A bit later there was another encounter, when a strange intimacy occurred between us, we embraced and kissed drunkenly, she was tender and quiet. This was on a boat, where we had gone in a group: Zhigulin and some fluffy girl, and the dried herring Zelensky, and us, ex-spouses.
The boat lay in a shallow little bay-Later the man who owned or rented it – he had arranged the party too, a certain Red – guided his old tub into a broader puddle, set it there in the middle of the puddle, and we all got drunk and stoned. Why we did this nobody knew.
Did I feel good? Not very, at first. To my good fortune, there wasn’t one man in the whole company who could have made advances to Elena. Two homosexuals, Mark and Paul, an old married couple, had more of a brotherly feeling for her. Still wearing the same little jeans and a wide lilac blouse, she paced among us, told bawdy anecdotes, served an ether-type drug to everyone in turn, held our nostrils herself and made us inhale. The mere pressure of he fingers on my nose was enough to put me in a faint. She was altogether the merry wench, thoroughly at ease with us, the life of our small party. My beauty paced among us a bit round-shouldered and ridiculous, and I was happy that there was no real man among us, no one was courting her in my sight. I was ready to shower kisses on Red, who was a man of indeterminate sex, and a friend of his who had no reaction to either women or men and who turned out to be an expert on the leaders of revolutionary movements. At first Elena didn’t talk to me very much. In the middle of the happening, when I was standing on the bow staring into the water, she came up and said, “This boat reminds me of that jazz boat, remember? We traveled down the Moscow River, and you and I got drunk and came to blows, and then in the morning we crawled out the cabin window.”
That was her first reminder of our past.
What followed happened as if in a haze and fog. No wonder I laid into the liquor and kept sniffing, with her help, though she served the drug to everyone. In the end, the moment when she and I embraced – I don’t know how long it lasted – slipped away from me. I’m so vexed and angry now at my drunken self. I did not drink that moment to the last drop, did not feel it deeply, I remember only that it was tender and very quiet. I sat and she stood, I think, and I stroked her little bosom under the blouse. Then fate, in the form of Zhigulin, led us off in different cars, we went home separately, I remember my terrible anguish over this.
Well, of course I called her after that, groping to find what I had forfeited. In hopes of a meeting with her I went out and bought some shoes, dreamed of a carnation in the lapel of my white suit. She was busy, or more likely had recovered from her momentary weakness, and I, too, after suffering awhile, thought it was better this way, I mustn’t hope for anything, otherwise little Eddie’s life would again become hell, and this way it was only half hell.
After a time she called, though I no longer remember, maybe I called; nor do I remember whether our meetings were in the chronological sequence in which I’ve enumerated them or in some other order. I called, I think, and it turned out she was sick. She lay in the studio alone, Zhigulin was in Montreal at the time, and she was hungry. I bought her some groceries, I don’t remember what, took some books, which she hadn’t especially asked for, it was merely that the sight of these books evoked memories, and I didn’t want memories, that was why I took her the books. I arrived – the door was open.
“Why don’t you close it?” I said to her.
“Anh!” She merely waved a hand, sat down on the bed. She had on tight-fitting striped knit pajamas. I made her a sandwich, she snorted, was dissatisfied with the kind of bread, I had bought the wrong bread. “A baby, a fucking baby, a rubber doll,” I thought, looking at her.
Having eaten, she began to boast. Some lover of hers had offered her five million to go away and live with him. “Oh, Nastasya Filipovna,” I thought, “you incorrigible eccentric!”
“He was poor when he met me,” Elena went on. “I told him that so long as he was poor we had nothing to discuss. He went away somewhere, and now he’s back and he’s offered me five million. He made it on cocaine.”
The woman who had been offered five million lay in her alcove, the mattress lay right on the floor, the refrigerator was empty and not even turned on, dirt and eternal semidarkness filled the studio, and for some reason there was no one but me to bring her anything to eat. Probably a coincidence.
She went on boasting to little Eddie. “I refused!”
“Why?” Eddie asked. “You’ve always wanted money, haven’t you?”
‘To hell with him. You always have to be on drugs around him. He’s strong but I’m not, I don’t want to turn into an old woman in a couple of years. And besides, they could always put him in prison, confiscate his property. And I didn’t want to leave New York with him, I don’t like him.”
He made money on cocaine the way Shurik did on oranges and anasha, I thought with melancholy. Shurik went from Kharkov to the port of Baku, and there bought oranges and anasha. Not cocaine, a narcotic. He flew to Moscow and sold it all at many times what he had paid. Took the money, returned to Kharkov, and brought the money to Vika Kuligina, a whore. Now, there was a good woman. Must be old by this time. Had some talent. Wrote poetry. Took to drink.
Here’s a parallel. Elena, Vika. But she doesn’t know. I was the one who saw Vika. She’s scrambled my whole world. The Shuriks, the Carloses. Cocaine. All is chaos, life chaos…
My last encounter with her earned me a gruesome attack of nerves. It was my own fault; she had nothing to do with it, she behaved in her normal fashion, did nothing to bring on an attack.
She called me in the morning and said, “Ed, do you want to go to my show? It’s today at three o’clock.” Her little voice, thin enough as it is, always becomes tiny when she’s nervous.
I said, “Of course, Elena, I’ll be very happy to!”
“Write down the address,” she said. “Between Twenty-sixth and Twenty-seventh Streets, on Seventh Avenue, the Fashion Institute of Technology, second floor, Editorial.”
I went. I was nervous. I had specially bought new perfume, put on my best white suit and black lace shirt, pulled my cross up under my throat. The bus moved terribly slowly, and I was already jittery in advance, afraid of being late.
I wasn’t late. I found the hall in the Institute’s huge building. All the front seats were taken. I located an empty seat somewhere in back and settled down to wait. On the stage a little garden or park had been created, plants set out in a special way, lighting set up in a special way. Electricians and photographers bustled around near the stage creating an atmosphere of anxious expectation. I waited.
Finally the sound came on, piercing music, strange to my ear. Perhaps the music struck me as strange only because it was so very long since I had been in any similar large gathering with people, so long since I had seen any kind of performance; except for the cinema I haven’t gone anywhere, I’ve become unsociable.
They came out, they froze in assorted poses, and then set up a din, an uproar, depicting autumnal animation. Little girls. Hobby-horses, starlets, models – they all looked alike at first glance, and only later, straining my eyes, did I learn by great effort to distinguish among them. Children of the female sex, thin, harried, trained to special tricks, they crossed the stage in time to the music, walked down the tonguelike runway, twirled at its tip, threw the spectators a smile or a grimace or a deliberately sulky look, and withdrew as they had come. For some reason I felt sorry for them, and my heart contracted every time I looked at them. I felt especially sorry for the ones with short haircuts. Perhaps because their little faces, without exaggeration, were the faces of children who had just endured a grave illness. Good Lord, and loutish men mauled these children, mauled, fucked, lay heavy, forced their cocks into them. I felt miserable, and only by an effort of will pulled myself together and looked at the stage.
Meanwhile, Elena too had appeared. She was excessively fidgety and jittery. I don’t remember her first costume because I didn’t make her out immediat
ely under the hat. By the time I realized that this was my darling, her little face had already flashed past and disappeared into the wings. Her second costume was something lilac, long and draped, it might have been called a dress, but then again it might not have. Her eyes flashing under the hat, Elena drew applause from the audience.
But on the whole she performed worse than the other girls. Though I don’t like to admit it, she jittered excessively; excitement made her overfamiliar and undisciplined. Among her girl friends there were several very high-class professionals. They worked precisely and mechanically, their movements were spare and honed, no unnecessary little added wrinkles appeared in their clothes, they exhibited a purity of style and purity in every movement. There was nothing extra: at the right time an abrupt movement of the face, up with the chin, all in time and precise.
But Elena pranced too much, flirted, took too much initiative, acted and overacted, bustled, her movements were impure.
If it were a question of beauty, in my view, Eddie’s unobjective view, she was much more attractive as a woman than all the other models, all the rest of the corps de ballet. But her work was amateurish, that was obvious.
Judge for yourselves: She appears in a little white duck outfit with a hood, and white boots; you know, a nice kind of outfit for a young and idle woman to wear when she emerges from the door of her villa somewhere in Connecticut to gather mushrooms after the rain. So she appears in this little outfit, dances onstage to the music as if gathering mushrooms, or berries, if you don’t gather mushrooms in America, and it comes off pretty well, some people applaud. But then when she has moved to the tongue, is already at the tip of it, precisely where she ought to display herself in large, Elena makes a sudden quick spin, her movements are jumbled, lose precision, so that we, the spectators, don’t even have time to make out her face. Elena’s smudged features flash by – hers? not hers? you can’t tell – and she’s gone from the tongue. She didn’t fix the image of her face even for an instant, didn’t know how to display it, stop it temporarily and present it. No, her performance was amateurish. The applause died out before it could begin.
At the end there were balloons, a procession, music, noise, tangled ribbons – here she was within her repertoire. Circus art is for her. She became entangled in the balloons, waved her hat and so on, she did this well. I was dissatisfied with her, I wanted her to be first in everything.
I hung around in the hall awhile and then went out to wait for her. By now many girls had walked by, they were being met by either lovers or friends, or were leaving alone – there were, it seemed, thin and brash girls like that – but there was still no Elena. Finally she came in sight. She was wearing a white hat and a light, flowery outfit of some sort, a blouse and skirt – later I saw that they were old – and brown shoes, also old; her little legs were covered in dull pantyhose. I went over and kissed her (cowardly Eddie had resolved to kiss her), congratulated her, noting that the makeup on her cheeks was somehow stale, caked. She looked tired.
“Thank you,” I said, “I liked it, only you hurried excessively. It was clear they didn’t give you much time.”
That was what I said. I could not say I hadn’t liked the way she performed; I didn’t want to hurt her. Zhigulin was also standing there with his camera, absent-minded, distraught Zhigulin, who of course had just arrived and had seen nothing.
“I can’t understand where George is,” Elena was saying, irritably glancing around. “He was in the hall, but where is he now?”
She was very edgy, she had no fucking need of her faithful dog Eddie, who would have come crawling all covered with blood if she had called. She needed George, who was not there. Eddie was a noble knight: he did not remind Elena of her remark that she didn’t love anyone, all men were the same to her. Eddie well knew, from Elena’s friends, that George had not invited Elena to Southampton last weekend; that Elena had found in his house some Tampax, obviously another woman’s; that George, who had earlier promised to buy Elena a fur coat, was by now planning to buy her just a cloth coat. And that to this day he had never yet paid, even once, for Zhigulin’s studio, as he had promised to do. The lame-legged cynic and zhlob, he was toying with her like a mouse.
Eddie held his tongue and only said sympathetically, “Maybe he’s in the lobby, shall we go look?” – and went with Elena to the lobby.
Of course, there was no George in the lobby or in prospect. She did not cry, maybe she can’t cry, I don’t know; the last time I saw her tears was when I strangled her, or tried to. Now she was edgy. Turning to Zhigulin, she said she would go home, perhaps George would call home; after all, they were supposed to go to the theater that evening.
I said that it would be nice to celebrate Elena’s performance in the Russian manner and that I proposed going somewhere for a drink, it was my treat. Simultaneously Eddie-baby apologized for not bringing Elena flowers, I had been in such a rush to see her that I hadn’t had time, and then I had wondered whether she wouldn’t be angry – it might be preposterous, by local standards, to give flowers to a model who had taken part in a show. It might be provincial.
In the end the two of us went to a bar. Zhigulin didn’t go. We sat, drank, and she explained to me a rather crazy idea of hers about some bolts of fabric in which she wanted to wrap herself up, thereby making a dress. She had some other wild designs for this same fabric; I was supposed to do the sewing. Although I myself am not a particularly normal guy, I understood that this too – Elena’s desire to bypass money, have dresses in this way, simply and easily, and to play designer besides – was a form of the fucking craziness caused by Western life. I understood that this childish venture was crazy, not a fucking thing would come of it, but I consented. I was afraid of hurting her or provoking her anger.
“Now let’s go and I’ll show you the fabrics, I have them at the studio,” Elena said. “You’ll help me wrap myself up. I have to go to the theater with George tonight, and I’m so sick of my old dresses.”
“Look, let me give you some money, and you buy yourself a dress,” I said.
“Oh, no…” she said uncertainly.
“Why not, Elena,” I said. “We’re old friends. When you become a great model, you’ll help me.”
“But how much money do you have with you?” she asked with interest.
“Oh, about a hundred dollars,” I said. She thought for a second.
“Finish your drink,” she said. “Let’s go to Bloomingdale’s and see what they have.”
She knocked back her drink in one motion. At that moment we were served with little sausages and some meatballs something like tefteli, on a little dish. Perhaps this is the custom. She tried one, then took another by the little stick on which it was impaled and popped it into my mouth. Attention of a special sort, a caress. I paid, gave the barman such a big tip that he grinned with pleasure, and we left.
The taxi ride took a very long time, traffic was heavy. We could almost have gotten there faster on foot. She was very edgy, tried to get out too soon, I kept soothing her.
“No, I’ll buy myself some shoes,” she said when we got out of the cab. “I can adapt that fabric somehow, but I still don’t have any shoes.” I said that it was up to her, and that I personally advised her to buy a big item, “something that will look important, be noticeable,” I said.
This time, strangely enough, the shoes that she bought thirty minutes later were ones I had pointed out to her. They were black shoes on a high, thin heel with a little gold trim. She tried on these shoes, then dragged the saleswoman to another department, tried on something there, then returned, put two mismatched shoes on her feet, walked up and down, looked, and settled after all on the ones I had pointed out to her. Having completed the tedious payment procedure – at Bloomingdale’s they don’t hurry, the shoes cost $57 – we left and walked up and down through other departments. I don’t know how we ended up in lingerie, she was already examining panties with ruches, frills, and flowers. “Do you like them?” she kept
turning to ask me. “I’ve been terrified to look at women’s underwear for some time,” I told her. She let my remark pass. Why should she listen to me, she had no fucking need of my problems. I shut up again, although I so wanted to finish what I had to say.
We bought her a considerable number of panties and some other trifles, then went to the studio.
There she immediately undressed in the bathroom and came out wearing just her pantyhose, right on her naked body, without panties, as models do at shows to avoid having a panty-line on the hips. The triangle of hair at her peepka stared ironically at little Eddie. Bare-breasted and bare-pooped under the pantyhose, Elena walked out in the new shoes.
I don’t think she was tormenting poor Eddie on purpose, she simply wasn’t thinking about him. She was used to going around that way among photographers, among the staff, and did not intend to change her habits. Little Eddie would see her naked and be miserable? To hell with him!
“You’re a nobody!” The words she had spoken to me over the telephone in February came back to me now. “No anger has my soul!” I told myself. “Like Christ with Mary Magdalene!” I went on, to calm myself. It helped.
Suddenly it dawned on me: Good Lord, she doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do with us all, with men, with the Victors, the Eddies, the Jeans… Use us in sex, get our money, have us take her to a restaurant. That’s all she can do with us. She’s innocent as a baby, for she doesn’t know how else she can use us. No one ever taught her. For the rest, we get in her way. She was dreaming when she lived with Victor, she was dreaming with me, she’s dreaming now. She doesn’t care who’s with her. She doesn’t see. The discovery terrified me.
She doesn’t know about love. Doesn’t know that it’s possible to love someone, pity him, save him, snatch him from prison, from illness, stroke his head, wrap his throat in a scarf, or, as in the gospel, wash his feet and dry them with her own hair. No one has told her about love, Cod’s gift to man. Reading books, she missed it. Brute love is accessible to her, there’s nothing complicated about that. She thinks it’s all there is. This is why she’s always so depressed in her notebooks (I’ve always read them), so helpless and dull in her perception of the world.
It's Me, Eddie Page 31