He began to tell her about his love life. She would have inclined, on the evidence before her eyes, to the view that he was homosexual. The salon was full of beautiful young men, who came, wielded the scissors briefly, giggled together in corners, and departed. Chinese, Indonesian, Glaswegian, South African. He shouted at them and giggled with them, they exchanged little gifts and paid off obscure little debts to each other. Once she came in late and found them sitting in a circle, playing poker. The girls were subordinate and brightly hopeless. None of them lasted long. They wore—in those days—pink overalls with cream silk bindings. She could tell he had a love life because of the amount of time he spent alternately pleasing and blustering on the telephone, his voice a blotting-paper hiss, his words inaudible, though she could hear the peppery rattle of the other voice, or voices, in the ear-piece. Her sessions began to take a long time, what with these phone calls and with his lengthy explanations, which he would accompany with gestures, making her look at his mirrored excitement, like a boy riding a bicycle with hands off.‘Forgive me if I’m a bit distracted,’ he said. ‘My life is in crisis. Something I never believed could happen has happened. All my life I’ve been looking for something and now I’ve found it.’He wiped suds casually from her wet brow and scraped her eye-corner. She blinked.‘Love,’ he said. ‘Total affinity. Absolute compatibility. A miracle. My other half. A perfectly beautiful girl.’She could think of no sentence to answer this. She said, schoolmistressy, what other tone was there? ‘And this has caused the crisis?’‘She loves me, I couldn’t believe it but it is true. She loves me. She wants me to live with her.’‘And your wife?’There was a wife, who had thought nothing to the purchase of the Rosy Nude.‘She told me to get out of the house. So I got out. I went to her flat—my girlfriend’s. She came and fetched me back—my wife. She said I must choose, but she thinks I’ll choose her. I said it would be better for the moment just to let it evolve. I told her how do I know what I want, in this state of ecstasy, how do I know it’ll last, how do I know she’ll go on loving me?’He frowned impatiently and waved the scissors dangerously near her temples.‘All she cares about is respectability. She says she loves me but all she cares about is what the neighbours say. I like my house, though. She keeps it nice, I have to say. It’s not stylish, but it is in good taste.’Over the next few months, maybe a year, the story evolved, in bumps and jerks, not, it must be said, with any satisfactory narrative shape. He was a very bad storyteller, Susannah realised slowly. None of the characters acquired any roundness. She formed no image of the nature of the beauty of the girlfriend, or of the way she spent her time when not demonstrating her total affinity for Lucían. She did not know whether the wife was a shrew or a sufferer, nervous or patient or even ironically detached. All these wraith-personae were inventions of Susannah’s own. About six months through the narrative Lucian said that his daughter was very upset about it all, the way he was forced to come and go, sometimes living at home, sometimes shut out.‘You have a daughter?’‘Fifteen. No, seventeen, I always get ages wrong!’She watched him touch his own gleaming hair in the mirror, and smile apprehensively at himself.‘We were married very young,’ he said. ‘Very young, before we knew what was what.’‘It’s hard on young girls, when there are disputes at home.’‘It is. It’s hard on everyone. She says if I sell the house she’ll have nowhere to live while she takes her exams. I have to sell the house if I’m to afford to keep up my half of my girlfriend’s flat. I can’t keep up the mortgages on both. My wife doesn’t want to move. It’s understandable, I suppose, but she has to see we can’t go on like this. I can’t be torn apart like this, I’ve got to decide.’‘You seem to have decided for your girlfriend.’He took a deep breath and put down everything, comb, scissors, hairdryer.‘Ah, but I’m scared. I’m scared stiff if I take the plunge, I’ll be left with nothing. If she’s got me all the time, my girlfriend, perhaps she won’t go on loving me like this. And I like my house, you know, it feels sort of comfortable to me, I’m used to it, all the old chairs. I don’t quite like to think of it all sold and gone.’‘Love isn’t easy.’‘You can say that again.’‘Do you think I’m getting thinner on top?’‘What? Oh no, not really, I wouldn’t worry. We’ll just train this little bit to fall across there like that. Do you think she has a right to more than half the value of the house?’‘I’m not a lawyer. I’m a classicist.’‘We’re going on that Greek holiday. Me and my girlfriend. Sailing through the Greek Isles. I’ve bought scuba gear. The salon will be closed for a month.’‘I’m glad you told me.’
Анна Михайловна Бобылева , Кэтрин Ласки , Лорен Оливер , Мэлэши Уайтэйкер , Поль-Лу Сулитцер , Поль-Лу Сулицер
Современная русская и зарубежная проза / Самиздат, сетевая литература / Фэнтези / Современная проза / Любовное фэнтези, любовно-фантастические романы / Приключения в современном мире / Проза