"What's the matter?" Linda asked me in an indolent, homey voice.

"They just brought an urgent letter," I said cheerfully, "with a check in it for…" and then I faltered, since it was actually hard for me to say the number out loud — "for four hundred thousand dollars."

Linda understood, and started laughing. "I realize, Edward, that you've never seen a check for a sum like that in your life. Relax, it's nothing special. After you've worked for us a little longer, you'll get used to it. I started trembling and gawking too when I first started working for Steven eight years ago. Just put the check on my desk."

"Wouldn't it be better to put it in the desk?" I asked uncertainly.

"Well, then put it in the desk, if you want to," Linda agreed, losing interest in me.

I put the check in the desk drawer in her office and sat for a while on her wheeled leather chair between the IBM typewriter and the telephone, and then took the check out of the drawer and looked at it. The unlikely amount of $400,000.00 stood out blood red against the pale lettuce green of the check like a Soviet banner over a green Czechoslovakian town. I tried to figure out how many years I'd have to work to accumulate such a sum. I was earning nine thousand a year in cash; that meant I'd have to work for Steven for forty-five years to make that kind of money. I thought that I would hardly live to be eighty, so I would have to think of some way to speed up the process. I hid the check and sat for a while longer, then took it out again and put it on the desk. After all, I wasn't expecting any guests that weekend.

Steven arrived for the first time in a limousine one evening in the middle of January — he had been skiing in Colorado — praised his servant for the steps, glanced at the book The Women's Room, which the servant was reading while sitting in the kitchen, and then asked the servant if he liked the book. I said it was terrible. Gatsby said he hadn't read the book, but he thought it would have to be terrible — neither employer nor servant were feminists, as you no doubt have already been able to guess, gentlemen. At that time, the inhabitants of the United States looked eagerly for either feminism or anti-feminism in every aspect of life, the feminist epidemic having burst on the scene even before the roller skating epidemic. Even people who had once seemed far from stupid to me suddenly turned out to be idiots whenever feminism was concerned. They all wanted to be liberal and ally themselves as quickly as possible with the latest liberal superstition.

I didn't say any of this to Steven, although I would have enjoyed talking to him. Except for Linda, I really didn't have many people to talk to in the millionaire's house either then or now, which is why I spend so much time in internal monologues. Gatsby remained in the kitchen no more than a couple of minutes to drink a glass of milk, and then he went off to bed. He never has time, or if he does, he prefers to talk instead of listen, as a result of which he misses a great deal, I think. If I should ever notice that I've gotten fond of chattering and that other people are actually listening to my words, I'll make an effort to look around and see if among my listeners there aren't at least a couple of quietly skeptical Limonovs.

When I came downstairs to the kitchen at 6:50 the next morning, it was still empty. I sat there by myself until 8:30, looking out the window and listening to every sound in the house, before I realized that the Flying WASP had already split.

I've since learned how to tell quite easily whether or not Gatsby's in the house on the basis of some very simple signs — every servant knows what they are. For example, if I don't find The New York Times by the front door when I get up, that means that my employer has risen before me, or that he hasn't spent the night in the house but has been off fucking somewhere else, and picked up the newspaper on his way in after taking a taxi home. He also has the habit of drinking white wine, the Italian Corvo, with his women before going off to bed with them, so that, as I've already mentioned, I always keep two or three bottles of it in the refrigerator for him and a case of it in the cellar. So, if there's a bottle of Corvo missing from the refrigerator, that almost certainly means that Gatsby has a lady with him. Around eleven o'clock in die morning, Olga brings the empty bottle and two glasses down to the kitchen with a regularity that I find touching.

Now I try to get up before Steven does, so that I'm already sitting and finishing The New York Times when he comes into the kitchen with his hair uncombed and his strong legs and bare feet sticking out from under his short robe. I always have his coffee ready or at least some boiling water so that I can make it at once. As His Majesty is sitting down to read the paper, I'm already serving him his coffee in one of the huge mugs we have in two colors, red and blue. If Gatsby has a woman upstairs, he doesn't stay in the kitchen very long, but takes his coffee, paper, and another cup of coffee back upstairs after asking me to make breakfast or not, as his mood or that of his lady dictates. If Gatsby takes the coffee back upstairs, it's almost certain the lady is Polly, a cultivated but slightly inhibited woman. But if in the morning Gatsby asks for a pot of tea, that means he's spent the night with the Tea Lady, as Linda and I call her. The Tea Lady is another of Steven's more or less regular girlfriends and of Asian origin, I think.

If Gatsby orders breakfast, I usually fix him a tray with something simple. He eats a lot at lunch and dinner, and so for breakfast he usually has just English muffins lightly browned in the toaster, butter, cheese if there is any, and jam. Only very occasionally will he ask me to make him an omelet. He drinks orange juice too, of course, as almost all Americans do, and it would be a strange thing if you too didn't want orange juice in the morning after getting sloshed every night, and I suspect Gatsby is in a pretty good state every night, since His Highness drinks all day, beginning with lunch, continuing with dinner and after dinner, and ending late at night with a bottle or two of Corvo. What amazes me is that he never takes the hair of the dog to relieve his hangover — just orange juice and cold soda water. We always have ten or twelve cylinders of seltzer on hand which are brought to us every Thursday by a funny little man from Brooklyn named Mr. Schuman, who looks like a mosquito. I always keep a couple or three of them in our gigantic refrigerator — so large in fact that you could easily fit a couple of bodies into it.

Gatsby almost always comes down to get the breakfast tray himself. He could make me bring it up to him, but he's too liberal to do that. Demanding that their servants bring the tray to their bedroom is the hallmark of bad bosses — our neighbors, for example, whose servants have told me what they're forced to put up with. But my boss is a good one, the best of all. If he doesn't want to come and get the tray, we simply use the dumb waiter. But that happens pretty rarely.

Whenever Steven's in New York, Linda arrives at the house at nine o'clock sharp, and sometimes even earlier. She always knocks on the kitchen door in precisely the same way. Not long ago I begged her to change the way she knocks for the sake of variety. She did for a little while, but now she does it the old way again. Linda's first question is, "Where is he?" If «he» is in the bathroom, she relaxes and sits down in the kitchen with me for a bit.

Gatsby takes a bath every morning, a bath being one of his principal pleasures in life, as his oldest son, Henry, told me. His bathtub is a very special one, large and deep, and custom made. I don't deny myself the pleasure of using his bathtub either, and from time to time luxuriate in it with a girl, or even two. And I always think, whenever I'm sitting in his bathroom, what would happen if he suddenly came in and saw me and my naked girls. But that never happens — we're too well organized. We have an extremely detailed schedule of Gatsby's activities, so that I always know ahead of time when to expect him. He surprised me only once when there were naked people running around the house, although fortunately I wasn't one of them.