January–February 1997
I spent Old New Year’s at home, alone, and enjoyed every minute of it. The two weeks before had left me reeling from parties, discos, balls, and dinners in New York. Zhorik dragged me from one balagan to the next, twenty-four hours a day. And where Los Angeles had disappointed me a couple of years earlier, New York thrilled me completely. It turned out to be a hundred thousand times more electric than any action movie. Energy gushed out of the city like a fountain. What I saw kept summoning up Woody Allen’s black-and-white film, loading me with associations, pounding my head, and then overwriting it with a new, full-color version, a hundred times more electric still.
A great city.
What was there for me to do there? As a walking wallet, I was needed by everyone in New York. As Roma Peskov — needed by no one.
I sat by the fireplace alone. A glass of wine, and one thought: «Here I am. I’m alone. No friends, no girlfriends.»
Fitting the mood, on TV Vlad Stashevsky was suffering: «Love No Longer Lives Here.»
I turned over everything — the run-up to the new year, the new year itself, and what lay ahead.
Why do I live? Toward what do I live? Who am I, and for what?
There was no answer.
In early February, there was an exchange of fluids with the director of the Department of External Relations, in the conference room. The next morning, the director acted like nothing had happened.
Then again, and again, on the couch in my office. The sex was groundless, monotonous, and baffling – why? what for? where had Elizaveta Alfredovna even come from?
I remembered! Sometime in summer or fall, on Svetlana Vladimirovna’s recommendation, the post of director of the Department of External Relations went to Liza, Sveta’s schoolfriend, fluent in five foreign languages. External relations amounted to trading text messages with Grzegorz and his associates, wheeler-dealers from the former socialist bloc. A manageable job for a girl with a summa-cum-laude diploma in «External Economic Relations» from some academy, formerly a finance-and-economics technical college. Liza had known the languages since school: her father had been listed as personnel officer at one embassy, then facilities manager at another.
Elizaveta turned out to be a young woman pleasant in every respect.
In March, I got in touch with Zhorik, talked it over with Ida, and in the end Liza was transferred to the marketing agency «S&D Keystone Advisors,» set up just before. Let her deal with respectable people as a top manager of some outside firm, an outsider herself. Zhora cut down office affairs and entanglements with a sword and burned them out with a hot iron – bad for morale, he said.
I got to drag myself around fashionable clubs with Liza and her friends – every one of them a village disco compared to the Hippodrome. We laughed, danced, lost our minds, made plans for the night. Her friends dreamed of being picked up by rich boys. I sighed that the fun I was getting felt manufactured. It used to be better. I hadn’t appreciated the best of it at the time.
Three years ago, the House of Culture in Novogireyevo had given off more drive than any club in Moscow now. To charge myself with the kind of energy that used to appear out of nowhere – from Zhorka’s flask, say – I swallowed and snorted the junk that never ran out at Vadik-Pinochet’s, our guide through clubland Moscow. Charged up with plastic positivity, I’d head home with whichever of Liza’s unattached friends was left over, who’d stay on to «crash for a bit.»
«A bit» turned out to mean anything from a couple of days to a couple of weeks. Sometimes five or seven girls lived in the house at once, refusing group sex and feeling such personal animosity toward each other that they couldn’t even eat in the same room: they’d ask for breakfast brought to their rooms. My sex life turned into routine, only a little warmer than with the whores who saw a clock face on every surface.
I peered into blue eyes, brown eyes, green eyes, gray eyes; smart eyes, dull eyes; small eyes, huge eyes; misted-over eyes and clear ones; greedy eyes, indifferent eyes; expectant eyes and vacant ones – hoping to catch some glimmer of the unearthly light in whose rays I’d once spent sixty magical seconds.
I tore the clothes off these girls, my fingers sliding over their bodies, trying to feel the heat seething under the skin. My lips worried at the cheeks, necks, breasts of whoever ended up in my bed. I could feel their heartbeats pulsing through my own body and was consumed by the urge to pry open their ribcages, look inside, and see whether, somewhere in that bloody tangle, there beat a soul able to hold me and my whole world.
And they – pretty ones and plain ones, cute ones and not-quite, smart ones and dumb ones, tall ones and tiny ones, thin ones and plump ones, young ones and older ones – would obediently stretch out straight as a string and, eyes half-closed, wait for a worked-up Romka to do it.
I did it.
I entered their flesh with a furious hope: any moment now, my brain would burst, my body would break apart into molecules, and my soul would rise as a light vapor into the diamond sky, to soar above the world!
And every time I became one with yet another of them, catching a shared rhythm, merging in a mutual hope for love, something at the back of my skull kept hammering: «A lie, a lie, a lie,» while high overhead a voice offered its condolences: «Shine on you, crazy diamond.»
Without ever breaking off my imitation of passion, without getting in the way of my body doing what it had to do, I switched off my thoughts and pounded, pounded, pounded away, waiting for the wind-up spring to run out.
«Work, and work, and work... Energizer!!!»
I was the pink bunny from the everlasting-battery commercial.
Having finished, drained and hollowed out, I’d lie there staring at the ceiling, thinking: «What for?»
Ages ago, at the height of things with Marianna, I mentioned in passing, talking to Zhorik, that I wanted to love someone, not just bang some chick at the going rate. Zhorik roared with laughter:
– What a chump you are! If a guy screws around without complications – that’s normal. But if he’s in love – that’s a deviation. Let me explain. A man’s supposed to be a hunter, it’s simple and clear. You go out into the jungle, lie in ambush, track the chick down, lure her in, screw her, and boom! Satisfied. Love is something else. It’s weakness, nonsense! Love doesn’t make a man stronger, it destroys him. If you ever meet the one – cross to the other side of the street and run. The girl you fall in love with is your doom. You’re not the one in the ambush – she is. Ever seen the movie Predator? My advice – avoid love.
The club marathon ended after a month. With only one day off a week, no amount of stimulated energy was enough for both the thrill-seeking and the business at the same time. I went back to my old routine: once every month or two, I’d get drunk and call up Veronika with an offer to drink and screw. She was pushing fifty, and had sex like it was the last time of her life. I wanted it like the first time. In some way, we matched. I never had sex like that with anyone else – feverish, annihilating.
