Chapter Eleven
The winter passed. I've noticed that I don't remember winters very well. My memory leaves them out, with the result that my year has only three seasons: spring, summer, and fall. The only winter I remember completely and distinctly is the winter of 1967–1968, my first in Moscow. The hellish forty-below frosts were supplemented by the fact that I was undernourished. My flesh and all my muscles ached from the cold when, after pulling on everything I had to pull on — all my clothes — I ran to the cafeteria on the corner of Uhlan Lane and the Sadovoe Circle Road. That cafeteria, an iced-over basement heaven where I ate black bread and mustard for free after paying for the obligatory glass of compote, will remain frozen in my memory forever. Sometimes I would also sneak uneaten food left on the plates — a piece of hot dog and some mashed potatoes or hot dog skin peeled off by a squeamish taxi driver. What had been inedible for the taxi driver was eaten with pleasure by the poet. I lost twenty-five pounds that winter, so I remember it all.
The New York winter of 1979–1980 I spent fucking and working, but mostly fucking my girls, since Steven went skiing no fewer than three times. No matter what was happening in New York, he dropped his business affairs and left his papers lying around and unsorted, while Linda hissed and raged. I remember one morning in January when Steven, pink and cheerful after his most recent ski trip, came down to the kitchen in his bathrobe, and I asked him politely if he had enjoyed skiing at Aspen. The question was an innocent one, just something to ask the boss about, without any ulterior motives, but Gatsby was taken aback and for some reason started justifying himself to me.
"I wasn't just on vacation, Edward," he said. "I had three separate business meetings in Colorado, all in different cities."
I forced out a respectful "Oh!!" What else could I say? His meetings didn't sound that convincing. While unpacking his things and turning over the strata and rubble in his suitcases and bags, I had found not a single work document, only light reading — among others, a book called The Last Convertible, as I recall — and an indecent quantity of woman's things: stockings, panties, mittens, and even a couple of hats. Business meetings! Olga later washed his business meetings in the laundry room. Around that time a magazine came out with that article about Gatsby portraying him as a «working-class» millionaire. And people read it and obviously believed it. He spoke very intelligently and wearily with the interviewer. Steven is good-looking and inspires confidence; what else do readers need?
The New York spring began. With the appearance of the first green in our garden, the housekeeper Edward received a letter from Rome which left him beside himself with happiness. One of the best-known small publishers in America, Leonard Angeletti, wrote to say that he had obtained my address from a friend of his in Rome, the Russian writer Evgeny Efimenkov, and that Efimenkov had told him I had written a "great book." And that he, Angeletti, would be flying to New York in a couple of days and wanted to see me and get the manuscript of my book with the object of possible publication by his publishing house. Angeletti named the date he would be in New York and asked me to be home so he could call and arrange a meeting.
Sure I'd be home! Even if they had put me in prison that day, I would have escaped and crawled to the millionaire's house wounded and bleeding. My book was going nowhere; not a single publisher was looking at it. Liza didn't know where to send it anymore. A dead end.
I almost had a publisher last fall. Now, just by looking at his face, I would say that as far as publishing my book was concerned, he would sit on the pot but he'd never finish shitting, and that he was completely wrong for it anyway, but then, as it happened, I still didn't know a fucking tiling about publishers. Malcolm had been introduced to me by an artist friend of mine on purpose, but as if in passing: "Let me introduce you. This is Malcolm, a publisher, and this is Edward, a writer." But mainly it was Malcolm who latched on to me and started asking me questions — what sort of book had I written, what it was about… The fact was that until then Malcolm hadn't published very many books, and what he had published were mostly expensive gift editions. You know, books with glossy paper and good photographs of places of note or of minerals or flowers… The sort of book, in short, that nobody except the publisher needs, not even the person it's given to. Token books. You give one of them to somebody, and then a week later he gets ready to visit one of his friends on his birthday and starts thinking about what sort of gift he himself will give. He doesn't really want to spend any money, and then his eyes fall on the book put out by the publisher Malcolm. Those books are always in excellent condition; frequently they've never even been opened. What's there to look at; they're all the same.
It was even written all over Malcolm's face that he wanted money very badly but was scared of taking risks. Only the housekeeper Edward preoccupied for six months with his problems could have believed, gentlemen, that that coward would publish his book, one ending with the words, "Fuck you, you cocksucking bastards! You can all go to hell!"
By that time I already had a complete text of the book in English. I'd paid the translator out of my own housekeeper's pocket — the main thing in my life being, after all, Edward the writer and his books and not Edward the housekeeper and his problems. Let Edward the housekeeper stay home instead of hanging around restaurants or buying himself new rags on sale at Saks. He'd survive.
Malcolm gave the Russian text to a professor in the Russian department of a university I'd never heard of, but he wouldn't tell me the professor's name, obviously so I wouldn't be able to exert any influence on him, or bribe him perhaps. The professor's review was super-favorable. There are still people who can think for themselves, I thought approvingly. It's nice to know they exist. Among other things, my unknown friend wrote, "…the author emphasizes the dehumanizing character of both societies, maintaining that there is no place in either for the independent and creative personality."
Malcolm wasn't satisfied with that opinion, and gave the English manuscript to three other people to read, and in addition read it himself and gave another copy to a scrawny forty-year-old mouse named Barbara. Barbara was his colleague and assistant; she walked his dogs the same way Madame Margarita walks Lodyzhnikov's and did other things of that kind. Maybe Malcolm fucked her too whenever he was on a diet. Even the timid little mouse Barbara liked the book, and all his other hired readers did too, but Malcolm continued to stall and drag things out. He was still afraid.
I once asked him over to the millionaire's for a drink, thinking that perhaps we hadn't had enough personal contact, that perhaps if he saw me in my actual circumstances, he would understand me better, just as Jenny had after visiting me in my hotel. He would see that I wasn't just a temporary guest in the house of literature. After sitting a while with me over a glass of whiskey, he would realize that I was very ambitious and talented. And I thought that after that he would want to come to terms with me and publish my book.
He came over and we had a drink. True, he didn't stay very long — he had to run off to some dinner engagement he couldn't put off — but I learned more about him during that brief visit than I had in all my months of meeting him at his office. He examined our house very carefully and obsequiously, servilely admiring our walls and even the shabby rugs on our floors, and he praised all the things I detested; he liked the Connecticut landscapes and our antique dishes on the buffet and our living room picture window with its view of the river, and the dimensions of the living room itself. He even tested the mattress in Steven's bedroom with his hand. Instead of sitting with me and drinking Scotch as I had intended, he walked fawningly around the house and talked to me about my kitchen. And I got to know him. I know you, mask! I thought. You're a petit bourgeois, little Malcolm. He badly wanted to grab up a house like that for himself so he could become a fucking grand bourgeois.