Canarino. Katherine Bucknell

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ meal, noon; a date, 7 p.m. It’s like being free. I used to be free with Leon.

      Zooming up Victoria Street, he pondered it, Leon and Lewis. Leon and anyone—it was not what he had ever thought. Or it was, but he’d been seeing it all at a slant or through a haze, not getting it, not understanding it. Where was the sex in Leon, that he could have kept it so buried like that? I felt like I knew him as a physical being. How did I miss it?

      Then David thought maybe that was the thing that had marked Leon out for him, lit him up, made him a better friend than all the other friends. I don’t mean sex, thought David, I mean charisma. It’s based on something to do with sex, maybe, that pull Leon has, but it’s not sex. And in his drunkenness and happiness he foggily pictured Leon and sex, and he found himself just staring at the picture inside his head, not getting it. Then, staring a while, maybe getting it just a little, his breath shortening, his pulse missing half a beat. Okay, I get it. I get sex. Maybe not kissing, but okay, sex.

      But David didn’t want to go there, in fact. It wasn’t repulsion, as he’d already briefly reassured himself in the restaurant. It was more like inertia. Funnily enough, he thought, I’m just too old. I’m too used to women; I’m hooked on them. Maybe I could have done the other thing a long time ago. And he tried to feel backwards in his sensations to some youthful, polymorphous self that might have liked sex with Leon. Naw, he thought. It could only have happened if girls didn’t exist at all. I can see it in the army, in prison. Yup. You would, especially after a while. But in real life, there wasn’t even enough time to get at all the girls; I would never have gotten around to boys. I can tell where those feelings are in me, David thought, but I’m just straight. I’m definitely straight—and Leon’s not.

      It made David feel bad, as if the only way he could really take Leon seriously and respect what he now knew Leon was, was to be like him. There on the back of the bike, on the back of Leon, was about as close as he could get to experiencing the world as if he were Leon. But the sex thing still separated them. He thought he ought to be able to muster a greater show of solidarity, some minimal show of sexual bi-dexterity. It made him feel like a square. What, for instance, would he do even to signal neutrality? He could only think of the broadest vulgarities like ogling a guardsman or that waiter back at the restaurant.

      Again he considered Leon and Lewis. He guessed that if Leon was in love with Lewis, then maybe the feelings that Leon had left over for David were the same feelings that David had for him. Boundless enthusiasm, rivalry, respect; an appetite for play, hour upon hour, and for making fun of the world from the place in their heads where they both knew they saw things exactly the same way—always had, always would. But Leon had hidden the more specific emotion from David for a long time. The arousal, the teeth-stinging passion that wore at you. David felt sure that had been part of Leon’s revelation—the being-in-love thing was back there somewhere between them. And at Princeton, probably in New York, too, David had walked right by it, day after day.

      David cringed. If I had known then, how the hell would I have coped with it? There wasn’t any way. I wouldn’t have coped with it at all. Through his mind raced vivid pictures of himself, much younger, outraged, hurling Leon away from him. The pictures were very physical. Leon was like a chair being thrown through a window, a fire extinguisher crashing down the stairs outside their dorm room. He was bruised, reviled, stomped on. The fighting was bloody, even though, in David’s imagination, Leon didn’t fight back. It was a beating, a massacre, and in his rage David scraped his skin clean, tore at his own flesh.

      So Leon had gotten that right. And it played on David’s heart again, as it had in the restaurant, only this time he knew what was causing the pain, and the pain didn’t frighten him as much because he had the proof of Leon’s being okay, thriving in his arms at this minute on the bike. It has to be called beautiful, David thought, that we have aged and mellowed to the point of getting past this revelation without a rupture. Leon was maybe some kind of emotional genius; how did he know what to do?

      Then David realized he wasn’t exactly right. There had been a rupture, in fact. At least there had been a hiatus in their friendship because it must have been five or six years now since they had even spoken to each other.

      Had it been just a break in the rhythm, a fading of their energy toward one another? He thought about the parade of girls in his bachelor life, how seamlessly they had moved in and out, the ones who stayed the night, the ones who stayed the week. And he thought about the toiling hours at his desk and the all-nighters at the printers when a deal was priced and how the days and nights had blurred into a constant round of hasty, barely kept dates, a cocktail on the way back to the office, dinner at eleven o’clock at night, maybe even with a different girl who might go wait for him in the apartment until dawn. When had he ever slept? When had he ever been at home in that little apartment for that matter? Had Leon minded all those girls? Had it felt like neglect?

      Weekends were spent everywhere but in the city—in the mountains, at the ocean, on some physical adventure, climbing or skiing, swimming or dancing, in the rattling old station wagon full of warped, outdated tennis rackets, torn sails, mateless shoes.

      But even after he and Leon had decided that each of them could afford his own apartment, even after they had agreed to make a stab at civilization, at privacy, at cleaning-ladies, they had gone on seeing each other. Leon was present in David’s memories of work, of play. He was omnipresent, for that matter, David thought. Ten years, fifteen years after college, they’d still been good friends. Close. And he had met Leon’s girlfriends. Leon had always introduced them. Every single one was offered up for David’s inspection.

      Or was it for his delectation, David suddenly wondered? What on earth had Leon been doing with all those girls?

      And then David’s thoughts stumbled over Elizabeth.

      He felt uncomfortable, exposed.

      Until tonight, David had never really admitted to himself that he had spotted Leon with Elizabeth and had screwed his friendship with Leon, ruthlessly, recklessly, easily, in order to get her. But now he also realized that this half-repressed scenario he had so carefully pretended not to have a guilty conscience about was entirely irrelevant. His sensation of guilt was accurate, but he had hurt Leon in a different way than he had been able to understand. Maybe the friendship hadn’t really changed that much after all; maybe Leon had just needed to go lead some different kind of life.

      This brought David to maybe the biggest puzzle of all, and they were nearly back at his house. What about Leon and Elizabeth? How had that worked then, the relationship between Leon and Elizabeth?

      Leon idled the motorcycle just outside David’s front door, and David climbed off in a reverie, stiffly, as if all his limbs were numb. His knees felt tender as his feet struck the pavement and he wobbled a little, then stretched.

      ‘What about Elizabeth?’ he asked, yawning, running his hands through his hair.

      Leon idled the bike lower, quietening it. ‘What do you mean?’

      ‘I always felt like a shit that I stole Elizabeth from you,’ David said. ‘When you guys were going out. You remember—you introduced me to Elizabeth?’

      ‘You didn’t steal Elizabeth from me, man! She was a gift. I gave her to you!’ Leon backed the bike away from the curb, turning the front wheel into the road. ‘I thought you’d be perfect together.’

      It started to rain, just a few big heavy drops at first, then suddenly, with a swishing susurrus, a downpour.

      ‘I’ll call you,’ Leon shouted, revving the bike. And he was gone.

       СКАЧАТЬ