Odnośniki
- Indeks
- Charles R Cross Room Full of Mirrors A Biography of Jimi Hendrix (pdf)
- Charles Eliot Hinduism And Buddhism, Vol I
- Dickens Charles OpowieĹÄ wigilijna
- Case of Charles Dexter Ward
- Laurie Grant Lord Liar
- J. G. Ballard The Drowned World
- Ingulstad_Fr
- Turner Linda CćÂśÂrka zdrajcy 231
- Kroniki brata Cadfaela 05 TrćÂdowaty z hospicjum śÂwićÂtego Idziego
- Alessandro Manzoni La storia della Colonna Infame
- zanotowane.pl
- doc.pisz.pl
- pdf.pisz.pl
- shakyor.htw.pl
weren't sure if your feet were there when you woke up in the morning
until you put them out on the floor where you could look at them. Mrs.
Hollis was fat. Mr. Hollis was dour, rarely spoke, and wore a
red-and-black checked hunting cap all year round .
The house was a helter-skelter mess of white-elephant furniture,
rummage-sale stuff, moldy mattresses, dogs, cats, and automotive parts
laid on newspaper. I had three "brothers," all of them wards. We had a
nodding acquaintance, like co-travelers on a three-day bus trip.
I made good grades in school and went out for spring baseball when I was
a high school sophomore. Hollis was yapping after me to quit, but I
stuck with it until the thing with Ace Carmody happened .
Then I didn't want to go anymore, not with my face all puffed and cut,
not with the stories Betsy Dirisko was telling around. So I quit the
team, and Hollis got me a job in the local drugstore.
In February of my junior year I took the College Boards, paying for them
with twelve bucks I had socked away in my mattress. I got accepted at
the university with a small scholarship and a good workstudy job in the
library. The expression on the Hollises' faces when I showed them the
financial-aid papers is the best memory of my life.
One of my "brothers," Curt, ran away. I couldn't have done that. I was
too passive to take a step like that. I would have been back after two
hours on the road. School was the only way out for me, and I took it.
The last thing Mrs. Hollis said when I left was, "You write, hear me?
And send us something when you can." I never saw either of them again. I
made good grades my freshman year and got a job that summer working
full-time in the library. I sent them a Christmas card that first year,
but that was the only one.
In the first semester of my sophomore year I fell in love. It was the
biggest thing that had ever happened to me. Pretty? She would have
knocked you back two steps. To this day I have no idea what she saw in
me. I don't even know if she loved me or not. I think she did at first
.
After that I was just a habit that's hard to break, like smoking or
driving with your elbow poked out the window. She held me for a while,
maybe not wanting to break the habit. Maybe she held me for wonder, or
maybe it was just her vanity. Good boy, roll over, sit up, fetch the
paper. Here's a kiss good night. It doesn't matter. For a while it
was love, then it was like love, then it was over.
I had slept with her twice, both times after other things had taken over
for love. That fed the habit for a little while. Then she came back
from the Thanksgiving break and said she was in love with a guy from
Delta Tau Delta, a guy who also came from her hometown. I tried to get
her back and almost made it once, but she had something she hadn't had
before-perspective. It didn't work and when the Christmas vacation was
over they were pinned.
Whatever I had been building up, all those years since the fire wiped
out the B-movie actors who had once been my family, that broke it down.
That pin on her blouse.
And after that, I was on again-off again with the three or four girls
who were willing. I could blame it on my childhood, say I never had
good sexual models, but that wasn't it. I'd never had any trouble with
the girl. Only now the girl was gone.
I started being afraid of girls, a little. And it wasn't so much the
ones I was impotent with as the ones I wasn't, the ones I could make it
with. They made me uneasy. I kept asking myself where they were hiding
whatever axes they liked to grind and when they were going to let me
have it. I'm not so strange at that. You show me a married man or a
man with a steady woman, and I'll show you someone who is asking himself
(maybe only in the early hours of the morning or on Friday afternoon
when she's off buying groceries), What is she doing when I'm not around?
What does she really think of me? And maybe
most of all, How much of me has she got? How much is left? Once I
started thinking about those things, I thought about them all the time.
I started to drink and my grades took a nose dive. During semester
break I got a letter saying that if they didn't improve in six weeks, my
second-semester scholarship check would be withheld. I and some guys I
hung around with got drunk and stayed drunk for the whole holiday. On
the last day we went to a whorehouse and I operated just fine. It was
too dark to see faces.
My grades stayed about the same. I called the girl once and cried over
the telephone. She cried too, and in a way I think that pleased her. I
didn't hate her then and I don't now. But she scared me plenty.
On February 9 I got a letter from the dean of Arts and Sciences saying I
was flunking two of three courses in my major field. On February 13 I
got a hesitant sort of letter from the girl. She wanted everything to
be all right between us. She was planning to marry the guy from Delta
Tau Delta in July or August, and I could be invited if I wanted to be.
That was almost funny. What could I give her for a wedding gift? My
penis with a red ribbon tied around the foreskin?
On the fourteenth, Valentine's Day, I decided it was time for a change
of scene. Nona came next, but you know about that.
You have to understand how she was to me if this is to do any good at
all. She was more beautiful than the girl, but that wasn't it .
Good looks are cheap in a wealthy country. It was the her inside .
There was sex, but the sex that came from her was like that of a
vineblind sex, a kind of clinging, not-to-be-denied sex that is not so
important because it is as instinctual as photosynthesis. Not like an
animalthat implies lust-but like a plant. I knew we would make love,
that we would make it as men and women do, but that our joining would be
as blunt and remote and meaningless as ivy clutching its way up a
trellis in the August sun.
The sex was important only because it was unimportant.
I think-no, I'm sure-that violence was the real motive force .
The violence was real and not just a dream. The violence of Joe's Good
Eats, the violence of Norman Blanchette. And there was even something
blind and vegetative about that. Maybe she was only a clinging vine
after all, because the Venus flytrap is a species of vine, but that
plant is carnivorous and will make animal motion when a fly or a bit of
raw meat is placed in its jaws. And it was all real. The sporulating
vine may only dream that it fornicates, but I am sure the Venus flytrap [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]