The Kuwaitis sat a little while longer and then at last went downstairs, shaking our already wobbly banister like masters of the house, and took their places in their limousine. I was grateful they had come between lunch and dinner, at a neutral time, so that I didn't have to make lunch for ten. Otherwise, I'd have been panting with exhaustion.
And then their asses were gone. After taking the fastest shower of his life, the boss at once disappeared after them; obviously he was running over to see Polly, his permanent New York woman. Does he have girlfriends in other cities in the world too, just like a deep-sea sailor? I wondered. Actually, I'm not so sure he did tear off to Polly's. That morning a van with the name "Tudor's Flowers" on it brought seven vases of flowers and plants, including a rubber plant. I almost sent them all back, since neither Linda nor I had ordered them. Fortunately Gatsby appeared in the doorway at that moment and with a sly smile suggested that they were a gift and that he had an idea from whom. Maybe he ran off to the woman who had sent the plants? To see the rubber plant lady, as I instantly named her? Most likely that was it.
All Gatsby did was smile and leave, whereas I wasted over an hour trying to find places in the house to put the flowers and plants and then taking them to different rooms. The full-grown rubber plant was particularly heavy; it was in fact a tree! I installed it in the living room, and the negotiations with the Kuwaitis had in fact been conducted underneath the rubber tree. Complain or not, it was my job.
Linda took off as soon as Gatsby went up to the bathroom; it was already after eight. I remained in the house alone, although I didn't feel free. I never do as long as Gatsby's in New York. I fixed myself a Scotch on the rocks and sat down in the kitchen and looked out the window.
Instead of the holiday life once promised me, I'm sitting in the kitchen, I thought bitterly. A man by a window. Outside, the Mystery of the Evening Dog Walk was in progress. I was interested in the women and the girls, not the dogs. My old girlfriend Jenny used to call dogs shit-producing machines. I share her point of view; it is, you'll agree, a practical one for a housekeeper or caretaker. Is it nice to have shit outside your window even if the dog's owner cleans it up? Bowing his legs outside my window, a big dog strained to push a large, dark turd out of himself.
At that moment my favorite appeared, although I of course had no idea who she was: a large yellow-haired woman with a ginger-colored dog on a leash. She was dressed in a slightly old-fashioned suit — a jacket and long skirt — and for some reason it was indecently charming.
That's what I need, a maiden wife with a yellow head, a big healthy girl like that, I thought. Then I'd be happy. And what's so good about my life anyway? All I do is sit in the kitchen by the window all the time or serve, while my employer goes off to restaurants.
I'm a human being too. I'd like to be happy too. You think my casual affairs satisfy me? I too would like to have coffee and a sweet roll in my own kitchen. Or lie in bed with a warm wife whose large pink bottom sticks out from under the blanket. I'm human too. (Turn on the music here.) I too would like to have a wife who is beautiful, who fills me with joy to look at. Don't I deserve that? But even now, after all the distance I've come from the Hotel Diplomat, I still don't have enough money to get married, or at least enough money to marry the kind of woman I want.
Who really needs me? Nobody. My boss is going to take part in a car race in California again, pulling a helmet down over his head and taking the steering wheel in his hands. He thinks he's a goddamn Paul Newman. During his absence I will of course be free to play and fill up the house with girls, but they still won't be the right ones. I want the expensive kind, like the girl-stranger who fucked me in the basement. Please forgive me my obsession with rich girls, gentlemen, but how could it be otherwise, since I measure life by women? They're the only ones who light up this world. There's nobody else. And they give the world its purpose, its excitement, and its movement.
What beauty is going to stand by and wait while I finally make the heroic effort to crawl out of this kitchen and become famous and maybe even rich? I thought sadly. What I'm striving for, the material part of what I'm striving for, Steven Grey has had since birth. No woman's going to take my stupid road with me. Who needs excuses like, "You know, I'm still a failure right now, but I'm very talented; wait, dear, just a little longer!" Why should she listen to my stories about the lunches and breakfasts I made and how I shined the boss's shoes and went shopping and suffered physically and spiritually, and sat by the window, just as I was doing then, and got depressed?
What woman is going to be interested in me when she can make the acquaintance of somebody who's already there, who already has something — of Steven Grey, six feet two, bearded, forty years old, and the owner of numerous elegant companies? "Who the fuck am I to beautiful women!" I yelled, pounding my fist on the table. The glass with ice fell off the table and broke on the kitchen floor. It was apparently the sight of gold that had brought on that little fit of hysteria, and the Kuwaitis, rich as swine, and the whiskey I'd drunk, very good and strong. "Who the fuck am I to them!" I repeated. Steven's rich and has a house that looks romantically out onto a garden and the river. What do I have? An old suitcase as old as I am given to me by my parents and a couple of obscure books in Russian I wrote in anger and disgust with the world.
Christ, how sick and tired I am of them all! I thought. I'd like to go into the dining room during lunch sometime, and instead of clearing away the dirty dishes and serving them salad and a cheese tray, spray the boss and his wine-drinking friends with a few rounds from an AK-47 or a no-less-celebrated Israeli Uzi! That day would have been a very good day for it — the fairy-tale Kuwaiti sheiks were an even more tempting mission than Steven Grey was. (The servant Limonov imagined the blood-spattered sheiks on the Persian cushions, imagined them slowly falling over onto the cushions.) It's possible that one of the Kuwaitis even fucked my Elena, I thought, that he burst into her pink cunt with his black prick. Why not? It's very possible in fact, I reasoned to myself.
And what was it all given to them for, those billions? I tried to comprehend. I'm not exactly sure what for, maybe simply because there was oil on their land. Probably that's all. Mere luck? All right. And Lodyzhnikov got what he has simply because the bourgeoisie happens at present to like ballet — ballet has taken its fancy — and pays hard cash. More luck. My Gatsby was left money by his father, luck again, right?
That's a lot of luck, don't you think? And I for some reason haven't been so lucky. True, it could all have been different with me. If I had written different books, I wouldn't be a servant sitting by the kitchen window now; if I had exposed Russia and its social system in a talented way, if I'd helped America in its ideological struggle against Russia, I'd be sitting on my own estate like Solzhenitsyn. Or I'd be speeding around the streets of Hollywood in a Rolls-Royce, hopping from party to party, and since I'm still fairly young, I'd have as many of my beloved rich whores as I could want. What am I doing in the kitchen?
After my monologue I picked up the New York Post, which Gatsby in his haste hadn't had time to read, and immersed myself in that yellow rag. Jenny's brother Michael Jackson had warned me about reading such trash, but I still read it. The Village Voice is full of lies too, only liberal ones.
It turned out a lord had been murdered the day before, a cousin of the Queen of England. A handsome lord, old, tall, and majestic. A former admiral with connections to India — its last viceroy. The Irish killed him; they want independence from Britain. To live on their own. Obviously they think killing lords will immediately solve all their problems — the hunchbacks will stand up straight, all those who don't have money will perhaps suddenly have it, and the impotent will at once find their cocks suffused with the blood of life. The simple common sense of a housekeeper suggests to me that the hunchbacks will remain hunchbacked and that the national state will help neither the impotent nor the dispossessed, although those who guide those murderers will certainly take their places among the Big Brothers — without a doubt. They never miss.