“Of course, Edward. Don’t worry, he’ll be on time today,” the butcher will say. “Bye!”
At first this ritual amused me. Now I’m sick of the regulated order of my life and the huge annual schedule on the cork wall in Linda’s office and the monthly schedule that hangs in front of her nose and that’s tacked to the lamp on the desk in Steven’s office. The fact that I know what Steven will be doing in six months, and therefore what I’ll be doing, is repellent to me. I live for the present, for those moments when Steven isn’t in the house, and knowing beforehand that he’ll be here, say, for five days next week, I already begin to anticipate how tired I’ll be. I plunge into his visits with trepidation, with my eyes closed, and I reemerge from them with joy. Maybe that’s only because I’m not a real housekeeper but a sham one, or maybe every servant feels that way. Or maybe I really am a housekeeper, and the writing business is just something I’ve made up for myself, it occurs to me sometimes. The only part of my life that has anything to do with writing are the few lines I scribble down in cheap notebooks from Woolworth’s and the phone calls I make from time to time to my agent, Liza, to find out which publisher she’s received a rejection from this time. There are already more than a dozen of them now — a dozen rejections. That’s my whole connection to writing, whereas I’m connected to the world of service all the time. Probably I am a servant. I’m a servant, a servant, and writing is merely something I play at, I think bitterly.
After buying groceries, I drag myself home loaded down with packages and bags, trusting Olga to put everything away for me while I methodically set about preparing lunch. I’ve learned to be precise — I know when to put the Brussels sprouts on and when to begin cleaning the broccoli, and the only thing that might possibly put me off schedule is the inordinate activity of Steven and his businessmen. From time to time one of them will come in and ask me to bring him a cup of coffee. I then have to take the sterling tray with coffee pot, cups, and milk and sugar to Steven in the office. I take it in, although it makes me angry. Steven thanks me, and I go back downstairs to my spacious kitchen, where I sometimes open the door and stand in it, cleaning the vegetables and thinking how nice it would be if all of them — Steven, and his businessmen, and Linda — would just leave me in peace.
Linda always claims part of the lunch for herself: “Edward, always order for yourself and me whatever you order for Steven,” she reminds me.
“If they’d only hurry up and finish stuffing their faces,” I mutter to myself, “and get back into their papers and arguments and so on, I can take my time clearing the table and worry about myself and my own thoughts.”
I cook the meat over a grill for five minutes on one side and three or four on the other. The Italian brothers without a doubt have the finest meat in the world; it melts in your mouth like butter. “Steven likes everything around him to be very classy,” Linda never tires of repeating, and I try to make it all as «classy» as I can: The vegetables and the meat are served on sterling too. The table looks impressive and beautiful, and if Gatsby is in a good mood, he may express his appreciation by saying, “Thank you, Edward!” But if he’s in a bad mood, you won’t get a fucking thing out of him, not even if you cooked him angel’s meat for lunch. Actually, his words of praise don’t mean that much to me. The best thing he can do for me is to eat his lunch in forty minutes and get the hell out of the dining room. But Steven sits at the table with his very important guests for an hour to an hour and a half on the average, and sometimes for three. And I nurse my antipathy in the kitchen.
After his guests finally leave and Gatsby returns to his office, I happily clear the table and then go upstairs to my room and flop down on the bed, sometimes even allowing myself to doze off with my clothes on for fifteen or twenty minutes or so. Frequently the doorbell rouses me, and then I race downstairs on the elevator. Gatsby won’t open the door — why should he? — and Linda is more often than not on the telephone at any time of day, and however many businessmen there may be in the house, they won’t make any effort even to open the door — that’s my responsibility, or Olga’s, but Olga leaves at one o’clock. I don’t react to telephone calls during my brief afternoon nap; I just continue to doze and nothing more. Man is a highly organized form of life, and I endure the two hundred and fifty to three hundred calls that come into our house each day without going out of my mind as the rats of Professor Pavlov or whomever would undoubtedly do.
Linda leaves at six or seven. Sometimes Steven is still having a Scotch with his businessmen, but if he doesn’t happen to see anybody around, he’s capable of fixing it himself. At eight or nine Gatsby is already dining out somewhere. Either at the Four Seasons or some other «classy» restaurant. He very rarely stays in unless he’s sick or the summer or winter Olympic games are on, since he loves sports. In my view he has too many interests in life. If he had fewer, I as his servant would have less work to do. If Steven were, say, to give up photography and making underwater movies, I wouldn’t have to run over to Forty-seventh Street to get his cameras repaired or go to the Modern Age framing shop.
Actually, Linda is more to blame for my trips around New York. Steven often yells at her for spending his money like water — she issues the checks and takes care of Gatsby’s bank accounts. So now the trusty Linda cuts corners in little things. She’s started using me as a messenger, not all the time, but she still does it. Delivery service charges have jumped back up, and she’s decided it’s cheaper for her to pay my taxi fare than to pay somebody sent by a delivery agency. At the same time that Steven bought Nancy a necklace for twenty-two thousand dollars as a gift. At the same time that it cost His Highness more than ten thousand dollars just to ship his racing car from England to California so he could take part in a race. It’s called economizing.
It’s my own fault too. I gave in to Linda a little, not in everything, but enough for her to get the upper hand. I myself volunteered in the beginning to run whatever errands she wanted — I said I liked walking around New York and preferred to be active. And it really is pleasant sometimes to hang around in the area of Fifth Avenue for a couple of hours instead of sitting at home with Linda and Steven and his gaggle of arrogant businessmen who think they’re the saviors of mankind, the key people in the world and the most important. The businessmen are firmly convinced that they’re the ones who give us poor mortals our work, our jobs, and that if it weren’t for them, the human race would soon be extinct. They’ve been taught their insolence by the American press, by books, movies, and television, but it’s a delusion, an American myth. They’re as proud of themselves as poets, these business gents. I used to think poets were the most arrogant and proud creatures on earth, but now I see that I was wrong; poets don’t even come close.
I’ve also spoiled Linda by making lunch for her. Even when Steven isn’t home I still make something, and around one o’clock Linda and I sit across the kitchen table from each other and feed our faces. It frequently happens that I don’t feel like eating, and even more often that I don’t feel like cooking, but I have to. I started that routine myself, hoping to predispose Linda to me, and I succeeded, and now she gets very offended if I refuse to make lunch for her. She’s even picky about what she eats, gentlemen — can you imagine that? If I make tuna fish with onion, which is easy to do — the whole operation only takes me ten minutes — Linda complains about the lack of variety in our diet: “Not tuna again, Edward!” Several months ago we discovered grilled Polish sausage and ate that with enthusiasm. But now Linda doesn’t want Polish sausage anymore; she’s sick of it, you see, and it might be fattening.
I don’t think it’s the Polish sausage that’s making Linda fat, but the fact that she’s been working for Gatsby for eight years, and getting nervous, and losing her temper, and putting up with Steven’s various moods, the moods of someone who’s closer to her than her own relatives, and taking pride in him, and hating him. I even have a suspicion that she’s in love with him — I mean it. Linda’s been sitting i
n one place too long; she needs some fresh new air and new people. I can see it, and even Jenny could. Linda needs to tell the millionaire’s house to shove it, and jump into life, and then she’ll stop gaining weight. And leave David, her fifty-year-old Jewish boyfriend of habit who’s always complaining he doesn’t feel well, and get herself a younger lover and start a new life.
Sometimes after one of her periodic arguments with Gatsby, Linda mutters about looking for another job, that she’s had it, that eight years of slavery is enough, but it’s still a long way, gentlemen, from fancy speeches to actually attempting to break out of a well-paying cage. She’ll never do it, although I hope to God I’m wrong.
I can picture the old Steven Grey inevitably cut down by a stroke during one of his rages and stuck in a wheelchair (a wheelchair of the most modern construction, of course, with computer controls) and bickering in the millionaire’s house with the old woman Linda. It’s all perfectly clear: they’ll never change. Gatsby will never stop, and he’ll never give up “this fucking business,” to use his expression, and take up teaching and become a professor, as he once threatened to do in my presence during a forty-five-minute access of sincerity. No, it’s all perfectly clear as far as Steven and Linda are concerned, and the only person for whom nothing is clear is the butler Edward — what will happen to him, and where and how and in what capacity he’ll meet his end. So that it’s possible I’m wrong to complain. I’m unquestionably freer than they are, although less happy. But you have to pay for freedom, butler Edward, so shut up and stop complaining about slavery.
But let’s get back to the lunches. Another reason why Linda insists on them is that she doesn’t want to spend her own money. She’s a bit stingy, as Jenny told me. Not that she’s pathologically greedy — she asked Jenny and me out to restaurants more than once, and she and David paid their share without any fuss, and Linda gives parties at her home, but she’s frugal. With Jenny she didn’t have it as good as she does with me — a free lunch, just like the kids in school. Jenny baked bread and cooked, but not every day.
But I continue to feed Linda; I don’t resist. Anyway, she sometimes does things for me too, things I either can’t do by myself or that are a nuisance for me to do. For example, she checks my business letters written in English from time to time and corrects my mistakes or even retypes the letters, which is very important to me. At the beginning of my career in Gatsby’s house, she helped me make lunch; I didn’t even know how to steam vegetables — all that asparagus and broccoli and those artichokes and Brussels sprouts — she helped me, and though she did introduce more fucking nervousness and fuss into the process than was necessary, her help was of great value, and I admit it. Moreover, when Steven wasn’t around, she even tried to teach me correct English pronunciation. I quickly tired of that activity, it’s true, but for a while I read her articles out of The New York Times I’d found interesting, and she corrected my pronunciation and explained the rules.
But Linda’s principal merit is that she talks to me. Several times a day I go up to her office, sit down on the couch next to her desk, and if she isn’t busy, gossip with her or talk about politics. But our main discussion club is in the kitchen, where during lunch we talk about the news of the day. I read all the international news in The New York Times without exception, and I regularly read Newsweek and Time, and for that reason am better acquainted with what’s going on than Linda is; I’m a newspaper freak and Linda respects my knowledge.
After my private eighteen-month propaganda campaign for an equal and unified humanity, Jenny departed for Los Angeles a very different Jenny than she’d been when I first met her. She hadn’t become pro-Russian or a great lover of communists, but after associating with me for a while, she realized that the human beings living on the other side of the globe are people too and not monsters. Weak, poor, intelligent, and stupid — people of all kinds, but people… The realization that Russians aren’t a 260-million-strong band of evil-doers and criminals was, gentlemen, no small thing for the mind of a girl raised in a country where the word «communist» had not long before been used to frighten children. An achievement, you might say.
Linda is a very skeptical person. She is, moreover, strongly influenced by David, who really dislikes Russians. He’s a cultivated person, a stage designer, and it would be difficult to suppose that he’s a racist, especially since Russians aren’t the most appropriate object for racism. Most likely he’s just a failure who has found himself a sufficiently remote target on which to vent his anger, since in my opinion he’s a coward — hence his karate.
David, although he’s friendly enough with me personally, half-seriously considers me a Russian spy. Linda certainly doesn’t share that opinion — she’s seen me scrubbing the kitchen floor on my hands and knees too many times, an image of me that has obviously displaced from her mind the image of Edward in a KGB cap being photographed with his fellow spy school graduates with the Kremlin in the background. But Linda is by nature a skeptic; she doesn’t trust the world. She cautiously peers out from behind her skeptical armor, and at any little thing withdraws again.
We discuss international problems until we’re hoarse, especially relations between America and Russia, although we always reach the same conclusion every time, namely that our peoples are decent and hard-working, and that it’s the fucking politicians who are trying to make us quarrel.
“Suckers!” I say. “Suckers!” Linda answers.
Thus we talk if Linda has time, and of course she doesn’t always, unfortunately, which is why she always sits in the same place in the kitchen next to the phone, since people call her during lunch too, which makes us both very angry; it interrupts our conversations. Angry or not, as soon as Linda picks up the phone, she’s instantly polite. “Hello, Steven Grey’s office! How may I help you, sir!” Even though she’s just shouted, “Fucking bastards! Why do they always have to call me at lunchtime!”
Linda always sits with her back to the window, whereas I always sit facing it — I like to watch the street. Our kitchen is about three feet below the sidewalk, so that the feet of people passing by land at about the level of our table. Actually, those “passing by” aren’t passing by at all but out for a stroll, since they don’t walk by our part of the street but come to it: It ends at the East River. They are almost always the same people — either rich ladies and gentlemen from expensive neighboring apartment buildings, the most expensive ones in the city, or their children, or their servants out walking their dogs. Only occasionally does a chance romantic couple wander past to sit by the river, smoke, and fondle each other. The characters in the street show are always the same, and you can set your watch by some of them. Thus, seeing a probably crazy elderly woman pass by the window on the other side of the street with a springy martial stride, you can say with certainty that it is exactly four minutes after nine. And that after going in the direction of the river, she will pass by the window again two minutes later, this time on our side of the street and going in the opposite direction. The only thing that changes in the course of the year are her clothes. In summertime she wears an orange plastic visor, and in wintertime, a blue nylon jacket. I think she’s an old maid who obviously lives somewhere nearby. During the year she never deviates from her schedule of 9:04 by more than a couple of minutes.
In the mornings our street belongs to the limousine chauffeurs waiting to take our bosses to the office so they can conduct their important affairs. Many of our little neighbor ladies have nice portfolios of stocks in companies with impressive, internationally famous names like Avon, Amoco, Texaco, and so on. Open the Wall Street Journal and run your finger through it, and you’ll make no mistake: you’ll find precisely the same company names that my neighbors gaze at with satisfaction every morning as they flip through their own Wall Street Journals. The limousine chauffeurs in their suits and caps polish their cars with rags or stand in groups, cautiously talking. Gatsby is one of the few on our block who rarely uses a limousine; he prefers taxi
s. The reason for that isn’t his liberalism but simply the fact that he doesn’t live here continuously; he doesn’t, however, hesitate to use his private plane to fly to his estate in Connecticut.
Our street is animated early in the morning not only by chauffeurs, but also by beautiful women — it’s a favorite site of New York commercial photographers. The façades of our buildings are exceptionally respectable, and we have a view of the river, so that our block has an old English look to it. And so almost every day on our street you’ll see a bus with half-naked girls inside being made up by fussy homosexual make-up men, while women with cigarettes dangling from their lips and dressed in trousers of the sadistic lesbian style hoarsely direct elegant young people where to drag the next case of camera equipment, and the photographer himself, most often a Jew, although Japanese are starting to turn up with ever greater frequency now, fiddles with his camera — the Jews anxiously, and the Japanese like brand-new automatons.
And I, the servant, gladly slip outside whenever the boss isn’t around to check out the girls, who are forced to repeat the same scene a dozen times — an unexpected meeting on the street, say. Although stupefied with boredom, the models pass in front of the camera with happy expressions. Like it or not, their faces must depict, for one, surprise and envy at the new dress of her friend, and for the other, pride in that dress — all this the creative discovery of the photographer or the hoarse lesbian. The male models irritate me: they’re always bull-like, boorish types who seem a bit stupid and uncouth. Actually, I haven’t had that much contact with them, so maybe I’m wrong.
In addition to the limousines and fashion buses, there are always at least a couple of vans parked on our street. We’re always being repaired and renovated and painted — at least it’s a rare day that there isn’t some van on the street belonging to Royal Plumbers or Green Air Conditioners or Sherlock Holmes Security Installations or some other very important representative of business on a smaller scale. Our house is serviced by a black man named Andy whose business is called King’s Air Conditioners — the same style, as you see, as the other representatives of private enterprise. Andy frequently gives me a hand in critical situations. I call him, for example, whenever a pipe bursts in the basement or a water spot appears on the ceiling in one of our rooms, such unpleasantness usually occurring in early spring. Andy respects me, and I respect him, although we’re both very different. Andy neither smokes nor drinks, and he has a wife and two children. I both smoke and drink, and I don’t have a family. Andy wants to educate his children and go for a long visit to Africa someday; he’s very interested in the land of his ancestors. I dumped the land of my own ancestors, and it’s unlikely I’ll ever go back. Yet for all our differences, we get along very well, and when we both have time, we have some coffee in the kitchen and talk. As I don’t try to extend my life to all the other rooms, I spend the larger part of it in the kitchen, as is appropriate for a servant.
His Butler’s Story (1980-1981) Page 21