His Butler’s Story (1980-1981) Read online

  His Butler’s Story (1980-1981)

  Edward Limonov

  Edward Limonov

  His Butler’s Story

  A sequence of hilarious sexual misadventures transplants Edward Limonov’s fictional hero — like himself a Russian émigré poet named Edward Limonov — from a roach-infested welfare hotel to the servant’s quarter’s of a New York tycoon’s townhouse. From there he hopes to launch himself to fame and fortune with the help of his as-yet-unpublished novel. So begins this ribald, wildly funny memoir of a Soviet poet turned butler in the glitzy world of Manhattan’s superrich. A literary high-wire act of outrageous audacity, His Butler’s Story takes on the American dream’s underside with boisterous wit as it parodies the world of émigré cultural superstars and their cronies.

  In Steven Grey’s East Side mansion, Limonov finds himself in the role of a servant to a multimillionaire whose jet-set friends range from the Shah of Iran to a celebrated Soviet writer whom Limonov knew in his Moscow days. Grey becomes not just Limonov’s master but a rival the poet wants to emulate as much as destroy. Limonov dreams of spraying his employer’s dinner table with an AK-47 rifle, but sex is the only revenge left to the servant, and he seduces the girlfriend of his boss’s teenage son and lusts after a neighborhood nymphet. An outcast as much in his new country as he was in his Soviet homeland, Limonov holds up a mirror to an America rarely seen with such an uncompromising yet ecstatic vision.

  Chapter One

  I had been completely captivated, completely enthralled by him for two months. Then on the twenty-eighth of February, 1979 — I remember that day of my humiliation well — his limousine came to take him to the airport, since he was going to California, and in the last minutes before he left, he treated me to a nasty little show of hysterics. He stamped his feet and stormed up and down the stairs, screaming the same thing over and over again: “God damn you! God damn you!” His face turned red, his beard bristled, and his eyes seemed about to pop out of their sockets. There were times before that when I had heard him from the kitchen shouting at our secretary, Linda, but I had never actually seen him in that state. I had only heard him.

  I stood with my back against the doorway and tried to figure out what I had done wrong. I had sent to the cleaners a pair of gray pants that he himself had put on the chest by the front door. The pants had spots on them and were lying on the chest with the other dirty things that were supposed to go to the cleaners, the chest being our special place for that. But it turned out he actually wanted to take the gray pants with him, since they were the ones he always wore on the plane. He didn’t have anything else to wear, poor guy, except for a hundred or so suits in his closet.

  So I stood there in the dining room doorway, while he ran up and down the stairs, hurling aside whatever got in his way and ripping open the doors and screaming the same thing over and over: “God damn you! God damn you!” and “Ask! Just ask!” He had shouted the first “God damn you!” while leaning over me, since he, my employer, was much bigger and taller than me, his servant — in fact, next to me he was a gorilla. He barked the rest of his imprecations from a distance. Perhaps he moved away from me because he was afraid he would lose control and hit me? I don’t know.

  It was during those few minutes that I first began to hate him. I was even a bit scared, but not that he would hit me. I would have killed him if he had. I would have gotten the better of him somehow, even rushing out of the kitchen after him with a butcher knife if it had come to that. No, what scared me was the obviously unhealthy nature of his hysteria and the insignificance of the pretext that had provoked it. Well, go fuck yourself then! I thought. Go scream at yourself! I know I haven’t done anything wrong, and if you don’t like it, fire me! Who cares! And already gathering my things together in my mind, I walked through the living room into the kitchen and went downstairs to the basement, took a bottle of soda water from the box, and proceeding to the farthest room, one heaped with broken furniture and the discarded or worn-out toys of his children, I sat down on a broken chair, opened the bottle of fizzing soda water, and started drinking it.

  It was only then that I noticed my hands were shaking. That observation infuriated me. Why the hell should I have to get mixed up in somebody else’s goddamn hysterics and inability to control himself! Why should I? Visions of myself moving off, suitcase in hand, into a yawning vastness of freedom both calmed me down and cheered me up.

  Upstairs I could hear loud stamping. Perhaps he was looking for me? So let him, the asshole, I thought. I’ll be damned if I’ll go back up there until he leaves. I’ve seen enough of his bloated face and bug-eyes. What’s he stomping around for, anyway? I thought. Has he got flat feet? I put special rubber soles on his shoes so his feet won’t blister, even if they are flat. Actually, I don’t put them on; the Greek shoe repairman does. I just take the shoes to the Greek. And sometimes I shine them too. He keeps thirty or forty pairs in the house. Shining his shoes is one of my duties. I’m his servant, and that’s what I’m paid for. When he’s here in New York, I make breakfast and lunch for him too. For him and for his fucking businessmen. They frequently go over their papers at lunch.

  The stomping and crashing continued. The house is probably fifty or sixty years old, so there was really nothing very odd about my being able to hear the hysterical Gatsby stomping around upstairs from the basement. The Great Gatsby. My employer. My boss. My oppressor.

  Obviously I don’t call him Gatsby to his face. Steven Grey, Multimillionaire, Chairman of the Board of Directors, Principal Stockholder, and President of Corporations, has no idea I call him that. But if he did, he’d probably be proud of the name; he’s well-read and graduated from Harvard, and he has a grandmother who used to be a writer and a great-grandfather who was a friend of Walt Whitman’s, and every room in our house has booklined shelves covering almost an entire wall. Mr. Grey knows who Gatsby is and would be pleased.

  Actually, while hiding out in the basement from Steven’s hysterics, I gave a completely different meaning to the image of the Great Gatsby. I suspected that Steven’s Gatsby was merely an attractive façade he turned toward his women and his friends. It would have been interesting to be the other Gatsby’s housekeeper too, to observe him from the kitchen, where I could have seen what he was really like.

  Steven Grey, stomping over my head for the last time, slammed the front door and was gone. The throb of his limousine soon followed. After sitting another five minutes or so just to make sure, I went back up to the kitchen, drinking the soda water and trying to suppress the passionately indignant and condemnatory speeches I was reciting to myself. It was 8:15. The whole episode had taken only fifteen minutes. I walked through the dining room to the hallway of our house, or rather his house, stepped into the elevator, went up to my fourth floor, or rather his fourth floor, entered my bedroom, which of course was really his, and started gathering my things together. The indignant speeches had stimulated my brain. I made them both to myself and out loud, appealing to an imaginary jury of arbitrators, whom I alternately called «guys» and “gentlemen,” pointing out to them the correctness of my own behavior in contrast to Gatsby’s hysteria, rudeness, and lack of self-control. Along with those thoughts, another, quite unexpected one suddenly occurred to me — that Soviet lads in faded battle tunics would soon be here, that my brothers would soon come to take revenge on everybody here, including my employer Gatsby, for all the insults I endured. Oh, what revenge they’d take…

  I hadn’t gotten together very many of my things, had in fact only managed to dump them all in a heap, when the doorbell rang. I went back to the elevator and downstairs to the first floor, wondering who in the hell it could be so early in the morning.r />
  It turned out to be Olga. I was so upset I had completely forgotten it was Wednesday. Olga is my one subordinate, a black woman of fifty from Haiti. She comes to our multimillionaire’s little house four times a week. She changes the sheets, including mine, that being one of my privileges, and does the washing and ironing in the basement laundry room. She also cleans the house’s bathtubs and toilets, polishes the silver, and wipes the dust from our surfaces, and does any other job that I, the housekeeper and therefore her immediate supervisor, ask her to do. I rarely ask her to do anything, however. I’m a shitty exploiter of other people’s labor; I get embarrassed.

  A well-defined morning routine was worked out years ago by Jenny, when she was still housekeeper before I took over, and it has been preserved during my time. I’m usually the first one to come down to the kitchen. I raise the window blinds, put the tea kettle on the huge restaurant-size gas stove, and wash out the grounds left over in the coffee maker from the night before. Olga usually arrives during that process. Then, sometime after nine, Linda arrives, the Great Gatsby’s permanent secretary of eight years’ standing. Just before or after Linda’s arrival, the house echoes with the constant ringing of our four different phones.

  I complained to Olga about our employer. Basically she agreed with me — after all, I’m her boss. I wasn’t looking for any particular reaction, however; I just wanted somebody to complain to. Olga is a very kind woman, decent and hard-working. I inherited her from the above-mentioned Jenny, and I’ve never thought of replacing her. Olga shook her head at my story. She too thought that Gatsby had been in the wrong: if he hadn’t wanted to send the gray pants to the cleaners, why had he put them on the chest with the other things?

  “To hell with him! He thinks I need his job! I’ll get another one. I’ll work as a waiter in a restaurant where I won’t have to put up with anybody else’s hysterics. I’ll work my eight hours and go home!” I told Olga, pacing back and forth in our immense kitchen. She stood leaning against one of the two long butcher-block counters that extend along its sides. I paced nervously, and she stood and listened. Then the phone rang. I picked it up.

  “Hi, it’s Steven,” said the indistinct voice of the Great Gatsby. “I’m calling from the airport. Forgive me, Edward. Considering it logically, you were quite right to send the pants to the cleaners. They were in fact on the chest where we always put the things that are supposed to go out. Forgive me; I was just upset about my own problems and business. It wasn’t directed at you personally.”

  I don’t know why, but I let him off. Linda rebuked me for it later. “It’s all right, Steven, I understand. Everybody’s got problems. It’s normal. It was my fault too; I should have asked.”

  “So long. I’ll see you next week,” he said. “Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye,” I said.

  “He apologized! That was him!” I told Olga in triumph. “He was calling from the airport.”

  Olga started smiling. She was glad it had all worked out so well, that Edward, who was already thinking about quitting his job, had managed to patch things up with Mr. Grey. I could understand her; from her point of view, I’m obviously a good person to work for. I frequently let her go home early, and I never tell her what to do, believing she knows what’s expected of her, as in fact she does. If she sees that the carpet in the hall or in the solarium or in the living room on the third floor is dirty, she gets out the vacuum cleaner and cleans it.

  Then Linda arrived, and I gave her my story. “It finally happened to me, Linda,” I told her excitedly. “Steven jumped on me this morning. He finally did it!” I said. “I had heard him yelling at you so many times, I was pretty sure my own turn would come sooner or later.”

  “Only don’t expect he’ll always apologize, Edward,” Linda said. “He only did this time because you’re new here, and he’s still kind of leery of you. With me he doesn’t stand on ceremony that much; I’m lucky if he apologizes every other time. And there wasn’t any reason for you to tell him it was your fault either. You should have let him know he was in the wrong, if only a little…”

  Linda is brave enough with me in the kitchen whenever Gatsby’s not around, but when he stays with us in New York, she trembles and worries. She’s thirty-one years old, and she’s worked for Gatsby for eight of those years. He has in that time trained her so well and gotten her so much under his thumb, that I’m sure that even at home in her nice, big apartment building in her not so nice neighborhood, she thinks about Gatsby’s affairs. When she’s in her light blue Victorian bedroom, or making love with her permanent boyfriend, David, or talking to her three cats, she remembers Gatsby. And Gatsby isn’t all that reluctant to call her at home either — to use up her free time too.

  Linda is the best possible secretary; otherwise Gatsby wouldn’t have kept her for eight years. And the other businessmen too, Gatsby’s friends and partners who come to our house, have told me more than once that Linda is very quick, reliable, and efficient.

  She really is, as the piece of paper tacked to the cork wall of the clean anteroom where she sits surrounded by cigarette smoke puts it, “Able to raise buildings and walk beneath them. To derail locomotives. To catch bullets with her teeth and eat them. To freeze water with a single glance. SHE IS GOD.” Next to this is written, “Linda.”

  Linda and her abilities are noted at the bottom of the list. At its top, by the name “Steven Grey,” is the following: “Chairman of the Board of Directors. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. More powerful than a locomotive. Faster than a speeding bullet. Walks on water. Gives orders to God.”

  Steven has been giving orders to Linda for eight years. And shouting at her. Once he even tore a telephone book to shreds in a fury. Linda is expected to remember and know absolutely everything. Another time he lost his temper because she couldn’t find the number of a girl he’d met on a plane a month or a month and a half before, according to him. “A month or a month and a half!” Linda said to me in an exasperated voice. “I found the number for him the next day. He had met her six months before, in November!” Everything that Steven doesn’t remember, and as it turns out there isn’t much that he does, Linda is required to remember for him — including the phone numbers of his girlfriends. She even classifies and files away the letters he gets from his mistresses.

  I was completely enthralled, completely captivated by him when I was Jenny’s “Russian boyfriend” and visiting the multimillionaire’s little house. Even though Jenny complained to me about his hysterics, I always thought she was exaggerating. I was infatuated with him; he really did seem like a Great Gatsby to me — an overworked businessman, a living symbol of American efficiency and energy. I was delighted by his almost daily flights from city to city or coast to coast across the full extent of America, and from country to country. I was delighted too by the fact that whenever he flew to Europe, he always took that most fantastic of airplanes, the Concorde — and really, what else could he take! It seemed to me that for someone so contemporary, only the Concorde would do.

  The corporations over which he presided as either Chairman or President were all very chic — businesses of only the most elegant kind. The extraordinarily expensive automobiles manufactured by one of his firms seemed then like automobiles of the future to me. That’s how cars will look in the twenty-first century, I thought. The computers produced by another of his firms competed successfully with the best in the world, those made in Japan. Gatsby and his firm were involved in a real war with the Japanese over those computers and a tiny chip the size of your fingernail (the chip was capable of storing 60,000 bits of information). A secret war of industrial espionage and the theft of technical secrets and of bribery and buying and selling. Just like the high-tech films of James Bond.

  My employer himself, invariably dressed in plain English woolens and very simple but impeccably tailored Astor shirts and low-heeled conservative shoes, bearded, and wearing glasses, a towering, energetic, loudly laughing, constant source of delig
ht to all those who hovered about him, whether friends, women, or business partners, was for me a symbol, a kind of film hero — the young millionaire, the soul and hope of America. I could see only the facade then, and it was dazzling.

  Even the fact that he had hired me, that he trusted me despite my being a poet and a writer and not a housekeeper at all, stood in his favor. Giving me the job meant sacrificing some of his own comforts. After all, I obviously had no experience whatsoever as a housekeeper, and I thought my service to him would therefore have to have its deficiencies and shortcomings. But he went ahead and hired me anyway, so that in the end it seemed to me that Steven Grey was, in a sense, patronizing the arts. And he had done so before. He was the producer of a film with excellent European actors, a very high-class film — “a piece of real art.” Real art doesn’t earn any money, of course, and as a consequence Steven Grey had lost “one point eight” million on that venture. I was extremely impressed by the loss of that “one point eight” million.

  Just how much I liked him can also be seen in the fact that in that period of my life I sometimes excepted him from the theory of class struggle I had so thoroughly mastered during my first years in America. No, he’s not a capitalist pig, I thought. A man who has thrown away almost two million dollars on an intellectual film and who laughs about it now obviously cannot be included in that crowd of faceless pigs. He deserves to be excepted.

  I found a great number of attractive qualities in Gatsby then. He looked his brilliant best, for example, in the story of how he saved, saved in the most literal sense, the life of his friend Anthony by sending a special plane for him to Kenya, where Anthony had had an accident. Because of an improperly prescribed dosage of a new, untested medicine, Anthony had suddenly lost control of himself and in that condition had thrown himself through the plate glass window of a modern hotel. He was critically injured and unconscious — in a coma, in fact — when the plane sent by Gatsby picked him up and brought him back to the United States and one of the country’s best hospitals, where several operations were performed. Anthony survived, although he remained a cripple. He had lost the use of one of his arms and both of his legs, and was no longer able to work, and had to give up the beloved architecture that took him to Kenya in the first place. But he was still alive. Thanks to Steven Grey. Steven had, moreover, for many years been paying the rent for the studio where Anthony lived, as well as paying for his food and a servant-companion, since Anthony was incapable of fixing his own meals or looking after his apartment himself. I, who still see so many unhappy events in my future, thought enviously of how fine it would be to have a friend like Steven Grey. I, who have looked so hard and long for friends and have so rarely found them, was deeply touched by that story. Even later, when my image of the captivating Gatsby had been filled in with certain less attractive details, the story of Anthony continued to have an effect on me.