Mudwoman. Joyce Carol Oates
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Название: Mudwoman
Автор: Joyce Carol Oates
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Ужасы и Мистика
isbn: 9780007467075
isbn:
M.R. felt a swirl of nausea. She was not so strong as people thought—even Leonard Lockhardt who’d come to know her painfully well misjudged her as a stronger woman than she was.
Remarkable woman. Such enthusiasm!
A natural-born leader.
She’d been in hiding. She’d been eating at her desk. The remains of M.R.’s supper on a greasy paper napkin: dry pita bread, strips of lettuce like confetti, “grilled” vegetables dry and tasteless as wood chips and a can of Diet Coke.
She’d canceled her dinner for that evening—she’d needed to be alone. As president of the University M. R. Neukirchen was scheduled for luncheons, receptions, dinners through the semester virtually day following day.
And such a friendly—accessible—person … So sympathetic, and so informed …
Such energy!
What comfort in being alone—at last. No one to observe the wounded “leader.”
The little phone ceased ringing. After a brief wait M.R. checked her messages hoping that Kroll hadn’t left a message but that—somehow—Andre had left a message instead.
Thinking Love is a sickness for which the only cure is love.
Of course—there was Kroll’s unmistakable voice. M.R. steeled herself for irony/mockery which was the politics professor’s usual style but this was very different.
“Hello? It’s Oliver—Kroll….” Haltingly Kroll spoke like one uncertain of his way. M.R. could hear his breath close against the mouthpiece. “I’m calling to say—to explain—I hope you don’t think that I had anything to do with … I don’t know what Alexander told you or hinted at but—it wasn’t—it isn’t—so … I did not have anything to do with him recording your conversation…. If I’d known what the hell he’d intended, I would have tried to dissuade him.” Kroll’s voice was strained, urgent. This was hardly a message M.R. might have expected from Oliver Kroll and so she listened surprised and fascinated. “He’s a—an—excitable young man … He’s brilliant but—obviously troubled. … Some things have come to light, Meredith, he’s told me about—just tonight—that will have to be revealed tomorrow, to the township police, to the security office, and to you…. Could you call me? Regardless of how late it is, call me? It would be better if we could talk, before. … Please call me at—” Hurriedly Kroll gave his number, and repeated it, though he’d have known that M.R. already had the number in her cell phone memory. He was breathing—panting—as if about to say more but broke the connection instead.
Meredith he’d called her. Beyond that, M.R. scarcely heard.
How they’d met, M.R. could not clearly recall. How they’d parted, M.R. hoped to forget.
It had been a time when M.R.’s (secret) lover had abandoned her.
Sent her into exile she’d joked. Sadly joked.
Somewhere in the hinterland of north central New Jersey he’d sent her—this prestigious Ivy League university floating like an improbable island of academic excellence amid vestiges of quaint-Colonial American history and a hilly-rolling ultra-affluent rural/suburban landscape which, until M.R. was invited to be interviewed for a position in the philosophy department, she had not visited and had not envisioned. Reporting back to her lover This can’t be a real place! It is too perfect.
She hadn’t quite been willing to think that Andre Litovik wanted her—hoped her to be—gone.
Not permanently gone—only just a respectable distance from Cambridge, Massachusetts. From his house on Tremont Street, and his household. From his family.
Nor had she been willing to think that really it was a good idea—a very good idea—for M.R. to leave the force field of her lover, a gravitational pull roughly equivalent to that of the planet Jupiter. With her instinct for self-effacement M.R. had planned to seek a teaching position in the Boston area, to be near Andre, at one or another far less distinguished university or college, which would have fatally sabotaged her career at the start; with her Harvard Ph.D. and early, much-admired publications in moral philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics, M. R. Neukirchen had been an extremely attractive candidate, and female.
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