Raymond was not sitting beside me, he was reaching for my prick from an armchair, but I was on the couch. This heightened the absurdity of the situation. I felt nothing at Raymond's touch, absolutely nothing. Kirill was here, and I was not a healthy peasant lad from some place like Arizona, with normal instincts and a prick that would naturally stand up if a stranger touched it. I was a ridiculous European with unnatural connections inside my body, I was a good actor, but this was something I couldn't control. Tears I could squeeze out any old day, but get my dick up in such a situation? Then again, I didn't know whether I had to. My only thought was that a dick without an erection might frighten him off. But no, it didn't; rather the opposite.
After a while I went out through Raymond's bedroom to a vast bathroom, artistically decorated with portraits and photographs. I made peepee, wiped my member with a tissue, and was on my way back when Raymond met me in the bedroom. His eyes were weird, his lips the color of strawberries that have spoiled in the sun, and he was muttering. Still muttering, he nestled up to me. I was much taller than he, I had to put my arms around his back and shoulders. We shifted from foot to foot, he continued to mutter and massaged my member through my slacks – why, I could not understand. We must have looked like Japanese wrestlers. Finally he began nudging me toward the bed. Well, I went, what else could I do, although I felt a growing dissatisfaction that he was managing it all so absurdly.
He put me on the bed, I lay on my back, and he lay on top, making motions such as you make when fucking a woman. He devoted himself to this travesty for some time, panted heavily and breathed in my ear, kissed my neck. I threw back my head and rolled it from side to side exactly as my last wife had, I caught myself doing it; I must have had the same expression on my face too. These things are contagious.
Raymond was heavy and awkward. For all my irritation I sympathized with him, acknowledging myself to be an inept virgin. "He'll have a hard time with me," I thought. But my dissatisfaction that he was making it all so foolish and awkward did not leave me.
In the next room Kirill was talking on the phone, and the door wasn't shut. Ah, that's why he muttered something inarticulate instead of speaking normally, I realized. I was thinking altogether too much at that moment. I won't think, I decided, and returned to reality. A heavy red-haired old fellow was wriggling on top of me. A fine situation, little Eddie, you're lying down and about to get fucked, it seems. But that's what you wanted. Well, put it this way, what I had wanted was not specifically a fuck but love, kindness – I was so weary of being without caressing kindness – and, as a natural extension, a caress for my prick as well. But what was happening was some kind of nonsense. Did he really lack the subtlety to realize that this was the wrong way to go about it with me? Or was he not concerned about frightening me, did he not value me?
He slithered down, unzipped my pants, but could not unbuckle the belt, didn't know how it worked. I smiled inwardly. In exactly the same way, my first woman had fallen afoul of my belt – that one was my papa's Soviet Army belt – she couldn't unbuckle the little kid's belt. This belt was Italian. My first man. "No, you won't get the fucking thing unbuckled, you don't know how it works. Fuck it – I'll help." Without changing the languid expression on my face, I lowered my hands from behind my head, where they had been the whole time, and unbuckled the belt.
In a fever he pulled open my red panties and took it out – my member. Good Lord, it was scrunched and little like a boy's, and at the touch of his grabby hand a droplet of urine came out, rolled out like a tear. No matter how much you wipe with tissues, that little drop always lurks deep inside, to come rolling out at the first opportunity. I wondered how Raymond would deal with it. "Did you think it would be easy to fuck the wounded?" I wanted to ask. He jerked and kneaded my member. A trifle coarse and hasty, I thought.
In the next room Kirill was reproaching his Jannetta for something. Without meaning to, I listened to Kirill's voice, picked out individual words. Raymond jerked and kneaded. I was uncomfortable, one of his knees was crushing my leg. Suddenly I realized that he didn't have a fucking chance of getting anywhere and that I was about to get up and flee. To avoid injuring myself or offending him, I promptly said in a languid whisper, "Kirill will hear!"
He understood and got up, or maybe he had despaired of doing anything with my member, but anyway he got up and went into the bathroom in a somnambulistic state.
When he returned I was already strolling around the bedroom, looking out the windows at the street below, with my pants zipped up and my shirt tucked in. We rejoined Kirill and picked up our drinks. Then I took from my vest pocket some poems I had brought, read them to Raymond and Kirill, with Kirill gravely expressing his opinion on each poem.
The poems restored my lost composure. In this business I am superior to everyone; here, only in poetry am I who I am. In reading my poems I found composure, as I say, although these men, Raymond and Kirill, were not right for my poetry. Raymond politely understood that this was art, and as art it must be appreciated and admired, but he scarcely had any real feeling for who was sitting before him or what was being read. Even though he was more European than American, he had lived in this country so many years that he had unthinkingly assigned to art the modest role of a knickknack ornamenting life. It was nice, of course, that his potential lover was a poet, it was interesting, romantic, but that was all. To him my poems were small, and he, Raymond, was big, while in fact little Eddie's sufferings were much bigger than Raymond, bigger even than the whole city of New York, precisely because Eddie was visible, could be seen, through the poems. Or so I flattered myself; however, I am fully convinced of it to this day.
It wasn't much of a treat for them, so I read maybe five to seven poems and put the manuscript away in my vest pocket. Enough. Especially since Raymond had been distracted by the telephone, and Kirill, of course, was trying to explain to me his own Petersburg-Leningrad attitude toward poetry. Leningrad people love pomposity and pathos, affectation and pseudoclassicism; my poems and I are too simple for them.
A guest appeared – a certain Frenchman, the owner of a chain of stores selling ready-made luxury clothes from Yves Saint Laurent, Cardin, and other French celebrities. These beautifully resonant names had been familiar to me back in Moscow. Louis Aragon, for example, member of the Central Committee of the French Communist Party and one of France's greatest poets, got his things from Yves Saint Laurent. How do I know? Oh, little Eddie has heaps of society connections, although he keeps quiet about them, doesn't drop many names. I was told about Aragon's penchant for Yves Saint Laurent by Lily Brik, the celebrated Lily, my friend, the woman who went down in history as the mistress of the great poet Mayakovsky – a great poet no matter what you may hear from various Soviet and anti-Soviet scum.
Oh yes, I'm forgetting the Frenchman. He wore his fine little threads of hair slicked down on both sides of his skull; bony and tall, with rather a large butt, considering his overall leanness; he had narrow, tight trousers and a face just as narrow, tapering to the nose. He looked like some kind of fish.
Breaking out in blotches – he was shy – Kirill began to speak French with the Frenchman. I must confess the young idler succeeded pretty well. The grandmother that he mentioned so often not only had known how to dash cracked Kuznetsov porcelain against the walls, but also had taught her grandson to speak French and English. The same cannot be said of my own grandmother, unfortunately.
At a request from Raymond, who was boasting about my figure, I was obliged to twirl before the Frenchman, displaying myself. I felt as if I were fifteen and my parents were displaying me to their friends. Not fifteen, younger. Ten, eight.