They went out, but Raymond had asked Kirill and me to stay and wait till he came back. Kirill, enjoying the fact that he had lived up to my expectations and kept his promise, asked patronizingly, "Well, Edichka, how do you like cher Raymond? Isn't he a charmer?" Here, I think, he was imitating the jargon of his renowned aristocratic grandmother, about whom he told a great many stories. The grandmother lived to be a hundred and four, and had what in my opinion was the bad habit of dashing cracked antique plates against the wall.
I said I thought he was okay, not a bad fellow.
"He's in love with Luis now, but when we were in the kitchen he said that he liked you very much."
How could he not like me? This sounds implausible, but he was the spit and image of Avdeev – the singer from the Teatralny Restaurant, admirer of my early youth. It's a strange world!
Kirill lavished praise on Raymond as if he were a commodity that he was planning to sell. Raymond was clever, he was cultured, he wore sumptuous clothes – so saying, Kirill led me into the bedroom, where Raymond's many things hung in the closet. "Look at this!" He proudly flung open the closet door. "So much of everything!"
Kirill himself went around in dreadful worn-down shoes. Although he suffered over this, he did not have the willpower – even when he had the money, which was very rare, but sometimes he did – to go out and buy shoes.
Raymond and Luis, Kirill continued in the tone of an affectionate mother recounting the escapades of her fervently loved son, were having tailcoats made specifically for the theater, special identical tailcoats. "You know, Limonov" – in the seriousness of the moment he even switched from Edichka to Limonov – "Raymond has known many great men, from Nijinsky to… And besides, Raymond has…"
Kirill had probably touted me to Raymond in exactly the same way. A poet, and clever, and so refined, the poor fellow has suffered horribly from his wife's treachery…
Soon Kirill turned melancholy. The excitement of having lived up to my expectations and fulfilled his promise was over. Evidently fighting off the emptiness, he went to the next room and began making phone calls. He called his mistress, Jannetta, and apparently got up the nerve to quarrel with her. Unsettled, he returned to the living room, took another bottle of vodka from Raymond's icebox, and we drank it, hardly noticing what we were doing. He withdrew to the telephone again, made several more calls, this time whispering stealthily in English, but did not hear what he wanted to from the receiver. Then, since I was the only available target, he began to badger me.
"Limonov, hey Limonov, remember you pointed out a woman you knew at the hotel, a Russian emigree? Call her up, have her come over, I'll fuck her."
"Shit, Kirill, you don't need her, and anyway she hardly says hello to me. Besides, it's twelve o'clock. The night is young for you and me, but it would be an insult to go calling up an ordinary person like that girl. She's been asleep for hours. And if I did call her, what would I say?"
"Can't you even do me one little favor, can't you call that tart? I'm miserable, I quarreled with Jannetta, I need somebody to fuck. I do everything for you – I introduced you to Raymond – but you don't want to do anything for me. What an egoist you are, Limonov," he said furiously.
"If I were an egoist," I replied calmly, "other people's actions wouldn't fuck me up and I wouldn't give a shit what my ex-wife did. It's precisely because I'm not an egoist that I lay dying on Lexington Avenue. What more can I say, you saw me dying there, saw the shape I was in. The reason I was in such bad shape was that I had suddenly lost my reason for living – Elena. I had no one to take care of, and I don't know how to live for myself. What kind of egoist am I?"
I said all this very seriously, very, very seriously.
"Take care of me," he said, "and yourself too – we'll fuck her together, want to? Come on, Edichka, call her, please?"
Maybe he wanted to compensate himself for his failure with Jannetta, vent his malice on someone else's cunt. Such things happen. But I could not have some tart present at my first experiment.
"I don't want to fuck dirty tarts," I said. "Women disgust me, they're vulgar. I want to start a new life, I want to sleep with Raymond this very day, if I can manage it. Anyway, don't hassle me, fuck off. We'd better have something to eat, I'm already hungry."
By reminding him of food I succeeded in turning him to another path. He was hungry too, and we went into the kitchen. "Raymond hardly ever eats at home," Kirill said cheerlessly. We raided the refrigerator – of what he had there, very little was edible. We settled on apples, ate two apiece, but the apples didn't satisfy us. In the freezer we found some cutlets that must have been there a hundred years, took them out, and began frying them in mayonnaise – we couldn't find the butter, although Raymond had served some with the caviar. There was caviar in the refrigerator, too, but we were shy about touching it.
We made a terrible stink – had to open all the windows – and at that moment, in walked Luis-Sebastian and Raymond.
"Phew, what did you burn? What a stink!" Raymond said prissily.
"We got hungry and fried some cutlets," Kirill answered, abashed.
"Couldn't you have gone down to the restaurant?"
"We don't have any money today," Kirill said modestly.
"I'll give you some money, go and eat, young men must be well nourished," Raymond said. He gave Kirill some money and came to see us off.
"Excuse me," he said to me intimately, at the door, "I want you, but Luis often stays with me to make love and sleeps here, he loves me very much." Suddenly he kissed me, an unexpectedly firm and long-drawn-out kiss, his big lips enveloping my little lips. What did I feel? The sensation was strange, and I felt a sort of force. But this didn't go on long; after all, Sebastian-Luis was stirring around in the living room. Kirill and I went out.
"Call me tomorrow at twelve o'clock, at work – Kirill will give you the number. We'll have lunch together," Raymond said into the narrowing crack.
Downstairs in the restaurant we each bought ourselves a huge long chunk of meat – steak and potatoes. It was very expensive, but it was good and we ate our fill. Weighed down with food, we went out into the New York night, and Kirill saw me to the hotel.
"Kirill," I said jokingly, "Raymond's good-looking, but I like you better. You're big and tall, and what's more, you're young. If you had a little money too, we'd make a beautiful couple."
"Unfortunately, Edichka, I'm not attracted to men for now – maybe some day," he said.
It was 2:00 a.m. by the electronic clock on the IBM tower.
The next day I called Raymond and we met at his office. After making my way through a barricade of sleek and fat-free secretaries, I finally found myself in the room – cold and light and spacious, of course, bigger than the lobby of our hotel – where he did his business. He looked like a grand seigneur: gray pinstripe suit, dotted necktie. We set off without delay for the very nearest restaurant, it was on Madison, not far from my hotel.
The restaurant was packed with gray-haired and very proper ladies; there were men too, but fewer. With regard to the ladies, my thought was that each of them had obviously dispatched a minimum of two husbands to the next world. We sat side by side; Raymond ordered me an avocado-and-shrimp salad.
"I can't eat that dish, it's fattening," he said. "But you can, you're a boy."
The boy thought to himself that yes, no doubt he was a boy, but if you made a hole in his head, took out the part of the brain that controlled the memory, washed and cleaned it properly, that would be luxury. Then you'd have a boy.
"What shall we have to drink?" Raymond inquired.
"Vodka, if I may," I said modestly, and adjusted the black scarf at my neck.
He ordered vodka for both himself and me, but they served it with ice, and it wasn't all I had expected.