Scenes like the episode regarding my sending his pants to the cleaners have never again been repeated in such a blatantly obnoxious form, and there's a reason for that, as I shall explain in due course, but outbursts of hysterics still do rock the house on occasion, reducing Linda to a state of nervous shock and causing me to lose my temper. "You weakling, you hysterical old woman! Why can't you learn to control yourself!" I whisper under my breath while washing the dishes or drying them, or clearing the table.
Once he had to go to his place in Connecticut after spending three days at my, or rather at Linda's and my, house. We had gotten incredibly tired of him during that time and were counting the minutes. He behaved more or less decently, and with my help had already loaded the car with a box of French wine, his suitcase, and several incomprehensible electronic devices with tangled wires, but was still lingering somewhere in the depths of the house. I was sitting at my usual place by the kitchen window keeping an eye on his car so he wouldn't get a ticket, and waiting for him to finally get his ass out of there, and already savoring the moment when I would at last be able to kick off my shoes and lie down, since I'd been on my feet since six A.M., and it was now almost six p.m.… When from upstairs — Linda's little anteroom and Gatsby's office communicate with the kitchen by a stairway, so that if the door's open I can easily hear what they're talking about — when from upstairs I heard a sudden uproar: Linda's muffled and nervous answers and the hysterical bass of my employer. "It's been stolen! It's been stolen!" the deep bass voice repeated. I couldn't hear Linda's answer; they had moved away from the doorway well into the interior of the office.
I cringed with a sense of foreboding. After the initial quarreling, shouting, and other supplementary noises resembling the sound of furniture being knocked over, all of which took place well inside the office, it became impossible to make out any words at all, only the din of voices, and then Linda came running into the kitchen and asked in a hysterical half-whisper, "Edward, do you know where Steven's small black portfolio that he always keeps on the windowsill in the office is? It's gone, it's been stolen, and it has all his credit cards and his passport in it!"
"Linda," I said, "except for you and me, no one has been in the house for over a week now. I have no idea where his portfolio is, but if it was on the windowsill, then it's still there. I haven't taken anything from either the windowsill or the desk, since I don't like to touch the boss's papers. Maybe Steven put it somewhere himself?"
"No, he didn't move it," Linda said, but she didn't sound so sure. And then she added, "We'll have to go through the whole house, although it's almost certainly been stolen." She looked at me tragically and reproachfully.
I shrugged. "Who could have stolen it? Guests? His guests? Ghupta stole his portfolio, or maybe another one of his friends — the Hollywood screenwriter Jeff? Or maybe his wife took it? Or I did," I added resentfully. "That's it, it was me."
Linda was too frightened to say anything more, and I didn't say anything either, while upstairs Gatsby continued to thump and crash about. And then it was suddenly quiet. A light lit up on the kitchen phone, which, like the phones in every other room in the house, has a button for each of our four numbers and another for the intercom we use to talk between rooms.
"He's calling somebody," Linda whispered.
He quickly finished his call, and then there was the sound of footsteps. Flat feet, I thought maliciously. The flat feet were clearly on their way down to us. I was aware that at that moment I was thinking like a servant, that I was full of a servant's fear and animosity, and that like a servant who has done nothing wrong, I had no wish to see him. Society, civilization, culture, history, and what else? — books, movies, and television had all shaped our roles, those of master and servant. Like it or not, Edward, if you play the servant, if you live like a servant, even if there is much more intellect in you, intellect sufficient for a poet, say, it doesn't make any difference; nobody cares. You have to play the fool and tragically wait for him to come down. Curled up inside like a shrimp at the approach of a fisherman's net, or like what else? — like a hedgehog which a noblewoman reaches for and prods with the tip of her umbrella, the servant Limonov listened as the steps approached the stairway and then started down. Linda stared like a rabbit at the doorway's gaping maw.
And then he was standing in the doorway. One thing I have acquired in this world after many years of associating with people like myself is the ability to look and not look at the same time, or the ability to see without looking. I acquired that skill after several years of training in the New York subway system. It has proved useful. I saw Gatsby without looking at him. I sensed his psychopathic aura, and I felt his sweaty nervousness and tension, and I had the feeling that steam was whistling from him as from a teakettle and he was surrounded by a sort of red cloud. Perhaps his puffy red face produced this last illusion, or perhaps his red beard was at fault — that made me think he was surrounded by a hysterical red cloud. I don't know what it was, but I do know that I hated him, and that I hated him doubly both for forcing me to play that idiotic social role which required me to detest him, and for his not being able to rise to the level of ordinary human relations. For not even being able, the primitive bastard, to remain on the level of employer toward those who work for him and are paid for their labor. Instead, the cocksucker used that swollen cloud to violently shove the two of us, Linda and me, into the role of servants. With one thrust of his nerves, he shoved us out of the twentieth century and into the Middle Ages and history. In a few minutes, without resorting to violence, he turned me, a poet and lover of intellectual books on social themes, an anarchist and admirer of the raw New Wave music of Elvis Costello and Richard Hell, into a quaking servant. What was the use of my trembling with hatred for him? My hatred changed nothing; it remained merely the private affair of a servant. I could hate him if I wished, but a servant I would remain. I stood still, while he walked past me toward Linda, past his servant, his servant, his servant!
It might be said that Edward Limonov concocted all that himself, it was all his own invention, and he really didn't have any basis for his resentment of Steven Grey. That's true; there wasn't any basis for it, except that Steven Grey consciously and unconsciously and any other way you like felt himself to be the master, thereby automatically turning Linda and me into his servants. Paradoxically, Olga, shielded from him by Linda and me, wasn't one of his servants, whereas we were. He played that game, the fucking feudal overlord, the bloated bastard, and we had to play it too. He played it unconsciously, and I was included in it unconsciously, and the fact that I realized what was going on changed nothing.
I always knew, both then and later, that physically it was easy for me to work for him and with him. I had no objection to getting up at seven, or even at six, or to the fact that his friends or the businessmen he needed would sometimes arrive at eight — I even found that the morning's drill stimulated me and put me in a cheerful mood. Nor did I object to the fact that I had to spend the whole day on my feet and could go off to bed only at midnight. After all, he was only in the New York house two or three days a week; you could count on your fingers the times when he stayed longer.
But that extraordinary ability of his to transform both Linda and me into servants by his mere presence wrecked our relationship with him and turned every one of his visits into a calamity. And it certainly wasn't that I wanted him to sit and drink vodka with me in the kitchen — I would have been the first one to say no to that. It wasn't his friendship that I required, but rather a sense that my work was my own and wasn't merely «service» in the menial sense of the word.