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:
“I think I’ll just freshen this,” she said. “How about you?”
“Well, make it light. Say, I’ll get them, Andrea.”
“Oh, you look much too comfortable,” she said.
She took her time fixing the drinks. She felt shaky and on edge, her mind trembling with an electric tension that reminded her of Eileen Fradin on diet pills. But in her own case the effect was not the result of pills. It was clearly the product of the conversation they were having. It was an enervating conversation, and in a way that was not entirely unpleasant. And she sensed that it was a very important conversation. She might have been an actress playing a scene at the close of the first act, and the whole structure of the third act would depend on how convincingly she played her part now. But she had a burden most actresses were spared. She had to make up her own lines as she went along.
Seated in the living room once again, with her drink in one hand and a fresh cigarette in the other, she said, “Where were we? I was saying that it just ended. Father’s big romance. I don’t know how long it took, a couple of weeks or a couple of months. I would guess no more than a month. It was never what you could call an arrangement, where the marriage is a marriage in name only and the affair is public knowledge, the way it is in English novels. I don’t know how long the affair went on before my mother knew about it, but I would guess it came out into the open fairly soon. And then I would guess it was over within a month.”
“Not much time in the course of a lifetime.”
She leaned forward, eyes bright. “That’s exactly it! They were together for almost thirty-nine years, and there were two or three bad months, and what does that mean over the whole course of their lives? I asked her how it had changed things afterward and she insisted it hadn’t changed them at all. That her feelings for my father never changed and that his feelings for her never changed, either. That it was something that just happened, and afterward maybe it made each of them appreciate the other a little bit more, but that was all. Now here was something that must have torn her completely apart, Mark, but remember she was telling me about it almost twenty years later, and even though she remembered it vividly she was able to talk about it as something that was ultimately no worse than a bad cold. What’s so funny?”
“‘No worse than a bad cold.’ That’s what they say about something else.”
“What? Oh, I’ve read the expression. It’s syphilis, isn’t it?”
“God, no. Gonorrhea.”
“Well, the same thing.”
“The hell it’s the same thing. Syphilis is a whole lot worse than a bad cold. So is gonorrhea, as I understand it. Another thing they say about gonorrhea is that you’re not a man until you’ve had it.”
“I hope you’re not a man according to that definition.”
“Nope, still a little boy.”
“Well, that’s good.” She fell silent for a moment. Then she said, “She told me they never talked about it after it was over. Except that one night he took her hand and said, ‘I want you to know that everything’s all right now, and there won’t ever be anything else to worry about.’ Or words to that effect.”
“And that was that.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And they were set for the rest of their lives. You have to give them both a hell of a lot of credit. It’s obvious that she deserves credit, but so does he. Or don’t you agree?”
“That’s exactly how I feel, but I thought it might be the way I felt about my father. You used an expression before. Faster than a bullet?”
“Faster than a speeding bullet.”
“Yes. What’s that from?”
“Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a mighty locomotive, able to leap tall women in a single bound—”
“Tall buildings.”
“I like it better my way.”
“You would. It’s Superman, isn’t it?”
“Uh-huh. The old radio program.”
“I thought so. Well, I always thought my father was Superman. Not literally, obviously, but the same way that Robin thinks you’re something special.”
“When actually we both know I’m nothing much.”
“Oh, you’re something special, and don’t think I don’t know it. But you’ll never get the devotion from me you’ll get from Robin, because that’s a very special thing between fathers and daughters. The point is, you never outgrow it. Or at least I never did. I still think my father was Superman. I’ll tell you what I’d like to know.”
“What?”
“Did he still have sex with my mother while he was in love with the woman? I don’t know why I care. Just the kind of curiosity you have when your mind’s in the gutter. Naturally I didn’t ask her.”
“Of course not. Does it matter whether he did or not?”
“Not to me it doesn’t.”
“That doesn’t interest me as much as wondering what the woman was like. That’s what I’d find fascinating.”
“It’s probably someone we know.”
“Really?”
“Really. She was at the funeral. My mother happened to say that, and I wanted to try to find out more, but I decided not to. She came to his funeral. I wonder how she felt. I wonder — oh, there are a million things I wonder. What it felt like for mom to see her at the funeral. But then again she’s probably seen her hundreds of times since it all happened. Thousands of times, even. Maybe they’ve been invited to the same parties for all those years. Maybe they run into each other constantly at the club. And by now it doesn’t matter any more.”
“That rounds it all out,” he said. “Don’t you think it does? I kind of like the idea that she came to his funeral.”
“Yes, I know what you mean.”
“You made these drinks on the heavy side, didn’t you?”
“I may have. Why?”
“Because I’m feeling mine.”
“Well, so am I, but in an enjoyable way.”
“Oh, I never said I wasn’t enjoying it.”
“You know what would be nice? Except that you don’t like to drink too much when you’ve got work the next morning, but it would be nice if I made us one more round of drinks, and we could take them in the other room and sit on the couch and watch the news.”
“Oh, is it time already?”
“Just about. We could sit on the couch, and we could maybe get a little drunk, and we could possibly even do a little country-style necking.”
“You think we could do that, huh?”
“Except that you have an office to go to tomorrow, and we might wind up having still another round of drinks, and the necking might tend to get out of hand.”
“It just might. Old down-home country-style necking has a way of doing just that. But do you know what I think?”
“What?”
“I think you should make the drinks.”
She took his glass from him and hurried into the kitchen. She swerved just the least bit en route — she really was feeling the drinks.
In her mind she heard a voice. Her father’s voice... Mark’s voice. “Everything’s going to be all right now. There won’t ever be anything else to worry about.”
Oh, it might not be all that easy for Mark and her. But you took things as they came and you found the right way to handle them, and sooner or later things worked out as they were supposed to.
She smiled, a very private and very self-satisfied smile, and then she finished making the drinks. Bringing them back to him, unsteady on her feet, she nonetheless felt calm, in control. It felt good, being in control again.
Friday
December 15, 1972
The morning started badly. She had wanted a shower and had planned on washing her hair before going to work. Toward that end she’d gotten up a half hour early to give her hair ample time to dry. But there was no hot water. While she stood sponging herself at the sink, a pale brown cockroach walked rather nonchalantly up the wall and scuttled into the medicine chest. A shudder went through her and she gritted her teeth, annoyed as much with her own reaction as with the insect itself. Roaches were a fact of life in New York. You couldn’t escape them, certainly not on her salary, and even the expensive new high-rises became infested sooner or later. She had been seeing more than usual lately, probably because a neighbor had had the exterminator come around with his chemicals and sprays. When she got around to it she would call the exterminator herself, and for a few days her apartment would smell of insect killer, and the little bastards would slip through the walls or tunnel through the plumbing and bother someone else. Just a fact of life, a drop of urban local color, like muggers and stalled subway cars and high rentals, and it was true that you could live in a suburb and ride in your own car and never see a mugger or a cockroach, but a couple of months ago she had decided finally and forever that she for one could not live that way, that sharing an apartment in Manhattan with transient insects was a better bargain than sharing a house in Tonawanda with a man she never should have married in the first place.