She points out to me a photograph – on the wall, framed under glass – of Elena, her lover. To her, Elena is a light in the window. Time and again she says lovingly that Elena's crazy, she's…
Had it not been for Elena's culture-shock, of course, had she not been so blind – she didn't know a fucking thing about the new life, about classes and groups of people – then Susanna, the honest working-girl who sins evenings and weekends, the exemplary good daughter who supports an old mother, would never have laid eyes on the rare little bird with the beautiful plumage… Elena.
But Susanna is convulsed with a fresh spasm of vomiting. I leave. What else can I do? But never again will she be my enemy. I recall with shame the March night when I tried to open the door of her building and set fire to it. "Den of filth!" I cursed. The door did not open. I broke the heel of my shoe that night. Henceforth Susanna will never be my enemy and will be of no interest.
Sonya… The second time we met was in accordance with a phone call. I had invited her to a birthday party for my friend Khachaturian – an artist and a modernist writer, a man with a formal mind, an inventor of procedures and techniques, who is now buried in uncontrollable formal research under the patronage and leadership of a wicked, sage little wife, who speaks English brilliantly and works at a company that makes scarves. We have come a long way together, they and I. They knew my previous wife, Anna, the one before Elena; they even spent their wedding night on the floor of Anna's and my apartment. We often fight, they understand me less and less, but that does not prevent us from preserving a semblance of friendship. We are friends.
In short, Sonya and I went. I took a bottle of champagne I had laid in ahead of time, a $10 Soviet champagne, the very bottle Mrs. Rogoff screamed about. There were about ten guests. There's no point in listing them all, though each of them figures in my life and is part of it to some extent. Sonya talked a lot of bullshit that night, provincial nonsense; I let it go by. I was in a good mood, nothing could spoil that sturdy, rugged good mood. I was pleased with myself, people were giving me compliments, there was lots to drink; company always brings me to life, I enjoy it. "I am a man of the town," as our Pushkin used to say. "Pushkin, Pushkin, the Pushkin who lived before me," as Alexander Vvedensky wrote – a modernist poet of the thirties, a brilliant person, like me a native of Kharkov; he was flung under the wheels of a train. So am I a man of the town.
Later, when the festivities were over and we left, I suggested – or she did, I no longer remember – but we decided to keep going and hit the bars. I had some money, and we set off. We drank vodka with a Pole in a bar on the East Side, she made an effort to talk to him in English. She needn't have bothered, you could tell by looking that he was an obvious type, an aging little man with no place to go; here he was, sitting in a bar at two in the morning. To provoke him I dropped some remark about Great Poland and Kiev. As expected, he got mad. It made me laugh. "Why do that to him?" Sonya asked. "I like to offend national sensibilities," I replied.
About three o'clock in the morning I effected a change of clothes. Back at my hotel I put on a white blazer instead of the lilac one, and we walked west to Eighth Avenue, which, thank God, I love and have studied thoroughly. I pointed out the prostitutes to her, and then I pulled her pants down, right on the street, and started masturbating her, shoving my finger into her cunt. She was wet and soft there, like all of them.
I convinced myself nothing had happened to them during these months. They still had their thing where it belonged, and if I shut my eyes it was just like Elena's to the touch – so I told myself, as I continued to run my finger over the genital lips of the young lady from Odessa. She arched foolishly and affectedly, and even when I penetrated her more deeply she was too frightened to come. How could she? She probably thought this was something unnatural. A Ukrainian woman in Kazakhstan killed her Latvian husband because in the second year of their marriage he finally forced her to take his cock in her mouth. She dropped him with an ax. And the artist Chicherin's wife, Marina, after many years of married life, simply would not let him fuck her from behind, on her knees. A woman who had read Teilhard de Chardin. The wife of an avant-garde Moscow artist.
I wanted very much for Sonya to come – in this ridiculous pose, with her slacks and underpants down around her ankles, a dark little clump of fuzz between her legs, her body contorted with inhibition and incomprehension – so I began to kiss her there. You know what she did? She managed to spoil it all – she began saying over and over in a rapid staccato whisper, "Edik, what are you doing, Edik, what are you doing, Edik, what are you doing?"
I can't stand it when people call me Edik. "What am I doing, nothing bad, I'm doing something good to you," I said, "doing something nice to you…"
She stood there dully, leaning back against the wall, with her slacks and underpants down as before. Suddenly angry, but hiding it, I pulled up her clothes and dragged her on.
By now it was getting light and I very much wanted to eat. But it was about four o'clock; all the places on Eighth Avenue had just closed. Finally, after several unsuccessful attempts, I knocked at a little corner restaurant and winked to a young black. Where I learned to wink like that I don't know, but the black opened the door immediately and let us in. I ordered us each a helping of meat and potatoes. For the two of us it came to about ten dollars…
"Do you have enough money, Edik?" Sonya asked.
"Plenty, plenty, but don't call me Edik. I don't like it."
I was slowly beginning to sober up – no, that's the wrong word, I hadn't been drunk all night. The fog around me had begun to lift, and I was seeing her – this homely little philistine with her face tired and old, if you like, at twenty-five – without the fog, which I had brought on myself. Eternal inhibition about sex, oh, there was a lot on that tired yellow morning face. It all began to irritate me. What the hell was I sitting here for? If I needed her as a woman, then why was I wasting time play-acting?
"Let's go to my place," I said.
"I can't," she said, "I love Andrey."
Andrey was one of the guys who had been helping Sashka. Maybe he was studying to be a bookkeeper. I don't remember. What do I care.
"What do I care who you love, Andrey or anybody else. I said I wouldn't infringe on your freedom – love Andrey, but let's go to my place now."
She said nothing and went on gobbling her meat and potatoes, although she had told me she wasn't hungry. Even here she lied and felt inhibited. This was getting disgusting.
The young black brought drinks. He was very attractive and he smiled at me – I obviously appealed to him, half drunk, with my black lace shirt and elegant white suit, vest, dark skin, high-heeled shoes. Their style. Marat Bagrov, the spiteful Jew, once said to me with characteristic familiarity, "Of course they relate to you, the blacks and coloreds. You're just like them. You dress the same and you're every bit as flighty."
The black put the glasses down and I slowly stroked his arm, glancing at silly uptight Sonya. He smiled and walked off. "Let's get out of here," she said. "Let's," I said, and we got up. She was afraid I'd go fuck him. Maybe there behind the counter, maybe in the kitchen, who knows. She was obviously afraid.