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:
“Tomorrow, the paper said. It does feel like rain, doesn’t it?”
“Could we just drive around for a while?”
He glanced at her, then returned his eyes to the road. “I guess so. It’s fine with me if it’s all right with the sitter.”
“No problem.”
“Fine. Do you want to go someplace for a private drink or do you just want to drive around?”
“Let’s just drive.”
“Sure.”
She folded her hands over the buckle of her seat belt. Sometimes the belts annoyed her, though not enough to keep her from using them. Tonight, however, she felt secure, comfortably enclosed. And that seemed to be the evening’s motif, she thought — that she was comfortably enclosed, blanketed, cocooned. By this seat belt. By her husband and her parents, by her friends, by this city.
After a few minutes she took a cigarette from her purse and lit it with the dashboard lighter. She smoked half of it and said, “Your sister called this afternoon.”
“Your memory’s failing. I suppose it’s part of being thirty years old.”
“Pardon me?”
“The arteries harden. Inescapable, I guess.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“You already told me she called, remember? When we were over at my folks’ place. She called and she’s fine and Jeff’s fine and the kids are fine and when are we coming out there for a visit. Don’t you remember? And my mother was saying—”
“She called a second time.”
“Oh?”
She leaned forward to deposit ash in the ashtray, then sat back again. “I promised I wouldn’t tell you this. I spent dinner deciding whether to keep something from you or violate a confidence. That’s a part of why I’ve been so quiet.”
“I see. What did you decide?”
“To violate a confidence, obviously. Or I wouldn’t have brought this up in the first place. Although there’s no real point in telling you except that if I know about it I think you ought to know about it, too.”
“Then go ahead and tell me.”
“Jeff moved out almost two months ago.” She looked at him as she spoke, watching his face for a reaction. He had his eyes on the road so she saw his face in profile, and if he changed expression she couldn’t tell. She went on talking, giving him an abbreviated but essentially accurate version of Linda Gould’s conversation.
When she stopped speaking he didn’t say anything for a few minutes and she thought he might be waiting for her to continue. Then he said, “Well, I’m glad you told me. I think you’re right, I think it’s the sort of thing either both of us should know or neither of us should know.”
“That’s what I decided. What do you think?”
“What is there to think, really? It’s their life; it’s their marriage. We’re not really close enough to know what’s going on and how much can you tell from one phone conversation with her? If he’s been fooling around for years maybe this is nothing serious or maybe it is. Maybe he’ll decide he’s had enough and want to come home and maybe she’ll want him to come home. Or maybe not. Evidently she doesn’t even know the answers to those questions, so it’s hardly possible for us to know.”
“I suppose so.”
“Don’t you agree? You sound doubtful.”
“Well, what I mean is how do you feel about it? I don’t mean what do you think will happen or what you want to happen, but how do you feel about the whole thing?”
“Oh. I see.”
She waited.
“Sorry for them, I guess. In that I have a fundamental bias in favor of marriage.”
“Do you really?”
“Isn’t that pretty obvious? In addition to adoring you, isn’t it fairly clear that I specifically like being married to you?”
She shook her head. “That’s not what I meant. I didn’t know you were pro-marriage as a general thing.”
“Oh, yes.”
“And antidivorce.”
He nodded emphatically. “Yes again. I’m basically pretty conservative, you know. Not in politics necessarily but in other respects. I like the idea of order. Not what the word means when Nixon or Wallace use it. They use law and order so that it means keep the kids and niggers in their place and bust heads if they get out of line. But I like the idea of an ordered universe and an ordered society. That’s one of the things that attracted me to law as a profession, you know.”
“I thought it was the logic of it.”
“Definitely that, but also the order element. That’s the first object of law, you know. Not justice. Most people believe that the object of law is justice, but it’s not. It’s order. People will tolerate injustice but disorder drives them out of their minds.”
“Yes.”
“Anyway, the point is—”
“That’s literally true, isn’t it? Order keeps people sane.”
She thought about that and fitted it into what she had been thinking earlier about how the community of people she belonged to made for stability and security and, yes, sanity. She followed her thoughts for a moment and lost track of what he was saying, and then she tuned in again to hear him say, “—effect on the children, though I don’t know the answer to that. Is it better to have the kids grow up in a broken home or in one where the parents can’t stand each other? Hell, we’ve heard this one before. Every time someone we know goes through it.”
“I don’t know the answer.”
“I’m not sure anybody does. What it comes down to is what the two of them want. God knows I wouldn’t blame her if she packed up the kids and jumped on a plane and left him in the middle of the fucking desert. I never did like that son of a bitch.”
“I thought you did.”
“Never.”
“You always get along with him.”
“Oh, I get along fine with him. Everybody gets along with him, it would be impossible not to get along with him, because he’s exactly the person he thinks you want him to be. But when you peel the layers away, just who in the hell is he? Not that I’ve spent tons of time with him because I haven’t, and that’s fine with me.”
“I never had any idea you felt that way about him.”
“Well, ninety-eight percent of the time I don’t feel any way about him, because I don’t have to. But when he’s forced on my attention, well, that’s how I feel about him.”
“Funny.”
“What is?”
“All the ways that you’re hard to know, and the fact that it keeps surprising me to remind myself of the fact. When I first met you I was struck by how straightforward you were.”
“Good old Mark, solid as the rock of Gibraltar. A little dull—”
“Now stop that!”
“A little simple, a little thick between the ears, but — ouch! Jesus, that hurt!”
“Well, you had it coming.”
“Not while I’m driving, huh?”
“I’m sorry.” Then, “Are you mad?”
“No, of course not.”
“Good. Mark? Is there anything we should do?”
“About what? Oh, my sister. No, not that I can think of. Like what?”
“I don’t know. We could go out there. They’ve been after us to come out often enough.”
“Be pretty obvious, wouldn’t it?”
“I suppose so.”
“Let’s say you were in Linda’s place. Would you want to see the cavalry come riding over the hill? And from their point of view we might not even be the cavalry. We might just be the Indians.”
“You’re right. I just wish there was something we could do, that’s all.”
They drove for a while in silence, and then he said, almost to himself, “I never really got to know her. We were just far enough apart in age when we were kids, and then when we were old enough so that age didn’t matter, she was married and we were involved in different lives. If they’d lived here, but they didn’t. And then there’s Phil, he lives in Buffalo, and how close am I to him?”