Jenny

Jenny enters Eduard Limonov’s life at a party in a luxurious East River townhouse, where he mistakes her for the daughter of the house. She is, in fact, its live-in housekeeper. Their brief relationship gives him access to a world of comfort he has rarely known, but its end leaves him without either Jenny or the refuge her home provided. Through her, his fantasy of crossing into the world of the rich collides with the practical arrangements of domestic service—and with his dependence on someone he has not truly understood.

Introduction and mistaken identity

At the party, Eduard follows Gennady Smakov to an address he is not sure he has been invited to visit. The four-story townhouse, its garden on the East River, ballroom-sized kitchen, and immaculate decorations seem even more splendid than the Libermans’ home. Among about thirty Russian and American guests, he recognizes only Mikhail Baryshnikov, whom he avoids. Jenny welcomes people as they arrive, moving from room to room to make sure everything is in order. Eduard assumes she must be the owner’s daughter: she seems too young to be the lady of the house. He notices that some guests kiss her and others do not, and regrets that he has not done so himself.

Vodka loosens him; the Jamaican weed he carries in his pocket draws a small group around him in the kitchen. Jenny takes a toke when she passes, and he grows increasingly familiar with her, joking as if they have known each other for years. Her approachable manner puts him at ease amid surroundings that otherwise make him feel out of place. After the other guests leave, he helps the staff clean up. Alone with Jenny in the kitchen, he shares a final joint and kisses her. She does not stop the kiss, but pulls away when he tries to go further. Even his suggestion that they sleep together “without doing anything” does not persuade her; she tells him it is time to go home.

Courtship and life at Sutton Place

Jenny eventually invites him over on a Sunday afternoon when she is alone. After the rain stops, they drink coffee in the small private garden overlooking the river. Eduard registers her sweatpants and what he considers her astonishingly thick ankles, attributing them to her Irish descent. Hoping to move her, he recounts stories from his past: his first wife, the second who left because he had no money, and his mother having him confined in a psychiatric ward. Jenny is moved, and they sleep together. The next morning she serves a breakfast of freshly squeezed orange juice, pancakes with maple syrup, bacon, and eggs. Eduard imagines the appeal of waking each day beside a loving wife in a warm bed, with Vivaldi playing and toast rising from the kitchen.

The mistaken identity takes nearly a month to clear up, and the book offers no dramatic scene of discovery. Jenny has done nothing to conceal her work; the narrator suggests she may not have realized either that Eduard misunderstood her position or how badly the error had deceived him. He had thought he had entered the inner circle of the prosperous. He had entered it, but as the housekeeper’s lover.

Once she considers him her boyfriend, Jenny introduces him to her employer, Steven Gray. She lives full time in his Sutton Place apartment; Steven’s family home is a sumptuous manor in Connecticut, and he comes to New York only occasionally. A secretary and a Haitian cleaning woman help Jenny with the apartment, while a much larger staff serves the Connecticut house. The workers dread Steven’s visits, although he presents himself as a liberal employer: he uses Jenny’s first name, fetches his own breakfast, and asks Eduard politely for the newspaper. Yet the tea and toast must already be ready, and Steven can be impatient and fly into rages over trifles before apologizing. Jenny’s place in this arrangement is both comfortable and subordinate.

She sees the position as a good one. In the magnificent house she can entertain whomever she likes, pay nothing, and enjoy the pleasures of wealth without carrying its worries; the few days Steven is present each month are the price of that freedom. Eduard can see the advantages too, but resents the status they reveal. One day he tells her, “Except for Christ’s sake, Jenny, you’re the maid! And I’m the maid’s lover!” He means to provoke her. She is more surprised than hurt and answers, “No one’s forcing you to stay, Ed.” Her composure exposes the choice he would rather not acknowledge: he has acquired a taste for luxury and does not want to return to the Embassy Hotel or the precarious life he led before. His staying is not something Jenny makes him do.

Care, separation, and aftermath

When Eduard falls ill after walking home along Madison Avenue, Jenny nurses him for two weeks, looking after him like a child. She is happy to care for him; when he recovers, she says with regret, “It was like you were human.” The remark registers a brief tenderness as well as a change in how she has experienced him: illness has made him someone to care for rather than the difficult, self-dramatizing man she usually encounters.

A year after he wrote his book on the grass in Central Park, Jenny asks him to vacation with her on the West Coast. He accepts partly from curiosity and partly because he has nowhere he wants to live while she is away. The trip includes her brother and two friends whose middle-class manner he dislikes. After Jenny returns, she tells him that she plans to move to California to join a man she met through them, marry him, and have his children. She is already pregnant. In a kind effort to spare Eduard pain, she says, “You and I weren’t really in love,” and explains that they were good friends who need not stop being friends when they live on opposite sides of the country.

Eduard performs the part of the understanding former boyfriend, but the breakup devastates him. He had assumed that he would be the one to leave and that Jenny loved him; that certainty had meant someone was waiting for him and that he had a refuge. Losing her returns him, in his own perception, to a hostile world. He remains welcome at Sutton Place for coffee, but no longer as part of Jenny’s household. Steven’s clumsy consolation and a recommendation for under-the-table work lead Eduard to spend two months on Long Island doing manual labor for four dollars an hour.

Jenny’s departure also creates the opening for Eduard’s next position. In the months before she leaves, he has already acted as a handyman and helper, repairing a table leg, oiling garden tools, and preparing borscht that the guests enjoy. He knows the house and its routines. With Jenny going to California and Steven lacking a replacement, Eduard proposes himself as butler; Steven is delighted by the idea of employing a Russian poet. Jenny is therefore central to the transition into His Butler’s Story: her relationship with Eduard brings him into the household, her departure makes a vacancy, and the domestic work he learned around her becomes the basis of his new role. The relationship ends, but the home and its labor outlast it.