His Butler’s Story (1980-1981)

by Edward Limonov

  “Yes, I know all about Marilyn; Jenny told me,” I replied, although I had never suspected that my being hired as housekeeper concealed such complicated behind-the-scenes machinations, intrigues, and struggles. “I thought Steven hired me because he’s a snob,” I said, “so he could brag a little to his friends about his butler being a writer.”

  “That too,” Linda nodded, “but you’ll still have to try to please Nancy, if you don’t want her undermining your position here. My feeling is that she still hasn’t given up the idea of Marilyn. So be careful!”

  “What should I do?” I asked.

  “You’ll have to try really hard, and when they see that you’re indispensable,” Linda said, “they’ll leave you alone. You’ll have to straighten up the house, clean out the basement, rearrange the tools, check each room individually, and fix all the little defects…” And she gave me an extremely long list of things to do, including scraping and repainting the front door.

  “And after I’ve finished taking out all that rubbish, they’ll hire Marilyn,” I said.

  “What do you want?” Linda asked irritably.

  And, really, what did I want? I went downstairs to the basement and worked there until six in the evening, and I did so because I wanted to remain in that house and be for a time a servant of the world bourgeoisie, at least until I got tired of it or until something else turned up. What else could an opportunist do? We always like to get ourselves in as tight as possible with the rich and famous. Maybe I’ll find myself a rich woman here, flashed feebly through my mind. Then we’ll see, I thought, as I cleaned out those Augean stables. The labors of Hercules and the cleaning of the Augean stables — you remember. It was only then that I realized what a shitty housekeeper Jenny was. The basement obviously hadn’t been cleaned for years, while she sat warming her ass in the kitchen and nurturing her “tummy,” as she called it, tending it and pampering it for her belly dancing efforts.

  I, the diligent whore Limonov, licked it all up and even found in the basement some remnants of the orange carpet that covered the hallway and stairs, and used them to repair the first three steps, which were completely worn out and torn. I knew how to serve — the first thing was to cover up the most conspicuous holes and let your boss see that you were working and make him aware of the results. And I also sorted out all our tools, electrical tools in one drawer and mechanical in another, and even sorted all the nuts and bolts and put white labels on the drawers so you could tell where everything was.

  But the three steps made the biggest impression, naturally. When about ten days later Steven made his first appearance at the house after hiring me, he noticed those three steps, since they had bothered him too; they were in fact the first thing you saw when you came in, and although he didn’t really want to spend money on a house in which he spent so little time, he was ashamed of those steps before his guests, who were as snobbish as he was. And so was Linda, whom in the first months of my employment I didn’t trust at all, considering her a spy for her employer, which in a certain sense she probably was, and not only then, either — I even overheard Linda telling Nancy on the phone, “…He fixed the steps in the hall… He does everything well.”

  I’ll be damned if I didn’t learn something from them — from Linda and from Gatsby, too. Both good and bad, depending only on how you look at it. “Don’t trust anybody but yourself,” Linda taught me. “Check on everybody — everybody! Start from the premise that the people you work with are lazy assholes; that’s the only way you’ll avoid mistakes.”

  She taught me not to trust anybody, and I didn’t, whether it was the butcher, the proprietor of the Modern Age framing shop that mounted and framed our pictures and photographs, the watch repairman to whom we sent Nancy’s gold and Steven’s ultramodern quartz and electronic watches to be fixed, the furrier Kaplan, or the opticians at the extraordinarily expensive optical shop of Clermont-Ferrand where I took Steven’s no less ultramodern glasses, or whether it was the bartenders and waiters who came to assist at our parties, or the electrician John, or the many, many others. Linda herself said I was paranoid about the bartenders, whom I virtually frisked when they left, in my stubbornness thereby rescuing a whole case of champagne once. Nor, as a result, did I have an iota of trust for Linda either, and never told her anything she could use against me. I was a very capable and diligent pupil, dear Linda, and “trust nobody” meant nobody.

  Once on a Saturday, a day when Linda doesn’t come in, the mailman delivered along with a pile of junk mail a registered letter which he asked Limonov to sign for. I signed for it, and since it was January and a wet snow was falling, I asked the mailman in for a cup of coffee out of altruism and boredom. He passed through to the kitchen, leaving muddy footprints behind, and drank his coffee while we chatted for a while. Outside the snow was coming down in sheets. The mailman was like any other — nothing special, a moustached man of about fifty who complained about the weather and his salary just as they all do. As soon as he left, I went down to the basement for a rag and then spent five minutes or so cleaning up the mud he had tracked in. And you want to be a lover of mankind, I thought to myself, and then from boredom and curiosity I opened the registered letter, from which a check dropped to the floor.

  I picked it up and looked at the figure and couldn’t believe my eyes. Printed on the check in thick red numerals was the number 400,000 — four hundred thousand dollars! Linda had asked me always to call her if there was anything urgent. I thought this was urgent enough to disturb her on her Saturday off, and I dialed her number.

  “What’s the matter?” Linda asked me in an indolent, homey voice.

  “They just brought an urgent letter,” I said cheerfully, “with a check in it for…” and then I faltered, since it was actually hard for me to say the number out loud — “for four hundred thousand dollars.”

  Linda understood, and started laughing. “I realize, Edward, that you’ve never seen a check for a sum like that in your life. Relax, it’s nothing special. After you’ve worked for us a little longer, you’ll get used to it. I started trembling and gawking too when I first started working for Steven eight years ago. Just put the check on my desk.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better to put it in the desk?” I asked uncertainly.

  “Well, then put it in the desk, if you want to,” Linda agreed, losing interest in me.

  I put the check in the desk drawer in her office and sat for a while on her wheeled leather chair between the IBM typewriter and the telephone, and then took the check out of the drawer and looked at it. The unlikely amount of $400,000.00 stood out blood red against the pale lettuce green of the check like a Soviet banner over a green Czechoslovakian town. I tried to figure out how many years I’d have to work to accumulate such a sum. I was earning nine thousand a year in cash; that meant I’d have to work for Steven for forty-five years to make that kind of money. I thought that I would hardly live to be eighty, so I would have to think of some way to speed up the process. I hid the check and sat for a while longer, then took it out again and put it on the desk. After all, I wasn’t expecting any guests that weekend.

  Steven arrived for the first time in a limousine one evening in the middle of January — he had been skiing in Colorado — praised his servant for the steps, glanced at the book The Women’s Room, which the servant was reading while sitting in the kitchen, and then asked the servant if he liked the book. I said it was terrible. Gatsby said he hadn’t read the book, but he thought it would have to be terrible — neither employer nor servant were feminists, as you no doubt have already been able to guess, gentlemen. At that time, the inhabitants of the United States looked eagerly for either feminism or anti-feminism in every aspect of life, the feminist epidemic having burst on the scene even before the roller skating epidemic. Even people who had once seemed far from stupid to me suddenly turned out to be idiots whenever feminism was concerned. They all wanted to be liberal and ally themselves as quickly as possible with the latest liberal sup
erstition.

  I didn’t say any of this to Steven, although I would have enjoyed talking to him. Except for Linda, I really didn’t have many people to talk to in the millionaire’s house either then or now, which is why I spend so much time in internal monologues. Gatsby remained in the kitchen no more than a couple of minutes to drink a glass of milk, and then he went off to bed. He never has time, or if he does, he prefers to talk instead of listen, as a result of which he misses a great deal, I think. If I should ever notice that I’ve gotten fond of chattering and that other people are actually listening to my words, I’ll make an effort to look around and see if among my listeners there aren’t at least a couple of quietly skeptical Limonovs.

  When I came downstairs to the kitchen at 6:50 the next morning, it was still empty. I sat there by myself until 8:30, looking out the window and listening to every sound in the house, before I realized that the Flying WASP had already split.

  I’ve since learned how to tell quite easily whether or not Gatsby’s in the house on the basis of some very simple signs — every servant knows what they are. For example, if I don’t find The New York Times by the front door when I get up, that means that my employer has risen before me, or that he hasn’t spent the night in the house but has been off fucking somewhere else, and picked up the newspaper on his way in after taking a taxi home. He also has the habit of drinking white wine, the Italian Corvo, with his women before going off to bed with them, so that, as I’ve already mentioned, I always keep two or three bottles of it in the refrigerator for him and a case of it in the cellar. So, if there’s a bottle of Corvo missing from the refrigerator, that almost certainly means that Gatsby has a lady with him. Around eleven o’clock in die morning, Olga brings the empty bottle and two glasses down to the kitchen with a regularity that I find touching.

  Now I try to get up before Steven does, so that I’m already sitting and finishing The New York Times when he comes into the kitchen with his hair uncombed and his strong legs and bare feet sticking out from under his short robe. I always have his coffee ready or at least some boiling water so that I can make it at once. As His Majesty is sitting down to read the paper, I’m already serving him his coffee in one of the huge mugs we have in two colors, red and blue. If Gatsby has a woman upstairs, he doesn’t stay in the kitchen very long, but takes his coffee, paper, and another cup of coffee back upstairs after asking me to make breakfast or not, as his mood or that of his lady dictates. If Gatsby takes the coffee back upstairs, it’s almost certain the lady is Polly, a cultivated but slightly inhibited woman. But if in the morning Gatsby asks for a pot of tea, that means he’s spent the night with the Tea Lady, as Linda and I call her. The Tea Lady is another of Steven’s more or less regular girlfriends and of Asian origin, I think.

  If Gatsby orders breakfast, I usually fix him a tray with something simple. He eats a lot at lunch and dinner, and so for breakfast he usually has just English muffins lightly browned in the toaster, butter, cheese if there is any, and jam. Only very occasionally will he ask me to make him an omelet. He drinks orange juice too, of course, as almost all Americans do, and it would be a strange thing if you too didn’t want orange juice in the morning after getting sloshed every night, and I suspect Gatsby is in a pretty good state every night, since His Highness drinks all day, beginning with lunch, continuing with dinner and after dinner, and ending late at night with a bottle or two of Corvo. What amazes me is that he never takes the hair of the dog to relieve his hangover — just orange juice and cold soda water. We always have ten or twelve cylinders of seltzer on hand which are brought to us every Thursday by a funny little man from Brooklyn named Mr. Schuman, who looks like a mosquito. I always keep a couple or three of them in our gigantic refrigerator — so large in fact that you could easily fit a couple of bodies into it.

  Gatsby almost always comes down to get the breakfast tray himself. He could make me bring it up to him, but he’s too liberal to do that. Demanding that their servants bring the tray to their bedroom is the hallmark of bad bosses — our neighbors, for example, whose servants have told me what they’re forced to put up with. But my boss is a good one, the best of all. If he doesn’t want to come and get the tray, we simply use the dumb waiter. But that happens pretty rarely.

  Whenever Steven’s in New York, Linda arrives at the house at nine o’clock sharp, and sometimes even earlier. She always knocks on the kitchen door in precisely the same way. Not long ago I begged her to change the way she knocks for the sake of variety. She did for a little while, but now she does it the old way again. Linda’s first question is, “Where is he?” If «he» is in the bathroom, she relaxes and sits down in the kitchen with me for a bit.

  Gatsby takes a bath every morning, a bath being one of his principal pleasures in life, as his oldest son, Henry, told me. His bathtub is a very special one, large and deep, and custom made. I don’t deny myself the pleasure of using his bathtub either, and from time to time luxuriate in it with a girl, or even two. And I always think, whenever I’m sitting in his bathroom, what would happen if he suddenly came in and saw me and my naked girls. But that never happens — we’re too well organized. We have an extremely detailed schedule of Gatsby’s activities, so that I always know ahead of time when to expect him. He surprised me only once when there were naked people running around the house, although fortunately I wasn’t one of them.

  Linda’s second question is even more succinct: “Alone?” In our private language that means something like, “Did Gatsby spend the night alone?” If I say that he didn’t, Linda’s asks, “Who?” She wants to know who’s with him, naturally. She and I are, in this, much like real servants: We love to spy on our employer and rummage in his dirty laundry.

  I, as his butler, am required to sort out his dirty laundry in the most literal sense of the word, to take it out of the suitcases he brings home after his trips around the globe, to fish it out of the extraordinary mixture of papers, new books, medicines, notebooks, cameras, cassettes, pants, jackets, and phone messages on stationery from hotels from all over the world, and foreign currency in every conceivable form, size, and color with which his suitcases are crammed.

  Now I take the lion’s share of whatever currency I find for myself. It wasn’t that I was afraid to before, but simply that I didn’t know how he would feel about that kind of expropriation. Convinced by all the evidence that he had no recollection of those paltry francs and pounds (my God, he spent hundreds of thousands a year, didn’t he?), I started helping myself. No, no, I’m not talking about hundreds of dollars, just small amounts — five dollars here, twenty dollars there. After all, a butler has to do a little stealing, or what kind of servant is he? Employers are right to believe that all servants steal, but the good servants are the ones who do so within acceptable limits, whereas the bad ones do so impudently. I wouldn’t let anybody plunder Gatsby’s things, nor would I myself take even one object. When not long ago two little silver vases from a sterling service disappeared, I was overcome with self-pity and despair, lest Gatsby think I’d stolen his silver when I hadn’t, but the forgotten bank notes justly belong to me, gentlemen, and no argument. After all, I only make a hundred and sixty-five dollars a week.

  In answer to the question “Who?” I reply to Linda, “The Tea Lady,” or, “Polly,” or, “I think it’s a new one.” Linda is also interested in what kind of mood Steven is in that day. «Average» happens rarely; most often the answer is either «excellent» or “very bad.” Armed with this knowledge and clutching an ashtray, Linda invariably goes upstairs to her room after pouring herself a cup of coffee and adding milk to it. She’s been spilling milk on the kitchen table every day now for two years, just as I have been giving her reproachful looks for two years while she gets mad.

  I wander idly around the house or sit by the kitchen window, my favorite spot, and look out at the street and think, while nervously waiting for Steven to make his appearance. I already know from the schedule, say, that there will be three people for lunch
at 12:30. I’ve already set the table in the dining room and put out the silver bread-and-butter plates too. I haven’t forgotten: Everything’s ready, all our magnificence is on display, and there are new candles in the candlesticks, although I still don’t know what Gatsby wants for lunch. I wait for him to escort his lady from the house and seat her in a taxi — for them to pass by the window, the lady in a fur coat and Steven without any jacket as usual — and then, as soon as he has returned to the house and before he has a chance to sit down in his office and make his first call, I deftly intercept him and ask, “Excuse me, sir [or Steven], what would you like for lunch today?”

  And Gatsby will say, “Lamb chops. I haven’t had lamb chops in a long time.” But if he’s had meat in the last few days, then he’ll say, “Make something light, Edward. Let’s have fish, salmon steaks, maybe, or Long Island Sound scallops.” Or perhaps he will say in an irritable voice, “I don’t know, Edward, make whatever you want. I’m sick of always having to decide and worry about everything.” In the latter case, I always decide in favor of meat.

  Having received my orders, I trot around to the stores as fast as I can, first calling the Ottomanelli Brothers butcher shop, if Gatsby has decided to stick with meat:

  “Good morning! How’s it going? This is Edward, Mr. Steven Grey’s housekeeper.”

  And one of the butcher brothers, wiping his hand on his white apron, will say, “Great, Edward, what do you hear from Jenny? Has she had her baby yet?”

  I’ll say no, she hasn’t, or later that yes, she has.

  “What would you like today?” the Ottomanelli brother will ask me then, since they don’t have time for long phone conversations — there are very probably about a dozen rich old twats standing in the shop who’ve come to pick out the best meat, and just as many maids who’ve come for the same purpose.

  “Send me a dozen lamb chops for lunch, please,” I’ll say, “only hurry up this time. The last time your delivery boy was slow in getting here, and I had to serve lunch ten minutes later than planned.”