It's Me, Eddie

Others and Raymond

I really got over my tragedy very fast, all things considered. Granted, I'm not quite over it even yet, but all the same the pace has been startling. I've known of other such tragedies, and people have recovered slowly, if at all. It was March when I made my first attempts at intimacy with men, and by April I had my first lover.

One day in March, Kirill, the young aristocrat from Leningrad, mentioned that he was acquainted with a fellow a little over fifty, and that he was a homosexual.

For some reason this stuck in my mind. "Kirill, old buddy," I said finally, "women rouse me to disgust, my wife has made intercourse with women impossible for me, I can't deal with them. They're always having to be serviced, undressed, fucked. They're panhandlers and parasites by nature, in everything from intimate relations to the economics of the normal joint household in society. I can't live with them anymore. The main thing is, I can't service them – take the initiative, make the first move. What I need now is someone to service me – caress, kiss, want me – rather than wanting and being ingratiating myself. Only from men can I get all this. You'd never guess I'm thirty fucking years old, I'm nice and trim, my figure is faultless, more like a boy's than a man's, even. Introduce me to this fellow," I begged. "Please, Kirill, I'll be eternally grateful!"

"Limonov, are you serious?" Kirill asked.

"You think I'm joking?" I replied. "Look at me, I'm alone now, I'm at the very bottom of this society – the bottom of it, hell, I'm simply outside it, outside of life. Sexually I'm totally freaked out, women don't arouse me, my dick is faint with incomprehension, it just dangles because it doesn't know what to want and its master is sick. If things go on like this, I'll end up impotent. I need a friend. There's no question in my mind, men have always liked me, always, they've liked me since I was thirteen. I need a solicitous friend to help me return to the world, a man to love me. I'm weary, no one has worried about me for a long time, I want attention, I want to be loved and fussed over. Introduce me, and I'll take care of the rest, really, he'll like me."

I wasn't lying to Kirill; it was a fact. I had even had some long-term admirers, I had snickered at their advances, but somehow I had enjoyed their attention. Now and then I had even allowed myself to go to a restaurant with them; once in a while, for the fun of it or maybe the stimulation, I had allowed them to kiss me, but we never fucked. Among ordinary people same-sex love was considered impure, dirty. In my country pederasts are very unfortunate. At the whim of the authorities they can be entrapped and put in prison for what in the opinion of Soviet law is an unnatural love. I knew a pianist who did two years for pederasty; the film director Paradzhanov is doing time now. But that is the attitude of ordinary people, the authorities, the law. I was a poet, and I had been intoxicated by Mikhail Kuzmin's "Alexandrian Songs" and other poems, where he sings the praises of his male lover and tells about love between men.

My most persistent admirer was a red-haired singer named Avdeev from the Teatralny Restaurant. The restaurant was directly across from my apartment windows. Every evening, if I was home, I could hear his voice belting out "Mama's Poor Heart" and other semiunderworld songs. The restaurant was small and on the dirty side; every night they had almost exclusively the same crowd. Among the habitues were thieves, gypsies from the outskirts of Kharkov, and other shady characters. In summer I heard my singer's voice loudly, at its natural volume; in winter, muffled by the closed windows.

I had just moved in with Anna, a beautiful gray-haired Jewish woman. We lived together as man and wife, it was a happy time for me, my poetry went well, life was gay, I drank a lot, I had a good coffee-colored English suit (which I hadn't come by quite honestly), I spent a lot of time hanging out on the main street of our city with my dear friend Gennady, handsome Gena, son of the manager of the largest restaurant in town.

Gena was a sheer joy. An idler, he saw his calling in drinking sprees and parties, but sumptuous ones. Strange as it may seem, his attitude toward women was almost indifferent. Even though he appeared to love Nona, who came on the scene later, he could give up a date with her for an excursion with me to a little out-of-town restaurant that we called the Monte Carlo, where they made sumptuous chicken tabaka. My friendship with Gena lasted several years, until I went away to Moscow. Gena and I were rakehells, like Fellini's provincial city boys.

The relationship with Gena, I think, was one facet of my innate homosexuality. For the sake of a date with him I used to escape my wife and mother-in-law by jumping from a second-story window. I loved him very much, although we didn't even embrace. As I now see, I was all entangled in homosexual liaisons, only I didn't understand that. When I said good-bye to Gena at the corner – I lived on Sumskaya Street, our main street, where the Teatralny Restaurant also was – Avdeev would come out of the restaurant, he had dark circles under his eyes, his lightly made-up lips glistened, he would walk over and say in a hollow, languid voice, "Good evening!" Sometimes he had to cross the street to do it. I believe he even interrupted his songs for the sake of this "Good evening"; I mean, he rushed right off the stage. He had a clear view of the street through the big windows. Often I was very drunk, and my friends recall that Avdeev sometimes helped me to my house, walked me into the entrance, and started me up the stairs.

Back before Gena and the nightly scene of Avdeev's figure bowed in greeting, back when I was in school, I had a butcher friend, Sanya the Red, a huge man of German descent with a florid complexion, which was why he was nicknamed "the Red." He was six or eight years older than I. I showed up at the butcher shop first thing in the morning, I went everywhere with him, I even accompanied him on dates with girls, and besides we had a more solid tie – we worked together. We stole. I played the role of a cherubic poet, usually this was at the dance pavilion or out in the park, I recited poems to the astonished, open-mouthed girls, and meanwhile Sanya the Red, with his stubby, clumsy-looking fingers, would lightly and unnoticeably – he was a great artist at this business – remove the girls' watches and pick their purses. It was all beautifully thought out, we never once got caught. As you see, my art then went side by side with crime. Afterward we either headed for a restaurant or bought a couple of bottles of wine, drank them right from the bottle in the park or in a doorway, and went for a walk.

I very much enjoyed appearing with him on the streets and in crowded places. He dressed brightly, wore gold rings – one had a skull, I remember, that captured my fancy. He had the taste of a gangster, as they are depicted in the movies. On a summer evening, for example, he liked to wear white pants, a black shirt, and rakish white suspenders; he had a predilection for suspenders. A huge man – he even had a paunch, which got bigger and bigger with the years – he in no way resembled the ordinary, in those years rather drab inhabitants of our city, which is a provincial industrial center with the most numerous proletariat in the Ukraine.

He got sent up without me – went to prison for attempting to rape a woman with whom he had had sex many times before. In prison he worked in the kitchen and… wrote poetry. When he got out, someone gave him a good deep dig with a knife. "Even my fat didn't help!" he complained, when I visited him in the hospital.

He was kind to me, he encouraged me in writing poetry and very much enjoyed listening to poetry. Several summers in a row, at his request, I read to an astonished crowd at the city beach lines that went something like this.

My girl they will snatch

From the car by the nape

And I will then watch

The men commit rape

Men with pates jutting

With cigarettes vile

Will run like dogs rutting

Round the scam of your thighs…

It is funny and sad to read these lines, written by a sixteen-year-old, but I am forced to confess to myself that they strike an unpleasantly prophetic note. The world has fucked my love, and the men with jutting pates – the businessmen and merchants – are the ones who now fuck her, my little Elena…

I was devoted to Sanya, body and soul. Had he wished it, I probably would have slept with him. But evidently he didn't know he could use me in this way, or had no inclination to, or wasn't sophisticated enough. Russia's mass culture didn't serve this to him on a platter the way American culture does.

Such is my history. A love for strong men. I confess, and I see it now. Sanya the Red was so strong that he used to break the bars in the fence around the outdoor dance pavilion, the bars were as thick as a big man's arm. True, he did this only when we didn't have the fifty kopecks for admission.

Gena was tall, well built, and looked like a young Nazi. Dark blue eyes. I never met a more handsome man.

My friendships are intelligible to me now. Those were but two, the most memorable; there were others, but for many years I lived as if in a fog, and only when my tragedy opened my eyes did I suddenly see my life from a new perspective.

Well, I somehow convinced Kirill, who was listening with awe, that my desire was sincere. He listens that way to the stories of all his companions, not just to mine, with a great show of interest, as if this were his main business in life; but it's only show. He's a young man who promises much but does little. In this case, thank God, I knew he wasn't stretching the truth to make himself look good, he really was living temporarily in the apartment of some homosexual who was out of town. I had visited him there and seen the special magazines for men, and all the rest of it. What the hell, maybe Kirill really would introduce me. I was forced to grasp at anything, I had nothing, we were alien to this world. Ignorance of the language, especially conversation; prostration after my tragedy; prolonged isolation from society – for all these reasons I was unutterably lonely. All I was doing was bumming around New York on foot, sometimes walking two hundred and fifty blocks a day, bumming around in neighborhoods both dangerous and safe, sitting, lying, smoking, drinking from a bottle in a paper bag, sleeping in the street. I would go two or three weeks without talking to anyone.

Time passed. I called Kirill once or twice and asked how were things, when would he keep his promise and introduce me to this fellow. He muttered something incomprehensible, justifying himself and obviously inventing excuses. I had completely given up hope in him, when suddenly he called me and said in an unnaturally theatrical voice, "Listen, remember our conversation? I'm here with a friend, he's French, his name is Raymond, he'd like to see you. Come on over, we'll have a drink and talk awhile – it's next door to your hotel."

I said, "Kirill, is it that fellow, the pederast?"

"Yes," he said, "but not that one."

I said, "All right, I'll be there in an hour."

"Make it quick," he said.

I am not going to lie and say that I rushed over there with flaming eyes and fire in my loins. No. I vacillated and was somewhat scared. For perhaps a minute or two I didn't even want to go. Then I spent a long time wondering what to wear. In the end I dressed very strangely, in torn French blue jeans and a fine new Italian denim blazer; I put on a yellow Italian shirt, a vest, multicolored Italian boots, wrapped my neck in a black scarf, and started off, nervous – of course I was nervous. Live all those years with women, and then try and switch to men. You'll be nervous.

He lived at – but I don't want to hurt the man. On the whole he's a nice old fellow. An apartment "done in antique-shop," as we used to say in Russia. On the wall, a Chagall with a dedicatory inscription; knickknacks; paintings depicting, as I later learned, our host himself in a tutu; photographs and portraits of male and female dancers, including Nureyev and Baryshnikov. An elegant, well-regulated bachelor life. Three, perhaps four rooms, with a nice smell, something that always distinguishes the apartments of society people and bohemians from the quarters of philistines and bourgeois families. The latter always stink of either food or cigarette smoke or something moldy. I am very sensitive to smells. Good perfume is a joy to me, a fact that my plebeian schoolmates used to laugh at. I liked the apartment for its smell.

Now our host wrenched himself from his armchair to meet me. Fairly long red hair; heavyset, not very tall; a little bit free-and-easy, like an artist; well-dressed even around the house. On his neck, a dense mass of beads and nice little chains. On his fingers, diamond rings. How old he was I didn't know, he looked to be more than fifty. In fact, he must have been over sixty.

Kirill and he were on friendly footing. They were squabbling in a friendly way. The conversation began. About this, about that, or, as Kuzmin wrote, "Now Heinrich Mann, now Thomas Mann, and into your pocket with his hand." Not really, no hands in the pocket for the time being, it was all very proper, three artistic individuals conversing, an ex-dancer, a poet, and an aristocratic young rakehell. The conversation was interrupted by the proposal that we have some cold vodka with caviar and cucumbers. Our host went to the kitchen, took Kirill with him. "I'll use him to cut the cucumbers." He wouldn't let me help. "You're a guest."

Lord in heaven, what bliss! The last time I had eaten caviar must have been in Vienna – I had brought several cans out of Russia. Elena was still with me…

How nice that he didn't start in by flinging himself on me…, I thought. After I've had some vodka I'll feel a little bolder, and while it's taking effect I'll be getting my bearings.

How very nice, vodka and caviar. I was so out of the habit of normal life that it all seemed a marvelous dream. We drank from elegant silver-rimmed crystal, not from crappy plastic, and although we were only having hors d'oeuvres, a delicate nice plate lay before each of us. This place was so spacious after my hotel prison cell, I could stand up, walk around, examine things. The bread was spread with real butter, on top was real caviar, the vodka was ice-cold, and the cucumbers were cut in strips, I noticed, glancing over the table again.

He still hadn't fallen upon me. In a peaceful and sympathetic way he inquired about my relationship with my wife, not to reopen my wounds, he just asked, as if in passing. He said that he too had had a wife, before he knew that women were so horrible. She had fled to Mexico ages ago with a policeman, or a fireman, I don't remember exactly; she was very rich, and she had two children by him. One son had died tragically.

When we finished the bottle, and we did so rather quickly – we all drank easily and were experts, men who drank constantly, every day and heavily – he shook himself off, went into the bathroom, and started getting ready for the ballet.

He put on very elegant clothes, a black velvet jacket from Yves Saint Laurent with a chic handkerchief in the pocket. When he came out he asked if we liked what he was wearing, and was very pleased to receive an affirmative from me and "Raymond, you're a charmer" from Kirill.

At this point the bell rang. Raymond was being called for by a certain Luis (his lover, Kirill whispered to me), but Raymond called him Sebastian, after the well-known saint who was executed by arrows. Sebastian was Mexican. He did not strike me as interesting, he was dressed very conservatively, the same height as Raymond, had a pleasant face but no outstanding features. He owned an art gallery. He was thirty-five or forty, and Raymond considered him young.

They went out, but Raymond had asked Kirill and me to stay and wait till he came back. Kirill, enjoying the fact that he had lived up to my expectations and kept his promise, asked patronizingly, "Well, Edichka, how do you like cher Raymond? Isn't he a charmer?" Here, I think, he was imitating the jargon of his renowned aristocratic grandmother, about whom he told a great many stories. The grandmother lived to be a hundred and four, and had what in my opinion was the bad habit of dashing cracked antique plates against the wall.

I said I thought he was okay, not a bad fellow.

"He's in love with Luis now, but when we were in the kitchen he said that he liked you very much."

How could he not like me? This sounds implausible, but he was the spit and image of Avdeev – the singer from the Teatralny Restaurant, admirer of my early youth. It's a strange world!

Kirill lavished praise on Raymond as if he were a commodity that he was planning to sell. Raymond was clever, he was cultured, he wore sumptuous clothes – so saying, Kirill led me into the bedroom, where Raymond's many things hung in the closet. "Look at this!" He proudly flung open the closet door. "So much of everything!"

Kirill himself went around in dreadful worn-down shoes. Although he suffered over this, he did not have the willpower – even when he had the money, which was very rare, but sometimes he did – to go out and buy shoes.

Raymond and Luis, Kirill continued in the tone of an affectionate mother recounting the escapades of her fervently loved son, were having tailcoats made specifically for the theater, special identical tailcoats. "You know, Limonov" – in the seriousness of the moment he even switched from Edichka to Limonov – "Raymond has known many great men, from Nijinsky to… And besides, Raymond has…"

Kirill had probably touted me to Raymond in exactly the same way. A poet, and clever, and so refined, the poor fellow has suffered horribly from his wife's treachery…

Soon Kirill turned melancholy. The excitement of having lived up to my expectations and fulfilled his promise was over. Evidently fighting off the emptiness, he went to the next room and began making phone calls. He called his mistress, Jannetta, and apparently got up the nerve to quarrel with her. Unsettled, he returned to the living room, took another bottle of vodka from Raymond's icebox, and we drank it, hardly noticing what we were doing. He withdrew to the telephone again, made several more calls, this time whispering stealthily in English, but did not hear what he wanted to from the receiver. Then, since I was the only available target, he began to badger me.

"Limonov, hey Limonov, remember you pointed out a woman you knew at the hotel, a Russian emigree? Call her up, have her come over, I'll fuck her."

"Shit, Kirill, you don't need her, and anyway she hardly says hello to me. Besides, it's twelve o'clock. The night is young for you and me, but it would be an insult to go calling up an ordinary person like that girl. She's been asleep for hours. And if I did call her, what would I say?"

"Can't you even do me one little favor, can't you call that tart? I'm miserable, I quarreled with Jannetta, I need somebody to fuck. I do everything for you – I introduced you to Raymond – but you don't want to do anything for me. What an egoist you are, Limonov," he said furiously.

"If I were an egoist," I replied calmly, "other people's actions wouldn't fuck me up and I wouldn't give a shit what my ex-wife did. It's precisely because I'm not an egoist that I lay dying on Lexington Avenue. What more can I say, you saw me dying there, saw the shape I was in. The reason I was in such bad shape was that I had suddenly lost my reason for living – Elena. I had no one to take care of, and I don't know how to live for myself. What kind of egoist am I?"

I said all this very seriously, very, very seriously.

"Take care of me," he said, "and yourself too – we'll fuck her together, want to? Come on, Edichka, call her, please?"

Maybe he wanted to compensate himself for his failure with Jannetta, vent his malice on someone else's cunt. Such things happen. But I could not have some tart present at my first experiment.

"I don't want to fuck dirty tarts," I said. "Women disgust me, they're vulgar. I want to start a new life, I want to sleep with Raymond this very day, if I can manage it. Anyway, don't hassle me, fuck off. We'd better have something to eat, I'm already hungry."

By reminding him of food I succeeded in turning him to another path. He was hungry too, and we went into the kitchen. "Raymond hardly ever eats at home," Kirill said cheerlessly. We raided the refrigerator – of what he had there, very little was edible. We settled on apples, ate two apiece, but the apples didn't satisfy us. In the freezer we found some cutlets that must have been there a hundred years, took them out, and began frying them in mayonnaise – we couldn't find the butter, although Raymond had served some with the caviar. There was caviar in the refrigerator, too, but we were shy about touching it.

We made a terrible stink – had to open all the windows – and at that moment, in walked Luis-Sebastian and Raymond.

"Phew, what did you burn? What a stink!" Raymond said prissily.

"We got hungry and fried some cutlets," Kirill answered, abashed.

"Couldn't you have gone down to the restaurant?"

"We don't have any money today," Kirill said modestly.

"I'll give you some money, go and eat, young men must be well nourished," Raymond said. He gave Kirill some money and came to see us off.

"Excuse me," he said to me intimately, at the door, "I want you, but Luis often stays with me to make love and sleeps here, he loves me very much." Suddenly he kissed me, an unexpectedly firm and long-drawn-out kiss, his big lips enveloping my little lips. What did I feel? The sensation was strange, and I felt a sort of force. But this didn't go on long; after all, Sebastian-Luis was stirring around in the living room. Kirill and I went out.

"Call me tomorrow at twelve o'clock, at work – Kirill will give you the number. We'll have lunch together," Raymond said into the narrowing crack.

Downstairs in the restaurant we each bought ourselves a huge long chunk of meat – steak and potatoes. It was very expensive, but it was good and we ate our fill. Weighed down with food, we went out into the New York night, and Kirill saw me to the hotel.

"Kirill," I said jokingly, "Raymond's good-looking, but I like you better. You're big and tall, and what's more, you're young. If you had a little money too, we'd make a beautiful couple."

"Unfortunately, Edichka, I'm not attracted to men for now – maybe some day," he said.

It was 2:00 a.m. by the electronic clock on the IBM tower.

The next day I called Raymond and we met at his office. After making my way through a barricade of sleek and fat-free secretaries, I finally found myself in the room – cold and light and spacious, of course, bigger than the lobby of our hotel – where he did his business. He looked like a grand seigneur: gray pinstripe suit, dotted necktie. We set off without delay for the very nearest restaurant, it was on Madison, not far from my hotel.

The restaurant was packed with gray-haired and very proper ladies; there were men too, but fewer. With regard to the ladies, my thought was that each of them had obviously dispatched a minimum of two husbands to the next world. We sat side by side; Raymond ordered me an avocado-and-shrimp salad.

"I can't eat that dish, it's fattening," he said. "But you can, you're a boy."

The boy thought to himself that yes, no doubt he was a boy, but if you made a hole in his head, took out the part of the brain that controlled the memory, washed and cleaned it properly, that would be luxury. Then you'd have a boy.

"What shall we have to drink?" Raymond inquired.

"Vodka, if I may," I said modestly, and adjusted the black scarf at my neck.

He ordered vodka for both himself and me, but they served it with ice, and it wasn't all I had expected.

We ate and talked. The salad was sophisticated and subtle in flavor, a gourmet dish; I was eating with a knife and fork again – I eat very adeptly, like a European, and I am proud of it.

To a stranger, of course, we looked like two pederasts, although he behaved very respectably except for stroking my hand. Several old ladies were obviously shocked, and on our banquette we felt as if we were on stage, sitting in a crossfire of stares. As a poet I enjoyed shocking these old ladies. I love attention of any sort. I was in my element.

Raymond began telling me about the death of his fifteen-year-old son. The boy had smashed up on a motorcycle, which he had bought without his father's knowledge. "He was in school in Boston, and I had no control over the purchase," Raymond said with a sigh. "After his death I went to Boston and saw the man who had sold him the motorcycle. He was black, and he said to me, 'Sir, you have my deepest sympathy in your grief. If I'd known this would happen, I never would have sold the boy the motorcycle, I would have demanded that he get his father's permission.' A very good man, that black," Raymond said.

Trying to distract him from his sad memories, I asked about his ex-wife. He brightened up – this was obviously a topic of interest to him.

"Women are much coarser than men, although that's the reverse of generally received opinion. They're greedy, egoistic, and repulsive. I hadn't had anything to do with them in ever so long, but recently I went to Washington and after an interval of many years, happened to fuck some woman. And you know, she struck me as dirty, although she was a very pretty thirty-five-year-old, feminine and clean. Their very physiology, their menstruation, harbors dirt. – Kirill told me that you loved your wife very much, and that she's a very pretty woman. You're still suffering now, of course, but you can't imagine how lucky you are that you escaped from her, you'll realize it later. A man's love is much more solid, and often a couple will spend their whole lives together." Here he sighed and took a sip of vodka. He was pensive a little while.

"True, such love is encountered more and more rarely nowadays. Before, twenty or thirty years ago, homosexuals lived very differently. The young lived with the old, learned from them; this is noble, when a young man and an old one love each other and live together. A young man often needs backing, the support of a mature, experienced mind. This was a good tradition. Unfortunately, it's very different now. The young prefer to live with the young now, and all that comes of it is bestial fucking. What can one young man learn from another…? There aren't any solid couples now, they keep switching partners." He sighed again.

Then he went on. "I like you. But I've been having a romance with Sebastian for a month now. I met him at a restaurant; we have special restaurants where women don't come, you know, only men like me. I was sitting with a whole group, and he was with a group too. I noticed him right off, he was sitting in a corner and being very enigmatic. He, Sebastian, took the first step – he sent me a glass of champagne, I replied with a bottle. I thought at first that he liked my friend, a handsome young Italian. No, it turned out he liked me, the old one. He came over to our table to introduce himself. That's how we met.

"He loves me very much," Raymond went on. "And he has a very good cock. Do you think I'm being vulgar? No, the subject is love, after all, and in love this matters – he has a very good cock. Yet he doesn't arouse me, and when I kissed you at the door last night, my cock stood up right away…"

In response to so frank an outpouring, I cut a morsel of avocado with exaggerated care, then laid down my knife and fork and picked up my glass, took a drink, and swished the ice cubes in the vodka.

Raymond did not notice my embarrassment.

He went on, "Sebastian had a terrible tragedy, you know. He was close to suicide. He had lived for six years with a certain man, I don't want to mention his name, he's a famous man, very, very rich. Sebastian loved him and never left his side the whole six years. They went to Europe together, traveled around the world on a yacht. And suddenly this man fell in love with someone else. Sebastian didn't recover for a year. He tells me that if I leave him he won't survive it. He treats me very well, he gives me gifts – he gave me this ring, and perhaps you saw the huge vase in the living room, he gave me that too.

"Yesterday, you noticed, he was a bit gloomy. A deal of his fell through, there was big money involved," Raymond went on. "Sebastian wanted to sell, but couldn't, some beakers that had belonged to a King George, I don't remember which one; he's very upset. He loves his work at the gallery, on the whole, but he gets very tired. He comes to me to make love, but he's apt to fall asleep from fatigue; I kiss him, trying to wake him up, I want sex, but he gets tired at work. Besides, he has to do a lot of driving, and it's a long ride for him to my place from work. We'd like to make our home together, but his work prevents it. The difficulty is that while men like us aren't persecuted in this country, it still wouldn't be a good idea for his rich clients, especially the women, to find out he's a pederast. They'd probably stop buying from him at the gallery. Not all of them, perhaps, but many. That's why we can't make our home together – inevitably, rumors would reach them. But for economic reasons too, it would be more convenient to live together. He's – oh, not stingy, but you know, thrifty, which is good, because I spend money too freely. He says we could eat at home sometimes, he likes to cook. I used to be able to afford a lot in my job, my restaurant expenses were paid by the company too, I enjoyed great privileges, I was a friend and partner to my boss. Now that my friend and partner has died – we created the business together – I no longer have such great privileges. The financial constraints irritate me. I'm used to living on a grand scale.

"What do you think?" He turned to me suddenly, breaking off his monologue. "Does Sebastian really love me, as he says? I often tell him, 'You're young, I'm old, why do you love me?' He answers that I am his love.

"I don't know what to do," Raymond went on pensively. "I like him, but as I told you – you made my cock stand right up, he doesn't make it happen that way, yet he says he loves me. Can I believe him? What do you think?" He looked at me expectantly.

"I don't know," I said. What else could I say.

"I'm afraid to fall in love," Raymond said. "By now I'm the wrong age. I'm afraid to fall in love. And then if I'm deserted, it will be a tragedy. I don't want suffering. I'm afraid to fall in love."

He looked at me expectantly and stroked my hand with his fingers, red hairs sticking up here and there from under his rings. His hand was heavy. Dully, as if in a dream, I looked at that hand. I understood that he wanted to know whether I would love him if he left Luis. He was asking for guarantees. What guarantees could I give him? I had no way of knowing. He was nice, but it was hard for me to tell whether I had any sexual affinity for him. I would be able to tell only after making love with him.

"Advise me what to do," he said.

"He probably does love you," I said, half lying, just for the sake of something to say. I wanted to be honest with him, as with the whole world; I couldn't tell him, "Desert Luis, I will love you devotedly and tenderly." I didn't know that I would. Moreover, I was suddenly struck by the thought, He's seeking love, care, and kindness, but I seek the very same thing – that's why I'm sitting with him, I came for love, care, and kindness. But how can we part? I was distraught. If I'm supposed to give him love, I don't want to – I don't, that's all. I want to be loved, otherwise I don't need any of it. In return for his loving me, if he does, I will come to love him later. I know myself, that's the way it will be. But to begin with, let him love me.

Then we walked away from this potentially explosive moment. We didn't walk away – we crawled away with difficulty. He asked me about my life in Moscow, and I patiently told the same story that I had had to tell maybe a hundred times, here in America, to polite but basically indifferent people. I repeated it all to him, only he was not indifferent. He was choosing me.

"My works were not printed by the magazines or publishing houses. I typed them myself, put them in primitive cardboard covers, stapled them together, and sold them for five rubles apiece. I sold these collections wholesale, in lots of five to ten, to my closest admirers, who served as distributors. The distributors, each of whom was the center of a circle of intellectuals, paid me at once, and then retailed the collections in their circles. Usually samizdat goes for free, I'm the only one ever to sell my books this way. By my calculations, they distributed about eight thousand collections for me."

I delivered this patter to Raymond in a studied monotone, the way one reads aloud a text he is sick and tired of.

"I also knew how to sew and made trousers to order. I got twenty rubles a pair. I made handbags too, and my previous wife Anna, I remember, used to go and sell them at GUM, the main department store on Red Square, for three rubles apiece. All these ways of making money were banned, persecuted in the USSR. I was taking a conscious risk every day."

He was no longer listening very closely. My Russian arithmetic held little interest for him. Three rubles, twenty rubles, eight thousand… He had his own worries. I had come for love, and I saw that love was wanted from me. He was estimating whether I was capable of it. I didn't like this. In this role, the role of the one who loves, I had already suffered defeat. I too wanted guarantees. I had absolutely no desire to return to my old situation.

We paid the bill – he paid, of course, I had nothing to pay it with, later I got used to the girl's role – and decided to take the elevator up. Raymond wanted to look at some china, he was planning to buy a new dinner service, and there was a gallery on the top floor.

We were received at the gallery by a homely girl, and later an old lady. I enjoyed having them see us – the imposing Raymond and me – and understand all. Raymond fingered the dishes, examined plates and goblets, offered old porcelain to me to admire, we passed the time intellectually, usefully. I love the beautiful, I shared his delight in the creations of the masters of the comfortable old world, where there were families, where there was no cocaine, where there were no Elenas fucking in a narcotic sweat, where the obscene world of photography did not exist, nor its dirty backstage milieu. Family dinners, an orderly life, that was what this porcelain embodied for me. Unfortunately, I was destined for something else, I thought.

But the inspection and pricing ended, we took the elevator down, he kissed me in sight of the elevator boy, and we went out on the street, which was full of automobiles. It was spring, 1976, twentieth century, the great city of New York at lunch hour.

"I'd like to make love with you, but Luis almost always stays now to spend the night. Besides, he'll be wary of you now, you saw how he watched you yesterday?" I remembered only Luis-Sebastian's tired look and my halting conversation with him.

"You might come to my place today at five – we'll spend a little time together, have a drink," Raymond said.

"All right, I'd be glad to," I said, and in fact I was glad, for I had again developed an adamant determination to sleep with him at all costs. I shall venture to use a bureaucratic expression: I wanted officially to become a pederast – inwardly I had already become one – and henceforth to be such and consider myself such. I wanted to finalize it. Perhaps girls feel this way about wanting to lose their virginity. There was even something abnormal about this desire of mine; I felt it.

We said good-bye on Madison. I did not go to the hotel right away but walked the streets a while longer, considering his words. In the world of pederasts too there are love and unlove, tears and tragedies, nor is there any refuge from fate, blind chance, I thought. And true love is just as rare.

I showered and was at his apartment by five. Kirill was there too. Raymond was sitting in the bedroom in an armchair. He had loosened the knot of his necktie and was having a drink, sipping from a tall glass. "Make him a drink!" he ordered Kirill. The young procurer gave me a conspiratorial wink and said, "Come on, Edichka, I'll make you a drink."

"What, can't you do it without company?" Raymond said in mock anger.

"It's just that I don't know what he wants, I'll show him what we have. Let him choose."

I went to the kitchen with Kirill. Luckily the phone rang and Raymond did not detain us, being occupied with his phone conversation.

"Before you came," Kirill whispered, making me a vodka and orange juice, "before you came, Raymond asked me to tell you he'll take you to restaurants very often, he'll buy you a suit, but just don't live with anyone for now. Raymond has to decide what he should do, stay with Luis or be with you. He says, 'Sebastian loves me very much, but I can't get it up with him. Eddie doesn't love me but perhaps he will yet; after all, we've only just met.'

"Actually," Kirill continued in a hissing whisper, "he doesn't believe you've never tried men. He says, 'I have the impression he's slept with men.'"

"That's how good my masquerade was," I said dully, thinking my own thoughts. I could have pretended, this afternoon in the restaurant, could have said I loved him, begged him to desert Luis and live with me, God knows what-all I might have said to him; I could have acted the part, leaned on his shoulder, stroked his red neck, kissed his ear, played the petit-bourgeois cocotte, the decadent woman, and laid it on thick with mannerisms, trivial whims, eccentricities and endearing little ways from which he would not have extricated himself, of course. I knew how to do that. The riddle for me would have been how to conduct myself in bed, but this, too, I hoped to master very quickly. I had acted unwisely but honorably, I had not started lying to him, and had not said I loved him.

We went out to the living room. In the bedroom Raymond was communing with the telephone receiver in French. We therefore remained in the living room.

"I encountered your ex-wife today on Fifth Avenue, Edichka," Kirill said. He looked at me attentively, anticipating an effect. I drank my vodka and merely said, after a faint pause, "And?"

"She was flying along Fifth Avenue, not seeing anyone, in a sort of red jacket, her pupils were dilated – she's probably shooting up heroin or sniffing cocaine – all keyed up, excited. She's going to Italy, she says, for a month of shooting, Zoli is sending her. 'How's Limonov, do you ever see him?' she asked. When she learned I had found you a 'friend'" – Kirill lowered his voice – "she was very pleased and said, 'I hate men, find me a rich old lesbian to caress me, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me with an artificial member…"' Kirill repeated this "fuck me" several times. Elena, too, must have said it that way, several times and with raised voice. I remembered the long and almost bestial orgasms that I myself had given her with an artificial member, and it set my head spinning, a nether warmth flowing: after those orgasms I had especially enjoyed fucking her. I took a big gulp of vodka, and while remaining aware of my sensations, aware of my filling prick, I shook off my torpor and listened, forced myself to listen to Kirill's words. He finished the sentence. After the artificial member came: "'…and then our family will be complete,' she said."

Next Kirill launched into a discourse on the fact that Elena was not to his taste and what did I see in her. I kept smiling at him automatically, mockingly, meanwhile hardly able to get myself out of our bed, get myself out of the "conjugal" bed.

Thank God, Raymond came in – a real person from the real world – and my torture ended. We had drink after drink. After a half hour spent in sophisticated conversation Raymond began fondling my member through my pants, completely unashamed before Kirill. I smiled and pretended nothing special was happening.

Raymond was not sitting beside me, he was reaching for my prick from an armchair, but I was on the couch. This heightened the absurdity of the situation. I felt nothing at Raymond's touch, absolutely nothing. Kirill was here, and I was not a healthy peasant lad from some place like Arizona, with normal instincts and a prick that would naturally stand up if a stranger touched it. I was a ridiculous European with unnatural connections inside my body, I was a good actor, but this was something I couldn't control. Tears I could squeeze out any old day, but get my dick up in such a situation? Then again, I didn't know whether I had to. My only thought was that a dick without an erection might frighten him off. But no, it didn't; rather the opposite.

After a while I went out through Raymond's bedroom to a vast bathroom, artistically decorated with portraits and photographs. I made peepee, wiped my member with a tissue, and was on my way back when Raymond met me in the bedroom. His eyes were weird, his lips the color of strawberries that have spoiled in the sun, and he was muttering. Still muttering, he nestled up to me. I was much taller than he, I had to put my arms around his back and shoulders. We shifted from foot to foot, he continued to mutter and massaged my member through my slacks – why, I could not understand. We must have looked like Japanese wrestlers. Finally he began nudging me toward the bed. Well, I went, what else could I do, although I felt a growing dissatisfaction that he was managing it all so absurdly.

He put me on the bed, I lay on my back, and he lay on top, making motions such as you make when fucking a woman. He devoted himself to this travesty for some time, panted heavily and breathed in my ear, kissed my neck. I threw back my head and rolled it from side to side exactly as my last wife had, I caught myself doing it; I must have had the same expression on my face too. These things are contagious.

Raymond was heavy and awkward. For all my irritation I sympathized with him, acknowledging myself to be an inept virgin. "He'll have a hard time with me," I thought. But my dissatisfaction that he was making it all so foolish and awkward did not leave me.

In the next room Kirill was talking on the phone, and the door wasn't shut. Ah, that's why he muttered something inarticulate instead of speaking normally, I realized. I was thinking altogether too much at that moment. I won't think, I decided, and returned to reality. A heavy red-haired old fellow was wriggling on top of me. A fine situation, little Eddie, you're lying down and about to get fucked, it seems. But that's what you wanted. Well, put it this way, what I had wanted was not specifically a fuck but love, kindness – I was so weary of being without caressing kindness – and, as a natural extension, a caress for my prick as well. But what was happening was some kind of nonsense. Did he really lack the subtlety to realize that this was the wrong way to go about it with me? Or was he not concerned about frightening me, did he not value me?

He slithered down, unzipped my pants, but could not unbuckle the belt, didn't know how it worked. I smiled inwardly. In exactly the same way, my first woman had fallen afoul of my belt – that one was my papa's Soviet Army belt – she couldn't unbuckle the little kid's belt. This belt was Italian. My first man. "No, you won't get the fucking thing unbuckled, you don't know how it works. Fuck it – I'll help." Without changing the languid expression on my face, I lowered my hands from behind my head, where they had been the whole time, and unbuckled the belt.

In a fever he pulled open my red panties and took it out – my member. Good Lord, it was scrunched and little like a boy's, and at the touch of his grabby hand a droplet of urine came out, rolled out like a tear. No matter how much you wipe with tissues, that little drop always lurks deep inside, to come rolling out at the first opportunity. I wondered how Raymond would deal with it. "Did you think it would be easy to fuck the wounded?" I wanted to ask. He jerked and kneaded my member. A trifle coarse and hasty, I thought.

In the next room Kirill was reproaching his Jannetta for something. Without meaning to, I listened to Kirill's voice, picked out individual words. Raymond jerked and kneaded. I was uncomfortable, one of his knees was crushing my leg. Suddenly I realized that he didn't have a fucking chance of getting anywhere and that I was about to get up and flee. To avoid injuring myself or offending him, I promptly said in a languid whisper, "Kirill will hear!"

He understood and got up, or maybe he had despaired of doing anything with my member, but anyway he got up and went into the bathroom in a somnambulistic state.

When he returned I was already strolling around the bedroom, looking out the windows at the street below, with my pants zipped up and my shirt tucked in. We rejoined Kirill and picked up our drinks. Then I took from my vest pocket some poems I had brought, read them to Raymond and Kirill, with Kirill gravely expressing his opinion on each poem.

The poems restored my lost composure. In this business I am superior to everyone; here, only in poetry am I who I am. In reading my poems I found composure, as I say, although these men, Raymond and Kirill, were not right for my poetry. Raymond politely understood that this was art, and as art it must be appreciated and admired, but he scarcely had any real feeling for who was sitting before him or what was being read. Even though he was more European than American, he had lived in this country so many years that he had unthinkingly assigned to art the modest role of a knickknack ornamenting life. It was nice, of course, that his potential lover was a poet, it was interesting, romantic, but that was all. To him my poems were small, and he, Raymond, was big, while in fact little Eddie's sufferings were much bigger than Raymond, bigger even than the whole city of New York, precisely because Eddie was visible, could be seen, through the poems. Or so I flattered myself; however, I am fully convinced of it to this day.

It wasn't much of a treat for them, so I read maybe five to seven poems and put the manuscript away in my vest pocket. Enough. Especially since Raymond had been distracted by the telephone, and Kirill, of course, was trying to explain to me his own Petersburg-Leningrad attitude toward poetry. Leningrad people love pomposity and pathos, affectation and pseudoclassicism; my poems and I are too simple for them.

A guest appeared – a certain Frenchman, the owner of a chain of stores selling ready-made luxury clothes from Yves Saint Laurent, Cardin, and other French celebrities. These beautifully resonant names had been familiar to me back in Moscow. Louis Aragon, for example, member of the Central Committee of the French Communist Party and one of France's greatest poets, got his things from Yves Saint Laurent. How do I know? Oh, little Eddie has heaps of society connections, although he keeps quiet about them, doesn't drop many names. I was told about Aragon's penchant for Yves Saint Laurent by Lily Brik, the celebrated Lily, my friend, the woman who went down in history as the mistress of the great poet Mayakovsky – a great poet no matter what you may hear from various Soviet and anti-Soviet scum.

Oh yes, I'm forgetting the Frenchman. He wore his fine little threads of hair slicked down on both sides of his skull; bony and tall, with rather a large butt, considering his overall leanness; he had narrow, tight trousers and a face just as narrow, tapering to the nose. He looked like some kind of fish.

Breaking out in blotches – he was shy – Kirill began to speak French with the Frenchman. I must confess the young idler succeeded pretty well. The grandmother that he mentioned so often not only had known how to dash cracked Kuznetsov porcelain against the walls, but also had taught her grandson to speak French and English. The same cannot be said of my own grandmother, unfortunately.

At a request from Raymond, who was boasting about my figure, I was obliged to twirl before the Frenchman, displaying myself. I felt as if I were fifteen and my parents were displaying me to their friends. Not fifteen, younger. Ten, eight.

The Frenchman obviously liked me. He was an inveterate old pederast, I don't know how old; he was preserved like antique ivory, shone as if polished. He smiled all the time and spoke in a thin, despairing, sophisticated voice, the way ridiculous society people speak in operetta – dukes and princes, ridiculous people, but he was not without charm. I liked the Frenchman too, and much better than Raymond, but I didn't dare tell him so. I found him agreeable, for some reason, from his tight, deliberately unstylish trousers to the little threads of hair on his head.

Raymond had more fat to him, more blood, more meat; naturally I liked the Frenchman better.

Out of courtesy, although he did not have a kopeck, Kirill was negotiating a purchase of suits for himself. It was clear to everyone that he wasn't going to buy a fucking thing, but this was his way of doing something nice for everyone, somehow participating in their lives. I imagine he was in utter ecstasy over the fact that he was sitting in the company of pederasts. A kind soul, he loved his friends, loved their titles, or absence of titles. I bet he always exaggerated Raymond's prosperity to me and to other people as well; he generally exaggerated everything about his friends, in the direction of bigger and better. It was an innocent childish amusement, but he did not thereby forget himself, either: he, Kirill, by having such friends seemed to grow in his own and others eyes.

The Frenchman very soon left, unfortunately. In parting he gave me a spank on the poopka and said, "I think you're better off that your wife deserted you." On his lips this sounded convincing. I thought, No doubt it is better, maybe it really is. And his spank had me in ecstasy – for some reason I liked it.

After the Frenchman came an Italian. "He was once my lover," Raymond said, after the Italian left to eat in the restaurant. "He never let me sleep; a very strong cock that young man has. Oh, what he can do!" Raymond said ecstatically. I heard a tinge of reproach in his words. It's your own fault, I thought, you don't have the technique.

The Italian had come to spend the night. When I inquired of Raymond why he didn't stay in a hotel, it became clear that he was also a millionaire. The millionaire was thirty-five, no more, and very appealing His name was Mario.

Homosexuals of all nationalities came to Raymond's that night. True, they did not congregate, they sat awhile and went away, others appeared in their stead. Only Mario stayed, but he soon went off to the guest room assigned to him and remained there.

Sometimes Raymond resumed touching my dick, but gradually it became apparent that he was tired. In his fatigue, no longer checking himself, he turned rather vulgar and told some clumsy, dirty jokes, which would not have happened in his normal state. In the end he informed Kirill and me that he was sorry but he wanted to get to sleep. I was disappointed. My face must have showed it because Raymond said, "Go to Mario, why don't you?" Then he went on jokingly, "The only thing is, he won't let you sleep. Personally, I'm a little afraid of Mario, although we haven't slept together for many years and don't arouse each other." He led us to Mario's room, walking a little unsteadily. This was understandable; he had worked all day at the office, after all, and then drunk with us all evening, glass for glass.

Mario was sitting with his shirt unbuttoned, going through some papers. A man of affairs, he truly was handsome, and given my desire to lose my virginity today – now – I probably would have stayed with him had I not perceived that Raymond didn't want me to: if he hadn't been disenchanted at the sight of my wrinkled appendage, he must not want me to stay. And I didn't, although Mario's jesting words and sidelong glance at me – he really gave me the once-over – convinced me immediately that Raymond was right about him, Raymond was not fabricating.

I should have left, but a stupid conversation got started, which was the fault of Kirill and the tired, suddenly flaccid Raymond. Tomorrow Raymond was supposed to have a party, a very important one because his boss was supposed to come, the owner of the business, who was not a pederast, and Kirill had volunteered to get a beautiful girl for the boss. Where he planned to get her I don't know, but the absurd conversation dragged on and on. Raymond kept complaining of his lack of china, but later recalled that Sebastian-Luis was going to bring him some lovely china.

"He called today, I completely forgot. All my sets are partly broken, I haven't entertained at home in ages, I always take people to restaurants," Raymond pouted, in the tone of the man who has everything. The vile bourgeois within him had awakened, the bourgeois who in return for his money laid claim to the whole world, with all its material and spiritual valuables. One of those who had bought my silly girl-child. My hackles rose.

Outwardly I was sitting in his arms, he was mechanically stroking my shoulder. But had you been able to peep within me, gentlemen, what would you have seen? Hatred. Hatred for this man obtunded by wine and fatigue. And suddenly I realized that I would gladly have taken a knife or a razor and slit this Raymond's throat, although it was not he who had raped me, I had raped myself. Here I sat, but I could have slit his throat, stripped off his diamond rings, headed home from the expensive apartment with the Chagall, and bought myself a prostitute for the whole night, the girl of Chinese-Malayan descent, the small and elegant one who always stands on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Forty-fifth Street, but female, a girl. I would have kissed her all night, I would have made it nice for her, I'd have kissed her peepka and her pretty little heels.

And with the rest of the money I would have bought the most expensive suit at Ted Lapidus for this booby Kirill, because who else would buy it for him, and I was older and more experienced. The whole fantasy was so vivid that I involuntarily started, and thereby dispelled the fog before my eyes. Kirill and the businessman Mario materialized, and beside me Raymond's meaty puss. "Time to go," I said. "You wanted to get to sleep, Raymond."

And we left. Kirill and I.

I called it quits with Raymond, although someone was supposed to phone someone, and once, as I came out of my hotel beautifully dressed, I encountered this same Raymond, and with him Sebastian in a black suit and a silly white straw hat, a "very expensive" one, in the opinion of the omnipresent Kirill, for whom I was waiting and who promptly walked up. There was a Mexican boy with them too. They looked like relatives from the Caucasus who had come to visit their Uncle Raymond in Moscow. The whole group was preoccupied with worry, they were looking for some new place to have lunch. "We should have their worries!" Kirill said enviously. Having spotted a Mexican restaurant on the other side of the street, Raymond and his Caucasian relatives hurried across. Halfway there, Raymond turned and looked at me. I smiled and waved to him. By then I had slept with Chris, I already had Chris.