And covering my eyes with my yellow comforter, with our yellow comforter, that is, I somehow dropped off into troubled sleep.

Naturally the next morning the house looked as if it had been turned upside down. Actually, after looking it over, I didn't find that any particularly serious damage had been done, except for one thing. Some jerk had tried to put his cigarette out on our TV projection screen, and a long and nasty hole gaped at its center. What can I do? I'll have to tell Nancy about it, only later — on Monday after Linda comes, I thought. I was, after all, concerned that morning with a problem of much greater significance to me — how to find out from Henry who that young creature had been, what her name was, and what she did, and maybe where she lived. I needed her, and nobody else.

Finding an opportunity as if in passing, I asked Henry who the girl in the black dress and bare arms had been, the very beautiful and mature one who had been sitting next to me in the living room when we were smoking hashish, and whom I'd been fucking in the basement, although I obviously wasn't able to mention the last part. Henry asked, "Which one do you mean, Edward? I seem to remember there were several girls in black dresses." I started explaining to him, but we got mixed up, since he, not surprisingly, couldn't remember who had been sitting next to me in the living room when I'd been smoking hashish. When I reminded him then how he had greeted her with open arms and then gone upstairs with her, he seemed to remember something, or at least his face looked like the face of somebody about to remember something, "Renée?" he asked, looking condescendingly at me, as it seemed to me. "The one who left with Gregory?" Henry was obviously getting bored with the conversation, but as a well-bred boy, he patiently explained that Gregory was the younger son of a senator from the state of X. "He came after everybody else," Henry said, "a tall blond guy in a white jacket."

For the first time in my life there wasn't anything I could do; it was beyond my power to unravel that story. If my stranger had been Renée, and she had left with the guy in the white jacket, and Henry confirmed that he'd seen them leaving together, then it followed that they had done so before I had put Henry to bed. But if she had left, then how did she manage to turn up in my room an hour or two after she'd gone? After pondering the question for a while, I realized that she could quite easily have come back, and even have done so without being noticed. The door had in fact been unlocked; I myself released the catch on it while shutting everything up. Door locks, as you know, have a safety catch on them, one position allowing the lock to be used in its normal way, and the other allowing the door to be opened from the outside by simply turning the knob. Whenever the eternally hurrying Gatsby runs outside to meet or accompany his guests, he always sets the lock in the second way. He doesn't want to be bothered with taking his key out of his pocket, which I certainly understand, but he almost always forgets to release the catch, so that it frequently happens that we sleep the whole night with the door unlocked. Anyone passing by could, if he felt like it, simply turn the handle of the door on the street and walk in.

I continued to struggle for a while against my fate, attempting to get «her» phone number from Henry, although obviously without asking him for it, but by pinching his notebook from his pocket. It was easy to do; Henry was even more absent-minded than Gatsby was. I took the notebook down to the basement, to my hideout there, and after a long search, since his notebook was extraordinarily chaotic, with first and last names and addresses running together, I found Renée's name and number but not her address. I had already begun to doubt that it was in fact Renée who had fucked me and dumped me; maybe it was another girl. I'd been stoned and drunk, and all the places we'd been together had been infernally dark. The only place where I had seen her "in the light" had been the elevator, if you consider that black, orgiastic lamp to be light. And in that moment, which lasted no more than a minute probably, since we could hardly have spent more time than that on the elevator, I didn't look very closely at the stranger. I had left my glasses in my room and was in any case occupied with something else, with my prick and my desire, and was kissing her on the neck, I think.

I called Renée, but her line was busy, gentlemen. My heart, my poor heart, was pounding. I started thinking hurriedly about what I would say to her. I couldn't just say, "Well then, my little adventuress, what did you run away for?" or "What's up, my little whore?" I called again a little while later, but nobody answered. And I called again that evening, once more without success. I've gradually accumulated my own list of grievances against telephones and have grown to hate them more and more. My call the next morning was answered by a maid. First she wanted to know my name and who I was. I lied that I was a friend of Renée's. Everybody tells me that my voice sounds very young. "Renée has gone to Europe with her parents and won't be back until October." And the maid mentioned the name of the town, in the south of France, I think.

I probably never would have been able to find her, if she hadn't wanted me to. And even if I could get her on the phone, what would I say to her, and even if I were able to summon up the audacity to remind her gently of what had apparently taken place between us, she would simply tell me I was a crazy, insolent servant. And if she wanted to say more, she would call me a sex maniac and hang up. She could even make a lot of trouble for me, if she wanted to. She could call Gatsby and tell him that his housekeeper had lost his mind and was imagining… "Can you imagine, Steven, that I..?" She wouldn't say "fucked him in the basement," of course, but she could say that I was sexually deranged and pestering her. Gatsby would in that event probably kick me out, and not even Efimenkov would be able to help, not with something like that.

She had unquestionably read all the books and seen all the porno flicks, which she'd probably gone to after putting on some old rags and making herself up to look like some impossible version of a whore. She went and probably even expected that somebody would fuck her there. She sat and trembled in fear while gazing at the backs of the men sitting by themselves, expecting that the owner of one of those backs would sit down next to her and put his hand on her knee or right on her cunt. It's unlikely though that she would permit anyone to do anything to her there, even if they did sit down. I understand her fear; you really can stumble onto who the fuck knows what there, even a psychopathic murderer. With me it was absolutely safe; she wasn't in a porno theater open to any creep who walks in, but in the house of a friend, a friend whose servant I was. She had probably heard something about me from Henry or from a couple of his friends, and even if she hadn't heard anything, it was clear enough from my appearance that I was a harmless but still healthy creature. "Cute," as Jenny and other women and girls have told me.

That case is closed, as far as I'm concerned; I never found die perpetrator. Or rather, excuse me, I never found the perpetratrix. To my great and everlasting regret.

My whole life over the last several years has been a yearning for "action." If, and this is something I long for, our civilization should in the next couple of decades begin to collapse, I would of course at once find myself an opportunity, and would probably be not the least among the bold and reckless of this world. For the time being, however, the only things that remain for me are sex and writing, the only two spheres in which a man, if he has the nerve, is still more or less free to show himself. All the other spheres have long been patrolled by civilization down to the least little byways and dead ends. Writing and sex have been placed in thrall too, and are under the control of civilization and social life, but there are still a few chinks in the machinery. Either there still are, or there already are. In any case, they still don't know how to control our thoughts; their geniuses in white coats still haven't found out how to read what's inside our brain cases. They've been listening for a long time to our telephone conversations and rummaging in our papers, but they still can't read our thoughts. Although I'm absolutely sure that feverish work is already under way in that area, and that the geniuses in white coats will eventually reach their goal — I have faith in human ingenuity. God grant I die before that glorious discovery is made, because after that you won't be able to write shit and you can fuck freedom goodbye.