toward morning after one of the usual bashes at her house, when she and I were both very drunk, I pulled off her pants and started fondling her pussy. A nice pussy to touch. Actually, in Jenny’s case it would be more accurate to call her organ a cunt. Jenny was a large girl, and she had a cunt, a childbearing organ, whereas pussies are found on girl-women, flat-chested and debauched androgynies who look like Olympia in the famous painting by Manet — you recall. My ex-wife Elena had a pussy. Jenny had a cunt. For me, unfortunately, it was somehow second-class. There’s a vast difference between a pussy and a cunt.
At first Jenny resisted, twisting and whimpering, but then, after turning on her side and raising her leg in what I have to say was a most indecent way and holding it there, she started to help me. Almost simultaneously with the appearance of a rosy strip of sky in the garden, she had an orgasm, during which she sobbed quietly like a rabbit. And at that moment I sincerely pitied her, a big baby, sick and drunk with a fat ass and thighs and that hole, that wound torn in her for some reason.
I don’t know why, but I didn’t stick my prick in Jenny that dawn; either I didn’t want a cunt but a pussy, or more likely I was simply too drunk to get it up. In any case, I didn’t even try to lodge it in her. After it was completely light, we stood up without speaking, like utter strangers, without even a kiss, and I went back to my hotel, not even wondering what it meant. The supermarket near me on Broadway was open, and I bought some beer and sausage that desolate morning, took it home and ate it, and then crashed.
I was awakened by the telephone ringing. “Yes!” I said in my usual way.
“Did you call me?” Jenny asked.
“No,” I answered, “I didn’t call.”
“Linda said somebody asked for me, a man who, spoke English with an accent. Linda thought it was you.”
“With an accent?” I mockingly asked. “That’s all I have. I don’t have the language, but I do have the accent,” I said.
“You speak pretty well, Edward,” Jenny objected, and added, “Debby and I are on Broadway not far from your hotel. We’re coming over, all right?”
She had never visited me at the hotel before. I was alarmed. My room really was so dirty, dismal, and poor. And glancing about my wretched little abode with its stained red bedspread, its peeling walls covered here and there with posters and drawings, and its hot plate on the windowsill, I thought, What will be will be! and I asked Jenny if she would give me half an hour.
“Why half an hour?” she asked, a little offended. “We’re right nearby.”
“My… translator, Bill, is here,” I lied. “He was passing through on his way from Massachusetts… We’ve been working on a translation, and we’re almost finished. He’s leaving in about half an hour.”
“All right,” Jenny answered, satisfied. “We’ll be there in half an hour.”
I rushed out to the store for some wine. I didn’t have any food either, but I didn’t have enough money to buy that, too. I had just enough for two bottles of wine, and then only the cheapest. And of course I didn’t know very much about wine then. It’s only now, after living in a house with probably the finest wine cellar on the whole East Coast of the United States, that I’ve become such a specialist, but then I didn’t know anything.
I had barely managed to return with the alcohol, had only just taken the bottles out of the paper bag, when the sisters arrived. I heard Jenny’s laughter coming down the corridor and the almost boyish voice of Debby, and I opened the door before they got there. They were smiling broadly and Jenny was shaking her head disdainfully.
“Somebody offered to sell us heroin on the elevator. Very cheap. When we said no, he offered us angel dust. ‘Very nice, ma’am, the best in town, ma’am, said this black guy without a shirt.”
‘“Whatever you want, ma’am, ” Debby continued. “And then he put his mouth right up to Jenny’s ear and quickly whispered, ‘Wanna good fuck, mama? “
The sisters laughed. The black slang sounded very natural in their imitation, as they drawled and sang the words. I could imitate the blacks, but I was a long way from their skill.
“So this is the way you live, Edward,” Jenny said, taking in my room with a mockingly squeamish look. “We had to wait fifteen minutes for the elevator, and in all that time we didn’t see one white person. Are you the only one here?”
Jenny sat down on the edge of my bed, on the red bedspread. On the wall above the bed was a huge slogan from Bakunin that I had written with a thick felt-tipped pen on separate sheets of paper and glued there: “Destruction is Creation!”
“Well, no,” I objected to Jenny, “I’m not the only white here. There’s an old Chinese man on my floor, and there are several old white women on Social Security, and our manager is white.”
I was even a little embarrassed that there were so few whites at our hotel. I offered the sisters some wine.
“Yes, we want some wine,” Jenny said, and stretched out on my couch, kicking off her shoes. “Give us some wine, Edward. We’ve come to visit you.”
Jenny made a face at the wine but drank it. We all sat on my bed, and after finishing the first bottle of wine, we opened the second and started arguing about revolution. The seventeen-year-old Debby took my part when I pronounced Steven an exploiter and declared my disagreement with inheritance laws that made it possible for idiots and half-wits of every kind to live in luxury and get on in the world just because their fathers and grandfathers were talented people. “I don’t object to people who’ve made their own way, who have gotten rich on their own — I even respect them,” I said, “but their children should start from zero like everybody else.”
Jenny said that Steven was neither an idiot nor a half-wit but a talented person in his own right and even a liberal.
I said that I didn’t mean her boss when I had been talking about half-wits, since I didn’t know Steven, but the system itself. “We need to completely reorganize society, our whole civilization; we need a world revolution, and the new history of man should start from zero,” I told the sisters.
“A revolution means blood and killing people,” Jenny said with conviction.
“What?” I said. “Read the history of any revolution carefully, Jenny. They all begin with flowers and fresh hopes, in a festive atmosphere, and it’s only counterrevolution that makes it necessary for
a revolution to take up arms!”
Then we all started yelling and interrupting each other and lighting cigarettes, until Debby and I somehow finally managed to convince Jenny. She admitted that her boss had very specialized talents, such as, for example, a talent for obtaining money to invest in his companies, but that he himself, without his inheritance, would never have been able to acquire a house and garden like that by the time he was forty, or his estate in Connecticut and all his millions of dollars.
“Even his grandfather was a millionaire,” I said heatedly, “but I’d like to see how he would have done if he had had to start out here at the Hotel Diplomat. Would he have survived or not!”
We all started laughing, and Jenny suggested getting out of the Diplomat and going somewhere for coffee.
“Then you’ll have to lend me some money, because I haven’t got a cent,” I said.
“Don’t worry about it,” Jenny said. “It’s our treat.”
We sat for a long time on some cardboard boxes waiting for the elevator. Dirty and squeaky though it was, it was the only one in all three wings and nine floors of the Hotel Diplomat.
We set off down Broadway, and they didn’t like it or anything it had to offer. Finally, after going almost as far as Lincoln Center, we took our seats in a little restaurant called “La Creperie.” I ordered something to eat and drank some wine, while the sisters had dessert and coffee. I ate while Jenny sat beside me and stroked my knee, which she had never done before. Something had clearly changed in her attitude toward me. The ice had broken somehow. Maybe the sight of my room and my awful slum hotel had persuaded her that I was real. I was just as honest as my hotel was. And just as straightforward.
Most likely that’s just what it was. She had seen that all my bullshit about revolution wasn’t entirely baseless, and she had seen my books and the typewriter and the sheets of paper. It was clear that I really was struggling, and that I had never had a fucking thing in life.
His Butler’s Story (1980-1981) Page 8