"The students loved me so," she says with a sigh. Perhaps. She's an unemployed instructor. Her terrific apartment must have been partly paid for, all these years, by her parents; her father is a wholesaler of ready-made clothes. She does not consider her father rich. She has a rich uncle and aunt with whom she quarrels whenever they meet, but the uncle and aunt assert that her father and mother don't know how to live.
Roseanne… Once I asked her to check over a letter of mine to Allen Ginsberg. Yes, I wrote him a letter in English, very illiterate of course. One more attempt to find friends, a milieu. I asked an American poet to meet with a Russian poet. And sent him my book, We Are the National Hero, in English translation. No answer so far. He doesn't need me a fucking bit. One more alternative eliminated, that's all. Roseanne proved right, she knew better the men of her own country, even if they were poets. She savaged my letter when she read it. "The way it's written, you want to stick him with your problems." My problems again, they're all so horribly afraid of other people's problems. Allen Ginsberg is afraid too. They're tough, here in their America, but happiness is not enhanced by the absence of other people's problems…
I asked her to check the letter anyway. She began to do it, but suddenly, sitting at the typewriter, she turned preposterously nasty.
"I don't plan to waste the whole evening on this, I worked all day writing," she snorted.
I could not contain myself. "I'm not going to ask you for anything ever again," I told her. "Disgusting psychopath," I cursed inwardly, "you forget how many nights running I've typed the Russian texts you needed. Louse, ungrateful wretch, you're used to getting it all yourself," I thought, staring at her back. But this happened after I had fucked her.
Roseanne decided to have a Fourth of July party. "It's a long time since I invited people over, but I don't have the money, I'm poor, I have to tell them to bring something to drink, I can't buy wine and liquor for them. One of my friends will bring meat for shashlik."
On July third I went to the stores with her. She was wearing the sort of dress that American women always wear when shopping close to home, a cross between an apron and a Russian sarafan. It was a very sunny hot day, we bought wine in a liquor store, and I bought a bottle of vodka. Because of my white clothes the salesman took me for a Russian sailor from one of the tall ships that had arrived in New York for America's Bicentennial Celebration and lay in the Hudson River. Someone selected fruit for her; he was a Latin-American she had known for many years, and she exchanged friendly insults with him, something on the subject of smoking. Either they had both quit smoking, or he had given up and begun smoking again, or she had, something in that vein.
Suddenly I felt good about this neighborhood, about Broadway streaming past flooded in sunlight – the produce store was right on Broadway – about the microcosm of salesmen and customers who had known each other for years, for decades. I envied her a bit, Roseanne. Then we trudged back, and her neighbors greeted her, and I felt good that I was so healthy and tan, in my open shirt, with my silver cross with the chipped blue enamel on my chest, with my green, bright eyes. And I was inwardly grateful to her for having brought me into this world as if I belonged here, walking with her, Roseanne. Although I had passed by this very spot on Broadway time and again, it had never seemed to me so congenial, as if I belonged, because today I was not a passerby.
That same day I cleaned up her terrace, which was no easy job, the wind had deposited a lot of grit on the green artificial grass rug. I cut up meat for shashlik and marinated it, washed windows, and left her late.
I was grateful to her, and she to me, we hung idiotic colored lanterns in all the penthouse windows, then had some whiskey and nearly fucked. I held back only out of mischief, having decided to fuck her exactly on the Fourth of July. I wanted the symbolism. She very much wanted to fuck, poor thing, and moaned pitifully when I stroked and hugged her. As she later confessed to me, she is supersensitive to being touched, while a kiss on the lips leaves her almost indifferent. She and I are alike in this; for me, too, the lips are the most insensitive part of the body. That evening was hard on her, but I held back, said good-bye anyway and left after telling her provocatively that we would make love tomorrow, the Fourth of July. She laughed.
What a fucking Fourth that was! The party was set for one o'clock, but since I knew American ways by now, I arrived at two, having bought her a dozen red roses, for which she seemed most sincerely glad. A great many people were already there, among them several Russians: a writer and instructor – already known to you, gentlemen, he's the one who brought me together with Carol the Trotskyite – and his wife Masha; the photographer Seva with his wife – he had worked about a year and a half for the well-known diver Cousteau. Seva came with his cameras, set them up and took pictures of the ships passing right under the windows. The Soviet Kruzenshtern was officially largest of all, the very largest sailing ship of the present day. "That's ours, largest of all!" I said with a laugh, nudging the writer.
After taking a turn through the crowd and quickly downing several glasses of wine, I began, along with a bearded man by the name of Karl, to make shashlik. Karl had brought a covered pot full of his own shashlik, made the Greek way, marinated in vegetable oil. Karl raised a storm of activity, slicing tomatoes and onions and putting them all on skewers. He knew a few words of Russian.
People are very fond of watching others work. Right away a smiling black girl from Jamaica came over; her father was a priest in his homeland, the girl spoke English very well, much better than Americans do. With many curious people scurrying around us, Karl and I had cleaned the peppers and were sitting there slicing them when Roseanne appeared, leading a very tall fat man in shorts.
"This is the proprietor of the hotel you live in," she said.
He started to laugh, I started to laugh, but inwardly recalling what she had told me about him, I thought, "In addition to our dismal Winslow he owns forty-five buildings in Manhattan; he hasn't got a million, he's got much more. He has a law office on the second floor of our hotel – his hotel – but they say he doesn't practice law at all. Why the fuck should he…"
The man in shorts withdrew into the crowd. "The elephant." Mentally I gave him the nickname, and it occurred to me that my life would be easier if, for the same $130, he gave me a room that was a little bit bigger, a little bit more spacious than my prison cubicle. But why should he do this for me, I decided. What was I to him?
Roseanne says the elephant once wanted to sleep with her. She says this about everyone. She said it even about little Charles, dressed in the operatic smock of a Rimsky-Korsakov shepherd, Charles of the Village Voice, buried in work. This is not a very normal thing to say. It may seem so to her; I don't know. The truth may be that she slept with the elephant, not merely that he wanted her to, but what business is it of mine, I don't love Roseanne, what do I care.
I don't love Roseanne. I realized it almost at once, after I caught her a few times in that hysterical pose, with her head thrown back, the way a cornered rat looks at you. I don't love her because she doesn't love me, she doesn't love anyone… I am firm in the knowledge that I need someone, it makes no difference whether a man or a woman, so long as that someone loves me. I already knew clearly by then – I had become wiser, after all, more normal, and had recently been compelled to think so much – I knew that my whole life had been a search for love, at times an unconscious search, at times a conscious one.