I was behaving now exactly as my wife had when I fucked her. I caught myself feeling this, and I thought, So this is how she is, this is how they are! Exultation surged through my body. In a last convulsive movement we dug into the sand and I downed my orgasm in the sand, simultaneously feeling inside me a hot burning. He came inside me. We sprawled exhausted in the sand. My cock dug into the sand, the sand grains pricked it pleasantly, it stood up again almost immediately.
Then we got dressed and settled ourselves comfortably to go to sleep. He took his old place by the wall, and I settled myself beside him, with my head on his chest and my arms around his neck – I'm very fond of that position. He hugged me and we fell asleep…
I don't know how long I slept, but I woke up. Maybe an hour had passed, maybe a few minutes. It was as dark as ever. He was asleep, breathing evenly. I woke up and could not get back to sleep. I sniffed him, scrutinized him, and thought.
No doubt about it, I'm incorrigible, I thought. If my first woman was a drunken Yalta prostitute, then my first man, of course, had to be someone I found in a vacant lot. I remember that girl distinctly. She picked me up one summer night at the bus station in Yalta. She liked the pretty kid dozing on the bench with his friend. She walked over, woke me up, and brazenly led me away to a little public garden behind the bus station. There she calmly lay down on a bench, she was completely naked under her dress. I remember the salty taste of her skin, and her still-wet hair – she had just been for a swim in the sea. I remember her very big, mature cunt with its many folds; I was stunned, it was all streaming with mucus, she wanted this kid, she fucked me not for money but out of desire. Southern scents, the rich southern night accompanied my first love. Next morning my friend and I left Yalta.
Fate is mocking me. Now I lie with a man of the streets. The years have made no essential change in me. A bum, nothing but a bum, I thought contentedly, meaning myself. I turned to scrutinize Chris again. He stirred, as if sensing my gaze, but then was still again.
Slanting patches of light from the nearby street lamp penetrated here and there through the crisscrossed iron of the scaffolding. There was a smell of gasoline, I was calm and content. Added to the sense of contentment and calm was the sense of a goal achieved. Well, here I am, a real pederast, I thought with a little giggle. You didn't back off, you outdid yourself, you knew how, good for you, Eddie boy! And although I knew in my heart that I was not entirely free in this life, that I was still a long way from absolute freedom, I had nevertheless taken a step, and a huge one, down that path.
I left him at five-twenty. That was the time on a clock that I saw when I got out to the street. I double-crossed him, left quietly as a thief, slid from his chest without waking him. Why did I do it? I don't know, maybe I feared my future life with him – not the sexual relationship, no, maybe I feared someone else's will, someone else's influence, being subject to him. Maybe. It was an unfathomed but quite powerful feeling that moved me to double-cross him and crawl out of his embrace. Glancing at him over my shoulder, I looked for my metal-rimmed glasses and the key to my hotel room. Once or twice I thought he was watching, but he slept on. Miraculously, I found my glasses in the sand. I was still wearing glasses then, but they didn't spoil my looks much, I looked like a wild man anyway, fucking crazy Eddie. I hunted down my glasses, somehow crawled out to the street, and strode away with a strange satisfaction that I had never before known, abandoning Chris and our future relationship, which might have been one variant of my fate.
I walked along dusting myself off. I had sand in my hair, sand in my ears, sand in my boots, sand everywhere. A whore returning from the night's escapades. I smiled, I wanted to shout to life, "Well, who's next!" I was free. Why I needed my freedom I do not know. I needed Chris much more, but contrary to common sense I left him. When I came out on Broadway I nearly wavered. But only for an instant, and I decisively strode on again toward the East Side.
A couple of weeks later I would be cursing myself for having left him, the loneliness and troubled silence would move in again, Elena's villainous image would again torment me, and by the end of April I would have an attack, a very violent, terrible attack of horror and loneliness. But back then, arriving at the hotel, asking for another key, riding up to my floor, and flinging myself wearily on the bed, I was happy and pleased with myself. I was still happy when I woke up the next morning. I lay there smiling and thought how I must be the only Russian poet who had ever been smart enough to fuck a black man in a New York vacant lot. Lascivious recollections of Chris clasping my poopka and whispering to quiet my moans – "Take it easy, baby, take it easy" – made me roar with joyous laughter.
Carol
I met her in Queens, one evening in May. We had much in common – my father was a Communist, her parents were Protestant farmers. To her parents she was an enfant terrible, and to mine I was likewise a prodigal son and enfant terrible.
She was a pupil of an acquaintance of mine; he gave Russian lessons and Carol was his pupil. Once he told me, "I have a new pupil, a leftist, she's in the Workers Party." I said, "Please be so kind as to introduce me." He and I are quite formal.
I had long wanted to meet people in the leftist parties. From my rough calculations of the future I understood that I could not get by without the leftists; sooner or later I would go over to them. I was not suited for this world. Where else could I go? Before meeting Carol I did have one experience – I went to the Free Space Center, in a dilapidated building on Lafayette Street, where a lecture on anarchism was supposed to take place. This must have been in March. Having seen an ad in the Village Voice, I went over there and walked up to the second floor – the whole place was hung with posters and flyers. Posters and flyers lay around in stacks, they were all different sizes, from handbills to newspapers.
In the room – whose decor recalled a revolutionary committee somewhere in the Russian provinces during the civil war, the same tin mugs, cigarette ashes, and dirt, scarred walls screaming with slogans – there were three people. Turning to them, I asked if this was where the lecture on anarchism would be, said I was Russian and would like to hear the lecture, I was interested. They replied yes, the lecture would take place in this room, and they asked something in their turn. When I didn't understand the question, the man who had asked it repeated it in Russian. He turned out to be a Russian, he had left Russia in the twenties, and it was he who had been advertised in the paper as the lecturer who was supposed to speak.
He soon began. Only one more person came. I was touched by the size and composition of the audience. Five people, two of them Russian. The action took place on Lafayette Street in New York. As is evident, Americans are not much interested in anarchism.
They were taping the lecture, my countryman was spewing words into a hand-held mike, but I walked around and studied the posters on the walls. I understood colloquial speech poorly then – for that matter, my English isn't brilliant even now – but I had, and still have, an enormous curiosity about life. This curiosity has pulled me all over Manhattan, on foot, down the terrible avenues C and D, anywhere at all, any hour of the day and night. And it has forced me to go to poetry readings, where I understood nothing but meticulously paid my contribution and listened to the unfamiliar words more attentively than anyone else. I remember one such reading at the Noho Gallery, where I sat on the floor with everyone else, and in their indifference they didn't so much as ask who I was. I drank wine, smiled, applauded, and was a full-fledged member of the audience. There was a nice little humpbacked poet at the gallery with whom I exchanged a few words. In general the composition of the group recalled a Moscow audience. Roughly the same types of people. Except that the New Yorkers were a little less pretentious.