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:
All spring and summer things had been bad between them. She would alternate, sometimes blaming him, sometimes putting the blame on herself. There were times when it seemed to her that he really had nothing to do with the way she felt, that no one had much to do with what was happening inside her. She felt so cut off from everyone and everything that bordered on her life.
She began having orgasms infrequently, then not at all. Before long she came to dread his approaches. She could bear intercourse but found herself loathing the preliminaries. Foreplay became repugnant to her, and the less specifically sexual it was, the more offensive it became. Kissing and touching were awful. Sometimes she thought it was him, and she tried to figure out why his touch should repel her. She thought it might be a reaction, long after the fact, to his affair — perhaps she felt his body had been soiled by contact with another woman. But she could not really believe this was the case, and eventually she decided that she was simply rejecting intimacy with anyone.
Gradually she established a pattern of sitting up late after he went to sleep. It was evident that this bothered him but he did not attempt to talk about it, as they both avoided discussing any aspects of what was going wrong between them. That winter she had begun reading a great deal. She had always been a reader, but now it became the chief thing that she did. She would go to the library on Brighton and take out half a dozen novels at a time. She read during the day, when he was at work and Robin at school, and she read for an hour or two after dinner, and then she would read far into the night while he slept. It didn’t seem to matter very much what she read, as long as it was fiction and not terribly demanding, as long as it gave her the opportunity to lose herself between its pages. Mystery stories were good, and the library seemed to have an infinite stock of them. She would latch onto a writer and read her way through his work, then move on to another. Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, Dorothy Sayers, Ellery Queen — she never bothered to puzzle out who had committed the murder, just let herself float along on the crest of the narrative.
Sometimes, when she didn’t feel like reading, or when there was nothing around to read, she would sit in the living room with a bottle and a glass and spend an hour or two sipping straight whiskey.
At two or three in the morning she would put her book away and rinse out her glass, and then she would slip into their bedroom and undress quietly in the darkness. She would always be very careful not to wake him.
Some mornings he would desire her upon awakening. He might touch her briefly while she slept, and then would roll his body on top of hers and take her. At first it usually seemed to be happening in a dream, but then she would awaken to feel his weight on her and his hips pumping rhythmically into her.
It did not bother her. She didn’t mind being fucked. She would keep her eyes closed and her body relaxed, and although she might meet his thrusts with little pelvic movements of her own, she did not really participate very much, nor did he seem to desire her participation. He was using her, of course, masturbating himself with her body, and it seemed to her that he had the right. He was getting little else from her, after all.
She wondered occasionally if he had anyone else. She didn’t think he did, but realized that she didn’t seem to care much one way or the other. When he had been seeing someone — and she-never did learn the identity of the woman he’d had an affair with, they never discussed it at all, never came closer to discussing it than they had done on that night when she told him about her father’s infidelity — when he had been having his affair, it had mattered enormously to her. And when she had known for certain that it was over the relief she’d felt had been monumental.
But that was then. Now it was hard for her to imagine what she’d been so upset about. She just didn’t seem to care. She didn’t seem to care about anything. She went to parties with Mark, spent evenings with one or two other couples. She went shopping with her mother, took Robin to her music lesson, drove her to Sunday school and picked her up afterward. She did all the things she had always done and walked through all the scenes of her life as if in a dream, as if sleepwalking.
In July he took her to New York for five days, a long weekend. They’d gotten into the habit of coming to New York once a year, and they had last driven down over Christmas vacation, taking Robin with them for the first time. So another trip just six months later was atypical, and although they didn’t discuss it she knew the motivation for it. He was concerned, and thought he would treat her to a trip as a peace offering of some sort. And perhaps he thought that being alone together would give them a chance to recapture the intimacy that had lately drained from their lives.
It was in New York, really, that she knew she would have to leave him.
They stayed at the Sherry-Netherland, ate in expensive restaurants, saw several shows. He would suggest things and she would agree, or he would ask her for suggestions and she would offer something she knew he would enjoy. They were together a great deal of the time and she was careful always to be pleasant company, cheerful and alert and seemingly involved. She went to bed when he did, and most of the nights they made love. She gave every sign of participating with enthusiasm and enjoyment, but she did not enjoy the lovemaking, nor did she enjoy the meals or the shows or the city itself.
On the last night after they made love she got out of bed and went to the window. Their room faced the park and the view, by day or by night, was quite magnificent. For just a moment she visualized herself raising the window and climbing over the sill. But she did not seriously entertain the thought of suicide. Rather she stood looking out at the city, her city, and wanted to reach out and take hold of it. She belonged here, she had always belonged here, this time she would know how to handle it, and it was high time she did something about it before it was too late.
But she didn’t say anything, not for weeks. She went back to her life in Buffalo and it was like being in a black-and-white movie. There was no color. Everything and everyone bored her. Robin bored her, and it horrified her to realize this because she loved her child. And Robin was not and had not ever been a boring child.
She knew she was going to leave, although she did not know when, and she found herself walking through her days with a secret smile on her lips. Because she would be leaving all of this, she would lose all this monotony and go looking for herself again.
Her plan took shape gradually in her mind. At night she would sit up reading Perry Mason stories, but periodically she would set the book aside and look off into the middle distance, filling in some more of the plan’s details. She would go to New York. She would take an inexpensive apartment, probably on the Upper West Side. Something temporary, because she would need more space later on when Robin joined her. She would have enough cash to get settled, but as soon as possible she would find a job. The job, too, could be construed as temporary. It hardly mattered what the job was, just so it paid her enough to live on. She couldn’t expect anything terribly glamorous, wasn’t qualified for much, but she was bright and personable enough to get something.
Sometimes she thought of taking Robin. But she had to rule that out for several reasons. If she took Robin, Mark was sure to come after her. And it would probably mean pulling Robin out of school in the middle of the term, because school would start before she would be ready to leave. And she had to be settled before she could have Robin with her. It would be awful to be separated from Robin, but it would be worse to stay here, impossible to stay here.
She kept wanting to discuss it with them, to give them some clue. Her husband, her mother, her daughter. But there was never a right time, never a way to put the words together and utter them.