Edward Limonov - His Butler’s Story (1980-1981)

Once Sarah appeared at my door in a very agitated state. Rushing in, she immediately demanded bourbon and announced that she was very hysterical that day. She was pretty hysterical every day. Downing the bourbon and pushing her wig back from her forehead, she told me with an insane gleam in her eye that she had gone to see about a job and that the man doing the hiring had made her pull up her skirt and expose more of her bosom.

I said, "I hope he was satisfied; you have nice breasts." And she really did have nice breasts, small and well-formed.

"Really, Edward?" she asked, becoming excited. "You really think I have nice breasts?"

"Yes," I said, "you really do." I didn't add that in my opinion her temperament was too loud and screwed-up; I just said, "Sarah, I'm hungry!" And that was the honest truth too. I didn't have any money and had been dreaming since morning of how nice it would be to have a piece of meat. I could have gone to Jenny's, but I couldn't take that crazy woman with me.

Sarah didn't have any money either, as she happily informed me.

"Let's fuck then," I said, and we went into the bedroom. But it didn't work; Sarah simply radiated craziness that day, and she kept giggling in a silly way. I gave up trying to fuck her and went back into my living room to make myself a drink. When I came back, she was naked and bending over like a monkey to cut her toenails.

"Sarah, it's vulgar to stick out your cunt and cut your nails in front of somebody you love."

"Edward, you're so petit bourgeois!" she retorted, continuing to cut her toenails.

"All right, so what if I am, but you look gross," I said.

She continued to cut her toenails anyway, chattering about something which I stopped listening to, and then she sprawled out on my bed, covering herself up a little, and put her dirty feet on my pillow. I'm not particularly squeamish, but I thought in puzzlement, What the fuck is the little slut lying around here for? What is she doing here? And then I said out loud that I had to meet some friends for dinner and that I couldn't take her with me.

Sarah grew sad and said that she was leaving too, but she had to make a phone call first. "Is that all right?" she asked.

"Of course it is," I said, and sat down at my desk as if I were going to write something…

Despite my indifference to her, Sarah still continued to play a role in my life for a long time. Long after Jenny had left and the traces of other less remarkable girls in my life had grown cold, Sarah still turned up in my bed now and then. Maybe the hope of obtaining me blazed up in her again from time to time. She really tried to win me. Even after I had grown completely insolent and sent her as a sort of living present to a friend of mine who had just arrived from Europe and was living by himself on Madison Avenue and didn't know anybody in New York and didn't have anybody to fuck, Sarah went obediently. I've already said that Sarah was open to any experiment.

We broke up just recently. After supper at P. J. Clark's, we came back to the millionaire's little house and climbed into bed, either to fuck or to sleep. But Sarah was so drunk and stoned that her Brooklyn upbringing started to come out. She accused me of greed (!), of having a middle-class mentality (!), and of other terrible sins as well, and shouted "Shit!" and "Fuck!" and laughed hysterically. She drove me into such a rage with her crazy behavior that I threw her out without fucking her. I am, when it comes down to it, the servant of millionaires. I have rich neighbor-whores living next door to me who sometimes even allow themselves to call up on the phone during parties given by my employer and complain about the noise. I don't much care for noise myself, and so in a fury I hit her naked body and threw her out on the street at three o'clock in the morning. I made her pick up all her rags, and I threw her out without even screwing her. I said, "Get the fuck out of here right now!"

Sarah looked at me with reproachful, sobered eyes and said over and over again, "Edward, aren't you ashamed of yourself! Aren't you ashamed of yourself!" I was ashamed, but I had decided to punish her.

A few days after that episode, I received a letter in the official envelope of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Sarah was working as a photographer. The letter was a remarkable one, and it was obvious that Sarah really did love me, so bitter was her farewell:

You're a big, gaping, empty zero. You're a synonym for permanent failure. You're a failure in friendship, you're a failure in love, and as far as your career is concerned, you're nothing but a self-deluded jerk. You're unlucky in everything you do because all you care about is your own superficial, insensitive personality.

The real reason your book isn't making it in the United States has nothing to do with its so-called controversial theme. The reason nobody will touch your book here is that the United States has much higher standards for literature, and your book just isn't good enough. Carol [her deadly dull, gray friend who works as a drudge at a publishing house] actually told me that your book is self-indulgent and boring, and that she couldn't even think about showing it to her publisher.

In the last analysis, your ideas are all on the surface and don't mean very much at all. You're just a pretentious idiot.

I doubt you have even one friend in this world you could show this letter. Nobody who would laugh at how silly all this is.

Go on living like a servant and moving from one servant's job to another and intoning your clichés.

Nobody will ever be affected by anything you do.

You're a baby with a huge ego. You're masturbating your way through life.

There wasn't any signature.

I broke up with Jenny very unexpectedly, although it was exactly the way I had always wanted to break up. She found herself another guy, got pregnant by him almost immediately, and went to live with him in another city — Los Angeles. God gave her a baby and established her in the life that was most befitting for her; with me she had obviously violated both the divine and the mundane orders of things.

After meeting my ex-wife Elena, Linda said to me, "Edward, I just can't see what Jenny and Elena have in common. Elena is a very stylish woman, but Jenny was almost a peasant." I explained to Linda that Elena had been the wife of the Russian poet Eduard Limonov, whereas Jenny was the girlfriend for a year and a half of another person altogether — a poor, unemployed welfare recipient and tenant of a single-room-occupancy hotel, the New Yorker Edward.

Jenny did the right thing in leaving me, or nature did. She wasn't getting anything new from our relationship, and even though we had started making love again, there were times when she was indifferent to my prick, and she was only very rarely happy; sexually, we just weren't compatible. Occasionally, she would start talking about marriage, and I, attempting to look sad, would say that we couldn't afford to start a family yet, and she would agree and drop the subject for a while.

I don't know if she ever suspected that I was having affairs with other women, or if she believed I was satisfied by the meager diet she provided. I just don't know. She did, I remember, find women's things in my bathroom several times — a little watch, a necklace, a ring — and there were several other times when she found hairpins on my bedroom floor. But either she preferred to believe me when I told her that one friend or another of mine had spent the night there with a girl or when I made up some other, sometimes rather clumsy lie, or perhaps, reasonably enough, she just didn't want to make a scene about it. But I don't think that she ever did suspect just how frantic my sexual life was, so frantic that I even had a little green book in which I wrote down my amorous meetings so I wouldn't get them mixed up. Sometimes I had two or even three different girls in a single day, and I was as proud of my Don Juanism as any adolescent.