мой дневник http://darly2006.livejournal.com/
# # #
Reba McClane was quiet, flushed, elated as they drove away. She turned to Dolarhyde
once and said slowly, "Thank you . . . very much. If you don't mind, I would dearly love
a martini."
читать дальше# # #
"Wait here a minute," Dolarhyde said as he parked in his yard.
She was glad they hadn't gone back to her apartment. It was stale and safe. "Don't tidy
up. Take me in and tell me it's neat."
"Wait here."
He carried in the sack from the liquor store and made a fast inspection tour. He stopped in the kitchen and stood for a moment with his hands over his face. He wasn't
sure what he was doing. He felt danger, but not from the woman. He couldn't look up the
stairs. He had to do something and he didn't know how. He should take her back home.
Before his Becoming, he would not have dared any of this.
Now he realized he could do anything. Anything. Anything.
He came outside, into the sunset, into the long blue shadow of the van. Reba McClane
held on to his shoulders until her foot touched the ground.
She felt the loom of the house. She sensed its height in the echo of the van door
closing.
"Four steps on the grass. Then there's a ramp," he said.
She took his arm. A tremor through him. Clean perspiration in cotton.
"You do have a ramp. What for?"
"Old people were here."
"Not now, though."
"No."
"It feels cool and tall," she said in the parlor. Museum air. And was that incense? A
clock ticked far away. "It's a big house, isn't it? How many rooms?"
"Fourteen."
"It's old. The things in here are old." She brushed against a fringed lampshade and
touched it with her fingers.
Shy Mr. Dolarhyde. She was perfectly aware that it had excited him to see her with the
tiger; he had shuddered like a horse when she took his arm leaving the treatment room.
An elegant gesture, his arranging that. Maybe eloquent as well, she wasn't sure.
"Martini?"
"Let me go with you and do it," she said, taking off her shoes.
She flicked vermouth from her finger into the glass. Two and a half ounces of gin on
top, and two olives. She picked up points of reference quickly in the house - the ticking
clock, the hum of a window air conditioner. There was a warm place on the floor near the
kitchen door where the sunlight had fallen through the afternoon.
He took her to his big chair. He sat on the couch.
There was a charge in the air. Like fluorescence in the sea, it limned movement; she
found a place for her drink on the stand beside her, he put on music.
To Dolarhyde the room seemed changed. She was the first voluntary company he ever had
in the house, and now the room was divided into her part and his.
There was the music, Debussy as the light failed.
He asked her about Denver and she told him a little, absently, as though she thought of
something else. He described the house and the big hedged yard. There wasn't much need to
talk.
In the silence while he changed records, she said, "That wonderful tiger, this house,
you're just full of surprises, D. I don't think anybody knows you at all."
"Did you ask them?"
"Who?"
"Anybody."
"No."
"Then how do you know that nobody knows me?" His concentration on the tongue-twister
kept the tone of the question neutral.
"Oh, some of the women from Gateway saw us getting into your van the other day. Boy,
were they curious. All of a sudden I have company at the Coke machine."
"What do they want to know?"
"They just wanted some juicy gossip. When they found out there isn't any, they went
away. They were just fishing."
"And what did they say?"
She had meant to make the women's avid curiosity into humor directed at herself. It was
not working out that way.
"They wonder about everything," she said. "They find you very mysterious and
interesting. Come on, it's a compliment."
"Did they tell you how I look?"
The question was spoken lightly, very well done, but Reba knew that nobody is ever
kidding. She met it head-on.
"I didn't ask them. But, yes, they told me how they think you look. Want to hear it?
Verbatim? Don't ask if you don't." She was sure he would ask.
No reply.
Suddenly Reba felt that she was alone in the room, that the place where he had stood
was emptier than empty, a black hole swallowing everything and emanating nothing. She
knew he could not have left without her hearing him.
"I think I'll tell you," she said. "You have a kind of hard clean neatness that they
like. They said you have a remarkable body." Clearly she couldn't leave it at that. "They
say you're very sensitive about your face and that you shouldn't be. Okay, here's the
dippy one with the Dentine, is it Eileen?"
"Eileen."
Ah, a return signal. She felt like a radio astronomer.
Reba was an excellent mimic. She could have reproduced Eileen's speech with startling
fidelity, but she was too wise to mimic anyone's speech for Dolarhyde. She quoted Eileen
as though she read from a transсriрt.
"'He's not a bad-looking guy. Honest to God I've gone out with lots of guys didn't look
that good. I went out with a hockey player one time - played for the Blues? - had a
little dip in his lip where his gum shrank back from his bridge? They all have that,
hockey players. It's kind of, you know, macho, I think. Mr. D.'s got the nicest skin, and
what I wouldn't give for his hair.' Satisfied? Oh, and she asked me if you're as strong
as you look."
"And?"
"I said I didn't know." She drained her glass and got up. "Where the hell are you
anyway, D.?" She knew when he moved between her and a stereo speaker. "Aha. Here you are.
Do you want to know what I think about it?"
She found his mouth with her fingers and kissed it, lightly pressing his lips against
his clenched teeth. She registered instantly that it was shyness and not distaste that
held him rigid.
He was astonished.
"Now, would you show me where the bathroom is?"
She took his arm and went with him down the hall.
"I can find my own way back."
In the bathroom she patted her hair and ran her fingers along the top of the basin,
hunting toothpaste or mouthwash. She tried to find the door of the medicine cabinet and
found there was no door, only hinges and exposed shelves. She touched the objects on them
carefully, leery of a razor, until she found a bottle. She took off the cap, smelled to
verify mouthwash, and swished some around.
When she returned to the parlor, she heard a familiar sound - the whir of a projector
rewinding.
"I have to do a little homework," Dolarhyde said, handing her a fresh martini.
"Sure," she said. She didn't know how to take it. "If I'm keeping you from working I'll go. Will a cab come up here?"
"No. I want you to be here. I do. It's just some film I need to check. It won't take
long."
He started to take her to the big chair. She knew where the couch was. She went to it
instead.
"Does it have a soundtrack?"
"No."
"May I keep the music?"
"Um-hmmm."
She felt his attention. He wanted her to stay, he was just frightened. He shouldn't be.
All right. She sat down.
The martini was wonderfully cold and crisp.
He sat on the other end of the couch, his weight clinking the ice in her glass. The
projector was still rewinding.
"I think I'll stretch out for a few minutes if you don't mind," she said. "No, don't
move, I have plenty of room. Wake me up if I drop off, okay?"
She lay on the couch, holding the glass on her stomach; the tips of her hair just
touched his hand beside his thigh.
He flicked the remote switch and the film began.
Dolarhyde had wanted to watch his Leeds film or his Jacobi film with this woman in the
room. He wanted to look back and forth from the screen to Reba. He knew she would never
survive that. The women saw her getting into his van. Don't even think about that. The
women saw her getting into his van.
He would watch his film of the Shermans, the people he would visit next. He would see
the promise of relief to come, and do it in Reba's presence, looking at her all he liked.
On the screen, The New House spelled in pennies on a shirt cardboard. A long shot of
Mrs. Sherman and the children. Fun in the pool. Mrs. Sherman holds to the ladder and
looks up at the camera, bosom swelling shining wet above her suit, pale legs scissoring.
Dolarhyde was proud of his self-control. He would think of this film, not the other
one. But in his mind he began to speak to Mrs. Sherman as he had spoken to Valerie Leeds
in Atlanta.
You see me now, yes
That's how you feel to see me, yes
Fun with old clothes. Mrs. Sherruan has the wide hat on. She is before the mirror. She
turns with an arch smile and strikes a pose for the camera, her hand at the back of her
neck. There is a cameo at her throat.
Reba McClane stirs on the couch. She sets her glass on the floor. Dolarhyde feels a
weight and warmth. She has rested her head on his thigh. The nape of her neck is pale and
the movie light plays on it.
He sits very still, moves only his thumb to stop the film, back it up. On the screen,
Mrs. Sherman poses before the mirror in the hat. She turns to the camera and smiles.
You see me now, yes
That's how you feel to see me, yes
Do you feel me now? yes
Dolarhyde is trembling. His trousers are mashing him so hard. He feels heat. He feels
warm breath through the cloth. Reba has made a discovery.
Convulsively his thumb works the switch.
You see me now, yes
That's how you feel to see me, yes
Do you feel this? yes
Reba has unzipped his trousers.
A stab of fear in him; he has never been erect before in the presence of a living
woman. He is the Dragon, he doesn't have to be afraid.
Busy fingers spring him free.
OH.
Do you feel me now? yes
Do you feel this yes
You do I know it yes
Your heart is loud yes
He must keep his hands off Reba's neck. Keep them off. The women saw them in the van.
His hand is squeezing the arm of the couch. His fingers pop through the upholstery.
Your heart is loud yes
And fluttering now
It's fluttering now
It's trying to get out yes
And now it's quick and light and quicker and light and . . .
Gone.
Oh, gone.
Reba rests her head on his thigh and turns her gleaming cheek to him. She runs her hand
inside his shirt and rests it warm on his chest.
"I hope I didn't shock you," she said.
It was the sound of her living voice that shocked him, and he felt to see if her heart
was going and it was. She held his hand there gently.
"My goodness, you're not through yet, are you?"
A living woman. How bizarre. Filled with power, the Dragon's or his own, he lifted her
from the couch easily. She weighed nothing, so much easier to carry because she wasn't
limp. Not upstairs. Not upstairs. Hurrying now. Somewhere. Quick. Grandmother's bed, the
satin comforter sliding under them.
"Oh, wait, I'll get them off. Oh, now it's torn. I don't care. Come on. My God, man.
That's so sweeeet. Don't please hold me down, let me come up to you and take it."
# # #
With Reba, his only living woman, held with her in this one bubbleskin of time, he felt
for the first time that it was all right: it was his life he was releasing, himself past
all mortality that he was sending into her starry darkness, away from this pain planet,
ringing harmonic distances away to peace and the promise of rest.
Beside her in the dark, he put his hand on her and pressed her together gently to seal
the way back. As she slept, Dolarhyde, damned murderer of eleven, listened time and again to her heart. Images. Baroque pearls flying through the friendly dark. A Very pistol he had fired at
the moon. A great firework he saw in Hong Kong called "The Dragon Sows His Pearls."
The Dragon.
He felt stunned, cloven. And all the long night beside her he listened, fearful, for
himself coming down the stairs in the kimono.
She stirred once in the night, searching sleepily until she found the bedside glass.
Grandmother's teeth rattled in it.
Dolarhyde brought her water. She held him in the dark. When she slept again, he took
her hand off his great tattoo and put it on his face.
...
Reba McClane was quiet, flushed, elated as they drove away. She turned to Dolarhyde
once and said slowly, "Thank you . . . very much. If you don't mind, I would dearly love
a martini."
читать дальше# # #
"Wait here a minute," Dolarhyde said as he parked in his yard.
She was glad they hadn't gone back to her apartment. It was stale and safe. "Don't tidy
up. Take me in and tell me it's neat."
"Wait here."
He carried in the sack from the liquor store and made a fast inspection tour. He stopped in the kitchen and stood for a moment with his hands over his face. He wasn't
sure what he was doing. He felt danger, but not from the woman. He couldn't look up the
stairs. He had to do something and he didn't know how. He should take her back home.
Before his Becoming, he would not have dared any of this.
Now he realized he could do anything. Anything. Anything.
He came outside, into the sunset, into the long blue shadow of the van. Reba McClane
held on to his shoulders until her foot touched the ground.
She felt the loom of the house. She sensed its height in the echo of the van door
closing.
"Four steps on the grass. Then there's a ramp," he said.
She took his arm. A tremor through him. Clean perspiration in cotton.
"You do have a ramp. What for?"
"Old people were here."
"Not now, though."
"No."
"It feels cool and tall," she said in the parlor. Museum air. And was that incense? A
clock ticked far away. "It's a big house, isn't it? How many rooms?"
"Fourteen."
"It's old. The things in here are old." She brushed against a fringed lampshade and
touched it with her fingers.
Shy Mr. Dolarhyde. She was perfectly aware that it had excited him to see her with the
tiger; he had shuddered like a horse when she took his arm leaving the treatment room.
An elegant gesture, his arranging that. Maybe eloquent as well, she wasn't sure.
"Martini?"
"Let me go with you and do it," she said, taking off her shoes.
She flicked vermouth from her finger into the glass. Two and a half ounces of gin on
top, and two olives. She picked up points of reference quickly in the house - the ticking
clock, the hum of a window air conditioner. There was a warm place on the floor near the
kitchen door where the sunlight had fallen through the afternoon.
He took her to his big chair. He sat on the couch.
There was a charge in the air. Like fluorescence in the sea, it limned movement; she
found a place for her drink on the stand beside her, he put on music.
To Dolarhyde the room seemed changed. She was the first voluntary company he ever had
in the house, and now the room was divided into her part and his.
There was the music, Debussy as the light failed.
He asked her about Denver and she told him a little, absently, as though she thought of
something else. He described the house and the big hedged yard. There wasn't much need to
talk.
In the silence while he changed records, she said, "That wonderful tiger, this house,
you're just full of surprises, D. I don't think anybody knows you at all."
"Did you ask them?"
"Who?"
"Anybody."
"No."
"Then how do you know that nobody knows me?" His concentration on the tongue-twister
kept the tone of the question neutral.
"Oh, some of the women from Gateway saw us getting into your van the other day. Boy,
were they curious. All of a sudden I have company at the Coke machine."
"What do they want to know?"
"They just wanted some juicy gossip. When they found out there isn't any, they went
away. They were just fishing."
"And what did they say?"
She had meant to make the women's avid curiosity into humor directed at herself. It was
not working out that way.
"They wonder about everything," she said. "They find you very mysterious and
interesting. Come on, it's a compliment."
"Did they tell you how I look?"
The question was spoken lightly, very well done, but Reba knew that nobody is ever
kidding. She met it head-on.
"I didn't ask them. But, yes, they told me how they think you look. Want to hear it?
Verbatim? Don't ask if you don't." She was sure he would ask.
No reply.
Suddenly Reba felt that she was alone in the room, that the place where he had stood
was emptier than empty, a black hole swallowing everything and emanating nothing. She
knew he could not have left without her hearing him.
"I think I'll tell you," she said. "You have a kind of hard clean neatness that they
like. They said you have a remarkable body." Clearly she couldn't leave it at that. "They
say you're very sensitive about your face and that you shouldn't be. Okay, here's the
dippy one with the Dentine, is it Eileen?"
"Eileen."
Ah, a return signal. She felt like a radio astronomer.
Reba was an excellent mimic. She could have reproduced Eileen's speech with startling
fidelity, but she was too wise to mimic anyone's speech for Dolarhyde. She quoted Eileen
as though she read from a transсriрt.
"'He's not a bad-looking guy. Honest to God I've gone out with lots of guys didn't look
that good. I went out with a hockey player one time - played for the Blues? - had a
little dip in his lip where his gum shrank back from his bridge? They all have that,
hockey players. It's kind of, you know, macho, I think. Mr. D.'s got the nicest skin, and
what I wouldn't give for his hair.' Satisfied? Oh, and she asked me if you're as strong
as you look."
"And?"
"I said I didn't know." She drained her glass and got up. "Where the hell are you
anyway, D.?" She knew when he moved between her and a stereo speaker. "Aha. Here you are.
Do you want to know what I think about it?"
She found his mouth with her fingers and kissed it, lightly pressing his lips against
his clenched teeth. She registered instantly that it was shyness and not distaste that
held him rigid.
He was astonished.
"Now, would you show me where the bathroom is?"
She took his arm and went with him down the hall.
"I can find my own way back."
In the bathroom she patted her hair and ran her fingers along the top of the basin,
hunting toothpaste or mouthwash. She tried to find the door of the medicine cabinet and
found there was no door, only hinges and exposed shelves. She touched the objects on them
carefully, leery of a razor, until she found a bottle. She took off the cap, smelled to
verify mouthwash, and swished some around.
When she returned to the parlor, she heard a familiar sound - the whir of a projector
rewinding.
"I have to do a little homework," Dolarhyde said, handing her a fresh martini.
"Sure," she said. She didn't know how to take it. "If I'm keeping you from working I'll go. Will a cab come up here?"
"No. I want you to be here. I do. It's just some film I need to check. It won't take
long."
He started to take her to the big chair. She knew where the couch was. She went to it
instead.
"Does it have a soundtrack?"
"No."
"May I keep the music?"
"Um-hmmm."
She felt his attention. He wanted her to stay, he was just frightened. He shouldn't be.
All right. She sat down.
The martini was wonderfully cold and crisp.
He sat on the other end of the couch, his weight clinking the ice in her glass. The
projector was still rewinding.
"I think I'll stretch out for a few minutes if you don't mind," she said. "No, don't
move, I have plenty of room. Wake me up if I drop off, okay?"
She lay on the couch, holding the glass on her stomach; the tips of her hair just
touched his hand beside his thigh.
He flicked the remote switch and the film began.
Dolarhyde had wanted to watch his Leeds film or his Jacobi film with this woman in the
room. He wanted to look back and forth from the screen to Reba. He knew she would never
survive that. The women saw her getting into his van. Don't even think about that. The
women saw her getting into his van.
He would watch his film of the Shermans, the people he would visit next. He would see
the promise of relief to come, and do it in Reba's presence, looking at her all he liked.
On the screen, The New House spelled in pennies on a shirt cardboard. A long shot of
Mrs. Sherman and the children. Fun in the pool. Mrs. Sherman holds to the ladder and
looks up at the camera, bosom swelling shining wet above her suit, pale legs scissoring.
Dolarhyde was proud of his self-control. He would think of this film, not the other
one. But in his mind he began to speak to Mrs. Sherman as he had spoken to Valerie Leeds
in Atlanta.
You see me now, yes
That's how you feel to see me, yes
Fun with old clothes. Mrs. Sherruan has the wide hat on. She is before the mirror. She
turns with an arch smile and strikes a pose for the camera, her hand at the back of her
neck. There is a cameo at her throat.
Reba McClane stirs on the couch. She sets her glass on the floor. Dolarhyde feels a
weight and warmth. She has rested her head on his thigh. The nape of her neck is pale and
the movie light plays on it.
He sits very still, moves only his thumb to stop the film, back it up. On the screen,
Mrs. Sherman poses before the mirror in the hat. She turns to the camera and smiles.
You see me now, yes
That's how you feel to see me, yes
Do you feel me now? yes
Dolarhyde is trembling. His trousers are mashing him so hard. He feels heat. He feels
warm breath through the cloth. Reba has made a discovery.
Convulsively his thumb works the switch.
You see me now, yes
That's how you feel to see me, yes
Do you feel this? yes
Reba has unzipped his trousers.
A stab of fear in him; he has never been erect before in the presence of a living
woman. He is the Dragon, he doesn't have to be afraid.
Busy fingers spring him free.
OH.
Do you feel me now? yes
Do you feel this yes
You do I know it yes
Your heart is loud yes
He must keep his hands off Reba's neck. Keep them off. The women saw them in the van.
His hand is squeezing the arm of the couch. His fingers pop through the upholstery.
Your heart is loud yes
And fluttering now
It's fluttering now
It's trying to get out yes
And now it's quick and light and quicker and light and . . .
Gone.
Oh, gone.
Reba rests her head on his thigh and turns her gleaming cheek to him. She runs her hand
inside his shirt and rests it warm on his chest.
"I hope I didn't shock you," she said.
It was the sound of her living voice that shocked him, and he felt to see if her heart
was going and it was. She held his hand there gently.
"My goodness, you're not through yet, are you?"
A living woman. How bizarre. Filled with power, the Dragon's or his own, he lifted her
from the couch easily. She weighed nothing, so much easier to carry because she wasn't
limp. Not upstairs. Not upstairs. Hurrying now. Somewhere. Quick. Grandmother's bed, the
satin comforter sliding under them.
"Oh, wait, I'll get them off. Oh, now it's torn. I don't care. Come on. My God, man.
That's so sweeeet. Don't please hold me down, let me come up to you and take it."
# # #
With Reba, his only living woman, held with her in this one bubbleskin of time, he felt
for the first time that it was all right: it was his life he was releasing, himself past
all mortality that he was sending into her starry darkness, away from this pain planet,
ringing harmonic distances away to peace and the promise of rest.
Beside her in the dark, he put his hand on her and pressed her together gently to seal
the way back. As she slept, Dolarhyde, damned murderer of eleven, listened time and again to her heart. Images. Baroque pearls flying through the friendly dark. A Very pistol he had fired at
the moon. A great firework he saw in Hong Kong called "The Dragon Sows His Pearls."
The Dragon.
He felt stunned, cloven. And all the long night beside her he listened, fearful, for
himself coming down the stairs in the kimono.
She stirred once in the night, searching sleepily until she found the bedside glass.
Grandmother's teeth rattled in it.
Dolarhyde brought her water. She held him in the dark. When she slept again, he took
her hand off his great tattoo and put it on his face.
...