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...
The dining room, where he and Charles ate dinner every night if they didn’t go out, was old-fashioned and fusty, left mostly intact from when Charles’s parents had lived there. The rest of the house had been renovated a decade ago, when Charles moved in, but this room still had its original long, polished mahogany table, and its matching Federal-period cupboard, and its dark-green wallpaper with its pattern of morning-glory vines, and its dark-green dupioni silk drapes, and its side-by-side portraits of Charles’s ancestors, the first Griffiths to arrive in America from Scotland, their clock with its creamy, whale-ivory face—an heirloom of which Charles was very proud—sitting atop the mantel between them. Charles had no good explanation for why he hadn’t changed the room, and when David was in it, he would always think of his grandmother’s dining room, a place very different in appearance and detail, but similarly unchanged—and more than the room itself, he would think of their family dinners: how his father would get nervous and drop the ladle into the tureen, splashing the tablecloth with soup; how his grandmother would get angry. “For heaven’s sake, son,” she would say. “Can’t you be more careful? Do you see what you’ve done?”
“I’m sorry, Mama,” his father would murmur.
“You see the kind of example you’re setting,” his grandmother would continue, as if his father hadn’t spoken at all. And then, to David, “You’re going to be more careful than your father, aren’t you, Kawika?”
Yes, he would promise, though he would feel guilty doing so, as if he had betrayed his father, and when his father came into his room that night to tuck him in, he would tell him that he wanted to be just like him. Tears would come to his father’s eyes then, both because he knew David was lying and because he was grateful to him for it. “Don’t be like me, Kawika,” his father would say, kissing him on his cheek. “And you won’t be. You’re going to be better than I am, I know it.” He never knew what to say to this, and so usually he would say nothing, and his father would kiss his fingertips and place them on his forehead. “Go to sleep, now,” he would say. “My Kawika. My son.”
He was suddenly dizzy. What would his father think of him now? What would he say? How would he feel if he knew his son had received a letter that probably contained news, bad news, about him, and had chosen not to read it? My Kawika. My son. He was seized by an impulse to run upstairs, tear the letter out of its envelope, and devour it, whatever it might say.
But, no, he couldn’t; if he did, the evening would be lost. Instead, he made himself go into the living room, where three of Peter and Charles’s old friends were sitting: John and Timothy and Percival. These were the nicest friends, the kind who would only look him up and down once, quickly, when he walked in, and for the rest of the evening would keep their eyes on his face. “The Three Sisters,” Peter called them, because they were all single and unglamorous, and because Peter found them insufficiently exciting: “The Spinsters.” Timothy and Percival were both sick; Timothy visibly so, Percival secretly. He had confided in Charles seven months ago, and Charles had told David. “I look fine, don’t I?” Percival asked Charles whenever they saw each other. “I look the same, don’t I?” He was the editor in chief of a small, prestigious publishing house—he was afraid he’d get fired if the company’s owners found out.
“You won’t get fired,” Charles always said. “And if they try, I know exactly the person you should call, and you’ll sue the hell out of them, and I’ll help.”
Percival ignored this. “But I look the same, don’t I?”
“Yes, Percy—you look the same. You look great.”
He looked over at Percival now. The others had glasses of wine, but Percival was holding a teacup in which David knew he was soaking a teabag of medicinal herbs that he got from an acupuncturist in Chinatown who he swore was strengthening his immune system. He studied Percival as he was distracted by his tea: Did he look the same? It had been five months since he’d seen him last—was he thinner? Did his complexion seem dustier? It was difficult to say; all of Charles’s friends looked slightly unhealthy to him, whether they were or not. Something, some quality, had disappeared from all of them, no matter how well maintained or robust—light seemed to vanish into their skin, so that even when they were sitting here, in the forgiving candlelight that Charles had grown to favor for these gatherings, they seemed made not from flesh but from something silty and cold. Not marble, but chalk. He had once attempted to explain this to Eden, who spent her weekends drawing nudes, and she had rolled her eyes. “It’s because they’re old,” she had said.
He looked next at Timothy, who was now clearly ill, his eyelids as violet as if he’d smudged them with paint, his teeth too long, his hair a fuzz. Timothy had been in boarding school with Peter and Charles, and back then, Charles said, “You wouldn’t believe how beautiful he was. The most beautiful boy in the school.” This was after the first time he’d met Timothy, and the next time, David had examined him, looking for the boy Charles had fallen in love with. He was an actor, an unsuccessful one, and had been married to a beautiful woman, and then for decades had been the lover of a very rich man, but when the man died, his adult children had made Timothy leave their father’s house, and Timothy had moved in with John. No one knew how John, who was jolly and large, made his money—he was from a modest family in the Midwest and had never had a job that lasted longer than a few months and wasn’t handsome enough to be kept—and yet he occupied an entire townhouse in the West Village and ate extravagantly (though, as Charles pointed out, usually only when someone else was paying). “When people like John stop being able to survive through mysterious means in this city is the day this city is no longer worth living in,” Charles would say, fondly. (For someone who was adamant about people earning their way, he had an unusual number of friends who seemed to do nothing at alclass="underline" It was something David liked about him.)
As always, the three said hello to him, asked him about what he was doing and how he was, but he had little to say, and eventually, their conversation turned back to themselves, to recounting things they’d done together when they were younger.
“…Well, that’s not as bad as when John dated that homeless guy!”
“First of all, we were hardly dating, and second…”
“Tell that story again!”
“Well. This was, oh, about fifteen years ago, when I was working at that framing shop on Twentieth between Fifth and Sixth—”
“Where you got fired for stealing—”
“Excuse me. I did not get fired for stealing. I got fired for being chronically tardy and incompetent, and for providing poor customer service. I got fired from the bookstore for stealing.”
“Oh, well, excuse me.”
“Anyway, can I continue? So I’d get off the F at Twenty-third Street, and I’d always see this guy, very cute, kind of a scruffy artist type, plaid shirt and a little beard, carrying a grocery bag, standing on Sixth near the empty lot on the southeast corner. So I cruise her, and she cruises back, and this goes on for a few days. And then, on the fourth day, I go up to her and we talk. She says, ‘Do you live around here?’ And I say, ‘No, I work down the block.’ And she says, ‘Well, we can go into this alley’—it wasn’t really an alley, but there was this little channel between the back wall of the parking lot and this other building they were tearing down—and, you know, we did.”