I had found love – Elena. But, innocent or guilty, in her savage will to destroy she had destroyed everything I had built. That is her custom, to destroy, she has never built anything, only destroyed. Now, for lack of another object, she is destroying herself. I am searching anew. How strange; but it may be that I have the strength for one more love.
I caught myself scanning the men and women in the group with identical interest. It was rather an odd feeling: I sat on Roseanne's soft, perhaps too soft, plastic couch, among her plants, conversed with her guests, all the while thinking about myself and seeking someone for myself. There was no one.
There were dried-up American women intellectuals, I knew all about them: they did not interest me, nor I them. Even crazy Roseanne, with the yellow skin of her broad face stretched in a tight smile, was much better. She at least had an interest in people. No love for them, but an interest in them. She had gathered around her a little knot of freaks, one of whom was me. I am under no delusions – of course I'm a freak. The dried-up thirty-year-old American ladies were not to my taste, they knew it all, and I thought they would be boring to fuck. They had no illusions, they no longer hoped for anything in this life but firmly and dryly went their uninteresting way. Where to? To nowhere, to death, of course, where we all go. Alternating this march with intellectual conversations, they were American-style intellectuals. Had I seen protest in the eyes of even one of them, protest and pain, I would have approached her. No, there was nothing of the sort.
The beefy, bull-like American men, showing the effects of at least three generations of good nutrition, did not interest me either. I grew bored. After exchanging a couple of jokes with the Russians I withdrew again to the penthouse terrace, under the open sky, and busied myself grilling shashlik with Karl. I brought along a bottle of vodka, I like it when I have the bottle handy. Since the place was packed, Roseanne could not enforce her zhlobby German-Jewish-American system of serving up the liquor in "decent" measures without handing a man the bottle, a system that always infuriates and insults me.
I stood the bottle in the shade of the shashlik pot and continued to work, talking back and forth with Karl and his wife and other people who approached the table, and at the same time helped myself to vodka whenever I felt like it. We had already begun to hand out the shashliks as they got done; being the chef, of course, I was eating one of the first, washing down the meat with more of the same vodka, when suddenly…
Suddenly Roseanne led a woman over to me. Bear in mind, I was seeing her for the first and last time. She… She was a Chinese woman, her father was Chinese, as I later learned, and her mother Russian. She had an uncommonly luminous face. I scrutinized her later, but at the time the only thing that struck my eye was the light of her face, and I saw that she was beautiful. As they wrote in the old Chinese classics, not in the slightest embarrassed by cliches – and I have read quite a few Chinese classics in translation – "She was like the flower of the lotus." A soft oriental smile played on her lips, and she was gay and sweet, open to the whole world and to me. "This is my best friend," Roseanne said, "my former roommate."
The roommate smiled in a way that made me want to embrace her then and there, kiss her, touch her, rub against her, and actually lie down with her right on the spot and caress her, which I did, about an hour later. I always have immediate reactions, they often get me in trouble. This was the second time it had happened to me during my stay in New York. The first time was when I encountered a very beautiful actress named Margot, whom I began to kiss and hug right at a party, in her husband's presence – by coincidence, he was Chinese – and almost went to bed with her. She had on a stunning object, a hat with a feather, hats have always done me in. I whispered wild Russian caresses and diminutives to Margot, words that exist in no other language, she was ashamed, she smiled, turned her face away and said helplessly, "This is scandalous, scandalous," but plainly she herself liked all this, she saw what she was rousing within me; I did not look altogether like an ordinary cunt-chaser with a hard-on.
That time my wife and someone else dragged me away. Even though she had reached an agreement with me about a free life, Elena was far from delighted with my behavior. True, she attributed her displeasure to the fact that I was behaving indecently. Elena, of course, was the height of decency. If I liked a creature with honey eyes, in a feathered hat, and I showed it, why was it indecent?
This fascinating Chinese girl had a lightning effect on me. All my behavior that night, from then until early morning, was irrational and subject solely to the unconscious, which, as has been shown by my numerous studies on myself, acts in concert with my conscious. Roseanne led the Chinese girl away to introduce her to others, but now I knew what I had to do. In my terrible agitation – "She is here! She has come! She is found!" – I began to drink, of course, and instantly drank off a huge quantity of vodka. I remember I brought out a second bottle and started in on it. Everything after that was told to me by others – Roseanne, and the photographer Seva. I'll tell you later what they told me, but the night into which I then plunged came to a sudden end, and I beheld myself wet, sitting on the bed in Roseanne's bedroom.
"What time is it?" I asked.
"Night," she said.
"Where is everyone?" I asked.
"They all left long ago. You got so drunk you don't remember anything. We held you under the shower, Karl tried to sober you up, you were in the shower for maybe three hours, but it was no use. How could you get so drunk! I was very ashamed for you, I even cried. True, that black man who makes amulets and necklaces was very drunk too, and your friend the writer was drunk. He and Masha got so drunk, when we dragged you into the shower Masha screamed: 'Don't touch him, he's a great Russian poet! All of you together aren't worth his fingernail, leave him alone! He does what he needs to! Get away from him, villains!' She was crazy and drunk," Roseanne concluded spitefully.
I grinned. Masha was one of us, she had been raised in the best traditions of Moscow's bohemia, she knew what to scream. Masha was a baptized Uzbek. Here in New York she zealously attended church, sang in the choir, but the best traditions of Moscow's free bohemia were firmly lodged within her. She knew that if your friend was being dragged off, then drunk or not you had to save him, even by screaming. Not for nothing had she been the lover of two consecutive Moscow celebrities, the sculptor Erast Provozvestny and the poet Heinrich Sapgir. Both were renowned for their scandalous alcoholic rows and even brawls. That sort of thing was accepted in the world I came from, it was not considered a disgrace; anyone had the right to relax, if he could and wanted to.
I recalled that today was the Fourth of July, and that I was supposed to fuck Roseanne. My head ached, I could hardly imagine where so many hours of my time had gone to, there wasn't even a dark hole left where they had been, those hours; but I was distracted from the discussion. I had to fuck her, otherwise I would cease to respect myself. Later I could try to reconstruct what I had done with those hours, but now I should carry out the promise I had made to myself.
"Come to bed," I told her. "I want you."
It was a lie, of course. Although I sometimes did want to fuck her, both before and after this, I didn't want her at all just now, when I was tired and drunk. Nevertheless I forcibly diverted my thoughts from my condition and became absorbed in her body, occupied myself with it.
I remember that after overcoming her halfhearted, nil, resistance, I very attentively undressed her, began to kiss and stroke her. I behaved as I usually did with women, stroked and caressed her, kissed her bosom. I must give her her due: she had a beautiful little bosom, it lay quite tranquil at her age, my new girl friend was past thirty, after all, but she had a beautiful bosom… you see, I don't take away what belongs to her. I did all that, and then climbed onto her. I threw one leg over, then the other, and lay down. I am very fond of stroking a woman's neck, chin, and bosom with my hand. I played with them all, and in Roseanne they were ever so slightly weary, autumn was in her body, autumn.