The Frenchman obviously liked me. He was an inveterate old pederast, I don't know how old; he was preserved like antique ivory, shone as if polished. He smiled all the time and spoke in a thin, despairing, sophisticated voice, the way ridiculous society people speak in operetta – dukes and princes, ridiculous people, but he was not without charm. I liked the Frenchman too, and much better than Raymond, but I didn't dare tell him so. I found him agreeable, for some reason, from his tight, deliberately unstylish trousers to the little threads of hair on his head.
Raymond had more fat to him, more blood, more meat; naturally I liked the Frenchman better.
Out of courtesy, although he did not have a kopeck, Kirill was negotiating a purchase of suits for himself. It was clear to everyone that he wasn't going to buy a fucking thing, but this was his way of doing something nice for everyone, somehow participating in their lives. I imagine he was in utter ecstasy over the fact that he was sitting in the company of pederasts. A kind soul, he loved his friends, loved their titles, or absence of titles. I bet he always exaggerated Raymond's prosperity to me and to other people as well; he generally exaggerated everything about his friends, in the direction of bigger and better. It was an innocent childish amusement, but he did not thereby forget himself, either: he, Kirill, by having such friends seemed to grow in his own and others eyes.
The Frenchman very soon left, unfortunately. In parting he gave me a spank on the poopka and said, "I think you're better off that your wife deserted you." On his lips this sounded convincing. I thought, No doubt it is better, maybe it really is. And his spank had me in ecstasy – for some reason I liked it.
After the Frenchman came an Italian. "He was once my lover," Raymond said, after the Italian left to eat in the restaurant. "He never let me sleep; a very strong cock that young man has. Oh, what he can do!" Raymond said ecstatically. I heard a tinge of reproach in his words. It's your own fault, I thought, you don't have the technique.
The Italian had come to spend the night. When I inquired of Raymond why he didn't stay in a hotel, it became clear that he was also a millionaire. The millionaire was thirty-five, no more, and very appealing His name was Mario.
Homosexuals of all nationalities came to Raymond's that night. True, they did not congregate, they sat awhile and went away, others appeared in their stead. Only Mario stayed, but he soon went off to the guest room assigned to him and remained there.
Sometimes Raymond resumed touching my dick, but gradually it became apparent that he was tired. In his fatigue, no longer checking himself, he turned rather vulgar and told some clumsy, dirty jokes, which would not have happened in his normal state. In the end he informed Kirill and me that he was sorry but he wanted to get to sleep. I was disappointed. My face must have showed it because Raymond said, "Go to Mario, why don't you?" Then he went on jokingly, "The only thing is, he won't let you sleep. Personally, I'm a little afraid of Mario, although we haven't slept together for many years and don't arouse each other." He led us to Mario's room, walking a little unsteadily. This was understandable; he had worked all day at the office, after all, and then drunk with us all evening, glass for glass.
Mario was sitting with his shirt unbuttoned, going through some papers. A man of affairs, he truly was handsome, and given my desire to lose my virginity today – now – I probably would have stayed with him had I not perceived that Raymond didn't want me to: if he hadn't been disenchanted at the sight of my wrinkled appendage, he must not want me to stay. And I didn't, although Mario's jesting words and sidelong glance at me – he really gave me the once-over – convinced me immediately that Raymond was right about him, Raymond was not fabricating.
I should have left, but a stupid conversation got started, which was the fault of Kirill and the tired, suddenly flaccid Raymond. Tomorrow Raymond was supposed to have a party, a very important one because his boss was supposed to come, the owner of the business, who was not a pederast, and Kirill had volunteered to get a beautiful girl for the boss. Where he planned to get her I don't know, but the absurd conversation dragged on and on. Raymond kept complaining of his lack of china, but later recalled that Sebastian-Luis was going to bring him some lovely china.
"He called today, I completely forgot. All my sets are partly broken, I haven't entertained at home in ages, I always take people to restaurants," Raymond pouted, in the tone of the man who has everything. The vile bourgeois within him had awakened, the bourgeois who in return for his money laid claim to the whole world, with all its material and spiritual valuables. One of those who had bought my silly girl-child. My hackles rose.
Outwardly I was sitting in his arms, he was mechanically stroking my shoulder. But had you been able to peep within me, gentlemen, what would you have seen? Hatred. Hatred for this man obtunded by wine and fatigue. And suddenly I realized that I would gladly have taken a knife or a razor and slit this Raymond's throat, although it was not he who had raped me, I had raped myself. Here I sat, but I could have slit his throat, stripped off his diamond rings, headed home from the expensive apartment with the Chagall, and bought myself a prostitute for the whole night, the girl of Chinese-Malayan descent, the small and elegant one who always stands on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Forty-fifth Street, but female, a girl. I would have kissed her all night, I would have made it nice for her, I'd have kissed her peepka and her pretty little heels.
And with the rest of the money I would have bought the most expensive suit at Ted Lapidus for this booby Kirill, because who else would buy it for him, and I was older and more experienced. The whole fantasy was so vivid that I involuntarily started, and thereby dispelled the fog before my eyes. Kirill and the businessman Mario materialized, and beside me Raymond's meaty puss. "Time to go," I said. "You wanted to get to sleep, Raymond."
And we left. Kirill and I.
I called it quits with Raymond, although someone was supposed to phone someone, and once, as I came out of my hotel beautifully dressed, I encountered this same Raymond, and with him Sebastian in a black suit and a silly white straw hat, a "very expensive" one, in the opinion of the omnipresent Kirill, for whom I was waiting and who promptly walked up. There was a Mexican boy with them too. They looked like relatives from the Caucasus who had come to visit their Uncle Raymond in Moscow. The whole group was preoccupied with worry, they were looking for some new place to have lunch. "We should have their worries!" Kirill said enviously. Having spotted a Mexican restaurant on the other side of the street, Raymond and his Caucasian relatives hurried across. Halfway there, Raymond turned and looked at me. I smiled and waved to him. By then I had slept with Chris, I already had Chris.
Chris
As I say, I grasped at everything in my search for salvation. I even resumed my journalistic career, or rather, I tried to resurrect it.
My closest friend, Alexander – prostrated, like me, by his wife's betrayal and his own absolute nothingness' in this world – was living in a studio apartment on Forty-fifth Street between Eighth and Ninth avenues, in a fine building located in a neighborhood of whorehouses and vice dens. He was a trifle afraid of his neighborhood at first, being a bespectacled intellectual, a cautious Jewish youth, but later grew used to it and began to feel at home.
We often got together at his place, trying to find ways to publish our articles in America. They ran counter to the politics of America's ruling circles, and we did not know which papers to try. The New York Times had refused to notice us. We had gone there in the fall, when I was a proofreader at Russkoe Delo, as was Alexander – we had sat across from each other there and quickly found much in common. We went to the Times with our "Open Letter to Academician Sakharov," and the Times cut us dead, they didn't even deign to answer us. Actually, it was a far from stupid letter and the first sober Russian voice in the West. An interview with us and an account of the letter did get printed, not in America, but in England, in the Times of London. The letter was about the idealization of the Western world by Russian intellectuals. In reality, we wrote, the West had plenty of problems and contradictions, no less acute than those of the USSR. In short, the letter was a call to cease destroying the Soviet intelligentsia – who don't know a fucking thing about this world – by inciting them to emigrate. That was why the New York Times didn't print it. Or maybe they considered us incompetent, or didn't react to the unfamiliar names.