Learn, Edward, I tell myself every time I see Carl sitting with Nancy in the kitchen and talking with her in a cultivated way about nothing at all. He's an opportunist, the genuine article — unlike you.

Nancy is forty and a very attractive woman, tall, with a good figure. The only thing you can reproach her or nature with is that, like Jenny, she is the most perfect of mothers, the sort whose affectionate lap it's good for a child injured by life to curl up in. Regardless of the things that have happened to me, even in the most difficult times in my life, I've never felt the need to have a good cry in my mother's lap or on her breast. What I need are capricious and whorish young girl-pals, haughty and painted and perfumed, and have never had dreams of myself as a timid little creature descending into a gigantic cunt — I'm not Steven and I'm not Carl, and Nancy doesn't appeal to me. Even though I did, like a true opportunist, have thoughts about the boss's wife in the beginning, after considering all the pros and cons, I realized she wasn't my cup of tea. It is, of course, another question entirely whether she would have been interested in me, although I doubt that she would have been. There wasn't even one point of contact between us, though there wasn't any antipathy either. Moreover, I think that Nancy and I are the same type of people: we're both self-assured, enterprising, and given to action, and I've always taken my women under my protection and been a papa to them, even when they were older than me. That may in fact be the reason why Jenny and I never really got on together. She wasn't a tempting girl-daughter for me, but mama Jenny, and we didn't need a mama Jenny — no. I myself am a papa Limonov; I myself like to be the one in control.

Carl the opportunist is a quiet person, and when he stays at the house, he's neither seen nor heard. Sometimes in the morning I find him in the kitchen reading the book on etiquette by Amy Vanderbilt, obviously a kind of handbook for opportunists — who else would need it? Gatsby has no need of books like that; he already knows a little, and in any case his wealth and self-assurance place him above any etiquette. Gatsby is a representative of the upper classes and not a bourgeois like the former bookkeeper Carl. It's right for Carl to read a book on etiquette, and he reads it. Nevertheless, they share the same woman.

How odd that nature sticks different types of people wherever it can, not worrying in the least about the bodies, using the first one that comes along. And so here is the robust fellow Steven Grey, six feet two inches tall, and inside him the vulnerable soul of a little boy who seeks a mother in all his women and who chooses the mother — Nancy and Polly, for example, and several of his other women as well, all of whom give off a maternal aura. Whereas I, Edward Limonov, five feet eight and with the face of a child, have — just imagine! — the habits of a papa. I remember that only once during the whole of my life with Jenny, at a time when I was sick with a fever, did I play the child with her, and in that instant everything suddenly assumed its proper place for her: She pressed my head against her breast and stroked my hair, obviously not even aware that she was doing it, and started muttering affectionately to me. The next day she told me sadly, "How sick you were last night, Edward, but at least you were human. It's the first time since I've known you."

Whenever I see the severe Nancy kneeling in the garden in her long dress, her face tanned and without any makeup and her hair pulled back in a bun, as she concentrates on transplanting an azalea bush from a pot, I feel a certain masculine superiority over my employer. Because he needs the protective caresses of this strong woman, while to this day I still sigh in anguish every night and toss and turn in my bed remembering the unbalanced child Elena, who could drive me to a frenzy with her whorishness, that child who had grown completely wild. Elena had run away from her papa Edward and was doing shocking things — fucking bad men and behaving in whatever hoodlum way she pleased, instead of living like a good daughter the way her papa wanted her to. What could I do — nature made me that way. If I had been able to, I would with pleasure have rested my head on some woman's large breast — like a poor, tired little boy.

Oh, I would give a great deal to enter Steven Grey's bedroom and see how he does everything with his women. It's only the curiosity of an investigator, gentlemen, only the curiosity of an investigator — nothing dirty, no sexual thoughts whatsoever. I would just like to see who dominates and how. Steven and his girlfriends, by the way, use not only the master bedroom but also the guest bedroom next door. Either he and Polly hump each other on his bed, and then she goes to sleep in the guest bedroom (in which case I've had it with these spoiled WASPs), or else Gatsby feels it would somehow be unethical to fuck in the family's master bedroom with its photograph of the naked Nancy holding an equally naked baby — Henry, his first-born. I don't know what the answer is, but Olga, the black woman from underdeveloped Haiti, has more work to do thanks to the strange scrupulousness of our lord and master. And the yellow half-Tatar Edward has yet another excuse for grins and reflections.

Just a few days after I became the millionaire's housekeeper, or butler as Gatsby says, the energetic bureaucrat Linda put together a curious document for me, a very long document on which she had obviously spent a great deal of time. In order to give you an idea of the kind of semi-military order that prevails in our house, I cite it here.