About three weeks later I received a large package. I often receive large packages, and so I didn't think anything about it at first, but when I read the address of the sender, "Richard Atlas, Sr." I understood it all. An office worker had sent the manuscript separately. The letter came the following day. "How could that have happened, Linda?" I asked the expert.
"Very simple," she said. "A secretary mailed the package and then remembered the letter the next day."
Linda knows all about secretarial work, I thought sadly. Ask whatever you like; she has the answer. And I unsealed the letter:
"I very much regret, Mr. Limonov, that I cannot be of assistance… Your manuscript, unfortunately, is not for our list… I wish you every success… I am confident that you…"
Ah, you asshole! I thought dully. You publish Khomsky; he's fine for your list, since he's a nice bourgeois poet. Meek. And more and more ponders the problems of life and death. And conducts himself with exceptional propriety, never saying more than he has to, and whenever he's called upon to judge Russia publicly, he doesn't criticize his new Motherland, he doesn't touch it — God forbid. His favorite poet is the Greek Cavafy, who quietly sat out his life, a man with a temperament like Joseph Khomsky's — both deep, private thinkers. For his obedient behavior, the poet Joseph Khomsky is certain in time to receive the inventor-of-dynamite prize.
And me? Next to the respectable Khomsky, the housekeeper Edward is a literary lowlife. On the housekeeper's desk is a portrait of Colonel Khadafy that even Efimenkov found shocking. It's not so much that I sympathize with the brand of Islamic socialism invented by the Colonel or with the rest of his views, but that I like his personality. He's a human being and not an asshole like the majority of rulers. He took power by himself, overthrowing his king and carrying out a revolution. I like his thirty-eight-year-old face. It's the face of a man. There was a time when I played at being homosexual out of despair and a love for the outrageous, and since there wasn't any place for my masculine face in Eddie, it surfaced in that picture…
If I'd written a novel about intellectuals «suffering» in Soviet mental hospitals, or about the oppressed Soviet national minorities, I thought, I would have found a place on their publisher's list immediately. Without a doubt. Gerard and Atlas is a publisher of liberal-intellectual tendencies. It's exactly the same as with the Moscow publisher "Soviet Writer," where you're perfectly free to publish a book on the life of the American unemployed. All you have to do is avoid sex scenes…
I didn't even get drunk. I had just paid off Bill the money I owed him for his translation of Eddie, and gritting my teeth, I started paying him to translate yet another book, Diary of a Loser, in order to begin a relentless general assault along the entire front and against all the New York and for that matter all the American Malcolms and Atlases, from coast to coast. I even started looking for a new literary agent. For that reason I became intimate with people I never would have made friends with. I felt it was either me or them, the Malcolms and Atlases. My own capacity for patience put me on guard; otherwise I would have had a nervous breakdown. It had begun four years since I'd begun trying to sell my book and gain a foothold as a writer, and I was afraid that I'd flip out, that I'd go to pieces and be finished.
It was at that moment that Angeletti's letter came. There is a God, I thought in jubilation. There is a God, Edward, there is! Angeletti's firm wasn't a large one, but he had published a number of very good things in the sixties, including a book by Jean Genet and another by the French surrealist poet Henri Michaux. True, he had also published a little volume of verse by a Soviet poet — tightrope walker, the same one against whom the pretender to the throne had been defending the Soviet regime at the Garrissons' party. But I immediately consoled myself by deciding that in publishing the poet, Angeletti was merely paying tribute to an international literary fad. Who is without sin? I thought.
Angeletti turned up promptly on the appointed day, notifying me by telephone that he was in New York, and I invited him for lunch — after taking the precaution of asking Linda's advice as to whether it would be appropriate to do so. Linda had forgotten who Angeletti was, but she said, "Why not? You could invite a prime minister to this house, Edward."
Angeletti arrived with a woman. He was a tall, balding old man with a beard, an old guy but still strong. The woman, whose name was Louise, was the sort men call a "nice broad." Not first-class or anything, but very nice: well-built, arms, legs, all there, all nice to look at, all the right curves. I didn't envy Angeletti his broad, but given the chance I wouldn't have turned her down either. Louise, however, had nothing to do with the business at hand. My relations with her were limited to her asking, "Are you a homosexual?" She explained her curiosity by saying she'd been told that I was a homosexual, although she didn't think I was. Angeletti was in the can at the time. I told Louise I was bisexual. And I said it, you know, proudly — not coyly but with pride: "I am a bisexual!" Afterwards it occurred to me to wonder just what sort of bisexual I was, given the fact that for a long time I'd been fucking only girls.
Before Angeletti's arrival, I had acquired several books on him and his generation and had looked through them and studied them. I had also obtained a book recounting how Angeletti had gotten started in publishing in order to show off my knowledge and demonstrate during our conversation my heightened interest in his publishing house. My boss, before any meeting with somebody he was seeing for the first time in his life, was always sent a dossier on the person in question from somewhere in the bowels of one of his companies. I imitated the boss and got together a dossier on Angeletti.
Initially we sat in the solarium. All the stories in the millionaire's little house begin in the solarium. I opened a bottle of Corvo for my guests, taking my cue from Angeletti's Italian last name. They partook of the cold wine, and Angeletti complained to me about how badly they had slept the night before.
"We're staying at the apartment of my old friends the poets Gluzberg and Kotovsky — you've heard of them, no doubt," said Angeletti, addressing me. "It's way down on the Lower East Side," he continued. "Gluzberg and Kotovsky have been living there for about thirty years, and have no interest in moving anywhere else, since the rent's so low. But it's a terrible neighborhood, and we couldn't get to sleep all night because the Puerto Rican teenagers down in the square never turned their radios off. But you have a very quiet neighborhood here, like the older parts of London, very peaceful," Angeletti suddenly announced, getting up from our green couch and looking out through the glass door into the garden.
"Too peaceful," I said.
"I haven't stayed over in New York for any length of time in twenty years," Angeletti went on thoughtfully. "I've stopped for a day or two on my way back from Europe on occasion, but always when I was very busy with meetings planned beforehand without a minute to spare, so I haven't really seen the city. Probably it's changed a lot?"
"Yes," I said. "Even in the five years I've been here, it's changed a great deal. Certain neighborhoods have come back, and others have gone under."
"Efimenkov spoke very highly of your book," Angeletti said, abruptly changing the subject. "He regards it as one of the best things written in Russian since the end of the Second World War."
"I don't know," I said. "Probably it's easier for him to tell. But the fact is it's been very hard for me to find that masterpiece a publisher."
"I'll take your manuscript, and if I like it, I'll publish it. We only bring out a few books a year, but what we do bring out we try to make as choice as possible." Angeletti said all this in a way that made it sound very solid.