I hung the card with the first naked beauty that came to hand on the pencil, took aim—and my hand shook. The first that came to hand—or if not the first one that came to hand, then one of ten, one of a hundred, one of a thousand of the first naked beauties that came to hand—looked a bit like The Most Beautiful Woman in the World. That same ideal outline of the shoulders, that same self-satisfied smile, that same motionless gaze.
My hand shook. I lowered my weapon. I was near tears from helplessness and sorrow. I became keenly aware that even the most accurate shot at the effigy of the first naked beauty that came to hand would be a complete embarrassment. Some trashy, per procura, symbolic execution was about to take place in my head. There was no point in shooting. Neither at the substitute likenesses, nor at seemingly neutral targets. There was absolutely no point in shooting. I would have to bear the defeat like a man. Not surrender. To fight, to search, to obtain her coordinates at any cost—even at the cost of humiliation. To try to identify a trustworthy soul, and, in spite of everything, to ask heroically, paying no heed to adversity, for her cellphone number… Heroically, since, after all, even if I would be successful, there is no guarantee what would come next… Jesus Christ! So greatly did the recurrence of a recent nightmare batter me and make me white-hot with rage that I did it. Not in a trance, but in cold calculation. All of my trances—once the trance itself has already basically been strained away—have an icy finish (recall my stroll through the private apartments of the ambassador and his wife), and that’s how it was now, too. I did this in cold calculation, with complete calm, and, toward the end, not without amusement. I brought fourteen 50 ml bottles of stomach bitters from the refrigerator, placed them methodically at decent intervals on the edge of the balcony, and—this will come as no surprise to you—I used fourteen shots on them. It goes without saying that there were no delaying tactics of the sort: empty the fourteen bottles, pour the hooch out into a jug, shoot away at the empties, and then engage in a little private revelry on top of that. No question of any of that. First, whoever has shot at a full bottle and at an empty bottle knows the difference this makes. It is a fundamental difference. It is like the difference between I won’t say which one thing and that other one. Second, I finally needed the smell of blood. And the subtle cloud of stomach bitters coming from the balcony, from the fourteen shattered 50 ml bottles, was like the smell of wolf entrails, like the vapor of tropical swamps, like poison gas. I fell asleep intoxicated and unconscious.
And when I woke up, and when, as usual, before getting out of bed I checked to see whether anyone had left some desperate message in the night, on the screen of my phone I found letters tapped out with the thumb of an angel: “I’m sorry that I disappeared so quickly, but I had to. In any case, I say yes. I say yes. Yes to the next installment of our conversation about life.” I got up, put on Vivaldi’s First Violin Concerto full blast and wrote back: “I say yes to our life.” “To our life together?” she replied three seconds later. “Yes,” I replied. “Do you think we will be happy?” she replied. “Yes,” I replied.
IV
I am writing the first bedroom scene of my life, and here I commit the classic debutant’s error: instead of getting right down to business, instead of beginning right off the bat and describing the body of The Most Beautiful Woman in the World as it evaporates like a cloud, I enter upon intricate preambles and digressions. But once you have The Most Beautiful Woman in the World in your bed, you feel so intellectually energized that you think you have the right to formulate fundamental theses. You have the right to pose and to settle key questions. And so, I pose (and also immediately settle) the following key question: What, namely, is the key question in sex? I answer: The key question in sex is the opening position. Oh, of course, it isn’t a matter of any opening position in bed. I’m not providing pitiful technical counseling here—where to place the feet, under what to place the pillow, etc. I’m concerned with the opening position in the fundamental sense, about the first—I use this term in the classical philosophical sense—position.***
To find the place to occupy the first position, and subsequently to occupy the first position—that is the fundamental question in sex. Fundamental, because it is the first. Without it, there are no further installments, and even if there are, they are chaotic and unharmonious. And chaos and lack of harmony are the extermination of sex. In short, it is a matter of sitting down in the proper place. The first position is always a sitting position. Schemes of the sort that would have us walk up to the window together, and at that window, or on the way back, have me embrace her; or the complete catastrophe that would have me lie in ambush for her on her return from the bathroom, and then romantically jump on her back—such schemes are disastrous because they are doomed to briefness. Just how long are you going to stand with her at that window? Just how long will the two of you rock back and forth in an amatory frenzy by the bathroom? Sooner or later you will have to loosen the passionate hold, and everything starts again from the beginning. Unless—God forbid!—seized by panic in such an ill-fated moment, you pick up the pace, thereby making matters worse. It is quite another matter that then at least you’ve gotten the thing over with. You’ve succumbed. You’re dead. Don’t try to tell me that death has only its bad sides.
It is my deepest conviction that the thing to do is to sit down next to the woman, to sit down properly next to the woman, to sit down next to the woman in the appropriate place—this is the essence of the art of love. He who has grasped the simplicity of this craft has learned much. He who has not grasped it will achieve little.
For various reasons, mankind has suffered amatory fiascos. It has suffered them because it was timid, because it didn’t have the proper conditions, because the hour had gotten late, because it was too early, because she wasn’t ready yet, because he was ashamed, because she became paralyzed with fear, because he got drunk, because she undressed too soon, because he said something stupid, because she suddenly remembered that she had to call her sister, because he didn’t take off his socks, because she spent half the night in the bathroom, because he had such an attack of nerves that he was constantly running to the can, because she, out of habit, addressed him as she did her husband—shnooky-lumps, because he, while sitting on the edge of the bed, began to reply to an SMS, because she suddenly broke down in tears, because he suddenly broke out laughing, because she cleared her throat significantly the whole time, because when he asked with a muffled voice, “When did you last fall in love?” she replied with hasty frankness, “Yesterday,” etc., etc. Mankind has suffered amatory disasters for a billion reasons. Mankind has suffered disaster a billion times, a billion times it came to nothing, because he didn’t know how to move from the armchair to the couch. A billion disasters—or perhaps a billion billions—derived from the fact that he didn’t know how to take up the first position. It’s quite another matter that, if you have a small apartment, then this is a genuine tragedy. That’s right—a small one. It’s worse in a small one than in a large one. After all, you’re not going to pile on next to her on the sofa bed, just as soon as she sits down, on account of the cramped quarters. Contrary to appearances, in a small apartment—stricter rules apply.
I had a small apartment. The Most Beautiful Woman in the World sat on the couch, I, on the other side of a small coffee table, on the arm chair. Seven mountains, seven rivers, seven seas, and seven infinities separated me from the first position. And that was terrible. But I already had scores of mountains,