After lunch we rolled out of the restaurant into the snow. Women are boastful too, and Sarah immediately dragged me off to show to one of her friends, a photographer and sadist. She wanted to parade me in front of the sadist, of course, and to show the sadist off to me. I didn’t refuse her that pleasure, especially since the sadist lived close by and we could walk there.
“The walls of his studio are black. Don’t be scared, but he has chains and whips hanging on the walls,” Sarah told me hurriedly, starting to run ahead in the snow and looking back at my face.
“Do I really look like somebody who’s afraid of chains and whips?” I asked her, laughing.
“No,” said Sarah, “but I didn’t feel too brave myself the first time I went there, and I’m not afraid of anything either.”
There really were both chains and whips. The sadist was a stocky fellow of middle age and very tired-looking.
“Are you a photographer?” he asked me almost at the front door.
“Sorry, no,” I said. “I’m a writer.”
“A writer,” the sadist repeated with evident satisfaction and asked me to sit down. “You’re a lucky man,” he continued. “Write your books and remember that you’re very lucky. You’re not in this shitty business — photography, I mean. I detest it.”
At that moment a half-dressed honey-blonde model with butterflies painted on her cheeks emerged from a barely noticeable door, also black, and said:
“Raphael, I can’t do what he wants me to. For this money let him get somebody else. I’m leaving!” And she disappeared through another door.
“Calm down, baby,” Raphael called after her. “You think I want to do anything for the money I get?” He turned to Sarah. “I take it this guy is your new boyfriend?”
And not waiting for her to answer, he addressed me. “You aren’t an American, what are you? No, wait, let me guess. French?” he said, doubtfully.
“No,” I said, “Russian.”
“Ah, a Russian… a Russian… You’re lucky, Sarah; they say Russians are very good lovers. Does he fuck you good?” asked Raphael, turning toward Sarah on his revolving chair. I forgot to mention he was sitting on a revolving metal chair.
“God, Raphael,” Sarah said, “why do you have to be so obnoxious?”
“I’m a tired old professional sadist who earns his living in the shitty business of photography. The shittiest business imaginable. You’re only a young cunt,” he said. “How old are you, twenty-three?”
“Twenty-two,” Sarah said.
“Aha, twenty-two, but I’m fifty-four. I’d like to see what you’ll be like at my age.”
“At least I’ll never be so cynical,” Sarah said.
“Russian, what’s your name?” Raphael asked me, once again not giving Sarah the satisfaction of an answer.
“Edward,” I said.
“Listen, Edward, hold on to this Jewish princess. She’s a very talented photographer, even though she’s still a young little cunt. In a few years she’ll make a lot of money at photography once she gets this crap about photography being an art out of her head, and she’ll be able to support you very well. All you’ll have to do in return is give her a good fuck from time to time; nothing more is required. Based on what I hear about Russians, that shouldn’t be too hard for you.”
“I refuse to make money doing fashion photography. I want to do what I like,” Sarah angrily protested.
“Oh please!” he said, waving her away. “Don’t talk such rubbish.” And then he stood up. “If you want coffee or something to drink, help yourselves; if not, I am unfortunately going to have to kick you out. Fucking business!”
We turned down the coffee and rolled back out onto the street.
“Don’t worry, he’s not as bad as he seems. He gives me work and helps me make a living,” Sarah said, starting to talk very fast. “I’m a good printer, and he often asks me to do printing for him and pays me pretty well. The first time we met, he invited me to join his harem — he has a harem of several girls, models — but I refused to.” Sarah ran ahead again and looked back at me anxiously. “I’ve never slept with him,” she added uncertainly.
“Sarah, you don’t have to justify yourself to me,” I said. “Raphael’s fine as far as I’m concerned. I like crazy people. And I even enjoy the fact that he talks out loud about things that ordinary people don’t. I can’t stand polite conversations about the weather. Raphael’s all right; he’s a good fellow.”
“Yes,” Sarah said, relieved. “I’m glad you liked him. He’s very kind, even though he pretends to be mean.”
We went to her place in Brooklyn. Ordinarily I wouldn’t go to Brooklyn for any reason, but now I was following a cunt there, was being led there by a cunt hidden beneath a brown wool skirt.
Back at her apartment, we immediately lay down on her huge metal bed with brass knobs and several tiers of lattice work of various kinds, and started fucking… By the middle of the night I was trembling all over from just the touch of her fingers on my skin, and we were completely covered with sweat and semen. When I looked at my prick while we were taking a shower together, it was torn and bloody, or more accurately, worn out.
You think she took her wig off in the shower? Shit no; she just tried to keep her head dry.
“What’s wrong with your hair, Sarah?” I asked, trying to put the question in an indifferent tone, as if by the way. How did I know, maybe she had a complex about it; maybe the wig was her Achilles’ heel.
“I’m crazy,” she said, a little embarrassed and turning her head a little to the side with a lightly apologetic smile. “I tear out my hair sometimes when I get depressed. It’s growing back now.”
Jesus, I thought, is it really necessary to tear your hair out, and how much do you have to tear out before it becomes necessary to wear a wig? You really are crazy, Sarah. I used to know a girl who had the nervous habit of pulling out her eyelashes and who sometimes went around without them, but to pull your hair out… All of it?
Maybe Sarah lost her hair as a result of illness, say a thyroid disorder; I’ve heard of things like that. Actually, the absence of hair on Sarah’s head didn’t bother me; I had always rubbed shoulders with freaks and crazies, and anyway I didn’t consider myself exactly a paragon of mental health. If she didn’t have any hair, then she didn’t…
All the same, I spent New Year’s Eve by Jenny’s side instead of going out. I was fair and not without a sense of gratitude, although I took the addresses and phone numbers where I could reach either Sarah or Andrea — just in case. I say I spent it “by Jenny’s side” because the poor girl was sick in bed with a bad cold or the flu. However much I wanted to be out in the noise and the crowds, I stayed with her; she deserved a Happy New Year.
At exactly twelve midnight I drank some champagne with the patient, bought obviously with her money, and we toasted with Gatsby’s very best champagne goblets, made of German crystal. “What do you wish?” Jenny sniffled, and I told her: “I want to be famous and I want the whole world!”
I don’t know what she wanted, maybe ten children and me, a husband in pajamas. After our toast we chatted a little more, and then she let me go into the TV room to watch a New Year’s program. “You’re probably bored, Edward,” said the noble Jenny, letting me go.
I went downstairs to the TV room with my goblet, watched Yellow Submarine, had several martinis, and then around three, I went back up to the bedroom, feeling very calm and majestic. Jenny was asleep and breathing heavily in the midst of clouds of water vapor from two round electric humidifiers. They were her latest fad. She had heard somewhere that there wasn’t enough moisture in the air in wintertime and that it was therefore a good idea to sleep with humidifiers on. Grinning like a hoodlum, I unplugged them and went to bed.
The time flew by, January and then February — it was already 1978. I worked every day with the photographer Seva, remodeling his loft, and then rushed off to see my girls.
In the spring, my roommate, Joe Adler, g
ave up his dreams of a free and independent life as an artist after all. His mama had won. She found Joe a well-paying position in Yonkers, and he decided to give up his part of the apartment, and I, mad fool that I am, was suddenly overcome with a desire to take the whole place for myself.
At first Jenny didn’t approve. “How are you going to pay for it, Edward?” she reasonably observed when I first told her of my intention. “You don’t have a regular job.”
Jenny didn’t realize that she was in fact going to pay the one hundred and sixty dollars for the other half of the apartment. For I was sure I could easily hook her, so to speak, on the idea of our sharing the apartment together, the apartment serving as a kind of prologue to our shared family life, a place where our children could perhaps play someday. “Our own apartment.”
Ours or not, I still had no intention of giving Jenny a key to it. Hell no!
Mama Jenny’s maternal heart was of course unable to resist the temptation of having her own nest. Within a few days I had, in addition to my study and bedroom, my own living room with four windows.
My relations with Sarah developed, unfortunately, along the same lines they had with my other girls; that is, she gradually started to irritate me. I was tired of her. When we fucked, I sensed even through my marijuana or alcoholic stupor that she was giving herself to me and was moved by me, which is something I can’t stand, in fact. I hate it when other people love me but I don’t love them. Looking at her with as unprejudiced and sober an eye as possible, I suddenly realized that she wasn’t pretty enough for me. Maybe I understood that earlier too, but the feverish state of mind I was in whenever I grabbed whatever cunt happened to be available just to keep from being alone and masturbating, and suffering the anguish of not having anybody to stick my prick into or take at least a modicum of animal warmth from — that state of mind had passed.
Sarah now seemed to me to be just a crude little slut from Brooklyn — crude and uncultivated, fussy and loud.
She would flop down in my apartment and throw on the floor her trashy boots, underpants, stockings, and other awful things which I turned away from in embarrassment and distaste, just as I had from my mother and her feminine secrets when we lived together in the same room.
Once Sarah appeared at my door in a very agitated state. Rushing in, she immediately demanded bourbon and announced that she was very hysterical that day. She was pretty hysterical every day. Downing the bourbon and pushing her wig back from her forehead, she told me with an insane gleam in her eye that she had gone to see about a job and that the man doing the hiring had made her pull up her skirt and expose more of her bosom.
I said, “I hope he was satisfied; you have nice breasts.” And she really did have nice breasts, small and well-formed.
“Really, Edward?” she asked, becoming excited. “You really think I have nice breasts?”
“Yes,” I said, “you really do.” I didn’t add that in my opinion her temperament was too loud and screwed-up; I just said, “Sarah, I’m hungry!” And that was the honest truth too. I didn’t have any money and had been dreaming since morning of how nice it would be to have a piece of meat. I could have gone to Jenny’s, but I couldn’t take that crazy woman with me.
Sarah didn’t have any money either, as she happily informed me.
“Let’s fuck then,” I said, and we went into the bedroom. But it didn’t work; Sarah simply radiated craziness that day, and she kept giggling in a silly way. I gave up trying to fuck her and went back into my living room to make myself a drink. When I came back, she was naked and bending over like a monkey to cut her toenails.
“Sarah, it’s vulgar to stick out your cunt and cut your nails in front of somebody you love.”
“Edward, you’re so petit bourgeois!” she retorted, continuing to cut her toenails.
“All right, so what if I am, but you look gross,” I said.
She continued to cut her toenails anyway, chattering about something which I stopped listening to, and then she sprawled out on my bed, covering herself up a little, and put her dirty feet on my pillow. I’m not particularly squeamish, but I thought in puzzlement, What the fuck is the little slut lying around here for? What is she doing here? And then I said out loud that I had to meet some friends for dinner and that I couldn’t take her with me.
Sarah grew sad and said that she was leaving too, but she had to make a phone call first. “Is that all right?” she asked.
“Of course it is,” I said, and sat down at my desk as if I were going to write something…
Despite my indifference to her, Sarah still continued to play a role in my life for a long time. Long after Jenny had left and the traces of other less remarkable girls in my life had grown cold, Sarah still turned up in my bed now and then. Maybe the hope of obtaining me blazed up in her again from time to time. She really tried to win me. Even after I had grown completely insolent and sent her as a sort of living present to a friend of mine who had just arrived from Europe and was living by himself on Madison Avenue and didn’t know anybody in New York and didn’t have anybody to fuck, Sarah went obediently. I’ve already said that Sarah was open to any experiment.
We broke up just recently. After supper at P. J. Clark’s, we came back to the millionaire’s little house and climbed into bed, either to fuck or to sleep. But Sarah was so drunk and stoned that her Brooklyn upbringing started to come out. She accused me of greed (!), of having a middle-class mentality (!), and of other terrible sins as well, and shouted “Shit!” and “Fuck!” and laughed hysterically. She drove me into such a rage with her crazy behavior that I threw her out without fucking her. I am, when it comes down to it, the servant of millionaires. I have rich neighbor-whores living next door to me who sometimes even allow themselves to call up on the phone during parties given by my employer and complain about the noise. I don’t much care for noise myself, and so in a fury I hit her naked body and threw her out on the street at three o’clock in the morning. I made her pick up all her rags, and I threw her out without even screwing her. I said, “Get the fuck out of here right now!”
Sarah looked at me with reproachful, sobered eyes and said over and over again, “Edward, aren’t you ashamed of yourself! Aren’t you ashamed of yourself!” I was ashamed, but I had decided to punish her.
A few days after that episode, I received a letter in the official envelope of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Sarah was working as a photographer. The letter was a remarkable one, and it was obvious that Sarah really did love me, so bitter was her farewell:
You’re a big, gaping, empty zero. You’re a synonym for permanent failure. You’re a failure in friendship, you’re a failure in love, and as far as your career is concerned, you’re nothing but a self-deluded jerk. You’re unlucky in everything you do because all you care about is your own superficial, insensitive personality.
The real reason your book isn’t making it in the United States has nothing to do with its so-called controversial theme. The reason nobody will touch your book here is that the United States has much higher standards for literature, and your book just isn’t good enough. Carol [her deadly dull, gray friend who works as a drudge at a publishing house] actually told me that your book is self-indulgent and boring, and that she couldn’t even think about showing it to her publisher.
In the last analysis, your ideas are all on the surface and don’t mean very much at all. You’re just a pretentious idiot.
I doubt you have even one friend in this world you could show this letter. Nobody who would laugh at how silly all this is.
Go on living like a servant and moving from one servant’s job to another and intoning your clichés.
Nobody will ever be affected by anything you do.
You’re a baby with a huge ego. You’re masturbating your way through life.
There wasn’t any signature.
Chapter Six
I broke up with Jenny very unexpectedly, although it was exactly the way I had always wanted to break up.
She found herself another guy, got pregnant by him almost immediately, and went to live with him in another city — Los Angeles. God gave her a baby and established her in the life that was most befitting for her; with me she had obviously violated both the divine and the mundane orders of things.
After meeting my ex-wife Elena, Linda said to me, “Edward, I just can’t see what Jenny and Elena have in common. Elena is a very stylish woman, but Jenny was almost a peasant.” I explained to Linda that Elena had been the wife of the Russian poet Eduard Limonov, whereas Jenny was the girlfriend for a year and a half of another person altogether — a poor, unemployed welfare recipient and tenant of a single-room-occupancy hotel, the New Yorker Edward.
Jenny did the right thing in leaving me, or nature did. She wasn’t getting anything new from our relationship, and even though we had started making love again, there were times when she was indifferent to my prick, and she was only very rarely happy; sexually, we just weren’t compatible. Occasionally, she would start talking about marriage, and I, attempting to look sad, would say that we couldn’t afford to start a family yet, and she would agree and drop the subject for a while.
I don’t know if she ever suspected that I was having affairs with other women, or if she believed I was satisfied by the meager diet she provided. I just don’t know. She did, I remember, find women’s things in my bathroom several times — a little watch, a necklace, a ring — and there were several other times when she found hairpins on my bedroom floor. But either she preferred to believe me when I told her that one friend or another of mine had spent the night there with a girl or when I made up some other, sometimes rather clumsy lie, or perhaps, reasonably enough, she just didn’t want to make a scene about it. But I don’t think that she ever did suspect just how frantic my sexual life was, so frantic that I even had a little green book in which I wrote down my amorous meetings so I wouldn’t get them mixed up. Sometimes I had two or even three different girls in a single day, and I was as proud of my Don Juanism as any adolescent.
His Butler’s Story (1980-1981) Page 16