After his guests finally leave and Gatsby returns to his office, I happily clear the table and then go upstairs to my room and flop down on the bed, sometimes even allowing myself to doze off with my clothes on for fifteen or twenty minutes or so. Frequently the doorbell rouses me, and then I race downstairs on the elevator. Gatsby won't open the door — why should he? — and Linda is more often than not on the telephone at any time of day, and however many businessmen there may be in the house, they won't make any effort even to open the door — that's my responsibility, or Olga's, but Olga leaves at one o'clock. I don't react to telephone calls during my brief afternoon nap; I just continue to doze and nothing more. Man is a highly organized form of life, and I endure the two hundred and fifty to three hundred calls that come into our house each day without going out of my mind as the rats of Professor Pavlov or whomever would undoubtedly do.

Linda leaves at six or seven. Sometimes Steven is still having a Scotch with his businessmen, but if he doesn't happen to see anybody around, he's capable of fixing it himself. At eight or nine Gatsby is already dining out somewhere. Either at the Four Seasons or some other «classy» restaurant. He very rarely stays in unless he's sick or the summer or winter Olympic games are on, since he loves sports. In my view he has too many interests in life. If he had fewer, I as his servant would have less work to do. If Steven were, say, to give up photography and making underwater movies, I wouldn't have to run over to Forty-seventh Street to get his cameras repaired or go to the Modern Age framing shop.

Actually, Linda is more to blame for my trips around New York. Steven often yells at her for spending his money like water — she issues the checks and takes care of Gatsby's bank accounts. So now the trusty Linda cuts corners in little things. She's started using me as a messenger, not all the time, but she still does it. Delivery service charges have jumped back up, and she's decided it's cheaper for her to pay my taxi fare than to pay somebody sent by a delivery agency. At the same time that Steven bought Nancy a necklace for twenty-two thousand dollars as a gift. At the same time that it cost His Highness more than ten thousand dollars just to ship his racing car from England to California so he could take part in a race. It's called economizing.

It's my own fault too. I gave in to Linda a little, not in everything, but enough for her to get the upper hand. I myself volunteered in the beginning to run whatever errands she wanted — I said I liked walking around New York and preferred to be active. And it really is pleasant sometimes to hang around in the area of Fifth Avenue for a couple of hours instead of sitting at home with Linda and Steven and his gaggle of arrogant businessmen who think they're the saviors of mankind, the key people in the world and the most important. The businessmen are firmly convinced that they're the ones who give us poor mortals our work, our jobs, and that if it weren't for them, the human race would soon be extinct. They've been taught their insolence by the American press, by books, movies, and television, but it's a delusion, an American myth. They're as proud of themselves as poets, these business gents. I used to think poets were the most arrogant and proud creatures on earth, but now I see that I was wrong; poets don't even come close.

I've also spoiled Linda by making lunch for her. Even when Steven isn't home I still make something, and around one o'clock Linda and I sit across the kitchen table from each other and feed our faces. It frequently happens that I don't feel like eating, and even more often that I don't feel like cooking, but I have to. I started that routine myself, hoping to predispose Linda to me, and I succeeded, and now she gets very offended if I refuse to make lunch for her. She's even picky about what she eats, gentlemen — can you imagine that? If I make tuna fish with onion, which is easy to do — the whole operation only takes me ten minutes — Linda complains about the lack of variety in our diet: "Not tuna again, Edward!" Several months ago we discovered grilled Polish sausage and ate that with enthusiasm. But now Linda doesn't want Polish sausage anymore; she's sick of it, you see, and it might be fattening.

I don't think it's the Polish sausage that's making Linda fat, but the fact that she's been working for Gatsby for eight years, and getting nervous, and losing her temper, and putting up with Steven's various moods, the moods of someone who's closer to her than her own relatives, and taking pride in him, and hating him. I even have a suspicion that she's in love with him — I mean it. Linda's been sitting in one place too long; she needs some fresh new air and new people. I can see it, and even Jenny could. Linda needs to tell the millionaire's house to shove it, and jump into life, and then she'll stop gaining weight. And leave David, her fifty-year-old Jewish boyfriend of habit who's always complaining he doesn't feel well, and get herself a younger lover and start a new life.

Sometimes after one of her periodic arguments with Gatsby, Linda mutters about looking for another job, that she's had it, that eight years of slavery is enough, but it's still a long way, gentlemen, from fancy speeches to actually attempting to break out of a well-paying cage. She'll never do it, although I hope to God I'm wrong.

I can picture the old Steven Grey inevitably cut down by a stroke during one of his rages and stuck in a wheelchair (a wheelchair of the most modern construction, of course, with computer controls) and bickering in the millionaire's house with the old woman Linda. It's all perfectly clear: they'll never change. Gatsby will never stop, and he'll never give up "this fucking business," to use his expression, and take up teaching and become a professor, as he once threatened to do in my presence during a forty-five-minute access of sincerity. No, it's all perfectly clear as far as Steven and Linda are concerned, and the only person for whom nothing is clear is the butler Edward — what will happen to him, and where and how and in what capacity he'll meet his end. So that it's possible I'm wrong to complain. I'm unquestionably freer than they are, although less happy. But you have to pay for freedom, butler Edward, so shut up and stop complaining about slavery.

But let's get back to the lunches. Another reason why Linda insists on them is that she doesn't want to spend her own money. She's a bit stingy, as Jenny told me. Not that she's pathologically greedy — she asked Jenny and me out to restaurants more than once, and she and David paid their share without any fuss, and Linda gives parties at her home, but she's frugal. With Jenny she didn't have it as good as she does with me — a free lunch, just like the kids in school. Jenny baked bread and cooked, but not every day.

But I continue to feed Linda; I don't resist. Anyway, she sometimes does things for me too, things I either can't do by myself or that are a nuisance for me to do. For example, she checks my business letters written in English from time to time and corrects my mistakes or even retypes the letters, which is very important to me. At the beginning of my career in Gatsby's house, she helped me make lunch; I didn't even know how to steam vegetables — all that asparagus and broccoli and those artichokes and Brussels sprouts — she helped me, and though she did introduce more fucking nervousness and fuss into the process than was necessary, her help was of great value, and I admit it. Moreover, when Steven wasn't around, she even tried to teach me correct English pronunciation. I quickly tired of that activity, it's true, but for a while I read her articles out of The New York Times I'd found interesting, and she corrected my pronunciation and explained the rules.