During the first few months of my employment, Steven's visits were fairly infrequent. Once or twice a week, say, he would appear at the front door in a taxi around six or seven in the evening, after rushing in directly from the airport. Often he was angry. He probably had his own private reasons for that, but the pretext was always that he could never find any money for the taxi, and he would run distractedly from me to the driver, coughing, continually taking his pipe out of his pocket, leaving it unlit, then putting it back again, and otherwise nervously fussing. His nervousness would at once invade our whole household, and I, who until then had belonged only to myself or to my regular duties, would suddenly belong to him. In the same way they have always done, his bad moods then would infect me and the house itself, but most of all they would infect Linda, if he happened to arrive during her working hours. Linda sits in her little anteroom on the second floor from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon.
I usually wait for him in the kitchen, keeping an eye on the street. When his taxi arrives, I run to open the door to spare him the extra annoyance he would inevitably feel at having to look for his key — as you see, I'm looking out not only for him but also for myself. After the commotion of arrival is over, and he has carried in, either with or without my help, his suitcase or suitcases and the invariable heap of tattered newspapers he has been reading in the taxi, he runs upstairs to his leather-and-wood-paneled office on the second floor and sits down at the telephone. The telephoning usually continues for about thirty minutes to an hour, although sometimes it goes on longer — two hours, or even three.
After he has finished with his calls, he comes back downstairs to the kitchen and appropriates my copy of The New York Post, always asking with old-fashioned courtesy if I have finished reading it and if he can have it. Finished or not, I always give it to him. It would be ridiculous not to. I ask him then if he would like a drink. By this I mean his usual glass of twelve-year-old Glenlivet Scotch with a quantity of ice and seltzer. If he is in a good mood, he makes the drink himself. I always put the bottle of Glenlivet out on the butcher-block counter in the kitchen, so he won't have to search for it among the other bottles in the kitchen cabinet that serves as our bar and once more become irritated or lose his temper. These little traditions of putting out bottles and opening doors were established long before in Jenny's time as essential precautions against his bad moods. I don't know whether he's aware that both Linda and I, that all of us in fact, are at the mercy of his moods, but maybe he is.
After quickly skimming through the paper, he picks up his glass and goes to the master bedroom on the third floor, fills his deep, wide bathtub with water and a special variety of green pine scent, and lies down in it. When he takes a bath, he listens to the radio I recently installed on the night stand next to his bed. And while he takes his bath, we wait for him below.
We wait, the house and I, until he splits — disappears or goes out to eat at a restaurant and then somewhere else to get himself fucked. Sometimes, more often now, he comes back very late to do his coupling at home. I wait, and the house does too, because I have a feeling that the house likes me, but not him. Why me? Because I live in it and clean it and take care of it. And I really do clean it, since in addition to my housekeeping duties I've kept those of my old job, which was to do the «heavy» cleaning. Once a week when Jenny was still working and living at the house, I came to clean, vacuuming it from top to bottom and waxing its floors. Certainly the house does like me, the one who keeps it clean and neat and makes sure that everything in it is warm and dry. All Gatsby does is throw his towels and his dirty shirts and socks and underwear and his soiled suits on the floor, and track in chalk and plaster from the street, or wherever he gets it, and leave half-empty wine glasses and coffee cups lying around. In short, he brings disorder and dirt into our home — he uses it up, whereas I look after it.
The house and I wait for him to go. For us, his arrival is like an extraterrestrial invasion. Often, when we're expecting him, his girlfriend Polly arrives, a very nice but in my opinion harassed woman. Linda and I both agree that Polly is very nice and a benevolent and calming influence on Gatsby, our feudal lord, and we hope to God they won't quarrel.
The comparison of Steven to a feudal lord came to me only gradually, of course, during the many, many lunches I made for him. Usually he eats meat — lamb chops or steaks which I order by phone from the best butcher in the city, the Ottomanelli Brothers. It was only after seeing my fill of him slightly dulled with red meat and French red wine, a minimum of two bottles of which were always consumed at meals — it was only after seeing my fill of the puffy, flushed, red-bearded face of Gatsby with his paunch hanging over his belt — that I finally hit upon that very apt, as I thought, description of him as a feudal lord. That lord, a hunter, horseman, and dog lover, finishing up a joint of mutton and dressed in high jackboots and reeking of alcohol, dogs, and the stable, came to me somewhere out of medieval England. And Gatsby does in fact have a strange smell of leather about him from the closets where he keeps his suits and his quantities of footwear, a leathery smell with a pungent admixture of cologne and Dunhill tobacco, his invariable brand. Like all snobs — and it shouldn't be difficult to guess that Steven Grey is a snob — he has his own particular brand of Scotch, Glenlivet, his own shirtmaker, Astor, his own brand of underwear, Jockey, and his own brand of tobacco, Dunhill. In addition, there are other, more general principles of snobbism and the good life — his socks, for example, come only from Bloomingdale's and have to be a hundred percent cotton. And it is also at Bloomingdale's that I purchase the bow ties for his tuxedo and the bed linen for his house, for each one of its seven bedrooms. The bed linen too has to be pure cotton — no polyesters allowed.
When Polly arrives, she usually greets me with some thoughtful phrase like, "How's your book coming, Edward?" — the words change, but it's obvious they're all supposed to express her concern for me and her interest in my fate — and then she goes upstairs to see Steven. If he has gotten out of the tub by then and is dressed, he runs down the stairs to meet her. Whenever that happens, I withdraw to the kitchen or to my bedroom, impatiently waiting for him to go out to his restaurant. At the same time, I remain on the alert, in case he should ask me about some object, thing, or person it is essential I find at once either inside the house or beyond its confines. Although the owner of a small empire of firms and the master of the numerous people who work for him, he can never remember, for example, where the glasses and cups in the kitchen are, and inevitably opens every one of its twenty cupboards in succession looking for them. Even when I go up to my room to give him a feeling of privacy in his own home, I always leave the door ajar, in case he should suddenly need something or want me.