Three Short Novels. Gina BerriaultЧитать онлайн книгу.
Vivian turned the volume knob to obliterate his moist voice and, dancing, approached her son. She danced with him in a spontaneous attempt to prove to all of them that his dancing was a boy’s imitation of dancing he had seen in the movies and that he was ignorant of its implications. She was a shield between him and the lascivious attorney’s story. But he lost his competence dancing with her; his legs bungled the rhythm, he looked down at his feet, and when the music was over he sat apart again.
When David danced with Duggan’s wife, who came up to him, he made up with wildness for his clumsiness dancing with his mother. The woman was a tall blonde, with utter vanity in the poking forward of her gaunt hips and long, bare thighs; an assumption, in her dancing postures, of a lunacy that matched her partner’s. These woman had no lunacy, Vivian thought. They had no wantonness, no risk, and he was wasting on them his abandonment of himself to his sensuality, the first public display of the sensuality that would be his in years to come. With her back to the dancing couple, with her drink held up high in her right hand while with her left she riffled through the record albums on the table, she lifted her eyes to see their reflection in the French doors: the woman’s turquoise shorts and white blouse with its one diagonal stripe of red, her long bare arms and legs in angular seduction, and David’s small figure in tan pants and soiled white shirt, his dark hair, and his face that was pale in the reflection against the night and yet was brown from the summer sun—both figures moving across the panes to the blaring jangle of the music.
At the moment she turned to watch them, Russell slipped himself between David and the woman, holding his arms up high in exaggerated homage to her and dancing away with her in his small-footed way that was always just a beat off. David sat for a while watching them, then went upstairs while everyone was dancing. After he left, although the records continued to fall into place and the music blared on and the vocalists sang on or whispered on, there was no more dancing.
Russell mixed a drink for them all that he called a golden viper. “This’ll stone you on the first swallow,” he warned them. The bank manager’s wife sipped with a little girl’s curiosity, her eyes big over the rim of her glass. Russell, Vivian saw, made the most of this small sway over them; from the secret of the viper he went on to reveal another secret—where and for what a low price he had purchased the cut glass from which they drank, holding up his glass to the light and turning it in his fingers, conscious, she knew, that she was watching him critically. While he sat on the edge of the table, the center of the group, host and entertainer, she remembered the times she had driven him home after parties, listening while he incoherently probed his depths and deplored his friends’ shallowness. The loan officials who peopled his days, he condemned when alone with her. They respected him for what they called his genius, and their appraisers overvalued the hotels and apartment houses so that the loans they made to him were larger than warranted; he ate lunch with them in the best restaurants and drank with them in the best bars, and was, she knew, always his charming, boyish, shrewd, and witty self; and at night he ridiculed them for a tie, for suede shoes, and for their very shrewdness that saw him as the one to put their money on.
While they were talking about the war in Korea, with the bank manager predicting that the Chinese were going to overrun the world, Vivian left them and went up the stairs. The heat of the day was pocketed in the upstairs hallway; all the bedroom doors, and David’s door at the end of the hallway, were closed. He was lying under the sheet, the blankets thrown off onto the floor, reading under the metal lamp fixed to the bed. His head was tilted against the headboard, the pillow stuffed under his neck.
“You were the life of the party and now they’re just talking,” she told him, collapsing into the canvas chair and resting her feet on the bed. The room had a meager look; it was more a sanctum than his room at home. “Silly rug looks like it’s eaten all around the edge by mouse teeth,” she said, lowering one leg to kick up the edge of the rug. “Read a little to me,” she said, closing her eyes.
“It’s just about birds,” he said.
“Go on, read to me if it’s about birds,” she urged. “I’m interested in birds.”
“What part?” he asked, embarrassed, she saw, about reading aloud, knowing that her interest was feigned. He flipped through the pages to lose deliberately the page that he had been reading, leading her away from himself by leading her away from the part that had absorbed him. “The hummingbird can’t glide,” he said. “You want that important bit of information?”
“Ah, poor things, can’t glide,” she said. “Go on. But what do they need to glide for?”
“You act like a teacher,” he said. “They ask you questions and spoil everything.”
“Me a teacher?” she cried in mock distress. “I came in here to learn a few things and you accuse me of acting like a teacher. Baby, I’m ignorant,” she pleaded. “I don’t know anything about birds except they’ve all got feathers and go peep-peep. Go on and tell me about them. Because birds are the greatest miracle. God really outdid Himself when He made a bird. Say you and I were God, could we think up something like a bird? Never in a million years. It took God to think them up, and even for Him it was something. You go on, tell me more about birds.”
“It says about migration,” he began again, “that millions of them never get there, where they’re going. It says it’s really a big risk to a bird, the biggest risk in his life. It says that hundreds of millions of them never get there.”
“Isn’t that funny? I thought they all made it,” she said.
For a time he read to her about the perils of migration. She recrossed her ankles, while she listened, observing the arches of her bare feet. Then, because she heard a murmur of voices in the glassed-in porch below, where the bank manager and his wife slept, and knew that the rest would be coming up the stairs and that only a short time was left her in her son’s room, she lost her feigned reverence for birds. “Listen, Davy baby,” she began. “I don’t want you to get vain about being a good dancer or looking like the great lover Gable just because you stirred up those women down there. You’re neither. You want to know what it is?” She tilted her head back, lifting her gaze to the ceiling. “It’s your youth. It’s because you’re so young, baby.” She laughed. “You look at them as if you’re seeing women for the first time, and what it does to them is make them feel they’re being seen for the first time by any man. You make them feel fabulous—oh, as if they’ve got a thousand secrets they could tell you.” She laughed again, still toward the ceiling. “You know what Russell is going to say? When everybody is asleep, he’ll say in a whisper, he’ll say, ‘Davy got out of hand tonight, didn’t he? Those women will be creeping around the house all night long.’ ” She brought her gaze down, a humorously warning gaze. “You want to put a chair against your door?”
She saw in his expressionless face that he did not want to understand her joke. He did not want to suspect that she had come up the stairs and away from the others not to tell him about the other women but to tell him, by her presence, that nobody else could claim his enticing youth except herself, if it were to be claimed at all. He was her son; she had given him his life and his youth, his present and his future, his elusiveness, and, by telling him she knew his effect upon the other women, she was reminding him of her claim to him, if she had a claim. “Go on,” she said, settling farther into her chair. “Read to me, read to me.”
She heard Duggan and his wife come up the stairs and enter their bedroom quietly, while the murmuring below was borne out on the still air into the dark yard. After a time she heard Russell come up. Then the murmuring ceased and the house was silent. David read to her for a while longer and when he was tired of reading she told him to turn off the light, and she sat in darkness, reluctant to go to her husband, to lie down beside him. She was struck by the years of her accumulated contempt for her husband as by an unexpected blow to her body. Their voices muted by the darkness, she and her son talked together, finding inconsequential things to talk about. He told her about a boy he had made friends with a few days before and how far around the lake they went with the boy’s uncle in his motorboat, and as he talked she listened more to the sound of his voice than to the words, feeling the sound of his young voice, his faltering,