I showed up at her place after work. I had gotten a job for a few days painting the wall of an office on 42nd Street a disgusting yellow color. I remember that I walked along happily, almost rejoicing from awareness that I was on my way to the house of a rich girl and that she wanted to see me.

Jenny, clean, calm, contented, was sitting in the "solarium," although I didn't know then that that was what it was called. She was listening to music, calm, well-fed, old music, Vivaldi perhaps. She sat me down across from her on another green sofa with only a transparent plastic table between us, and we started talking. Or rather she asked me about my life, and I, getting confused and embarrassed, tried both to speak coherent English and somehow to make myself more interesting. I made up a lot of lies about myself, some of which I was able to put right later by referring to my then poor knowledge of the language, while others have remained uncorrected to this day, but I was, as I recall, very afraid that she would think I wasn't worth the effort and wouldn't want to see me anymore. In my pocket I had seventy-five dollars I had borrowed specifically for the occasion, and I involuntarily kept checking it, I think.

What did I talk to her about? I suddenly realized that in spite of myself, I wanted to make her feel sorry for me, and I remember that in telling her about my life, I mentioned my second wife, Anna, who had gone crazy, and my last wife, Elena, who had left me here because I didn't have any money. "Because of money" made an impression on Jenny; she even started blinking very fast and angrily muttered, "The bitch!" Inspired, and sensing in my bones that there wasn't very much time left and that if I didn't succeed in getting her interested in the next hour or so, I probably wouldn't have another chance like that again in my life, I informed her with fateful resolve that no one had ever loved me in my whole life, that my mother hadn't lived with me, but had left my father and me when I was only two, and that I had lived among soldiers until I was fifteen and had been raised by them. I sat there and told inspired lies about myself while looking out into the garden, where it was green and deserted and where a child's swing was swaying slowly and temptingly in the breeze. It's a good thing my super-decent mama couldn't hear, my mother who in almost forty years of living with my father had probably spent not even a single evening outside the house. Forgive me, Mama, but you wouldn't have wanted your son to perish, would you?

Mechanically staring into the garden, I clumsily struggled to pronounce the difficult English words, hurrying and stumbling over them, and wishing I had a glass of wine, some vodka, a joint — anything that would have relaxed me and helped me to make up even more and better stories. Watching her face, I had the sense that it wasn't working, that I was boring her, since she had grown very quiet and thoughtful, and was sitting there without moving, leaning back on the green sofa and lightly pulling with one hand at the strands of her chestnut hair parted on the side, her carefully washed chestnut hair. And she was moving her foot a little too — she was barefoot, and why not, with such soft carpets and such brilliantly polished parquet. I thought it wasn't working, but I was in fact saying then the full one hundred percent of what she needed to hear, she, Jenny Jackson, an American girl with English, Irish, and Polish blood in her veins. The point is, gentlemen, that she was unbelievably softhearted. But I only found that out later. I didn't know it then, and that's why those first hours with her have remained so painful a memory.

I blurted out all those admissions and then was suddenly quiet, physically aware, sensing it instinctively, that the sky in the garden was turning a dark blue. There was so much sky in her garden. And it was turning a dark blue and then graying and darkening.

Jenny sat half-turned toward me, wearing that evening the dress that I came to prefer over all her others, a dress with a little hood and narrow, very narrow gray-black stripes, a wide skirt that reached down below her knees, and a tight-fitting bodice — very pretty. She sat half-turned toward me and said nothing. Then suddenly she whispered, "Poor thing!" and faced me. A tear was rolling down her cheek.

Success! During the pause I had managed to conceive a hatred both for her mansion and for her "rich and idle" person, and in the infinite despair of my thoughts in that moment had already consigned the house and the garden to wholesale pillage, filling the place with my mythical comrades-in-revolution — I could already hear their footsteps and voices and the clank of their weapons.

"Poor thing." Even though I had lied about some things, it still referred to me. But wasn't I a "poor thing" in fact? I was. That meant she understood, that meant she was a human being, however unexpected and strange that was.

But poor Edward wasn't able to rejoice in his victory; he was too exhausted from an effort that had exceeded his strength. I remember dropping my arms to my knees and staring at the green rug, never imagining that more than once in the future I would have to vacuum it and even from time to time fuck members of the opposite sex on it when I was too impatient to go to my room… And not long ago I happened to find on that same green rug the doming, watches, bracelets, rings, and undergarments of a certain lady and my boss, Steven Grey, but not the owners themselves… That all happened much later, however. On that May evening, as we were sitting there, the tear still rolling down Jenny's cheek, the doorbell rang, or rather it chimed, and sniffing like a baby, she said, "That's my sister," and went to open the door.

Sister Debby had brought a saxophone with her; she played the saxophone, as it turned out — little sister Debby, that is. The saxophone was placed on its legs there in the solarium next to a barrel organ and a music box — in the music corner. Sister Debby didn't resemble sister Jenny at all. She was very slender, with short black hair and olive skin, and thanks to her gaudily painted lips and eyes, she looked like a hoodlum and older than her seventeen years. Sister Debby had come up from Virginia, where the whole family lived, as it turned out — the first reliable information I got then. It also turned out that besides Debby, Jenny had three other sisters and five brothers.

"God," I said. "You're like Latin Americans; they're the ones who're supposed to have such big families."

"Ten children is really good," Jenny said. "You have somebody to play with when you're little and somebody to share your troubles with. An only child is always unhappy and lonely. You left Russia, Edward, and now your parents are all by themselves." Saying this, Jenny looked at me significantly and then continued. "If they had had more children, they wouldn't be so lonely now." Jenny was very sensible, it turned out.

That evening the three of us went out together. "Let's go somewhere for a drink," Jenny said carelessly. "Debby's tired of Virginia; she wants to go out."

"Of course, let's go out," I said, although inwardly I was terrified about what I would do if I didn't have enough money. But it was impossible to refuse, even though I would gladly have bought a bottle and drunk it there at home; that's what I always did.

And so we went out. The slender and insolently vulgar Debby put on a gray poncho, and I had on a checked jacket that the above-mentioned Tolya had once given me for nothing and that I had shortened and taken in, and a black cap from Paris I was very proud of that still had the label "Enchanted Hunter" in it. I had bought it for $1.25 at a used clothing store on the Lower East Side. Over her pretty little dress Jenny wore a long knitted cardigan with little knitted balls dangling from strings.