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

God placed you among simple people, Limonov, even though you have fled them your whole life, I thought, pushing myself into a corner and suffering from my hangover. "God!" I appealed to Him. "You saw how I tried to save Jenny from her friends, from the warm bog she's grown accustomed to, but she simply refuses to understand what's going on, and is boldly and resolutely going down the drain with her peasant friends. Even though she's better than they are, their society is swallowing her up," I said to God. To which God replied that all human beings are equal in His sight, and that He didn't appreciate my snobbish little jokes — that if Jenny spent her life in the company of Martha and Jennifer as a housekeeper or as a mama cow, that was for Him, God, no different than a life in which she became terribly intellectual and read every possible book and spoke with Alyoshka Slavkov about literature for six hours straight, in the end driving him into a corner — an intellectual Jenny peering derisively at Alyoshka through recently acquired glasses: "What was that, Alyoshka?"

"No, no," I said to God, "that's not what I meant. I know it's a primitive idea, but I still think that man makes his appearance in the world for just a short time, that he is, as a philosopher once said, a corpse on vacation, so that it's probably necessary to try to do your utmost and be exceptionally vigorous."

"Listen!" said God. "You go ahead and be vigorous — you're ambitious — but Jenny has a different agenda. If it doesn't interest you, it still interests her. And anyway, she tried to be vigorous. She has lived with you almost a year and a half, and you yourself know what a difficult person you are — I don't need to tell you that — and I just don't think she should try anymore. It's all clear now — actually it was all quite clear to Me at the very beginning, although not to you, of course: The two of you just don't make a couple. You've had your rest and regained your strength. Now it's time to give Jenny her freedom. She deserves it."

I didn't give Jenny her freedom; she took it herself. Haven't I been saying that she was a strong girl? We stayed in the redwoods for a while, reemerging every other day to go to the beach, and although the girls irritated me, we got along somehow. Remembering my conversation with God in the Toyota, I was lenient with them. In addition to everything else, a whole family of farmers had taken up residence in the saloon, real peasants this time — a high school friend of Jenny's and her husband and their two children. The husband, however, didn't refuse to sit around the fire with me in the evenings and drink, beer for him and vodka and beer for me, and we talked about crops, land improvement techniques, Soviet grain purchases, fishing, and horses…

I endured it all and looked forward to the day when we would finally have to leave: we had bought round-trip tickets with a specific return date. Cheap tickets. But early one morning, Jenny informed me with a yawn that after discussing it, she and Martha had decided to stay for another week, and that she had called Linda in New York the day before and warned her she would be delayed, and did I want to stay on with them too?

Good old honest Jenny. I could tell by her face and eyes that she was weary of me, that she wanted to stay on without me, and be free of me and my ironical, intellectual look that judged and criticized everything, of my spying look that made her uncomfortable, and spend the week at her own simple peasant amusements — in conversations about nothing at all, in gossiping and sitting with her legs spread as wide as she pleased, in dancing and prancing and gobbling down health food, in drinking her gallons of carrot juice along with handfuls of vitamins A, B, C, and D, and the like.

And so I said, "No thanks, Jenny, I need to get back. I've got unwatered plants at home, and I've got to finish my Diary of a Loser," the book I was working on then. And Lenya Kosogor, a friend of mine who was repairing X-ray machines for the B & B company, had promised to take me on as his assistant. I needed the money; my rent was coming up soon.

Jenny and Martha took me to the airport. It turned out there weren't any economy seats left on the plane, and they put me in first class for the same price with my beloved and hated big brothers. "Lucky man!" Jenny said, and I kissed her and then, like one caviar grain among the rest, I resolutely took my place in the dark passenger mass.

In the seat next to me was a large, sturdy, well-groomed fellow with his tie loosened who looked like Steven, and who spent the whole five hours of the flight shuffling through some obviously very important papers bound in a dark leather folder with a gold imprint — the image of a lady tenderly feeding breakfast to a huge cat through a doorway — while I read a greasy copy of Interview the whole time and bitterly thought that someday they'll have to do an interview with me, and their Bob Colacellos or even Truman Capotes can go fuck themselves — I'm still more interesting than the people they interview.

Jenny arrived in New York not a week but about ten days later. She didn't call me; I called her, or rather I called Linda to find out whether she had heard anything from California, and got Jenny instead. It seemed odd to me that she hadn't let me know immediately that she was back, and I even got upset about it. "But why," you ask, "why, Edward? You, an opportunist, got upset because your servant girl didn't call you when she got back from vacation?" I'm a live human being, gentlemen, and not an opportunist from a psychiatry textbook case. Besides, we opportunists and ambitious people are just as sensitive and egoistic as anybody else, and we suffer from life even more keenly than normal people do, and get nervous and depressed, only we still find the strength to take action when we need to.

The next day was Saturday, the day I was supposed to clean the millionaire's house. I vacuumed and waxed and polished the floors, and didn't cut corners then as I do now, but did what I was supposed to honestly, working by the sweat of my brow for eight hours, and during that whole time suppressing the vague anxiety I was feeling. After washing the kitchen floor and thereby finishing my work, since that was always the last thing I did, I sat down in the kitchen with Jenny and had a drink. I tried to persuade her to have something too, but she refused for a long time, until I forced her. I was in an alert state of mind and sensed that something had happened to her.

After a few drinks — lemon and rum toddies with cinnamon sprinkled over the top of the steaming drink; there's nothing better than that awful mixture if you want to get drunk — I said to her, "All right, Jenny, let's have it. What happened?"

"Nothing special," she said timidly, obviously trying to keep her composure. "Martha and I have decided to move to Los Angeles to live. Martha found a job at a hotel, and I'll make batik. You remember when I gave Isabelle that dress, Edward? It turned out really well, didn't it? Well, I'm going to make dresses or blouses like that and sell them to a store. Isabelle knows somebody who has a women's clothing store and she promised to introduce me to her."

"When did you decide to move?" I asked, sipping my hot elixir. The steaming rum entered my nose, making it hard for me to drink.

"In January," Jenny said and paused. "Right after New Year's," and she was silent again, not saying anything else, not asking me if I wanted to go with her or how I felt about her decision. I didn't say anything either and drank my rum, and when I had finished it, I stood up and walked over to our huge kitchen stove, poured myself some hot water and more rum, took her empty glass and poured her hot water and rum into it too and added a slice of lemon to each glass, and then sat down again. Without saying anything. We drank our two toddies, and then I said to her, "Well, if you really do want to go, who do you have waiting for you there?"