Such were my reflections while she twirled her poopka, and at that moment Zhigulin arrived.
"Eddie bought me some shoes," she said.
"Would you buy some for me?" Zhigulin asked with interest.
"Elena, you're supposed to go out, and you also promised to go to the bar with me," I said, not answering Zhigulin.
"We'll make it," she said. "I'll shower now and we'll go to the bar."
She showered and we began the wrap job. It was horribly silly: she with nothing on, as before, and I with trembling hands wrapping her in transparent fabrics, first lilac, then black and yellow. This was crap, she realized it, but she said we didn't know how to wrap, neither I nor she. Of course not, how could we, we weren't Indians.
She decided to wear the lilac dress. I was put to work hemming up the dress for her. I hemmed it, what else! I can do everything, it's really lousy. Finally, after ordering Zhigulin to send the lame "economist" downstairs to the bar, she went down with me. My white suit jacket was unbuttoned, she wore the weird lilac dress and the shoes I had bought her, with the long cigarette holder in her hand – beautiful, seductive. You might have thought we were rich people, a husband and wife, or lovers, prosperous Eddie and the beauty Elena whom prosperous Eddie had bought, going down to the bar.
She ordered cognac, I whiskey, J B. We drank. Striking people. I had already begun to enter into the role, but she kept distracting me, the whole time she kept looking out the window at the street, and suddenly she broke loose. She walked out – walked out, hell, she ran out – and returned with someone wrinkled and mustachioed, I briefly saw something yellow. She introduced us and they left at once, my lilac vision withdrew. "His name is George." We know he's George.
The Japanese barman saw, the barman understood. They had stabbed me in the heart, and at that moment everything burst into flames, everything!
And how would you have felt in that bar on East Fifty-fourth, Fifty-eighth Street, if a rich man had stolen your love merely because he was rich, and you were left on the stool to drink your J B and pose as a visiting foreigner? Fucking shit! All my hatred for this world – the personal hatred of talented brave Eddie, musky little wild beast – a bitter and miserable hatred, unable to vent itself, was instantly in my eyes.
Do not forget the milieu in which I grew up and was formed. A milieu where love and blood stood side by side, betrayal was barely a step ahead of the word knife. I sat on the stool and reflected that the boys back home, my friends rotting in prison camps for their crimes, the gangsters and thieves of Kharkov, now scorned me as a pathetic rag. "They stole her, you shitass, and you didn't even put a knife in the chump's ribs. Everyone who feels like it fucks her, she sucks them all off, you shitass, and you let them mess on your soul. Asshole, coward, lousy fucking intellectual!"
So said the boys, they spoke terrifyingly and frankly. From their own parochial viewpoint they were right, yes, they were definitely right, by their code and mine I should have knifed her if I loved her. And I did love her.
Little Eddie was silent. What could he say to the boys? That this was her own evil will, that lame George had nothing to do with it, or Jean…
When Kirill walked into the bar – this was half an hour later, Zhigulin had told him I was sitting here with Elena – he told me afterward, "From the look in your eyes, you'd just seen someone run a red-hot poker through the head of your beloved child." Kirill loves to express himself ornately, but evidently it was true.
When he came in I was on my sixth or seventh J B, I ordered the same for him, it may have been White Label, I don't know, but we drank it and went from there to another place, and I remember almost nothing further. Kirill said afterward that we were in several bars, that we got thrown out of one, that I undressed and swam in a fountain, that I climbed up on some sort of sculpture and jumped down, that I posed as a mobster, a godfather. Of course this was all my subconscious.
He spent the night at the hotel, and in the morning he and I had a row. When I tried to take my contact lenses out of my eyes, I discovered they weren't in my eyes. "Fuck the lenses, fuck the two hundred and twenty dollars, so much is already lost that this isn't even a loss," I told Kirill. He evidently caught my inner hysteria because he began to torture me with stories about how I had behaved.
"You were repulsive," Kirill said in a sort of malicious ecstasy. "You hurled yourself under cars, you took off your shoes and went barefoot, your face was vile."
Kirill said all this standing over, me as I lay on the bed with my face to the wall. A pleasure, when they get to you at fucking eight in the morning. Your world's a filthy garbage pit as it is, and now they have to denounce you too.
"Leave me alone," I said wearily. "What do you want from a sick old man, why are you telling me all this?"
He screamed, "I'll smash that prostitute's face! Why does she take money from you? Let her get money from the guys she sucks off! You bought her panties, you fool, you shitass! George, Jean, some other photographer, and Zhigulin are all wiping their dicks on your panties, she's fucking all of them now! Jean called me, boasted he'd fucked Elena again, twice!"
He kept yelling like that and I drove him out. He went away, and I plunged into a terrible idiotic state, now floating up from the gloom, now plunging back in. When I floated up, I got a drink of water, lay down again, thought interminably about Elena, about the fact that I, Eddie-baby, had no fucking reason to live in the world the way I was.
I lay there until twelve o'clock and then went to the shower, thinking I would go out to Eighth Avenue and get a prostitute. That ought to calm me. You can't die – you have to live. I had already collected myself completely, I even knew exactly who I would get on Eighth Avenue, which girl, when suddenly the phone rang. This happened when I had just put a ten in one pocket and another ten in the other – that's my way. After love I planned to take the prostitute to a bar, I needed to have a drink with someone.
The phone rang, and from the receiver poured forth the voice of my beloved. My beloved ordered me to report to her without delay for implementation of her crazy designs. Since she demanded it, I had to go. Eddie's cock would have to wait. I could put off the prostitute. Suicide too. I had to cut out little Elena's transparent fabrics for her. Picking up a hardly touched bottle of whiskey of unknown provenance, I set out to see my ladylove.
My ladylove, before cutting the fabric, was planning an expedition to Bloomingdale's to purchase thread, belts, pins, zippers, and other frippery. I went with her. I bought her some fur slippers she liked; panties were purchased again, and other items. When we left I didn't have a cent, and she had nothing left of her $20 either, we had pooled our dimes and quarters for the last panties. The panties were red. I thought with anguish about the prostitute; I had no more money. You think I regretted anything? Far from it. I always act on my whims, the little girl was glad for the panties. I enjoyed it.
Zhigulin and his guest, who met us in the studio, did not appreciate the panties. Lowbrows, what did they know about red panties. Only with me could Elena talk about them, only with me. We also drank, shot the bull about this and that. After several good slugs of whiskey I completely lost any desire to cut or sew. But, fucked out and drenched in sweat, I got busy with it anyway.
I cleared their things off the table, spread out the fabric, and began to puzzle over it. I was very tempted to lie down and take a nap. She was walking around here, Zhigulin was here, the cat was here, I would have fallen asleep calmly and without nightmares in her bed, for example. But I didn't have the guts to ask. Quite possibly she would have consented. I would have asked to sleep without her, not with her.