It's Me, Eddie Read online

  We were received at the gallery by a homely girl, and later an old lady. I enjoyed having them see us – the imposing Raymond and me – and understand all. Raymond fingered the dishes, examined plates and goblets, offered old porcelain to me to admire, we passed the time intellectually, usefully. I love the beautiful, I shared his delight in the creations of the masters of the comfortable old world, where there were families, where there was no cocaine, where there were no Elenas fucking in a narcotic sweat, where the obscene world of photography did not exist, nor its dirty backstage milieu. Family dinners, an orderly life, that was what this porcelain embodied for me. Unfortunately, I was destined for something else, I thought.

  But the inspection and pricing ended, we took the elevator down, he kissed me in sight of the elevator boy, and we went out on the street, which was full of automobiles. It was spring, 1976, twentieth century, the great city of New York at lunch hour.

  “I’d like to make love with you, but Luis almost always stays now to spend the night. Besides, he’ll be wary of you now, you saw how he watched you yesterday?” I remembered only Luis-Sebastian’s tired look and my halting conversation with him.

  “You might come to my place today at five – we’ll spend a little time together, have a drink,” Raymond said.

  “All right, I’d be glad to,” I said, and in fact I was glad, for I had again developed an adamant determination to sleep with him at all costs. I shall venture to use a bureaucratic expression: I wanted officially to become a pederast – inwardly I had already become one – and henceforth to be such and consider myself such. I wanted to finalize it. Perhaps girls feel this way about wanting to lose their virginity. There was even something abnormal about this desire of mine; I felt it.

  We said good-bye on Madison. I did not go to the hotel right away but walked the streets a while longer, considering his words. In the world of pederasts too there are love and unlove, tears and tragedies, nor is there any refuge from fate, blind chance, I thought. And true love is just as rare.

  I showered and was at his apartment by five. Kirill was there too. Raymond was sitting in the bedroom in an armchair. He had loosened the knot of his necktie and was having a drink, sipping from a tall glass. “Make him a drink!” he ordered Kirill. The young procurer gave me a conspiratorial wink and said, “Come on, Edichka, I’ll make you a drink.”

  “What, can’t you do it without company?” Raymond said in mock anger.

  “It’s just that I don’t know what he wants, I’ll show him what we have. Let him choose.”

  I went to the kitchen with Kirill. Luckily the phone rang and Raymond did not detain us, being occupied with his phone conversation.

  “Before you came,” Kirill whispered, making me a vodka and orange juice, “before you came, Raymond asked me to tell you he’ll take you to restaurants very often, he’ll buy you a suit, but just don’t live with anyone for now. Raymond has to decide what he should do, stay with Luis or be with you. He says, ‘Sebastian loves me very much, but I can’t get it up with him. Eddie doesn’t love me but perhaps he will yet; after all, we’ve only just met.’

  “Actually,” Kirill continued in a hissing whisper, “he doesn’t believe you’ve never tried men. He says, ‘I have the impression he’s slept with men.’”

  “That’s how good my masquerade was,” I said dully, thinking my own thoughts. I could have pretended, this afternoon in the restaurant, could have said I loved him, begged him to desert Luis and live with me, God knows what-all I might have said to him; I could have acted the part, leaned on his shoulder, stroked his red neck, kissed his ear, played the petit-bourgeois cocotte, the decadent woman, and laid it on thick with mannerisms, trivial whims, eccentricities and endearing little ways from which he would not have extricated himself, of course. I knew how to do that. The riddle for me would have been how to conduct myself in bed, but this, too, I hoped to master very quickly. I had acted unwisely but honorably, I had not started lying to him, and had not said I loved him.

  We went out to the living room. In the bedroom Raymond was communing with the telephone receiver in French. We therefore remained in the living room.

  “I encountered your ex-wife today on Fifth Avenue, Edichka,” Kirill said. He looked at me attentively, anticipating an effect. I drank my vodka and merely said, after a faint pause, “And?”

  “She was flying along Fifth Avenue, not seeing anyone, in a sort of red jacket, her pupils were dilated – she’s probably shooting up heroin or sniffing cocaine – all keyed up, excited. She’s going to Italy, she says, for a month of shooting, Zoli is sending her. ‘How’s Limonov, do you ever see him?’ she asked. When she learned I had found you a ‘friend’” – Kirill lowered his voice – “she was very pleased and said, ‘I hate men, find me a rich old lesbian to caress me, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me with an artificial member…”’ Kirill repeated this “fuck me” several times. Elena, too, must have said it that way, several times and with raised voice. I remembered the long and almost bestial orgasms that I myself had given her with an artificial member, and it set my head spinning, a nether warmth flowing: after those orgasms I had especially enjoyed fucking her. I took a big gulp of vodka, and while remaining aware of my sensations, aware of my filling prick, I shook off my torpor and listened, forced myself to listen to Kirill’s words. He finished the sentence. After the artificial member came: ”’…and then our family will be complete,’ she said.”

  Next Kirill launched into a discourse on the fact that Elena was not to his taste and what did I see in her. I kept smiling at him automatically, mockingly, meanwhile hardly able to get myself out of our bed, get myself out of the “conjugal” bed.

  Thank God, Raymond came in – a real person from the real world – and my torture ended. We had drink after drink. After a half hour spent in sophisticated conversation Raymond began fondling my member through my pants, completely unashamed before Kirill. I smiled and pretended nothing special was happening.

  Raymond was not sitting beside me, he was reaching for my prick from an armchair, but I was on the couch. This heightened the absurdity of the situation. I felt nothing at Raymond’s touch, absolutely nothing. Kirill was here, and I was not a healthy peasant lad from some place like Arizona, with normal instincts and a prick that would naturally stand up if a stranger touched it. I was a ridiculous European with unnatural connections inside my body, I was a good actor, but this was something I couldn’t control. Tears I could squeeze out any old day, but get my dick up in such a situation? Then again, I didn’t know whether I had to. My only thought was that a dick without an erection might frighten him off. But no, it didn’t; rather the opposite.

  After a while I went out through Raymond’s bedroom to a vast bathroom, artistically decorated with portraits and photographs. I made peepee, wiped my member with a tissue, and was on my way back when Raymond met me in the bedroom. His eyes were weird, his lips the color of strawberries that have spoiled in the sun, and he was muttering. Still muttering, he nestled up to me. I was much taller than he, I had to put my arms around his back and shoulders. We shifted from foot to foot, he continued to mutter and massaged my member through my slacks – why, I could not understand. We must have looked like Japanese wrestlers. Finally he began nudging me toward the bed. Well, I went, what else could I do, although I felt a growing dissatisfaction that he was managing it all so absurdly.

  He put me on the bed, I lay on my back, and he lay on top, making motions such as you make when fucking a woman. He devoted himself to this travesty for some time, panted heavily and breathed in my ear, kissed my neck. I threw back my head and rolled it from side to side exactly as my last wife had, I caught myself doing it; I must have had the same expression on my face too. These things are contagious.

  Raymond was heavy and awkward. For all my irritation I sympathized with him, acknowledging myself to be an inept virgin. “He’ll have a hard time with me,” I thought. But my dissatisfaction that he was making it all so foolish and awk
ward did not leave me.

  In the next room Kirill was talking on the phone, and the door wasn’t shut. Ah, that’s why he muttered something inarticulate instead of speaking normally, I realized. I was thinking altogether too much at that moment. I won’t think, I decided, and returned to reality. A heavy red-haired old fellow was wriggling on top of me. A fine situation, little Eddie, you’re lying down and about to get fucked, it seems. But that’s what you wanted. Well, put it this way, what I had wanted was not specifically a fuck but love, kindness – I was so weary of being without caressing kindness – and, as a natural extension, a caress for my prick as well. But what was happening was some kind of nonsense. Did he really lack the subtlety to realize that this was the wrong way to go about it with me? Or was he not concerned about frightening me, did he not value me?

  He slithered down, unzipped my pants, but could not unbuckle the belt, didn’t know how it worked. I smiled inwardly. In exactly the same way, my first woman had fallen afoul of my belt – that one was my papa’s Soviet Army belt – she couldn’t unbuckle the little kid’s belt. This belt was Italian. My first man. “No, you won’t get the fucking thing unbuckled, you don’t know how it works. Fuck it – I’ll help.” Without changing the languid expression on my face, I lowered my hands from behind my head, where they had been the whole time, and unbuckled the belt.

  In a fever he pulled open my red panties and took it out – my member. Good Lord, it was scrunched and little like a boy’s, and at the touch of his grabby hand a droplet of urine came out, rolled out like a tear. No matter how much you wipe with tissues, that little drop always lurks deep inside, to come rolling out at the first opportunity. I wondered how Raymond would deal with it. “Did you think it would be easy to fuck the wounded?” I wanted to ask. He jerked and kneaded my member. A trifle coarse and hasty, I thought.

  In the next room Kirill was reproaching his Jannetta for something. Without meaning to, I listened to Kirill’s voice, picked out individual words. Raymond jerked and kneaded. I was uncomfortable, one of his knees was crushing my leg. Suddenly I realized that he didn’t have a fucking chance of getting anywhere and that I was about to get up and flee. To avoid injuring myself or offending him, I promptly said in a languid whisper, “Kirill will hear!”

  He understood and got up, or maybe he had despaired of doing anything with my member, but anyway he got up and went into the bathroom in a somnambulistic state.

  When he returned I was already strolling around the bedroom, looking out the windows at the street below, with my pants zipped up and my shirt tucked in. We rejoined Kirill and picked up our drinks. Then I took from my vest pocket some poems I had brought, read them to Raymond and Kirill, with Kirill gravely expressing his opinion on each poem.

  The poems restored my lost composure. In this business I am superior to everyone; here, only in poetry am I who I am. In reading my poems I found composure, as I say, although these men, Raymond and Kirill, were not right for my poetry. Raymond politely understood that this was art, and as art it must be appreciated and admired, but he scarcely had any real feeling for who was sitting before him or what was being read. Even though he was more European than American, he had lived in this country so many years that he had unthinkingly assigned to art the modest role of a knickknack ornamenting life. It was nice, of course, that his potential lover was a poet, it was interesting, romantic, but that was all. To him my poems were small, and he, Raymond, was big, while in fact little Eddie’s sufferings were much bigger than Raymond, bigger even than the whole city of New York, precisely because Eddie was visible, could be seen, through the poems. Or so I flattered myself; however, I am fully convinced of it to this day.

  It wasn’t much of a treat for them, so I read maybe five to seven poems and put the manuscript away in my vest pocket. Enough. Especially since Raymond had been distracted by the telephone, and Kirill, of course, was trying to explain to me his own Petersburg-Leningrad attitude toward poetry. Leningrad people love pomposity and pathos, affectation and pseudoclassicism; my poems and I are too simple for them.

  A guest appeared – a certain Frenchman, the owner of a chain of stores selling ready-made luxury clothes from Yves Saint Laurent, Cardin, and other French celebrities. These beautifully resonant names had been familiar to me back in Moscow. Louis Aragon, for example, member of the Central Committee of the French Communist Party and one of France’s greatest poets, got his things from Yves Saint Laurent. How do I know? Oh, little Eddie has heaps of society connections, although he keeps quiet about them, doesn’t drop many names. I was told about Aragon’s penchant for Yves Saint Laurent by Lily Brik, the celebrated Lily, my friend, the woman who went down in history as the mistress of the great poet Mayakovsky – a great poet no matter what you may hear from various Soviet and anti-Soviet scum.

  Oh yes, I’m forgetting the Frenchman. He wore his fine little threads of hair slicked down on both sides of his skull; bony and tall, with rather a large butt, considering his overall leanness; he had narrow, tight trousers and a face just as narrow, tapering to the nose. He looked like some kind of fish.

  Breaking out in blotches – he was shy – Kirill began to speak French with the Frenchman. I must confess the young idler succeeded pretty well. The grandmother that he mentioned so often not only had known how to dash cracked Kuznetsov porcelain against the walls, but also had taught her grandson to speak French and English. The same cannot be said of my own grandmother, unfortunately.

  At a request from Raymond, who was boasting about my figure, I was obliged to twirl before the Frenchman, displaying myself. I felt as if I were fifteen and my parents were displaying me to their friends. Not fifteen, younger. Ten, eight.

  The Frenchman obviously liked me. He was an inveterate old pederast, I don’t know how old; he was preserved like antique ivory, shone as if polished. He smiled all the time and spoke in a thin, despairing, sophisticated voice, the way ridiculous society people speak in operetta – dukes and princes, ridiculous people, but he was not without charm. I liked the Frenchman too, and much better than Raymond, but I didn’t dare tell him so. I found him agreeable, for some reason, from his tight, deliberately unstylish trousers to the little threads of hair on his head.

  Raymond had more fat to him, more blood, more meat; naturally I liked the Frenchman better.

  Out of courtesy, although he did not have a kopeck, Kirill was negotiating a purchase of suits for himself. It was clear to everyone that he wasn’t going to buy a fucking thing, but this was his way of doing something nice for everyone, somehow participating in their lives. I imagine he was in utter ecstasy over the fact that he was sitting in the company of pederasts. A kind soul, he loved his friends, loved their titles, or absence of titles. I bet he always exaggerated Raymond’s prosperity to me and to other people as well; he generally exaggerated everything about his friends, in the direction of bigger and better. It was an innocent childish amusement, but he did not thereby forget himself, either: he, Kirill, by having such friends seemed to grow in his own and others eyes.

  The Frenchman very soon left, unfortunately. In parting he gave me a spank on the poopka and said, “I think you’re better off that your wife deserted you.” On his lips this sounded convincing. I thought, No doubt it is better, maybe it really is. And his spank had me in ecstasy – for some reason I liked it.

  After the Frenchman came an Italian. “He was once my lover,” Raymond said, after the Italian left to eat in the restaurant. “He never let me sleep; a very strong cock that young man has. Oh, what he can do!” Raymond said ecstatically. I heard a tinge of reproach in his words. It’s your own fault, I thought, you don’t have the technique.

  The Italian had come to spend the night. When I inquired of Raymond why he didn’t stay in a hotel, it became clear that he was also a millionaire. The millionaire was thirty-five, no more, and very appealing His name was Mario.

  Homosexuals of all nationalities came to Raymond’s that night. True, they did not congregate, th
ey sat awhile and went away, others appeared in their stead. Only Mario stayed, but he soon went off to the guest room assigned to him and remained there.

  Sometimes Raymond resumed touching my dick, but gradually it became apparent that he was tired. In his fatigue, no longer checking himself, he turned rather vulgar and told some clumsy, dirty jokes, which would not have happened in his normal state. In the end he informed Kirill and me that he was sorry but he wanted to get to sleep. I was disappointed. My face must have showed it because Raymond said, “Go to Mario, why don’t you?” Then he went on jokingly, “The only thing is, he won’t let you sleep. Personally, I’m a little afraid of Mario, although we haven’t slept together for many years and don’t arouse each other.” He led us to Mario’s room, walking a little unsteadily. This was understandable; he had worked all day at the office, after all, and then drunk with us all evening, glass for glass.

  Mario was sitting with his shirt unbuttoned, going through some papers. A man of affairs, he truly was handsome, and given my desire to lose my virginity today – now – I probably would have stayed with him had I not perceived that Raymond didn’t want me to: if he hadn’t been disenchanted at the sight of my wrinkled appendage, he must not want me to stay. And I didn’t, although Mario’s jesting words and sidelong glance at me – he really gave me the once-over – convinced me immediately that Raymond was right about him, Raymond was not fabricating.

  I should have left, but a stupid conversation got started, which was the fault of Kirill and the tired, suddenly flaccid Raymond. Tomorrow Raymond was supposed to have a party, a very important one because his boss was supposed to come, the owner of the business, who was not a pederast, and Kirill had volunteered to get a beautiful girl for the boss. Where he planned to get her I don’t know, but the absurd conversation dragged on and on. Raymond kept complaining of his lack of china, but later recalled that Sebastian-Luis was going to bring him some lovely china.