It's Me, Eddie

Roseanne

She was the first American woman I fucked. It sounds fantastic, but I fucked her on July 4, 1976 – the day of America's Bicentennial. Commit this symbolic event to memory, gentlemen, and let us go on to Roseanne herself.

Kirill again, solely Kirill. He was sick of his role as interpreter for Alexander and me. We needed to go to the Village Voice, where we had decided to take our open letter to the editor of the New York Times. We had written the letter apropos of our unnoticed demonstration against the Times. Kirill said, "I can't go, go by yourselves, why can't you go by yourselves?"

"Listen, Kirill," I said, "this is a serious, delicate matter, and with our barbaric English it would be foolish to go alone. We'd just ruin everything."

"But I can't," Kirill said, "I'm busy. Take someone else." "Who?" I said.

"Well, there's Roseanne. You remember, I pointed her out to you at the exhibit at the Russian gallery. Over thirty, a bit of a weirdo."

"All right, Kirill," I said, "call her up and ask her to go to the Village Voice with us."

"No," Kirill said, "I'm afraid of her, I think she wants to fuck me. You'd better call her yourself, I'll give you the number." "All right," I said, "let's have it."

I reached her the next day, and she invited me over that same evening. She was having some friends, an out-of-work history instructor and his wife. I arrived there all charged up, I needed relationships in any shape or form, and any relationship made me glad. She lived, and still does, in a wonderful penthouse apartment. The windows of the long hallway and living room all look out on the Hudson River. On the other side of the living room there's a door out to the terrace – properly, a large fenced-off section of the roof. In addition she has a bedroom and a study. Next door there is another apartment that belongs to her, of smaller size, which she rents out. The whole apartment is as windswept as a sailing ship, and it recalls a sailing ship in its brightness and whiteness, the surge of the wind in it, and the Hudson River beyond the windows. The air is good, it's easy to breathe there. The only thing about the apartment that's a little hard to take is Roseanne herself.

A day or two later we met again and went to the Village Voice with the letter, which she had recast in her own style, cleaning up our excessively leftist political phraseology, making the letter more American. Alexander and I had consented to these revisions.

Even then I noticed her irritation at having to work, type, think, although at that time she was still controlling herself. The letter was practically nothing, less than a page; she agonized over it, while behind her back I scrutinized the piles of books in her study. But then, when she had typed the letter she was very proud of herself. Observing the smile that distorted her face, a strange smile, gentlemen, slightly degenerate, her good facial features notwithstanding, this grimace exposed a mental, psychical defectiveness – observing her face, I had a sudden clear insight. A schiz.

My associations to this word go way back, to my crazy second wife Anna, to the literary and artistic bohemia of Kharkov, the passion for abnormality and disease.

I was raised in the cult of madness. "Schiz," abbreviated from schizophrenic, was the name we gave eccentrics, and it was considered praise, the highest rating a person could have. Eccentricity was encouraged. To say that a man was normal was to insult him. We segregated ourselves sharply from the herd of "normals." How did this surrealistic cult of madness come to us, the boys and girls of the Russian provinces? Via art, of course. Anyone who had not spent time in a mental hospital was considered unworthy. A suicide attempt in my past, practically in childhood, was the kind of credential with which I, for example, had arrived in this company. The very best recommendation.

Many of my friends, both in Kharkov and later in Moscow, received "Group" pensions, as they are called in the USSR. Group 1 was considered the height of praise. A Group 1 Schiz – that was the absolute limit. Many people went too far with this game, and a very dangerous game it was. The poet Arkady Besedin brought his life to an excruciating and atrocious end, the poet Vidchenko hanged himself, we were proud of ourselves. There were but a few hundred like us in the whole city. We had nothing to do with ordinary people. Boredom, despondency, and in the last analysis a joyless death – ordinary Russian people reeked of it. Americans reek of it now.

I understood that Roseanne was one of us. But she was and she wasn't. She easily made Group 1, but there was something unusual about her. A Jew, daughter of parents who had fled Hitler's Germany, the little girl had dreamed of being a pianist and had played professionally from age eleven to thirteen. But American life, the American provinces, the high school where they occasionally beat her up for being Jewish (the last time when she was eighteen, she says) gradually turned Roseanne away from an artistic upbringing too complex for America, away from the piano and her pianist mama – her grandmother was also a pianist – and reshaped her life. She began to be ashamed of her European upbringing, she quit the piano and started down another path in life. It led her to Russian language and literature, led her to work actively against the war in Vietnam while an instructor at a college in one of the boroughs of New York. And then came the event that made her a Group 1 Schiz. She lost her job.

"I'm almost Russian," she says sometimes. But a Russian, in my observation, can go schizzy from just about anything, except from losing his job. She went schizzy. She was depressed for almost two years and still has her ups and downs. She wanted to expose the man who had fired her – unjustly, she said – but the New York Times refused to print her article about the man, and she went schizzier than ever. We are unanimous on the question of the New York Times.

"The students loved me so," she says with a sigh. Perhaps. She's an unemployed instructor. Her terrific apartment must have been partly paid for, all these years, by her parents; her father is a wholesaler of ready-made clothes. She does not consider her father rich. She has a rich uncle and aunt with whom she quarrels whenever they meet, but the uncle and aunt assert that her father and mother don't know how to live.

Roseanne… Once I asked her to check over a letter of mine to Allen Ginsberg. Yes, I wrote him a letter in English, very illiterate of course. One more attempt to find friends, a milieu. I asked an American poet to meet with a Russian poet. And sent him my book, We Are the National Hero, in English translation. No answer so far. He doesn't need me a fucking bit. One more alternative eliminated, that's all. Roseanne proved right, she knew better the men of her own country, even if they were poets. She savaged my letter when she read it. "The way it's written, you want to stick him with your problems." My problems again, they're all so horribly afraid of other people's problems. Allen Ginsberg is afraid too. They're tough, here in their America, but happiness is not enhanced by the absence of other people's problems…

I asked her to check the letter anyway. She began to do it, but suddenly, sitting at the typewriter, she turned preposterously nasty.

"I don't plan to waste the whole evening on this, I worked all day writing," she snorted.

I could not contain myself. "I'm not going to ask you for anything ever again," I told her. "Disgusting psychopath," I cursed inwardly, "you forget how many nights running I've typed the Russian texts you needed. Louse, ungrateful wretch, you're used to getting it all yourself," I thought, staring at her back. But this happened after I had fucked her.

Roseanne decided to have a Fourth of July party. "It's a long time since I invited people over, but I don't have the money, I'm poor, I have to tell them to bring something to drink, I can't buy wine and liquor for them. One of my friends will bring meat for shashlik."

On July third I went to the stores with her. She was wearing the sort of dress that American women always wear when shopping close to home, a cross between an apron and a Russian sarafan. It was a very sunny hot day, we bought wine in a liquor store, and I bought a bottle of vodka. Because of my white clothes the salesman took me for a Russian sailor from one of the tall ships that had arrived in New York for America's Bicentennial Celebration and lay in the Hudson River. Someone selected fruit for her; he was a Latin-American she had known for many years, and she exchanged friendly insults with him, something on the subject of smoking. Either they had both quit smoking, or he had given up and begun smoking again, or she had, something in that vein.

Suddenly I felt good about this neighborhood, about Broadway streaming past flooded in sunlight – the produce store was right on Broadway – about the microcosm of salesmen and customers who had known each other for years, for decades. I envied her a bit, Roseanne. Then we trudged back, and her neighbors greeted her, and I felt good that I was so healthy and tan, in my open shirt, with my silver cross with the chipped blue enamel on my chest, with my green, bright eyes. And I was inwardly grateful to her for having brought me into this world as if I belonged here, walking with her, Roseanne. Although I had passed by this very spot on Broadway time and again, it had never seemed to me so congenial, as if I belonged, because today I was not a passerby.

That same day I cleaned up her terrace, which was no easy job, the wind had deposited a lot of grit on the green artificial grass rug. I cut up meat for shashlik and marinated it, washed windows, and left her late.

I was grateful to her, and she to me, we hung idiotic colored lanterns in all the penthouse windows, then had some whiskey and nearly fucked. I held back only out of mischief, having decided to fuck her exactly on the Fourth of July. I wanted the symbolism. She very much wanted to fuck, poor thing, and moaned pitifully when I stroked and hugged her. As she later confessed to me, she is supersensitive to being touched, while a kiss on the lips leaves her almost indifferent. She and I are alike in this; for me, too, the lips are the most insensitive part of the body. That evening was hard on her, but I held back, said good-bye anyway and left after telling her provocatively that we would make love tomorrow, the Fourth of July. She laughed.

What a fucking Fourth that was! The party was set for one o'clock, but since I knew American ways by now, I arrived at two, having bought her a dozen red roses, for which she seemed most sincerely glad. A great many people were already there, among them several Russians: a writer and instructor – already known to you, gentlemen, he's the one who brought me together with Carol the Trotskyite – and his wife Masha; the photographer Seva with his wife – he had worked about a year and a half for the well-known diver Cousteau. Seva came with his cameras, set them up and took pictures of the ships passing right under the windows. The Soviet Kruzenshtern was officially largest of all, the very largest sailing ship of the present day. "That's ours, largest of all!" I said with a laugh, nudging the writer.

After taking a turn through the crowd and quickly downing several glasses of wine, I began, along with a bearded man by the name of Karl, to make shashlik. Karl had brought a covered pot full of his own shashlik, made the Greek way, marinated in vegetable oil. Karl raised a storm of activity, slicing tomatoes and onions and putting them all on skewers. He knew a few words of Russian.

People are very fond of watching others work. Right away a smiling black girl from Jamaica came over; her father was a priest in his homeland, the girl spoke English very well, much better than Americans do. With many curious people scurrying around us, Karl and I had cleaned the peppers and were sitting there slicing them when Roseanne appeared, leading a very tall fat man in shorts.

"This is the proprietor of the hotel you live in," she said.

He started to laugh, I started to laugh, but inwardly recalling what she had told me about him, I thought, "In addition to our dismal Winslow he owns forty-five buildings in Manhattan; he hasn't got a million, he's got much more. He has a law office on the second floor of our hotel – his hotel – but they say he doesn't practice law at all. Why the fuck should he…"

The man in shorts withdrew into the crowd. "The elephant." Mentally I gave him the nickname, and it occurred to me that my life would be easier if, for the same $130, he gave me a room that was a little bit bigger, a little bit more spacious than my prison cubicle. But why should he do this for me, I decided. What was I to him?

Roseanne says the elephant once wanted to sleep with her. She says this about everyone. She said it even about little Charles, dressed in the operatic smock of a Rimsky-Korsakov shepherd, Charles of the Village Voice, buried in work. This is not a very normal thing to say. It may seem so to her; I don't know. The truth may be that she slept with the elephant, not merely that he wanted her to, but what business is it of mine, I don't love Roseanne, what do I care.

I don't love Roseanne. I realized it almost at once, after I caught her a few times in that hysterical pose, with her head thrown back, the way a cornered rat looks at you. I don't love her because she doesn't love me, she doesn't love anyone… I am firm in the knowledge that I need someone, it makes no difference whether a man or a woman, so long as that someone loves me. I already knew clearly by then – I had become wiser, after all, more normal, and had recently been compelled to think so much – I knew that my whole life had been a search for love, at times an unconscious search, at times a conscious one.

I had found love – Elena. But, innocent or guilty, in her savage will to destroy she had destroyed everything I had built. That is her custom, to destroy, she has never built anything, only destroyed. Now, for lack of another object, she is destroying herself. I am searching anew. How strange; but it may be that I have the strength for one more love.

I caught myself scanning the men and women in the group with identical interest. It was rather an odd feeling: I sat on Roseanne's soft, perhaps too soft, plastic couch, among her plants, conversed with her guests, all the while thinking about myself and seeking someone for myself. There was no one.

There were dried-up American women intellectuals, I knew all about them: they did not interest me, nor I them. Even crazy Roseanne, with the yellow skin of her broad face stretched in a tight smile, was much better. She at least had an interest in people. No love for them, but an interest in them. She had gathered around her a little knot of freaks, one of whom was me. I am under no delusions – of course I'm a freak. The dried-up thirty-year-old American ladies were not to my taste, they knew it all, and I thought they would be boring to fuck. They had no illusions, they no longer hoped for anything in this life but firmly and dryly went their uninteresting way. Where to? To nowhere, to death, of course, where we all go. Alternating this march with intellectual conversations, they were American-style intellectuals. Had I seen protest in the eyes of even one of them, protest and pain, I would have approached her. No, there was nothing of the sort.

The beefy, bull-like American men, showing the effects of at least three generations of good nutrition, did not interest me either. I grew bored. After exchanging a couple of jokes with the Russians I withdrew again to the penthouse terrace, under the open sky, and busied myself grilling shashlik with Karl. I brought along a bottle of vodka, I like it when I have the bottle handy. Since the place was packed, Roseanne could not enforce her zhlobby German-Jewish-American system of serving up the liquor in "decent" measures without handing a man the bottle, a system that always infuriates and insults me.

I stood the bottle in the shade of the shashlik pot and continued to work, talking back and forth with Karl and his wife and other people who approached the table, and at the same time helped myself to vodka whenever I felt like it. We had already begun to hand out the shashliks as they got done; being the chef, of course, I was eating one of the first, washing down the meat with more of the same vodka, when suddenly…

Suddenly Roseanne led a woman over to me. Bear in mind, I was seeing her for the first and last time. She… She was a Chinese woman, her father was Chinese, as I later learned, and her mother Russian. She had an uncommonly luminous face. I scrutinized her later, but at the time the only thing that struck my eye was the light of her face, and I saw that she was beautiful. As they wrote in the old Chinese classics, not in the slightest embarrassed by cliches – and I have read quite a few Chinese classics in translation – "She was like the flower of the lotus." A soft oriental smile played on her lips, and she was gay and sweet, open to the whole world and to me. "This is my best friend," Roseanne said, "my former roommate."

The roommate smiled in a way that made me want to embrace her then and there, kiss her, touch her, rub against her, and actually lie down with her right on the spot and caress her, which I did, about an hour later. I always have immediate reactions, they often get me in trouble. This was the second time it had happened to me during my stay in New York. The first time was when I encountered a very beautiful actress named Margot, whom I began to kiss and hug right at a party, in her husband's presence – by coincidence, he was Chinese – and almost went to bed with her. She had on a stunning object, a hat with a feather, hats have always done me in. I whispered wild Russian caresses and diminutives to Margot, words that exist in no other language, she was ashamed, she smiled, turned her face away and said helplessly, "This is scandalous, scandalous," but plainly she herself liked all this, she saw what she was rousing within me; I did not look altogether like an ordinary cunt-chaser with a hard-on.

That time my wife and someone else dragged me away. Even though she had reached an agreement with me about a free life, Elena was far from delighted with my behavior. True, she attributed her displeasure to the fact that I was behaving indecently. Elena, of course, was the height of decency. If I liked a creature with honey eyes, in a feathered hat, and I showed it, why was it indecent?

This fascinating Chinese girl had a lightning effect on me. All my behavior that night, from then until early morning, was irrational and subject solely to the unconscious, which, as has been shown by my numerous studies on myself, acts in concert with my conscious. Roseanne led the Chinese girl away to introduce her to others, but now I knew what I had to do. In my terrible agitation – "She is here! She has come! She is found!" – I began to drink, of course, and instantly drank off a huge quantity of vodka. I remember I brought out a second bottle and started in on it. Everything after that was told to me by others – Roseanne, and the photographer Seva. I'll tell you later what they told me, but the night into which I then plunged came to a sudden end, and I beheld myself wet, sitting on the bed in Roseanne's bedroom.

"What time is it?" I asked.

"Night," she said.

"Where is everyone?" I asked.

"They all left long ago. You got so drunk you don't remember anything. We held you under the shower, Karl tried to sober you up, you were in the shower for maybe three hours, but it was no use. How could you get so drunk! I was very ashamed for you, I even cried. True, that black man who makes amulets and necklaces was very drunk too, and your friend the writer was drunk. He and Masha got so drunk, when we dragged you into the shower Masha screamed: 'Don't touch him, he's a great Russian poet! All of you together aren't worth his fingernail, leave him alone! He does what he needs to! Get away from him, villains!' She was crazy and drunk," Roseanne concluded spitefully.

I grinned. Masha was one of us, she had been raised in the best traditions of Moscow's bohemia, she knew what to scream. Masha was a baptized Uzbek. Here in New York she zealously attended church, sang in the choir, but the best traditions of Moscow's free bohemia were firmly lodged within her. She knew that if your friend was being dragged off, then drunk or not you had to save him, even by screaming. Not for nothing had she been the lover of two consecutive Moscow celebrities, the sculptor Erast Provozvestny and the poet Heinrich Sapgir. Both were renowned for their scandalous alcoholic rows and even brawls. That sort of thing was accepted in the world I came from, it was not considered a disgrace; anyone had the right to relax, if he could and wanted to.

I recalled that today was the Fourth of July, and that I was supposed to fuck Roseanne. My head ached, I could hardly imagine where so many hours of my time had gone to, there wasn't even a dark hole left where they had been, those hours; but I was distracted from the discussion. I had to fuck her, otherwise I would cease to respect myself. Later I could try to reconstruct what I had done with those hours, but now I should carry out the promise I had made to myself.

"Come to bed," I told her. "I want you."

It was a lie, of course. Although I sometimes did want to fuck her, both before and after this, I didn't want her at all just now, when I was tired and drunk. Nevertheless I forcibly diverted my thoughts from my condition and became absorbed in her body, occupied myself with it.

I remember that after overcoming her halfhearted, nil, resistance, I very attentively undressed her, began to kiss and stroke her. I behaved as I usually did with women, stroked and caressed her, kissed her bosom. I must give her her due: she had a beautiful little bosom, it lay quite tranquil at her age, my new girl friend was past thirty, after all, but she had a beautiful bosom… you see, I don't take away what belongs to her. I did all that, and then climbed onto her. I threw one leg over, then the other, and lay down. I am very fond of stroking a woman's neck, chin, and bosom with my hand. I played with them all, and in Roseanne they were ever so slightly weary, autumn was in her body, autumn.

Taking my cock – which, because of my binge, was not obeying me any too well, first it stood up, then it didn't, it keeled over and fell – I touched it to her cunt. Again I give her her due: she had a good cunt, a sweet, succulent, ripe cunt… you see all those names. Running my cock along her cunt, which became even hotter at my touch and pleased my cock as it did me, I thrust it into this softness, flow, and succulence. It squeezed its way in there, into this mysterious place. Though taught by bitter experience, I still consider this place mysterious.

I fucked her for quite a while, stimulating and sliding open her sticky canal with my cock. This felt good to me, but even so, because of the six or seven hours I had spent unconscious, my cock did not fill to full strength, my mind and imagination were working much better than my poor flower.

I fucked her awhile, she came, and I hadn't even been properly aroused. But the cunt, I tell you, was all coated with mucus, soft, sucking my cock in. The cunt was not hysterical like Roseanne, it didn't get irritated, didn't shout, it was the cunt of a woman thirty-three or thirty-four years old, a good cunt, which seemed mildly to admonish and soothe. "We shall all die. Be here, here it is warm and moist, burning and tranquil, and only here does a man feel he is where he belongs." That was what her cunt said, her soft, plump, yielding cunt, and I agreed. What Roseanne herself said was worse. It would have been all right in English, but she said it in Russian; her Russian lovers and her frequent trips to the USSR were making themselves known.

"You can't come," she said in Russian, fucking, and panting a little from the rhythm of the fuck. "You're too nervous, you're hurrying, don't hurry, don't hurry, darling!"

I would have hit her, only she wouldn't have understood what for. I could not explain to her that her accented Russian had a terrible effect on me, it made me feel as if I were not in bed but in the grim, squalid office of the Russian emigre newspaper with its peeling walls, dust, stink, and garbage. "You came," she said – "ty koncheel." At her last thin, misaccented ee-sound, an invisible icy hand gripped my cock, and it fell, it faded, my poor ardent flower, once my pride and often my misfortune. I couldn't. Couldn't do anything, anything at all… and didn't want to.

Well, I whipped myself into a demoniacal frenzy. I can do that when I have to, I wanted her moans and cries and howls. I pulled my unneeded do-nothing out of her and crawled down, spread her legs, stuck out my tongue, now so essential to me, ran my tongue around my own lips, licked myself once, and then ran it around her genital lips. Oh, did her body appreciate this pleasure. It twitched and became quiet. Then I first checked out all the little corners and culs-de-sac of her cunt, this was essential to me, I knew my business, I needed to test where everything lay, and only then could I begin to act.

I tested. I advanced slowly, testing. I love the smell and taste of the cunt. I have no aversion to it, the cunt. I have love for it. But for Roseanne I had no love. In giving her cunt pleasure, I rejected Roseanne. As I ran my tongue ardently and hotly into the soft canal leading to her womb, listened with pleasure to the quiet sobs of another living being – I love this – I was thinking that this was a most perfect wrong thing.

I could not be happy with her, but since I was in the habit of being happy – the last four years I had been utterly happy with my Elena – I sought happiness out of habit, unmindful that most people simply live in the world without having happiness, men and women have the mutual relationship of a prostitute and her client, all is boring and unbearable, and perhaps, Cod forbid, I would simply find no replica of Elena, no duplicate of her, no, nor a new happiness.

Well, when I was fucking her with my tongue, even though I gave no thought to any of this, I conducted myself properly, of course, I immersed myself in what I was doing, immersed myself in her cunt. My mouth and nose and half my face were covered with sticky mucus, this is the compound they secrete for lubrication so that our cocks may enter, nature made them so. With my hands I stroked all the soft and silky forbidden places near her cunt, around it, in order to create an added ambience of tender lassitude and pleasure, accompanying this with powerful sensations from the constant stimulation of her canal by my tongue.

My friends, she came, giving me a certain pleasure with her moans and ahs, inexpressive though they were. But what a difference it makes, boys, whether the woman you fuck is loved or unloved! A world of difference. Here, if you please, was a good cunt, everything was good, she had good legs, maybe even better than Elena, and good hair; I sought out her virtues, she had them, but she was at least thirty-three, boys, she was a crazy hysteric, and upon her, in addition to the eternal sorrow of the Jewish people, lay the mark of her abnormal personal sorrow as well. I do not condemn her: I myself am not particularly normal, I confess, but I didn't love her, friends, what could I do?

Love turned out to have corrupted me. Love is a kind of sexual perversion, don't you think? It's a rare abnormality, and perhaps it belongs in the medical textbooks ahead of sadism and masochism. I am so alone in my perversion it's hard for me to find a partner.

She came, then I fucked her with my cock, then didn't fuck her, then fucked her again. That whole night left me with the sensation of a sort of fleshy turmoil. Well, I don't know, all men are different, someone else might have found it good. Both before my time and after and during, Roseanne had admirers, quite decent-looking fellows. I've probably been knocked fucking stupid by love, because several of them, whom I knew quite well, really coveted Roseanne.

At last we lay motionless, sprawled on her yellow sheets in a troubled, awkward, and brief morning slumber. You know what time she woke up? Guess! Six. Enough to drive you fucking crazy. She woke up and lay there, she was angry, then she started to get up.

"Do you know what you did yesterday?" she asked me. For some reason, along with a tormenting desire to sleep, my sense of humor had returned to me. I had never thought the two could be coupled, humor and sleep.

"I don't remember anything," I said, wrapping myself up in the red-flowered yellow sheet, wrapping up just a little. To be exact, wrapping only my dick. Even for her, I was not averse to exhibiting my beautiful body once more in a beautiful pose. I loved my body; what do you expect.

"Don't you remember, you were hugging Lily," she said passionately. The Chinese girl, it turned out, was named Lily. She really was a lily.

"I hugged Lily!" I said in a shocked voice. "What, is that true, Roseanne? Oh God, how could it happen, how could I get that drunk! You know, there've been times in my life when I've had terrible pathological intoxications. A few times. Once when I was seeing off my friend Oleg Chikovani, he was leaving the USSR, I drank two glasses of dry wine and didn't wake up till the next morning. They even rubbed me with snow, but I didn't come to. And another time I got so drunk that for some reason I made a pass at my best friend's wife, got my hand up under her skirt," I went on in the remorseful voice of a great martyr and sufferer, "and I lost my friend forever."

Of what I told her, the first item was true and the second half true. I had gotten up under the skirt of a certain lady the first time we met, but the lady so loved poets, and her husband didn't give a damn who got under her skirt. Besides, her husband wasn't with her, it was my friend Dima, a handsome poet and at that time her lover. He was offended at me, but not for long.

"Don't be angry at me, Roseanne," I said passionately, "it's my misfortune, it's my disease. Everyone in our family was alcoholic," I said without a trace of embarrassment. "My uncle the doctor died under the wheels of a train. I hadn't told you, I'm ashamed to tell, but now I'm forced to. I'm holding my own, but it's a hereditary disease, sometimes I don't have the strength to fight it." Moved by the solemnity of the moment 2nd the secret I was supposedly confiding, I even sat up in bed.

My brazen lie made an impression on her. She looked at me attentively, sighed, and said, "Yes, I thought you had something the matter with you. But I thought you were conscious and wanted to get back at me for not giving you enough attention. I saw you were nervous, but it was a party, there were so many people, one asking where's the salt, another where's the pepper, a third where's something else, I got so tired.

"Lily should have left," she went on. "Everyone saw you in each other's arms, that's bad, why do Russians always get so drunk. We had interesting people, this poet, George, we planned to read some poetry, then we thought you'd read too. But why did your friend get drunk?" she said. "Why are you Russians forever getting drunk? Masha got drunk. We had a drunk Russian poet lying in one corner, a drunk Russian writer in the other."

"I've told you why I got drunk," I said ruefully. "It doesn't happen often, only when I'm very nervous. In a calm mood I'm perfectly normal. Often I don't have the strength to fight my disease," I concluded, and assumed a bleak, humble expression. "Forgive me, Roseanne," I added.

Sober Seva, the photographer, later told me that the Chinese girl was fucking terrific, that I had made no mistake, and that although he, Seva, was with his wife, he had nevertheless counted on getting something going with her, but when he was ready to make his move he saw that I was already lying down – lying down, you notice – with my arms around her, kissing her, and saying something, all but making love, in front of everyone.

"And how did she react to it?" I asked Seva.

"She lay there, she felt awkward, of course, there was a crowd of people around, but you could see she was enjoying it, she was giggling. Roseanne chased her out, Roseanne even cried, she was so furious. When you have a girl friend like that, don't invite her," Seva concluded philosophically.

Seva reported all this to me later. But even that morning it was clear to me what I had done with Lily. I knew myself well.

"Yes, you were nervous because I wasn't paying attention to you," Roseanne persuaded herself. I had begun sinking into a doze, which was about to turn into sweet slumber. You think I fell asleep? Fuck no. She wouldn't let me. The love of order that she had brought from Germany summoned her to clean the apartment. Since I was in the house, she had to make use of me. Subsequently I was amazed by her ability to use me and evidently everyone else. If I was going out, even after making love, even at two in the morning, she did not forget to hand me a bag of garbage, which I was supposed to stick in the garbage chute on my way. If I came to her penthouse to get a tan, she always thought up some job for me – first I had to help her transplant flowers, then it was some other equally urgent matter…

Even that morning she wouldn't let me sleep. Instead of lying there, sleeping, waking up, and loving each other – despite all, we had become lovers that night – I was forced to crawl out to the living room, reeling with fatigue and barely propping up my eyelids with my hands to keep my eyes from closing. Then, like sleepy flies, she a spiteful and irritated fly and I an unhappy one submitting to someone else's will, we had breakfast on the veranda.

It was all in small quantities, but nicely served. I would have preferred to eat without plates, but more of it. She was muttering and practically weeping, kept going to the telephone, having long conversations, not forgetting to report that she had had a party yesterday and the Russians had been very drunk.

I drank from a big jug of wine, I had a splitting headache from the sun. A bright red tomato lay cut open on the table, a little breeze was blowing, there seemed to be all the makings of a good mood and happiness, if it weren't for Roseanne. I drank wine; people had brought so much that there was a month's supply left, she had told everyone to bring wine, everyone had obediently done so.

I drank three glasses of California chablis from a gallon jug, dreadful shit. I must say I would have preferred a bottle of beaujolais. I saw Roseanne had five or six bottles of good wine left; why drink shit if you can drink good wine? But she didn't offer it to me, and I didn't want to start a conversation about wine with her when she was irritated, she wouldn't have understood. Subsequently she always gave me bad wine, although she had good wine, French or Spanish, lying right next to it.

The general principle is correct, you know, thrifty. Why waste bad wine. She always asked me, "What, is the wine bad?" But she couldn't fight herself, she always invariably gave me the bad. Poor girl, what psychic torment I caused her. Sometimes I wanted to bawl, "Yes, the wine's bad! Bad! Shitty! Give me that one over there, Roseanne, the Spanish one! I know what's what in wine, why begrudge the good stuff, woman? You don't buy it, after all, people bring it. So let's have it! And not in a piddling glass, drag out the bottle!"

Oh, I never did say it. My mama had taught me, and so had my papa – Communist and political instructor, worked in the MVD's secret police force – they taught me while they could, my parents did: "Don't throw people's weaknesses up to them, Edichka, pity them, don't hurt them. He who has a weakness is already hurt!"

I felt no malice toward her, toward Roseanne. Well, was it her fault if she was stingy by my standards? She had been born in this world, where children were not raised to be carefree idlers and wastrels. The gesture, the display, the overgenerosity that suited us barbarians, us Georgians and Russians – according to one anecdote, a Georgian leaves his overcoat as a tip for the doorman and instead of saying "Keep the change!" says "Keep the coat!" – this was hardly necessary in a young lady from a Jewish family that had emigrated from Germany.

"You've come to an alien land, be patient, they have different customs here," I told myself with anguish, watching the wine in my glass diminish at each swallow. Thank God, while she was on the phone I managed to drain my glass twice more, since it hardly showed on the gallon jug.

"Does she understand that I can view her this way, from such an unexpected angle?" I wondered. "She should have foreseen it; after all, she's been to Russia."

Oh, it may be petty, but this was what formed my image of her. I was open, so help me, I was open to people; I stopped at any word on the street; I sought love, wanted love, and could give it myself; but I couldn't give it when things were this way. All this stuck in my mind, you can't cast out your petty displeasures. Even when I fucked her I could not forget this pettiness, could not separate her sweet cunt from her stinginess – stinginess in my view, gentlemen, only in my view. To you, perhaps, it's the rule.

I didn't thrust my preference on her. But if she had good wine and we were lovers, I simply could not comprehend why she didn't give it to me. I, after all, begrudged nothing, gentlemen. Such feasts I put on for my guests in Russia, even though a poor man! To celebrate my birthday, for instance, I went to the bazaar with friends and bought fifty pounds of meat, gentlemen, and invited forty people, and bought liquor the Russian way, allowing a bottle of vodka per boy, a bottle of wine per girl. I spent all my money, to my last kopeck, and at times I also borrowed. I had no bank accounts, I cared little what the morrow would bring. "God will give the day, God will give us food," as my grandma Vera used to say.

Guests at my house ate, drank, and when in their cups often fought with their host. Now I am dirt, a beggar, in an alien land, but even so I'm always having someone over to eat. And I am not the only such exceptional good fellow. My neighbor Edik Brutt feeds everyone too, if he has anything himself. First of all give a man food and drink. Then you're a friend to him.

In sum, I understood that we were from different worlds, yet I couldn't help myself. I was demanding that Roseanne fulfill barbarian customs of hospitality. But she was a civilized lady.

After breakfast that day I felt exhausted, sat there lazily sprawled in the chair, and naturally didn't want to take a cleaning compound to the floor, which had been trampled to mud the day before. I wanted to stare unblinkingly at the water of the Hudson River, and let the breeze cool my forehead, and fall asleep with my arms on the table in this bright apartment, and have Roseanne become the young Elena, the way she used to be.

Sleep, hell. The lady threw a fit of hysterics, as a result of which, almost with tears in her eyes, she darkly posed the issue point-blank: Either I cleaned the apartment or I had to go home. It was also said that if I was sleepy I could go and sleep in her bedroom, but given the tone of voice in which it was said, how could I possibly go and sleep! I didn't want to quarrel with her; moreover, I felt, despite all, that I was to blame. There was a large element of Russian swinishness in my Bicentennial Celebration behavior. There was, I confess. Since I was to blame, I confess, but I'm poor unlucky Eddie, put yourself in my place.

I washed the floor for her, I vacuumed her wonderful, brightest-in-the-world hallway, her bedroom, and all the other rooms. I did it all, to the ruin of my health. This was the greatest violence I had ever done to myself, the most inconvenient hangover. But for the shitty wine that I had drunk during her long, dreary phone conversations, I could not have coped with the cleaning, I'd have fallen by the wayside. Almost soaring above myself, rising above my own hangover thanks to Roseanne, I suddenly saw that there was strength even beyond the limits of strength.

After a While some neighbors visited her, they lived two floors below. The woman was a mixture of Jew and American Indian, I don't know which tribe. "They're like the Russians, their national disease is drunkenness!" Roseanne remarked to me in Russian. "Her father is an alcoholic!"

This exploiter had revived after my heroic feat and looked satisfied. One thing remained unclear: Why hadn't she cleaned the apartment herself, instead of bitching on the telephone or trailing around with some object in her hands? Why did her apartment have to be cleaned by crazy drunken Eddie on welfare? Who the fuck knows, even now it's unclear to me. She and I had known each other six days, no more. She may have felt that I was guilty before her and should therefore expiate my guilt through chore duty. But what was I guilty of? I hadn't even told her I loved her, hadn't been able to wring the words out.

We sat on the balcony, I mean on her terrace, and she asked would these people have some sausages, and would I have sausages. I said yes. "How many?" she asked. "Two? Three?" She didn't say "four" or "five." I said three. I could have said not a one, but man is weak, I was hungry, couldn't resist, I said three. "He eats so much!" she told them, by way of a joke. After that occasion, proud and morbidly touchy Eddie ate at her house only when she had guests. I always refused to eat when we were alone; I felt uncomfortable for her, didn't want to put her in an awkward position. Moreover, her food didn't fill me up, yet I could not say that two or even three sausages (which was obviously the height of gluttony in her opinion) weren't enough for me, that I didn't even consider this to be food. I stopped eating at her house, and she doesn't suggest it anymore.

Everything I observed in her was extremely interesting to me. Thanks to her I became familiar with several definite, though not very vividly manifested, character traits of Western woman. I can't say that I studied her on purpose; in the beginning I thought that by making some concessions to myself I might even come to like her a little. To this end I imagined that she was unhappy, and began to pity her. The illusion of her unhappiness didn't last long. She was a schiz, yes, but she was a demanding and practical schiz.

As the sun went down that day, she read my book We Are the National Hero to the visiting couple, in English; since the manuscript consisted of short pieces, it could be read in one sitting. The book had been lying around her house for quite a while, and to judge by the interest with which she read, she was reading it for the first time. I listened, my face was indifferent and ironic, but inwardly I was very angry. "How can she be so incurious?" I thought. After all, she found me interesting, she was calling me two or three times a day, inviting me over, and in the end she had fucked me, and wanted to, until I presently put a stop to it myself because of my obvious lack of need to do it with her. And she hadn't found the time to read my book. This was the whole thing, this was the solution to the calm riddle of this woman. She needed me, as she needed others in this world, only to the extent that I could be useful to her, to Roseanne. She couldn't give me even the small fraction of her time, even the thirty or forty minutes, required to read my book. Could she really have no interest in what he wrote, this Russian (or Japanese, Chinese, Indian) who was fucking her now?

No, she had no fucking interest. Everyone wants to be loved. We all want it, from the street bum who spends the night on benches to the holder of a huge fortune. And no one wants to do the loving himself. True, there is love in me, a useless love for a woman who does not need me, for Elena. But, frankly speaking, I sometimes have a suspicion even about myself. Were I not now a destitute man on welfare – suppose a wealthy lover were to show up tomorrow, a man or woman who would suddenly fall in love with me – in my new situation of love and wealth I might forget Elena. Not all at once, gentlemen, but gradually, might I not forget? But I have had no chance to test my suspicions, and never will have. Fate offers only one solution.

Sometimes Roseanne was rather sweet. When she looked at herself in the mirror, trying on a dress, she was always free of grimaces. Nearly all the rest of the time there was a nervous grimace present on her face, a kind of tic. It made her simply ugly. I have already said that I loved sitting in her living room at the table by the long glass wall, all the windows of the hallway and living room looked out on the Hudson River; I loved to sit and be silent. Darkness came on, and a little breeze blew on my face, and the lights burned in New Jersey on the other shore, and my heart felt so strange in my utter loneliness, and although Roseanne would say something sometimes about what good friends we were and how nice it was that we were friends, or she would complain, why had I forgotten that I was her friend… I heard little of it and looked at the water and was intimate with the breeze.

Ten days or so after the Fourth of July I fucked her again, this time with greater success, but also, as it were, in shame that I wasn't justifying her hopes, wasn't fucking her. In the line of duty, so to speak. I fucked her, and naturally went on lying in her bed; she was sleepy from her medicines but was still tossing and turning.

Suddenly I remembered a story of Slava-David's, about a certain New York girl who had hysterically chased him out after passionate lovemaking, because, you see, she couldn't sleep with men, wasn't used to it. Love is love, but sleep must be sterile, deep, calm.

Remembering this, and respecting the freedom of the individual – I was not, after all, in the USSR – I asked sleepy, tossing Roseanne if she wouldn't like to be left alone; even though it was late I wouldn't mind going home. My ulterior motive was to escape from the morning, from her jumping up at six o'clock and the whole hysterical morning environment.

But now she rose to the occasion. Yes, she was unaccustomed to sleeping in the same bed with anybody, she had slept alone all her life, but it was already late, I would wait a long time for the subway, therefore I should stay.

I felt sincerely sorry for Roseanne for having lived all her life like this, in desultory fucking. She fucked rather a lot, I think, but had never known the incredible happiness of sleeping entwined in one mass with a loved one, of feeling, in the middle of the night, the sleepy breath of another living creature on one's own shoulder. Even when Elena and I no longer made love we slept together, and at times, in her sleep, she put her arm around me, and I would lie awake holding my breath all night, afraid to stir lest that little arm disappear, go away. Tears would flow down my cheeks, not from any fucking weakness but from love. Ah, poor crazy Roseanne. I felt sorry for her.

Morning came. The pale dawn of a cloudy day penetrated the bedroom, and I discovered myself fucking Roseanne from behind, having set her on her knees. Gripping her butt, I thought: Lord, how boring it all is this way, without love, the morning is boring and the dawn is gray, how uninteresting it all is, I've even lost my hard-on.

The people who gathered at her place were defective. Once a man came who was sick with an incurable venereal disease. The disease would go away temporarily but then reappear. I had never heard of such a case, but here before me sat a live specimen. Roseanne, like a good tour guide, told me about the details of his disease, about the fact that his wife had now left him. Despite my own inglorious situation, my habit of ridicule was so deeply entrenched that I guffawed inwardly, admiring our company. He, sick with this crud; I, sick with love; and she, too, sick with her own disease. The three sickies went to a film and then to a little restaurant where, even though I was hungry, I did not eat, only drank a glass of rose. The venereal paid, and I was obliged to thank him. "Thanks," I said to him, because I had no money. Roseanne told me to: "Thank him," she said. I thanked him.

Gradually I reached the conclusion that I had no fucking need of her. Except that I kept up the relationship with her for the sake of having at least some sort of involvement in American life, seeing at least some sort of people. This was soothing to me. It's not true that I thought ill of her, I thought well of her; that morning it was just that I thought I wanted a sweet young girl, naive, touching, and beautiful, not a fully formed monster. But life didn't offer me any such girl, I had only two or three people to serve as my entrees into this world, and in order to find such a girl or man – as I have said, by now it was all the same to me – I had to meet her or him somewhere.

Where? My friends the Glickermans had obviously turned their backs on me because of my attempt to strangle Elena. A man like that, they thought, might do anything at all. I called Tatyana perhaps five times that spring, wanting to get together, but each time she postponed my visit under some pretext, until I understood clearly that I couldn't fight my way in there. And why should I! I spoke badly, wasn't a fascinating conversationalist, why should I go to their parties. I, a welfare recipient, ought to associate with people like myself, and not go social-climbing among artists and writers, not fill up the Glickermans' living room with my presence, not hobnob with Avedon and Dali. I stopped calling them.

My other acquaintances, too, obviously did not hold me in the highest repute because of my strangling Elena. That barbarian and scoundrel Eddie really had turned out to be an utter nobody in this world. As you see, I had no place to get appropriate acquaintances, I was stifling without a milieu, and that was another reason I didn't break off with Roseanne. I too was calculating to the best of my abilities.

I say "was," but I might as well say "am." This period is not over, I am in it, in this period, even at the present time. This period of my life is characterized by an unconscious new habit of mine, a completely unconscious saying. Often when in my room or walking along the street at night, I have caught myself maliciously pronouncing one and the same phrase, sometimes aloud, sometimes to myself or in a whisper: "You can all go straight to hell!" Sounds good, doesn't it? "You can all go straight to hell!" Good. Very good. That applies to the whole world. And what would you say if you were in my shoes?

Roseanne was working on a dissertation, I think she wanted to get her Ph.D. in philology. My feeling was, and still is, that nobody fucking needs those dissertations except for the people who defend them, as I declared to Roseanne with all lack of ceremony back in the early days of our acquaintanceship, at which she took offense. She was obsessed with her dissertation, but she was doing it slowly and in my view spent more time bitching on the phone than writing the dissertation. Nevertheless, she always talked about her work, mentioned that she was working, and anyone who didn't know her might have thought she was a very businesslike person. Having lived here, I am convinced that people here generally work not more but less than in Russia, yet they are very fond of talking about their work and how much they work. In the USSR it's the other way around: the nation traditionally considers itself an unbusinesslike nation, but in reality many people work much harder and more productively than American gentlemen. Maybe I'm unjust. But of course I am, and I don't want to be just. I told Roseanne about it, told her that you Americans are very fond of making a big deal out of your work and how busy you are. Roseanne was offended on behalf of the American people and her dissertation, but it was so.

Whereas I could write in one morning, between eight and twelve or one o'clock, an average of five to ten pages, she barely eked out two, she said. I wrote my articles for Russkoe Delo, when I worked there, in two or three hours, and published more than twenty of them in six months. By now it's autumn, and to this day she has not been able to write, as that same Charles of the Village Voice requested, a background article on the open letter Alexander and I wrote to the editor of the New York Times. It has to be done well, she says, she can't hurry it, and she does nothing. But she and I are equally sick, I perhaps more so.

I stopped making love with her, I don't know how she felt about this, she didn't stop calling me. No, she considers me her friend, and I feel awkward telling her it's not so. I have nobody, I can't spit on her, turn around and leave. Especially since I'm beginning to think that she's the only person who for some reason needs me. She has already called me several times at moments when I was very low. I am needed, you see, but only by a crazy woman. She herself says, "I'm paranoid." On the wall in her study hangs a saying of Bakunin's: "I shall remain an impossible person until such time as all possible persons cease to be so." This saying, on a poster, is a remnant of her stormy youth, her participation in the struggle against the Vietnam war, her college teaching, student meetings, little leftist newspapers.

As it happens she really is an impossible person in this world, but to what degree am I, then, an impossible person? I must be a monstrously impossible person. I was an impossible person even there, in the country that gave birth to Bakunin; here my nonconformism is merely more colorful, more shrill, and takes more loathsome forms.

Ah, fuck it. Once Roseanne was having company. She asked me to come a little late, as if I had dropped by accidentally. The whole group was sitting on the terrace when I burst in. There were her new lover, Joe; Joe's friend, a boastful photographer, with his wife; and some German guy that Roseanne, who spoke German fluently – it was the language of her childhood – had picked up on the street.

Joe was a very common-looking man in a red shirt. He talked very rapidly and somehow harshly. I thought he might have been in prison, he bore some imprint. In the USSR I had observed the same thing in Daniel – you've probably heard about the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel. Well, I once observed Daniel drunk. After spending six years in prison, when he got drunk he resembled a drunken criminal. Not that he behaved badly in any way, no, he was merely drunk, didn't insult anyone, didn't harass anyone. But his face, his manners, the way he gesticulated, the set of his body, made him a drunken criminal. Joe was the same way that night, he struck me as a drunken criminal. And it turned out he really was. Sometime later Roseanne called me and said Joe had confessed to her that he had done time for dealing in drugs. I was proud of my perspicacity, though the whole world lives by the same laws and it's not surprising that I, who was already thirty, knew those laws.

Roseanne and Joe were fucking; if I had felt even a flicker of displeasure over this fact… nothing of the kind, shit, I was glad for her that someone was fucking her. It was nice he was fucking her, why not? Now she seems to have gotten tired of Joe and parted company with him, she didn't want to go away with him for the weekend. "He'll get me upset," she said. She doesn't want to get upset, doesn't give a shit about other people's problems. Besides, he drinks all the time. He's a sculptor, this Joe; maybe I'll have to see his sculptures sometime. He had in mind a rather crazy scheme to show his slides on the surface of the World Trade Center downtown, only I don't know whether it was the first tower or the second.

I wasn't at all antagonized by them, I listened attentively to the conversation, but didn't find it interesting to sit with them. They didn't argue about anything, didn't focus critically on anything, they bypassed all the critical places, laughed without apparent reason, the whole conversation was built up out of little anecdotes, out of tiny particles – funny incidents or funny words. I find it hard to say whether it's only they, "the Americans," who are uninteresting, or whether people in general have become uninteresting to me. I think it's that people in general have become uninteresting to Eddie, the ones who are only for themselves, about themselves, unto themselves. Russians are even more uninteresting to me than Americans. I'm in a lousy situation, really bad.

Roseanne is plain as day to me, so well defined that she irritates me. As you see, I can't even use her as a woman. I can't force myself even to that.

Sometimes I even seem proud of my satiety and the fact that I can calmly not use a sweet cunt. This circumstance, engendered of course by my tragedy, separates me from those who get for themselves, love themselves, live for themselves. If I knew that Roseanne needed me, that I could save her, help her, make her different, I would give myself; in essence, it doesn't matter to me now where I throw myself, if only I could give myself completely. But I can no longer help her. No one can.

She and I are drifting ever farther apart, chance acquaintances who met a few times on her yellow sheets. Eddie-baby carries away with him only the soft breeze from the Hudson River, the lights of New Jersey on the other shore, and a piece of Debussy's that she used to play.