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:
And caught her eye again. And did not quite smile.
She knew he would call, and was surprised when Monday came and went without word from him. By the time he did call, the following afternoon, she had rehearsed the conversation endlessly. In some of the versions he apologized and they agreed that nothing like that would happen again. In others he swore that he had always loved her and begged her to leave Mark. But in the little imaginary conversations that she thought of as realistic, he called and tried to coax her into an affair without success.
But the conversation did not go like that at all.
“Andrea, I’d like to see you.”
“All right.”
“Can you get free for an hour or two Thursday or Friday? Say in the early afternoon?”
“Thursday would be better. I can leave Robin with the cleaning woman.”
“I’ll be at the University Manor motel. That’s at Main and Bailey. Park your car at the shopping plaza around the corner.”
“Isn’t there parking at the motel? Oh, I get the point.”
“You don’t want the car to be seen.”
“Of course not. You’ll have to bear with me. I’m not used to having to think this way.”
“Can you get there around noon?”
“I suppose so.”
“Just call me at the motel when you have the car parked and I’ll tell you the room number.”
“All right.”
“I’ll see you then. That’s Thursday, that’s the day after tomorrow.”
“Yes, the day after tomorrow.”
She kept the date that Thursday, leaving the car in front of the bookstore on University Plaza, then taking the trouble to buy a book at the store to justify her presence. (A book she saw but did not buy was the paperback edition of John Riordan’s novel. The thought of purchasing that particular book on this particular occasion appealed to her, but she had already taken the book out of the library.)
She called him from a booth and he told her what room he was in. She walked around the corner, hoping no one saw her turn in to the motel. That was the dangerous moment and there was not much she could do about it, but she went on and turned and if anyone saw her she never knew about it. She found his room and knocked on the door and he opened it and closed it quickly as soon as she was inside.
While she was lighting a cigarette he asked her if she wanted a drink. She nodded and he put ice cubes into a glass and added Canadian Club. “All the comforts of home,” she said.
He didn’t say anything. She looked at him for a moment and thought that there ought to be something to say. But she couldn’t think what it might be. She took a small ladylike sip of her drink, put the glass down on the dresser, took a puff of her cigarette, stubbed it out in an ashtray, and began removing her clothes.
Since then they had been together perhaps a dozen times, maybe a little more than that. Their meetings usually took place on Thursday, when a sullen thick-bodied black woman named Lucinda arrived by bus to clean Andrea’s house. She would drive to the shopping plaza, park her car, walk briskly and nonchalantly around the corner to the motel. She would knock, a door would open, and within five minutes she would be out of her clothes and in bed with him,
The ease with which she did this surprised her, and went on surprising her. Not the ease with which the deception was accomplished, because of course it was simple enough to steal an hour or two in the course of a week. She was mobile and her schedule was flexible, She had her own car and did not have to account closely for her time. On those weeks when Thursday turned out to be inconvenient for one or the other of them, it was usually possible to arrange something on another mutually convenient day. Robin could be dropped at her mother’s house, at Mark’s mother’s house, at Eileen Fradin’s.
In the novels she read, women caught up in adultery found themselves doing a lot of limit testing, becoming increasingly flagrant in their behavior, either because they wanted their husbands to catch them or because they wished to establish for themselves the extent of their husbands’ gullibility. From the beginning she watched herself for signs of this pattern, and she was reassured when they failed to appear. She and Cass did not attempt to see each other more frequently, or for longer periods of time, or in more public and hence dangerous situations. On the contrary, their relationship adhered quite rigidly to the pattern originally established. In all their time together, they never skated on thinner ice than they had that first night, when he had touched her in her kitchen with Mark a matter of yards away from them.
On an emotional level, too, they were both automatically cautious and conservative. One time, after they had made love, he poured himself a drink and said, “You know, this whole business is almost too secure for an affair.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’re so accomplished at this and so cool about it. One thing I knew at the beginning was that this was going to be safe for us. Neither of us was going to fall in love with the other. Neither of us was going to think we were in love.”
“No, hardly that.”
“In books and movies the cheating people go into these mad passionate clinches whenever they’re alone together. And there’s this whole if-only number. If only we could spend a week on a white sand beach in the Caribbean. If only your husband and my wife could get swallowed by a runaway brontosaurus. If you were the only girl in the world and I was the only boy. That whole romantic routine.”
“That’s funny.”
“What?”
“You’re putting it down, the romance routine, but you sound almost wistful about it.”
“Well, of course. It’s crap, and I know it’s crap, but some of the time you have to wish you were capable of believing in that kind of crap. Listen, my mother went to Mass every morning until the day she died. I never stopped thinking that was total nonsense. I couldn’t have been much more than ten years old when I figured out that religion was baloney. The only hard part was making myself realize that other people really took it all seriously. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t occasionally envy my mother for being able to believe in it all. Not that I would want it for myself. Not that I would willingly be the kind of simpleminded person who could swallow all of that. Religion, romance, it’s the same thing, isn’t it?”
“How?”
“Easy answers. Jesus, especially with the if-only number. ‘Life would be terrific if only we could be together forever, but it wouldn’t be fair to everybody else.’ So you get to feel that things could have worked out if only, and you get to feel very noble for denying yourself, and you never have to face the fact that there’s nothing that’s gonna make everything work out well because people’s lives just don’t work out very well.”
“Not ever?”
“They don’t add up to happily-ever-after, do they?”
“No,” she said. “I guess they don’t.”
“I stopped believing in happily-ever-after around the same time as Heaven and Hell and the Immaculate Conception. It’s all the same kind of bullshit.”
“And you’re a tower of strength who can survive without all that.”
He looked thoughtfully at her for a moment. “No,” he said. “No, I’m just a cynical son of a bitch. That’s all.”
Why did they go on seeing each other?
One Thursday afternoon she asked the question aloud. They had made love and were still naked in bed. He had made himself a drink. She had lit a cigarette. It was late July and their affair, if that was the name for it, had been in progress for about two months. She sat for a moment watching the smoke rise from the tip of her cigarette, listening to the rain lashing at the window of their room.