After the poetess had finished reading, there was a party given in her honor by Queens College at which I drank a lot and out of boredom shared several joints with Vadimov, who desperately wanted to be contemporary and American. I wasted quite a few joints on Vadimov and some other bumpkins, in fact, and the poetess smoked a couple too, but Lodyzhnikov turned them down; he was looking out for his body. Some crazy old couple took me for Lodyzhnikov and asked for my autograph. I thought it was hilarious, but Lodyzhnikov didn't, for some reason.
I knew from experience that if I wanted to continue the evening's entertainment, and it was still pretty early, I'd have to be pushy about it. And that meant I'd have to invite myself along with the rest of the company to supper or wherever else they were going. And so, like an experienced outsider, I attached myself to Vadimov and resolved not to let him out of my sight. I followed him everywhere until I was sure he wasn't trying to get rid of me and would take me wherever he was going. It turned out that the girl (Jenny) who had been sitting with Lodyzhnikov and Vadimov had already left, had gone home to the house where Makhmudova and her husband, Vadimov, were staying, and where they were all going to have supper. I wanted to have supper too, and so I took the bull by the horns and said I would go in the same car with them, justifying my persistence with a few mumbled words about my feeling for Vadimov and the poetess. It was a lie. I just didn't want to go back to my hotel on Broadway and the filth and the stench and the loneliness.
Finally, after we had succeeded in wresting the poetess from her crowd of Russian and non-Russian admirers, we squeezed ourselves into Professor Barth's car, the same Jon Barth who would later escort Efimenkov and who in such situations was always on the very best of terms with Soviet writers — their guide and friend. «We» in this case meant Lodyzhnikov, Makhmudova, Vadimov, and I. The car set off down the road, while Makhmudova's admirers gaped and waved.
The professor's car happily chewed up the miles, and then, after about a half hour's drive, we came to a halt, emerging into the darkness and entering an open door, and thus began what was to be perhaps one of the most important events of my life. I found myself in the multimillionaire's little house, as I would call it later. Entering, of course, I didn't have the least suspicion that my subsequent fate would be tied up for several years with that house and its inhabitants or that I would live there. No, I didn't sense anything of the sort. It was dark, and I was stoned and drunk; after all, you've got to cheer yourself up a bit in this world to keep from drifting away out of depression and boredom.
I brutally abandoned Tolya the drunk that evening, although it was in fact he who had gotten me started on that journey in the first place. There was only one place left in the car — for me. "Bolivar can't carry two." Having played his part as an instrument of fate, he vanishes from the stage. Forgive me, Tolya.
The first thing I saw was the kitchen. Wide, like a dance hall. With a huge gas stove, as in a restaurant. With a thousand components, appliances, jars, boxes, counters, and shelves. It's difficult now to say whether I noticed all that abundance then, or whether it was simply the kitchen's sheer scale that impressed me; after all, I was stoned. And then I saw the dining room where the young girl Jenny, getting tangled in her long skirt, was preparing an American-style supper — putting out plates and knives and forks and numerous other things whose function was beyond me.
The poetess, out of Russian generosity (something that has always seemed suspect to me, even though I'm a Russian myself; it's more a lack of character than generosity), had invited some thirty people to dinner, which naturally shocked Jenny, although she had the good manners not to say anything about it. Several people helped her add a leaf to the table, which though large, still wasn't big enough for all that fraternity.
Above the table hung a spiral chandelier made of dark copper and no doubt very old, an elaborate structure of tubes and lamps that looked like the coiffure of a seventeenth century lady of fashion or a hat from a picture by Picasso. On one wall stood a high, open buffet with plates and dishes standing on end and painted with fishes, the various fishes of freshwater America, obviously. Depicted on the largest of them was an enormous pike. On another wall of the dining room stood a small old cupboard, and above it hung a painting, old too, with its surface even cracked in places, depicting a plenitude of different foods, from meat to fruit. A third wall was covered from end to end with the wooden lattices of windows and a doorway opening out onto the garden of the millionaire's house. Imagine, a garden!
It was all the more impressive for me, since at the time I was residing at a dirt-cheap hotel on Broadway in the nineties, a place where fires burned. That same April several rooms near mine on the tenth floor had been completely gutted, and I remember running down the hall with a suitcase containing my manuscripts under one arm and my white suit dangling from the other. Just think — after a hotel where the drunks urinated in the elevator and where they vomited too, where the stench of urine and excrement was never aired out of the filthy rugs, where it seemed that the inhabitants never slept and where at four o'clock in the morning they were still swearing at each other from window to window across the squalid courtyard, where trash and empty bottles were simply chucked out of the windows, and where the police visited every day; after a hotel like that, you suddenly find yourself in a house with a garden. And a garden, as you later discover, that faces the river. That faces the river directly, and what could be more natural than that? And in the garden are trees and birds — as if you weren't in New York at all. And among the other houses facing the garden stands one that a couple of years before had belonged to Onassis, and next door is another that belongs, you are told, to a woman everybody calls "Mrs. Five Hundred Million." And among all those houses, Jenny's is by no means the worst, but one of the best.
At the time, obviously because we were keeping her from setting the table, Jenny had the door to the garden open, and I walked out into it with Lodyzhnikov and Vadimov and nearly went out of my mind from the fragrance of April grass recently and abundantly watered by the spring rain, and from the leadenly turbid East River with its whirlpools made by the huge ship or, more likely, barge that was floating silently and ominously by while Vadimov told me about some mutual Moscow acquaintances who, unfortunately, didn't interest me in the least, and Lodyzhnikov disdainfully interjected something in that skeptical way typical of people who are very successful but shy. I didn't hear a goddamn thing they were saying. Not far off the lights of a huge bridge shone like a Christmas tree, and on the other side of the river the cars were moving quietly and enigmatically along narrow little roads, while above a full moon had come out in the suddenly clearing sky. An immense tree in the center of the garden was still dripping with rain when we went back inside the house. It was a life so different that it seemed like another planet. I had sobered up.
Of that whole evening and of the "Russian party," as Jenny and I would later call it, I remember only the insane crush and the faces of a great many people who remained nameless, then as now. I remember too that I was very excited. After living for years in crappy, shit-smelling hotels, I was excited by the light and the talk and the food, although I was too excited to eat. Besides "Jenny's House" (one and the same for me then), there was yet another reason for my excitement. If only for an evening, I was again able to be what I am — a poet and writer. And although I valued only two or three people in that whole crowd, I was still myself again, and not that denizen of the benches of Central Park, that sullen, lonely Broadway transient with a knife in his boot who patronized pornographic movie theaters, that failure and half-dumb person who barely understood English. And so I was grateful to that crowd.