"David Eddings - Losers, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eddings David)

If his weeks were consumed with study, his weekends were devoted to what he chose to feel was debauchery. Isabel Drake proved to be a woman of infinite variety and insatiable appetite. She seemed to delight in instructing and guiding him in what, a few months earlier, he would have considered perversion. He did not delude himself into believing that it was love. She was charmed by his innocence and took joy in his youthful vigor and stamina. It was so far from being love that sometimes on Sunday nights as he drove back to Portland, physically wrung out and even sore from his exertions, he felt that he had somehow been violated.

For the first few weekends Flood had accompanied him, delivering him, as it were, into Isabel's hands. Then, almost as if he had assured himself that Raphael would continue the visits without him, he stopped going down to the lake. Without Flood's presence, his knowing, sardonic eyes always watching, Isabel's demeanor changed. She became more dominant, more demanding. Raphael sometimes had nightmares about her during the week, vivid, disconnected dreams of being suffocated by the warm, perfumed pillows of her breasts or crushed between the powerful white columns of her thighs. He began to dread the weekends, but the lure of her was too strong, and helplessly he delivered himself each Friday evening to her perfumed lair by the shores of the lake, where she waited sometimes, he almost felt, lurked-in heavy-lidded anticipation.

"Have you read the Karpinsky book yet?" It was the girl, Marilyn Hamilton, and she spoke to him as they came out of the library one evening after it closed. '

"I'm nearly finished with it," he replied.

"I don't know," she said, falling into step beside him, "but it seemed to me that he evades the issue."

"He does seem a little too pat," Raphael agreed.

"Glib. Like someone who talks very fast so you don't have time to spot the holes in his argument."

They had stopped near the center of the broad lawn in front of Eliot Hall.

"Pardee seems to think a lot of him," Raphael said.

"Oh yes," the girl said, laughing slightly. The vibrance of her voice pierced him. "Mr. Pardee studied under Karpinsky at Columbia."

"I didn't know that."

"My sister found out. She took the course a couple years ago. Mr. Pardee won't mention it in class, of course, but it's a good thing to know." She suddenly mimicked their instructor's gruff voice and deliberately antigrammatical usage. "Since he ain't about to accept no disrespect."

Raphael laughed, charmed by her.

She hesitated and then spoke without looking at him. "I saw you play in that game last month," she told him quietly.

"Oh," he said, "that. It wasn't much of a game, really."

"Not the way you played, it wasn't. You destroyed them."

"You think I overemphasized?" he asked, grinning.

"I'm trying to pay you a compliment, dammit." Then she grinned back.

"Thank you."

"I'm making a fool of myself, right?"

"No, not really."

"Anyway, I thought it was really spectacular--and I don't like football very much."

"It's only a game." He shrugged. "It's more fun to play than it is to watch."

"Doesn't it hurt when you get tackled like that?"

"The idea is not to get tackled."