I had barely managed to return with the alcohol, had only just taken the bottles out of the paper bag, when the sisters arrived. I heard Jenny's laughter coming down the corridor and the almost boyish voice of Debby, and I opened the door before they got there. They were smiling broadly and Jenny was shaking her head disdainfully.

"Somebody offered to sell us heroin on the elevator. Very cheap. When we said no, he offered us angel dust. 'Very nice, ma'am, the best in town, ma'am, said this black guy without a shirt."

'"Whatever you want, ma'am, " Debby continued. "And then he put his mouth right up to Jenny's ear and quickly whispered, 'Wanna good fuck, mama? "

The sisters laughed. The black slang sounded very natural in their imitation, as they drawled and sang the words. I could imitate the blacks, but I was a long way from their skill.

"So this is the way you live, Edward," Jenny said, taking in my room with a mockingly squeamish look. "We had to wait fifteen minutes for the elevator, and in all that time we didn't see one white person. Are you the only one here?"

Jenny sat down on the edge of my bed, on the red bedspread. On the wall above the bed was a huge slogan from Bakunin that I had written with a thick felt-tipped pen on separate sheets of paper and glued there: "Destruction is Creation!"

"Well, no," I objected to Jenny, "I'm not the only white here. There's an old Chinese man on my floor, and there are several old white women on Social Security, and our manager is white."

I was even a little embarrassed that there were so few whites at our hotel. I offered the sisters some wine.

"Yes, we want some wine," Jenny said, and stretched out on my couch, kicking off her shoes. "Give us some wine, Edward. We've come to visit you."

Jenny made a face at the wine but drank it. We all sat on my bed, and after finishing the first bottle of wine, we opened the second and started arguing about revolution. The seventeen-year-old Debby took my part when I pronounced Steven an exploiter and declared my disagreement with inheritance laws that made it possible for idiots and half-wits of every kind to live in luxury and get on in the world just because their fathers and grandfathers were talented people. "I don't object to people who've made their own way, who have gotten rich on their own — I even respect them," I said, "but their children should start from zero like everybody else."

Jenny said that Steven was neither an idiot nor a half-wit but a talented person in his own right and even a liberal.

I said that I didn't mean her boss when I had been talking about half-wits, since I didn't know Steven, but the system itself. "We need to completely reorganize society, our whole civilization; we need a world revolution, and the new history of man should start from zero," I told the sisters.

"A revolution means blood and killing people," Jenny said with conviction.

"What?" I said. "Read the history of any revolution carefully, Jenny. They all begin with flowers and fresh hopes, in a festive atmosphere, and it's only counterrevolution that makes it necessary for a revolution to take up arms!"

Then we all started yelling and interrupting each other and lighting cigarettes, until Debby and I somehow finally managed to convince Jenny. She admitted that her boss had very specialized talents, such as, for example, a talent for obtaining money to invest in his companies, but that he himself, without his inheritance, would never have been able to acquire a house and garden like that by the time he was forty, or his estate in Connecticut and all his millions of dollars.

"Even his grandfather was a millionaire," I said heatedly, "but I'd like to see how he would have done if he had had to start out here at the Hotel Diplomat. Would he have survived or not!"

We all started laughing, and Jenny suggested getting out of the Diplomat and going somewhere for coffee.

"Then you'll have to lend me some money, because I haven't got a cent," I said.

"Don't worry about it," Jenny said. "It's our treat."

We sat for a long time on some cardboard boxes waiting for the elevator. Dirty and squeaky though it was, it was the only one in all three wings and nine floors of the Hotel Diplomat.

We set off down Broadway, and they didn't like it or anything it had to offer. Finally, after going almost as far as Lincoln Center, we took our seats in a little restaurant called "La Creperie." I ordered something to eat and drank some wine, while the sisters had dessert and coffee. I ate while Jenny sat beside me and stroked my knee, which she had never done before. Something had clearly changed in her attitude toward me. The ice had broken somehow. Maybe the sight of my room and my awful slum hotel had persuaded her that I was real. I was just as honest as my hotel was. And just as straightforward.

Most likely that's just what it was. She had seen that all my bullshit about revolution wasn't entirely baseless, and she had seen my books and the typewriter and the sheets of paper. It was clear that I really was struggling, and that I had never had a fucking thing in life.

All three of us came out of the restaurant with our arms around each other, feeling very close. It was a warm evening, and the idle stoned were wandering up and down Broadway. Everybody wants to make that one life slipping continually through his fingers more beautiful and interesting, even if it's only in marijuana dreams. We have only one life, after all, and there's always less of it.

We walked along, and I could feel Jenny's warm, living body next to mine and her large hip, and my prick started to rise, and I took her by the breast with one hand like a country lad, embarrassed neither by Broadway nor by Debby. Jenny laughed.

Debby left us at Columbus Circle and started looking for a taxi, and I said to Jenny, "You realize of course that I want you very much."

"Yes," she said, "and I really, really want you. And you'll have me, but not now."

"Why not now, Jenny? When?" I asked.

She pretended to get angry and said, "I have to explain to this Russian ten times that I have a vaginal infection and that it hurts me."

"Is it dangerous?" I asked.

"Not for you," she said, "but it's painful for me."

I didn't remember her telling me about an infection. Maybe it was the night before, or when I was drunk. Probably it was when I was drunk.

"How long have you had the infection, how much time?" I asked.

"Eight months," she answered in embarrassment.

"When will you get over it?" I asked in dismay.

"Maybe I already have," Jenny said. "I'll find out tomorrow. I'm going to the doctor's."

Before getting into the taxi she patted me on the cheek and then suddenly took my hand and kissed it. And then they drove off, and I remained standing on Columbus Circle. Then I went back to the hotel — where else was there to go? My mood was pensive. She's a good girl, I thought. We could buy a farm and have children. We could live… I could become an American…

Back at the hotel I discovered I was out of cigarettes and I badly wanted to smoke. Usually in such circumstances I went down to the street where without any trouble along the edges of the sidewalk I found thick butts or even whole cigarettes lost by some goof or drunk. This time for some reason I didn't feel like waiting to take the elevator down and then back up again. My window was open, given the fact that it faced not the courtyard but open space, open all the way to Central Park in fact, since the buildings in that direction were all lower than the Diplomat. In the room above me they were stamping and yelling something to repetitious music, and so I went to close the window.

At that moment, carried by a gust of wind from an upper floor, a thick butt touched with lipstick plopped heavily on my windowsill. It wasn't even a butt, but a barely smoked cigarette. Oh, these women! I burst out laughing, picked up the butt, lit it, and while pacing around the room, sang: