This was only one of our skirmishes, and one of the facets of her world view.
Oh yes, I meant to tell about the pleasure she gave me. I arrived very late, had trouble finding their out-of-the-way neighborhood, green and quiet. I was ushered into an apartment that did not even remotely resemble an American one. The door closed behind me and I found myself in Odessa. She served me fried chicken, cucumber and tomato salad, bouillon – a typical south Ukrainian dinner. We ate the same sort of thing in Kharkov, too.
Her mama was like Yura Komissarov's mama, or the mother of any of my provincial friends. Her pajama-clad father occasionally popped out into the corridor – he was installing a newly purchased air conditioner. Her father was like a provincial Jewish father, all my friends had fathers like him. It's a safe bet he wore his big underpants around the apartment; his wife and daughter made him put on pajamas because daughter had a guest coming. Maybe he was a bookkeeper like Andrey. Mama solicitously served fruit – pears one minute, watermelon the next. Courteously and respectably, I refused vodka and wine.
Later her parents left to visit a sick aunt in the hospital, and I went and lay down on the couch – if you're going to rest, then really rest. The provinces… You have to do that, tie on some weight, as they said in the Ukraine. You can show off a bit once without being quite in your element. Sonya played me a record of some Odessa comedians, pupils of the great Raykin; their names were not familiar to me, which genuinely amazed Sonya. "No," I said, "I don't know them, alas." The comedians were boring and were meant for people working in Soviet scientific research institutes. But I listened to them and did not get irritated. A day in Odessa. Never mind, we'll be patient. Only here in America did I see for myself the huge distance that separated Moscow from the Russian provinces.
"We might go for a walk in the park," she said. "There's a castle there. They brought it over from Europe by boat – took it apart brick by brick and reassembled it here."
"Let's go," I said. "Everything here was brought over from Europe."
We set off, and I felt quiet and calm. It was getting dark, for some reason we had to take an elevator up to the park. We took it. We walked along the deserted lanes, almost without speaking. I was grateful to her for being silent. Still in silence, we arrived at the castle and sat down on a bench.
The castle was not what mattered – it was far less interesting than, for example, Fra Diavolo's castle, which I had seen in Itri, in Italy. Nothing much, a boring American castle. I could not believe they had brought it over from Europe. Probably a fake.
But from every quarter came the smell of fresh forest and ocean; it was very nice. A quiet, spacious moment. Had I been even a tiny bit in love with her, I would have been completely happy. But even so, this was my first quiet evening mood. I had been running without looking, I'd been running, I was tired, I stopped, I reflected, and the world appeared soft, caressing, an all-forgiving, all-cleansing eternal world.
"Thank you, Sonya," I told her, softly and sincerely.
Then we rode into the city to my place. The wind was blowing through the bus, a little old black man who had had a drop too much changed a dollar for me, and Sonya didn't irritate me… I fucked her that night with gratitude, I even tried.
Another time she and I were hanging out in the Village – she fed me octopus on Sullivan Street. It was an Italian holiday, a bride and groom were riding to church, which gave me a little pang. I remembered my own wedding, the crowds of friends, and I hurried to get away from the church. Little Sonya was clicking away with her camera, taking pictures of me from all angles. I could very likely have made her a slave; all I had to do was hint that I hated slacks on women and loved dresses, and the next day she came in a new, specially bought dress. Very likely I could have made her a slave, but I myself was seeking slavery, slave-girls were not what I needed.
Once she took me to a cinema on Bleecker Street to see some new French films. I was wildly pleased with one of them, about a killer who is commissioned to murder an ex-model, but he falls in love with her even though he's a homosexual. Sonya kept sighing; it was apparently of no interest to her, but I took it hard. I was enthralled with the man, who trusted the woman at first, but the woman wanted to be uncommitted, alone. I saw in this film a similarity to my own fate: I too loved and wanted to be loved, I did not want to live alone, just for myself, and what did I get – life cast me aside, the woman did not want me.
After that film I changed my hairstyle – I have bangs covering my forehead now. But she was bored in the movie theater; I don't know what sort of film she would have enjoyed. Perhaps art in general roused her indignation? She was a philistine, only her sexual inadequacy distinguished her from a philistine.
I say "was," because after her birthday party in a little restaurant in the Village – which continued with a smaller group in Chinatown and ended on the subway with an argument and cursing on political and ethnic themes, including Che Guevara and the Jewish question – after that I did not encounter her again. Toward the end I couldn't even keep my promise to let her lie down awhile in my room at the Winslow after the abortion. Bastard, I was at Roseanne's that day.
Roseanne had just appeared in my life – the next stage, the first American woman I fucked. I did not encounter Sonya again. Oh yes, once, coming out of my ex-wife's – Elena had moved in with Zhigulin by then, and I was bringing her something she had asked for – I caught a glimpse of my little Yid; she must have been eavesdropping. She quickly slunk away. It didn't even occur to me to follow her, and I turned in the opposite direction.
Where she made love
I found myself there without him, without Jean-Pierre. It was easy, I never dreamed it would be so easy. I had imagined myself kicking the door open and running in, pale, holding a revolver out in front of me and shouting "Bitch!" They would be lying in bed and I would fire at them and blood would come through the blanket. Nothing remarkable; the fantasies of a deceived husband, a man who has been cuckolded. Normal fantasies, right? But in I walked, into Jean-Pierre's studio, calmly, through the open door, without a revolver, and the characters on stage were not they.
This place is painful to me, this is where it all began, it was here that Elena first betrayed me, here that someone else's cock destroyed my "I can do anything!" I had been powerless against unlove and chaos. And to experience powerlessness, even once, had been terrifying.
This was in Sonya's time. Again Kirill was involved. He lives all over New York, first one place, then another, at random, the young idler has no apartment of his own. Jean-Pierre had gone to Paris for the month, leaving Kirill, in return for some favor, to live in his studio, whether for money or for nothing, no money, I don't know. I feel some semblance of love for the young bastard, fatherly love perhaps. We are eight or nine years apart.
So one dull rainy day I showed up there in a three-piece denim suit – jeans, vest, blazer – a black kerchief at my neck, a walking-stick umbrella in my hand. It was the sixth of June, our poet Pushkin's birthday, and I had met Elena exactly five years before. I was all atremble with the presentiment of somber impressions awaiting me.
The characters on stage are three: myself, Kirill, and as a finishing touch a certain Slava-David, who is celebrated for the fact that after Elena and I left Russia he lived in our Moscow apartment, which he says my friend Dima had turned into a Limonov museum. Now, in keeping with all the best canons of the mysterious, Slava-David was living with Kirill in the atelier of my ex-wife's ex-lover, the atelier – sorry, the studio – it's the apartment, too – of the fisheyed, skewbald Frenchman Jean-Pierre. I realized at once that Slava-David was the instrument of higher forces, although he looked quite ordinary. I think he'll appear again in that capacity, more than once.