"Why don't you close it?" I said to her.
"Anh!" She merely waved a hand, sat down on the bed. She had on tight-fitting striped knit pajamas. I made her a sandwich, she snorted, was dissatisfied with the kind of bread, I had bought the wrong bread. "A baby, a fucking baby, a rubber doll," I thought, looking at her.
Having eaten, she began to boast. Some lover of hers had offered her five million to go away and live with him. "Oh, Nastasya Filipovna," I thought, "you incorrigible eccentric!"
"He was poor when he met me," Elena went on. "I told him that so long as he was poor we had nothing to discuss. He went away somewhere, and now he's back and he's offered me five million. He made it on cocaine."
The woman who had been offered five million lay in her alcove, the mattress lay right on the floor, the refrigerator was empty and not even turned on, dirt and eternal semidarkness filled the studio, and for some reason there was no one but me to bring her anything to eat. Probably a coincidence.
She went on boasting to little Eddie. "I refused!"
"Why?" Eddie asked. "You've always wanted money, haven't you?"
'To hell with him. You always have to be on drugs around him. He's strong but I'm not, I don't want to turn into an old woman in a couple of years. And besides, they could always put him in prison, confiscate his property. And I didn't want to leave New York with him, I don't like him."
He made money on cocaine the way Shurik did on oranges and anasha, I thought with melancholy. Shurik went from Kharkov to the port of Baku, and there bought oranges and anasha. Not cocaine, a narcotic. He flew to Moscow and sold it all at many times what he had paid. Took the money, returned to Kharkov, and brought the money to Vika Kuligina, a whore. Now, there was a good woman. Must be old by this time. Had some talent. Wrote poetry. Took to drink.
Here's a parallel. Elena, Vika. But she doesn't know. I was the one who saw Vika. She's scrambled my whole world. The Shuriks, the Carloses. Cocaine. All is chaos, life chaos…
My last encounter with her earned me a gruesome attack of nerves. It was my own fault; she had nothing to do with it, she behaved in her normal fashion, did nothing to bring on an attack.
She called me in the morning and said, "Ed, do you want to go to my show? It's today at three o'clock." Her little voice, thin enough as it is, always becomes tiny when she's nervous.
I said, "Of course, Elena, I'll be very happy to!"
"Write down the address," she said. "Between Twenty-sixth and Twenty-seventh Streets, on Seventh Avenue, the Fashion Institute of Technology, second floor, Editorial."
I went. I was nervous. I had specially bought new perfume, put on my best white suit and black lace shirt, pulled my cross up under my throat. The bus moved terribly slowly, and I was already jittery in advance, afraid of being late.
I wasn't late. I found the hall in the Institute's huge building. All the front seats were taken. I located an empty seat somewhere in back and settled down to wait. On the stage a little garden or park had been created, plants set out in a special way, lighting set up in a special way. Electricians and photographers bustled around near the stage creating an atmosphere of anxious expectation. I waited.
Finally the sound came on, piercing music, strange to my ear. Perhaps the music struck me as strange only because it was so very long since I had been in any similar large gathering with people, so long since I had seen any kind of performance; except for the cinema I haven't gone anywhere, I've become unsociable.
They came out, they froze in assorted poses, and then set up a din, an uproar, depicting autumnal animation. Little girls. Hobby-horses, starlets, models – they all looked alike at first glance, and only later, straining my eyes, did I learn by great effort to distinguish among them. Children of the female sex, thin, harried, trained to special tricks, they crossed the stage in time to the music, walked down the tonguelike runway, twirled at its tip, threw the spectators a smile or a grimace or a deliberately sulky look, and withdrew as they had come. For some reason I felt sorry for them, and my heart contracted every time I looked at them. I felt especially sorry for the ones with short haircuts. Perhaps because their little faces, without exaggeration, were the faces of children who had just endured a grave illness. Good Lord, and loutish men mauled these children, mauled, fucked, lay heavy, forced their cocks into them. I felt miserable, and only by an effort of will pulled myself together and looked at the stage.
Meanwhile, Elena too had appeared. She was excessively fidgety and jittery. I don't remember her first costume because I didn't make her out immediately under the hat. By the time I realized that this was my darling, her little face had already flashed past and disappeared into the wings. Her second costume was something lilac, long and draped, it might have been called a dress, but then again it might not have. Her eyes flashing under the hat, Elena drew applause from the audience.
But on the whole she performed worse than the other girls. Though I don't like to admit it, she jittered excessively; excitement made her overfamiliar and undisciplined. Among her girl friends there were several very high-class professionals. They worked precisely and mechanically, their movements were spare and honed, no unnecessary little added wrinkles appeared in their clothes, they exhibited a purity of style and purity in every movement. There was nothing extra: at the right time an abrupt movement of the face, up with the chin, all in time and precise.
But Elena pranced too much, flirted, took too much initiative, acted and overacted, bustled, her movements were impure.
If it were a question of beauty, in my view, Eddie's unobjective view, she was much more attractive as a woman than all the other models, all the rest of the corps de ballet. But her work was amateurish, that was obvious.
Judge for yourselves: She appears in a little white duck outfit with a hood, and white boots; you know, a nice kind of outfit for a young and idle woman to wear when she emerges from the door of her villa somewhere in Connecticut to gather mushrooms after the rain. So she appears in this little outfit, dances onstage to the music as if gathering mushrooms, or berries, if you don't gather mushrooms in America, and it comes off pretty well, some people applaud. But then when she has moved to the tongue, is already at the tip of it, precisely where she ought to display herself in large, Elena makes a sudden quick spin, her movements are jumbled, lose precision, so that we, the spectators, don't even have time to make out her face. Elena's smudged features flash by – hers? not hers? you can't tell – and she's gone from the tongue. She didn't fix the image of her face even for an instant, didn't know how to display it, stop it temporarily and present it. No, her performance was amateurish. The applause died out before it could begin.
At the end there were balloons, a procession, music, noise, tangled ribbons – here she was within her repertoire. Circus art is for her. She became entangled in the balloons, waved her hat and so on, she did this well. I was dissatisfied with her, I wanted her to be first in everything.
I hung around in the hall awhile and then went out to wait for her. By now many girls had walked by, they were being met by either lovers or friends, or were leaving alone – there were, it seemed, thin and brash girls like that – but there was still no Elena. Finally she came in sight. She was wearing a white hat and a light, flowery outfit of some sort, a blouse and skirt – later I saw that they were old – and brown shoes, also old; her little legs were covered in dull pantyhose. I went over and kissed her (cowardly Eddie had resolved to kiss her), congratulated her, noting that the makeup on her cheeks was somehow stale, caked. She looked tired.