"You came! I forgot to tell you, I don't take anything. Everyone says that if you take those pills you can't have children," she whispered bleakly.
What made her think I had come? "If only I could come," I told her, "that would be happiness for me."
"So you didn't come!" she said, and began kissing me gratefully.
God! Again I noticed her upper lip. "Don't you dare scorn her!" someone said in my ear. "You ought to love everyone who's in trouble, everyone who's unhappy and has complexes, everyone…" But what could I do – I looked at her and saw a lip exactly like my neighbor Tolik's, a boy I used to go to school with. Poor kid, he was hunchbacked and stunted, his father was an alcoholic. "Quit it, you swine!" said the voice. "You should be ashamed – you're the filthy one, she's kind and good!"
She really was kind and good. Subsequently she often bought me wine and vodka, took me to the cinema and the theater; she would have given me all her money if I had asked her to, I think. That was fine, but she wasn't much good in bed.
I worked over her for a long time. Finally, by means of all kinds of manipulations I succeeded – having pulled out of her – in dirtying the hotel sheet with my semen. Squalid pleasure, I noted with ennui. She wanted desperately to sleep, but I wouldn't let her. I wanted to see how she would come. With a foolish grimace, obviously. By now it had turned into a sport. I worked over her until I asked venomously, "Sonya, tell me, have you ever come in your life?"
"Once," replied honest Sonya.
"I'm going to buy you an artificial member, and I'm going to fuck you with it until you fall off the bed, until you start to come over and over – until brute stimulation makes orgasm run into orgasm. I'll do it. And you have to understand that you need it. You need to fuck a lot. With any man, all men, not just me. Otherwise you'll never be a woman…"
I did not keep my promise, although I am confident that if I had, I would have made a person of her. I did not buy her an artificial member, I very quickly lost all interest in her. The reasons had to do with class, which may be surprising, but it's so. She proved to be an incorrigible plebeian, and that I could not forgive. What she liked to be in life was shit, dung. She had no illusions or hopes. She hated all the higher manifestations of man – hated the great men of history, hated history itself, hated with the hatred of an ant. Perhaps this was a self-defense against me, I could easily have crushed her, but why would I?
She fell asleep, but I slept barely half an hour. I wanted to fuck, even with her. Later on she did not arouse me at all. One time I wanted so much not to fuck her that I began complaining of a pain in my prick and said I thought I had some sort of venereal disease. This was a couple of days after the night I spent with Johnny, a black guy from Eighth Avenue – to this day I remember his round poopka and beautiful figure under the baggy clothing of a street bum, a habitue of dark alleys. There was a grain of truth in the ailing prick. I think Johnny had overdone it, sucking off my cock; he may have been a little too zealous with his teeth. More about Johnny elsewhere. I told Sonya that I could not take the responsibility of making love to her without going to a doctor first. She left, thank God, and I spent the evening masturbating dreamily on some flowery celestial theme.
Whenever I made love with her it was like the first time, I couldn't fuck her deep. She demanded – imagine, demanded – that I kiss her on the neck, it was supposed to stimulate her. I couldn't see that it did. The whole thing was really lousy – she was like an old log, she didn't get soft. "Be soft," I demanded. I finally had it, and once when I stayed the night with her at Alexander's I didn't listen to any of her claims of pain or anything else. I finger-fucked her rudely and grimly, spreading her cunt open to incredible size – I almost got my hand inside – and she came. And how!
Having started down this road, I might have made her into a convenient object, but as I say, her plebeianism killed me outright. I finished with her on her birthday. Toward the end she turned out to be pregnant by Andrey, she had fucked with him before me – poor guy. She was elated at being pregnant, even though she planned to have an abortion. "It means I can," she said proudly, "I can have a baby!" "Not after the abortion, you can't," I told her cynically.
All the same, on several occasions she did give me pleasure indirectly, in a purely human way. One occasion came at a time when I was worn out at last from my nocturnal rambles on the West Side. The day before I had smoked too much grass and had lain all day in the pond in Central Park, up to my waist in the water. The police came by several times to make sure I was alive. Seeing that I was, they walked on. It was only toward dark that I found the strength to get up and go to the hotel. So I was lying in my room the next morning like a prisoner, dreaming about eating, when she called up and invited me to her parents' place. She was living there at the time, and she went there every evening, and went back in the night from my place, all the way across town, even though she had to get up at seven o'clock. She was working at some company, I wasn't very interested which one. In the end she got mugged, a black guy snatched her purse. From that time on she had a bad attitude toward all blacks.
I remember once we were riding on a bus, a stretch of the route lay through Harlem. There were several fire hydrants open – water was pouring noisily over the sidewalks, happy half-naked children were jumping around.
"Just look what your precious blacks are doing," she said. "Savages! They don't give a damn that water purification costs a lot of money. They don't give a damn about anything. They just consume what whites have created, they don't want to work!"
"You're a racist," I said.
"But you're not, you're a leftist. I'd like to see what you'd say if you got mugged. My knee still hurts to this day -"
"But why did you hang on to the purse? You should have handed it over, that's all. Besides, he could have been white. So far as that goes, if fifty percent of all muggers really are black, then fifty-five percent of the mugged are also black. You know I hang out wherever I want to at night, Sonya, I don't carry a thing, not even a dollar, I go on foot so I don't even carry a subway token. But even if I did get mugged by blacks, I wouldn't start howling and projecting my hatred for a bunch of muggers onto the whole race. Idiocy!"
"That's all theory," she said furiously. "When they take away money that you've earned, you won't talk like that."
"When the preelection meeting of the Workers Party was over, I got on a bus with a group of comrades. The meeting was in Brooklyn, in a dark and remote district populated mainly by blacks. While we were boarding the bus, threats and curses rang out from the benches in the shadow of the trees, where the local hooligans were sitting, black hooligans. Then they started throwing bottles at us. I got on last. A bottle hit the bus right by my head. What would you have me do, Sonya? Bear within me hatred toward all blacks? Those guys sitting there on their benches don't know a fucking thing about the world. I've been in their shoes, I was a hooligan and a bandit myself – I know the psychology of these people. It's not their fault they're like that -"
"At work they get away with anything," she went on hotly. "Just try being late if you're white – once, twice, and you're out. But it doesn't affect a black, they're afraid to touch him, he can accuse them of racial discrimination. They make life impossible -"
"You were indignant at anti-Semitism in Russia, how can you say such revolting things?" I said. "And it's not just you, that's what's so terrible. But you know that America was built mainly by the hands of their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers. They have just as much right to everything here as the whites. It's only been the last fifteen years that they've gotten anything. Do you think they're happy here in their Harlem? Many of them would rather live on the East Side, but they don't have the money. Anyway, quit bitching – you don't know a fucking thing, you talk like a philistine. You should be ashamed…"