A Week as Andrea Benstock
- Автор: Блок Лоуренс
- Год: 1975
- Язык: английский
- Год: Arbor House
- ISBN: 978-0-87795-100-1
- Жанр: Романы для взрослых
Электронная книга - «A Week as Andrea Benstock». Краткое содержание книги:
Cheers, Winkie. Requiescat in pace. Olev hasholem.
She drank about an ounce of whiskey and felt it burn its way down her throat. Warmth spread in her stomach and she fancied she could feel the warmth slipping into her blood, moving through her body, bringing life and quickness to her toes and fingers. For a moment there was a sensation of heaviness in the center of her chest and then that passed and there was nothing but the warmth and a feeling of comfort.
She thought of Winkie and tried to think of other deaths. Grandparents, the parents of some of her friends. A classmate at Bennett, barely known to her, existing in memory as no more than an occasional bloodless smile in the hallways, tossed during their third year through the windshield of her father’s car. A boy a class ahead of her in Sunday school who had died of a blood disease of some sort, presumably leukemia but that, too, had been a word one never heard spoken aloud. How old had she been when he died? Eleven, maybe. Eleven, perhaps twelve.
What was his name?
She drank more whiskey. She thought of a poem of Dylan Thomas, who had himself died before she’d ever been to the White Horse, damn him for being so inconsiderate. He’d written that there was no death after the first one. Well, neither was there any death before the first one.
Oh, Winkie. For Christ’s sake, Winkie, why?
Eileen would never swallow pills and wish the dawn away. Eileen understood enough not to seek to understand too much. She knew intuitively when to avert her eyes, and when to blink. She could survive, bending but not breaking, like that fable about the tree and the reeds.
And Andrea?
She had been a friend to Winkie, finding the role a perfectly natural one, and now without any strain she was a friend to Eileen. They were so very different, those two friends of hers, different in such a variety of ways that neither could gladly have suffered the other’s company. Winkie’d find Eileen boring and mindless and predictable. Eileen would see Winkie as snobbish, weird, undependable.
So what did it mean, that she herself was capable of friendship with both of them? She frowned inwardly, chasing the thought, trying to catch its tail. Did the two of them represent disparate aspects of herself? Or different stages of her life? Or did they combine to prove that she herself was undefined, an empty slate, a mirror that served only to reflect whoever posed before her?
Whiskey clarified and distorted at one and the same time. Like the shop in Through the Looking-Glass, where Alice could see what was on the shelf above and the shelf below, but not on the shelf she was looking at. Alcohol’s insights came obliquely, and when you reached for them you were grabbing empty air.
Her glass was empty. Odd, because she didn’t recall finishing her drink. And she had put the bottle away because she had decided to have one drink and no more. She walked very steadily, got the bottle, poured her glass half-full, replaced the bottle and went back to her chair. She lit a cigarette and found one already burning in the ashtray. She stubbed it out very carefully, very very carefully.
Two months ago. What had she been doing the night Winkie had died? What day of the week had it been? She closed her eyes and tried to calculate but gave it up as impossible. And it didn’t seem worth the trouble of checking the calendar.
Some conversations, solitary dialogues, while sipping scotch from a juice glass:
“Winkie, why?”
“Oh, put a cork in it, Kleinman. Didn’t you always know I would do it? Face it, I wasn’t put on earth to be somebody’s grandmother. Nobody wants a madcap grandmother.”
“You had plenty to live for.”
“I had plenty to live up to and plenty to live down. I would have had to grow up, kid. And if you grow up you can’t fly, Wendy. How many times do I have to tell you that?”
“You’re making me laugh, damn it.”
“Well, I could always make you laugh, Andrea Beth. That’s what each of us loved about the other. And what’s so bad about laughing, huh? Tell me that.”
“Who’s gonna make me laugh now, Winks? You tell me that.”
And:
“The thing is, Winkie, you keep dying. You died a little bit when we moved to New York, and then you died again when I came home to Buffalo.”
“Home to Buffalo. Remember that phrasing, Andrea Beth.”
“Stop it, you’ll make me miss the point of this. Then you died really two months ago, and then you died again when I found out about it this afternoon. And here we are having this conversation.”
“Spooky, huh?”
“Why weren’t we friends in New York?”
“Because we reminded each other of college.”
“Is that the only reason?”
“Oh, I wound up in Yorkville and you wound up in the Village. I got involved with the Time-Life crew and you were hopping Village saloons.”
“I didn’t ask what happened. I asked why.”
“Being dead doesn’t mean knowing all the answers. It means you don’t get called on quite so often, that’s all.”
“Winkie, I keep losing more and more pieces of you.”
“But I’m not completely dead, right? Right? I mean am I right or am I right, Kleinman?”
“You’re crazy.”
“I always was. ‘The part of me they could not kill/ Lives on to orrrrrrganize.’ Remember when we sat up until dawn singing Wobbly songs? Remember how that idiot Giddings wanted us all to join the IWW when I told her they still existed? Then she heard they were on the Attorney-General’s list and how would she explain it to her mother? Do you remember all that?”
“Oh, God. I remember everything.”
“Course you do, Kleinman.”
“It’s Benstock, now.”
“That’s right. I keep forgetting.”
And again:
“Winkie? I just realized something.”
“What?”
“I’m going to have a son.”
“How can you tell?”
“You just know these things, that’s all. And—”
“Remember when we went to that kindly old abortionist in Reading?”
“How could I forget? And—”
“Let me finish, please. Death has its privileges. You were busy being a tower of strength afterward, and I told you how I asked the doctor whether it would have been a boy or a girl, and you got these huge saucer eyes and were all prepared to nurse me through a complete emotional catastrophe, and I told you he said it was neither, it was a dachshund? Remember?”
“I thought I was going to die laughing.”
“Well, if you gotta go—”
“But this is important, Winkie. I’m going to have a boy, I know it, and that’s what I want. I thought it didn’t matter but I was wrong. It matters. I want a son.”
“Okay.”
“Because a son is better off.”
“Okay.”
“Because girls keep killing themselves. Sometimes all at once and sometimes a little at a time but either way they just, they just keep on killing themselves—”
“Don’t cry, Andrea Beth. Please don’t cry.”
“I can’t help it!”
Until it was time, finally, to go to sleep. She knew this without literally knowing what time it was, because she had rather deliberately avoided looking at the clock once since getting out of bed. It couldn’t have been too late. It was still as dark outside as when they had gone to bed.
She was drunk, of course, but not too drunk. She was sober enough to wash and dry her glass and put it away, sober enough to empty the overflowing ashtray, sober enough to return her robe to the hook in the bathroom, sober enough to swallow a couple of aspirin against the morning.