When I'm in a very bad mood, instead of Madison, I walk along Central Park South, where our city's most expensive hotels are drawn up in a line. In the spring or fall when it's raining, especially when it's raining, the entrances of the expensive hotels and restaurants present an unusual spectacle. Huge elegant automobiles drive up one after the other out of the mist, their chauffeurs obsequiously leaping out with big umbrellas, while absent-minded and imposing gentlemen assist their ladies from the dark warmth of the cars and fastidiously open their wallets to give the doormen a tip. Friends meet friends — they all know each other, these wealthy people — and at once kiss the little hands of their ladies there on the street, while a sudden breeze lifts the white scarf of one of die participants in that scene and carries to me, a modest passerby, the smoke of an expensive cigar and with it, the faint fragrance of warm feminine perfume.
I have in the millionaire's house the most expensive cigars and wines, wines that couldn't even be found, perhaps, in the cellars of the restaurants they frequent, and if I wish, I can open a bottle of Château Lafite Rothschild 1964 and drink it. But I'm a servant, and not one of their race. I know that sooner or later they'll accept me under the name of writer — it's inevitable. They won't be able to withstand my strength, and I'll descend on them and fuck their women, and their women will be wild about me and my masculinity and wickedness. That's right, my masculinity, for a wave of masculinity has for the first time in my life emerged on my face with its prominent cheekbones and taken it over. But how to survive the day and its humiliations; that's the hardest thing. I will endure it all, I think stubbornly, while examining the decked-out crowd around the Plaza — no, you won't have that pleasure, I won't go crazy and buy a Beretta from a pimp I know on Times Square, a little black instrument of death just like his, and bump off a congressman out of bitterness and hatred — a disgusting swine-faced congressman for all my sufferings, for all the sufferings of the pitiful failure Edward. No, I won't give you that pleasure. I will survive, survive and endure a great many more rejections from publishers, and many more years of empty evenings like this, and thousands of walks like today's. I will survive them and join you on the pinnacle as the most intelligent and malevolent. And not for your company, which I'm sure will be only a bit more amusing than that of Jenny and her friends, and not even for your women, but for myself. I want to prove to myself that I can. The main thing is that I respect myself.
Returning to my refuge in the millionaire's little house, I realize that for many years I've wanted somebody to be waiting for me at my door. And I carefully glance ahead, seeking the doorway of our house in the darkness to see if perhaps somebody might be sitting there and waiting for me. But there's no one there. And that is yet one more small proof of the fact that in this world nobody cares about the servant. But then I don't have to care about them either, the servant thinks.
Tatiana turned up again several days later under the pretext of needing to talk to me. Her usual story. I immediately stuck a large gin and tonic in her hand, since she's much easier to deal with after she's had something to drink.
"You're the one who did this to me, Limonov," Tatiana said. "You did it on purpose so I'd get pregnant."
Such a declaration came as a surprise even from her. "Wait a second, how old are you, girl? You're thirty-one and you've fucked a lot of men, or at least you say you have, and you enjoy it, don't you?" I said. Tatiana was silent. I continued. "How can you screw around without taking birth-control pills or any other precautions, hm? It's dumb. It's idiotic. And doesn't it seem a little abnormal to you to blame me because you're pregnant by another man? Would I blame you if I got some girl pregnant, the village idiot, say?"
Tatiana looked at me with her Spanish eyes and said stubbornly, "It's still your fault. I didn't want to go out with him, so why did you give him the phone?"
"In the first place, you always said you wanted me to introduce you to a rich man. Didn't you? Why did you ask then? And in the second place, if you didn't really want to go out with him, all you had to do was say 'no, " I said.
"But he was so sneaky about it, the animal," Tatiana continued, sipping her gin and tonic. "I had no idea he would attack me. We came back from a movie and he told me he wanted to take a shower and change and we would go to a restaurant, and then he took advantage of the moment and jumped on me. And he came inside me, the Burmese animal."
Thus did Tatiana lament, and I laughed uncontrollably. In the first place, I wasn't at all convinced she was pregnant. And I was also beginning to realize that getting into scrapes, both big and small, was for Tatiana a way of life.
"Tell me, where does he live?" she started asking me.
"Of course," I said, "I'll tell you right now; come on," and I took her by the hand up to my room on the elevator, and in spite of all her «noes» took her clothes off and started fucking her. At the height of that process, the phone rang, of course. Another time I wouldn't have picked it up for anything, but I was expecting a guest at the house, a Polish artist-friend of the boss's, and it could have been him calling from the airport. It wasn't. It was my boss, Steven, calling from God knows where to ask me to record a film about Vietnam on video tape for an elderly woman neighbor of his in Connecticut whose son had died in Vietnam. "It already started five minutes ago," the boss said in an apologetic tone.
Fuck the mother and her dead son! Why reopen old wounds? I thought, pulling my prick out of the warm Tatiana, putting on my pants and black shirt, and running downstairs to turn on the tape machine. They won't even let you fuck in this house! I inserted a sixty-minute cassette, pressed the record button, rode back upstairs on the elevator to fuck some more, and once again plunged my prick into the only slightly cooled cunt of Tatiana, who was almost in tears and kicking and howling something about the CIA and the KGB.
"And the CIA and KGB are all the same as you; they just sit there, the scum, and won't let me live either!" she screamed, although thanks to the action of my prick she soon quieted down and merely moaned, while I laughed and softly and derisively said to her, "What's that, you pregnant whore, what did you say?"
When Tatiana's fucking she has an enchanting look about her, and her body, though slender, is very soft and what's called well-fucked in Russian. An hour later, after coming on her eyes and forehead, and in her mouth, I ran downstairs again to change the cassette. I got there just in time — it was down to the last few feet. I put on a new one, pressed the record button again, and then went down to the kitchen for a drink. Sitting in the kitchen was Gatsby's step-brother Mr. Richardson with a couple of guests, I don't remember who. I drank a glass of vodka, and after asking Mr. Richardson to turn the television off in an hour — the film about Vietnam was exactly two hours long, and I could hear explosions and machinegun fire coming from it — I took the elevator back upstairs and grabbed Tatiana again. The pregnant whore lazily told me that she had just that minute come again after masturbating while I was downstairs. "You didn't think I was going to wait for you, did you?" she asked insolently.
"All right," I said, "that means you're still hot," and pulling her bottom to me — she was lying on her side — I stuck my prick into her crack, which was already beginning to dry. When after a little while we were both starting to enjoy it again, the abominable intercom buzzer sounded, the same one that Efimenkov had used to wake me up in the middle of the night. What the fuck is it now? I thought without climbing off of Tatiana. The buzzer didn't go off again, but there was soon a knock at the door.