Who really needs me? Nobody. My boss is going to take part in a car race in California again, pulling a helmet down over his head and taking the steering wheel in his hands. He thinks he's a goddamn Paul Newman. During his absence I will of course be free to play and fill up the house with girls, but they still won't be the right ones. I want the expensive kind, like the girl-stranger who fucked me in the basement. Please forgive me my obsession with rich girls, gentlemen, but how could it be otherwise, since I measure life by women? They're the only ones who light up this world. There's nobody else. And they give the world its purpose, its excitement, and its movement.
What beauty is going to stand by and wait while I finally make the heroic effort to crawl out of this kitchen and become famous and maybe even rich? I thought sadly. What I'm striving for, the material part of what I'm striving for, Steven Grey has had since birth. No woman's going to take my stupid road with me. Who needs excuses like, "You know, I'm still a failure right now, but I'm very talented; wait, dear, just a little longer!" Why should she listen to my stories about the lunches and breakfasts I made and how I shined the boss's shoes and went shopping and suffered physically and spiritually, and sat by the window, just as I was doing then, and got depressed?
What woman is going to be interested in me when she can make the acquaintance of somebody who's already there, who already has something — of Steven Grey, six feet two, bearded, forty years old, and the owner of numerous elegant companies? "Who the fuck am I to beautiful women!" I yelled, pounding my fist on the table. The glass with ice fell off the table and broke on the kitchen floor. It was apparently the sight of gold that had brought on that little fit of hysteria, and the Kuwaitis, rich as swine, and the whiskey I'd drunk, very good and strong. "Who the fuck am I to them!" I repeated. Steven's rich and has a house that looks romantically out onto a garden and the river. What do I have? An old suitcase as old as I am given to me by my parents and a couple of obscure books in Russian I wrote in anger and disgust with the world.
Christ, how sick and tired I am of them all! I thought. I'd like to go into the dining room during lunch sometime, and instead of clearing away the dirty dishes and serving them salad and a cheese tray, spray the boss and his wine-drinking friends with a few rounds from an AK-47 or a no-less-celebrated Israeli Uzi! That day would have been a very good day for it — the fairy-tale Kuwaiti sheiks were an even more tempting mission than Steven Grey was. (The servant Limonov imagined the blood-spattered sheiks on the Persian cushions, imagined them slowly falling over onto the cushions.) It's possible that one of the Kuwaitis even fucked my Elena, I thought, that he burst into her pink cunt with his black prick. Why not? It's very possible in fact, I reasoned to myself.
And what was it all given to them for, those billions? I tried to comprehend. I'm not exactly sure what for, maybe simply because there was oil on their land. Probably that's all. Mere luck? All right. And Lodyzhnikov got what he has simply because the bourgeoisie happens at present to like ballet — ballet has taken its fancy — and pays hard cash. More luck. My Gatsby was left money by his father, luck again, right?
That's a lot of luck, don't you think? And I for some reason haven't been so lucky. True, it could all have been different with me. If I had written different books, I wouldn't be a servant sitting by the kitchen window now; if I had exposed Russia and its social system in a talented way, if I'd helped America in its ideological struggle against Russia, I'd be sitting on my own estate like Solzhenitsyn. Or I'd be speeding around the streets of Hollywood in a Rolls-Royce, hopping from party to party, and since I'm still fairly young, I'd have as many of my beloved rich whores as I could want. What am I doing in the kitchen?
After my monologue I picked up the New York Post, which Gatsby in his haste hadn't had time to read, and immersed myself in that yellow rag. Jenny's brother Michael Jackson had warned me about reading such trash, but I still read it. The Village Voice is full of lies too, only liberal ones.
It turned out a lord had been murdered the day before, a cousin of the Queen of England. A handsome lord, old, tall, and majestic. A former admiral with connections to India — its last viceroy. The Irish killed him; they want independence from Britain. To live on their own. Obviously they think killing lords will immediately solve all their problems — the hunchbacks will stand up straight, all those who don't have money will perhaps suddenly have it, and the impotent will at once find their cocks suffused with the blood of life. The simple common sense of a housekeeper suggests to me that the hunchbacks will remain hunchbacked and that the national state will help neither the impotent nor the dispossessed, although those who guide those murderers will certainly take their places among the Big Brothers — without a doubt. They never miss.
A powerful bomb exploded on the lord's fishing boat. There were two pages of photographs in the Post devoted to the lord's life. Pictures of him walking majestically with a rajah, and standing like a tower to one side of an old man suffering from dystrophy and wrapped up in a piece of white cloth — the old Ghandi. And the lord's wife standing on the other side like another tower. And an Indian landscape in the background.
I averted my eyes from the newspaper and wondered why they regretted the lord's death by bombing so much. He would have gotten sick or expired of old age, bedridden and barely able to open his mouth, smelling bad and annoying his servants and no longer in possession of his faculties. Would that really have been better? This way he died like a soldier, the way he should have, blown up by a bomb. I envied him. A man ought not live to the point where he has to crawl. It's ugly and dirty.
A few pages later in the newspaper I found, by way of illustration for my thoughts, a picture of a hospital ward with several human bodies hooked up to artificial life-support equipment. The caption under the picture said they'd been lying like that for years. Vegetables. Why keep them going? What's the purpose of that degradation? I'd rip the hoses from everybody hooked up to life-support equipment. I'd go around to all the hospitals and cut the hoses or turn off all the switches. Cruel? No, honest, even noble.
Something we don't understand has happened to us, to people, to the human race. We've gone down a dead end, maybe, or we have developed in some mistaken way. I don't know what, but something's wrong, I told myself while rummaging through the paper. And then the telephone rang.
It was an acquaintance of mine, somebody whom I had inherited from Jenny and Martha and who at one time had been Martha's boyfriend. He's twenty-five to twenty-eight and works as an assistant manager at the huge Waldorf-Astoria. His name is James, James O'Brien. Even the disciplined and hard-working Martha used to call James a slave — Martha, who never missed a day of work! Probably James O'Brien deserved that epithet. James occasionally drops by die kitchen out of habit to chat with Linda and me for a while, just as he did with Martha. Linda and I don't encourage him, but we don't chase him away either. We tolerate him.
"Do you want to go to a movie, Edward?" O'Brien said over die phone. "I and my boss, Youssef, are going to one tonight. Several girls are coming with us." James has very refined manners, and so he added, "I'm sure you'll like the film very much, Edward; it's The Seduction of Joe Tynan. It deals with intellectual problems very important for our time."
I wavered. Another time I'd have refused without hesitating — I usually don't go out when Steven's staying overnight — but that day or the next was a damned full moon, and I was already a little crazy, or maybe it was just that I was getting sick of it all.