If you woke up every morning from the wheezing of a catatonic lying next to you who was being fed liquids through a hose into his belly and from the howls of a naked red-haired Bulat who kept screaming, "I'm the chief Soviet whale! I'm the chief Soviet shark!" then your faith in your mother, or anybody else for that matter, would soon perish. Probably my misfortune was that I had managed to land inside a psychiatric hospital at a still very tender age. My mother, of course, had never in her life been committed to a psycho ward, and so I made no attempt to tell her what I had seen there. I just kept silent. What was there to tell her? Like everyone else, she had her own life to live and was looking out for herself, mother or not. When the orderlies knock somebody down at the foot of your bed and start beating him until he's bloody, then you do what's necessary and draw your own conclusions about the world and mankind. I drew them.

And so when I saw Jenny's motherly little ways, my feelings were mixed. On the one hand, I needed Jenny's help and concern and company, and on the other, her mothering irritated and intimidated me, and I felt uncomfortable whenever I encountered it. In the beginning that happened rarely; after all, we'd only just become friends.

It was only a month after we first met that I finally learned that Jenny was the housekeeper — that it was her job to keep the house in order, that she had been living there for four years, and that she began as a live-in sitter for the "music teacher" Steven's children. The "music teacher" grew from his initial innocuousness into something on the order of God the Father looming over our cloudless life in the millionaire's little house and capable of ending it with a single word. Watch out, Edward!

And now that I am myself his housekeeper and servant, I find that my life is in a sense divided. One life I lead while Steven's away, and the other I lead when Papa Steven's at home. He's only five years older than I am, but the sense never leaves me that he's my father. When he's not around, I commit "illicit acts" and carry on a "dissolute and sinful life," which I carefully conceal from him out of fear of punishment. But when Steven's at home, I go around with my lips pursed, an exemplary servant, and I retire early, don't drink, and get up at seven, before he does, in order to have time to make him coffee.

Not only king, count, lord, and "master," but also father, as in the Middle Ages. Not only tsar but father too. In his office, where you make your appearance every morning along with a throng of the other members of your trade, the boss hardly seems like a father, yet Steven Grey, someone to whom I am linked by a complex system of particularly intimate «employer-servant» relations, is necessarily a father too. And that's why I fear his comings and tremble in panic. Terrible is the wrath of the father Abraham.

I can't remember anymore exactly how I found out that Jenny was a housekeeper, a servant. Maybe she even told me herself, since she certainly didn't conceal it from me — that she was mistress of the house was something I imagined on my own. Externally I didn't react; my expression remained unchanged, but internally I was dismayed. "Edward is the 'lover of a governess. " Or more accurately, the admirer. I remember that the words "housekeeper's lover" and "servant's lover" made a deep impression on me, and that henceforth I thought of myself as such, sometimes with bitterness and despair and sometimes with the defiant pride of an outcast. The pride of an outcast, in my view, can be even more passionate than that of an aristocrat or lord, however the hell ancient his family.

I later met European aristocrats in Steven's house. Some of them traced their genealogies back to the times of Saint Louis and the Crusades. Just recently Lord Charley stayed with us, a likable alcoholic, one of whose ancestors had in some way distinguished himself at the Battle of Hastings. During his visit at the house, I made an instantaneous improvement in my knowledge of how Scotch whisky is made and of the various ways it may be employed. To start with, the lord rebuked me for drinking it with ice. Scotch, it seems, should at the most be mixed with a couple of drops of water. The lord mixed his one drop with his finger. He started drinking in the morning.

So now, having seen my share of aristocrats close up, I believe myself to be much prouder, morbidly proud in fact. But for me, as a proud man, there was also a kind of distinction to be found in the acknowledgment that "Edward is the lover of a housekeeper." Well, all right, go fuck yourselves, so she's a housekeeper, what of it? I still needed Jenny. And I stayed.

By the end of May I finally succeeded, patient pilgrim, in reaching her cunt. In the solarium toward morning after one of the usual bashes at her house, when she and I were both very drunk, I pulled off her pants and started fondling her pussy. A nice pussy to touch. Actually, in Jenny's case it would be more accurate to call her organ a cunt. Jenny was a large girl, and she had a cunt, a childbearing organ, whereas pussies are found on girl-women, flat-chested and debauched androgynies who look like Olympia in the famous painting by Manet — you recall. My ex-wife Elena had a pussy. Jenny had a cunt. For me, unfortunately, it was somehow second-class. There's a vast difference between a pussy and a cunt.

At first Jenny resisted, twisting and whimpering, but then, after turning on her side and raising her leg in what I have to say was a most indecent way and holding it there, she started to help me. Almost simultaneously with the appearance of a rosy strip of sky in the garden, she had an orgasm, during which she sobbed quietly like a rabbit. And at that moment I sincerely pitied her, a big baby, sick and drunk with a fat ass and thighs and that hole, that wound torn in her for some reason.

I don't know why, but I didn't stick my prick in Jenny that dawn; either I didn't want a cunt but a pussy, or more likely I was simply too drunk to get it up. In any case, I didn't even try to lodge it in her. After it was completely light, we stood up without speaking, like utter strangers, without even a kiss, and I went back to my hotel, not even wondering what it meant. The supermarket near me on Broadway was open, and I bought some beer and sausage that desolate morning, took it home and ate it, and then crashed.

I was awakened by the telephone ringing. "Yes!" I said in my usual way.

"Did you call me?" Jenny asked.

"No," I answered, "I didn't call."

"Linda said somebody asked for me, a man who, spoke English with an accent. Linda thought it was you."

"With an accent?" I mockingly asked. "That's all I have. I don't have the language, but I do have the accent," I said.

"You speak pretty well, Edward," Jenny objected, and added, "Debby and I are on Broadway not far from your hotel. We're coming over, all right?"

She had never visited me at the hotel before. I was alarmed. My room really was so dirty, dismal, and poor. And glancing about my wretched little abode with its stained red bedspread, its peeling walls covered here and there with posters and drawings, and its hot plate on the windowsill, I thought, What will be will be! and I asked Jenny if she would give me half an hour.

"Why half an hour?" she asked, a little offended. "We're right nearby."

"My… translator, Bill, is here," I lied. "He was passing through on his way from Massachusetts… We've been working on a translation, and we're almost finished. He's leaving in about half an hour."

"All right," Jenny answered, satisfied. "We'll be there in half an hour."

I rushed out to the store for some wine. I didn't have any food either, but I didn't have enough money to buy that, too. I had just enough for two bottles of wine, and then only the cheapest. And of course I didn't know very much about wine then. It's only now, after living in a house with probably the finest wine cellar on the whole East Coast of the United States, that I've become such a specialist, but then I didn't know anything.