“Have something to eat with us,” Osip said to me-as-Mayakovsky. I sat down in the third chair—the empty one—at their table. Giving my bouquet of bright red roses to Lilya didn’t feel right somehow, so I handed them to Osip.

“These are wonderful roses,” he said, his face lighting up. “Roses only you could write. What’s more, they don’t seem like merely personal roses. They have the power to change our whole society. Consider this a small token of thanks,” he said, casually taking a roll of bills out of his pocket and handing it to me. I took it without thinking. What country’s money it was I couldn’t say, but as I had never held a roll of bills like this, as thick as a dictionary, my heart was pounding. Mayakovsky as played by me was rather pathetic, happily taking money from his rival.

“You’re awfully thin. Have you been getting enough to eat? I’ll treat you, so have a good nourishing supper tonight.” Osip was genuinely worried about Mayakovsky. Just as she is always concerned about my health. But now I was Osip’s rival in love. This whole situation made me unbearably angry. Lilya couldn’t have forgotten how cornered she’d felt, unable to endure the emptiness of bourgeois life until that day when, craving the poet’s body, she’d pounced on him, clinging to him as if she were having some kind of fit. Yet now she was cuddling up to her husband as if none of that had ever happened.

The man did have qualities that Mayakovsky lacked: he had a stable income, he granted small favors easily, he was clean and well groomed, he liked children—that sort of thing. Nothing that a poet needed to envy him for. Feeling very nasty, I blurted out, “Your wife has a tendency to be attracted to bohemians—she wants to lose herself in dangerous love affairs. Don’t you think she might run off with an artist one of these days?”

“Oh, my,” he laughed, putting his arm around his wife’s shoulder, “what a naughty girl.” He sounded awfully affected but didn’t seem to be putting on an act.

I noticed Osip’s leather briefcase lying on a side table—the sort of case a businessman would carry. The clasp was open, so I could see the spines of the books inside. The names Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, printed in gold, glittered in the light. Did Osip love both of these literary masters at the same time? I’d never before met anyone who did. Perhaps he’d just picked two volumes at random to add some weight to his briefcase. Or were these books a sort of talisman he carried around, for security? I was getting more and more frustrated. Mayakovsky might have been angry enough to knock the briefcase off onto the floor.

Lilya leaned back in her chair and crossed her legs. The hem of her skirt floated up to reveal her thigh, white as a fish’s belly, all the way up to the lace trimming of her slip. Taking a rose from the bouquet, she started tickling her own thigh with it. Her eyes were trained on me. The rose petals lapped at the skin of her thigh like a dog’s tongue. The flower gradually slid up until it slipped inside her skirt and began tickling between her legs. From his angle, her husband couldn’t see what she was playing at. Mayakovsky was being tempted. I had to say something. If I opened my mouth, shocking insults might come pouring out. Perhaps that was exactly what Lilya was hoping for. Maybe she wanted to watch a fight between her husband and her lover. The sight of them fighting would be evidence of how deeply she was loved—she wanted to devour that. But I wouldn’t let her get away with it. Ignoring her, I calmly turned to Osip and smiled.