"My works were not printed by the magazines or publishing houses. I typed them myself, put them in primitive cardboard covers, stapled them together, and sold them for five rubles apiece. I sold these collections wholesale, in lots of five to ten, to my closest admirers, who served as distributors. The distributors, each of whom was the center of a circle of intellectuals, paid me at once, and then retailed the collections in their circles. Usually samizdat goes for free, I'm the only one ever to sell my books this way. By my calculations, they distributed about eight thousand collections for me."
I delivered this patter to Raymond in a studied monotone, the way one reads aloud a text he is sick and tired of.
"I also knew how to sew and made trousers to order. I got twenty rubles a pair. I made handbags too, and my previous wife Anna, I remember, used to go and sell them at GUM, the main department store on Red Square, for three rubles apiece. All these ways of making money were banned, persecuted in the USSR. I was taking a conscious risk every day."
He was no longer listening very closely. My Russian arithmetic held little interest for him. Three rubles, twenty rubles, eight thousand… He had his own worries. I had come for love, and I saw that love was wanted from me. He was estimating whether I was capable of it. I didn't like this. In this role, the role of the one who loves, I had already suffered defeat. I too wanted guarantees. I had absolutely no desire to return to my old situation.
We paid the bill – he paid, of course, I had nothing to pay it with, later I got used to the girl's role – and decided to take the elevator up. Raymond wanted to look at some china, he was planning to buy a new dinner service, and there was a gallery on the top floor.
We were received at the gallery by a homely girl, and later an old lady. I enjoyed having them see us – the imposing Raymond and me – and understand all. Raymond fingered the dishes, examined plates and goblets, offered old porcelain to me to admire, we passed the time intellectually, usefully. I love the beautiful, I shared his delight in the creations of the masters of the comfortable old world, where there were families, where there was no cocaine, where there were no Elenas fucking in a narcotic sweat, where the obscene world of photography did not exist, nor its dirty backstage milieu. Family dinners, an orderly life, that was what this porcelain embodied for me. Unfortunately, I was destined for something else, I thought.
But the inspection and pricing ended, we took the elevator down, he kissed me in sight of the elevator boy, and we went out on the street, which was full of automobiles. It was spring, 1976, twentieth century, the great city of New York at lunch hour.
"I'd like to make love with you, but Luis almost always stays now to spend the night. Besides, he'll be wary of you now, you saw how he watched you yesterday?" I remembered only Luis-Sebastian's tired look and my halting conversation with him.
"You might come to my place today at five – we'll spend a little time together, have a drink," Raymond said.
"All right, I'd be glad to," I said, and in fact I was glad, for I had again developed an adamant determination to sleep with him at all costs. I shall venture to use a bureaucratic expression: I wanted officially to become a pederast – inwardly I had already become one – and henceforth to be such and consider myself such. I wanted to finalize it. Perhaps girls feel this way about wanting to lose their virginity. There was even something abnormal about this desire of mine; I felt it.
We said good-bye on Madison. I did not go to the hotel right away but walked the streets a while longer, considering his words. In the world of pederasts too there are love and unlove, tears and tragedies, nor is there any refuge from fate, blind chance, I thought. And true love is just as rare.
I showered and was at his apartment by five. Kirill was there too. Raymond was sitting in the bedroom in an armchair. He had loosened the knot of his necktie and was having a drink, sipping from a tall glass. "Make him a drink!" he ordered Kirill. The young procurer gave me a conspiratorial wink and said, "Come on, Edichka, I'll make you a drink."
"What, can't you do it without company?" Raymond said in mock anger.
"It's just that I don't know what he wants, I'll show him what we have. Let him choose."
I went to the kitchen with Kirill. Luckily the phone rang and Raymond did not detain us, being occupied with his phone conversation.
"Before you came," Kirill whispered, making me a vodka and orange juice, "before you came, Raymond asked me to tell you he'll take you to restaurants very often, he'll buy you a suit, but just don't live with anyone for now. Raymond has to decide what he should do, stay with Luis or be with you. He says, 'Sebastian loves me very much, but I can't get it up with him. Eddie doesn't love me but perhaps he will yet; after all, we've only just met.'
"Actually," Kirill continued in a hissing whisper, "he doesn't believe you've never tried men. He says, 'I have the impression he's slept with men.'"
"That's how good my masquerade was," I said dully, thinking my own thoughts. I could have pretended, this afternoon in the restaurant, could have said I loved him, begged him to desert Luis and live with me, God knows what-all I might have said to him; I could have acted the part, leaned on his shoulder, stroked his red neck, kissed his ear, played the petit-bourgeois cocotte, the decadent woman, and laid it on thick with mannerisms, trivial whims, eccentricities and endearing little ways from which he would not have extricated himself, of course. I knew how to do that. The riddle for me would have been how to conduct myself in bed, but this, too, I hoped to master very quickly. I had acted unwisely but honorably, I had not started lying to him, and had not said I loved him.
We went out to the living room. In the bedroom Raymond was communing with the telephone receiver in French. We therefore remained in the living room.
"I encountered your ex-wife today on Fifth Avenue, Edichka," Kirill said. He looked at me attentively, anticipating an effect. I drank my vodka and merely said, after a faint pause, "And?"
"She was flying along Fifth Avenue, not seeing anyone, in a sort of red jacket, her pupils were dilated – she's probably shooting up heroin or sniffing cocaine – all keyed up, excited. She's going to Italy, she says, for a month of shooting, Zoli is sending her. 'How's Limonov, do you ever see him?' she asked. When she learned I had found you a 'friend'" – Kirill lowered his voice – "she was very pleased and said, 'I hate men, find me a rich old lesbian to caress me, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me with an artificial member…"' Kirill repeated this "fuck me" several times. Elena, too, must have said it that way, several times and with raised voice. I remembered the long and almost bestial orgasms that I myself had given her with an artificial member, and it set my head spinning, a nether warmth flowing: after those orgasms I had especially enjoyed fucking her. I took a big gulp of vodka, and while remaining aware of my sensations, aware of my filling prick, I shook off my torpor and listened, forced myself to listen to Kirill's words. He finished the sentence. After the artificial member came: "'…and then our family will be complete,' she said."
Next Kirill launched into a discourse on the fact that Elena was not to his taste and what did I see in her. I kept smiling at him automatically, mockingly, meanwhile hardly able to get myself out of our bed, get myself out of the "conjugal" bed.
Thank God, Raymond came in – a real person from the real world – and my torture ended. We had drink after drink. After a half hour spent in sophisticated conversation Raymond began fondling my member through my pants, completely unashamed before Kirill. I smiled and pretended nothing special was happening.