VanCleef & Arpels on the summer night. Nonna Ananieva

Чтение книги онлайн.

      I barely managed to carry all the bags to the boot of the car. Women aren’t built for grocery shopping. I was sitting in front of the steering wheel when my mobile phone rang. It was my girlfriend calling, the one who can’t get through an evening alone. She feels bored. Me, for example, I can easily be alone. Not in a forest, obviously, or on some ranch, but in the city I’m happy to be alone. This loneliness is entirely voluntary – I have been married twice and I’m in no hurry to tie the knot for a third time. Although there is a candidate – a decent, forty-five year old guy. He has blue eyes. They’re probably the best thing about his very masculine character. All men are so similar! But that doesn’t really matter. The most important thing is for a man to have appeal for some inexplicable reason, to surprise you – in a good way, of course – and to not get boring. Apartments, money, securities… those are indispensable components of attraction, but also secondary ones – though they do speak strongly to your taste, and resonate with fundamental aspects of the evolutionary process. If you can manage to work with all this a little bit, then good things quite easily happen – at any age. Incidentally, I dislike thirty-year-old men most of all: the cheeky, self-assured, sporty males. Inheritors of the family business. Worthy sons. Unfaithful, hungry, handsome, with sharp tongues. Dreaming only about toys. You can’t get through to them. By the age of forty, or maybe just after forty, men like this sometimes find another version of themselves. Some invisible shell, like an eggshell, comes off their hearts all of a sudden and they begin to really notice the world and women. Speaking frankly, I can’t take the opposite sex seriously at all. With men, you can’t plan anything – it’s a question of chance, and nothing more. When two people separate, even if they try to postpone the separation or pretend it’s not happening – because they don’t want to lose all the benefits, because they feel bad for their children – it’s still a separation. Whether the experience is painful and acrimonious or smooth, they still do it for the sake of love – for themselves, for him, for her, for their futures. They might sacrifice their health, career, friends, or simply a lot of money for their separation, but if they have strong personalities, they will always come out on top. Here again the supernatural is at work. And there is only one governing law – the law of love. Life is granted to everyone simply to fulfill this law – to the ballet-dancer, the mathematician, the banker, the doctor, the musician, the spy, the photographer, the teacher, the fireman, the clergyman, even the president. There are so many different couples out there: pretty ones, uninteresting ones, plain ones, weird ones, absurd and dangerous ones.… I often lose myself in thoughts like these. But I hardly ever tell anybody about them.