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:
Two girls about the same age as the boy sat on folding chairs behind a card table cluttered with clipboards and leaflets. Both had long straight hair and both wore jeans and loose sweaters. They looked impossibly young. She wanted to talk to them but could think of nothing whatsoever to say.
“I don’t have a pen,” she said.
One of the girls handed her a pen and passed a clipboard to her. The piece of paper on the clipboard had spaces for a couple of dozen signatures with nothing at its top to indicate precisely what she was signing. She decided it didn’t much matter.
“Andrea Beth Kleinman,” she wrote. “47 Jane Street, N.Y.C.”
“I wonder what she really looked like.”
The voice startled her. She turned, and a man smiled at her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Were you talking to me?”
“Thinking aloud, actually. But don’t you wonder what she looked like? Modigliani obviously distorted faces. He couldn’t have encountered an endless parade of long-necked women, could he?”
“I suppose not.”
“I often think it would be interesting to have photographs of the subjects of portraits. So that one could know to what extent the artist pays homage to reality. And what he finds with a brush that the camera couldn’t capture.”
“I never thought of that.”
She turned toward the picture, imagining what Modigliani’s model might have looked like, trying to recall the Modigliani at the Albright-Knox in Buffalo. The man moved alongside of her and they looked at the picture together.
“I’d love to know what Rembrandt’s models looked like. Or Hals’s. Of course they didn’t have cameras at the time, did they? But do you know Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein? I’ve seen photographs of the woman taken at about the same time, and Picasso’s portrait is surprisingly authentic. And yet he invests the woman with so much more character than the camera lens picks up.”
They moved on together to the next picture. She generally preferred to be alone in museums and art galleries, but now she found this man’s company engaging. He was about thirty-five, she judged, with a not unattractive wedge-shaped face. His hair was dark brown and shaggy, his moustache a fighter brown with red highlights. He wore a tan corduroy jacket over a dark blue shirt open at the neck.
In front of a cubist Picasso he said, “You know, I never understood cubism until quite recently. I knew intellectually what it was about but I didn’t really comprehend it on a gut level. Do you ever smoke marijuana? I swear by all that’s holy I’m not an undercover policeman.”
She laughed. “I have smoked,” she said. “Not in years.”
“I don’t often, but once in a while. Usually when I’m alone listening to some music that I really want to absorb. But the point is that a couple of months ago I got high, you see, and I came here, and for the first time I looked at cubist things, at this particular painting as a matter of fact, and I was able to dig it. To understand just what was going on. It’s as if I learned a new way of seeing things, and I can still do it now without being high.”
“That’s interesting.”
“On the other hand, I still don’t like cubism much. But now I have a better idea why I don’t like it.”
She laughed. “You almost had me ready to try it. But if I’m not going to enjoy the paintings any more I guess I’ll pass it up.”
“Oh, I think it’s worth knowing why one doesn’t like something, don’t you? You really ought to try it some time. Do you get a chance to come here often?”
“I’m afraid not. I’m from out of town.”
“Oh? Whereabouts?”
“Upstate. Buffalo.”
“I’ve never been there. Do you like it?”
“It’s not a bad city. Do I like it? Well, it’s home, you see. I was born there.”
“I would have thought you were a New Yorker. You’ve lived here, haven’t you?”
She nodded. “For a few years. After college.”
“Radcliffe? Smith?”
“Bryn Mawr.”
“That would have been my third guess.” He smiled. He had a very easy smile. He looked at his watch, then at her. “I have twenty after two. Are you planning to go to the movie?”
“I hadn’t even thought about it.”
“It’s Citizen Kane again.”
Did she want to sit through a movie? It seemed silly to squander part of a free day in New York at the movies, even to see Citizen Kane, even in the Modern. She told him she didn’t think she would go.
“I’m not going either,” he said. “I don’t suppose you have time for a cup of coffee? Or a drink, if you’d prefer.”
“Oh, I don’t—”
“You don’t want to spend too much time on your feet, you know. It’s very easy to do that in New York. We could have coffee downstairs, or there’s a decent sort of pub just around the corner.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Which shall it be? Coffee or cocktails?”
He was trying to pick her up. He was very obviously trying to pick her up, and how had she managed to be quite so stupid about it? The Modern during the afternoon was a standard meeting place, as established as Bloomingdale’s on Saturdays. And he had been trying to pick her up all along, and doing a rather good job of it, and it was only now dawning on her what had been going on.
She felt herself blushing and couldn’t seem to do anything about it.
“I have to go,” she said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I have to meet my husband. I’m late, I have to meet him—”
“Oh, really.”
“I—”
“You don’t have to meet him for a few hours, do you? Or you wouldn’t have weighed the prospect of seeing Citizen Kane. Is that your way of telling me you’re married? I’d already noticed the ring, you know.”
Involuntarily her eyes went to his hand. He was not wearing a wedding ring. But that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Not all men wore them.
“Divorced,” he said. “Almost three years now.”
“I’m not divorced,” she said. “I’m very happily married. I have a fifteen-month-old child.”
“Boy or girl?”
“Why? A girl.”
“I have two girls. Eight and five.”
“I’m sorry, but I—”
“Rachel and Melissa.”
“Pardon me?”
“My daughters. Their names are Rachel and Melissa. What’s your girl’s name?”
“I don’t see that it concerns you.”
“It doesn’t. How long have you been married?”
“That’s none of your business either.”
He raised his eyebrows. “The hell of it is,” he said, “that we were having a perfectly enjoyable conversation. At least I was enjoying it, and I had the feeling you were enjoying it, too. Was I wrong?”
She didn’t say anything.
“I don’t think I was wrong. Then you suddenly decided that having a cup of coffee with me was tantamount to violating your marriage vows. I don’t recall making an immoral proposition. Or even a moral one. I didn’t expose myself or use bad language or anything of the sort. Did I?”
“Please,” she said.
“Is your husband wildly jealous? Would he object to my buying you a drink?”
“I would object.”
“Would you happen to have any idea why?”
She closed her eyes for a moment. It was a hell of a thing, she thought, when a woman couldn’t go to a museum alone without some idiot making a pest of himself. But he was not an idiot. And it was her fault as much as his; she had stupidly played a particular role in a particular scene without knowing what was going on.
Speaking very deliberately, she said, “Look, it’s my fault. I’m just a dumb little housewife from the sticks. I thought you were being friendly.”