She informed me that she had a lover on the nineteenth of December, in the terrible cold and the dim evening light of our tragic Lexington Avenue apartment. Shaken and humiliated, I told her, "Sleep with whomever you wish, I love you madly, I want only to live with you and care for you," and I kissed the knee uncovered by her robe. And that was how we lived.
Even this decision she attributed to my weakness, not to love. At the beginning, after the nineteenth of December, she was still forcing herself not to refuse me in love, trying to make love with me. From some quirk of my constitution I wanted her every day then, I had a constant hard-on. In my diary, if I summon the courage to look in it, I discover joyful short notes: I had made love with her four times, or twice, or once. But she grew more and more insolent, and gradually our coitions – no other word will do, so solemn were they for me – became very infrequent.
At last she completely stopped making love with me and said openly aloud that she wanted to leave me. I wandered in the twilight of my unconscious, masturbated at night in the bathroom after donning Elena's – she had just come home and was already asleep – still-warm pantyhose and panties; often both the one and the other were spotted with semen, someone else's of course, and I wanted but one happiness, to fuck my very own wife. Thus a delirious idea gradually took hold in me – to rape Elena.
One sunny, very sunny, frosty day, from a cultured salesman with a little beard, in a store on Broadway, I bought a pair of handcuffs. They were… well, everyone knows what kind of handcuffs you buy on Broadway for seven dollars. By the time I got home I was in complete hysterics over this purchase. After testing and closely examining the handcuffs, I had discovered with horror that there was a button to open them without the aid of a key, that is, they were steel and apparently strong, but for play, for children. There was even a notice that children over three could play with the handcuffs. A pitiful story, very pitiful.
I burst into sobs of pity for myself and my body, which was forced to resort to such nightmarish methods to get a caress. Even my attempt at rape was a failure. I howled, I wept a very long time, and then, gasping and weeping, found a remedy after all. I took a serrated kitchen knife and in half an hour, never ceasing to weep, sawed the release buttons off the handcuffs and made them real, they would open now only with the aid of a key. As I did this I saw myself from outside and decided, as a writer, that this gruesome scene was fit for Hollywood: Limonov weeping with grief over a pair of handcuffs for his beloved and filing off the safety button with a kitchen knife.
I never did put the handcuffs to use, or the rope either. The dream of raping Elena went hand in hand with the dream of killing her. Already insane, two weeks before buying the handcuffs, I had taken up the rug, the preposterous pink rug in our bedroom, and installed a rope snare under it. I fastened one end of the rope to a pipe in the corner of the room; from the other end I made a slip noose, so that as a last resort, when it became more than I could bear, I could strangle her easily and noiselessly. Then I thought of killing myself by means of… the means of killing myself kept changing in my imagination. The rope lay there quite a long time, sometimes I think it was what saved Elena and me from death. Lying there beside Elena at night, strangers, neighbors, she under her blanket and I under mine, breathing the smell of alcohol and smoke that emanated from her – she had taken a liking to marijuana, cocaine, and other delights – lying there, she snored faintly in her sleep, exhausted from orgasms with hateful American men (this is why I can never love you again, America!), despite all, I was comforted to remember the rope. Despite all, I knew that if I reached under my pillow the end of the rope would be in my hands; it would be nothing to throw the noose over the head of the little tormentress lying beside me. The possibility, the ease, of ending it all comforted me, and perhaps that is why I escaped the outbursts that could have led to murder: I was sure I could always kill her, I could do it at any time. Thanks to the rope, some part of the malice and madness gradually left me…
All these horrors came to mind while I folded napkins. Nicholas returned me to reality – he thrust an empty coffeepot into my hands and I flew to the kitchen, noticing along the way that the young woman and the corpulent man who looked like a gangster had finished their breakfast and left, and that Fred, the manager himself, was clearing the table and spreading a clean tablecloth, when I was the one who was supposed to do that. My blunder sobered me up completely; I ran to the kitchen so fast that on the turns I had to grab at the wall to keep from falling. I wonder what she is to him, I thought as I ran. Certainly not his daughter – either his wife or his mistress. He doesn't look like someone from a pulp and paper convention, but then why the fuck is he up so early? With such a beautiful woman I personally could not be dragged out of bed before dinner…
As you see, our restaurant was also frequented by women. They were many fewer than the men, I stared at them with caution, disbelief, and forgive me… with delight. Alas. I stared at them in a peculiar way – I scorned them, hated them, simultaneously realizing that their pastimes would never be open to me. They had an advantage over me, the advantage of birth. I had everlastingly served them in this life, invited them places, undressed them, fucked them, and they had lain silent, or cried out, or lied and pretended.
Even in the past I had sometimes suffered acute attacks of hostility to women, genuine malicious hostility. Then came Elena, and the hostility subsided, hid. Now, after everything, I was suffering acute envy toward Elena, and since she embodied for me the whole female sex, envy toward women in general. The biological injustice roused my indignation. Why must I love, seek, fuck, preserve – so many more verbs could be piled on – while she must only use. I think my hatred proceeded from envy that I had no cunt. For some reason it seemed to me that a cunt was more perfect than a prick.
Bitches, I thought, staring at the well-cared-for girls and women arriving in our restaurant. Once my fellow busboys caught one of those stares. The busboy Patricio, a dark-browed criminal type with false teeth, pointed to the woman I had stared at and asked sarcastically, "Do you like ladies?" I said yes, I had been married three times. Patricio and Carlos looked at me in disbelief. "Maybe you like men?" Patricio asked with interest, breathing alcohol at me. He used to finish off the liquor the customers left in their glasses. Later I began doing it too, usually going behind a sort of screen. Now and then I also finished off the food the customers hadn't eaten. Being an Oriental, I'm very fond of fatty meat, for example. The customers left the fat, but I wasn't so picky.
The conversation about women and men ended with a retort that delighted Carlos and Patricio: that in general I liked women, but I might also change the object of my love and in the future love men. Then Ricardo the headwaiter appeared and dispersed us; one of us ran for butter, one for napkins, one to clear empty dirty plates from under the customers' noses.