"Why don't you say anything?" Jenny asked irritably.

Making a wry face and pulling her skirt out of the clutches of the machine, I said, "I'll kill you at five."

"Why at five?" she asked in puzzlement.

I didn't say anything, but thought to myself, Well, gonorrhea then. It's even fair — I have to pay the price, don't I, for living here and fucking Jenny and having the pleasure of seeing the children's room and not having to suffer the heat thanks to the air conditioner… and for the expensive French wine she brings me from the cellar, and for the garden and the other pleasures? Obviously I have to pay the price…

"You'll have to see a doctor," Jenny said.

"Uh huh," I answered, and pressed down on the pedal again, stitching the next seam.

"You're not being serious, Edward," she said.

"What am I supposed to do?" I said, turning toward her for the first time in the whole conversation. And really, what did she want from me? Gonorrhea is just gonorrhea; nobody dies of it, and if they do, so what?

And I left her to go to the bathroom — there was a bathroom in every bedroom in the millionaire's house. I pissed, and afterwards washed my cock in the wash basin while standing on tiptoe and stretching, and then wiped it with satisfaction on a face towel. "You get it too!"

Jenny didn't say anything to me after I came back to the room, and we went downstairs to the kitchen to get something to eat. Another friend of Jenny's had come over too — Martha, a stocky blonde just as pimply as the others. I knew from Jenny that she was pregnant and was planning to have an abortion soon. I sat down with them and ate some shchi I had made a couple of days before, and they had some too. I sat there and fumed. The shchi was very hot; even the potatoes in it were overcooked and falling apart.

If you're going to infect me with gonorrhea, at least don't overcook the shchi. Why the fuck was it left on so long! She forgot about it, the cunt! I thought to myself.

I was sitting at the table with three defective sluts and dreaming about how I'd like to chase them all out, the pimple-faces. Jennifer was particularly disgusting — pug-nosed, with a rose in her hair. She had on a yellow skirt that day too. She had her feet up on the air conditioner; they all went around in their bare feet. They were drinking beer. Fat. And then they complain in The Hite Report about what a poor job men do of fucking them, I thought resentfully. What kind of man would you have to be to get it up for a fat, pimply creature like that?

As soon as I finished eating, I went upstairs to Henry's old room without saying anything, opened the door to the roof, and sat down in the doorway. A few minutes later Jenny came in.

"If you won't go to my doctor, I'll never fuck you again and I won't see you anymore," she said angrily.

Go fuck yourself, I thought. She gave me gonorrhea, and now it's my fault too. I'm fed up with your fucking house, you servant, and this whole musty summertime story. You peasant cunt! And I walked out, saying, "I'll come back when you calm down."

Neither Jenny nor I could hold out in proud solitude for very long. Two days at most. During that time I managed to make the rounds of the darker Broadway dives and visit two prostitutes. There was never any doubt in my mind that I didn't have gonorrhea, and if I had, the prostitutes would probably have detected it, since they always carefully examine the client's penis before setting down to work. After rolling in the mud a little, I at once felt better and freer, and in two days was again sleeping on "the other bed," while Jenny groaned in her sleep nearby — the air conditioner was on, and it was cold.

Autumn came. I remember peering out the window at the wet terrace and its wet chairs with the usual autumn thoughts going through my mind, as if looking timidly out at chaos from the comfortable nook I had wrested from life — the millionaire's town house. Sometimes I would open the door to the terrace and stand confidently on the threshold, while chaos whistled around my feet. Looking at it from the millionaire's little house, it didn't scare me — it wasn't intimidating but defeated, not what it had been from my hotel. Seen from the hotel, it was a genuine, epic, old-fashioned, invincible chaos. But in the town house I just poured myself a shot of cognac, put a slice of lemon and a piece of Camembert on a red breakfast tray, sat down in the solarium with some quiet music on and maybe a book in my hands, and gazed into die rainy garden undismayed.

You see, the rich have over us poor not only the advantages of property; they are also freer from the onslaughts of chaos. It mounts its attacks, but the rich man merely lights a fire in his fireplace or orders somebody else to do it (I light Mr. Grey's fires for him), and sits down, warms his hands, lights his pipe, and puffs a pleasant tobacco. Chaos is frightened away by the fireplace and the pipe. And it's frightened away most of all by beautiful women. Whereas all the poor man can do is hang around the streets, so that whenever the weather is bad, his whole life comes to pieces.

So my life was sweet. My only duty was maintaining good relations with Jenny. And, as you see, I did maintain them, upsetting them only occasionally, but never seriously. Whenever she started in on her favorite topic — the children she wanted to have with me — I nodded with enthusiasm, "Sure, sure, Jenny, of course we'll have children." But at the same time I thought that to merge my sperm with her ovum, or whatever it's called, would be contrary to nature.

It was during this time that Dr. Krishna finally had the sense to examine Jenny thoroughly — I don't think it was his idea alone; somebody had obviously suggested it to him — and a huge tumor was discovered in her vagina. So much for obscurantism. You can believe in whatever you want, in forms with three hundred questions or in gonorrhea, and never have the sense to conduct a simple medical examination, to look inside her cunt. In any case, Jenny now thought she had cancer (!) and was undergoing treatment. Whatever sexual relations I had with her came to an end. She didn't feel like sucking my cock anymore. First, we were already pals; second, how could a person do that if she had cancer?.. It wouldn't have bothered me.

I really wanted to fuck, but I did my best to sublimate, to transfer my sexual energy to some other domain. I became furiously active, and after several setbacks finally found a literary agent with Madame Margarita's help, or more accurately, a female literary agent, and she agreed to work with me. Unfortunately, Liza's still working with me, and the book that so delighted Efimenkov remains unsold…

I also did all the things the classic failure's supposed to do. I wrote long letters to the newspapers and magazines, on political topics mostly, and I even sent a letter to President Carter, which nobody answered of course. The newspapers and magazines didn't answer either. I used Jenny to check my clumsy translations into English, and she either laughed or got mad, but she still helped me. In exchange I got some patterns and made her skirts with ruffles, which she had grown increasingly fond of. I have no illusion the skirts I made were masterpieces of the tailor's art, but Jenny liked them and they made her happy. So, as you see, we worked together excellently in life, even if not in bed.

From time to time Jenny would buy me presents. Knowing, say, that I liked beautiful boots and that my own were starting to wear out, she would with a smile suddenly hand me a box — "Surprise!" — containing just the kind of boots I wanted to replace my old ones with. Once she bought me several pairs of jeans and some sweaters all at once, which, given the dilapidated state of my wardrobe, were very much to the point. In general she took care of me like a mother.