Guests at my house ate, drank, and when in their cups often fought with their host. Now I am dirt, a beggar, in an alien land, but even so I'm always having someone over to eat. And I am not the only such exceptional good fellow. My neighbor Edik Brutt feeds everyone too, if he has anything himself. First of all give a man food and drink. Then you're a friend to him.
In sum, I understood that we were from different worlds, yet I couldn't help myself. I was demanding that Roseanne fulfill barbarian customs of hospitality. But she was a civilized lady.
After breakfast that day I felt exhausted, sat there lazily sprawled in the chair, and naturally didn't want to take a cleaning compound to the floor, which had been trampled to mud the day before. I wanted to stare unblinkingly at the water of the Hudson River, and let the breeze cool my forehead, and fall asleep with my arms on the table in this bright apartment, and have Roseanne become the young Elena, the way she used to be.
Sleep, hell. The lady threw a fit of hysterics, as a result of which, almost with tears in her eyes, she darkly posed the issue point-blank: Either I cleaned the apartment or I had to go home. It was also said that if I was sleepy I could go and sleep in her bedroom, but given the tone of voice in which it was said, how could I possibly go and sleep! I didn't want to quarrel with her; moreover, I felt, despite all, that I was to blame. There was a large element of Russian swinishness in my Bicentennial Celebration behavior. There was, I confess. Since I was to blame, I confess, but I'm poor unlucky Eddie, put yourself in my place.
I washed the floor for her, I vacuumed her wonderful, brightest-in-the-world hallway, her bedroom, and all the other rooms. I did it all, to the ruin of my health. This was the greatest violence I had ever done to myself, the most inconvenient hangover. But for the shitty wine that I had drunk during her long, dreary phone conversations, I could not have coped with the cleaning, I'd have fallen by the wayside. Almost soaring above myself, rising above my own hangover thanks to Roseanne, I suddenly saw that there was strength even beyond the limits of strength.
After a While some neighbors visited her, they lived two floors below. The woman was a mixture of Jew and American Indian, I don't know which tribe. "They're like the Russians, their national disease is drunkenness!" Roseanne remarked to me in Russian. "Her father is an alcoholic!"
This exploiter had revived after my heroic feat and looked satisfied. One thing remained unclear: Why hadn't she cleaned the apartment herself, instead of bitching on the telephone or trailing around with some object in her hands? Why did her apartment have to be cleaned by crazy drunken Eddie on welfare? Who the fuck knows, even now it's unclear to me. She and I had known each other six days, no more. She may have felt that I was guilty before her and should therefore expiate my guilt through chore duty. But what was I guilty of? I hadn't even told her I loved her, hadn't been able to wring the words out.
We sat on the balcony, I mean on her terrace, and she asked would these people have some sausages, and would I have sausages. I said yes. "How many?" she asked. "Two? Three?" She didn't say "four" or "five." I said three. I could have said not a one, but man is weak, I was hungry, couldn't resist, I said three. "He eats so much!" she told them, by way of a joke. After that occasion, proud and morbidly touchy Eddie ate at her house only when she had guests. I always refused to eat when we were alone; I felt uncomfortable for her, didn't want to put her in an awkward position. Moreover, her food didn't fill me up, yet I could not say that two or even three sausages (which was obviously the height of gluttony in her opinion) weren't enough for me, that I didn't even consider this to be food. I stopped eating at her house, and she doesn't suggest it anymore.
Everything I observed in her was extremely interesting to me. Thanks to her I became familiar with several definite, though not very vividly manifested, character traits of Western woman. I can't say that I studied her on purpose; in the beginning I thought that by making some concessions to myself I might even come to like her a little. To this end I imagined that she was unhappy, and began to pity her. The illusion of her unhappiness didn't last long. She was a schiz, yes, but she was a demanding and practical schiz.
As the sun went down that day, she read my book We Are the National Hero to the visiting couple, in English; since the manuscript consisted of short pieces, it could be read in one sitting. The book had been lying around her house for quite a while, and to judge by the interest with which she read, she was reading it for the first time. I listened, my face was indifferent and ironic, but inwardly I was very angry. "How can she be so incurious?" I thought. After all, she found me interesting, she was calling me two or three times a day, inviting me over, and in the end she had fucked me, and wanted to, until I presently put a stop to it myself because of my obvious lack of need to do it with her. And she hadn't found the time to read my book. This was the whole thing, this was the solution to the calm riddle of this woman. She needed me, as she needed others in this world, only to the extent that I could be useful to her, to Roseanne. She couldn't give me even the small fraction of her time, even the thirty or forty minutes, required to read my book. Could she really have no interest in what he wrote, this Russian (or Japanese, Chinese, Indian) who was fucking her now?
No, she had no fucking interest. Everyone wants to be loved. We all want it, from the street bum who spends the night on benches to the holder of a huge fortune. And no one wants to do the loving himself. True, there is love in me, a useless love for a woman who does not need me, for Elena. But, frankly speaking, I sometimes have a suspicion even about myself. Were I not now a destitute man on welfare – suppose a wealthy lover were to show up tomorrow, a man or woman who would suddenly fall in love with me – in my new situation of love and wealth I might forget Elena. Not all at once, gentlemen, but gradually, might I not forget? But I have had no chance to test my suspicions, and never will have. Fate offers only one solution.
Sometimes Roseanne was rather sweet. When she looked at herself in the mirror, trying on a dress, she was always free of grimaces. Nearly all the rest of the time there was a nervous grimace present on her face, a kind of tic. It made her simply ugly. I have already said that I loved sitting in her living room at the table by the long glass wall, all the windows of the hallway and living room looked out on the Hudson River; I loved to sit and be silent. Darkness came on, and a little breeze blew on my face, and the lights burned in New Jersey on the other shore, and my heart felt so strange in my utter loneliness, and although Roseanne would say something sometimes about what good friends we were and how nice it was that we were friends, or she would complain, why had I forgotten that I was her friend… I heard little of it and looked at the water and was intimate with the breeze.
Ten days or so after the Fourth of July I fucked her again, this time with greater success, but also, as it were, in shame that I wasn't justifying her hopes, wasn't fucking her. In the line of duty, so to speak. I fucked her, and naturally went on lying in her bed; she was sleepy from her medicines but was still tossing and turning.
Suddenly I remembered a story of Slava-David's, about a certain New York girl who had hysterically chased him out after passionate lovemaking, because, you see, she couldn't sleep with men, wasn't used to it. Love is love, but sleep must be sterile, deep, calm.
Remembering this, and respecting the freedom of the individual – I was not, after all, in the USSR – I asked sleepy, tossing Roseanne if she wouldn't like to be left alone; even though it was late I wouldn't mind going home. My ulterior motive was to escape from the morning, from her jumping up at six o'clock and the whole hysterical morning environment.