Jenny borrowed a car from one of her friends, and on a cold, snowless first of December, I dragged all my shopping bags, my pictures, and my suitcase out of my hole in the hotel and took my leave of the manager, who said, "Good luck, Comrade Limonov!" Dressed in an ankle-length black coat with a caracul collar that had belonged to her grandmother and, for some reason, in a black dress too, Jenny stepped on the gas and we set off for a new life. The "Destruction is Creation!" poster I had left hanging in the hotel. Looking back for the last time I saw standing in the wind next to the hotel a little crowd of our black brothers, including I think my neighbor Ken. He had a long and passionate conversation with somebody in the hallway on one of my last nights in the hotel. When out of curiosity I opened my door a crack to see who it was and what was going on, Ken was alone. Poor guy, he was evidently already suffering from delirium tremens.

"Hurrah!" I shouted when I was finally alone after Jenny had left and the boy Joe had gone to a meeting of the building association. I had succeeded in climbing out of that shit after all. Congratulations, Limonov! I said to myself seriously and triumphantly.

I started enjoying life a lot more then — it was a new period. I became exceptionally zealous about equipping «my» new apartment, as I affectionately called it. By New Year's, I had completely furnished my two rooms; I even had a large desk given to me by Jenny — who else? — and for the first time in my life had the pleasure of my own desk with a great number of drawers into which I at once put all my papers. I had a bookcase too, old and slightly rotten, more a shelf than a case, but exceptionally pleasing to me, and I started buying and stealing books in order to fill it up as quickly as possible, and when I did fill it up, the books made their way onto the windowsills and other convenient places.

I didn't fight with Jenny anymore; my apartment brought us together. Its appearance in her life provided a new object for motherly concern and practical activity. Every time Jenny visited, she brought something along with her: kitchen towels, or a skillet, or some dishes she had picked up very cheap — "Guess how much they were, Edward?"

Once she dropped by with Bridget, Martha, and Douglas, Douglas out of breath from dragging in a box of French wine, and the girls carrying between them about twenty bottles of different kinds of alcohol quite essential to any decent home. A small loan from Mr. Grey, who would never notice this drop in his sea of bottles. I couldn't even begin to count all the stuff Jenny dragged over to the apartment, including such things as linen and even a huge quantity of various Mister Cleans and Spic-'n'-Spans and the other poisonous liquids and powders with which my new homeland is so richly endowed.

But I got the bed myself. I too had certain practical talents, not to mention a super I knew in a huge stone box on West End Avenue.

I even went so far as to get myself a Christmas tree. I didn't have anything on it except for lights, that being as far as my money would go, unfortunately, but it didn't matter. The main thing was that I had my own Christmas tree reaching to the ceiling as in my childhood. It was as if a war had ended and everything was beautiful once more and life was set right again. I put the Christmas tree in the corner of my study, or my office, as I called it, and frequently turned on the lights and lay down by it, by my own tree, and enjoyed it. I had a home. Not a hole into which a tormented animal retires only to sleep, but a home. For the first time in many difficult years. A home.

It's natural that when you acquire an apartment, you acquire expenses too, and so I took whatever work I could find — anything to keep from sliding back into the past and its mode of life. And when Seva, a photographer I knew, asked me to help him turn some empty industrial space he had just rented on Madison Avenue in the twenties into a loft for four dollars an hour, I happily agreed, and we started knocking down partitions. Jenny was very glad I had found work. She was in fact an exact clone of my mother, who had always been very happy too when after getting stuck in some shit, I found myself a regular job. Even if it was difficult, dirty, mindless work.

After breaking down the partitions, we began putting up new walls, after which there was plastering and painting to do. As a consequence of the close working relationship that developed between us, Seva once asked me to go with him and his wife to a party given by a photographer friend of his, a woman who also taught at the School of Visual Arts. I went with Seva, since I have never turned down a party, neither then nor now, and we had a lot to drink.

Sarah was a pupil of the lady photographer, and I remember she was the first to talk, provoking me and laughing at me… The result was that we left together. It was a rainy New York winter evening, and I suggested she come with me. And she did…

The most distinctive tiling about my new girl was her wig. In the process of fucking or, if you prefer, the sex act, I was suddenly amazed to see that her wig had slipped down over her eyes. Or more accurately, I was astonished to see that her scalp had slipped down over her eyes, and at once realized that it was a wig. Unembarrassed, Sarah rearranged the wig with one hand; the other was busy holding my balls. We fucked all night lying on the floor by the Christmas tree, on a mattress brought in from the bedroom. Sarah's cunt wasn't too big, her skin was white, and the little Jew humped like a nanny goat. Twenty-two years old, a little shorter than me, hook-nosed, slender, and with large dark eyes, she was a true daughter of the Jewish race, a seeker of adventure and collector of the most diverse experiences, including even the lesbian kind, and was ready at any moment to go wherever you liked. All she needed was to grab her small but voluminous shoulder bag.

Around midday we crawled out of bed and went down to the Village, having decided to get something to eat there. Snow was falling, fluffy and light just like in Moscow, falling and melting on the dark New York sidewalks, while the inadequately dressed New Yorkers pulled their hoods over their heads, or wrapped themselves in scarves, or opened their umbrellas. Our insolent New York children packed the wet snow into snowballs and threw them at people. The skeleton of the Great City stood out vividly against the snow storm.

Sarah and I walked arm in arm, and she gazed at me lovingly the whole time — you know, with that satisfied and sated look a woman gives you when you have fucked her well, have fucked her unbelievably well. I was her man, her male, in the most direct and unashamed sense of the word, her prick that had taken and untied die knot of her passions and tensions, so that they had all flowed out of her, leaving nothing behind, and it was good for her to be with me, and she was calm and easy, and her body didn't torment her anymore. How do I know all this? I saw it all in her loving gaze. I know that fawning feminine gaze.

We came to a little restaurant called Johnny Day's I've visited many times — unlike inquisitive New Yorkers, I'm conservative — and where we ordered steaks and Beaujolais Villages and talked animatedly. After all, we still didn't know each other and there was a lot to talk about, although during the conversation too I caught that fawning, submissive look again from time to time. I enjoyed myself, I'll admit — we drank two bottles of Beaujolais and I sat there and made up some boastful lies, I remember, and she knew I was making it all up, but we didn't care. We were "having a good time" — I love that charming expression — and laughing, while outside the large picture window of Johnny Day's, the snow was falling.