But now she rose to the occasion. Yes, she was unaccustomed to sleeping in the same bed with anybody, she had slept alone all her life, but it was already late, I would wait a long time for the subway, therefore I should stay.
I felt sincerely sorry for Roseanne for having lived all her life like this, in desultory fucking. She fucked rather a lot, I think, but had never known the incredible happiness of sleeping entwined in one mass with a loved one, of feeling, in the middle of the night, the sleepy breath of another living creature on one's own shoulder. Even when Elena and I no longer made love we slept together, and at times, in her sleep, she put her arm around me, and I would lie awake holding my breath all night, afraid to stir lest that little arm disappear, go away. Tears would flow down my cheeks, not from any fucking weakness but from love. Ah, poor crazy Roseanne. I felt sorry for her.
Morning came. The pale dawn of a cloudy day penetrated the bedroom, and I discovered myself fucking Roseanne from behind, having set her on her knees. Gripping her butt, I thought: Lord, how boring it all is this way, without love, the morning is boring and the dawn is gray, how uninteresting it all is, I've even lost my hard-on.
The people who gathered at her place were defective. Once a man came who was sick with an incurable venereal disease. The disease would go away temporarily but then reappear. I had never heard of such a case, but here before me sat a live specimen. Roseanne, like a good tour guide, told me about the details of his disease, about the fact that his wife had now left him. Despite my own inglorious situation, my habit of ridicule was so deeply entrenched that I guffawed inwardly, admiring our company. He, sick with this crud; I, sick with love; and she, too, sick with her own disease. The three sickies went to a film and then to a little restaurant where, even though I was hungry, I did not eat, only drank a glass of rose. The venereal paid, and I was obliged to thank him. "Thanks," I said to him, because I had no money. Roseanne told me to: "Thank him," she said. I thanked him.
Gradually I reached the conclusion that I had no fucking need of her. Except that I kept up the relationship with her for the sake of having at least some sort of involvement in American life, seeing at least some sort of people. This was soothing to me. It's not true that I thought ill of her, I thought well of her; that morning it was just that I thought I wanted a sweet young girl, naive, touching, and beautiful, not a fully formed monster. But life didn't offer me any such girl, I had only two or three people to serve as my entrees into this world, and in order to find such a girl or man – as I have said, by now it was all the same to me – I had to meet her or him somewhere.
Where? My friends the Glickermans had obviously turned their backs on me because of my attempt to strangle Elena. A man like that, they thought, might do anything at all. I called Tatyana perhaps five times that spring, wanting to get together, but each time she postponed my visit under some pretext, until I understood clearly that I couldn't fight my way in there. And why should I! I spoke badly, wasn't a fascinating conversationalist, why should I go to their parties. I, a welfare recipient, ought to associate with people like myself, and not go social-climbing among artists and writers, not fill up the Glickermans' living room with my presence, not hobnob with Avedon and Dali. I stopped calling them.
My other acquaintances, too, obviously did not hold me in the highest repute because of my strangling Elena. That barbarian and scoundrel Eddie really had turned out to be an utter nobody in this world. As you see, I had no place to get appropriate acquaintances, I was stifling without a milieu, and that was another reason I didn't break off with Roseanne. I too was calculating to the best of my abilities.
I say "was," but I might as well say "am." This period is not over, I am in it, in this period, even at the present time. This period of my life is characterized by an unconscious new habit of mine, a completely unconscious saying. Often when in my room or walking along the street at night, I have caught myself maliciously pronouncing one and the same phrase, sometimes aloud, sometimes to myself or in a whisper: "You can all go straight to hell!" Sounds good, doesn't it? "You can all go straight to hell!" Good. Very good. That applies to the whole world. And what would you say if you were in my shoes?
Roseanne was working on a dissertation, I think she wanted to get her Ph.D. in philology. My feeling was, and still is, that nobody fucking needs those dissertations except for the people who defend them, as I declared to Roseanne with all lack of ceremony back in the early days of our acquaintanceship, at which she took offense. She was obsessed with her dissertation, but she was doing it slowly and in my view spent more time bitching on the phone than writing the dissertation. Nevertheless, she always talked about her work, mentioned that she was working, and anyone who didn't know her might have thought she was a very businesslike person. Having lived here, I am convinced that people here generally work not more but less than in Russia, yet they are very fond of talking about their work and how much they work. In the USSR it's the other way around: the nation traditionally considers itself an unbusinesslike nation, but in reality many people work much harder and more productively than American gentlemen. Maybe I'm unjust. But of course I am, and I don't want to be just. I told Roseanne about it, told her that you Americans are very fond of making a big deal out of your work and how busy you are. Roseanne was offended on behalf of the American people and her dissertation, but it was so.
Whereas I could write in one morning, between eight and twelve or one o'clock, an average of five to ten pages, she barely eked out two, she said. I wrote my articles for Russkoe Delo, when I worked there, in two or three hours, and published more than twenty of them in six months. By now it's autumn, and to this day she has not been able to write, as that same Charles of the Village Voice requested, a background article on the open letter Alexander and I wrote to the editor of the New York Times. It has to be done well, she says, she can't hurry it, and she does nothing. But she and I are equally sick, I perhaps more so.
I stopped making love with her, I don't know how she felt about this, she didn't stop calling me. No, she considers me her friend, and I feel awkward telling her it's not so. I have nobody, I can't spit on her, turn around and leave. Especially since I'm beginning to think that she's the only person who for some reason needs me. She has already called me several times at moments when I was very low. I am needed, you see, but only by a crazy woman. She herself says, "I'm paranoid." On the wall in her study hangs a saying of Bakunin's: "I shall remain an impossible person until such time as all possible persons cease to be so." This saying, on a poster, is a remnant of her stormy youth, her participation in the struggle against the Vietnam war, her college teaching, student meetings, little leftist newspapers.
As it happens she really is an impossible person in this world, but to what degree am I, then, an impossible person? I must be a monstrously impossible person. I was an impossible person even there, in the country that gave birth to Bakunin; here my nonconformism is merely more colorful, more shrill, and takes more loathsome forms.
Ah, fuck it. Once Roseanne was having company. She asked me to come a little late, as if I had dropped by accidentally. The whole group was sitting on the terrace when I burst in. There were her new lover, Joe; Joe's friend, a boastful photographer, with his wife; and some German guy that Roseanne, who spoke German fluently – it was the language of her childhood – had picked up on the street.
Joe was a very common-looking man in a red shirt. He talked very rapidly and somehow harshly. I thought he might have been in prison, he bore some imprint. In the USSR I had observed the same thing in Daniel – you've probably heard about the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel. Well, I once observed Daniel drunk. After spending six years in prison, when he got drunk he resembled a drunken criminal. Not that he behaved badly in any way, no, he was merely drunk, didn't insult anyone, didn't harass anyone. But his face, his manners, the way he gesticulated, the set of his body, made him a drunken criminal. Joe was the same way that night, he struck me as a drunken criminal. And it turned out he really was. Sometime later Roseanne called me and said Joe had confessed to her that he had done time for dealing in drugs. I was proud of my perspicacity, though the whole world lives by the same laws and it's not surprising that I, who was already thirty, knew those laws.