How is Mark going to put up with her? I thought. "Goodbye, Jenny Jackson," I said at the door.

"Goodbye, Edward Limonov," she replied with a smile. Nobody asked me to go to the airport, and so I didn't. The door shut behind her.

Only then, gentlemen, did I realize how lucky I was that Jenny was gone from my life. It's good, I thought, when your whole future is open to you, wide open again, and you can do whatever the hell you want. For a start I went up to her former room, now mine, and thoroughly washed it and threw out everything I thought should be thrown away, with a firm hand clearing away all her trash and her dirt. I worked on that project for the next two days — Saturday and Sunday. As I've been saying, Jenny hadn't done anything for the last several months, except read books on babies and how to raise them.

On Monday Linda arrived and my working life began.

"Edward," she said, "the basic thing you need to know about Steven is that he's not a detail person. He pays other people, people like you and me, to work out the details for him. He only gives general instructions, and he likes you to anticipate his thoughts."

"Okay," I said, "I'll anticipate his thoughts." I didn't have any idea then how I was going to do that, and I still don't, but I was already well beyond that other Edward, the naive Russian, and was saying "Yes!" to everything, and somehow it has worked out. It's an easy thing to say "yes," and it doesn't cost you anything. And so I said, "Yes," "Of course," and "I'll do it."

"The fact Steven hired you means you're more than halfway there, but were you aware that Nancy wanted to hire Marilyn," Linda said, lighting a cigarette, "a girl who used to work for her on the farm in Connecticut? She's taken Marilyn under her wing, and Steven hired you against her wish. Just between us," Linda continued, "that's the main reason he took you. Nancy wanted a spy in the house, but Steven can't stand Marilyn — she's fat, ugly, and pimply — and he won't have a spy in his home; he wants to keep his personal life private."

"Yes, I know all about Marilyn; Jenny told me," I replied, although I had never suspected that my being hired as housekeeper concealed such complicated behind-the-scenes machinations, intrigues, and struggles. "I thought Steven hired me because he's a snob," I said, "so he could brag a little to his friends about his butler being a writer."

"That too," Linda nodded, "but you'll still have to try to please Nancy, if you don't want her undermining your position here. My feeling is that she still hasn't given up the idea of Marilyn. So be careful!"

"What should I do?" I asked.

"You'll have to try really hard, and when they see that you're indispensable," Linda said, "they'll leave you alone. You'll have to straighten up the house, clean out the basement, rearrange the tools, check each room individually, and fix all the little defects…" And she gave me an extremely long list of things to do, including scraping and repainting the front door.

"And after I've finished taking out all that rubbish, they'll hire Marilyn," I said.

"What do you want?" Linda asked irritably.

And, really, what did I want? I went downstairs to the basement and worked there until six in the evening, and I did so because I wanted to remain in that house and be for a time a servant of the world bourgeoisie, at least until I got tired of it or until something else turned up. What else could an opportunist do? We always like to get ourselves in as tight as possible with the rich and famous. Maybe I'll find myself a rich woman here, flashed feebly through my mind. Then we'll see, I thought, as I cleaned out those Augean stables. The labors of Hercules and the cleaning of the Augean stables — you remember. It was only then that I realized what a shitty housekeeper Jenny was. The basement obviously hadn't been cleaned for years, while she sat warming her ass in the kitchen and nurturing her "tummy," as she called it, tending it and pampering it for her belly dancing efforts.

I, the diligent whore Limonov, licked it all up and even found in the basement some remnants of the orange carpet that covered the hallway and stairs, and used them to repair the first three steps, which were completely worn out and torn. I knew how to serve — the first thing was to cover up the most conspicuous holes and let your boss see that you were working and make him aware of the results. And I also sorted out all our tools, electrical tools in one drawer and mechanical in another, and even sorted all the nuts and bolts and put white labels on the drawers so you could tell where everything was.

But the three steps made the biggest impression, naturally. When about ten days later Steven made his first appearance at the house after hiring me, he noticed those three steps, since they had bothered him too; they were in fact the first thing you saw when you came in, and although he didn't really want to spend money on a house in which he spent so little time, he was ashamed of those steps before his guests, who were as snobbish as he was. And so was Linda, whom in the first months of my employment I didn't trust at all, considering her a spy for her employer, which in a certain sense she probably was, and not only then, either — I even overheard Linda telling Nancy on the phone, "…He fixed the steps in the hall… He does everything well."

I'll be damned if I didn't learn something from them — from Linda and from Gatsby, too. Both good and bad, depending only on how you look at it. "Don't trust anybody but yourself," Linda taught me. "Check on everybody — everybody! Start from the premise that the people you work with are lazy assholes; that's the only way you'll avoid mistakes."

She taught me not to trust anybody, and I didn't, whether it was the butcher, the proprietor of the Modern Age framing shop that mounted and framed our pictures and photographs, the watch repairman to whom we sent Nancy's gold and Steven's ultramodern quartz and electronic watches to be fixed, the furrier Kaplan, or the opticians at the extraordinarily expensive optical shop of Clermont-Ferrand where I took Steven's no less ultramodern glasses, or whether it was the bartenders and waiters who came to assist at our parties, or the electrician John, or the many, many others. Linda herself said I was paranoid about the bartenders, whom I virtually frisked when they left, in my stubbornness thereby rescuing a whole case of champagne once. Nor, as a result, did I have an iota of trust for Linda either, and never told her anything she could use against me. I was a very capable and diligent pupil, dear Linda, and "trust nobody" meant nobody.

Once on a Saturday, a day when Linda doesn't come in, the mailman delivered along with a pile of junk mail a registered letter which he asked Limonov to sign for. I signed for it, and since it was January and a wet snow was falling, I asked the mailman in for a cup of coffee out of altruism and boredom. He passed through to the kitchen, leaving muddy footprints behind, and drank his coffee while we chatted for a while. Outside the snow was coming down in sheets. The mailman was like any other — nothing special, a moustached man of about fifty who complained about the weather and his salary just as they all do. As soon as he left, I went down to the basement for a rag and then spent five minutes or so cleaning up the mud he had tracked in. And you want to be a lover of mankind, I thought to myself, and then from boredom and curiosity I opened the registered letter, from which a check dropped to the floor.

I picked it up and looked at the figure and couldn't believe my eyes. Printed on the check in thick red numerals was the number 400,000 — four hundred thousand dollars! Linda had asked me always to call her if there was anything urgent. I thought this was urgent enough to disturb her on her Saturday off, and I dialed her number.