By the bed and in the bathroom, pencil drawings. A girl licking somebody's cock, you can't see whose. She looks like my wife, which of course affords me no special pleasure. I twitch my shoulders convulsively. With this ordinary movement anguish is gone, anger is back. Try it.
Other drawings: two genital organs, a man's and a woman's, in waiting position. The woman has opened her cunt with her fingers and is carefully sitting down on someone's cock. Being somewhat knowledgeable about art, especially contemporary art and this brand of drawing, I can say that the Frenchman's drawings are dilettantish – too labored, no line at all. Far better are the similar drawings in public toilets. There, moved by the unconscious, submitting to Papa Freud's laws, anonymous artists easily and swiftly achieve expressiveness through exaggeration, hyperbolization, and simplification. Here, we have the details, but that makes the drawings far dirtier. They reek of intellectual long Johns, there is something senile about them, they reek of semen – that's obvious – and it is obviously the semen that was in my wife's panties.
I am a soldier from a defeated regiment. The army has marched on; the battlefield is deserted, and I have come to inspect it. I wander in the underbrush, climb to high ground, try to determine the cause of the defeat. Why, in the end, did they beat us?
Outwardly I am in complete contact with Slava-David and Kirill. I may be joking or telling some story. But only outwardly. In reality, I am trying to solve a problem that I can never solve: Why? I was looking for the answer long before I met Elena. In my poem-cycle "Three Long Songs," written in 1969, you can see this ominous, sullen Why? hanging over little Eddie's world.
On the sixth of June I wrestled all day and all night, like Jacob, with this enigmatic Why? And in the morning I left. And we did not vanquish one another…
Yes, after our grim and beggarly little apartment on Lexington this studio is a fairy-tale palace. A studio bathed in romance, in the Village, on Prince Street. I hate that word now, "prince." She phoned me from outer space at eleven o'clock, I sat in that Lexington Avenue squalor and said from my writing desk, "Little one, when will you be home? I've been worried!" "We're still shooting," she said, and I could hear music in the background.
And now I know where the music components are set up at Jean-Pierre's and where the telephone instrument is – the one and a second and a third.
A lover of the luxurious life, which she had never really seen, a poetess, a girl from the Frunze Embankment in Moscow, after a year of tears and failures, of wanderings through Austria, Italy, and America, through luxurious capitals where we lived on potatoes and onions and got one shower a week (she wept so much that year), Elena no doubt rested, here.
I found a poem in her notebook (her poems always delineated her mood to me more graphically than she could have imagined): "From the festive streets a scent…" I no longer remember it, but there was something about the romance of the Village streets and bars, about a man with a beard (Jean-Pierre), and her sexual feeling toward him was likened to a teenage girl's attitude toward a doctor – likened to childhood.
This was right; she had a right to rest, lie on this bed of his, relax, think of nothing and watch the shades flap… He fucked – no, it's crude to talk like that even in regard to your ex-wife's lover – he caressed her, she could hide here until she grew strong and insolent, hide from that apartment on Lexington and from me, who was for her a part of the world of destitution and tears. Alas! I believe she was happy here. I have a little wisdom, and I know: A thing that is likened to childhood cannot be a lie.
To her he was the doctor from her childhood, and she was drawn to him without shame. Bearded and half gray, he seemed to her a defense. "Into his tender hands," as they say. She took him into her and shared with him the shudders that had formerly belonged only to me.
And I? Come now, she considered herself far above me. She would not tolerate the idea that I was a more talented and prominent person than she. She felt she had the right to act according to her own whim. She suspected I loved her sincerely, she knew it would be unbearable to me, perhaps I would do away with myself – she knew that too, the possibility was there – but what was I to her?
A ridiculous little Ukrainian, silly little Eddie, hassling her with his love. I think she saw weakness even in my love for her and scorned me for it. Long ago, back in Moscow, I remember, I was supposed to go to Ivanovo and I couldn't tear myself away from her, couldn't get up and leave. How she yelled that time!
Here in America she considered me incapable of moving up. I remember how spitefully she screamed at me when we first visited the woman who was to become her lover, the lesbian Susanna, when I cautiously remarked that Susanna and her friends were uninteresting: "But I want pleasure! Even if it's with them! Through them I'll meet others. Play the aristocrat and you'll just keep on sitting there on Lexington Avenue in that filthy apartment! And die there!"
I memorized it all, my memory is revoltingly clear. And now, as I squeamishly poke at Jean-Pierre's blanket with the tip of my umbrella and peer under his bed in the hope of spotting something interesting, I remember her during our last days.
"Excuse me," I said to her, "but I'm the reason you're free. You took a lover because I shielded you from the necessity of working. I went to work at that dreadful absurd newspaper above all for you, and so that we could survive, you and I. But you -"
"Yes," she said with hysterical challenge, "and so what if I'm free because you're not! So what? That's the way it's supposed to be…"
I was ready to shoot her. If I had had any chance of buying a revolver then, I would never have had to see Jean-Pierre's studio, never have had to walk the deserted battlefield. But I had almost no connections, I had no money, and no strength.
She treated me with no consideration, merely because by then she thought me capable of nothing. She developed for herself a life plan in which I was merely a stage, since she had outgrown her ex-husband Victor, moved on and left him behind, she calculated that it would be the same with me. Here she was mistaken, it's always dangerous to develop plans. Real life is more complicated, and merely by existing I think I'll provide her with considerable grounds for reflection. I don't know about regret, but reflection, yes.
Once she had recovered a little and felt at home, she still looked up to Jean but also began looking around. By my calculations this happened several months later. She began inventing things with him – whips, binding – she was the initiator, of course. She was curious. I had taught her a few things too, not just fucking with the naked cock. These were revelations to her at the time – oh, I whipped her on the peepka with a thong, and… all sorts of things, we even made a half-joking attempt at group sex. Well, with him she wanted to go further. She did.
She lay on this bed, resting after the act, and smoked. She likes to smoke in the intervals. Sometimes she falls silent and looks off somewhere into emptiness, into the unknown. It's a way of hers. I always asked her, "Little one, what are you thinking, where are you?" "Mmh?" she would say, coming to. Did he ask her what she was thinking? Her eyes would go glassy with abstraction.
Probably we all seem the same to her – I, Victor, Jean-Pierre, some other man. Does she make any distinction between me, the man who had sex with her for over four years, who loves her, and a man who fucks her once, on a drunk? I don't know. She probably does, and I doubt it's in my favor.