I remember that I helped Jenny clear the table afterwards, and I remember that I sat to her right (she was at the head of the table) and that I tried to talk to her, and that she gladly responded to me with amused curiosity. And I remember too that her front teeth with the large gap between them prompted a feeling of tenderness in me. I asked Vadimov, who sat next to me, where Jenny's parents were, why they were absent. "She lives here by herself," Vadimov answered curtly; he was talking to a beautiful woman sitting across from him, and I had distracted him. I had learned something about Jenny from my conversation with her, that her grandmother was a Pole, for example, but my impression of her, thanks to my rudimentary and slipshod knowledge of English, the alcohol (I had had more to drink), and the joints (I had more than enough of them that evening), was rather impressionistic and intuitive, although even in a normal state I'm more intuitive than reflective. And I sensed intuitively that it was very good for me there, and that I wasn't going to leave that house and its strange new life that day, that I shouldn't leave it, whatever the cost.
Jenny's girlfriend Jennifer, a somewhat heavy, pug-nosed brunette, sat across the table from me. She was dressed in dark, wide pants and something embroidered with tassels, and something else that was dark and shawl-like, as a result of which I concluded she was from Turkey. Jennifer smiled at me the whole time, probably because I was comical, a drunk and stoned Russian, but I noticed that evening that they, that is, Jenny and Jennifer, gradually began to take me more seriously, perhaps because I was interested in them, and talked to them instead of to the Russians, and moreover helped them clear the table.
There were only two characters, Jenny and me, in the evening's concluding scene, which took place in the kitchen. I found a last joint in my pocket, to which Jenny reacted with unaffected pleasure. When I told her I had had dozens of them before that and had smoked them with the Russians, she was even a bit miffed. "Why didn't you give some to me?" she asked. I told her apologetically that I didn't understand myself how it had happened that she wasn't there when I was smoking the joints and passing them out, but that I wasn't being greedy; I just hadn't realized she smoked grass. Jenny informed me she had been smoking it for eleven years and answered my excuses with feigned severity. I could tell she was just kidding me; my English was so awful it made me look ridiculous. We smoked the joint.
There's a lot of the muzhik in me, and when I'm stoned it slips out into the light of day in all its abundance and often its vulgarity. I started grabbing her, and after stroking her hair I moved on to her arms and breasts, and then I started kissing her neck, and even though she laughingly pushed me away, it was obvious and understandable that our love play was not unpleasant for her, and it continued. She wouldn't let me put my hand very far under her dress, but she did let me stroke her large and beautiful legs and kiss her. I realized later that Jenny was perhaps an inch taller than I was, and when she wore high heels, she towered over me, but I still liked her to wear them — she looked imposing and a little ridiculous, with her soft round ass swinging back and forth and her long arms and legs that made her look like a woman in a Mannerist painting.
I don't know how long our love games continued, but laughing and looking me in the eye, she suddenly said, "I know what you want. You want to stay here and fuck me."
I'll admit I never expected such a declaration from a girl I barely knew, but delighted by her candor, I boldly and shamelessly announced that yes, I did want to, and that for all she knew maybe I loved her. Jenny said she could hardly believe that I loved her, since I didn't know her at all, but as to my wanting to fuck her — that she could believe, but it was already very late and she had to get up early and go to the airport the next morning. She was leaving New York for two weeks.
I certainly didn't want to leave. And I went on grabbing her the same way the peasants (to continue the art comparisons) grab their wives in Dutch paintings — just the way it probably ought to be between a man and a woman, once you get past the well-bred grimacing and prancing that civilization requires of us. Which is why I like marijuana. It doesn't increase my sexual potential, but it does take away my veneer of education and good manners, so that there's nothing left but a naked Russian lad.
We fooled around like that for a while, and she particularly liked it when I stroked her hair, or her head, if you like. But she continued insisting that I go home — it was already three in the morning, and the poetess and Vadimov were already sound asleep somewhere upstairs. I didn't want to go and quietly resisted, becoming alarmed only when she threatened to call the police.
"I'm calling the police," she said, and went to the telephone in the kitchen corner.
"The police don't scare me," I said.
"Then I'll tell them you tried to rape me," she announced with a giggle and, wiggling her ass, started dialing the number.
She actually could be calling the damn police, I thought.
"OK, I'm going, I'm leaving, but give me your phone number and maybe I'll give you a call when you get back and we can get together?"
"Fine, fine," she said, obviously genuinely tired and anxious to go to bed. And after writing her number down on a piece of yellow paper, she gave it to me.
"Or maybe I should stay?" I said, twirling my umbrella in the doorway.
"I really am going to call the police," she said, getting angry and moving towards the phone.
"I'm leaving, I'm leaving," I hastily agreed, and then after adding uncertainly, "I'll see you," I shut the door behind me.
That night in the elevator at my hotel a well-dressed souteneur, or pimp, as the locals say, tried to talk me into coming to him whenever I needed a girl or drugs. "If you're ready to spend twenty dollars, drop by; I have very nice girls — at any time of night. I'm in 532." Although the pimp was fancily dressed and I myself was wearing a velvet jacket, both of us were on welfare, and the elevator had just been used to take the garbage from the top floors downstairs to the basement and stank from the reddish slop that had seeped into the depressions of its old floor.
And now I'll tell you something that will probably make you despise me — my relationship with Jenny began as the result of a colossal mistake on my part. Unable to distinguish among the different faces and types found in the land of America, I took the housekeeper Jenny for the mistress, for the owner. I decided she was the mistress of the millionaire's house, and living there by herself, a wealthy heiress, while her parents were traveling abroad or residing somewhere deep in the American continent, eccentrically preferring the prairies of Texas or the mountains of Colorado to that little garden on the East River. I wanted, I'll admit, to worm my way into the house, of course I wanted to, and the thought of eventually marrying that rich girl also crossed my mind — to such things are we humiliated paupers driven by the circumstances of our lives. It was with that delusion that I called her from a phone booth one rainy day in May, and to my surprise, she invited me over. I had been sure she wouldn't want to see me.
Ah, dear Jenny, maybe you had your own reasons for taking in an unemployed foreign poet fifteen years your senior. Maybe you were satisfying your own inferiority complex, the complex of a housekeeper, by taking a poet for one of your lovers, even if he was a Russian poet.
But even if that's true, what difference does it make. The fact remains that you provided me with food and drink and gave me your body at a most difficult time in my life, and that that was enough to quiet and confound my proud soul, my proud and bitter soul, and to make me think, even with a kind of disappointment, that here was Jenny who for some reason didn't act like other people, who didn't keep it all for herself, but shared with others.