Natasha was wrong to say I never paid any attention to her. I did and was even very proud of her virtuosity on the piano, and often asked her to play for my guests, if any were at the house. She was, moreover, a Russian girl, and I felt a sort of responsibility for her — I don't know before whom; all right, before God, although I don't believe in Him — a responsibility for my little sister Natasha, a girl from my own tribe. I tried not to hurt her. Sometimes she would spend several days at the house with me, and besides not having to fuck me, she played the piano for hours, and walked in the garden, and rocked in the rocking chair, and read if she wanted to, or listened to recordings of her beloved classical music, and in general had a good time.

Although many of the things Natasha accused me of were ridiculous and clumsy, I still gave her letter a lot of thought. The Limonov in her letter was after all very like his employer, Gatsby. That fact both pleased and troubled me, for I wanted to be both like Gatsby and not like him.

Chapter Nine

Henry always stands off to the side in family photographs. He has a separate, naive, but also slightly sardonic expression on his face. The other members of the family, and the younger children too, are much less refined than he is. He's as tall as his father, Steven, but extraordinarily thin, even for his seventeen years, so that it seems he is about to break in two at the waist. He has short blond hair like his mother, Nancy, and on his nose he wears the delicate glasses of a Parisian student. He hardly looks like a typical American boy.

Henry and I are friends. Not great friends; he doesn't live at the millionaire's house after all but goes to school, but in the ten or more times we have met, we've become fairly close. We even share certain enthusiasms — James Bond films, for instance.

At the end of April Henry came down from Connecticut accompanied by a dozen other boys and girls, his mother, Nancy, having called beforehand to warn me of their arrival and ask the butler Edward to look after the young people. As it turned out, there was going to be a children's costume party at our house to celebrate the end of the school year. Henry planned to shoot at the party, the final scene of a movie he was producing and in which he had one of the main roles. As you see, Henry was playing at being his father: Papa had been a producer once, and Henry had turned to the art of film too.

The children arrived as if on elephants in several large cars daubed with paint, and cheerfully started dragging their stuff into the house: costumes, a movie camera, bags, candles, blue lights, colored paper… Along with all the other stuff there was even a large lemon tree in a tub. Henry ceremoniously introduced me to the other children — he was a polite boy. Their girls, the housekeeper remarked to himself, might easily have been mine. Some of them were even very pretty, and inasmuch as they all went to an exceptionally privileged and expensive private high school, they were all obviously from very good families; their faces were cultivated. Their school had been founded by the famous arms manufacturer Mr. X in order to atone to humanity for his sins. It would be interesting to count the number of people who perished from his primitive but reliable death machines before he was suddenly overcome with remorse and the desire to make amends. I've always been touched by innocent monsters like Mr. X, whose number includes the inventor of dynamite, Mr. Nobel, and the great altruist Mr. Sakharov, one of the fathers of the Soviet hydrogen bomb.

Apologizing with elegant good manners, the well-bred Henry told me his mama had said he could invite ten people or so to the party, "but we started counting, Edward, and there will be about fifteen or maybe even more, since if you don't invite somebody they'll be offended for the rest of their lives. I realize that means extra responsibility and work for you, Edward, but we'll be very quiet and afterward we'll pick up the whole house. Only please don't tell Mother, all right?"

Well, whatever I am, I'm not an informer. Seeing their rather meager supplies of alcohol, I even gave them a box of Corvo ripped off from Steven, and a couple of bottles each of whiskey, gin, and vodka, for which they were extremely grateful. I had the key to the wine cellar, and although the cellar is never locked, this time I locked it — the kids might get drunk and break all the expensive bottles.

To be honest, I looked forward to their party with great impatience. The fact is, I'd taken into my head the usual servant's desire — to fuck one of their girls. A little high-school girl, a blonde. To smoke some grass and then fuck her. A desire that was, if you think about it, more social than sexual. Taking one of their girls was the same as taking something from the world of my employer, as stealing something that didn't belong to me, a servant — as revenging myself, so to speak. Sex, as you've probably already guessed, gentlemen, was the only means of revenge available to me. I thought that in the confusion of the party, where, at a minimum, there would be twenty or more girls, I'd be able to get myself one of them. I was a man who knew what he wanted after all, whereas the most that boys of sixteen or seventeen would dare would be to grab a girl's ass, and so the evening would pass. Even boys of their generation — they weren't from the South Bronx or even Brooklyn, but the children of wealthy parents — were undoubtedly more «spoiled» in words than in action. So that while helping them set the table and make Sangria and screw in their blue light bulbs (they didn't ask for my help; I offered it in order to ingratiate myself with them), I was beginning to get excited and looked forward to the evening with impatience.

Henry diplomatically asked me if I planned to go out that evening. "No," I said, "I prefer to stay at home. If somebody calls the police, Henry — not that they will — there will at least be one adult here with you." Henry said in a sincere tone that he would be glad to have me to join them, and maybe he was sincere.

And then the children-guests began to arrive. And what sort of guests didn't Henry have: sullen beanpoles twice my size in leather jackets with safety pins stuck in their ears and the faces of murderers, and polished boys with depraved faces and painted lips who were dressed in frock coats, bow ties, and top hats and carrying walking sticks — several such boys arrived together — and ironical young intellectuals in sweaters and glasses. One very beautiful boy came dressed in a wig, a black dress, and black stockings. And there were very solid and hefty round-headed lads in sturdy shoes and ties, in whom I saw large but unimaginative businessmen twenty years later — the owners, say, of supermarkets, or at least something connected with food. There was also a rosy-cheeked, red-haired fop in black patent leather shoes, striped trousers, and a broad white tie under an exceptionally lively and comic face, on whose arm affectedly reclined a slender, dark-haired little beauty wearing what were obviously her mother's furs.

To my dismay almost all the children arrived at the beginning in couples, boy and girl, but a half hour later what were simply noisy groups began to show up, and among them I was pleased to see several girls who apparently didn't belong to anybody. I had a strange feeling in that crowd, which seemed to grow and grow, so that even though there were already a lot more than fifteen people there, the flow of guests still didn't end. I felt that they weren't adolescents or children at all. I certainly didn't feel that they deserved to have any kind of allowance made for them — this was the normal world, and they were normal people. And just as in our adult world, they had their own hierarchy which duplicated our adult one precisely.