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

  Incidentally, Steven financed the film I just mentioned out of friendship too. Once, in one of those rare instances of real intimacy between us, while we were sitting in the kitchen for a half-hour’s chat — and for Gatsby to waste a half an hour was like anyone else’s wasting a month — he, the employer, told me, the unusual servant, how he had come to finance it.

  “For three years, Edward, I played chess with a film director, and he played well. He was a good opponent. But during that time he continually complained to me about how he wanted to make that film, but that no one would finance it for him because it was too serious, so the poor fellow was forced to make commercial trash, which was not at all what he wanted to do. After three years I finally got so sick of those conversations that I told him I would give him the money myself, if he would just quit whining about it.”

  Mr. Grey smiled complacently. I’m not sure his version of how the film got made had much basis in fact. More likely, it was a legendary account of what had happened, but one that Mr. Grey himself believed. Yet the film did exist; that fact was indisputable. Gatsby then went into a complicated discussion of the financial reasons behind the loss of the “one point eight” million. According to him, the main problem had been a lack of control over ticket sales in most of the theaters.

  “In those theaters where we had guards to keep track of how many people went in, and then compared that number with the amount of money we got back, we didn’t lose anything,” he said.

  I don’t know whether my employer was right; I don’t know enough about it to say. Everything I know about economics comes down to the conviction that the best investment in the world is putting your money into revolution. It may be a very risky investment, but if you win, you win it all. I was therefore dying to say to him, “Why not put all those millions of yours into a revolution, sir?”

  Thus we live. After that episode in February, there were still a number of other times when I found him delightful, but the shadow of that incident remained, until, supplemented by other shadows, it finally altered beyond all recognition the image of my employer as the superman, intellectual liberal, and best friend of servants, animals, and children that he very likely considered himself to be. My girlfriend Jenny used to call Steven Grey a limousine liberal, a name I grew to like very much. Here I am living in the most expensive neighborhood in Manhattan on the banks of the East River in a house worth one and a half million dollars, and in the service of a limousine liberal. I, a spoiled servant of the international bourgeoisie, as I jokingly, and sometimes not so jokingly, think of myself.

  And it’s true that I am spoiled. Or better, I’m spoiled for the time being. It could be — and I’m always ready for this, just in case — that I’ll have to leave the millionaire’s house and set off on my own again into a world full of poverty and the struggle for survival. But right now I live in a way that few people can in this city or this world.

  In the first place, I am, as I’ve already said, the only one who lives at the millionaire’s house continuously. Mr. Grey and his family live in Connecticut, in the «country» in the large manorial house on their estate. Mr. Grey’s wife, the blonde Nancy, his four children, their staff of Connecticut servants, and his four automobiles are all there. As are their vegetables, their horses, their flowers, their swimming pool, and die several tenant farmers that Gatsby leases his land to.

  Hanging everywhere in the little Manhattan house are landscapes of Connecticut and the land owned by Gatsby lightly sketched in oils by the absolutely photographic artist Harris — Jacob Harris, I think. The frames are made of old, blackened, unfinished wood. Those landscapes remind me of the Russia I left five years ago — the same shallow brooks, country roads, spruce trees, and snow-covered meadows. The artist Harris painted countless picket fences, hedges, autumn trees, and red brick farm walls on commission from Gatsby.

  Nancy and the flying Gatsby on weekends, when he isn’t in his Asias and Europes, live there in very wholesome surroundings, with good milk (there are cows here and there in Harris’s landscapes). It is assumed that their children will grow up there to become healthy, energetic, and authentic Americans too.

  But I, Edward Limonov, live in the townhouse. My bedroom is on the fourth floor and looks out onto the garden and the river. Birds sing in the garden in the morning, and at any time of the day or night you can see ships, barges, and tugboats sailing by. The light of day enters my bathroom through a skylight cut in the ceiling. Every Monday Linda gives me money to buy food for the house, since one of my duties is to see that the refrigerator is always full, just in case, and on Thursdays she pays me my wages for the week. Going through the basement of the multimillionaire’s house you come to the wine cellar — an object of real pride to my employer with its thousands of bottles of old French wine and stronger beverages too. All five floors of our house are filled with comforts, luxuries, soft beds, couches, books, and records. And it would all be good, a heaven surrounded by ivy and suffused with light — it would all be good, if its master, its real master, didn’t visit it from time to time.

  During the first few months of my employment, Steven’s visits were fairly infrequent. Once or twice a week, say, he would appear at the front door in a taxi around six or seven in the evening, after rushing in directly from the airport. Often he was angry. He probably had his own private reasons for that, but the pretext was always that he could never find any money for the taxi, and he would run distractedly from me to the driver, coughing, continually taking his pipe out of his pocket, leaving it unlit, then putting it back again, and otherwise nervously fussing. His nervousness would at once invade our whole household, and I, who until then had belonged only to myself or to my regular duties, would suddenly belong to him. In the same way they have always done, his bad moods then would infect me and the house itself, but most of all they would infect Linda, if he happened to arrive during her working hours. Linda sits in her little anteroom on the second floor from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon.

  I usually wait for him in the kitchen, keeping an eye on the street. When his taxi arrives, I run to open the door to spare him the extra annoyance he would inevitably feel at having to look for his key — as you see, I’m looking out not only for him but also for myself. After the commotion of arrival is over, and he has carried in, either with or without my help, his suitcase or suitcases and the invariable heap of tattered newspapers he has been reading in the taxi, he runs upstairs to his leather-and-wood-paneled office on the second floor and sits down at the telephone. The telephoning usually continues for about thirty minutes to an hour, although sometimes it goes on longer — two hours, or even three.

  After he has finished with his calls, he comes back downstairs to the kitchen and appropriates my copy of The New York Post, always asking with old-fashioned courtesy if I have finished reading it and if he can have it. Finished or not, I always give it to him. It would be ridiculous not to. I ask him then if he would like a drink. By this I mean his usual glass of twelve-year-old Glenlivet Scotch with a quantity of ice and seltzer. If he is in a good mood, he makes the drink himself. I always put the bottle of Glenlivet out on the butcher-block counter in the kitchen, so he won’t have to search for it among the other bottles in the kitchen cabinet that serves as our bar and once more become irritated or lose his temper. These little traditions of putting out bottles and opening doors were established long before in Jenny’s time as essential precautions against his bad moods. I don’t know whether he’s aware that both Linda and I, that all of us in fact, are at the mercy of his moods, but maybe he is.

  After quickly skimming through the paper, he picks up his glass and goes to the master bedroom on the third floor, fills his deep, wide bathtub with water and a special variety of green pine scent, and lies down in it. When he takes a bath, he listens to the radio I recently installed on the night stand next to his bed. And while he takes his bath, we wait for him below.

  We wait, the house and I, until he splits
— disappears or goes out to eat at a restaurant and then somewhere else to get himself fucked. Sometimes, more often now, he comes back very late to do his coupling at home. I wait, and the house does too, because I have a feeling that the house likes me, but not him. Why me? Because I live in it and clean it and take care of it. And I really do clean it, since in addition to my housekeeping duties I’ve kept those of my old job, which was to do the «heavy» cleaning. Once a week when Jenny was still working and living at the house, I came to clean, vacuuming it from top to bottom and waxing its floors. Certainly the house does like me, the one who keeps it clean and neat and makes sure that everything in it is warm and dry. All Gatsby does is throw his towels and his dirty shirts and socks and underwear and his soiled suits on the floor, and track in chalk and plaster from the street, or wherever he gets it, and leave half-empty wine glasses and coffee cups lying around. In short, he brings disorder and dirt into our home — he uses it up, whereas I look after it.

  The house and I wait for him to go. For us, his arrival is like an extraterrestrial invasion. Often, when we’re expecting him, his girlfriend Polly arrives, a very nice but in my opinion harassed woman. Linda and I both agree that Polly is very nice and a benevolent and calming influence on Gatsby, our feudal lord, and we hope to God they won’t quarrel.

  The comparison of Steven to a feudal lord came to me only gradually, of course, during the many, many lunches I made for him. Usually he eats meat — lamb chops or steaks which I order by phone from the best butcher in the city, the Ottomanelli Brothers. It was only after seeing my fill of him slightly dulled with red meat and French red wine, a minimum of two bottles of which were always consumed at meals — it was only after seeing my fill of the puffy, flushed, red-bearded face of Gatsby with his paunch hanging over his belt — that I finally hit upon that very apt, as I thought, description of him as a feudal lord. That lord, a hunter, horseman, and dog lover, finishing up a joint of mutton and dressed in high jackboots and reeking of alcohol, dogs, and the stable, came to me somewhere out of medieval England. And Gatsby does in fact have a strange smell of leather about him from the closets where he keeps his suits and his quantities of footwear, a leathery smell with a pungent admixture of cologne and Dunhill tobacco, his invariable brand. Like all snobs — and it shouldn’t be difficult to guess that Steven Grey is a snob — he has his own particular brand of Scotch, Glenlivet, his own shirtmaker, Astor, his own brand of underwear, Jockey, and his own brand of tobacco, Dunhill. In addition, there are other, more general principles of snobbism and the good life — his socks, for example, come only from Bloomingdale’s and have to be a hundred percent cotton. And it is also at Bloomingdale’s that I purchase the bow ties for his tuxedo and the bed linen for his house, for each one of its seven bedrooms. The bed linen too has to be pure cotton — no polyesters allowed.

  When Polly arrives, she usually greets me with some thoughtful phrase like, “How’s your book coming, Edward?” — the words change, but it’s obvious they’re all supposed to express her concern for me and her interest in my fate — and then she goes upstairs to see Steven. If he has gotten out of the tub by then and is dressed, he runs down the stairs to meet her. Whenever that happens, I withdraw to the kitchen or to my bedroom, impatiently waiting for him to go out to his restaurant. At the same time, I remain on the alert, in case he should ask me about some object, thing, or person it is essential I find at once either inside the house or beyond its confines. Although the owner of a small empire of firms and the master of the numerous people who work for him, he can never remember, for example, where the glasses and cups in the kitchen are, and inevitably opens every one of its twenty cupboards in succession looking for them. Even when I go up to my room to give him a feeling of privacy in his own home, I always leave the door ajar, in case he should suddenly need something or want me.

  Scenes like the episode regarding my sending his pants to the cleaners have never again been repeated in such a blatantly obnoxious form, and there’s a reason for that, as I shall explain in due course, but outbursts of hysterics still do rock the house on occasion, reducing Linda to a state of nervous shock and causing me to lose my temper. “You weakling, you hysterical old woman! Why can’t you learn to control yourself!” I whisper under my breath while washing the dishes or drying them, or clearing the table.

  Once he had to go to his place in Connecticut after spending three days at my, or rather at Linda’s and my, house. We had gotten incredibly tired of him during that time and were counting the minutes. He behaved more or less decently, and with my help had already loaded the car with a box of French wine, his suitcase, and several incomprehensible electronic devices with tangled wires, but was still lingering somewhere in the depths of the house. I was sitting at my usual place by the kitchen window keeping an eye on his car so he wouldn’t get a ticket, and waiting for him to finally get his ass out of there, and already savoring the moment when I would at last be able to kick off my shoes and lie down, since I’d been on my feet since six A.M., and it was now almost six p.m.… When from upstairs — Linda’s little anteroom and Gatsby’s office communicate with the kitchen by a stairway, so that if the door’s open I can easily hear what they’re talking about — when from upstairs I heard a sudden uproar: Linda’s muffled and nervous answers and the hysterical bass of my employer. “It’s been stolen! It’s been stolen!” the deep bass voice repeated. I couldn’t hear Linda’s answer; they had moved away from the doorway well into the interior of the office.

  I cringed with a sense of foreboding. After the initial quarreling, shouting, and other supplementary noises resembling the sound of furniture being knocked over, all of which took place well inside the office, it became impossible to make out any words at all, only the din of voices, and then Linda came running into the kitchen and asked in a hysterical half-whisper, “Edward, do you know where Steven’s small black portfolio that he always keeps on the windowsill in the office is? It’s gone, it’s been stolen, and it has all his credit cards and his passport in it!”

  “Linda,” I said, “except for you and me, no one has been in the house for over a week now. I have no idea where his portfolio is, but if it was on the windowsill, then it’s still there. I haven’t taken anything from either the windowsill or the desk, since I don’t like to touch the boss’s papers. Maybe Steven put it somewhere himself?”

  “No, he didn’t move it,” Linda said, but she didn’t sound so sure. And then she added, “We’ll have to go through the whole house, although it’s almost certainly been stolen.” She looked at me tragically and reproachfully.

  I shrugged. “Who could have stolen it? Guests? His guests? Ghupta stole his portfolio, or maybe another one of his friends — the Hollywood screenwriter Jeff? Or maybe his wife took it? Or I did,” I added resentfully. “That’s it, it was me.”

  Linda was too frightened to say anything more, and I didn’t say anything either, while upstairs Gatsby continued to thump and crash about. And then it was suddenly quiet. A light lit up on the kitchen phone, which, like the phones in every other room in the house, has a button for each of our four numbers and another for the intercom we use to talk between rooms.

  “He’s calling somebody,” Linda whispered.

  He quickly finished his call, and then there was the sound of footsteps. Flat feet, I thought maliciously. The flat feet were clearly on their way down to us. I was aware that at that moment I was thinking like a servant, that I was full of a servant’s fear and animosity, and that like a servant who has done nothing wrong, I had no wish to see him. Society, civilization, culture, history, and what else? — books, movies, and television had all shaped our roles, those of master and servant. Like it or not, Edward, if you play the servant, if you live like a servant, even if there is much more intellect in you, intellect sufficient for a poet, say, it doesn’t make any difference; nobody cares. You have to play the fool and tragically wait for him to come down. Curled up inside like a shrimp at the approach of a fis
herman’s net, or like what else? — like a hedgehog which a noblewoman reaches for and prods with the tip of her umbrella, the servant Limonov listened as the steps approached the stairway and then started down. Linda stared like a rabbit at the doorway’s gaping maw.

  And then he was standing in the doorway. One thing I have acquired in this world after many years of associating with people like myself is the ability to look and not look at the same time, or the ability to see without looking. I acquired that skill after several years of training in the New York subway system. It has proved useful. I saw Gatsby without looking at him. I sensed his psychopathic aura, and I felt his sweaty nervousness and tension, and I had the feeling that steam was whistling from him as from a teakettle and he was surrounded by a sort of red cloud. Perhaps his puffy red face produced this last illusion, or perhaps his red beard was at fault — that made me think he was surrounded by a hysterical red cloud. I don’t know what it was, but I do know that I hated him, and that I hated him doubly both for forcing me to play that idiotic social role which required me to detest him, and for his not being able to rise to the level of ordinary human relations. For not even being able, the primitive bastard, to remain on the level of employer toward those who work for him and are paid for their labor. Instead, the cocksucker used that swollen cloud to violently shove the two of us, Linda and me, into the role of servants. With one thrust of his nerves, he shoved us out of the twentieth century and into the Middle Ages and history. In a few minutes, without resorting to violence, he turned me, a poet and lover of intellectual books on social themes, an anarchist and admirer of the raw New Wave music of Elvis Costello and Richard Hell, into a quaking servant. What was the use of my trembling with hatred for him? My hatred changed nothing; it remained merely the private affair of a servant. I could hate him if I wished, but a servant I would remain. I stood still, while he walked past me toward Linda, past his servant, his servant, his servant!