Autumn. It's gotten cold. And at the hotel, when I get to my floor, it's dirty, warm and smells of cunt. It's even cozy. Many prostitutes live here, that's the reason.
You walk down the street, your cap on, your velvet jacket fits nicely. Well-built, you encounter the frequent glances of women. You know the reason – you look European, your face is delicate and somehow tormented. Women like that. Still, you can't use your fortune of good looks to your advantage – your accommodations are horrid: the dirty hotel. It's unlikely that a woman would go to such a place. Besides, you have no money. You can't even treat a woman to a drink – not one glass. So you trudge on.
Again, I have to wait. If I sell the book, there'll at least be some money. But until then, it's just sitting and waiting and being thankful for whatever comes your way – broads, ugly or handicapped. And sometimes, with luck, something rare happens.
Go on, talk after that about a just social structure. It will be just when sex won't depend on money:
«Hello, Madam. Do you like me?»
«I do.»
«And I like you. How much money do you have?»
«$3.30.»
«And I have $2.60. Let's get some wine and then go to my dirty hotel.»
And so they did.
An unidentified body in the Long Island waters. Damp autumn fog hovers over the unidentified body, it licks the heels of the unidentified body.
Who was she? With an ordinary expression on her face did she sit at a restaurant, speaking in a ringing voice? Did she spread like a shadow under her man's wiry abdomen? My God, why do you whip our poor bodies? Why do you freeze them, pierce them through and beat them?… Sometimes there's no blood, but often it is sticky and coagulates…
Autumn ground, the roots of plants cut by a shovel, a young dead hand in a sandy puddle. The sleeve of a cotton sweater. The body laps together with coins in a pocket of her denim skirt. They did not fall out. I'm staring – forgive me – the way a lover would stare at his beloved. The weather is nasty, swampy, and the body laps in the water, its head and its hair swaying, its left hand swinging. And there's also the ocean, the grimy ocean.
I'm a terribly curious person. I remember that I kept shoving my prick towards the dog so he could lick it. I was 24 then. It was winter, and I was sitting on a red couch.
But the dog wasn't too interested. He licked it a few times and that was it.
All my life, my prick keeps bothering me.
And in that same house there was, aside from the dog, another temptation: a landlady's thirteen-year-old daughter. I remember how – my fingers trembling – I measured the distance between her breasts. I was sewing a white blouse for her. Her mother was there, and so was my then wife. They stared.
The blouse was intended for some kind of Young Pioneer celebration.
My sweet mother! Such rejoicing in the window!
The Revolution, mother, has come – festive and triumphant!
With flowers and branches. Such joy, mother!
Such happiness!
Hey, guys, let's run outside! The Revolution, like Christ, has come to our town. Over there they take from the rich and give to the poor. And over there they prepare the tables, and people of all types embrace one another. It's good over there, the lanes are sprinkled with sand…
The ruddy cheeks of a woman at the beginning of her decline, her wrinkled neck-these are wildly sexy.
She wears her cap askew like a hooligan. Still beautiful, wearing tough rain-and-wind gear, she's on her way somewhere on the bus. She looks at me through the mist, sitting so that her head is level with my waist, as I stand next to her. From time to time she raises her head, takes a look and gives me a crooked smile from under her cap.
I know what she sees. I always wear pants so tight they almost burst at the seams and when I have a hard-on it's terribly conspicuous. And due to her ruddy cheeks and the wrinkles on her neck my prick is up and it stays that way.
Neither she nor I are embarrassed. There even appears to be a kind of a warm intimacy. Unfortunately, the bus turns from 57th Street onto Fifth Avenue. I have to get off here. We smile at each other for the last time. Farewell, little cap…
Leaving a woman I've never loved – on the corner, in the wind, in tears she ran after me without even putting on her shoes – I almost cried. (It's that millionaire's housekeeper.) Still, rudely, maliciously, I left with tender and pitiful thoughts of her within myself.
Walking up to 2nd Avenue, suddenly I couldn't bear it, and started sobbing under the horrible lights of the cars turning right. I pulled my cap down over my eyebrows. The abandoned woman – her wounded pose and her wretchedness – reminded me of my mother at the Kharkov Airport timidly waving goodbye to her only son, who was leaving forever, whom she would never see again. God, I'm cruel!
What drives us on, why can't we stay with those who love us, where we find warmth and care and happiness? Housekeeper, forgive me for Christ's sake, will you?
The left side of Lincoln Center reminds me a lot of a cemetery. The black stone benches, the straight rows of trees between and above them. Amazingly dark foliage intensifies the resemblance, though there are no tombstones.
Sometimes I come by and take a seat by myself in the October sun; I think about people; I sigh. More often than not my thoughts are sad and pensive. I'm thirty-four, and I'm beginning to get tired of human interaction.
Today there's one cherry lying on the slab at the foot of a bench. I glance around, stretch my hand, grab it and eat it. The cherry turns out to be a tiny apple, you know that kind, they call it crabapple. At that time the disappearing sun reappears. And what sort of cherries could there be in October!?
Boys are better than girls at surviving summers. Girls feel summers with their stomachs and their insides. For girls, summer is sticky, it's very hard for them to resist their own flesh in the summer. They're anxious, timid, and their nerves go in knots around them and outside their clothes. They keep thinking that they're being pelted to death with apples, or that they're being bathed in hot jelly made of inseets. There's always the danger of being tickled or of something crawling where it's not supposed to. (Generally, a woman's perennial state is the sensation of an impending sneeze every minute of her life.)
It's frightful to be a girl in the summer. Since I feel this, I question which I am more of – a boy or a girl? Yet all along I'm positively certain that I'm a queer man of thirty-four years of age, somewhat refined in the French manner, having a disorganized sex life.
We came over to my place, to my stinking hotel, we undressed and suddenly I embraced her so, embraced her – so tender.
The poor, already bedraggled twenty-six-year-old girclass="underline" how exhausted we are in our endless search for love!
I stroked and caressed her all night long, imagining that she was my daughter. My poor little daughter. She also was quite thin and short. And so today, like normal people I have a kind of family. We keep each other warm in October under a coarse army blanket with the letters US printed on it.
And in the morning the sun rolled in through the window and spread out on the blanket.
Mumbling something, my child rolled over, pressed herself against me, and fell asleep again, breathing heavily. And she has the reputation of an out-and-out whore!