Eduard becomes Steven Gray's butler

Eduard becomes Steven Gray’s butler at a moment when both his private refuge and his literary prospects seem to have collapsed. The position grows out of practical familiarity with Steven’s household: after rejection, isolation, and poorly paid labor on Long Island, Eduard turns months of helping around the house into a role that makes his skills, Russian identity, and literary persona newly useful. For a year, the Russian poet becomes an exacting, inventive servant—and, to Steven’s circle, a Manhattan sensation.

From abandonment to a place in the house

Jenny’s departure removes a reassurance Eduard had taken for granted. Returning from vacation, she tells him that she will move to California to marry the man who had invited them to a barbecue before Eduard’s abrupt departure; she is already pregnant. Although Eduard had not believed himself in love with her, he had counted on her love and on the refuge of knowing someone was waiting. He had expected to be the one to leave. Instead, he finds himself alone again, and the pain of being left surprises him.

He can still visit Sutton Place for coffee, but no longer as someone who belongs there. Steven, awkwardly patting him on the shoulder as if to console him for being dumped, asks what he will do. With Eduard’s practical ability in mind, he connects him to a friend seeking off-the-books work at a country house. That referral sends Eduard to Long Island for two months, shoveling and troweling for four dollars an hour. His new employment begins not as a literary triumph but as a precarious means of getting by.

The house is empty and unheated during the week, and Eduard sleeps on a foam mattress, protected from the damp floor as best he can by a tarp. He heats instant soup on a hot plate and piles on sweaters without getting warm. In occasional sunny spells he goes to the beach to frighten seagulls; a beer at the nearest village bar can be followed by a rain-soaked walk back. For weeks, his only conversations are with the bar and supermarket owners. The phone number he leaves with the few people he still considers close—including Steven, Jenny, and Gennady Smakov—brings no calls. When his agent reports that Macmillan has rejected his manuscript as too antagonistic, Eduard is alone in the empty house, sitting on a bag of cement. The book ends with an abusive dismissal of its readers, and the rejection seems to confirm his fear that he has tried and failed.

An opening created by familiarity

The route from this low point to the butler’s position is already present in Eduard’s earlier work around Steven’s home. For months he has been a handyman and helper there, repairing a table leg, oiling garden tools, and preparing borscht that the guests enjoy. He knows the house and its routines. When Jenny is about to join her fiancé in California, Steven is sad to lose her and has not found anyone to replace her. Eduard’s useful presence offers a solution; Steven’s social vanity supplies an additional attraction. The idea of employing a Russian poet as a butler enchants him.

The change is therefore not a sudden discovery that Eduard can work with his hands. His practical competence has already been tested in small, domestic tasks; what changes is the position those tasks can occupy. The man who has been doing isolated, low-paid work on an empty country property is brought into the continuing life of Steven’s household. Steven’s preference for the idea and Eduard’s knowledge of the home meet in a job that is at once service and performance.

The Russian poet at work

Eduard proves not merely adequate but exceptionally accomplished. He is exacting with the Haitian cleaning lady and manages a good relationship with the secretary, despite her occasional difficulty. At the door he is suspicious of callers until he recognizes them, then shifts easily into deference. He handles deliveries, selects the best cuts at Ottomanelli’s, and cooks for Steven’s tastes. His repertoire extends from borscht and beef Stroganoff to the fashionable vegetables—fennel, broccoli, and arugula—that had been unfamiliar to a man raised on potatoes and cabbage.

Trust becomes part of the job’s definition. Steven can send Eduard to the bank to collect ten thousand dollars in cash, and Eduard attends carefully to his employer’s habits, even serving whiskey at the right temperature. He observes household discretion too, averting his eyes without fuss when a naked woman leaves the bathroom. These are different kinds of competence: vigilance toward strangers, sociability with guests, culinary skill, and an ability to respect privacy without becoming conspicuous.

That discretion does not mean that Eduard disappears into the uniform. He understands which guests will welcome his wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt beneath his livery and joining the conversation. The combination captures the peculiar visibility of the position: he knows his place in the household while also making his presence memorable. Steven’s friends envy him, and Eduard becomes the talk of Manhattan. His success depends not on suppressing the identity that makes the arrangement unusual, but on knowing when and how to display it.

A temporary reversal

The employment lasts a year. Then a French publisher accepts Eduard’s book, and he flies to Paris with Steven’s sincere good wishes. The earlier Macmillan rejection does not prove final: publishers who had refused the manuscript will soon publish his books in the United States. In 1987, Grove Press brings out His Butler’s Story, turning the butler’s position into material for a book as Eduard’s literary career carries him away from the household.

The episode reverses the terms of his isolation without erasing its hardship. The rejected writer who feared that no one would know he had been alive becomes an indispensable worker in a rich New York household and an object of social curiosity. Yet the position remains temporary: it gives him shelter, recognition, and a new role, while the acceptance of his writing—not domestic service—sets the direction of his departure.