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

I told her that there that was no question about her right to rest any way she liked, and that, yes, she was paying, but since she had taken me with her — I hadn't imposed myself on her — I had certain rights too…

We couldn't reach any agreement and drifted further and further apart. In the evenings, Alyoshka and I sat by the fire, and I made ukha, or Russian fish soup, and drank vodka from a huge bottle, while Jenny and Martha made a point of going to restaurants in town, first Japanese and then something else. We were virtually enemies.

Seeing the state of affairs, Alyoshka decided to go back to Los Angeles and stay there with a friend for a while, especially since he was also finding our health food diet expensive — he was a student, remember. Once more I found myself caught between two fires. I understood Alyoshka, who was complaining that he was running out of money too fast — I myself had scraped by for several years, and many of my more impoverished friends got by on very small amounts of money, so that it was possible to understand him. The standard of living of the millionaire's housekeeper was much higher than that of the student Alyoshka. But I could also understand Jenny's point of view when she complained to me that Alyoshka hadn't given her enough money, and that he obviously expected her and Martha to feed him at their own expense. If I hadn't known Jenny, I would have thought she was cheap, but she wasn't. It was just that we had all driven each other to the point of hysteria while rolling along the highways of California inside that tin can. We should never have gotten together in one group, or at least we shouldn't have taken Alyoshka with us. Then I would have been able to take an ironic tack with the girls and we wouldn't have become enemies…

I breathed a sigh of relief when we deposited Alyoshka on one of Los Angeles' little green streets. I embraced him, and he trudged away. The girls too were much happier when I got back to the Toyota, and I hoped the remainder of our trip would be more pleasant.

And so it was for a while. After leaving part of our things at the saloon in the redwood forest, we turned the nose of our Toyota northward and set off for the town of Carmel, where an automobile "concours d'élégance" was supposed to take place. Steven Grey and his whole family were there — he was an exhibition sponsor, of course.

God, how some people in the United States live! Racing along the Seventeen-mile Drive on our way to Carmel, I saw green golf courses with men and women dressed in linen golf clothes taking aim at the ball with their clubs or crossing the greens in little white electric cars. And I saw buildings surrounded by virtual fortress walls, one as big as the Mauritanian Citadel or the Novodevichy Convent in Moscow and perched on a cliff, so that it would have been possible to jump from the windows of that little house into the crashing Pacific below. Everywhere were walls of flowers, palm trees, grape arbors, and then again along the road the extraordinary dwellings of the rich receding into the distance.

The exhibition had been organized on the grounds of a very expensive hotel, on an unnaturally green golf course, one edge of which came unexpectedly and abruptly to an end right above the ocean. A happily murmuring, well-dressed crowd surrounded the automobiles, and as it moved the crowd changed its form, composition, and color from moment to moment like a kaleidoscope turned by the skillful hand of a child. The white, pink, and light blue summer dresses of the women, the white pants of the men, the handsome, respectable judges sitting at a table covered by a white tablecloth with the beard of Steven Grey flashing among them, the extraordinary automobiles themselves passing in front of the judges' table before returning once again to their assigned places at the exhibition — all of those things and people, that whole palette, struck me at once. I was lost in wonderment in much the same way, probably, that Robert was from his hallucinogenic mushrooms. I knew that it was that world that I belonged to, and not the world of our vulgar Toyota and Jenny and Martha, or even of the student Alyoshka.

Steven Grey's oldest son, Henry, came over to us, a tall boy dressed in white linen pants and white shirt and a dark blue club blazer and a tie of the same color, and wearing delicate glasses and a name tag with the word «sponsor» on it — tall, cultivated, and happy. I very quickly attached myself to him and followed him away, leaving my girls, who had suddenly grown much less sure of themselves, somewhere behind.

I walked among the cars and admired them. All around shimmered the hot California midday. Sitting in a white Rolls-Royce that according to its placard had been made in 1906 was, to my very great astonishment, a tall, erect, completely gray woman in an old-fashioned white dress, lace hat, and gloves reaching to her elbows. With the infrequent golden spokes of its wheels and its bicycle tires, the Rolls-Royce looked exactly like the carriage that took Cinderella to the king's ball. Its body was made of wood and painted white, and its doors and fenders were edged in gold.

Following my Virgil — Henry, that is — I walked through the exhibition grounds, passing by the most unbelievable structures, some more reminiscent of mausoleums and parthenons than contemporary automobiles, and others gleaming in gilt and lacquer and sometimes the size of small Victorian living rooms. Some of those extraordinary cars even seemed to have parts of churches or public buildings attached to them, and one marvel produced at the beginning of the century even had columns!

Standing nearby a cylinder-shaped racing car of the thirties under a gorgeous tree whose species I didn't recognize, and next to a small white table containing only two sweating glasses with a few ice cubes and the dregs of something rose-colored on the bottom, was a couple — a well-groomed man in a white linen suit who looked like a spoiled writer or actor, and a girl. The girl was like a creature come to me from one of my dreams — in a white hat with a black veil, and behind the veil a young, beautiful, shining face made uneasy by something. Pink stockings, a dress whose black skirt was covered by a transparent white one, and furs of some absurd kind — several little beasts, chinchillas perhaps, hanging from die upper part of her body, although I can't say whether they were actually hanging from her dress or stitched to her wrap — fool that I am, I just don't remember. Her outfit was obviously from the twenties, and the girl, nervously young and bold, belonged to that rare order of young women whom I liked unconditionally and had dreamed about in all my hotels and shabby apartments. She was the one I dreamed about, and not Jenny…

At that very moment Jenny herself touched me on the sleeve. I pretended I was looking at the ocean. The girls had found me all the same. They had, as it turned out, already said «hello» to Steven — the reason Jenny had come to Carmel in the first place. And they led me from the exhibition like a prisoner or some doomed person back to our vulgar Toyota and took me away, although I would have preferred not to go, would have preferred to stay there forever.

Sitting in the car I closed my eyes from time to time and tried to visualize the "girl in chinchilla," as I called her, although I wasn't at all sure that the little beasts she was wearing were in fact chinchillas — I had had no more chance in my life to learn to distinguish among furs than the majority of the population of India, poor people, has had to distinguish among the different kinds of meat — lamb from pork, say? — without ever tasting either one or the other.

The girl in chinchilla. Good Lord, I thought, how has it happened that I'm already thirty-five and have only twenty years or so left, and that I've got to fit into those twenty years all my pleasure and delights, and all the books I still have to write, and all my women? I don't have the girl in chinchilla! Even if she's mean, even if she is disgustingly silly, it doesn't matter, because she's beautiful and out of a fairy tale, and if I don't have her, then what am I? Nothing! I bowed down to beauty then, gentlemen. I was ready to fall down on my knees before beauty. Where did I, a boy from the ugly and boring outskirts of Kharkov, contract that infection, that love of beauty which makes life in this world a hundred times more difficult? Do you actually think it was easy for me with my love of beauty to live at the Hotel Diplomat, where the best-looking faces, or at least the healthiest, were the faces of pimps? Do you think that abasing myself before beauty as I did it was easy for me to fuck the Rumanian dancer Rena with her monkey face, or to ride in the Toyota with those crude girls?