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:
But Mark was not apt to be casual about such things, The sexual roles, as Eileen conceived them, were turned upside down in Andrea’s marriage. It was Mark who had had rather less premarital experience, Mark who was less able to divorce the physical and emotional components of sex.
She had been with two other men since her wedding day, and even now, when she found the whole idea of adultery hateful, she could not really find it in herself to waste time regretting those two affairs. That afternoon with John Riordan hardly seemed like adultery, and certainly could not be said to constitute an affair. It was a way of closing out the past, of recognizing the dimensions of the role she had chosen for herself, of saying good-bye permanently to the person she had been before marriage. She had not been touched, and this was consistent with the nature of the sex act she had chosen. She had remained clothed. Riordan had not touched her flesh. Her mouth had performed a mechanical service, making the sex act a metaphorical statement.
With Cass Drozdowski, the string of Thursdays had been any number of things, none of them threatening her marriage in any substantial way. There had been a real element of risk. If Mark had found out about their affair — and it had not been impossible that he should have found out — then her marriage might have been imperiled. That possibility aside, it had never been for a moment conceivable that either she or Cass would begin building sand castles of romantic love. Oh, Cass was a way for her to “prove to herself that she had a life outside of her role as wife and mother. It gave her a vehicle for harmless revenge on Mark for his having cast her in this role. But it had never meant anything to either of them, and they were both relieved when she ended it.
On her thirtieth birthday she had decided to terminate the affair, and indeed she had seen him only once after that. It was two weeks and a day after her birthday and they met as arranged at the motel where they always met. But they did not embrace and they did not go to bed. She explained to him what she had decided, finding as she did so that it was much easier to have this conversation than she had thought it would be. But then she had always found it easy to talk to Cass.
When she had finished speaking he said, “Well, I expected this. I thought another month or two, but probably not much more than that, and God knows we’ve already had the best of it. I’d say something about staying friends but of course we will and it goes without saying.”
“Friends. It’s all we ever were.”
“That’s exactly true, Andrea. Andrea. Did they ever call you Andy?”
“They never did and they better never start.”
“Far be it from me to be the first. Where were we? Friends and how that’s all we ever were. It’s true, and I’ll tell you something. That put us ahead of most people. You wouldn’t believe the number of people go to bed together without even liking each other.”
“Oh, I would believe it.”
“Yes, you might at that.”
“Is that supposed to mean something?”
“Just the dumb Polack making conversation. No, it’s not supposed to mean anything in particular. Why did you ever marry the guy in the first place, Andrea?”
“Now that’s a hell of a question.”
He nodded. “It’s one I’ve been wondering about ever since I met you. Well, not quite, because I met you before you were married.”
“New Year’s Eve.”
“New Year’s Eve, and I can’t say I paid much attention to you that night. Nothing personal. The way I was drinking I didn’t pay much attention to anything or anybody. But ever since I got to know you, yes, I’ve been wondering about it.”
“And what is wrong with the usual answers? Such as Mark and I happen to love each other.”
“I’m sure you do. But I don’t think that’s why you married him. It could be why he married you but not the other way around.”
“I suppose you have a theory.”
“Oh, maybe the bare bones of a theory. Not that you want to hear it.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
He considered, then shrugged. “All right. I think you married him the same way you moved back to Buffalo and into your parents’ house. Both moves were ways of coming home, of playing it safe. It was a kind of retirement, wasn’t it?”
“That’s a really crummy way of putting it.”
“If it makes you angry I’m sorry.”
“I’m not angry.”
He looked at her, his eyes intent. “I have the feeling something happened in New York before you left, something that really scared the living shit out of you. And everything afterward was a reaction to it. What happened there, Andrea?”
“Nothing in particular.”
“That’s hard to believe.”
She thought for a moment. “Nothing you don’t more or less know about,” she said. “I was doing too much drinking and too much screwing around. The two seemed to go together.”
“They still do, I’ve noticed. For most of the people in the world.”
“Maybe. Where was I?”
“Drinking and screwing around.”
“Yes.” She closed her eyes for a moment, taking time to examine the memories that filtered in behind her eyelids. “I’d been working uptown. A music publisher, it was secretarial work but there was supposedly an opportunity to learn the business. But I didn’t want to learn the business and I didn’t care about the work and I lost the job.”
“They fired you?”
“Not exactly. I was coming in late and calling in sick a lot and the boss talked to me, and the two of us more or less agreed I would leave. It was one of those things where I could have talked my way back in but I didn’t want to.”
“Uh-huh. Then what?”
“Then I went through a period of time, I don’t know how long, where I would wait tables here and there in the Village. There were plenty of jobs available and you could go from one to another and work when you needed the money. With the tips it paid better than office work. And it made it very easy to drift. You could adjust your hours at will. And I wasn’t getting anywhere and wasn’t even trying to get anywhere, and eventually it occurred to me that I didn’t want to get anywhere. I didn’t want to wait tables for the rest of my life but I didn’t want a more challenging job, either. And the life I was leading, sleeping with a lot of men and barely knowing their names, hanging out at the bars every night, it was no way to spend a life.”
“You must have enjoyed it.”
“Of course I did, for a while. But you can only spend so much time that way or you go off the edge. You said something must have scared the shit out of me.”
“I had the feeling.”
“There were lots of things that scared me. There was a woman who used to turn up at the Riviera. I don’t know how old she was. Probably the age I am now, but maybe older. She seemed very old to me at the time. She was an alcoholic but she didn’t get sloppy drunk and she was presentable, and just about everybody who hung out there had gone home with her at one time or another. I reached a point where I hated to be in the same bar with her because it was so easy to see myself turning into her.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Vicki, her name was. I never knew her last name. Hundreds of people down there that I knew by their first names only. Those were funny days. There was one morning — Cass, I don’t know if I should tell you this.”
“Don’t if you don’t want to.”
“Oh, there’s really no reason not to. It was the first thing I thought of when you said something must have scared me. One morning I woke up in my own bed in my own apartment.”
“And there was a total stranger lying next to you.”
“No. That happened once but it wasn’t that bad, and there were times when I would wake up in some man’s apartment without remembering going there or what we did, but usually I would at least remember the guy, No, this time I woke up alone.”