I throw back my head and yell up from the street, as I have promised, "Kirill! Kirill, you motherfucker!" Kirill sticks his shaggy head out the window. Then the aristocrat comes downstairs and opens the door for me, because you can't get into this building without your host's assistance. We take the elevator up and enter the studio, not quite by the route I imagined in my fruitless attempts to force my way in. The door that I impotently and tearfully tried to open from the stairway leads into an elevator corridor shared by two studios, not directly into Jean-Pierre's studio as I had thought. This plunges me into melancholy.
I walk into a large white-walled apartment. To the left the breeze is billowing the lightweight shades at the several windows. And there it stands, what to me is the terrible bed, the love arena, the place of my torment. Here she made love. I walk over, expecting to see my own corpse…
To the right of the door is the kitchen and, not walled off from it, in keeping with American custom, a sort of salon: a couch by the wall, a round table, and armchairs. These are encircled by several pillars.
With quickened heartbeat I walk over to the pillars and begin to examine them closely. Somewhere there have to be marks from the ropes with which she bound the fisheyed owner, beat him, and then fucked him in the anal orifice with a rubber dildo. Little silly, novice hustler, she told me all this herself in boast, while I was still her husband. Of course – she had to share it. Next she turned up with a mask, a black one sewn with feathers and bits of glass, it hid most of her little face. And next she turned up with a shiny studded dog collar. I tried it on my own neck, it barely went round, although my neck is 141/2. That meant she was wearing the collar herself, for greater chic. She boasted that she had a whip, too, but she didn't keep that or the dildo at home. She very much wanted to conform to the sexy films she had seen. She was doing things right, you see, the silly stringy child from Moscow's privileged Frunze Embankment. A Moscow girl. She probably affords her current lovers great pleasure, however. She tries hard. The provincial desire to outperform everyone. To be the mostest. But then, I'm the same way.
Yes, here are the marks, obviously rubbed by the rope, or perhaps by a chain, no, a rope for sure. Someone gently but forcefully squeezes my heart. I see them naked, frolicking around the pillars… She and I once hung a basket from the ceiling with ropes and took the bottom out of it; I lay down under it, inserted my cock into her peepka, the twisted ropes untwisted, and she was supposed to twirl around my member. She giggled enigmatically. But it didn't work very well, precise calculations were needed. Afterward we broke our bed in the usual way. I never had much need of artifice with her, she aroused me in the extreme. Even now, when she's just a friend, I occasionally go see her and the mere sound of her voice gives me a hard-on. Terrible.
Everything in the atelier is clean, large in scale, equipped to the last detail. Unlike me, the man who lives here respects his own life, values it.
A door off the first salon leads into a huge, clean, bare, light office with two or three of our host's huge paintings on the walls. A narrow corridor off the first salon leads into a third salon, you wouldn't call it a room, it's so huge. There, evidently, he paints, daubs his masterpieces. And there in the corner stands a bed, with Slava-David's clothes lying around, and a stack of pornographic magazines, belonging to Jean-Pierre, in which women copulate with pigs and horses. All things considered he is what is called in Russian a yobar, a cunt-chaser. The reason such men become artists is that a liberated profession makes it easier for them to drag a woman to bed.
No, his quarters in no way resemble the poor artist's studio she had told me about.
During all my further perambulations both Kirill and Slava-David are present, later it will be only Kirill, though Slava-David will come back again late at night, but in this instance there is no need to take note of them, for I am plunged into a mood that I have long awaited and feared, I am on the spot where it happened, I am where she made love. I move from object to object, sniffing, and illuminating them with my terrible tension. I am waiting for them to answer.
At intervals I eat, drink a lot of beer, I smoke marijuana, but absolutely none of this plays any role; therefore I mention these "events" only lightly, in passing.
The pillars lead me to cruel and melancholy recollections of the traces of semen in her panties, which I discovered more and more often in the last months of our life together. There was semen even on her pantyhose. Once the whole inside of her black slacks was doused with semen, white by morning, crusted dry, so revolting that there was no longer any doubt, and then it was that I first raised a row with her. That was the end of my happy days, of the boundless happiness I had experienced for the four and a half years since the day I met her.
At the mention of my happy days, our love, our wedding, I am convulsed with disgust and shame. I was so stupid. I loved, trusted, but they fucked me over, smeared me with another man's semen, bound me with the elastic from his underpants, daubed my shapely and delicate body with vulgarity.
I grimace wildly, remembering the pines in the yard at her dacha, and her in a translucent, angelic dress, a little girl with a crooked front tooth. Little squirrel, little silly, little bitch – I remember her swollen genital lips the time I flew in from California in a frenzy, trying to save it all. I flew in at night, she showed up in the morning. She sat in the bathtub, the skin on her back striped with cuts, fine little cuts, from what, a whip? And those rosy genital lips.
It was enough to make me push her head underwater, she had no idea how near she was to death. I urged her to come back and live, if only for a year, six months… She sat in the tub and overexcitedly discoursed on the fact that I did not know how to enjoy myself. She had absolutely no taste. She was incapable of understanding that I was all but dead and that right now it was ignoble, at the very least, to boast to me about how easily she could find a partner to fuck with… She discoursed, and I sat on the bathroom floor and stared dully at her swollen peepka. That I know about, it means she's been fucking, she's fucked all night… Okay, but why not me, why am I… I had hoped – had thought – as whores, adventurers, prostitutes, what you will, but together all our lives.
No, I do not remember my happy days, I don't remember a rucking thing, but when I do, I feel like vomiting, as if I'd gorged myself or something or had a stomach upset.
Meanwhile, I find myself near a shelf of his books. His books… Oh, he has everything, lovingly collected, in sets, he has Lautreamont, Andre Gide, Rimbaud – familiar great names – all in his native French. In much the same way you'll find whole sets of The Poet's Library or World Literature in the homes of Russian intellectuals.
I have never collected books in sets. I've had my individual favorite books, but there have been so many moves in my life, from apartment to apartment, city to city, country to country, and I have divided my books – my only valuables – with my wives so often, that nowadays I glance unkindly at the three dozen or so volumes remaining to me and think maybe I should chuck those too. Jean-Pierre is a cultured man. Converting to Russian norms, the ordinary library of the average intellectual.
On the whole, as I study his home, I come to the conclusion that the Frenchman is a very pedantic person. Follow me and you will see. First the paintings. They are very large oil canvases, most of them painstakingly ruled. Usually a black or a dark background, traversed by numerous, often pulsating lines. The art of a bookkeeper – straight lines, checks, squares. Not bad; it's a pleasant little world this man has – lines, rectangles, squares. But here are pictures of another sort.