It's Me, Eddie Read online

  At this point the bell rang. Raymond was being called for by a certain Luis (his lover, Kirill whispered to me), but Raymond called him Sebastian, after the well-known saint who was executed by arrows. Sebastian was Mexican. He did not strike me as interesting, he was dressed very conservatively, the same height as Raymond, had a pleasant face but no outstanding features. He owned an art gallery. He was thirty-five or forty, and Raymond considered him young.

  They went out, but Raymond had asked Kirill and me to stay and wait till he came back. Kirill, enjoying the fact that he had lived up to my expectations and kept his promise, asked patronizingly, “Well, Edichka, how do you like cher Raymond? Isn’t he a charmer?” Here, I think, he was imitating the jargon of his renowned aristocratic grandmother, about whom he told a great many stories. The grandmother lived to be a hundred and four, and had what in my opinion was the bad habit of dashing cracked antique plates against the wall.

  I said I thought he was okay, not a bad fellow.

  “He’s in love with Luis now, but when we were in the kitchen he said that he liked you very much.”

  How could he not like me? This sounds implausible, but he was the spit and image of Avdeev – the singer from the Teatralny Restaurant, admirer of my early youth. It’s a strange world!

  Kirill lavished praise on Raymond as if he were a commodity that he was planning to sell. Raymond was clever, he was cultured, he wore sumptuous clothes – so saying, Kirill led me into the bedroom, where Raymond’s many things hung in the closet. “Look at this!” He proudly flung open the closet door. “So much of everything!”

  Kirill himself went around in dreadful worn-down shoes. Although he suffered over this, he did not have the willpower – even when he had the money, which was very rare, but sometimes he did – to go out and buy shoes.

  Raymond and Luis, Kirill continued in the tone of an affectionate mother recounting the escapades of her fervently loved son, were having tailcoats made specifically for the theater, special identical tailcoats. “You know, Limonov” – in the seriousness of the moment he even switched from Edichka to Limonov – “Raymond has known many great men, from Nijinsky to… And besides, Raymond has…”

  Kirill had probably touted me to Raymond in exactly the same way. A poet, and clever, and so refined, the poor fellow has suffered horribly from his wife’s treachery…

  Soon Kirill turned melancholy. The excitement of having lived up to my expectations and fulfilled his promise was over. Evidently fighting off the emptiness, he went to the next room and began making phone calls. He called his mistress, Jannetta, and apparently got up the nerve to quarrel with her. Unsettled, he returned to the living room, took another bottle of vodka from Raymond’s icebox, and we drank it, hardly noticing what we were doing. He withdrew to the telephone again, made several more calls, this time whispering stealthily in English, but did not hear what he wanted to from the receiver. Then, since I was the only available target, he began to badger me.

  “Limonov, hey Limonov, remember you pointed out a woman you knew at the hotel, a Russian emigree? Call her up, have her come over, I’ll fuck her.”

  “Shit, Kirill, you don’t need her, and anyway she hardly says hello to me. Besides, it’s twelve o’clock. The night is young for you and me, but it would be an insult to go calling up an ordinary person like that girl. She’s been asleep for hours. And if I did call her, what would I say?”

  “Can’t you even do me one little favor, can’t you call that tart? I’m miserable, I quarreled with Jannetta, I need somebody to fuck. I do everything for you – I introduced you to Raymond – but you don’t want to do anything for me. What an egoist you are, Limonov,” he said furiously.

  “If I were an egoist,” I replied calmly, “other people’s actions wouldn’t fuck me up and I wouldn’t give a shit what my ex-wife did. It’s precisely because I’m not an egoist that I lay dying on Lexington Avenue. What more can I say, you saw me dying there, saw the shape I was in. The reason I was in such bad shape was that I had suddenly lost my reason for living – Elena. I had no one to take care of, and I don’t know how to live for myself. What kind of egoist am I?”

  I said all this very seriously, very, very seriously.

  “Take care of me,” he said, “and yourself too – we’ll fuck her together, want to? Come on, Edichka, call her, please?”

  Maybe he wanted to compensate himself for his failure with Jannetta, vent his malice on someone else’s cunt. Such things happen. But I could not have some tart present at my first experiment.

  “I don’t want to fuck dirty tarts,” I said. “Women disgust me, they’re vulgar. I want to start a new life, I want to sleep with Raymond this very day, if I can manage it. Anyway, don’t hassle me, fuck off. We’d better have something to eat, I’m already hungry.”

  By reminding him of food I succeeded in turning him to another path. He was hungry too, and we went into the kitchen. “Raymond hardly ever eats at home,” Kirill said cheerlessly. We raided the refrigerator – of what he had there, very little was edible. We settled on apples, ate two apiece, but the apples didn’t satisfy us. In the freezer we found some cutlets that must have been there a hundred years, took them out, and began frying them in mayonnaise – we couldn’t find the butter, although Raymond had served some with the caviar. There was caviar in the refrigerator, too, but we were shy about touching it.

  We made a terrible stink – had to open all the windows – and at that moment, in walked Luis-Sebastian and Raymond.

  “Phew, what did you burn? What a stink!” Raymond said prissily.

  “We got hungry and fried some cutlets,” Kirill answered, abashed.

  “Couldn’t you have gone down to the restaurant?”

  “We don’t have any money today,” Kirill said modestly.

  “I’ll give you some money, go and eat, young men must be well nourished,” Raymond said. He gave Kirill some money and came to see us off.

  “Excuse me,” he said to me intimately, at the door, “I want you, but Luis often stays with me to make love and sleeps here, he loves me very much.” Suddenly he kissed me, an unexpectedly firm and long-drawn-out kiss, his big lips enveloping my little lips. What did I feel? The sensation was strange, and I felt a sort of force. But this didn’t go on long; after all, Sebastian-Luis was stirring around in the living room. Kirill and I went out.

  “Call me tomorrow at twelve o’clock, at work – Kirill will give you the number. We’ll have lunch together,” Raymond said into the narrowing crack.

  Downstairs in the restaurant we each bought ourselves a huge long chunk of meat – steak and potatoes. It was very expensive, but it was good and we ate our fill. Weighed down with food, we went out into the New York night, and Kirill saw me to the hotel.

  “Kirill,” I said jokingly, “Raymond’s good-looking, but I like you better. You’re big and tall, and what’s more, you’re young. If you had a little money too, we’d make a beautiful couple.”

  “Unfortunately, Edichka, I’m not attracted to men for now – maybe some day,” he said.

  It was 2:00 a.m. by the electronic clock on the IBM tower.

  The next day I called Raymond and we met at his office. After making my way through a barricade of sleek and fat-free secretaries, I finally found myself in the room – cold and light and spacious, of course, bigger than the lobby of our hotel – where he did his business. He looked like a grand seigneur: gray pinstripe suit, dotted necktie. We set off without delay for the very nearest restaurant, it was on Madison, not far from my hotel.

  The restaurant was packed with gray-haired and very proper ladies; there were men too, but fewer. With regard to the ladies, my thought was that each of them had obviously dispatched a minimum of two husbands to the next world. We sat side by side; Raymond ordered me an avocado-and-shrimp salad.

  “I can’t eat that dish, it’s fattening,” he said. “But you can, you’re a boy.”

  The boy thought to himself that yes, no doubt he was a boy
, but if you made a hole in his head, took out the part of the brain that controlled the memory, washed and cleaned it properly, that would be luxury. Then you’d have a boy.

  “What shall we have to drink?” Raymond inquired.

  “Vodka, if I may,” I said modestly, and adjusted the black scarf at my neck.

  He ordered vodka for both himself and me, but they served it with ice, and it wasn’t all I had expected.

  We ate and talked. The salad was sophisticated and subtle in flavor, a gourmet dish; I was eating with a knife and fork again – I eat very adeptly, like a European, and I am proud of it.

  To a stranger, of course, we looked like two pederasts, although he behaved very respectably except for stroking my hand. Several old ladies were obviously shocked, and on our banquette we felt as if we were on stage, sitting in a crossfire of stares. As a poet I enjoyed shocking these old ladies. I love attention of any sort. I was in my element.

  Raymond began telling me about the death of his fifteen-year-old son. The boy had smashed up on a motorcycle, which he had bought without his father’s knowledge. “He was in school in Boston, and I had no control over the purchase,” Raymond said with a sigh. “After his death I went to Boston and saw the man who had sold him the motorcycle. He was black, and he said to me, ‘Sir, you have my deepest sympathy in your grief. If I’d known this would happen, I never would have sold the boy the motorcycle, I would have demanded that he get his father’s permission.’ A very good man, that black,” Raymond said.

  Trying to distract him from his sad memories, I asked about his ex-wife. He brightened up – this was obviously a topic of interest to him.

  “Women are much coarser than men, although that’s the reverse of generally received opinion. They’re greedy, egoistic, and repulsive. I hadn’t had anything to do with them in ever so long, but recently I went to Washington and after an interval of many years, happened to fuck some woman. And you know, she struck me as dirty, although she was a very pretty thirty-five-year-old, feminine and clean. Their very physiology, their menstruation, harbors dirt. – Kirill told me that you loved your wife very much, and that she’s a very pretty woman. You’re still suffering now, of course, but you can’t imagine how lucky you are that you escaped from her, you’ll realize it later. A man’s love is much more solid, and often a couple will spend their whole lives together.” Here he sighed and took a sip of vodka. He was pensive a little while.

  “True, such love is encountered more and more rarely nowadays. Before, twenty or thirty years ago, homosexuals lived very differently. The young lived with the old, learned from them; this is noble, when a young man and an old one love each other and live together. A young man often needs backing, the support of a mature, experienced mind. This was a good tradition. Unfortunately, it’s very different now. The young prefer to live with the young now, and all that comes of it is bestial fucking. What can one young man learn from another…? There aren’t any solid couples now, they keep switching partners.” He sighed again.

  Then he went on. “I like you. But I’ve been having a romance with Sebastian for a month now. I met him at a restaurant; we have special restaurants where women don’t come, you know, only men like me. I was sitting with a whole group, and he was with a group too. I noticed him right off, he was sitting in a corner and being very enigmatic. He, Sebastian, took the first step – he sent me a glass of champagne, I replied with a bottle. I thought at first that he liked my friend, a handsome young Italian. No, it turned out he liked me, the old one. He came over to our table to introduce himself. That’s how we met.

  “He loves me very much,” Raymond went on. “And he has a very good cock. Do you think I’m being vulgar? No, the subject is love, after all, and in love this matters – he has a very good cock. Yet he doesn’t arouse me, and when I kissed you at the door last night, my cock stood up right away…”

  In response to so frank an outpouring, I cut a morsel of avocado with exaggerated care, then laid down my knife and fork and picked up my glass, took a drink, and swished the ice cubes in the vodka.

  Raymond did not notice my embarrassment.

  He went on, “Sebastian had a terrible tragedy, you know. He was close to suicide. He had lived for six years with a certain man, I don’t want to mention his name, he’s a famous man, very, very rich. Sebastian loved him and never left his side the whole six years. They went to Europe together, traveled around the world on a yacht. And suddenly this man fell in love with someone else. Sebastian didn’t recover for a year. He tells me that if I leave him he won’t survive it. He treats me very well, he gives me gifts – he gave me this ring, and perhaps you saw the huge vase in the living room, he gave me that too.

  “Yesterday, you noticed, he was a bit gloomy. A deal of his fell through, there was big money involved,” Raymond went on. “Sebastian wanted to sell, but couldn’t, some beakers that had belonged to a King George, I don’t remember which one; he’s very upset. He loves his work at the gallery, on the whole, but he gets very tired. He comes to me to make love, but he’s apt to fall asleep from fatigue; I kiss him, trying to wake him up, I want sex, but he gets tired at work. Besides, he has to do a lot of driving, and it’s a long ride for him to my place from work. We’d like to make our home together, but his work prevents it. The difficulty is that while men like us aren’t persecuted in this country, it still wouldn’t be a good idea for his rich clients, especially the women, to find out he’s a pederast. They’d probably stop buying from him at the gallery. Not all of them, perhaps, but many. That’s why we can’t make our home together – inevitably, rumors would reach them. But for economic reasons too, it would be more convenient to live together. He’s – oh, not stingy, but you know, thrifty, which is good, because I spend money too freely. He says we could eat at home sometimes, he likes to cook. I used to be able to afford a lot in my job, my restaurant expenses were paid by the company too, I enjoyed great privileges, I was a friend and partner to my boss. Now that my friend and partner has died – we created the business together – I no longer have such great privileges. The financial constraints irritate me. I’m used to living on a grand scale.

  “What do you think?” He turned to me suddenly, breaking off his monologue. “Does Sebastian really love me, as he says? I often tell him, ‘You’re young, I’m old, why do you love me?’ He answers that I am his love.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Raymond went on pensively. “I like him, but as I told you – you made my cock stand right up, he doesn’t make it happen that way, yet he says he loves me. Can I believe him? What do you think?” He looked at me expectantly.

  “I don’t know,” I said. What else could I say.

  “I’m afraid to fall in love,” Raymond said. “By now I’m the wrong age. I’m afraid to fall in love. And then if I’m deserted, it will be a tragedy. I don’t want suffering. I’m afraid to fall in love.”

  He looked at me expectantly and stroked my hand with his fingers, red hairs sticking up here and there from under his rings. His hand was heavy. Dully, as if in a dream, I looked at that hand. I understood that he wanted to know whether I would love him if he left Luis. He was asking for guarantees. What guarantees could I give him? I had no way of knowing. He was nice, but it was hard for me to tell whether I had any sexual affinity for him. I would be able to tell only after making love with him.

  “Advise me what to do,” he said.

  “He probably does love you,” I said, half lying, just for the sake of something to say. I wanted to be honest with him, as with the whole world; I couldn’t tell him, “Desert Luis, I will love you devotedly and tenderly.” I didn’t know that I would. Moreover, I was suddenly struck by the thought, He’s seeking love, care, and kindness, but I seek the very same thing – that’s why I’m sitting with him, I came for love, care, and kindness. But how can we part? I was distraught. If I’m supposed to give him love, I don’t want to – I don’t, that’s all. I want to be loved, otherwise I don’t need any of it. In
return for his loving me, if he does, I will come to love him later. I know myself, that’s the way it will be. But to begin with, let him love me.

  Then we walked away from this potentially explosive moment. We didn’t walk away – we crawled away with difficulty. He asked me about my life in Moscow, and I patiently told the same story that I had had to tell maybe a hundred times, here in America, to polite but basically indifferent people. I repeated it all to him, only he was not indifferent. He was choosing me.

  “My works were not printed by the magazines or publishing houses. I typed them myself, put them in primitive cardboard covers, stapled them together, and sold them for five rubles apiece. I sold these collections wholesale, in lots of five to ten, to my closest admirers, who served as distributors. The distributors, each of whom was the center of a circle of intellectuals, paid me at once, and then retailed the collections in their circles. Usually samizdat goes for free, I’m the only one ever to sell my books this way. By my calculations, they distributed about eight thousand collections for me.”

  I delivered this patter to Raymond in a studied monotone, the way one reads aloud a text he is sick and tired of.

  “I also knew how to sew and made trousers to order. I got twenty rubles a pair. I made handbags too, and my previous wife Anna, I remember, used to go and sell them at GUM, the main department store on Red Square, for three rubles apiece. All these ways of making money were banned, persecuted in the USSR. I was taking a conscious risk every day.”

  He was no longer listening very closely. My Russian arithmetic held little interest for him. Three rubles, twenty rubles, eight thousand… He had his own worries. I had come for love, and I saw that love was wanted from me. He was estimating whether I was capable of it. I didn’t like this. In this role, the role of the one who loves, I had already suffered defeat. I too wanted guarantees. I had absolutely no desire to return to my old situation.

  We paid the bill – he paid, of course, I had nothing to pay it with, later I got used to the girl’s role – and decided to take the elevator up. Raymond wanted to look at some china, he was planning to buy a new dinner service, and there was a gallery on the top floor.