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:
It was hard to say precisely when she had made the decision. But it had been October when she’d acted upon it, and now it was mid-December and she still couldn’t look at the little bastards without shivering. She could accept them well enough intellectually. Certainly there were enough things about them that could have been worse. They didn’t bite, for example, and they didn’t seem to eat much of anything, and she’d fallen in love with archy and mehitabel in high school, and none of this prepared her for the sight of the creature walking up her wall and into her medicine cabinet as if he owned the place.
Half of her English muffin got stuck in the toaster and she mutilated it getting it out. And she just missed one subway train and waited an unusually long time for the next one. When it came it was crowded. She had to stand all the way from Eighty-sixth Street to Times Square. Normally she would have taken the shuttle across town to Fifth Avenue but she was tired of being crowded, so she left the station and walked across Forty-second Street. After she had gone a block it began raining.
“Well, that just fucking figures,” she said aloud. “Shit!”
No one paid any attention to her.
This was her fifth week at the store. It was a foreign language bookshop at Fifth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street, and Andrea had managed to get the job because she was more nearly fluent at French than the store manager. That her French was actually quite tentative turned out to be unimportant. The store carried a large stock of titles in French, German, Italian, and Spanish, plus scattered titles in a dozen other languages. No one could be expected to converse in all of those tongues, nor was it often necessary to speak anything but English. While the store’s customers might prefer to read in their native languages, virtually all of them spoke English quite competently.
“The odd merci or danke doesn’t hurt a bit,” Cal had told her, “but appearance and manner is the whole thing. That’s why old Hubbell hired you. It’s all image. You look slightly intellectual but not severe, you don’t talk through your nose, you don’t pop chewing gum, and you don’t dress like a hippie. Considering that you’re overworked and underpaid, how much more can they expect of you? He was lucky to get you.”
“Well, I’m lucky to have the job.”
“Oh, please. How could anyone be lucky to work here? Either the store’s empty or there are sixteen harpies yammering at you in as many languages, none of them one’s own. And when someone dishy does walk in, which happens once every third blue moon, he speaks either Swedish or Urdu and all the English he knows is I goink now and meet my wifes.” She laughed, Cal always made her laugh, and then he’d said, “I don’t know why I stay. I’ve been here almost two years now. I don’t know why I started in the first place. Yes I do. I’d had a little disagreement across the street with that pig at Doubleday. He’s not even there any more. And most of the stores in the neighborhood seemed to be full up, and I thought I’d get on the list and live on unemployment for a month or three, and then I was on that unemployment line once and I couldn’t believe what they put you through. It’s so incredibly tacky, the whole process, and when you think it’s not charity at all, they take it out of your check every week and when you come to get some of your own back they make you feel like you’re on a bread line. Well, my dear, I cashed my first check because I’d waited so long for it, and then I took this job just until something better came up.”
“And here you are.”
“And here I am, lucky me. The months go by and here am I, and I can’t quit now, not until Christmas comes and brings my merry little bonus check with it. Not that it’s going to be enough to retire, but why save them the cost? If my bonus covers my own Christmas tips to the doormen and super and all the other seasonally smiling faces, I’ll be glad to break even. But I don’t think I’ll stick it out much after that. My goodness, I’ve been in bookstores since I came to this town.
That’s — well, it doesn’t matter how many years that comes to. Enough years, let us say. I can walk in anywhere and get a job just like that. I don’t have to stay here with the Urdu speakers. You know, I started working in bookstores in the first place because I always loved to read and I welcomed the chance to associate with literate people. Well, presumably literate people, anyway. So here I find myself surrounded by books I can’t read and people who don’t talk too good the English.”
“You could get a manager’s job, couldn’t you? With your experience.”
“Oh, who would want the responsibility, Andrea? If I were to have anything so crass as ambition I’d want to be ambitious for something more worthwhile than managing a bookstore. No, I’m far happier being a flighty little faggot clerk, and there’s a great security in being paid less than your worth, you know. If makes the bastards quite reluctant to see the last of you. I suppose I could earn more money but all that would mean is I’d pay more taxes and take more cabs. The walking’s good for my waistline. I have simple tastes, you know. And my apartment’s rent-controlled, and I’ve never cultivated a palate for caviar or cocaine. Now what sort of palate would you want for cocaine, do you suppose? Cleft, I daresay. Oh, Andrea, don’t stare, but get a load of what just waltzed in. Isn’t he divine?”
“Not my type, I’m afraid.”
“Well, he’s certainly my type. But am I his? I just know it’s going to be another of I goink now and meet my wifes. Ah, once more into the breach, dear friends.”
At the beginning she had decided she could get along well enough with Calvin Burleigh, but she hadn’t expected that they would become at all close. She had never been friendly with a homosexual, not to her knowledge, and while Cal was not at all effeminate he was obviously gay and quite candid about it. Indeed, it was his openness more than his manner that made her uneasy at first. The homosexuals she’d dealt with in Buffalo — a hairdresser, a florist, a photographer who’d taken some unremarkable pictures of Robin — had been at least as patently homosexual as Cal, but would never have alluded to their homosexuality in front of Andrea.
Ultimately, of course, it was his openness that made it possible for them to be friends. And in the short time she’d known him she’d come to the conclusion that a male homosexual was an ideal sort of friend for her to have just then. She was at a very difficult and demanding stage in her life, and it was fortunate that she was able to realize as much. Her life was exciting for the first time in more years than she wanted to think about. She was constantly meeting new people, constantly going places and doing things, finding out over and over again the extraordinary extent of her new freedom. She could go anywhere, do anything, take any route she wished to become her own real self. That was wonderful, thrilling freedom, but it was also hazardous.