The limousine waited for the senator. I handed him a key and showed him how to open the door. I had no intention of staying up for him; in fact, I planned to go to bed. Although already on his way out, he still stuck me with an errand — to call Room 816 at the Park Lawn Hotel and say that the senator was already on his way and would meet the lady in the lobby. I closed the door behind the senator, went to the kitchen, dialed the number, asked for Room 816, whereupon a sweet little voice, redolent of perfume, and belonging, I'll bet, to an elegant young whore, drawled into the phone, "Y-e-e-s?"

"The senator has already left for the hotel and will meet the lady in the lobby," I said in the conspiratorial voice of a movie spy and hung up.

So I already knew something about senators. While I was watching the movie, I tried to think of an excuse I could use to leave my companions as soon as it was over. It was clear to me that it would be even more tedious afterward. We would go to the cheapest restaurant we could find, maybe even a coffee-shop, and after we'd eaten, O'Brien and Youssef and the girls would add up how much money each person owed, even writing it down with a ballpoint pen on a paper placemat, and there would be yet more boredom and awkwardness. By the time the movie was over I had come up with something. I told them I was expecting a phone call from Europe that night, that somebody was supposed to call me from France at a certain time, and I had to be home when they did. I left them at an intersection with a sense of relief. The Egyptian was unquestionably glad to see me go, and parted with me in a very friendly way. Now he can certainly fuck one of the draggle-ass girls, I thought. If I had stayed, he wouldn't have been able to. The Egyptian reasoned very practically — since a cunt was already there and indeed walking nearby, it remained only to bring matters to a conclusion. With me, aesthetics and social issues inevitably get mixed with the business of fucking. Thank God there are normal people too.

I went home by myself, independent and mysterious, went back to my own elegant East Side and as far away as possible from ordinary people and their petty lives. It was better not to be with anybody. Or to have only my professional relationship with my boss — I wasn't ashamed of him, at least. He's rich and healthy. I was ashamed of the casual acquaintances I'd just made, for some reason.

After I got home, I had something to eat and then wandered around the house. As I'd suspected, the boss still wasn't home; he was obviously staying over at his lady's place. I sat in the TV room, flipping back and forth among the channels for a fairly long time. If the boss turned up, I would hear the door close and have time to slip up to my room. Not that there's anything in the house I'm not supposed to do. It's just that I like to avoid those evening encounters with him and his ladies for my own reasons, out of my own sense of delicacy. I went to bed at four a.m. feeling closer to Gatsby than to anybody else on earth — odd, isn't it, gentlemen? As I was falling asleep, I made a discovery; I suddenly understood the reason for my being in the millionaire's house. I needed the atmosphere of dreams, and the millionaire's house is the closest thing to dreams there is in this life. Further from normal life and closer to dreams, I thought and then fell asleep.

I was already up by six and sitting in a pine oil bath. Through the skylight above me I could hear that the birds had just awakened and were beginning to sing, and I too was cheerfully singing a song: "I wanna fuck somebody who is good… " A busy day lay ahead, and here I was copying the boss, even down to the bath oil, which I'd swiped from his bathroom. Steven's bathroom is located downstairs right underneath my own, and opening the dumb waiter, I could hear radio music and water pouring into his bathtub too. We were both up.

At seven, the housekeeper Edward, dressed in black serving pants and a white Pierre Cardin shirt and wearing a quilted Chinese jacket, was raking up the dry September leaves from the terrace and putting them in a big plastic bag. The mornings had grown cool, but the garden was still very beautiful. Steven was expecting the president of Rolls-Royce for lunch, and I, energetic and thoughtful servant that I am, and knowing the boss's habits as I do, was sure that either before or after lunch Gatsby would take the president of Rolls-Royce and the other businessmen accompanying him out to the garden to sit in the late September sunshine and drink coffee on iron benches right by the East River and go through their papers there. That's why the hard-working Edward decided to clear the terrace of the leaves that had already accumulated there in considerable quantities — so that they wouldn't hinder the hard-working businessmen.

At the height of my pastoral labors on the terrace, Steven carne out with the newspaper and a cup of the coffee that had already been waiting for him in the kitchen.

"Good morning, Edward!" he said. "What a beautiful day!"

"Good morning, Steven," the servant answered. "It is beautiful!" And I continued with what I was doing — raking and putting the leaves in a bag. It was very beautiful that morning, just as in Germany, in Bavaria on the Rhine, and the variegated colors of the dying leaves put me in a festive mood. The air was heavy with the fragrance of dead plants already beginning to rot, tiny blue berries were falling in great numbers onto the terrace from the ivy on our house, and around the servant and his master, birds of an unknown species whirled, trying to grab their share of the morning's exchange of capital and labor. I like the pastoral life very much, and although it's usually hard for me to spend very much time in the country, I enjoy working on our terrace, and following Nancy's example, I even plant things there from time to time, say new azalea bushes wherever there are bare spots around its perimeter, and this fall I'll plant some tulips.

I was just sweeping up, while Steven, his hair still wet, read his paper, when the telephone rang for the first time. It was 7:30. My ex-wife Elena on the other side of the globe would just be going to bed. Steven answered the phone himself, reaching it before I was able to, and talked for a while, and then came back out onto the terrace and said it had been Nairobi calling.

"It was the man who may soon become the premier of Uganda, Edward," Gatsby boasted to me — there wasn't anybody else around.

I thought the boss would in that case probably be undertaking some sort of business in Uganda, starting rabbit or chicken farms there in order to develop their national economy, and would be feverishly trading with them, in oil maybe, since Ghupta had some. Only recently Ghupta and his attorney had been negotiating from my kitchen phone (!) for the purchase of a new tanker. They concluded their business at two o'clock, doing the figures on a calculator and calling from the kitchen all over the world, and the next day all the necessary documents arrived by express mail and they signed them. I wondered if Gatsby was aware of it. We could therefore transport oil to Uganda on Ghupta's tanker. Maybe Gatsby would even send me to Uganda to do something on his behalf, trading in some rubbish that was absolutely essential to underdeveloped countries. Anything was possible. I remembered Rimbaud wending his way to Khartoum by caravan, or maybe it was back from Khartoum…

Linda arrived. Steven went upstairs to change from his bathrobe into a suit, and I finished my work on the terrace and went in to set the table, covering it with our cleanest and whitest tablecloth and putting out the flatware. We spend fabulous sums on laundry each month, and I have my own things done with Steven's, so everything I own gleams and I look as well-groomed and fresh as our silver and tablecloths do — not like my business affairs, thank God.