It's Me, Eddie

Where she made love

I found myself there without him, without Jean-Pierre. It was easy, I never dreamed it would be so easy. I had imagined myself kicking the door open and running in, pale, holding a revolver out in front of me and shouting "Bitch!" They would be lying in bed and I would fire at them and blood would come through the blanket. Nothing remarkable; the fantasies of a deceived husband, a man who has been cuckolded. Normal fantasies, right? But in I walked, into Jean-Pierre's studio, calmly, through the open door, without a revolver, and the characters on stage were not they.

This place is painful to me, this is where it all began, it was here that Elena first betrayed me, here that someone else's cock destroyed my "I can do anything!" I had been powerless against unlove and chaos. And to experience powerlessness, even once, had been terrifying.

This was in Sonya's time. Again Kirill was involved. He lives all over New York, first one place, then another, at random, the young idler has no apartment of his own. Jean-Pierre had gone to Paris for the month, leaving Kirill, in return for some favor, to live in his studio, whether for money or for nothing, no money, I don't know. I feel some semblance of love for the young bastard, fatherly love perhaps. We are eight or nine years apart.

So one dull rainy day I showed up there in a three-piece denim suit – jeans, vest, blazer – a black kerchief at my neck, a walking-stick umbrella in my hand. It was the sixth of June, our poet Pushkin's birthday, and I had met Elena exactly five years before. I was all atremble with the presentiment of somber impressions awaiting me.

The characters on stage are three: myself, Kirill, and as a finishing touch a certain Slava-David, who is celebrated for the fact that after Elena and I left Russia he lived in our Moscow apartment, which he says my friend Dima had turned into a Limonov museum. Now, in keeping with all the best canons of the mysterious, Slava-David was living with Kirill in the atelier of my ex-wife's ex-lover, the atelier – sorry, the studio – it's the apartment, too – of the fisheyed, skewbald Frenchman Jean-Pierre. I realized at once that Slava-David was the instrument of higher forces, although he looked quite ordinary. I think he'll appear again in that capacity, more than once.

I throw back my head and yell up from the street, as I have promised, "Kirill! Kirill, you motherfucker!" Kirill sticks his shaggy head out the window. Then the aristocrat comes downstairs and opens the door for me, because you can't get into this building without your host's assistance. We take the elevator up and enter the studio, not quite by the route I imagined in my fruitless attempts to force my way in. The door that I impotently and tearfully tried to open from the stairway leads into an elevator corridor shared by two studios, not directly into Jean-Pierre's studio as I had thought. This plunges me into melancholy.

I walk into a large white-walled apartment. To the left the breeze is billowing the lightweight shades at the several windows. And there it stands, what to me is the terrible bed, the love arena, the place of my torment. Here she made love. I walk over, expecting to see my own corpse…

To the right of the door is the kitchen and, not walled off from it, in keeping with American custom, a sort of salon: a couch by the wall, a round table, and armchairs. These are encircled by several pillars.

With quickened heartbeat I walk over to the pillars and begin to examine them closely. Somewhere there have to be marks from the ropes with which she bound the fisheyed owner, beat him, and then fucked him in the anal orifice with a rubber dildo. Little silly, novice hustler, she told me all this herself in boast, while I was still her husband. Of course – she had to share it. Next she turned up with a mask, a black one sewn with feathers and bits of glass, it hid most of her little face. And next she turned up with a shiny studded dog collar. I tried it on my own neck, it barely went round, although my neck is 14¹/₂. That meant she was wearing the collar herself, for greater chic. She boasted that she had a whip, too, but she didn't keep that or the dildo at home. She very much wanted to conform to the sexy films she had seen. She was doing things right, you see, the silly stringy child from Moscow's privileged Frunze Embankment. A Moscow girl. She probably affords her current lovers great pleasure, however. She tries hard. The provincial desire to outperform everyone. To be the mostest. But then, I'm the same way.

Yes, here are the marks, obviously rubbed by the rope, or perhaps by a chain, no, a rope for sure. Someone gently but forcefully squeezes my heart. I see them naked, frolicking around the pillars… She and I once hung a basket from the ceiling with ropes and took the bottom out of it; I lay down under it, inserted my cock into her peepka, the twisted ropes untwisted, and she was supposed to twirl around my member. She giggled enigmatically. But it didn't work very well, precise calculations were needed. Afterward we broke our bed in the usual way. I never had much need of artifice with her, she aroused me in the extreme. Even now, when she's just a friend, I occasionally go see her and the mere sound of her voice gives me a hard-on. Terrible.

Everything in the atelier is clean, large in scale, equipped to the last detail. Unlike me, the man who lives here respects his own life, values it.

A door off the first salon leads into a huge, clean, bare, light office with two or three of our host's huge paintings on the walls. A narrow corridor off the first salon leads into a third salon, you wouldn't call it a room, it's so huge. There, evidently, he paints, daubs his masterpieces. And there in the corner stands a bed, with Slava-David's clothes lying around, and a stack of pornographic magazines, belonging to Jean-Pierre, in which women copulate with pigs and horses. All things considered he is what is called in Russian a yobar, a cunt-chaser. The reason such men become artists is that a liberated profession makes it easier for them to drag a woman to bed.

No, his quarters in no way resemble the poor artist's studio she had told me about.

During all my further perambulations both Kirill and Slava-David are present, later it will be only Kirill, though Slava-David will come back again late at night, but in this instance there is no need to take note of them, for I am plunged into a mood that I have long awaited and feared, I am on the spot where it happened, I am where she made love. I move from object to object, sniffing, and illuminating them with my terrible tension. I am waiting for them to answer.

At intervals I eat, drink a lot of beer, I smoke marijuana, but absolutely none of this plays any role; therefore I mention these "events" only lightly, in passing.

The pillars lead me to cruel and melancholy recollections of the traces of semen in her panties, which I discovered more and more often in the last months of our life together. There was semen even on her pantyhose. Once the whole inside of her black slacks was doused with semen, white by morning, crusted dry, so revolting that there was no longer any doubt, and then it was that I first raised a row with her. That was the end of my happy days, of the boundless happiness I had experienced for the four and a half years since the day I met her.

At the mention of my happy days, our love, our wedding, I am convulsed with disgust and shame. I was so stupid. I loved, trusted, but they fucked me over, smeared me with another man's semen, bound me with the elastic from his underpants, daubed my shapely and delicate body with vulgarity.

I grimace wildly, remembering the pines in the yard at her dacha, and her in a translucent, angelic dress, a little girl with a crooked front tooth. Little squirrel, little silly, little bitch – I remember her swollen genital lips the time I flew in from California in a frenzy, trying to save it all. I flew in at night, she showed up in the morning. She sat in the bathtub, the skin on her back striped with cuts, fine little cuts, from what, a whip? And those rosy genital lips.

It was enough to make me push her head underwater, she had no idea how near she was to death. I urged her to come back and live, if only for a year, six months… She sat in the tub and overexcitedly discoursed on the fact that I did not know how to enjoy myself. She had absolutely no taste. She was incapable of understanding that I was all but dead and that right now it was ignoble, at the very least, to boast to me about how easily she could find a partner to fuck with… She discoursed, and I sat on the bathroom floor and stared dully at her swollen peepka. That I know about, it means she's been fucking, she's fucked all night… Okay, but why not me, why am I… I had hoped – had thought – as whores, adventurers, prostitutes, what you will, but together all our lives.

No, I do not remember my happy days, I don't remember a rucking thing, but when I do, I feel like vomiting, as if I'd gorged myself or something or had a stomach upset.

Meanwhile, I find myself near a shelf of his books. His books… Oh, he has everything, lovingly collected, in sets, he has Lautreamont, Andre Gide, Rimbaud – familiar great names – all in his native French. In much the same way you'll find whole sets of The Poet's Library or World Literature in the homes of Russian intellectuals.

I have never collected books in sets. I've had my individual favorite books, but there have been so many moves in my life, from apartment to apartment, city to city, country to country, and I have divided my books – my only valuables – with my wives so often, that nowadays I glance unkindly at the three dozen or so volumes remaining to me and think maybe I should chuck those too. Jean-Pierre is a cultured man. Converting to Russian norms, the ordinary library of the average intellectual.

On the whole, as I study his home, I come to the conclusion that the Frenchman is a very pedantic person. Follow me and you will see. First the paintings. They are very large oil canvases, most of them painstakingly ruled. Usually a black or a dark background, traversed by numerous, often pulsating lines. The art of a bookkeeper – straight lines, checks, squares. Not bad; it's a pleasant little world this man has – lines, rectangles, squares. But here are pictures of another sort.

By the bed and in the bathroom, pencil drawings. A girl licking somebody's cock, you can't see whose. She looks like my wife, which of course affords me no special pleasure. I twitch my shoulders convulsively. With this ordinary movement anguish is gone, anger is back. Try it.

Other drawings: two genital organs, a man's and a woman's, in waiting position. The woman has opened her cunt with her fingers and is carefully sitting down on someone's cock. Being somewhat knowledgeable about art, especially contemporary art and this brand of drawing, I can say that the Frenchman's drawings are dilettantish – too labored, no line at all. Far better are the similar drawings in public toilets. There, moved by the unconscious, submitting to Papa Freud's laws, anonymous artists easily and swiftly achieve expressiveness through exaggeration, hyperbolization, and simplification. Here, we have the details, but that makes the drawings far dirtier. They reek of intellectual long Johns, there is something senile about them, they reek of semen – that's obvious – and it is obviously the semen that was in my wife's panties.

I am a soldier from a defeated regiment. The army has marched on; the battlefield is deserted, and I have come to inspect it. I wander in the underbrush, climb to high ground, try to determine the cause of the defeat. Why, in the end, did they beat us?

Outwardly I am in complete contact with Slava-David and Kirill. I may be joking or telling some story. But only outwardly. In reality, I am trying to solve a problem that I can never solve: Why? I was looking for the answer long before I met Elena. In my poem-cycle "Three Long Songs," written in 1969, you can see this ominous, sullen Why? hanging over little Eddie's world.

On the sixth of June I wrestled all day and all night, like Jacob, with this enigmatic Why? And in the morning I left. And we did not vanquish one another…

Yes, after our grim and beggarly little apartment on Lexington this studio is a fairy-tale palace. A studio bathed in romance, in the Village, on Prince Street. I hate that word now, "prince." She phoned me from outer space at eleven o'clock, I sat in that Lexington Avenue squalor and said from my writing desk, "Little one, when will you be home? I've been worried!" "We're still shooting," she said, and I could hear music in the background.

And now I know where the music components are set up at Jean-Pierre's and where the telephone instrument is – the one and a second and a third.

A lover of the luxurious life, which she had never really seen, a poetess, a girl from the Frunze Embankment in Moscow, after a year of tears and failures, of wanderings through Austria, Italy, and America, through luxurious capitals where we lived on potatoes and onions and got one shower a week (she wept so much that year), Elena no doubt rested, here.

I found a poem in her notebook (her poems always delineated her mood to me more graphically than she could have imagined): "From the festive streets a scent…" I no longer remember it, but there was something about the romance of the Village streets and bars, about a man with a beard (Jean-Pierre), and her sexual feeling toward him was likened to a teenage girl's attitude toward a doctor – likened to childhood.

This was right; she had a right to rest, lie on this bed of his, relax, think of nothing and watch the shades flap… He fucked – no, it's crude to talk like that even in regard to your ex-wife's lover – he caressed her, she could hide here until she grew strong and insolent, hide from that apartment on Lexington and from me, who was for her a part of the world of destitution and tears. Alas! I believe she was happy here. I have a little wisdom, and I know: A thing that is likened to childhood cannot be a lie.

To her he was the doctor from her childhood, and she was drawn to him without shame. Bearded and half gray, he seemed to her a defense. "Into his tender hands," as they say. She took him into her and shared with him the shudders that had formerly belonged only to me.

And I? Come now, she considered herself far above me. She would not tolerate the idea that I was a more talented and prominent person than she. She felt she had the right to act according to her own whim. She suspected I loved her sincerely, she knew it would be unbearable to me, perhaps I would do away with myself – she knew that too, the possibility was there – but what was I to her?

A ridiculous little Ukrainian, silly little Eddie, hassling her with his love. I think she saw weakness even in my love for her and scorned me for it. Long ago, back in Moscow, I remember, I was supposed to go to Ivanovo and I couldn't tear myself away from her, couldn't get up and leave. How she yelled that time!

Here in America she considered me incapable of moving up. I remember how spitefully she screamed at me when we first visited the woman who was to become her lover, the lesbian Susanna, when I cautiously remarked that Susanna and her friends were uninteresting: "But I want pleasure! Even if it's with them! Through them I'll meet others. Play the aristocrat and you'll just keep on sitting there on Lexington Avenue in that filthy apartment! And die there!"

I memorized it all, my memory is revoltingly clear. And now, as I squeamishly poke at Jean-Pierre's blanket with the tip of my umbrella and peer under his bed in the hope of spotting something interesting, I remember her during our last days.

"Excuse me," I said to her, "but I'm the reason you're free. You took a lover because I shielded you from the necessity of working. I went to work at that dreadful absurd newspaper above all for you, and so that we could survive, you and I. But you -"

"Yes," she said with hysterical challenge, "and so what if I'm free because you're not! So what? That's the way it's supposed to be…"

I was ready to shoot her. If I had had any chance of buying a revolver then, I would never have had to see Jean-Pierre's studio, never have had to walk the deserted battlefield. But I had almost no connections, I had no money, and no strength.

She treated me with no consideration, merely because by then she thought me capable of nothing. She developed for herself a life plan in which I was merely a stage, since she had outgrown her ex-husband Victor, moved on and left him behind, she calculated that it would be the same with me. Here she was mistaken, it's always dangerous to develop plans. Real life is more complicated, and merely by existing I think I'll provide her with considerable grounds for reflection. I don't know about regret, but reflection, yes.

Once she had recovered a little and felt at home, she still looked up to Jean but also began looking around. By my calculations this happened several months later. She began inventing things with him – whips, binding – she was the initiator, of course. She was curious. I had taught her a few things too, not just fucking with the naked cock. These were revelations to her at the time – oh, I whipped her on the peepka with a thong, and… all sorts of things, we even made a half-joking attempt at group sex. Well, with him she wanted to go further. She did.

She lay on this bed, resting after the act, and smoked. She likes to smoke in the intervals. Sometimes she falls silent and looks off somewhere into emptiness, into the unknown. It's a way of hers. I always asked her, "Little one, what are you thinking, where are you?" "Mmh?" she would say, coming to. Did he ask her what she was thinking? Her eyes would go glassy with abstraction.

Probably we all seem the same to her – I, Victor, Jean-Pierre, some other man. Does she make any distinction between me, the man who had sex with her for over four years, who loves her, and a man who fucks her once, on a drunk? I don't know. She probably does, and I doubt it's in my favor.

This grudge of mine. It is the melancholy grudge of one animal against another.

So, she did right. But what can Eddie do, Eddie-baby who loved her, Eddie with his very delicate sensibilities, his morbid reaction to the world, he who slashed his own veins three times in his rapture over that world, he who, mad and passionate, was wedded to her in church, who snatched her from the world, who had sought her so many years and is convinced to this day that she is the one, yes, she, the only woman for him – what happens to him, little Eddie? The Eddie who wrote lyrics and poem-cycles about her, who has never been understood by her, what about him? Where has he disappeared to in this story?

What happened to Elena is clear enough, she escaped from the Lexington Avenue tragedy, fled, took off without a backward glance, but what about Eddie? She's a free woman, but weren't you always at one with each other?

"Both the woman and the man have the right to murder," proclaims Chapter One of the never-written code of man-woman relationships.

Eventually she tired of Jean-Pierre too, although she did not immediately leave him. The three of them went on living together – he, she, and Susanna. America had a bad influence on her. She filled up on Flossy, The Story of O, The Story of Joanna, and vulgar films of that ilk. Those syrupy sex concoctions with handsome gray rich men who don't know where to put their pricks, those castles and bedrooms, that cinematic beauty and bullshit – that was what drove her mad. She took the films seriously. And she tried hard to be like the sexy heroines. The young model in The Story of O served as her example, I think, she raved about that film many times.

Elena went to sex parties where you fucked whomever you pleased. In the photographers' and models' milieu where she found herself, partners for any sort of experiment were easy to come by. She had women lovers, and one who fucked her for a long time was Susanna, a frigid woman who derives satisfaction only from someone else's orgasm.

Elena… My Elena… Where is the tearstained Elena with the white poodle black with the mud of Moscow's February thaw, the Elena who came to live with me upon leaving Victor, her forty-seven-year-old husband. Came to me, who had nowhere to live, nothing to live on, but whom she apparently loved. How did it happen, the transition from that Elena, from the wedding candles to the dildo with which she fucked Jean, and with which, evidently, he more than once fucked her.

The spiral candles of the Orthodox wedding… I gave them back to her. Tossed them into her suitcase. I gave back the icons that had been our wedding gift. I don't want to look at the silly old mockeries. I gave back her dog collar, which I had stolen. What was I trying to prevent by taking her dog collar? The mask, I confess, I had long since torn up. Along with his pictures.

I love her very much. I understand her provinciality, I see that here in America she had accepted the very worst – marijuana, underworld jargon, cocaine, the constant "fuckin' mother" after every word, the bars, the sex accessories. Even so, I love her very much – she is typically Russian, throwing herself headlong into the very thick of life without reflection; I'm the same way myself, I love her daring, but I don't love her stupidity. I forgave her betrayal of Eddie, but I will not forgive her betrayal of the hero. "As whores, prostitutes, adventurers, but we could have been together," I whisper.

I am thinking all this as I move through Jean-Pierre's studio, peering into his drawers and shelves. What else can I do? I realize this is bad, but since when have I done nothing but good? My curiosity is all from that sinister Why.

The kitchen. Hundreds of little boxes: spices of every variety and hue, tea, herbs, pepper, this and that. Every necessary kitchen appliance. Everything… They're people… and what am I… down and out. At thirty I don't have a thing, and never will. But that's not what I was seeking. How many years has he lived on this street? Ten years? Twelve? The only place I've lived for more than a year is one apartment in Moscow.

My God! The past is so disgusting, and there's so much of it. I have more of it than most – yet I haven't amassed any things. And I do not foresee having things in the future. Shall I ever have all these little boxes, labels, tags… Never, I'm sure. I amass the immaterial…

The fact is, here in America she found me uninteresting. She meant what she told me that time, February 13; I have a revolting memory: I lay there wanting to starve myself, I wanted so badly to die, and she spoke the ghastly word to me over the telephone. "You're a nobody."

Sadly I swing a coffee can back and forth in my hand. A "nobody" – and I had thought I was a hero. Why a "nobody"? Because I had not become the lascivious, rich, gray owner of a castle, exactly like the men in sexy films. I was supposed to do it in six months – she was in a hurry – and I didn't. I smile sadly.

Alas! I couldn't. Unfortunately, my profession is to be a hero. I always thought of myself as a hero, and I never hid it from her. I even wrote a book by that name back in Moscow: We Are the National Hero.

But I'm a nobody because I don't even have a studio like Jean-Pierre's, all these little jars and boxes; I don't paint bookkeeperlike pictures. Logic did not interest her, it did not occur to her that Jean-Pierre had lived here all his life, while I had arrived yesterday. She didn't trouble herself with logic.

What was I here? Only a journalist who now had a scandalous reputation among the Russian emigres of Europe and America as a leftist and a Red. Who gives a fuck about that! Who needs these Russian scandals here in America, where you have live Warhols and Dalis walking around. And who cares that I am one of Russia's greatest living poets, that I am writhing in agony as I live out my heroic fate. You have herds of rich men here, you have bars on every corner, and literature is reduced to the level of a professorial game. Shit if I'd go to your fucking Arlington or Bennington or whatever it is, to teach your zhlobby children Russian literature. I did not refuse to be bought in the USSR merely in order to sell myself cheap here. And please note – membership in the Soviet Writers' Union is a much better honor than a professorship, even at a university of yours.

The "nobody" walks slowly from object to object. He has already drunk many cans of beer, smoked a couple of joints with Kirill, and everything is therefore turning black in his world, turning dark, becoming harsh and extreme. Kirill has gone off to make phone calls. His world is much brighter and purer than mine. Like a child he wants a Rolls-Royce and money, but he cannot do anything to get them. A baby. In his case it's not even tragic. Suppose his dream does get smashed to smithereens? He's young, he'll think up a new one, there's no harm in that. When the conversation turns to my "leftist" views, Kirill yaps like a puppy and defends the system. He feels obliged to do that because he thinks he belongs with the people in this world who fuck the world and everyone in it, not with those who get fucked.

In some ways Kirill is like Elena. The same desire to jump, run, participate in the games of this world, go to parties, sleep till three in the afternoon, and not work. He is very lovable, although he has no character whatsoever. For all our dissimilarities he's a cultured young man, not a plebeian, I enjoy him more than any of the other Russians. Sometimes he and I go out for a stroll, or take a bottle of cheap California champagne and go to Central Park…

I slip into Jean-Pierre's office. Two desks placed back to back, as in a business office or a Soviet institute. Some of the drawers are locked, others not. If Kirill weren't here, and if it were two or three hours from now, I would open the locked ones, the most interesting things are sure to be in those. Alas, I have to be satisfied with the open ones.

Unhurriedly I go through his things – unhurriedly, but not calmly. How could I be calm… Letters from Paris, from a girl or woman with a Czech or Polish surname, these letters I find in quantity in various desk drawers… but here's something more interesting – a little envelope of hair, little blond hairs obviously from the pubis, and these hairs have got to be my Elena's. The envelope of hair makes me break out in a cold sweat all over, a symptom of utmost agitation. Perhaps I should find comfort in the fact that she isn't living with him. He's the one who doesn't want it, however. So they tell me; I don't know.

The drawers hold nothing more interesting than the little envelope. Writing pads, notebooks, extra erasers, vast numbers of slides of his works. I patiently look through all his slides in the hope of seeing photographs of her. A secret little voice whispers, "in indecent poses." Indecent poses, hell! I merely want to know more than I do, and perhaps to overwhelm the Why? But the slides are only his – slides of his works. More letters, business cards from people and organizations. All this is diluted in a vast quantity of financial documents, a vast torrent of bank bills, all sorts of things; I can't tell what they are.

I open a little box. Lying in it are dark grains and fragments, and on top two fat, homestyle marijuana cigarettes, a far cry from the skimpy joints made to be sold for a dollar apiece on Forty-second Street or in Washington Square.

Then I poke around on the shelves, where his lithographs lie neatly interleaved with paper. They do not interest me. I am looking for something else. At last I see what I'm looking for – photographs of her. Enlargements, she didn't skimp, she was giving a present to her dear friend. Not to me – to him. Photographs done by little-known photographers, they are imitations of the works of well-known masters, or rather, imitations of their formal execution. They are not Avedon, of course, or Francesco Scavullo, or Horowitz, or… Imitative photographs. Elena smeared with something shiny, her hair slicked down; Elena in a highly improbable, unnatural pose; Elena with her face painted like an Indian mask…

Alas, it's all pretty feeble. The fact is, the photographs are all whorish and no good. My darling isn't getting very far with her career. But her career was what she talked about, proud girl. "I love nobody, my career is all that interests me."

I look at photographs of this woman's body, now alien to me, and I see before me the whole system. The chic profession of the photographer. I know how photographers knock themselves out for decades trying to make it here. My friend Lyonka Lubenitsky, who recently had a photo on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, really feels beat when he comes to my hole at night. Hard times, can't make any money.

Thousands of photographers work in New York. Tens of thousands of people are involved in photography. They all dream of the glory and riches of an Avedon or a Eugene Smith, but few of them know how hellishly hard Avedon works. Lyonka Lubenitsky knows, he worked for over a year as an assistant at Avedon's for $75 a week. The models all dream of the career of a Verushka or a Twiggy. Tens of thousands of girls report to their agencies every day, and then set off in taxis and on foot to different addresses, knock at studio doors. Elena is one of them. Her chances are slim.

I turn page after page. The photographers toy with her body like a ball, the body of the girl from the Frunze Embankment. Her little nipples, shoulders, poopka flip past, I remember one photograph she had, it was left behind in Moscow. Elena is four or five years old; she stands with her mother, making a face and looking away. It's already all there, in that photograph. All her life she has looked away.

I am seeking an answer, I have to kill the Why, kill it through understanding, otherwise it will kill me, may kill me, and therefore I peer at these photographs so hard it hurts. Part of the answer may be there. But what's there is a lie. The lie of the untalented, the third-rate. The only truthful thing in them, rising from their depths, bursting through their gloss, is the thirst to live, at the price of any mistake, to accept as life anything at all, anything that moves, and to live, to lie underneath someone, be photographed, ride someone else's horse, love someone else's house, someone else's studio, someone else's objects and books, but to live.

I was not life, in her understanding, not at all. I did not move, she detected no signs of movement in me. I was, in her opinion, an unmoving object. The squalid apartment on Lexington – she thought that was me. She wanted to live. Physical, material life, that was the only thing she understood. She didn't give a damn about the values of civilization, history, religion, morals. She hardly knew of them. Instinct – I think she understood that. A poetess, besides; too powerful an imagination. Didn't I tell you she wrote poetry? Sorry, I forgot, but that is very important.

Presently she will sober up a little, Jean-Pierre's studio will no longer seem to her a fairy-tale palace, nor he the kindly doctor from her childhood. Presently he will demand the $100 she borrowed for the trip to Milan. That's normal, they no longer sleep together – so pay back your debt.

Rummaging in his papers, I see some neat columns of figures. The purposes for which the money was spent are noted at the side. Too bad I can't read his writing, I might encounter Elena's name here too. He has complained several times to Kirill that Elena was bilking him, she cost too much.

I turn his list over and over in my hands. I am unused to this sort of thing, I don't condemn it but I'm unused to it. Their very method of keeping their earnings in a bank develops qualities in them that are negative from the viewpoint of a Russian, and especially a typical bohemian like me, I think as I continue to rummage through his papers. Thriftiness, a pedantic tidiness with money, isolation from other people…

I'm used to other foreigners, fun-loving and friendly people who throw currency around openhandedly, sometimes uproariously. In Moscow every one of us had an American acquaintance, not all of them were openhanded but many were. Perhaps because the dollar was actually worth a great deal in Moscow. Colonial, dependent Russia…

In New York I came up against normal Americans. "Them." Lately I've developed an inescapable feeling that I'm not Russian, was not fully Russian even in Russia, national traits are very approximate; still, I shall permit myself to speak of something I dislike. I often hear "them" use the expression, "That's your problem." It's just an expression, but it irritates me greatly. One time, God knows where, my butcher friend Sanya the Red picked up the expression Tebe zhit – "It's your life!" He used it apropos of everything, where it was necessary and unnecessary, uttering it with the gravity of a philosopher. Even so, "It's your life!" is much warmer. These words are used when another person has refused friendly advice: Well then, see for yourself, I tried to help you, you don't want advice, I yield, it's your life.

"That's your problem!" is used in order to dissociate oneself from other people's problems, set a boundary between oneself and bothersome people trying to worm into one's world. I heard this expression from Monsieur Jean-Pierre during the ghastly February days when, as I lay in bed dying, knowing that Elena had left him too, or so I thought, I called and asked him to meet me for a drink. So help me Cod, I had no evil in mind. But he said to me, "That's your problem, yours and Elena's. That's not my problem." Didn't say it maliciously; no, indifferently. And he was right, who am I to him? Foolish me, why did I bother him with my tribal, barbarian social habits?

Oh, he has so many financial papers! I can't tell whether all these are sums that he's supposed to pay or that someone is supposed to pay him. I'm sick of his papers, and I stuff them all back into the desks and up on the shelves, but neatly, not roughly, trying to put each one where it was before. No reason at all for the owner to know that someone has been checking on him.

Jean-Pierre, Jean-Pierre – for an artist he's extremely cautious. But weren't there some like him in Russia? There were. Why carp at him! Don't carp at your wife's lover, Limonov. You're compensating yourself for the insult he inflicted. All the same, he's a bit of a coward, cautious. Later this will be confirmed: when he learns about my demonstration against the New York Times he will warn me, with wary friendliness, that they can refuse citizenship, they can deport one from America. He is amazed at Elena's lively, extravagant, devil-may-care behavior, her lack of concern for the future; like Susanna, he says of her, half in delight, "Crazy!" My indifference toward citizenship likewise amazes him. American citizenship! Of course, in his eyes I too am crazy. He is rather tame.

He does not interest me. But for Elena, it would not occur to me to notice him if I met him at a party somewhere. He belongs to a definite caste of men, who are scattered throughout the world. I knew lots of them in Russia. They feel they were born to live to the fullest and enjoy themselves. Having "lived," that is, having slept with women to their hearts' content, they grow old and die without leaving a shadow or trace on the earth. A species of philistine, that's all. Back in Kharkov they were named Bruk or Kuligin, in Moscow they were named something else; they arrived and disappeared; now and then I took an interest in them, sometimes they became my friends for a short while, but I never dreamed that Elena would leave for their world. In Russia she would not have left for these vulgarians, she had chosen Limonov. Was it because American cunt-chasers, with their much wider opportunities for a dissolute life, were of a better quality than Russian ones? Or did she not recognize them in their American aspect, did she decide that these men were different – loftier and more interesting? I don't know. The Why? would have vanished immediately had Elena left for an American Limonov. But for these men?

Jean… Jean received Elena for nothing, for free, as a gift of fate. A lucky man. In point of fact, he is far beneath her. But I had wrested her from fate, my Elena. True, he didn't get her for long… We all have pricks, they hang between our legs; and balls, these unlucky balls, whose touch to a woman's body is so glorified in cheap, sexy books; but, my sweet, we are not all alike…

I walk out of the office. Kirill is still making phone calls. I ask who he's talking to, he mutters something in my direction. He has firmly decided that what he and I lack for our complete happiness is a bottle of vodka, and he wants to get that bottle from someone. Today is Sunday, and the gambit of borrowing money and making a last-minute purchase at the liquor store is out. That means we have to go visiting. Everything is just as at my place in Moscow or his in Petersburg, except for the coffee shop sign burning outside the windows. But there's no need to look out the window. The usual situation – we haven't had enough to drink. The only difference is that we hardly know anybody here.

Tearing himself away from the telephone, Kirill requisitions a couple more cans of beer from Slava-David's supply – he is always well provided – and we polish them off immediately. There is already a whole bag of empties lying in the corner.

Meanwhile, between what I've drunk and what I've seen, I am slowly going into an ecstasy. In its physical routine this whole day has been an exact repetition of many another day after a binge, and a binge is what I had yesterday. Now at the stage of "ecstasy!" I request what is currently my favorite Beatles record, "Back in the USSR!"

The record is not in Jean-Pierre's collection. Without asking me, Kirill puts on his own records, which are lying there in the common heap. First comes Vertinsky.

The sense of rhythm characteristic of all poets awakens in me. It is in our blood. I begin to dance around. I execute rhythmic figures. Kirill, although he carries on with his phone conversations, does not forget to change the records – according to his own whim, however. The Alexandrov soldiers' chorus is succeeded by "Dark Eyes," then come revolutionary songs, and "Dark Eyes" again…

I begin to experience the feelings of my people. My dance takes me past a mirror. It is large; they may have looked at themselves in it more than once, together and naked, but the thought slips by and disappears. The music drives it out. I dance insane dances, I dance away from the mirror toward the kitchen, pass close to the telephoning Kirill, and in an intricate rhythmic pas I dance around "those" pillars. As in Eliot, I think: "Here we go round the prickly pear Prickly pear prickly pear Here we go round the prickly pear At five o'clock in the morning." My erudition delights me. Then and there I repeat Eliot's lines in Ukrainian.

I leap and dance, and Kirill smiles. Oh that Eddie, that crazy Eddie! I love Kirill because he never acts surprised at me. If I do surprise him, he pretends that that's as it should be and that if he, Kirill, is not a pederast himself, he's a liberated man in any case and can understand everything. Even if he's only pretending, that's fine too.

Now he breaks off his conversation, and in the blinding light of all of Jean-Pierre's lamps we dance to "Dark Eyes." The music of our native Russia, it has made the rounds of all the taverns in the world. At one time danger-loving officers in uniform used to howl this wild piece in the taverns, weeping drunkenly, like me, Eddie. What anguish, and anguish-destroying exultation, there is in these doleful Asiatic sounds with their sudden outcries. Ah, but nothing binds me to humanity except Welfare, which I take from them. And my nationality is nagging me to death. "A machine gun, oy, give me a machine gun, my dears!" I scream hysterically, to Kirill's delight.

No doubt I am overplaying it a little. But didn't I want to embrace her fucking corpse? Didn't I write suicide notes and then try to strangle her? Or was that a fantasy? No, it happened, the "dark eyes" are not lying, and I am not lying about myself.

The pandemonium of the dance lasts a very long time. Russian records are succeeded by French ones. I dance to Brel, Piaf, and Aznavour. I dance in an ecstasy, and although I feel as if the whole world were watching, the "day after" is always like this by nighttime. In reality, even Kirill has left again, to torment the telephone receiver with his English talk, not realizing that although he's a dear boy no one fucking needs either him or me, tonight or any other night.

With a wild dance on the spot where she betrayed me, with beer and marijuana – this is how I mark the fifth anniversary of our acquaintanceship. Like a tame member of society. I don't set any fires, don't smash everything, don't howl, don't even weep.

After a while I cool off. The "depression" stage begins, I go and collapse on the bed with my nose in the blanket and lie there for a while, sniffing the bed. Maybe it smells of her? No, it smells of Kirill. I turn over on my back and lie staring at the ceiling, not moving, for maybe a whole thirty minutes. I think about her, about him, about myself. Shadows chase across the ceiling, the shade flaps, and the world enters into night, in order then to enter into day.

A natural desire to make peepee forces me to get up. I walk into the bathroom, and there I continue to think, reason, and listen to myself. I examine afresh the pathetic drawings hung over the toilet. I peer into the drawers – again, hundreds of names of objects. I am struck by the staccato pettiness of his existence, surrounded as it is by such a quantity of details, and it hurts my eyes, they begin to hurt. There is cotton here too, she may have used it, and what they stick in the peepka during menstruation, Tampax. A well-provided monsieur.

In the first years of our love we invariably fucked when she was menstruating, we couldn't wait out those four days. We would begin as if in play, rub against each other and kiss, and then we would fuck after all, trying not to go too deep. When we came, and we almost always did together, I would pull out my member all bloody. That was gratifying both to me and to her, and we'd gaze at it a long time.

I look again at the woman opening her cunt as she sits down on the cock. I have just made peepee and am wiping my member with a tissue. At the touch of the toilet paper my delicate member shudders, something in me begins to stir, my member slowly grows into a cock. Almost unconsciously I begin to fondle the head of my cock, knead it and stroke it, all the while thinking that they fucked here too, in the bathroom – she and I fucked in all our bathrooms, that means she and he fucked here too – and I move my palm along my member and begin masturbating urgently.

Darling Eddie!

I simply cannot get anywhere. I stand up and sit down, my erection does not go away, but I cannot come. I always have trouble the "day after," even with a woman. But I want so much to be connected to this house and what they did here, to splash out my semen where his semen too has flowed, into the tub or into the toilet. His semen flowed there out of her, of course, out of her peepka.

Darling Eddie!

Forty minutes went by; someone had phoned Kirill, some other fan of late-night gab, and he was talking with renewed strength, briskly and joyfully. Perhaps he was getting somewhere. I was getting nowhere with my cock. At length I despaired, and lowered the curtain on my cock by hiding it in my pants.

I hid the yellow hell of the bathroom by extinguishing the obsessive light, shut the door, and went out to my drinking companion.

"We may be going to a party at twelve," said the joyful young idler, "they'll call us back. But now let's go have coffee at the bar on the corner of Spring Street and West Broadway. It's a very famous spot. They've always got very nice women artists and bohemians there. We might pick someone up," Kirill said.

I wanted no one and nothing. I hadn't even managed to come. Poor Eddie. I was tired and wanted to go home. If we couldn't drink, I should take off. The party's over, don't overstay my welcome.

But the aristocrat had no wish to be alone. He needed me so that he wouldn't have to sit in the bar alone, so that he would be seen by the young or not-so-young women artists not as a lonely, horny cunt-chaser but as a respectable man who had come with a friend. The jerk, he didn't realize that together we would look like two pederasts, and he would be even less likely to achieve his goal…

He pestered the fuck out of me. I very much wanted to go home, but he grumbled and raged so much that I finally walked him the hundred meters to this establishment, and then there was no help for it, I went inside with him. A coffee-colored darkness reigned; every spot was taken, and people were standing in line waiting, too. Everyone wanted to mix, talk, and of course get acquainted and fuck. Women artists and women nonartists, pretty ones and dogs in homespun dresses and jeans, they were all there.

He had $5 and that was it. All I had was a subway token. We might have gotten a table, but what we wanted was coffee. We trudged back and began making our farewells at the door of the Frenchman's building. By dint of extravagant mutual compliments we had reached the point of parting, when I suddenly remembered the cigarettes in Jean-Pierre's drawer.

"If you were a good boy, I'd tell you where to find two marijuana cigarettes in Jean-Pierre's house," I announced brazenly.

"Edichka, what are you doing in other people's cupboards and desks?" he said.

"I have the right," I said gravely. "After all, he's my wife's ex-lover." "I'm sorry, Edichka," he said.

We began haggling over the marijuana and decided we would each get a separate cigarette, although Kirill tried to insist on smoking them both together. I threatened not to show him where the cigarettes were if he didn't give in.

"We'll each do what we want with our own cigarette," I said. "You can throw it out or shove it up your ass."

After that we went up to the studio.

I went to the office and got the cigarettes from the box, and we returned to the kitchen. I gave him the cigarette that was due him, and my own I lit up right away. It turned out to be amazingly strong – I had never had anything like it, thick and fat. By the time I had sucked it down to the end, so that I could no longer hold it with my nails, all I could do was struggle the six or seven meters to the couch and collapse in hallucinations.

I heard all that went on in the studio, and at the same time I had dreams, fantastic ones made up of what was past and what had never been. A maniacal girl was trying to open a little box in which lived a thinking being. Her hair flying, she bent over the box, gnawed at it, but could not get it open. Finally, by some sort of trick, by turning a mechanical device, the maniac opened the box, and out poured a stinking brown liquid similar to semen – the being had been killed. I was horror-stricken, but the maniac bared her teeth in a grin.

I heard all that went on in the studio, and at the same time Kirill, who had smoked only half his cigarette, was making phone calls and debating whether or not he should go to the party, his pants were dirty and unpressed. Then Slava-David arrived. He asked what was the matter with me, and they hauled me up, laughingly hoisted me from the couch, then let go of me. I floated and swayed. "Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell" – Eliot's lines surfaced and disappeared, succeeded by my Moscow friend the poet Heinrich Sapgir wearing a yellow tiger face.

It was morning before I could stand up. Although I tried to get up twice in the night, it was eight in the morning before I could do it. Slava-David made me some toast in the toaster. The toast burned and scraped my throat. I took my umbrella and left.