Happy New Year, Herbie and other stories
- Автор: Хантер Эван
- Год: 1963
- Язык: английский
- Год: Simon and Schuster
- Жанр: Современная русская и зарубежная проза
Электронная книга - «Happy New Year, Herbie and other stories». Краткое содержание книги:
“A few more minutes,” Epman said. “You go ahead and change.”
“If you’ll excuse me,” Flora said, and again she smiled and then moved toward the bathroom with a walk that was peculiarly unfeminine even though the hip and leg movements were those usually associated with feminine, if not outright sexy, women. The effect puzzled me. I watched her as she walked across the room. She was, I supposed, about five feet two inches tall. She walked with her shoulders back and her head erect, the bun at the nape of her neck curled with the artistic precision of a conch shell. Her waist, though beginning to record the advance of years, was slender nonetheless, smoothly flowing into the curve of wide hips. She moved with a fluidity that tightened her skirt across an invitingly plump backside, and her legs looked clean and trim, tapering to the flawlessly cut high-heeled pumps. The effect should have been one of desirable, if mellowing, femininity. And yet something was lacking.
She moves like a frightened bird, I thought.
I realized in a rush that Flora Epman had known either Hollywood or Sam Epman for too long a time. The marshmallow exterior she presented might once have been only the coating for a solid steel core, but it was genuine enough now. Whatever strength she’d once possessed had become a banality. For all her smiling agreement, she was a lost and frightened woman. And I wondered if Sam Epman hadn’t made her that way.
Epman waited until the bathroom door had closed behind her.
“I’ll make this short,” he said. “You’re the boys who are going to write this movie. Are you supposed to sit down and work with each other without even knowing what brand cigarettes you smoke? Impossible. I took the liberty,” he went on, moving toward the dropleaf desk near the windows, lowering the front of the desk and reaching into it, “of buying copies of your respective books. Everybody should take such liberties, huh? Not that you need it.” He chuckled. “Mr. Cohen, from you I bought Slum Boy because this is all you wrote so far. From you, Mr. Wainwright, I bought your latest one, Tambourine, on the theory that a man’s latest is always his best.” He picked up the books and carried them across the room. “You only get one book each,” he said, chuckling. “Your own book you don’t have to read.” He extended the books. I took my copy. Wainwright glanced through his and then handed it back.
“I’ve already read this,” he said.
“What?” Epman asked, as though he hadn’t heard Wainwright’s earlier praise of my novel.
“I thought it would be a good idea to research my colleague’s work,” Wainwright explained. He shrugged in embarrassment like a student who, in a class of forty, is the only one who’s prepared his assignment.
“Well, good, good for you,” Epman said. “But if you don’t mind, would you read it again? I want you to get acquainted with each other’s styles. We got to marry these two different styles into one shooting script; it shouldn’t look like the Russian Army wrote it. So learn them. It won’t be boring, believe me. Those are good books. If they weren’t, their authors wouldn’t be working on my picture.”
He pulled a slender pocket watch from his vest pocket, held it on the palm of his hand for an instant, and then put it back into the pocket. “I’ll see you all in the morning,” he said. “In the meantime, I better get dressed or Flora will take a fit. Thanks for coming up.”
“It was a pleasure hearing your ideas, Mr. Epman,” Wainwright said. “It sounds as if we’re going to have a great picture here.”
“I think so,” Epman said reflectively. “I think we’re going to have a great picture here.”
He paused and looked at me.
I cleared my throat. “I think we’re going to have a great picture here,” I said.
Epman smiled. Then, with sudden energy, he said, “Listen, I don’t want you to think I’m kicking you out, because what I’m doing, actually, is kicking you out. Unless you want to see a hairy-legged producer in his undershorts.” He chuckled and smoothed his mustache, as if mention of hair had reminded him of it. With his free hand he opened the door.
“See you in the morning, Mr. Epman,” Wainwright said cheerfully.
“Right,” Epman snapped with a curt nod of his bald head, and then he closed the door behind us. Wainwright and I stood awkwardly in the hallway.
“Feel like joining me for a drink, Dave?” he asked. He grinned. “Or would you rather start reading my novel?”
“The drink now, the novel later,” I said.
We walked down the hallway in silence. I rang for the elevator, and then I turned to Wainwright, a frown on my face, and asked, “What do you think of all this? Do you think it’ll really work?”
Wainwright nodded quickly. There was in his eyes the same fear I had felt emanating from Flora Epman. “I think it’ll be a great picture,” he said, and then as if I hadn’t already done it, rang for the elevator again.
The Final Yes
He took the key from his pocket, unlocked the padlock, and then took the shotgun down from the rack.
The shotgun was a Savage automatic, and he thought the name was wryly appropriate because he was about to kill himself and he considered the act essentially savage and at the same time automatic, almost inevitable. Holding the gun in his big hands, he looked down at it with a curiously sad smile. He hadn’t even wanted the damn thing.
The house was very still.
He stood in the center of the wood-paneled den, alone in the house, the ceiling lights glinting on the sleek, polished barrel of the gun. His face in the shining barrel was eerily reflected, distorted by the curve of the metal and shimmer of the overhead fixture. The gun was light in his hands. It had a checkered walnut stock, with a full pistol grip. The barrel was plain and round, but it was made of a special alloy steel so that, even though it was a twelve-gauge gun, it felt as light as any twenty-gauge he’d ever handled. It was really ironic, he thought, that Beth was the one who’d insisted on buying the gun, over his protests. It was really so goddamn ironic that he felt like crying because... because this gun, this gun he held in his hands, was something more than a weapon or a deliverer. Its possession, his ownership of it even though he’d never wanted it, was an admission of a way of life. And his way of living had really left very little choice in determining the way of his dying.
How still the house was, almost as if it expected a sudden noise and were bracing itself for the shock. That’s ridiculous, he thought. The house is empty because Beth and the children are at the beach. No one expected me home this early, not on a Friday afternoon.
He looked at the gun again.
Well, he thought, I might as well get it over with. Shells, he thought. I suppose I’ll need shells.
Aimlessly, he began walking toward the garage. The shotgun felt a little heavier in his hands. He felt no real sense of urgency, and yet he knew the thing had to be done before Beth and the children got home. He supposed that would be around five o’clock, and it was only three now. It seemed much later than that. The idea had come to him at exactly two-thirty, just a half hour ago. He had said his final “Yes” at that time and then had glanced at his desk clock, as if wanting to mark the hour, as if knowing even as the “Yes” left his lips that it was the last time he would ever say that word, the last time he would allow himself to be talked into doing something he did not want to do.
He found the box of shells at the back of one of the drawers in the old chest stored in the garage. He went back into the house and loaded the gun to its full five-shot capacity, even though he knew he’d need only one shot, and then he sat with the gun across his lap for several moments and tried to think if there was anything he wanted to do before he killed himself. He had no idea as yet whether he would put the barrel of the gun in his mouth or simply hold it against his temple. The idea of killing himself did not frighten him. In fact, he accepted it with a sort of depressive calm, as if he had known from the very beginning, from that time so long ago when he had first said “Yes,” that this was the way it would end.