I tried to persuade him, he raised objections, and then I went ahead with the sauerkraut, and he with the "Memorandum." His English is good, he translated the two pages quickly, but all the same we had to have the paper looked over and the mistakes corrected, so we gave it to Bant, the American who was a friend of Edik Brutt, my neighbor at the hotel. There weren't too many mistakes; he had mainly left out articles, the poet and Gatholic Alyoshka. After that was accomplished, after his hard work, he wanted to rest. His idea of a rest is a few drinks.
I took him to my favorite store, on Fifty-third Street between First and Second avenues, and there we bought Jamaican rum – something I had been wanting for about a week. He too wanted rum, we both wanted to experience the taste sensation. We were not alcoholics – hell, no – although, as you will see, we did get drunk in the end. He also bought himself some soda, and we jointly acquired two lemons, then headed for my hotel.
We arrived. Sat down by the window. It was evening, the low five-o'clock sun illumined my garret. The rum was shot with yellow, it lay silvery and thick in the tawdry crude glasses, Eddie's glasses; God knows who had brought them or when. From time to time we dispatched it down our gullets. Alyoshka lit up a cigar, stretched out his stiff leg; he was enjoying himself. In the process, he moved the chair, the chair brushed a plug, an extension cord that powered the refrigerator, and the result was invisible sabotage. A puddle of water was revealed a half hour later; we had to wipe it up when we had already grabbed the remains of the rum and were preparing to disappear, set out on our way. Alyoshka was insisting on it, he had a bug up his ass, all he wanted to do was go to the Public Library and buy some joints.
We left. On the way I discovered that Alyoshka, despite being an insolent Russian poet, did not know how to use a joint properly. It seems he bought joints that had been rolled into nice slim cigarettes, unrolled them, mixed them with ordinary cigar tobacco, and then smoked them. I laughed long and patronizingly at Alyoshka. Now it was clear, of course, why marijuana didn't affect him; he was always complaining about it.
"That's like buckshot to an elephant. You're supposed to smoke that nice slim ready-made cigarette without mixing it with anything. Asshole," I told him, "Ivan the Moscow provincial."
When we left we even took the soda with us. We bought joints at the Public Library on Forty-second Street, two from one guy and two from another, just in case – if one pair proved weak, the other might be better – and began trying to decide where to go. He wanted to drag me to the Latham Hotel. But I had shitty memories of that hotel, Elena and I had lived there when we arrived in America, in room 532, before the little apartment on Lexington, before the tragedy or in the very beginning of the tragedy, and I did not want to see my past.
I wanted to live as if I had acquired consciousness on March 4, 1976, the day I moved into the Hotel Winslow, as if there had been nothing before then – a dark hole and that was all, nothing else, nothing. But Alyoshka was dragging me over there, to show me. I had no desire to see his friend, a long-haired saxophonist named Andrey who had just arrived, I did not want to revive my past, but he was dragging me. Well, what could I do, he's a stubborn bastard.
I told him I had been happy there in the Latham Hotel, I had loved and fucked my Elena, we used to turn the whole bed inside out, and I remember we fucked during Solzhenitsyn's speech, with the TV turned on and his puss on the screen, we fucked and I wanted to come right then but couldn't, contemplating him in his military-style jacket, even my girl-child's sweet peepka could not make me come. We fucked during Solzhenitsyn, of course, out of sheer mischief.
Whenever she got tired of fucking (this had already begun) and wanted to watch television I turned her around on our vast hotel bed – we had never had such a bed in our lives – I turned her around, put pillows under her, and she knelt on all fours, watched a TV program, usually some sort of horror show, she loves them, and I fucked her from behind. Even this, her incipient disregard for me, could not cool me. I wanted her very much, although she and I had been making love for four years now, and possibly it was time for me to stop and look around. I was a fool not to do it. I should have changed our lifestyle myself, without waiting for her to force the change. I could have brought somebody else, a man perhaps, or a woman, into our sex life, but I didn't think to do it. My inaction… What could I do, I had many cares: I was working at the newspaper for $150 a week, I wrote articles in the evenings, hoped to do something more in the emigre field, and clung to my family in its traditional form. Little Eddie did not understand, yet she had already made it cautiously clear, asking, "What would you say if…" Then would come a proposition, a giggling proposition about a boy fucking her while I in turn fucked him in the poopka, and all sorts of other mind-boggling acrobatics. What a shithead I was, and I'm the one for whom there existed, to all intents and purposes, no prohibitions in sex. In return for whatever I might have allowed her she would have loved me more and more, but as it was I lost her, forever and irrevocably. Then again, I sometimes think there may be a form of life in which I could get her back; but not as a wife in the old sense of the word, that's impossible by now. A paradox. I myself, who want the new more than anyone, proved to be the victim of these new relationships between man and woman. "What we fought for has been our undoing."
Alyoshka wanted me to go, to see the site of my former happiness and compare it with my current insignificant status. What could I do? He insisted. And there was no way I wanted to be alone, when I had already been hit with almost half a liter of rum and something close to anguish. I had to go.
The saxophonist lived in the same wing we had lived in, of course, and even on the same floor; I had to walk right by the door of 532. He had this long, long hair, jeans, a beard – shit, you'd never say he came from the USSR. Shit, you'd never say it about me either. We finished off the rum, one more guy arrived, a burly blond from Leningrad, a poet, the quiet type, writes poems about the KGB and boots, formalistic stuff. Who the fuck knows why he came to America. Those two preferred alcohol, and Alyoshka and I smoked the joints; they only took one drag apiece. Alyoshka tried to claim that the fucking marijuana wasn't affecting him, but his tongue began to get thick.
Then, like a lord on a spree, Alyoshka decided that his friends didn't have enough to drink, and we decided to go buy a bottle of vodka. The four of us set out, and after some delay on account of the lateness of the hour, found a store that had vodka. We bought a bottle, and in another little shop bought some sauerkraut and a can of an American meat product with a suspicious list of sodium and other salts on the label. We returned to the hotel. On the way up, there was the torture of the elevator doors: my mark, two little letters, "E E," which I had scratched with a key, once when I was drunk. More torture. "Unhappy fetishist!" I whispered to myself, biting my lips. I had to stifle my feelings.
We disposed of the vodka rather quickly. Andrey had with him, in addition to his saxophone, a guitar, we sang some songs, and then he rather quickly got drunk and wanted to sleep. The fuzz-faced poet went off to his room, and Alyoshka and I, dissatisfied and insufficiently drunk, tumbled out of the hotel. Unhappy fetishist, I tried to do it with my eyes shut.