Having visited all the galleries that are in the same building as Castelli, I usually go down to West Broadway. People are roaming around. I can always pick out the artists. Their faces are familiar to me, like the fat faces of the boys in Washington Square. These are the faces of my Moscow artist friends. Bearded, inspired-looking, or on the contrary unremarkable, whether worn out from work or fresh and impudent, they’re familiar down to the last little wrinkle. So are the faces of their girl friends – faithful women who have been with them through many years, or cheerful casual traveling companions to share a bed, a drink, and a smoke, who have not touched their hearts, who are here today and gone tomorrow. In April and March I wanted to live in SoHo, I was bursting to go there, I wanted to live in a small building, know all my artist neighbors, sit on the steps of the building at night, drink beer, gab with the neighbors, acquire solid connections. I wanted it so much, but lofts are extremely expensive and I did not realize my dream. Now that I have grown calmer, I no longer want to live in SoHo. I realize that I have changed greatly, that art alone no longer satisfies me, nor the people of art. That which once made me happy, the bohemian, light-hearted way of life, is already irretrievable, and if I succeeded in imitating it, it would soon turn out to be an unnecessary, irritating, and infuriating repetition of what I have already seen. They are selfish, I think as I trudge down the street looking at the denizens of SoHo. They seek success in this society, they are cynical and locked into their own circle of friends, they are hard to organize, and in the final analysis they are merely part of this civilization. In youth they protest, seek, are indignant in their art, but later they become pillars of the system.
What has become of Salvador Dali? Once a talented artist he is now an old buffoon, capable only of adorning wealthy salons with his own mummy. It was in one such salon that I became acquainted with him. Elena and I had been taken there, as usual, by the Clickermans, Alex and Tatyana.
Dali was sitting in the place of honor, along with his male secretary and some girl. He turned out to be a short, bald old man with bad skin, who said to me in Russian: “Ladybug, ladybug, fly to the sky, Your babies are up there, eating meat pie…” This is what many generations of Russian children have said when the ladybug, with her little spotted winglets, lights on their hands. My Elena was in raptures over Dali, and he over her, it seemed; he called her Justine. Though her head was crammed with superficial knowledge picked up here, there, and everywhere, she was essentially an uneducated girl from the Frunze Embankment and did not get the point. Well, of course, I, big clever Eddie, told her that Justine was the heroine of one of the Marquis de Sade’s novels. Dali called her “the little skeleton.” “Thanks for the little skeleton,” he told the Clickermans. His secretary, who spoke English worse than I do, wrote down our phone number and promised to call on a certain day.
Elena waited eagerly for the call. Although she unfortunately got sick, she constantly sniffed something to make her get well and said she would go to Dali’s even if she were dying. But he didn’t call. I felt sorry for the disappointed little girl, the old dotard had disappointed the child, and because of her despair and her cold and illness she and I fucked long and well that night, though it was already the era of the panties blotted with semen.
Everything is perverted by this civilization, the gentlemen in suits have fouled and besmirched everything. Lithographs and etchings by old dotards like Picasso, Miro, Dali, and others, which are sold in all the stores, have turned art into a huge unclean bazaar. The money they have is not enough, they want more and more. Paintings in oil, in tempera, are not enough; drawings, watercolors, and gouaches are not enough; to make even more money they do their hackwork on stone and put it on sale in hundreds and thousands of copies. They’ve devalued everything, the bastards. Many of them are burdened with wives and several families, with relatives and friends; they need lots of money. Money, money and the greed for money, guides these wretched old men. Once rebels, they have turned into dirty operators. The same fate awaits the young men of today. This is why I have ceased to love art.
The only thing I fear in SoHo is Prince Street, where he lives, my wife’s first lover. When I even glance at the signpost with the name prince street it torments me, spots of light play before my eyes and I come close to vomiting. As I draw near Prince Street I try to avoid the signpost with the name, it exasperates me, it’s such a substantive corroboration of my pain and torments, my defeat. But occasionally I fail to close my eyes in time, and then I am stabbed in the eye by this name. And more important, my heart: I am stabbed in the heart. The same thing happens when I’m riding the subway and all of a sudden the name of this station steps out of the darkness, bright and prominent, repeated perhaps fifteen times. It comes running after the train, running, running… Elena has apparently already left her Jean, but the terrible name will probably make me turn over even in my grave; before it I had known no defeats in life, or they had been immaterial.
Idle Washington Square and retiring, taciturn SoHo weary me at times, and I take to visiting Central Park, since it’s right under my nose. Walk four streets up, turn off Madison onto Fifth Avenue, and there I am in Central Park. Usually I walk as far as Sixty-seventh or Sixty-eighth Street alongside the park and enter it near the playground. I climb uphill by a winding little path, go to the far end of it, take off my clothes, and lie down on the hot stones to tan. In my own geographical atlas this spot is called Children’s Mountain. I lie there contemplating the sky and the posh penthouses on Fifth Avenue with plants sticking up from them, and I hypothesize about the kind of life that goes on there. The children run around near me. Usually these are good children. Bad ones turn up too – there was one savagely malicious boy, for example, who spent more than two hours breaking and tearing my favorite bush on Children’s Mountain. There was nothing I could do but suffer in silence, for the cretin’s father was sitting nearby smiling encouragingly. The father was also a cretin. When they left I got up and went to straighten the bush.
Back in Moscow the poet Sapgir told me that plants also suffer greatly, that special indicating devices had registered horror in a certain plant when a man came into the room who the day before, in the presence of this plant, had killed another plant related to it. Plants do not fear me, but I had little success in putting things right after this fiendish boy.
Children’s Mountain is where I am usually to be found in Central Park. I write poetry there, and while I do that my back, the rear half of me, is slowly turning black.
When I get tired of lying there I pull on my white trousers and set off to roam the park. Usually I go to the Alice in Wonderland sculpture and walk in her vicinity, or sit on a bench observing the children romping on the sculpture. She’s never empty, this Alice, someone is forever romping on her. Usually I sit there until about four o’clock, and sometimes, looking at certain children, I am visited by strange desires, but sometimes I am totally normal and take pleasure in watching the shaggy-haired, freckly American boys boldly jump their skateboards down the five or six long steps near Alice. Some of them are remarkably adroit at this. There’s one little kid I especially like, he’s such a brat. He looks like a girl, even has curls, but his brashness and courage make him stand out among his other friends. They’re too virile, he’s a delicate boy.
I too was delicate as a child, for which my dogheaded friends always teased me. How could they understand that I was of a different breed? The boy by Alice is also of a different breed. Through his brashness, of course, he is trying to atone for his guilt before these little lowbrows. I too was desperately bold. On a bet I once went up to a woman hawking pastries at an outdoor festival and took one of her trays. Calmly bearing it over my head, I carried it off into the crowd and then into the bushes in the park. I was atoning for my girlish exterior. I was thirteen.
I smile. There’s one good thing about my life. Measuring it against my childhood, I see that I haven’t fucking betrayed it, my dear and fabulously distant childhood. All
children are extremists. I have remained an extremist, have not become a grown-up. To this day I am a pilgrim, I have not sold myself, have not betrayed my soul, that’s why I suffer such torments. These thoughts hearten me. And the princess I dreamed of encountering in life and always sought – I did encounter her, and it all came to pass, and now, thank God, I am behaving worthily, I have not betrayed my love. “Once, only once,” I sigh…
I forsake Alice, and the smile of the Cheshire Cat melts in the air. Semipederast Red brat Eddie marches uphill in step to a gallant song from the Russian Civil War:
Army White and Baron Black,
They’re fixing to bring the old Czar back,
But from the taiga to the British seas
The Red Army scatters its enemies…
So be it the Red, with bayonet
In calloused hand gripped fast.
None can halt us! Into the battle!
March and fight to the last!
And all I want, gentlemen, at this moment, is a bullet in the head because I’m tired of holding on, to tell the truth, and scared I will not die a hero.
Beyond the park fence, New York picks me up in its arms. I sink into its warmth and summer – a summer coming to an end, gentlemen – and my New York carries me past the doors of its shops, past the subway stations, past the buses and the liquor store windows. “None can halt us! Into the battle! March and fight to the last!” resounds within me.
The new Elena
What has been happening to Elena, you will ask, while Eddie-baby has been sleeping with black guys, chasing after girl-revolutionaries, raging at Roseanne, and strolling around New York? How is she, Elena, and does Eddie encounter her, at least once in a while, in the jungles of the huge city – nose to nose, two animals who snort in recognition?
He does encounter her, yes. And oh, he remembers those encounters. They began slowly some time ago, but only in August did they become common and stick in my memory. Mild, all-smoothing August… it lay over my city in a dull, thready cloud, preparing the way for nasty autumn and harsh, leaden winter. A transition period, gentlemen. The rains kept trying to come, testing their influence over me. Nature convinced herself that I could take it, although rain does make me more gloomy and depressed – since earliest times, the Russian has been susceptible to the influence of the weather. “He can take it,” Nature said, and turned on the sun again.
There had been trivial interactions between Elena and me since April. We had found it necessary to meet from time to time in order to bring each other things or books, generally it was a matter of trivial objects changing hands. The normal interactions between a divorced husband and wife.
This time it was a lousy overcast day. I picked up my check at 1515 Broadway, then went to a bank on Eighth Avenue and cashed the check, then trudged to Fourteenth Street, spent a long time pricing things and finally bought myself a pair of panties (blue and yellow, the colors of the Ukrainian national flag), wanted to buy some strawberries and eat them but begrudged the eighty-nine cents, bought an ice cream, and went to the hotel.
When I arrived Alexander called and said there was going to be a hurricane.
I replied, “Only a hurricane? Not an earthquake simultaneously with a worldwide flood and a conflagration in the six New England states as well as the state of New York?”
“No,” Alexander said, “only a hurricane, alas.” Alexander too wished the world safe in hell.
Later Elena called. “I’ll be home,” she said. “You can come get your book.”
By my “book” she meant that same long-suffering National Hero, the manuscript in English, which had been translated two years before and published nowhere. Elena was perfectly familiar with this piece of mine in Russian. The reason she needed National Hero was to give it to her new lover to read, George the economist, as she calls him. The “economist” does something in the stock market, and he’s a millionaire. So Elena says; I don’t know whether it’s true. Let’s suppose it is. He has a dacha in Southampton, where other such millionaires live. As Elena tells it, they don’t do a fucking thing, they just smoke, sniff cocaine, drink, give parties, and fuck, for which she, Elena, is very glad. I don’t know whether that’s true either. At any rate, that’s what she says.
How did my National Hero fit in here? Well, I think she wanted to brag to her economist about her clever ex-husband. In the process, part of the intellect and talent would automatically accrue to her, Elena. The economist could not have cared less about Elena’s ex-husband’s literary works and took three weekends reading my manuscript, although it’s forty minutes’ worth, and I think he preferred to fuck Elena rather than read her husband’s literary works. People who have things behave very cautiously in this world, for they are afraid that somebody will lop off part of what they have. They need literature like a cunt needs a door.
I went to get the book. Since returning from Italy she no longer lived at Zoli’s but rented half of Sashka Zhigulin’s studio – this was where I had met the little Jewish bourgeoise, if you recall – and her fucking economist had more or less promised to pay for the studio.
When I go to see her I am always nervous; I can’t help myself, I’m nervous like a child before an exam. I wore a little checked shirt, a denim vest, denim jeans, white socks, two-color shoes – very lovely shoes, though I had found them on the street – and a black scarf at my neck. I arrived.
She met me looking extraordinarily fine, in a billowing floor-length white summer dress, a red cord across her brow and neck. So beautiful I could kill her, the whore. What a weakling; how could I let her be fucked by anyone else?
Such were my thoughts, and to stay out of trouble I said, “Want me to buy some wine?” – and instantly fled to the store, almost before she could say, “Go ahead, if you want to.”
It seems I bought some good wine. I myself always drink just any old shit, but that’s me, I’ve always been a sensible mutt; she is a fair lady, it does not befit her to drink shitty wine. We each took a seat at the table. We sat, drank wine. Talked. Then Zhigulin arrived with his father, who had flown in from the country, from Israel. The father took a seat too, and so did Zhigulin. We talked about mutual acquaintances. Talked about Starsky. Formerly a rich and famous Moscow artist, Starsky had been a typical representative of, and in a way the idol of, Moscow’s privileged “golden youth.” Elena and he had moved in the same set; Elena’s ex-husband, Victor, was a friend of his. Elena was even in love with Starsky, and as she subsequently confessed, had dreamed of fucking him. But he didn’t get around to it, delayed for some reason, and then I forcibly burst into her life, and stayed in her life until she just as forcibly drove me out.
Elena wondered what life was like for Starsky.
“Bad,” replied Zhigulin Senior. “Sometimes I think he’ll do away with himself. He has no work, there’s almost no market for his paintings, he’s even been forced to sell his car.”
Starsky so loved cars, it was hard to imagine him without one; he had had one since childhood. “If Lyoka has sold his car, I can imagine what his life is like,” Elena said. “But why is he staying there and not leaving?”
“Life in Israel isn’t for him, of course,” Zhigulin Senior continued. “There, everyone goes to bed by eleven, but Lyoka – you remember Lyoka – that’s when his day is just beginning. He may come here; he’s apparently planning on America.”
“He’ll be better off here,” Elena said.
I thought, Now that you’ve broken loose from your chains, little one, you want to compensate yourself by fucking mustachioed, wrinkled Starsky, don’t you? Anger flared within me. But instantly died out.
What can you do, Eddie? She’s a free person, you can’t do a fucking thing, she’ll sleep with Starsky. You don’t live by the Novodevichy Convent any more, Eddie. Times are different. Really, Eddie, are you sure she isn’t fucking Zhigulin Junior? After all, they live in the same studio and their beds are ten paces apart. How could they not fuck, in a neighborly way?
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br /> My powerlessness gave me an unpleasant feeling. All I could do was observe her life, I couldn’t even give her advice, she wouldn’t accept advice from me. I am the ex-husband; that should not be forgotten. I am the past, the past cannot give advice to the present. Furthermore, all are free to mess up their own lives as they wish, and people like Elena and me are especially capable of messing up our own lives.
She is. I remember her first and last trip to Kharkov: Touched by the spectacle of my fat, gray, and crazy ex-wife Anna, she removed a diamond ring from her own finger and put it on Anna’s. Anna, also a person given to excess in her hereditary madness (not without reason were her paintings so terrible and bright), rolled up her eyes and fell upon Elena’s hand with kisses.
My thoughts flew back to Kharkov; I saw that scene vividly, and all my anger, which had been about to flare up, passed off. It may be worth living just for the sake of such scenes. Not to yourself, but from yourself – that’s beautiful. That’s why I so hate miserliness and do not love Roseanne. Elena Sergeevna is a little bitch, a whore, what you will, but she’s capable of impulses, or was. Oh, I am proud of her now, from afar. What else do I have left?
It's Me, Eddie Page 29