A powerful bomb exploded on the lord's fishing boat. There were two pages of photographs in the Post devoted to the lord's life. Pictures of him walking majestically with a rajah, and standing like a tower to one side of an old man suffering from dystrophy and wrapped up in a piece of white cloth — the old Ghandi. And the lord's wife standing on the other side like another tower. And an Indian landscape in the background.
I averted my eyes from the newspaper and wondered why they regretted the lord's death by bombing so much. He would have gotten sick or expired of old age, bedridden and barely able to open his mouth, smelling bad and annoying his servants and no longer in possession of his faculties. Would that really have been better? This way he died like a soldier, the way he should have, blown up by a bomb. I envied him. A man ought not live to the point where he has to crawl. It's ugly and dirty.
A few pages later in the newspaper I found, by way of illustration for my thoughts, a picture of a hospital ward with several human bodies hooked up to artificial life-support equipment. The caption under the picture said they'd been lying like that for years. Vegetables. Why keep them going? What's the purpose of that degradation? I'd rip the hoses from everybody hooked up to life-support equipment. I'd go around to all the hospitals and cut the hoses or turn off all the switches. Cruel? No, honest, even noble.
Something we don't understand has happened to us, to people, to the human race. We've gone down a dead end, maybe, or we have developed in some mistaken way. I don't know what, but something's wrong, I told myself while rummaging through the paper. And then the telephone rang.
It was an acquaintance of mine, somebody whom I had inherited from Jenny and Martha and who at one time had been Martha's boyfriend. He's twenty-five to twenty-eight and works as an assistant manager at the huge Waldorf-Astoria. His name is James, James O'Brien. Even the disciplined and hard-working Martha used to call James a slave — Martha, who never missed a day of work! Probably James O'Brien deserved that epithet. James occasionally drops by die kitchen out of habit to chat with Linda and me for a while, just as he did with Martha. Linda and I don't encourage him, but we don't chase him away either. We tolerate him.
"Do you want to go to a movie, Edward?" O'Brien said over die phone. "I and my boss, Youssef, are going to one tonight. Several girls are coming with us." James has very refined manners, and so he added, "I'm sure you'll like the film very much, Edward; it's The Seduction of Joe Tynan. It deals with intellectual problems very important for our time."
I wavered. Another time I'd have refused without hesitating — I usually don't go out when Steven's staying overnight — but that day or the next was a damned full moon, and I was already a little crazy, or maybe it was just that I was getting sick of it all.
"All right," I said to O'Brien, "let's go to a movie." And attempting to find out more, I added, "And what about the girls, are they nice?"
"One of them is very nice and very intellectual," O'Brien answered with the voice of a robot. "She isn't going with anybody, and you can have her if you want, Edward." James is fond of words like «intellect» and "intellectual."
"Okay," I said. "We'll see how it works. Where are you meeting?"
The Egyptian Youssef was planning to drop by James's house, and so I set off there too, a place I'd never been before. James lived, it turned out, not far from me or the Waldorf-Astoria — on Fifty-fourth Street near the corner of Madison.
Despite his excellent address, I realized almost as soon as I set foot in his apartment that I'd come to him from another life. Everything in the apartment was shabby and of poor quality and messy. A filthy couch, a couple of silly faded hassocks of indeterminate color, and a dark blue carpet which James had picked up at his hotel for nothing, as he immediately bragged. He still hadn't managed to put the carpet down, and I found him cutting it up when I came in. Either James was a jerk-off and couldn't put his one room in order — and he could have made it attractive; it even had a fireplace — or maybe I as a servant of the world bourgeoisie had already gotten so spoiled by the millionaire's house that all life outside it seemed paltry and dirty. I don't know, but the impression made on me by my visit to O'Brien's apartment was disheartening, even though we left almost immediately after the Egyptian Youssef showed up. Youssef, O'Brien's boss, was a short but very self-assured person, and he somehow calmed me down. He reeked of sweet perfume.
We were supposed to meet the girls near the Little Carnegie theater next to Carnegie Hall and the Russian Tea Room. There's always a crowd of people there, including a lot of girls, and as I strode down Fifty-seventh Street with O'Brien and Youssef I tried to make out in the distance which ones were ours. I was in for a disappointment, unfortunately. Ours were the worst. Two short, frightful-looking girls carrying purses and dressed in baggy jeans and something like slippers, with asses that almost dragged on the ground, and both wearing shabby velvet jackets. I got very upset, since I was wearing white boots from Valentino's, blue and white striped pants, and a white jacket. With my tan I probably looked foreign and very mysterious, and now I was going to have to walk down the street with these eyesores. The girls felt awkward with me too, I think, but who could have foreseen such a situation? James was always neatly dressed and wore gold-rimmed glasses, so there was no way I could have known he would have such eyesores for girlfriends. He worked like a slave, Mr. O'Brien, sometimes even two shifts in succession — twelve hours a day, and he was on his way up, hoping someday to become manager of the Waldorf-Astoria Towers. Millionaires always stay at the Towers, as do heads of state and their wives, and the world's few remaining kings. Come on, O'Brien, I thought, a careerist should have better girls.
"You're always in such good shape, Edward," O'Brien said to me in passing, his eyeglasses flashing. He obviously sensed that I was holding myself a bit aloof and was unhappy with the girls' appearance. "Do you exercise?"
What the hell would I need to exercise for? I thought. All I had to do was spend fifteen years of my life half-starved, so that now that I have enough to eat, I'm no longer capable of getting fat. I muttered something innocuous to O'Brien.
Our whole group, I thought, I, a housekeeper, and they, the employees of a fashionable hotel, remind me of the crowd that went around with Clyde Griffiths, the hero of An American Tragedy, a big two-volume book I read many years ago in Russia after discovering it in my parents' library.
The movie turned out to be extremely boring — about a senator and his personal life. The senator's wife leaves him. And she leaves him at the very moment he's nominated for President at a party convention. And his lover leaves him, and his daughter doesn't love him, only it isn't clear why. And the daughter's so hysterical, it's as if she's forty and not fifteen. But the senator's career is more important: he loves his work; he's a bureaucrat by calling. And even though he's unhappy in his private life, he's nominated as the party's candidate, and the crowd applauds, and even the senators who are his enemies applaud, and the balloons go up, and the music thunders and roars. And everybody in the theater learns that the senator too is a human being. As for me, I never doubted it, even without the film. A senator once stayed with us briefly at the millionaire's house. Not for very long, but long enough for me to understand that he too was a human being.
The senator came from the airport one evening in a limousine with a briefcase and bag. We briefly introduced ourselves to each other. He said he was a senator; I told him I was the housekeeper. In appearance he looked rather like a male model — the face of an actor who does lotion ads. You know, a very masculine face, tanned, with large, massive features. A "real man." The first thing he asked me after putting his briefcase and bag in the guest room on the third floor was whether he could bring a lady to spend the night and where the cognac was, since he was planning to come back late. He also asked me to show him how to turn on our complicated television equipment. The servant Limonov showed him how everything in our movie theater worked — which buttons to push and in what sequence. I also showed him where the cognac was, not even forgetting to point out where we kept the snifters, rarely ever used, since cognac makes the master's face break out. With regard to the lady, the servant brazenly informed him that whether or not he brought a lady back to the house with him was of course a personal matter the senator would have to decide for himself, but that if I was not mistaken, Nancy was supposed to come down from Connecticut early the next morning. "Nancy has urgent business in New York," I cheerfully lied.