Malcolm wasn't satisfied with that opinion, and gave the English manuscript to three other people to read, and in addition read it himself and gave another copy to a scrawny forty-year-old mouse named Barbara. Barbara was his colleague and assistant; she walked his dogs the same way Madame Margarita walks Lodyzhnikov's and did other things of that kind. Maybe Malcolm fucked her too whenever he was on a diet. Even the timid little mouse Barbara liked the book, and all his other hired readers did too, but Malcolm continued to stall and drag things out. He was still afraid.

I once asked him over to the millionaire's for a drink, thinking that perhaps we hadn't had enough personal contact, that perhaps if he saw me in my actual circumstances, he would understand me better, just as Jenny had after visiting me in my hotel. He would see that I wasn't just a temporary guest in the house of literature. After sitting a while with me over a glass of whiskey, he would realize that I was very ambitious and talented. And I thought that after that he would want to come to terms with me and publish my book.

He came over and we had a drink. True, he didn't stay very long — he had to run off to some dinner engagement he couldn't put off — but I learned more about him during that brief visit than I had in all my months of meeting him at his office. He examined our house very carefully and obsequiously, servilely admiring our walls and even the shabby rugs on our floors, and he praised all the things I detested; he liked the Connecticut landscapes and our antique dishes on the buffet and our living room picture window with its view of the river, and the dimensions of the living room itself. He even tested the mattress in Steven's bedroom with his hand. Instead of sitting with me and drinking Scotch as I had intended, he walked fawningly around the house and talked to me about my kitchen. And I got to know him. I know you, mask! I thought. You're a petit bourgeois, little Malcolm. He badly wanted to grab up a house like that for himself so he could become a fucking grand bourgeois.

He walked around the house and I followed and looked at his bald patch and his not so much fat but spreading ass bashfully covered up by his shiny pants. His velvet "intellectual's" jacket didn't impress me anymore — it was all too clear now. And when I mockingly said to him, "Malcolm, if you want a house like this, then buy my book!" it was just to spite him. I knew he wouldn't publish it; he didn't have the guts, little Malcolm. He didn't even drink Scotch — he drank wine. You bald pussy, I thought, you fat-assed little pussy.

Malcolm tried very hard to be high-society and decadent. Once he invited me to a dinner party among whose guests were some women who were finishing or already had finished dissertations on Proust and Yeats. The one who had written/was writing about Proust had nice white legs. Also present were: an old Mexican woman in broad Spanish skirts who had obviously not been fucked by anybody in about ten years, and an aging European beauty named Rosa who was supposed to be Malcolm's girlfriend, although I found that pretty hard to believe. It seemed to me that if he wasn't actually a homosexual of the very worst type — old, fat-assed, and bald — he was in any case something in between. Even though it was still February, I arrived dressed entirely in white and, like my boss, without my coat and in a taxi — ready for spring. When he opened the door, Malcolm paid me a compliment so incredible that I was forced to stay at his place a good two hours, although I ought to have left immediately, since it was already clear they were a waste of time. Malcolm said, "Oh, Edward! You look just like the Great Gatsby!" Thus was I compared with my employer.

While serving us dinner — stuffed cabbage prepared by Rosa — Malcolm apologized to me. "I'm sorry, Edward, but I don't have as much room in my apartment as you do in your house." What? I thought. Doesn't he know I'm only a housekeeper? Does his servility even extend to the point where he identifies me with the house?

Malcolm continued fucking with me until spring, and then in March he said to me (even here the whore couldn't be a man about it and give me a simple "no"), "It's not that I'm rejecting you, Edward — we're still considering your book, although you have to understand that things are very difficult right now in the publishing business — but I don't want to tie you down with any obligations. You might try your luck with some other publisher if you don't feel like waiting for us." To top it all, the fat-assed bastard asked me for Elena's address in Europe. It turned out he knew her, Elena having once been, you see, an extremely popular member of New York society. Malcolm was going to Europe. Naturally, I didn't give him the address. Malcolm was a sneaky little son of a bitch.

Writers always abuse their publishers. True, but I despise Malcolm not because he wouldn't publish my book, but because he was small about it.

"A holy place is never empty," as the Russian proverb has it. Malcolm was gone, and Richard Atlas at once stepped in to fill the void. That's right, the personage himself, Mr. Richard Atlas, publisher, of the house of Gerard and Atlas. I met him at a party given by Mrs. Janet Garrisson, the wife of the chairman of one of America's oldest panty hose manufacturers, who had started receiving me again. Despite all my dislike of rich old ladies, this was one I was even fond of. I had particularly good feelings about her after learning that she had once energetically and cheerfully supported herself and her daughter by making women's dresses. Labor is something I respect. I don't know whether Madame Garrisson supported herself on dresses alone, or whether she also supplemented her income with a little trading in her cunt, as women are wont to do, but I respect her. At the age of seventy or whatever, she's unbelievably cynical and for that reason a rare pleasure to talk to. The other reason I became enamored of her was that she liked my book — my whole life revolved around it, gentlemen, as you see. I had given Mrs. Garrisson a copy to read. The homosexual Volodya had long before wormed his way in with the Garrissons, and her enthusiasm for the book had been his work. I thought she would be embarrassed by it and dismiss all my strong feelings as "pornography." But she didn't; she was up to it. "I'm in raptures!" said Janet, looking like an old circus clown as she descended from her upstairs chambers to the living room where I was waiting for her. "Let me kiss you, my dear!" She kissed me, and afterward looked slyly at me and said, "In your next book you can write that I'm an old hag, a repulsive old hag." And so I have, as you see, but she's not an old hag; that's the wrong image for her. If I were a little older, and she about thirty years younger, I'm sure we'd have hit it off beautifully. As I was leaving her that day, she came out to the doorway of her house, between Park Avenue and Lexington, and said to me very seriously, "Watch out for Elena!" Elena was in New York then, and Madame Garrisson was, as you see, concerned about me and shielding me from that monster.

And so it was at a party at the Garrissons that I met Richard Atlas. A cocktail party, that is, with people coming and going. Andy Warhol was there with his retinue. I could have asked Madame Garrisson to introduce me to him, but what the hell for? To show him my two books in Russian? What else could I have done? I already believed firmly in the system and felt that until I had a book in English, I didn't exist. I could, say, have stood with Warhol and said some intelligent things to him, since I did know something about his work and his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, but I didn't want to bullshit anonymously; I wanted to speak as Edward Limonov and not as a nonentity, and so I didn't ask Madame to introduce us. There'll be time for that. I hope that Andy and I will both be around for a while.