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

"Well, who do you think?" Jenny asked, making an effort and looking not at me, but out the window.

"Mark, who else?" I said, not looking at her either.

And then she burst into tears and fell down on her knees in front of me and begged me to forgive her, and said she had hurt me, as well as a lot of other things you're supposed to say in such situations. To which I calmly replied, patting her on the head and in fact exulting in the vileness of human nature, that nothing had happened, that it was normal, and that she shouldn't take it so hard. The noble Limonov.

We poured ourselves some more rum, no longer bothering to mix it, just plain, incredibly strong dark Meyer's rum from Jamaica, and before we drank it, Jenny proposed a toast in a quiet, piping voice:

"To the greatest guy in the world!"

I wondered who that might be, since she couldn't be so tactless as to drink to Mark in my presence.

But no, thank God, the toast was for me. "To you, Edward!" Jenny added fervently. And then she asked me what I thought about him — about Mark. I answered something to the effect that I thought they would make a good couple, which in fact was what I thought; you remember my thinking as they were dancing together in Los Angeles that they were well-suited. She shed a few more tears, and we agreed to be friends, the best of friends, of course we would be friends, and I kissed her and went home.

I walked along and thought. What had happened was of course no great tragedy, but it was very unpleasant and even painful for me, gentlemen. I thought dejectedly of the fact that this one too had betrayed me, this Jenny whom I had sometimes called a saint to myself and whom I had finally begun to trust, so that it would never have occurred to me that she, that Jenny would betray me. I walked up York Avenue, repeating some lines of Apollinaire's to myself: "Even she who is ugly/ May cause her lover pain,/ She's the daughter of a constable,/ Who serves on the island of Jersey…"

And for some reason I also remembered the time my mother betrayed me, and the medical orderlies took me away as if to be executed, and then, when I was eighteen and already a completely different person and still wobbly from an insulin injection they'd just given me, my return home from the mental hospital with my military father. And as I walked the thirty blocks back to my Eighty-third Street, I remembered too that cruel, hopeless New York winter when Lena had betrayed me, and I recalled all the grudges I had against people; I remembered them all and tallied them up and drew my conclusions.

Go your own way, I told myself; don't trust anybody. People are crap. It's not that they're bad, but weak, feeble, and pitiful. They betray more out of weakness than from malice. Go your own way. Strong creatures hunt by themselves. You're not a jackal; you don't need a pack.

And then, as I was already nearing home, I suddenly discovered in the midst of my pain joy that I had been betrayed — it was, ultimately, proof of my solitariness, my specialness, and, if you like, of a kind of success. Before I had had the sense that Jenny was somehow superior to me. Now, thanks to what had happened, she was just like all the other girls and women. In itself, the fact that Mark was fucking Jenny meant little to me. Only that Saint Jenny no longer existed. And that was good. Order once more reigned in my world. It's terribly hard to live with saints. It's better to live with prostitutes; they're more honest. It's better to live with bandits; you can defend yourself from them with a knife in your boot, or even better, a pistol stuck in your belt under your T-shirt. The hardest thing is to defend yourself from people who are good.

You will say that I'm not being objective, since I myself had in fact betrayed Jenny with numerous other women, and even hated her, and was planning to leave her at the first opportunity. Exactly, I was planning to, but what if I wouldn't actually have done it? What if it was all just empty talk and bravado?

Thus was I betrayed by my servant girl, my peasant angel.

The next day I did something I would never have expected of myself. And you too will probably be just as surprised to find out what the next turn of events was. I went to the millionaire's house and proposed to Jenny — asked her, Jenny Jackson, to marry me. She started crying, but she turned me down, although she respected me tremendously for it and said, "Thank you, Edward!" and kissed my hand. And then I left, breathing a sigh of relief.

I walked back up York Avenue again on my way home to the plants and the bookcases and the tables and chairs that Jenny had dragged in to build a nest that was never to be, and as I walked, I thought once more, Go your own way, Edward. Strong animals hunt by themselves. You don't need a pack, Eddie baby, you don't need one.

I spent the next two weeks almost continuously fucking and hash smoking with a poetess named Diane at her dark, many-roomed labyrinth on Third Street crammed with idiotic furniture and hung with pictures painted by her own hand, since before becoming a poet, she had been a painter. We woke up every morning to an awful rumbling and roaring just outside our window: the street was the headquarters of the Hell's Angels, or at least of their New York chapter, or whatever they call it. At any time of day or night there would always be dozens of motorcycles drawn up on the street in ranks, with the Hell's Angels themselves sitting in the building doorways with cans of beer in their hands. In the mornings they warmed up their bikes, or something.

Only once, in the company of Diane, who swayed like a sleep-walker and had painted her fingernails with black lacquer and was wearing a short coat just as black from under which her skinny legs stuck down like two sticks, did I take the subway back to my place to water my plants. For some reason we preferred fucking at her place, to the roar of the Hell's Angels' motorcycles while lying under a huge portrait of a headless half-man, half-woman. Diane had for a long time been the girlfriend of a certain punk rock star who was either insane or merely pretended to be, and although she was only twenty-five, she was ready for the scrap heap.

After two weeks, having sufficiently recovered my self-esteem, I summoned my strength, and leaving Diane alone with her headless portrait, I returned to a normal life. I called Jenny to inquire about the state of affairs at the millionaire's house and to find out if I still had my job as cleaning man, even though I'd missed two days of work.

"Of course you have, Edward. Don't worry about it, everything's fine," said the decent Jenny over the phone. "You haven't lost your job, and you'll still get your eighty dollars for those two Saturdays. I told Linda you did the cleaning, and anyway, she only notices the rug in her office, which Olga vacuumed."

Jenny also said that Madame Margarita had been looking for me. But she didn't ask me where I'd been for the last two weeks, not wanting to pry into my private affairs.

I called Madame Margarita and heard her perpetually cheerful voice say: "Limonchik! I'm glad you called me. I've got masses of work for you to do. Only I'll tell you beforehand that the work is very hard — you've got to dig in the ground and do a lot of other kinds of construction things. I've just started remodeling my house in the country, and I've hired a contractor who has his own local workers, but then I remembered you and that I had promised you some work," Madame Margarita said, very proud of herself, "and the contractor has agreed to take you on. I'm going up there tomorrow. It's in upstate New York, and if you like I can take you along with me."

It turned out later that she hadn't just happened to remember me. It was simply that one of the hired workers had made off with a goddamn antique clock of hers, and she'd hired me to replace him. But everybody likes to seem like a benefactor. When after living in America for five years, I finally obtained a green card, four people immediately told me that it was because of their efforts that I got it.