Later, after we – mainly Elena and I, of course – had drunk several carafes of wine, we abandoned the rich people dining in warmth and light and went to the Playboy Club on Fifty-ninth Street. It had been there all the time, I could have walked out of the Winslow in my slippers and found myself in another world. Carlos had a Playboy card – of course he was a playboy, how could he not be. A bunny stood at the entrance, Carlos showed her his card. The bunnies wore ears and pantyhose, that was practically all they had on. Inside, in the semidarkness, other bunnies walked around serving drinks. Elena and Carlos led me through all the floors of the club, showed provincial Eddie the den of vice. Each floor had its own bar or restaurant, waiters in different uniforms, paintings and photographs, semidarkness, as I have already noted, and suchlike splendors. Amidst mild music, sipping my vodka from a huge glass, I remembered by contrast some friends of a week's standing, Brooklyn Bridge bums, and burst out laughing. Shit, and this is civilization. Why aren't they afraid of the gigantic waves that will some day rise up from the slums of Brooklyn and the Lower East Side and fucking submerge the little islets where the feast goes on in time of plague, where the sounds of hollow music flow, bunny asses flit around practically bare, and my Elena walks accessible to all? And no provincial one-story America can fucking save anybody, all shall be as New York wants, my great and flaming city…
We were sitting near the dance floor, I was sipping my vodka, when suddenly Elena invited me to dance. We were off. Oh, she dances brilliantly, my angel fucker, as Eddie-baby once called her when drunk, while still her beloved husband. She liked the nickname then. Angel fucker.
During the first dance there were other couples on the stage, and the celebrated bunnies danced alongside us. Then for some reason we danced alone – who the fuck knows how we happened to be alone – and there was a flashing light that kept suddenly fixing our poses. It was delicious. She was near, and it seemed to me that nothing had changed. There had been no blood or tears, and now we would dance awhile longer, and start home with our arms around each other, and lie down together.
Shit, no way. We weren't there long. Carlos dragged us to the home of some friends of his to watch pornographic films. Our host was about fifty, in appearance he was like Tosik, a mutual acquaintance of Elena's and mine, a sharp operator from Tbilisi; his tart was young. During the porn films, in which disgusting and vulgar women joyfully swallowed the semen of a pimply cretin, my darling sat in the same chair with Carlos for some reason, and in my opinion he spent the whole time trying to grab or embrace her. They were sitting behind me, but even from the kind of noise they were making I understood that she was ashamed before me, and that he, Carlos, held none too high an opinion of her.
He sees her as a tart, I thought, and she keeps playing the queen and starting adoration games. I had taught her, Moscow had taught her: she was Fair Helen of Troy, the best woman in Moscow, and if in Moscow, in all of Russia. A Nathalie Pushkin. But she didn't see how he looked at her. The simple little idiot Sasha Zelensky, who is secretly in love with Elena, had said – not to me, of course, but to one of our friends – that he had encountered Elena taking a man to her place: "Do you know how he looked at her? We always made such a fuss over her: 'Elena, our Helen!' But he knew her price, our Helen's price, he knew perfectly well." That may have been Carlos, how should I know – Eddie-baby doesn't know a fucking thing. I have only pain, only pain.
Elena came over to me after the porn filth and said, as if in self-justification, "Carlos wanted to see what my face would be like, how I'd react to those films. Well, how are you?" she said, and suddenly stroked my hair. Oh!
How was I? Picture a bandit at large, who is accustomed to react to everything simply and clearly: I felt like shooting everyone in the house and riding off with her into the night. But after all, this was her evil will – she and I had to live this way. And I endured it.
Then we left. He tried to get a taxi, I stood with her under the pillars of the building, and she said that I looked good, that I had found my own style in dress. I thanked her for the evening and for the Playboy Club.
"Have you been to the Infinitive? It's a discotheque," she asked. "No," I said, "I haven't."
"I'll take you, I have a membership card," she said. "Or rather, it's George's card, but that's all right"
It was pouring rain. He finally flagged a cab. We started off, she demanded to be taken home first. We took her home; getting out, she kissed me on the lips. When I glanced in the mirror at the hotel, my lips were all lipstick. I wiped it off, and then was sorry I had.
A bit later there was another encounter, when a strange intimacy occurred between us, we embraced and kissed drunkenly, she was tender and quiet. This was on a boat, where we had gone in a group: Zhigulin and some fluffy girl, and the dried herring Zelensky, and us, ex-spouses.
The boat lay in a shallow little bay- Later the man who owned or rented it – he had arranged the party too, a certain Red – guided his old tub into a broader puddle, set it there in the middle of the puddle, and we all got drunk and stoned. Why we did this nobody knew.
Did I feel good? Not very, at first. To my good fortune, there wasn't one man in the whole company who could have made advances to Elena. Two homosexuals, Mark and Paul, an old married couple, had more of a brotherly feeling for her. Still wearing the same little jeans and a wide lilac blouse, she paced among us, told bawdy anecdotes, served an ether-type drug to everyone in turn, held our nostrils herself and made us inhale. The mere pressure of he fingers on my nose was enough to put me in a faint. She was altogether the merry wench, thoroughly at ease with us, the life of our small party. My beauty paced among us a bit round-shouldered and ridiculous, and I was happy that there was no real man among us, no one was courting her in my sight. I was ready to shower kisses on Red, who was a man of indeterminate sex, and a friend of his who had no reaction to either women or men and who turned out to be an expert on the leaders of revolutionary movements. At first Elena didn't talk to me very much. In the middle of the happening, when I was standing on the bow staring into the water, she came up and said, "This boat reminds me of that jazz boat, remember? We traveled down the Moscow River, and you and I got drunk and came to blows, and then in the morning we crawled out the cabin window."
That was her first reminder of our past.
What followed happened as if in a haze and fog. No wonder I laid into the liquor and kept sniffing, with her help, though she served the drug to everyone. In the end, the moment when she and I embraced – I don't know how long it lasted – slipped away from me. I'm so vexed and angry now at my drunken self. I did not drink that moment to the last drop, did not feel it deeply, I remember only that it was tender and very quiet. I sat and she stood, I think, and I stroked her little bosom under the blouse. Then fate, in the form of Zhigulin, led us off in different cars, we went home separately, I remember my terrible anguish over this.
Well, of course I called her after that, groping to find what I had forfeited. In hopes of a meeting with her I went out and bought some shoes, dreamed of a carnation in the lapel of my white suit. She was busy, or more likely had recovered from her momentary weakness, and I, too, after suffering awhile, thought it was better this way, I mustn't hope for anything, otherwise little Eddie's life would again become hell, and this way it was only half hell.
After a time she called, though I no longer remember, maybe I called; nor do I remember whether our meetings were in the chronological sequence in which I've enumerated them or in some other order. I called, I think, and it turned out she was sick. She lay in the studio alone, Zhigulin was in Montreal at the time, and she was hungry. I bought her some groceries, I don't remember what, took some books, which she hadn't especially asked for, it was merely that the sight of these books evoked memories, and I didn't want memories, that was why I took her the books. I arrived – the door was open.