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:
This past spring, just after her father’s heart attack, she had begun to think of getting pregnant again. She had never given voice to the thought, recognizing it even then as being largely a response to her father’s attack. The idea stayed with her but she remained on the pill, and before much time had passed she was glad she had not acted on that impulse. Because Robin had emerged as an individual to such an extent that she could only imagine another baby as being an intruder into the family circle which the three of them constituted. There had been a time when a second baby would have been acceptable, but the time had passed.
By then, too, there was another more practical reason for her to be on the pill. Because by then she had begun sleeping with Cass Drozdowski.
It seems to her afterward that she should have been able to recognize her restlessness, to identify it for what it was. There were symptoms, certainly, though how was one to know what they were symptoms of? Nights when sleep wouldn’t come, nights when it wouldn’t stay until dawn. Days when she felt her mind going hundreds of yards up in the air, looking down at the suburb in which she lived and seeing a checkerboard, a patchwork quilt, a close-knit network of unrelated lives. She would feel a black heat spreading in her brain. Everything was too close and too busy and there was too much of it.
To walk in the woods. To be alone in an infinity of sand, to kneel down and rear back on your haunches and scream. To just scream and scream and scream—
Silent screaming, while she drove to the market with Robin in her car seat. Shrill screams that stayed echoing in the brain and never passed the lips, screams unuttered while she cooked a meal or visited her parents or sat across the room from her husband.
Not that often. Not constant, not even frequent. But enough so that, had she thought about it, she might have seen it for what it was. Might have recognized that she was ready.
As he had recognized.
She had never thought of Cass in those terms. When she had fantasies (and she had them often enough, alone or in company, peeling potatoes or making love) they never involved someone she knew. Her partners were always strangers and they generally remained wholly faceless in her fantasies. Perhaps the anonymity of her phantom partners made fantasy more acceptable, especially as a muted accompaniment of marital coupling. When you lay in your husband’s arms and thought of another man, surely it was less a matter of emotional adultery if the other man was only vaguely defined, only hazily imagined.
There were men whom she had recognized as attractive, either in the abstract or specifically attractive to her. Colleagues of Mark’s, husbands of friends, But she had recognized their attractiveness in a purely hypothetical way, with no intention of embracing them in fact or in fantasy. And even so Cass had not entered into that picture. She had never bothered to think of him as attractive.
She had thought of him — how? As someone with far more of a role to play in Mark’s life than in hers, certainly. Mark’s partner, Mark’s friend. Tall, rangy, with streaky light brown hair that he slicked straight back, hair beginning to recede now, hair allowed to pile up in curls on the nape of his longish neck. High cheekbones, deep-set gray eyes, a long narrow nose. A political anomaly, proclaiming that he couldn’t make up his mind whether to vote for George Wallace or Dick Gregory. A pole. A Catholic too lazy for out-and-out apostasy. A man with a wife, with three sons and a daughter, with two brothers and three sisters (all older than himself), with a tract house in Cheektowaga, with an ear for Chopin (“That Jewboy Rubinstein plays him better than anybody”) and country music. (“If I had anything else on the car radio it’d take me fifteen minutes longer to get where I’m going.”)
There was a particular Saturday night. It was in early May, with Martin Luther King a month in his grave and Bobby Kennedy a month away from his. David Kleinman, ten weeks after a slight coronary occlusion, was well enough to resume his dental practice on a limited scale. And that night the Benstocks had had some guests for dinner and drinks. Lawyers and their wives. Cass and Ellie Drozdowski. Jeff and Pauline Kaiser. Alan and Debbie Gersten. Not the Santoras — they were out of town.
An ordinary evening. She had spent so many evenings like this one, with these people, with other people similar to them, at her own house, at their houses. The conversation that had taken place one night at one house could have taken place as easily another night at another house with a different collection of people. It was as easy to differentiate the menus, to remember what had been served and who had had what to drink, easier to recall what clothes she had worn.
She remembered what she wore. She wore pants and a sweater. The sweater was a wedgwood blue and underneath it she wore a no-bra bra, and the pants were gray flannel and would probably not be fit to wear in company another season because they were beginning to wear slightly at the knees and beginning to pill at the crotch.
And around midnight she’d been in the kitchen, assembling a speed-the-parting-guests platter of cheese and crackers, when she sensed another’s presence and half-turned to see Cass approaching. And he looked at her, and she supposed she looked back at him because she recalled he put his left arm around her waist, his hand settled confidently on her hip, and his right hand went between her legs and fastened upon the crotch of her pants where the flannel material was starting to pill.
Just like that.
And for how long had he touched her? She with her eyes closed, blocking off one sense to enlarge another, one hand holding onto the formica countertop for balance, the other still clutching a round of Dutch cheese coated with red wax. His hand holding on her hip, holding her, and his hand between her legs, playing with her. Either he knew just where to touch her or it didn’t really matter where he touched her, just that he touched her.
For how long?
It couldn’t have been very long. It didn’t have to be very long. Her body responded without consulting her brain at all as if she were being stroked while asleep. There was not even any pleasure in it, really. It was too mechanical for pleasure to be a part of it. She responded, urgently and automatically, and his fingers worked, and she shuddered and sighed.
If he had not been holding her she would have fallen.
He continued to hold her for another few seconds until she had her balance. Then his hands disengaged themselves and he returned to the living room. He was out of the kitchen before she had her eyes open.
A little while later, while the eight of them sat with cheese and crackers and cups of coffee and final drinks, it was hard for her not to believe that she had imagined all of this. They sat, all of them, just as they would have sat if the incident in the kitchen had never taken place. The same conversation went on in quite the same way. And if she had imagined the incident, imagined it so vividly as to believe it to be true, it was a likely indication that she was losing her grip on things.
But was she any less likely to be losing her grip if it had really happened?
Then Cass’s eye caught hers, just for a second. And then, while he knew she was looking at him, he put a cheese-covered Triscuit in his mouth. And chewed and swallowed. And deliberately put the first two fingers of his right hand into his mouth and sucked appreciatively on them.