Desperate Characters. Paula Fox
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Название: Desperate Characters
Автор: Paula Fox
Издательство: HarperCollins
isbn: 9780007397457
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“Tanya! I thought Tanya lived her whole life on the phone.”
“She won’t answer it any more unless she’s just broken off a love affair.”
“Love affair,” he snorted, following Sophie down the hall to their bedroom. “Tanya and love!”
“She calls up people, though.”
“I hate Tanya.”
They stood facing each other beside the bed. “You’ve never told me that,” she said. “I’ve never heard you say that you hated anyone.”
“I only just realized it.”
“What about Claire?”
“Claire is all right. What do you care what I think about Tanya? You don’t like her yourself. You hardly ever see her.”
“I hardly ever see anyone.”
“Why do you make me feel it’s my fault?”
“You haven’t explained about not answering the phone,” she said accusingly.
“Because I never hear anything on it that I want to hear any more.”
They were both standing rigidly, each half-consciously amassing evidence against the other, charges that would counterbalance the exasperation that neither could fathom. Then he asked her directly why she was angry. She said she wasn’t angry at all; it was just so tiresome of him to indulge himself about the telephone, to stand there so stupidly while it rang, to force her to do it.
“Let’s go to bed,” he said wearily.
She gave him an ironic look, which he ignored. She was really wondering what would happen if she told him the telephone call, that sinister breathing, had frightened her. He would have said, “Don’t be foolish!” she concluded. “Stop telling me I’m foolish,” she wanted to shout.
He was hanging up his suit. She watched him straighten the pants. “You ought to throw out the underwear you’re wearing,” she said. “It’s about to fall apart.”
“I like it when they get so soft, after I’ve had them a long time.”
He sounded rather plaintive. She felt kinder toward him. There was something funny about people’s private little preferences and indulgences, something secretive and childlike and silly. She laughed at him and his soft old underwear. He looked down at himself, then at her, as he stripped off the shorts. His expression was complacent. Let him be complacent, she thought. At least, they’d avoided a pointless quarrel. She wondered if Tanya had ever tried to seduce Otto. Then she remembered Tanya’s only visit to Flynders. Otto had been shocked, morally outraged really, when he had accidentally discovered that Tanya had used every drawer in an immense bureau for the few articles she’d brought with her that weekend. “My God! She has a scarf in one drawer, a pair of stockings in another, one girdle in another. What kind of a woman is it who would use all the drawers in a chest just because they’re there?” he had cried to Sophie.
“Tanya is pretty awful,” Sophie said as Otto got into bed next to her. “I bet she’s awful to make love to. I bet she can hardly take her eyes off herself long enough to see who she’s in bed with.”
“Go to sleep,” he pleaded. “You’re going to wake me up.” She subsided without complaint. She wasn’t irritated with him now, and it didn’t seem to matter why she had been. She examined her hand and decided to give it a soaking. It certainly hurt.
When Sophie awoke, it was 3:00 A.M. Her hand, doubled up beneath her, was like an alien object which had somehow attached itself to her body, something that had clamped itself to her. She lay there for a moment, thinking of the cat, how surprised she’d been, seeing it again, when she and Otto had come home. It had looked so ordinary, just another city stray. What had she expected? That it would have been deranged by its attack on her? That it planned to smash and cuff its way into their house and eat them both up? She got up and went into the bathroom. The swelling, which she had managed to reduce earlier by the long soak in hot water, had returned. She filled the basin and immersed her hand. Then, looking at her face in the mirror over the sink—she didn’t want to see what she was doing—she began to press the fingers of her other hand against the swollen mass of skin. When she looked down, the water was clouded. She flexed her fingers, then made a fist.
When she got back into bed, she half threw herself against Otto’s back. He groaned.
“My hand is worse,” she whispered. He sat up at once.
“We’ll call Noel first thing in the morning,” he said. “If we have to, we’ll drive up to Pelham and drag him to his office. You’ve got to have that looked at.”
“If it isn’t any better.”
“Anyway.” Otto fell back against the pillows. “What time is it?” There were times when he felt he had not had a full night’s sleep since he had been married. Sophie seemed to take a special pleasure in night conversations.
“Three. Did you notice how young Mike behaved? How he looked? Did you see that Hungarian ribbon around his forehead, or folk art ribbon, or whatever it was?”
“Don’t talk about it,” he said sharply. “Just don’t bring it up. It only makes me angry. Wait till he tries to get a job.”
“He’ll never get a job. Mike will fund him. And the hair. He was playing with it all the time I was talking to him. Pleating it, braiding it, stroking it, pulling it.”
“What did you talk to him about?”
“Stupid things, stupidly.”
“They aren’t all that bad,” Otto said.
“Water babies. They come out of faucets, not out of people.”
“They want to be Negroes,” Otto said, yawning.
“I wish I knew what they’re up to,” she said, suddenly remembering she had told Mike’s father that she wanted to be a Jew.
“They’ve chosen to remain children,” he said sleepily, “not knowing that nobody has that option.”
What was a child? And how would she know? Where was the child she had been? Who could tell her what she had been like? She had one photograph of herself at four, sitting in a wicker rocker, a child’s chair, her legs straight out, in white cotton panties, wearing someone’s Panama hat that was too big for her. Who had assembled all those things? Panama hat, wicker chair, white cotton panties? Who had taken that picture? It was already turning yellow. What did young Mike, dirty, mysterious, seemingly indifferent, speaking that hieratic lingo that both insulted and exiled her, have to do with her childhood? With any childhood?
“Otto?” But he was asleep. A car went by. A slight breeze came through the open window, carrying with it the sound of a dog’s bark. Then she heard knocking, a fist on wood. She went to the window and looked down at the ledge which hid from view the stoop and anyone who might be standing there.
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