To Paradise
- Автор: Yanagihara Hanya
- Год: 2022
- Язык: английский
- Год: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
- Жанр: Современная русская и зарубежная проза
Электронная книга - «To Paradise». Краткое содержание книги:
In an alternate version of 1893 America, New York is part of the Free States, where people may live and love whomever they please (or so it seems). The fragile young scion of a distinguished family resists betrothal to a worthy suitor, drawn to a charming music teacher of no means. In a 1993 Manhattan besieged by the AIDS epidemic, a young Hawaiian man lives with his much older, wealthier partner, hiding his troubled childhood and the fate of his father. And in 2093, in a world riven by plagues and governed by totalitarian rule, a powerful scientist's damaged granddaughter tries to navigate life without him--and solve the mystery of her husband's disappearances.
These three sections are joined in an enthralling and...
Now here he was in a similar pose, waiting for his beloved. He, unlike the heiress, had fewer reasons to be anxious, and yet he was. But why? Charles loved him, he would always care for him, he had given him a life he could never have afforded on his own, even if it sometimes felt as if he didn’t truly possess it but was an understudy, hurried onstage in the middle of a scene he couldn’t remember, trying to read his fellow actors’ cues, hopeful his lines would return to him.
When he had met Charles, a year and a half ago, he had been living in a one-bedroom apartment with Eden on Eighth Street and Avenue B, and although Eden had found their street exciting—the moaning drunks who shouted at you, inexplicably, just to make you jump; the long-haired boys they occasionally found passed out on their stoop in the morning—he had not. He had learned to leave for the law firm at seven a.m. exactly: any earlier and he would find himself encountering partiers and unsuccessful drug dealers stumbling home from the night before; any later and he would have to pass the first panhandlers of the day, mumbling for change as they shuffled west from Tompkins Square Park to St. Marks Place.
“Got a quarter? Got a quarter? Got a quarter?” they would ask.
Sorry, no, I don’t, he had murmured one morning, his head down as if ashamed, trying to sidestep the man.
Normally, this was enough, but this time, the man—white, with a ragged blond beard knotted with filth, a twist tie wrapped around a clump of it—began to follow him, so closely that David could feel the tips of the man’s shoes ticking at the heels of his, could smell his peppery, porky breath. “You’re lying,” he had hissed. “Why do you lie? I can hear it in your pocket: all that jingle-jangle of coins. Why are you lying? Because you’re one of them, a fucking spic, a fucking spic, aren’t you?”
He had been scared—it was only seven-thirty, and the street was mostly deserted, but there were a few other people out, who stood and gawped at them, as if the two of them were putting on a performance for them to enjoy. (This was something he had quickly grown to hate about this place: how New Yorkers congratulated themselves for ignoring the famous, while watching with unabashed avidity the minor dramas of the plain and average as they played themselves out on the street.) He was almost at Third Avenue by then, and in one of the rare salvations the city sometimes offered, the bus was pulling up to his stop—ten steps, and he would be safe. Ten, nine, eight, seven. And then he was boarding, and he turned and yelled at the man, his voice shrill with fear: I’m not a spic!
“Oh!” said the man, who made no move toward the bus himself. A kind of glee had entered his voice, a delight in getting a response. “Fucking gook! Fucking Chink! Fucking fag! Fucking wop! Fuck you!” As the door had closed, the man had bent, and as the bus pulled away, there had been a thunk on its side, and David had turned and looked out the window and had seen the man, now wearing only one shoe, limping into the street to retrieve its companion.
By the time he reached the office, walking crosstown on Fifty-sixth Street to Broadway, he had managed to compose himself, but then he had seen his reflection in the plate-glass window of the building and realized his pen had leaked, and the entire right-hand side of his shirt was saturated with dark-blue ink. Upstairs, he had gone to the lavatory, only to find it inexplicably locked, and, nearly breathless with panic, had gone instead to the executive washroom, which was empty. There he had begun to dab, fecklessly, at his shirt, the ink dissipating, but not enough. Now his fingers and cheek were stained blue as well. What would he do? It had been a warm day; he hadn’t worn a jacket. He would have to go to a store and buy himself a shirt, and he didn’t have money for that—not money for the shirt itself, not money to lose the pay for the hour it would take to buy it.
It was as he was blotting, cursing, that the door opened, and he looked up and saw Charles. He knew of Charles; he was one of the senior partners, and he was, he supposed, handsome. He had never thought much about it beyond recognizing that he was—Charles was powerful, and old. Spending further time considering his handsomeness was both counterproductive and potentially dangerous. He did know that the secretaries thought Charles was handsome, too. He knew as well that Charles wasn’t married—this was a topic of speculation among them.
“You think he’s a homosexual?” he had overheard one of the secretaries whisper to another.
“Mr. Griffith?” she said. “No! He’s not like one of them.”
Now he began to apologize—for being in the executive washroom, for being covered in ink, for being alive.
Charles ignored his apologies, however. “You do know that shirt’s a goner, right?” he asked, and David looked up from his dabbing to see him smiling. “I’m assuming you don’t have another.”
No, he admitted. Sir.
“Charles,” said Charles, still smiling. “Charles Griffith. I’ll shake your hand later.”
Yes, he said. Right. I’m David Bingham.
He resisted the impulse to apologize again for being in the executive washroom. No land is owned land, Edward used to tell him, back when he was still called Edward. You have the right to be wherever you want. He wondered if Edward would think that same principle would apply to a senior-management bathroom in a midtown Manhattan law firm. He probably would, though the very concept of a law firm, of a law firm in New York, of David working in a law firm in New York, would disgust him even before he got to the absurdity of there being separate bathrooms in the law firm based upon its employees’ rank. Shame on you, Kawika. Shame on you. I taught you better than that.
“Wait here,” said Charles, and left, and David, looking up into the mirror and realizing the extent of his dishevelment—there was a clot of ink above his right eye that was sinking into his skin like a bruise—took his wad of paper towels and went into one of the stalls in case another of the partners came in. But when the bathroom door opened next, it was only Charles, with a flat cardboard box tucked beneath his arm. “Where are you?” he asked.
He peered around the stall door. Here, he said.
Charles looked amused. “What are you doing, hiding in there?” he asked.
I’m not supposed to be here, he said. I’m a paralegal, he added, as clarification.
Charles’s smile became a bit wider. “Well, Paralegal,” he said, lifting the lid of the box to reveal a white shirt, clean and folded, “this is all I have. I think it might be a little big on you, but it’s better than walking around looking like the dark side of the moon, right?”
Or topless, he heard himself say, and he saw Charles’s look turn sharp and appraising. “Yes,” he said, after a short silence. “Or topless. We can’t have that.”
Thank you, he said, taking the box from Charles. He could feel from the cotton that the shirt was expensive, and he pulled out its stays and the cardboard beneath its collar and unbuttoned it with his inky fingers. He was about to hang it on the back of the stall door and begin unbuttoning his own shirt when Charles reached out his hand: “Let me take it,” he said, and he draped his own, clean shirt over his arm, like a caricature of an old-fashioned waiter, while David began undressing. It seemed churlish to close the door at that point and ask for privacy, and, indeed, Charles didn’t move, but stood there, silently, watching him unbutton his shirt, remove it, exchange it for the one he held, and then button up the new one. He was very aware of the sound of their breaths, and of how he hadn’t worn an undershirt, and of how his skin was pimpling even though the bathroom wasn’t especially cold. When he had finished buttoning it and then stuffing it into his pants—turning from Charles as he did to unfasten his belt: How clumsy and graceless it was, this process of dressing and undressing—he thanked Charles again. Thank you for holding my shirt, he said. For everything. I’ll take it back. But Charles grinned. “I think you’d better just throw it away,” he said. “I don’t think it’s salvageable.” Yes, he agreed, but he didn’t add that he had to try—he only had six shirts, and he couldn’t afford to lose one.