Three Short Novels. Gina Berriault

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СКАЧАТЬ back in Boston. In the shop he had chatted with her about the two cities, comparing this point and that, and then had invited her to dinner. In a quick breath, nervously, he told her he had some Scotch in his room and asked her to come up before dinner so they could work up an appetite. Up in his room, after the Scotch had eased his nervousness, he was able to look at her for a long moment with his eyes unclouded by his fear of her personal life.

      “You got a husband?” he asked her, like a doctor who has been told that psychologizing with the patient helps in the cure. He sat on the foot of the bed and she in the chair. “Ah, somewhere?” he asked.

      She saw him glancing at her legs and wished that silk stockings were still available—the rayon kind weren’t so flattering. “He’s dead,” she said, her mouth wanting the captain’s mouth. She saw that his little blue eyes were surprised. “At St. Vith. He was a doctor, he was a captain with the second division. They gave him a silver star, he has a silver star,” she said, tears slipping down her face.

      “Ah, that’s too bad,” he said, alarmed, suddenly turning his head to see what was behind him. “You want to come over here and lie down?”

      She lay on her back, weeping with her face exposed as if had just received the news from this man. He lay down beside her, jolting the bed in an awkward attempt to lie down tenderly, and put his arm across her, and she wanted to relate every detail of her life to him because he had laid his arm across her comfortingly like a man who was to love her and protect her for the rest of her life. She turned her head at his prompting to enable him to wipe her face with the palm of his hand and his fingertips, and saw, above his fingers, the many intimate details of his face that was as close as her husband’s had been, as the faces of the other men who had meant something to her, whom she had loved or had thought she loved; and she desired from that face, close beside hers, what all faces that lie close are called upon give. She had imagined that, since his face was temporal, she would ask for nothing, only the time together, even the eventual indifference, only the transience itself, the excitement of the transient union; but now she called for the lastingness that ought to come from the one close on the bed. She gazed above his fingers into his eyes that avoided hers; at his sparse lashes that were here and there in clusters; at the coarse skin tinged with pink, a weatherworn skin with a few small scars so faint she knew they were childhood scars; at the flat, small ears and the very short, scrubby hair and the hairline where there were some few gray hairs, hardly different in color from the rest; at the thin lips concealing thought; and, having examined the minute particulars of his face, she kissed the palm of his hand as it crossed her mouth.

      With his mouth on hers, he moved his hand over her body heavily as if receiving long, difficult messages through his palm. “Well, what pretty things,” he said about her garments in the way. “What pretty little things,” and helped her remove them with care while she kissed his hands and his body. “Well, what pretty things. You know you had such pretty things?” holding up her opalescent slip to follow its satin glow moving up and down the folds. “Ah, the pretty things to cover up the pretty things. One pretty thing deserves another, right? Never saw such pretty things in all my life. Look at that.” Even if he had a wife in Boston, he might not be getting along with her, or before the war was over his wife might leave him, or the woman for whom he had bought the slip was not his wife. A man who could undress her with consoling words must be the man who would return to her.

      But when he sat up on the side of the bed, rubbing his thighs, the bed moving up and down as he nervously rocked, the intent of the evening accomplished before the evening began and his gaze muddled, she knew that he was to be for that time only. She drew the blankets to her chin and lay grieving about his temporality as if it were a surprise, a revelation, and not a conviction that had accompanied her in the rising elevator. A sudden lowering of her spirits, an onslaught of reality, the elusiveness of the men she had loved, Paul elusive by running away and George by dying, all brought on a need for grieving under blankets. She watched this one as he walked around the room, pouring Scotch—his bare, very muscular legs, his short body and broad back, his bristle haircut and small, flat face, his eyes narrowing to appear wise when he came to the denouement of the story with which he was bombastically entertaining her.

      Afraid of other temporal lovers, she fell in love with him to transform him into the lasting lover as he hopped around the room, pulling on his trousers.

      She clung to him in the taxi. She ran her lips up and down his face and told him that there had never been anyone so good to her, even her husband. She would not release him when the taxi drew up at the curb before her house and made him sit with her for half an hour while she begged him to return to her. The taxi driver, a woman, got out and took a stroll down the middle of the street, her hands in her trouser pockets.

      Alone in her room, she removed her clothes that seemed soiled as though from several days of wear because she had already removed them twice that night, once before supper and once again after, and felt a rage take her over, a rage against the man who had left her at her door. She knew he would never write to her and never return to her, that he had rubbed his mouth against her face and promised to write only because the promising and the rubbing were part of the joke that he always seemed to be laughing at to himself and that he could not tell her, and she felt rage against herself for clinging to him, for exaggerating her wish beyond the true degree of it, when the truth was she wanted nothing to last, when she wanted to be as he was, elusive as he was. Wrapped in her negligee, she smoked one after another of the canteen cigarettes the captain had given her because so few were available to civilians, smoking them as though they were a glut on the market.

       6

      Her father escorted her one evening to a small lounge in one of the large hotels on Nob Hill. The manager sat down with them; he was a patient of her father’s and deferential to him, ordering a cognac for them, chatting with them, and watching them put the glasses to their lips. Over in a corner a slight, blond man was pounding a baby grand piano, smiling over its dark, slanting wing at the men in uniform and their women, who crossed their knees when he sang at them, their short skirts slipping up their thighs. While she was glancing away at the couples in the dim light of the carriage lanterns, stirred by the crowding of bodies, the manager clasped her wrist and asked her to sing. He escorted her to the pianist, who seemed delighted, who said he remembered her, and she sang, picking up the tricks again, toying with her beads, coddling her voice in her throat, combining the skills of her voice and her body. She was hired to sing several nights a week, and she and her father drank together with the manager to celebrate. She knew that her father would be delighted by his daughter’s becoming a famous singer as much as—or more than—he would be by his son’s becoming a physician who was summoned to the bedsides of presidents. He was attracted to theatrical people, to artists, especially to bizarre artists of any field if they were elegantly bizarre, not imitative, not tawdry. He never missed a first night at the Opera House or a society ball, and even his everyday clothes had the touch of the actor—his dark gray form-fitted overcoat and his black homburg.

      David liked to watch her prepare herself to go out and sing. He sat cross-legged on her bed with his head thrown back against the headboard, his mouth open because he was bemused by her and, since it was nine o’clock, half asleep. His eyes shifted from the glitter of the buckles on her shoes to the glow of the dress where it curved over the hips and the breasts to the fall and sway of the long string of beads. He did not often look at her face, he was used to her face and was, instead, intrigued by the animation of inanimate things. But sometimes she sang to him as she dressed, and he would watch her face then, as if it too were inanimate and the words and the tune made it flicker and change, as curious about the mechanism in her throat that made the low, strong whisper of a voice as he was about the central mystery of a performing toy; and while he gazed at the lively spirits in her garments and in her face, she was transfixed by him, in return—by the particulars of his beauty, the sturdy shape of his legs, his half-closed eyes and open lips, by the vitality evident even in repose. At this phase of his life, although all he could convey to her was what he perceived, as СКАЧАТЬ