My business affairs were in a terrible state. Harper & Row had turned me down a few days before. Who hasn't turned me down? I thought. Soon there'll hardly be any left who haven't. Defeat after defeat on that, my principal front. It would be better to have a falling out with Gatsby; I could stand that somehow. The main problem is that I can't get involved personally in that fucking bureaucratic business of selling. I'm compelled to sit passively and wait.
I put out the glasses and continued the same line of thought: Waiting for decisions from unknown office forces, from people you've never seen even once in your life and never will see is just like being condemned to death and sending your appeal to one court and having to wait months for an answer. In the end they send you a paper with a "no," and you then appeal to another court, since you can. And you wait again, and then after months have gone by, another «no» surfaces from the bureaucratic depths. You are on the verge of terror and hysteria and in despair, since you still fear death, and their decisions in those Kafkaesque inner offices have nothing to do with your work, or with who you are and what you have created. Houses of Terror and Fate — that's what publishers are.
Long gone are the simple patriarchal times when you took what you had written directly to the publisher himself, and said, "Hi, Bob (or John or Moses)! Here's my book. I'm convinced it will do well. Let's make a deal! I'm young and energetic, and this is my most recent work."
And Bob (or John or Moses) read the book and after scratching the back of his head, said, "Okay, Ed, I think this book will bring in something, it will earn us some money, although there's a risk of course, but all right, we're ready take it…" Those were the good old days!
I knew a fair number of people in Russia who were willing to sit in prison for years just so their books could be published. Many got involved in the social struggle and came into conflict with the government for that reason alone. Does that seem like a normal situation to you? But the same kind of barriers are erected in the individual's path in absolutely every area of life, the servant thought, and such are the daily murders that civilization inflicts on us.
The nice thing about physical labor is that sometimes it allows you to give yourself up to your thoughts while you're doing it. I ordered lamb chops over the phone.
"All right, Edward," one of the Ottomanelli brothers said, "you'll get your lamb chops. But maybe you'd rather have sirloin? We have some excellent fresh sirloin today."
"No thanks," I said. "We're conservative. The boss wants lamb."
"Okay!" the Ottomanelli brother laughed.
I spent the next fifteen minutes or so trying to extract a check from Linda. She bounced around like a billiard ball the whole time as she took one phone call after another, half of them making no sense at all, while I sat disgustedly in the Chinese lacquered chair next to her desk and waited. There was no way Linda was going to interrupt one of her goddamn phone conversations just to write me a check.
"How much do you need?" she finally asked me in a suspicious tone.
"Give me a hundred and fifty," the housekeeper said.
"What do you need a hundred and fifty for? That seems like a lot. Steven's leaving tomorrow. You're not going to spend a hundred and fifty dollars on one lunch, are you? After all, you won't have to pay cash for the meat, Edward. Take a hundred," Linda said.
"And you, my dear, aren't you going to eat anything tomorrow or the next day? Aren't you going to have lunch too?" I asked her snidely.
She gave me a hundred and fifty. She's the boss's own Cerberus, that Linda.
I stuck the check in my pocket and leisurely set off for the bank. When you're around money, when you find yourself rubbing up against it all the time, you tend to have a certain unhurried confidence in yourself. Until I started working for Steven, I used to be afraid of banks and always felt like a timid pauper in them. I'm much bolder now. I even lost my temper once when a new teller asked me to endorse the back of a check for Steven made out, I think, for $1,500 — cash for one of his trips. As I signed my name, I disgustedly told the bank slave, "Listen, you, I come here, at a minimum, twice a week, and sometimes more often, and nobody has ever asked me to endorse one of our checks before." For on its face the check carries the proud name of Mr. Grey. But I didn't say that to the slave. I thought it.
The produce markets in our excellent city of the devil are for some reason run by Koreans, just as in Moscow all the bootblacks are Assyrians. A Korean girl with a flat intellectual face always greets me with a smile whenever I enter her store; I'm a regular customer. I picked out my invariable romaine, some asparagus, and whatever else I felt like, and with one hand in my pocket set off for home in the same unhurried manner. On the way I dropped in on the chubby Michael at the little shop Mad for Cheese to pick up some cheese and bread, the bread so fresh that Linda has been expressing her amazement with it every day for the past year and gobbling it up as if she were mad for bread. I walked back to the house very slowly, since it was still early, and the day was the kind I like. In general I like the fall. In the fall I listen to myself with particular attention; in the fall everything's clearer and makes more sense to me and is less confining.
That day it became clear to me for the first time that I would soon be moving out of the millionaire's little house. I still didn't know how, and it still wasn't even clear when, but the first signal had already reached me from somewhere. I didn't make any decisions about it then; I just continued my leisurely way back to the house in my old Chinese jacket. I picked up that jacket after Henry had left it, or perhaps it was left by one of his friends, and the host never mentioned it. I wasn't ready to make any decisions then, but I know myself well. I've moved around in my life so often and have completely changed the scene of action and the cast of players so many times, that I've learned that if I once start thinking about leaving, it means I will. Even the millionaire's house has outlived its usefulness. It will be three years next spring since I entered it, and that's enough. Other lands and countries and women, and other adventures, beckon to me. If I stay here I'll turn out like Linda, but I don't have the right to do that, to stay in the same place for eight years. I don't have eight years. I need to get my ass out of here, I thought with a happy smile, as I opened the door with my key. Nearby they were shooting a commercial, and a beautiful model — they just won't leave me alone — smiled at me as she straightened her hair while the photographer fiddled with his camera. Maybe she thought the house was mine.
The president of Rolls-Royce came in a Rolls-Royce. But not the elegant white-lacquered and chrome-plated kind that black pimps drive around Central Park with their white girls by their sides or that high-class drug dealers use. He came in an unpretentious silver-gray Rolls of medium size, the sort that doesn't require a chauffeur with a cap. The Rolls was driven by his business associate, and they both looked quite unpretentious. Steven even came out to meet them, something that doesn't happen very often. He sees his guests to the door, but I open it for them, or, less often, Olga does. I think Gatsby secretly despises the Rolls-Royce company for the slightly vulgar nature of its product, maybe for precisely the fact that pimps and drug dealers drive around in their cars. Drug dealers and pimps don't drive around in Steven's cars, even though they're produced in far fewer numbers than Rolls-Royces are (and cost almost as much). «Our» cars are as staid as an old English conservative tweed suit and don't look like much at first sight, but the expert will note their restrained severity of form and color and will appreciate it.