His Butler’s Story (1980-1981)

by Edward Limonov

  We emerged into the darkness and stuffy warmth. I know my basement perfectly, and so I gropingly drew her toward the side where the mattress was, without turning on the light, but to my surprise she resisted and pulled me in the other direction. To the left of the elevator is a door leading to a small room containing the elevator drive with its dangerously turning cogged wheels behind a grating, but if you pass through that room to the other side, you enter another room heaped with old furniture, the most remote room of all, the same one where after my first and last argument with Gatsby I hid out and drank soda water.

  The kid dragged me in there. It was very dark in the room, although a little evening light did penetrate from outside through a dirt-streaked basement window. We stumbled against things of every conceivable kind that had been piled on the floor there — boards, jars of paint, and parts of chairs. The lady pulled me all the way over to the window, where she came to a halt and then started moving about, releasing my hand. The place stank of old wood, with a slightly moldy smell given off perhaps by the cold, bare stone, not brick, with which the walls had been constructed. I finally realized what she was doing — she was getting undressed, and had taken her panties off herself, stepping out of them while hopping lightly on one leg and holding on to me and using her other hand to pull them off, since they had caught on her shoe. Her excitement had obviously returned, and giggling nervously she turned her back to me and bent over, resting her breasts on top of something and sticking her bottom out in my direction, and with a sudden movement flipped up the hem of her dress from behind and pulled it off, thereby revealing her unexpectedly large maidenly ass, which gleamed before me in the darkness with her legs descending like columns below.

  I was even a little abashed by the brazen speed with which she did it all, until I remembered witnessing a similar scene in a porno film. True, that scene hadn’t taken place in a basement and hadn’t involved a servant, and the heroine hadn’t suddenly assumed that position herself, but had been placed in it by somebody else. I glanced at what she was leaning on; it was a highchair — you know, a chair for infants with a special tray to keep them from falling out and hold the dish with their food. So there she was resting her breasts on that little chair, flattening them out on that childhood object and serendipitously using it for her own nymphomaniacal purposes. Bravo!

  I of course use the term «nymphomaniac» ironically, gentlemen, for she was unquestionably a Seeker of Adventure, a wild and untamable spirit of the kind that’s sometimes implanted in a woman, and let those around her beware! She won’t leave anybody in peace for another forty years, a nymphomaniac by birth and conviction, I thought as I inserted my organ into her little crack. To top it all, her twat was prickly — she had shaved it, if you can imagine that. She had probably shaved herself clean that very morning.

  I showed her everything I had, gentlemen, aroused by her charming lack of shame. I hope she still feels to this day that it’s far more interesting to fuck a servant than a representative of her own class, that is, if she understands anything about it, since it’s possible her curiosity was greater than her desire, that she had more a perverted imagination than a developed sexuality. I don’t know, but if her sexual feelings weren’t developed, then she pretended very skilfully. She moaned quietly and tenderly while my prick turned and moved inside her plump, cultivated little hole, and I hope inside all her hidden depths.

  My cock felt so engorged with blood and so rigid that I thought its head was going to burst at the seams like an overripe banana. I had the delicious sense of having reached a limit, and when I roughly pulled her ass, well-fed on her mama’s and papa’s capitalist bread, toward me, moving it onto my prick, I felt that I’d gone as far as I could, that I’d reached one of life’s limits, one of its most extreme manifestations — that warm, white flesh crammed onto me, embracing every inch of my prick.

  I fucked her and fucked her, never doubting I would come inside her, and would even have killed her probably, if that was the only way I could have reached orgasm. I needed to hurl my seed deep inside her slippery depths, deep inside her little pink folds, somewhere near her heart perhaps, but I also wanted to reach the state where I wouldn’t be able to stand it anymore and my whole prick would almost break off inside her.

  I came inside her with such force that it seemed to me that despite the fact that that young whore had no doubt taken the world’s best and most up-to-date birth-control pills, or whatever the very latest invention in that area was, my sperm would break through all the barriers and she would bear my child. A horse or a centaur perhaps, but definitely something hooved and proud.

  We remained stuck together like that for a while, panting heavily, until I thought I would fall down, that my strength would all at once desert me, since my legs were suddenly in tremendous pain and cramping nearly to the point of convulsions. She and I had trampled my white jeans underfoot, almost tearing them apart, and they shone dimly on the floor…

  Somehow we separated, and she slipped off the highchair and made her way over to the wall and leaned against it. We groped at each other in the dark, reaching out our hands toward each other, each pulling the other closer, and kissed each other on the lips for the first time, and then stood embracing, still breathing heavily, and feeling very close to each other, she and I. I liked her unutterably, that desperate girl, oh how I liked her.

  She was the first to start moving. “Go on upstairs to your room,” she said hoarsely. “I’ll be up in a minute.” And then, in answer to my unspoken question, “Where are you going?” she added, “I have to get my things out of the kitchen; I don’t want the other guys to know I’m still here.” And gracefully putting her panties back on, she slipped out of one darkness into an even greater one. I groped my own way back to the elevator.

  I didn’t even ask her if she knew how to find the kitchen from the basement. Most likely she did.

  I waited for her in my room exactly ten minutes, gentlemen, and when she didn’t come, I went back downstairs, although to be frank, I didn’t at all expect to find her there. It was perfectly clear: I had been fucked and discarded. Used like a servant and then thrown away.

  Naturally she wasn’t in the kitchen, how else? I was going to start checking the other rooms, and had gone into the TV room, where some of the kids were still asleep on the floor, but then I gave up that idea as useless and poured myself a glass of vermouth, dropped a couple of ice cubes in it, and went back upstairs to my room. I sat down at my desk, an old one that had once belonged to Linda and that I’d dragged up from die basement a day or so after I’d cleared out the last of Jenny’s things from the room. A servant has no need of a desk, of course, but a writer does, and it has stood in my room by the window ever since. I raised the blinds, sat down at the desk, and gazed out the window. It was getting light in the garden, a rosy April dawn, and in the distance you could see the tip of Roosevelt Island, and beyond that a lighthouse on a rock and a foggy, open expanse of water.

  All right, I thought, I had my pleasure too, if it comes to that, and what pleasure it was! But however much I tried to convince myself that my own pleasure had been at least as great as hers, that arithmetic was of little use, and I was still depressed. The mere fact that she had been capable of such an adventure, the bold little whore, made her hopelessly attractive to me. Moreover, she had during the act been as passive as she could be, yielding to me and moving backwards onto my prick. My girl exactly, I continued my sad thoughts. She didn’t make even one extra movement the whole time. It was all the way it was supposed to be, the way you feel it should be. And to lose a specimen like that!

  And covering my eyes with my yellow comforter, with our yellow comforter, that is, I somehow dropped off into troubled sleep.

  Naturally the next morning the house looked as if it had been turned upside down. Actually, after looking it over, I didn’t find that any particularly serious damage had been done, except for one thing. Some jerk had tried to put his cigarette out on our
TV projection screen, and a long and nasty hole gaped at its center. What can I do? I’ll have to tell Nancy about it, only later — on Monday after Linda comes, I thought. I was, after all, concerned that morning with a problem of much greater significance to me — how to find out from Henry who that young creature had been, what her name was, and what she did, and maybe where she lived. I needed her, and nobody else.

  Finding an opportunity as if in passing, I asked Henry who the girl in the black dress and bare arms had been, the very beautiful and mature one who had been sitting next to me in the living room when we were smoking hashish, and whom I’d been fucking in the basement, although I obviously wasn’t able to mention the last part. Henry asked, “Which one do you mean, Edward? I seem to remember there were several girls in black dresses.” I started explaining to him, but we got mixed up, since he, not surprisingly, couldn’t remember who had been sitting next to me in the living room when I’d been smoking hashish. When I reminded him then how he had greeted her with open arms and then gone upstairs with her, he seemed to remember something, or at least his face looked like the face of somebody about to remember something, “Renée?” he asked, looking condescendingly at me, as it seemed to me. “The one who left with Gregory?” Henry was obviously getting bored with the conversation, but as a well-bred boy, he patiently explained that Gregory was the younger son of a senator from the state of X. “He came after everybody else,” Henry said, “a tall blond guy in a white jacket.”

  For the first time in my life there wasn’t anything I could do; it was beyond my power to unravel that story. If my stranger had been Renée, and she had left with the guy in the white jacket, and Henry confirmed that he’d seen them leaving together, then it followed that they had done so before I had put Henry to bed. But if she had left, then how did she manage to turn up in my room an hour or two after she’d gone? After pondering the question for a while, I realized that she could quite easily have come back, and even have done so without being noticed. The door had in fact been unlocked; I myself released the catch on it while shutting everything up. Door locks, as you know, have a safety catch on them, one position allowing the lock to be used in its normal way, and the other allowing the door to be opened from the outside by simply turning the knob. Whenever the eternally hurrying Gatsby runs outside to meet or accompany his guests, he always sets the lock in the second way. He doesn’t want to be bothered with taking his key out of his pocket, which I certainly understand, but he almost always forgets to release the catch, so that it frequently happens that we sleep the whole night with the door unlocked. Anyone passing by could, if he felt like it, simply turn the handle of the door on the street and walk in.

  I continued to struggle for a while against my fate, attempting to get «her» phone number from Henry, although obviously without asking him for it, but by pinching his notebook from his pocket. It was easy to do; Henry was even more absent-minded than Gatsby was. I took the notebook down to the basement, to my hideout there, and after a long search, since his notebook was extraordinarily chaotic, with first and last names and addresses running together, I found Renée’s name and number but not her address. I had already begun to doubt that it was in fact Renée who had fucked me and dumped me; maybe it was another girl. I’d been stoned and drunk, and all the places we’d been together had been infernally dark. The only place where I had seen her “in the light” had been the elevator, if you consider that black, orgiastic lamp to be light. And in that moment, which lasted no more than a minute probably, since we could hardly have spent more time than that on the elevator, I didn’t look very closely at the stranger. I had left my glasses in my room and was in any case occupied with something else, with my prick and my desire, and was kissing her on the neck, I think.

  I called Renée, but her line was busy, gentlemen. My heart, my poor heart, was pounding. I started thinking hurriedly about what I would say to her. I couldn’t just say, “Well then, my little adventuress, what did you run away for?” or “What’s up, my little whore?” I called again a little while later, but nobody answered. And I called again that evening, once more without success. I’ve gradually accumulated my own list of grievances against telephones and have grown to hate them more and more. My call the next morning was answered by a maid. First she wanted to know my name and who I was. I lied that I was a friend of Renée’s. Everybody tells me that my voice sounds very young. “Renée has gone to Europe with her parents and won’t be back until October.” And the maid mentioned the name of the town, in the south of France, I think.

  I probably never would have been able to find her, if she hadn’t wanted me to. And even if I could get her on the phone, what would I say to her, and even if I were able to summon up the audacity to remind her gently of what had apparently taken place between us, she would simply tell me I was a crazy, insolent servant. And if she wanted to say more, she would call me a sex maniac and hang up. She could even make a lot of trouble for me, if she wanted to. She could call Gatsby and tell him that his housekeeper had lost his mind and was imagining… “Can you imagine, Steven, that I..?” She wouldn’t say “fucked him in the basement,” of course, but she could say that I was sexually deranged and pestering her. Gatsby would in that event probably kick me out, and not even Efimenkov would be able to help, not with something like that.

  She had unquestionably read all the books and seen all the porno flicks, which she’d probably gone to after putting on some old rags and making herself up to look like some impossible version of a whore. She went and probably even expected that somebody would fuck her there. She sat and trembled in fear while gazing at the backs of the men sitting by themselves, expecting that the owner of one of those backs would sit down next to her and put his hand on her knee or right on her cunt. It’s unlikely though that she would permit anyone to do anything to her there, even if they did sit down. I understand her fear; you really can stumble onto who the fuck knows what there, even a psychopathic murderer. With me it was absolutely safe; she wasn’t in a porno theater open to any creep who walks in, but in the house of a friend, a friend whose servant I was. She had probably heard something about me from Henry or from a couple of his friends, and even if she hadn’t heard anything, it was clear enough from my appearance that I was a harmless but still healthy creature. “Cute,” as Jenny and other women and girls have told me.

  That case is closed, as far as I’m concerned; I never found die perpetrator. Or rather, excuse me, I never found the perpetratrix. To my great and everlasting regret.

  My whole life over the last several years has been a yearning for “action.” If, and this is something I long for, our civilization should in the next couple of decades begin to collapse, I would of course at once find myself an opportunity, and would probably be not the least among the bold and reckless of this world. For the time being, however, the only things that remain for me are sex and writing, the only two spheres in which a man, if he has the nerve, is still more or less free to show himself. All the other spheres have long been patrolled by civilization down to the least little byways and dead ends. Writing and sex have been placed in thrall too, and are under the control of civilization and social life, but there are still a few chinks in the machinery. Either there still are, or there already are. In any case, they still don’t know how to control our thoughts; their geniuses in white coats still haven’t found out how to read what’s inside our brain cases. They’ve been listening for a long time to our telephone conversations and rummaging in our papers, but they still can’t read our thoughts. Although I’m absolutely sure that feverish work is already under way in that area, and that the geniuses in white coats will eventually reach their goal — I have faith in human ingenuity. God grant I die before that glorious discovery is made, because after that you won’t be able to write shit and you can fuck freedom goodbye.

  Steven Grey’s housekeeper hasn’t been making very much progress with the writing part of it. The American publishers have one after another re
fused to publish my book. Maybe they’ve reached an agreement with my former girlfriend Sarah? Although I have long felt the itch to move on, although I have the ambition to proceed to the next rung in my life, I’m still compelled to remain here in service, and my life in the millionaire’s little house, having now entered its second year, has in a way come full circle. It’s all routine now and no longer interesting, and I’ve been looking around to see where I, the indefatigable Mr. Limonov, Edward, will turn up next. All those I started out with way back then have made their peace, some in jail and others with families, but in any case have come to a halt. Even Elena has grown tired apparently, and is married to her own European aristocrat, and only very occasionally permits herself little love adventures. But not I.

  The publishers answer Liza in much the same way, with something like, “Mr. Limonov’s novel is too threatening, and his hero too negative.” Inside, deep in my heart, I believe they’re right in refusing to publish my novel. I’m really their enemy, and books like mine destroy, if not civilization, then at least faith in it, so that it’s logical not to publish them. But the struggle is the struggle, and I therefore try with all my strength to win. I haven’t reacted emotionally to their rejections in a long time. My agent just methodically sends the book off to those publishers who haven’t been terrorized by it yet, and if Liza gets tired of the job, I won’t die of a broken heart. I’ll just find myself another agent and start over from the beginning. They’re greedy when it comes to money, and they’ll buy me in the end. I’m persistent. But unfortunately I’m also oversensitive, as my girlfriend Jenny once observed, and sometimes it all makes me sick to my stomach, and then, like a madman, I run off to the first place I think of, and more often than not I look for relief in sex.