The Zhigulins, both Senior and Junior, went up to see crazy Sasha Zelensky, who lived upstairs. Elena and I were left alone. She was in a quiet mood today and began to tell me how she had spent last weekend in Southampton.
She’s ambitious, there’s no help for it. “And the daughter of a certain multimillionaire was there too, you must know -,” and she mentioned some name. I couldn’t imagine how I, a welfare recipient, a moving man, John’s helper, would know a multimillionaire’s daughter’s name, or the daughter herself. “Well,” Elena went on, “so this girl came with a handsome guy. Later someone told me he was a gigolo, a man she had bought in order to have him make out he was her boyfriend.”
Elena was swaying on Zhigulin’s high stool, holding at some distance from her the very long cigarette holder that she had brought from Italy, a telescoping black lacquer tube.
“So this guy kept hovering around me, and the multimillionaire’s daughter was furious. She actually came in a T-shirt, dirty jeans…”
I had the cheerless thought that the poor multimillionaire’s daughter might be ugly, and… I had a shitload of thoughts, listening to her stories.
“But I’m sick of them all by now,” Elena went on. “Sunday was horribly rainy, you know, I put on a raincoat and walked along the seashore alone. It was so nice.”
I, Eddie-baby, by strange coincidence, having spent the night at Alexander’s, on that same Sunday morning had walked in the rain along the ocean to the Coney Island subway station. Not a single living creature was there. I rolled my trousers up to the knees so that the wet white duck wouldn’t lash against my legs, and walked, at times knee-deep in the water. There were seagull-pecked crabs and their parts on the sand, mussels, things of man that had fallen under the sea’s jurisdiction. Rain and more rain. A confused melody trembled within me. In this melody, perhaps, lay the sad implication that the world was worth nothing, that everything in this world was nonsense and decay and the eternal comings and goings of the gray waves, and only the indwelling love in my body distinguished me in any way from the landscape…
I told Elena, sparingly and simply, that I too had walked along the seashore alone that Sunday.
“Yes,” she said.
Then I went with her to buy hair coloring. She put on some gray old jeans we had bought her when she still lived with me. On the whole, as you will see later, she hadn’t acquired many new things. Either her lovers weren’t noted for generosity or she didn’t know how to squeeze money out of them or she made love with them just for the pleasure of making love; I don’t know.
She put on these little jeans and also a little black turtleneck, took an umbrella, and we set off. Like the good old days. The fucking rain was coming down in buckets, but my heart was gay. I was walking with her. Our umbrellas touched now and then.
In the shop on Madison, everyone gawked at us – a slightly rumpled pair of little kids had come to buy something. She chose hair coloring, and she then took half an hour choosing a cosmetics case, and during that time, gentlemen, I was enjoying myself. Cod had sent me pleasure. At length she finished choosing the case. Then she bought soap, some sort of cap for the bath, and something else. She asked if I had any money with me. I said, “I do, I do!”
“Give me a ten, I’ll pay you back later.”
I said she didn’t need to pay anything back; she didn’t have money now and I did. Several jobs in succession with John really had brought me some dollars.
I always loved to watch her browse in stores. She knew what was what, she knew what she needed, but always, here in America, the poor little girl had no money at all. It occurred to me, as I watched her, how nice it was that I hadn’t been able to strangle her, she was alive, and I wanted her to be warm and dry in this world – that was the main thing. As for the fact that all sorts of sleazebags were poking their cocks into her little peepka, well, all right, it was what she wanted. It hurt me, but she was getting pleasure. You think I’m farting around showing off, making myself out to be an all-forgiving Christ? Fuck no, this is honest, I wouldn’t lie, I’m too proud. It hurts me, it hurts, but every day I tell myself and instill in myself:
“Treat Elena, Eddie-baby, as Christ treated Mary Magdalene and all women who sinned. No, treat her better. Forgive her both today’s whoredom and her adventures. All right, it’s the way she is,” I exhorted myself. “If you love her, this long, thin creature in faded little jeans who is browsing now among the perfumes, sniffing them with an important air and unscrewing the stoppers – if you love her, love is above personal grudge. She’s unwise and evil and unhappy. But you feel that you’re wise and good: love her, don’t scorn her. Keep an eye on her life. She doesn’t want you to, don’t pry into her life, but help when you can and must. Help, and expect nothing in return – don’t demand that she come back to you in return for whatever you’re able to do. Love does not demand gratitude and gratification. Love itself is gratification.”
That is what I taught myself in the perfumery on Madison Avenue. Oh, I haven’t always succeeded, of course, but with interruptions for malice and loathing, I have disposed myself more and more in that direction, and I think I do love her that way now.
To me her wash-faded jeans are dearer than all the blessings of this earth, and I would betray any cause for those slim little legs with their complete absence of calves, I thought in the perfumery, while this interested creature bent down and straightened up over objects and scents.
We returned to the eternally dark studio. Had it been light, Zhigulin would have paid a lot more than three hundred for it. To Elena there was nothing good about living in the dirty studio. After the wonderful Zoli Agency building, Zhigulin’s studio was a come-down for Elena. What it was that she and Mr. Zoli did not share, what the reason was for her eviction, I don’t know. Elena attributed his displeasure to the fact that she had left Milan without waiting for a show in which she was supposed to participate. Her trip to Milan had been totally unproductive for her career, and to all appearances Zoli was no longer betting on her at all, nor predicting a brilliant future for her as a model. Elena’s friends, or enemies, told me in secret that Zoli was dreaming of getting rid of the eccentric Russian girl altogether; that was why he had packed her off to Milan. When she returned from Milan the room she had lived in was allegedly occupied. I don’t know, that’s what they say.
At Zhigulin’s she occupied the left half of the studio, in theory at least. Her bed was located in an alcove, the mattress lay right on the floor, next came the pillows, and sometimes I noticed on the bed our linens, which she had had custom-made in Moscow, and which she had brought over with her. I have to turn aside when I see these linens – after all, they were witness to numerous love sessions with her. She is not a fetishist, but I am. vile fetishist, I throw away things of the past to keep from crying over them. So I turn aside. In many ways Zhigulin’s studio is a museum because both my writing desk from Lexington Avenue and my armchair are there; Elena bought these when I began working at the newspaper. And our damn cat, white and deaf, filthy dirty or freshly washed, comes creeping out from time to time. She’s still just as gluttonous and just as stupid. Zhigulin’s whole studio – he has somehow wormed his way unnoticed into my life, a pretty good guy, by and large – his whole studio is strung with power lines, everything in it collides, crisscrosses, squeals, sparks. Sometimes the thought occurs to me, What if it’s this way only to me, and not to Elena? What if, to her, the studio is calmer and quieter? Or always a deathly silence? Then I really feel shitty. We’re all automatically inclined to liken others to ourselves, and later it turns out we are far from the truth. I had already likened Elena to myself, had already been punished for it. To the end of my days the scars on my left arm, red from sunburn, will remind me of the unwisdom of likening.
We returned with several fruits of the perfumery paradise. I regretted not having much money with me. My girl, it appeared, was living on bread and water; a model’s earnings, if she’s not a big-time model, just ra
nk and file, are paltry.
We got hungry. She took some fish sandwiches out of the refrigerator; she has always hated to cook. In our family I did the cooking, I was the waiter too; what’s more I was secretary to her, my beloved poetess, retyped her poems; I made and remade clothes for her; I was also… in our family I had many trades. “Fool,” you will say, “you spoiled the woman. Now you have only yourself to blame!”
No, I didn’t spoil the woman, she was that way with Victor, the rich husband twice as old as she, whom she married at seventeen; she lived just the same way. Victor made the soup, drove a Mercedes, he was a private chauffeur – the poor artist was earning money, while Elena Sergeevna went out in an ostrich feather dress to walk her dog. And when passing by the Novodevichy Convent, she and the white poodle stopped in at a poverty-stricken, blindingly sunny little room to see the poet Eddie. It was I, gentlemen. I undressed this creature, and having drunk a bottle of champagne or even two – the poverty-stricken poet drank only champagne in the land of the Gulag Archipelago – having drunk some champagne, we gave ourselves over to such love, gentlemen, as you have never fucking dreamed of. The regal poodle – a girl, named Dvosya, who passed away prematurely in 1974 – watched us enviously from the floor and let out an occasional yelp…
Oh, I don’t want to remember. Presently on our agenda is New York, as I myself used to say when I was council chairman of a Young Pioneer detachment, a Pioneer and an honest child. On our agenda is New York. And that’s all.
We gulped down the fish sandwiches. They weren’t enough, of course, for the former husband and wife. The thin young man and woman had healthy appetites. I said I was hungry: “Shall we go eat somewhere?” “Let’s,” she said, “let’s go to the Italian restaurant, it’s right close by, the Pronto. I’ll call Carlos.” Why she had to call Carlos in order to go to an Italian restaurant I didn’t understand, but I didn’t protest. I would have endured a hundred Carloses for the pleasure of sitting with her in a restaurant. Who knows, she may have been afraid to go alone with me to a restaurant. I had nearly killed her; she had her reasons.
The not-quite-strangled girl began dialing Carlos. He was a rather dim character, in my view. I had seen him once here at the studio, an ordinary person, nothing special, nothing interesting. He didn’t do a fucking thing, but he had plenty of money, Elena said. Where from? His parents. That’s the state of affairs the world revolution will be aimed against. Working men – poets and busboys, porters and electricians – must not be in an unequal position vis-a-vis shitasses like him. Hence my indignation.
She did not dress up at all, merely put on a little powder and wound the twisted red cord around her forehead and neck again, and went as she was in her little jeans and black turtleneck. He wasn’t there yet, thank God. We sat on a raised floor to the right of the entrance, took a table for four, ordered red wine, and she looked around for him. She had developed this silly habit of waiting and looking around for someone. She didn’t use to look around for anyone.
“I forgot to tell you,” she said suddenly, a little embarrassed, as it seemed to me, “this is a very expensive restaurant. Do you have money?”
I had $150 in my pocket; if I was out with her, I knew her habits. A hundred and fifty – it would be enough.
“I have money, don’t worry,” I said.
Then this character appeared. I wouldn’t be hostile to him if it weren’t for Elena, I have no fucking need of him, a dim character with a checkbook. Those who themselves have wrung money out of this life you can at least respect for something; what could you respect him for, dependent as he was on his parents? Why the fuck had he crossed my path!
He arrived. Short hair, conservatively dressed – that’s not my expression, I swiped it from Elena and the lesbian Susanna. He sat down beside her, kept squeezing my darling’s little hand. I found this disagreeable, but what could I do. An expression of Chris’s rose to the surface of my mind: “Take it easy, baby, take it easy!” And I grew calmer. He squeezed her little hand, kept putting his arm around her shoulders and taking it away. An open-and-shut case: she isn’t letting him fuck much, or she let him just a little and isn’t anymore, I thought with monstrous coolness, gazing at this woman to whom I had been married according to the royal rite in a brilliantly illumined church. I recalled the priest’s farewell counsel: “Evil men will try to part you.”
The evil man kept grabbing her hand. I could have shot him without a qualm. It’s for men like him that the laws have been created, to preserve their property and their dubious rights, so that men like me will not achieve (without a qualm) the right to justice. I sat opposite him, even in my misfortune spirited and mean, with much more breadth and talent than he. All my misfortune lay in my virtues. I was able to love, knew how to love. But he was an indifferent cork bobbing on the waves of the sea of life, all he had was a cock, and he kept after her, touching her hand, seeking to insert his itching cock into her peepka.
They didn’t talk about anything interesting. Oh, for propriety I asked him some questions, somehow participated in the conversation. My goal was to sit beside her.
Later, after we – mainly Elena and I, of course – had drunk several carafes of wine, we abandoned the rich people dining in warmth and light and went to the Playboy Club on Fifty-ninth Street. It had been there all the time, I could have walked out of the Winslow in my slippers and found myself in another world. Carlos had a Playboy card – of course he was a playboy, how could he not be. A bunny stood at the entrance, Carlos showed her his card. The bunnies wore ears and pantyhose, that was practically all they had on. Inside, in the semidarkness, other bunnies walked around serving drinks. Elena and Carlos led me through all the floors of the club, showed provincial Eddie the den of vice. Each floor had its own bar or restaurant, waiters in different uniforms, paintings and photographs, semidarkness, as I have already noted, and suchlike splendors. Amidst mild music, sipping my vodka from a huge glass, I remembered by contrast some friends of a week’s standing, Brooklyn Bridge bums, and burst out laughing. Shit, and this is civilization. Why aren’t they afraid of the gigantic waves that will some day rise up from the slums of Brooklyn and the Lower East Side and fucking submerge the little islets where the feast goes on in time of plague, where the sounds of hollow music flow, bunny asses flit around practically bare, and my Elena walks accessible to all? And no provincial one-story America can fucking save anybody, all shall be as New York wants, my great and flaming city…
We were sitting near the dance floor, I was sipping my vodka, when suddenly Elena invited me to dance. We were off. Oh, she dances brilliantly, my angel fucker, as Eddie-baby once called her when drunk, while still her beloved husband. She liked the nickname then. Angel fucker.
During the first dance there were other couples on the stage, and the celebrated bunnies danced alongside us. Then for some reason we danced alone – who the fuck knows how we happened to be alone – and there was a flashing light that kept suddenly fixing our poses. It was delicious. She was near, and it seemed to me that nothing had changed. There had been no blood or tears, and now we would dance awhile longer, and start home with our arms around each other, and lie down together.
Shit, no way. We weren’t there long. Carlos dragged us to the home of some friends of his to watch pornographic films. Our host was about fifty, in appearance he was like Tosik, a mutual acquaintance of Elena’s and mine, a sharp operator from Tbilisi; his tart was young. During the porn films, in which disgusting and vulgar women joyfully swallowed the semen of a pimply cretin, my darling sat in the same chair with Carlos for some reason, and in my opinion he spent the whole time trying to grab or embrace her. They were sitting behind me, but even from the kind of noise they were making I understood that she was ashamed before me, and that he, Carlos, held none too high an opinion of her.
He sees her as a tart, I thought, and she keeps playing the queen and starting adoration games. I had taught her, Moscow had taught her: she was Fair Helen of Troy, the bes
t woman in Moscow, and if in Moscow, in all of Russia. A Nathalie Pushkin. But she didn’t see how he looked at her. The simple little idiot Sasha Zelensky, who is secretly in love with Elena, had said – not to me, of course, but to one of our friends – that he had encountered Elena taking a man to her place: “Do you know how he looked at her? We always made such a fuss over her: ‘Elena, our Helen!’ But he knew her price, our Helen’s price, he knew perfectly well.” That may have been Carlos, how should I know – Eddie-baby doesn’t know a fucking thing. I have only pain, only pain.
Elena came over to me after the porn filth and said, as if in self-justification, “Carlos wanted to see what my face would be like, how I’d react to those films. Well, how are you?” she said, and suddenly stroked my hair. Oh!
How was I? Picture a bandit at large, who is accustomed to react to everything simply and clearly: I felt like shooting everyone in the house and riding off with her into the night. But after all, this was her evil will – she and I had to live this way. And I endured it.
Then we left. He tried to get a taxi, I stood with her under the pillars of the building, and she said that I looked good, that I had found my own style in dress. I thanked her for the evening and for the Playboy Club.
“Have you been to the Infinitive? It’s a discotheque,” she asked. “No,” I said, “I haven’t.”
“I’ll take you, I have a membership card,” she said. “Or rather, it’s George’s card, but that’s all right”
It was pouring rain. He finally flagged a cab. We started off, she demanded to be taken home first. We took her home; getting out, she kissed me on the lips. When I glanced in the mirror at the hotel, my lips were all lipstick. I wiped it off, and then was sorry I had.
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