She forced me out. I had a live, beautiful, twenty-five-year-old wife with a sweet peepka, yet I was obliged to hide like a thief, dressed up in her things – for some reason that gave me special pleasure – and spill my semen in her sweet-smelling panties. She had bought herself a pungently fragrant raspberry-colored oil and was smearing it on her peepka, so that all her panties smelled of the oil.
My friends, if you ask why I didn't find myself another woman, the truth is, Elena was too splendid, and anything else would have seemed squalid to me in comparison with her little peepka. I'd rather fuck a fantasy than a vulgar woman. Besides, I had no women handy at that time. When some turned up, I tried to fuck them, as you will see, I did fuck them, but then retired into my world of fantasy. They were uninteresting to me and therefore unneeded. My solitary intellectual diversions with Elena's shade had a criminal aura and were much more enjoyable. Elena's voice rings in my ears to this day, I can thank this sentence, this thin little voice, for a good fifty orgasms: "I put my fingee there, I press down and lightly stroke my peepka and look in the mirror, and gradually I see a white juice ooze out of me, a white drop appear in my rosy peepka." This little tale was the accompaniment to one of my last coitions with her. Besides everything else, you see – that is, besides me, Jean, Susanna, and company, she also masturbated. All of us together, you see, were not enough for her. The pig.
I remember a row, it was the day she first met Susanna the lesbian, she had spent the whole evening hugging and kissing her. I hauled her home almost by force, she hissed and dragged her heels. At home the row flared up worse than ever. Elena had already undressed for bed. She was screaming at me, shrilly and drunkenly, slurring her sibilants as she usually did when drunk. And now I felt descending upon me a certain masochistic ecstasy. I loved her, this pale, gaunt, small-breasted creature in her whorish scrap of panties, who had donned my socks to sleep in. I was ready to cut off my own head, my own unhappy refined noggin, and throw myself face down before her. For what? She was a sleaze, a pig, an egoist, a stinker, an animal, but I loved her, and this love was higher than my consciousness. She humiliated me in everything, she had humiliated my flesh, killed, crippled my mind, my nerves, everything I clung to in this world, but I loved her with those panties round on her neat little poopka, loved her pale, with her froggy thighs, sweet thighs, loved her standing with her feet on our foul bed. I loved her! It was horrible, I loved her worse and worse.
Such were the memories that saw me off to sleep with semen smeared on my belly. At five-thirty I woke up from nightmares that were more of the same. Shaking them off, I turned on the light and started my coffee, shaved (to this day I have nothing to shave on my Mongol puss), tied a funereal black kerchief around my neck, and dragged my ass over to the Hilton. The street was deserted, I headed west on Fifty-fifth, hunching against the cold. Had I ever thought such experiences would fall to my share in life? To be perfectly honest, I had never expected any of this. A Russian lad brought up in a bohemian milieu. "Poetry, art, these are the highest occupations one can have on this earth. The poet is the most important person in the world." These truths had been impressed upon me from childhood. And now, while still a Russian poet, I was a most unimportant person. Life had smashed me in the face…
The days passed, and the Hilton Hotel with all its stinking dungeons was no longer a mystery to me. Half a hundred professional terms tripped lightly from my tongue, I had no time to converse, I was supposed to work, that was what I was being paid for, not to converse. The whole kitchen spoke Spanish, the Italians spoke Italian among themselves, all languages were heard in the "servants' hall" (as it was called in olden times) except correct English. Even our manager, Fred, was Austrian. Some time ago the manager had suddenly taken to calling me Alexander. Perhaps in his conception all Russians were Alexanders. That was no surprise; the Thracian slaves in Rome were all addressed simply as "Thracian," why the fuck stand on ceremony with them, they were slaves. Having had an eyeful of the Hilton's multinational slaves, I already knew what supported America. I cautiously told Fred that I was Edward, not Alexander; he corrected himself, but the next day I became Alexander again. I did not correct Fred anymore, I reconciled myself. What difference does it make what your name is?
The restaurant began to get on my nerves. The only thing it had brought me was a little money. With that money I had been able to realize some of my trivial desires; for example, I had bought a black lace shirt at the Arcadia shop on Broadway, and made the acquaintance of the owner while I was at it. As a souvenir of the Hilton and the Old Bourbon I have a white suit hanging in my closet, bought at Cromwell on Lexington Avenue. But the restaurant itself got on my nerves, I was tired. Thoughts of Elena were not disappearing. Sometimes they suddenly surfaced in the midst of work and covered me with a cold sweat; on several occasions, although I'm a robust fellow, I nearly collapsed in a faint. But the worst of it was that I constantly saw my enemies, those who had stolen Elena away from me – our customers, men who had money. I realized that I was being unjust, but could not help myself. Is the world just to me?
I was penetrated ever more deeply by a feeling that I arbitrarily defined to myself as class hatred. I didn't so much hate our customers as individuals; no, essentially I hated all gentlemen of this type, gray and sleek. I knew that it was not we, the tattered, shaggy, and fucked-up, who had introduced the plague into this world, it was they. The plague of money, the disease of money, is their handiwork. The plague of buying and selling is their handiwork. The murder of love, the fact that love is something to be scorned – this too is their handiwork.
And most of all I hate this system, I realized when I tried to make sense of my feelings, the system that corrupts people from birth. I made no distinction between the USSR and America. Nor did I feel ashamed of myself because my hatred sprang from what was essentially such an understandable and personal cause, my wife's betrayal. I hated this world, which turned touching, poetry-writing Russian girl-children into creatures fucked up by drink and narcotics, to serve as bedding for millionaires who would wear out but not marry the silly Russian girls, who were also trying to do their business. Country gentlemen have always had a weakness for Frenchwomen, have sent for them in their Klondikes, but have kept them as whores and married pure farmers' daughters. I could no longer look at our customers.
At about this time I was supposed to go to Bennington, get acquainted with its women's college and its Professor Horowitz. I had sent them a letter about myself, and they evidently wanted to hire me. I don't know what the job title was, something trivial, but connected with the Russian language. At the time I wrote the letter I was so fucking crazy I just wanted to hide somewhere, but when Professor Horowitz, after several phone calls, finally caught me at the Winslow, I realized that no Bennington or its American girls from good families could save me, I would flee from Bennington to New York inside of a week. I knew myself all too well. I did not want to play their game. I wanted, as in Russia, to be outside the game, or if possible, if I could, to play against them. "If I could" implied a temporary condition: I meant that for the time being I knew very little about the world I had come to. They had robbed me, fucked me, and damn near killed me, but I did not yet know how to get my revenge. That I would get it I had no doubt. I did not want to be calm and just. Fuck justice – you can have it; I'll take injustice…
Sitting with Wong in the cafeteria, I explained to him why I didn't like rich people. Wong didn't like rich people either, I did not have to persuade him on this point; in this world the poor are all revolutionaries and criminals, only not everyone finds the way, not everyone has the resolve. The laws were devised by the rich. But, as one of the proudest slogans of our unsuccessful Russian Revolution proclaims, "The right to life is higher than the right to private property!"