Stanislaw had enough for meat and butter, but with artists, as with writers, if you're not among the first, you consider yourself a failure. The headlines in newspapers, the photographs, and the monographs are enjoyed by the few at the top. All that remained for Stanislaw was Marisza.
He would look and look at girls I would show him, and how could I not, since from time to time we would all sit in the kitchen, and his young friend Krysztof, a large, easygoing retired athlete, would come over too, and we would drink and smoke grass. Once Stanislaw couldn't restrain himself and started stroking Natasha's hair; she looks about twelve, gentlemen — you know, a small, blonde, rosy-cheeked creature with a white ass.
"Give her to me, Edward," Stanislaw said, as if joking.
I knew he wasn't really — I'd seen how hard he struggled to get back his lost connections again. But as the cunning and wise Oriental Ghupta had said, "If you're gone from New York for a month, all the girls are gone and have made other arrangements for themselves." It will be the same after our deaths, brothers, I wanted to say cheerfully to both Ghupta and Stanislaw — a few days after our deaths all our girls will have found new dicks for themselves, and the livelier ones will have made other arrangements the very same day. Nature leaves nothing of our sentiments behind, and all is reduced to dust and ashes, regardless of what you hold on to or use as your foundation.
"Take her," I said to Stanislaw. And I asked Natashka, "Would you like to go to bed with Uncle Stanislaw?" My girls are all very well trained now, and Natashka looked inquiringly at me.
She didn't need Stanislaw; she needed me, who could calmly send her off to the Pole's bed or anyone else's. He wasn't a bad sort, the Pole, and probably was a good lover, but she was mine. I didn't want her to go to bed with the Pole, and she said, "No, I don't want to."
As soon as I stopped paying attention to them, to my girls, they completely changed the way they behaved with me, and inflicted scenes of jealousy and outraged love on me, although without any response on my part. They love me and reproach me now, and are afraid of losing me. Whereas before it irritated them when I asked them where they went without me and whom they were seeing, now they get angry that I don't care at all what they do outside the confines of the millionaire's house — whether they're fucking somebody else or not. When they start telling me what they've been doing, my face clearly shows my boredom, as a result of which as a rule they suddenly stop in dismay and ask me, "Don't you care, Edward?"
"No. Why do you say that?" I ask. "Go on with what you were saying."
It's clear I'm not interested. It's always the same story, and how many have I heard in my dismal bedroom by the glow of cigarettes and to the background music of wine gurgling down my throat? Their stories are all alike, and even if I wanted to sympathize with what they're saying, I still wouldn't be able to, since it's all so trivial. Almost every one of them carries the burden of an unhappy love affair and some kind of grudge against the world. A grudge against her parents or, more often, against her husband or her lover. «He» is either mean-spirited or callous, and as a rule doesn't understand anything about «her» life.
They've devised the same kind of unhappy lives for themselves that I devised for myself with Jenny — we're all the same, only besides my prick I have will and talent, while they have their cunts and sometimes talent, but no will. Their lives are probably more tranquil in reality than they seem from my bed.
I don't treat them badly; oh no, I share everything I have with them — the house, wine, marijuana, money. I take them all to P. J. Clark's on Third Avenue, a former Irish bar turned restaurant.
There's nothing particularly special there, but the checkered table cloths, the old gravures, and the jerk-off waiters all create a sense of human comfort. Besides, they have very good steak tar-tare — not the slush they serve you at other New York restaurants.
I sit in P. J. Clark's with my girls and drink Beaujolais Villages.
We look at each other with friendly grins and touch each other's hands from time to time. Having just emerged from bed, we feel for each other the tenderness of animals who have been fucking each other, the affection of little dogs who have just fucked each other well. I always share with my girls my misfortunes, my ideas, and my little stories. I don't pretend my life is cloudless. "My agent called yesterday," I complain, "and told me another publisher has rejected my novel, a very progressive publisher that's published some good books in the past, but now that they've made some money, they've gotten lazy and are very careless about reading manuscripts. Liza doesn't want to drop me, she wants to continue working on it, but she admitted to me, 'To be honest, Edward, I don't know where to send the book anymore. Maybe you have some ideas? "
Together my girls are like a wife to me — one woman with many faces and bodies. I can share with them my anger about my most recent setbacks, and I don't get depressed anymore. I can tell them about my feverish plans for the future, and they understand; they aren't all that normal themselves. For some reason they come to me almost immediately after their attempts to kill themselves, or from deep depressions, or even from psychiatric clinics. It's obvious I don't attract healthy girls, or maybe healthy ones don't interest me, or maybe, gentlemen, there just aren't any healthy girls in the world?
Love? I love them in my own way, only I allocate my love among them. Would it really be fair for only one to have it? I feel the same tenderness for them that I felt for Jenny when I looked at her for the first time in our garden — a tenderness for those creatures who are alive at the same time I am, the tenderness of a male dog for his bitches. I service them and protect them from enemies. I would live with them all in one house, but they rebel, almost every one of them wanting all of me and not satisfied with merely a part. Then it's necessary to get rid of the rebels, to replace them with fresh young girls.
They often get drunk, my girls, because it's hard for them to have a normal relationship with me; they get drunk and take drugs for courage, and that's when they decide to rebel.
Even the little pianist Natasha rebelled against me in a way. I was sitting with her in a dark barn-like bar on the Lower East Side and drinking J & B, of course (their company should send me a case of whiskey once a month for the publicity I give them: "Edward Limonov drinks only J & B"). Natasha, as I've already mentioned, looks about twelve, an exaggeration of course, although she's almost young enough to be my daughter, and that isn't an exaggeration.
We were on a spree, although where we drank before that I don't remember. My girl, drunkenly puckering her little face, berated me for my indifference to life, for my lack of curiosity. The accusation of a lack of curiosity was unjust, but I didn't say anything: She wanted to fight. The fact is that all her grievances came in the end to something like, "You're special, you're unique, you can be, so why aren't you what I need?" Translating it all into normal language meant, "Why don't you love me?"
The bar was huge and cold and dated back to hippie days, and a gigantic bartender of about forty with hair as long now as it had been back then served punk boys and girls in leather jackets and multicolored tufts of hair. There were a few older types in the bar too, unshaven and with dark circles under their eyes. I said nothing, smoking one cigarette after another and drinking my J & B. As I get older I feel less and less the need to explain myself, especially since I know from long experience that you can't explain; everybody understands the words differently, and it's useless.