"Ellison, Harlan - Love Ain't Nothing But Sex Misspelled" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

He was affronted. Practically shrieked at me. What the hell kind of a guy did I think he was? He didn't screw around with those kinda people. Listen, if that was the kinda guy I thought he was, I would kindly honor him by forgetting his unlisted number. The nerve! The gall! What kind of a creep did I run around with, to need a guy who'd do that and finally Good-bye slam!
I turned around to Jenny and Rooney. "He hung up on me. Thanks."
They seemed shocked, and Rooney made devious remarks about the furtiveness of some shady types. I think I groaned.
Then I tried Van Jessup, a character actor who seemed to know everyone. He knew no one. Then I tried a tv director I'd played gin with a few times, and he said he'd get back to me. Then I tried a chick who made the Sunset Strip scene, and she asked a couple of guarded questions and said she'd get back to me. Then I called a relative in Pomona and she giggled outrageously, and said I should get back to her. Then I called The Boffer, who is a writer and a singer and a hustler of personal needs, and the conversation went like this:
"I need a doctor."
"So go to one."
"Not for me, man, for a chick."
"Pregnant?"
"Of course, stupid. You think I'm the Blue Cross or somedamnthing?"
"Rooney?"
"Don't be funny."
"Who then? And does Rooney know you've been playing pattyfingers?"
"I didn't do the knocking-up."
"A likely story."
"Cut it, man. I'm serious. This thing has lost its funny for me. It isn't my woman, and I didn't do the job on her, and I need a D&C man. Now can you help me or not?"
"I suppose so. I've had occasion to--"
"I don't want to know. Everyone agrees you're the finest swordsman in these parts. Can you get me a guy ... this is a favor I need, Boffer. It's for a friend."
"You know, everybody you call is gonna think it was you."
"I know."
"Since when did you get such humanitarian instincts?"
"A recent malady. What's his name? Is there a number?"
"You're a lot more noble and friendly than I'd be. This kinda scam is liable to ruin your reputation."
"I haven't got a reputation. What's his name? Give!"
There was a pause, as though The Boffer was seriously considering saying no. He's peculiar that way. His reasoning is on a very furry plane, taken up by intricacies even he barely understands, and informed by a scurrying rodentlike deviousness that comes from having been on the Hollywood merry-go-round for too many years. "Take this down. You got a pencil? Okay, take this down: S. Jaime Quintano: the number is--"
He rattled it off twice and I still didn't get it. So he laid it on me slowly, and I wrote it as accurately as I could.
"Thanks, Boffer. You've got one coming."
I gave the information to Jenny, and she stared at it as though it was contaminated. "You'll have to do the calling," I told her. "Apparently he's a good man, has his own clinic, works most of the week in the Miguel Aleman Hospital, that's the big one down there. This friend of mine says he's taken girls down there a couple of times and this man has been very clean, very good. Three hundred dollars."
She continued to stare at the slip of paper.
"This is the number," I emphasized. It was like talking to a statue. "D-U-five-three-three-seven-two, that's in Tijuana, and I think I have his name spelled right. Jenny ... ?"
First her shoulders began to heave. Silently. Then her entire body shook, as though possessed. And in a second she was dry-crying, her head sunk down on her chest almost, the top of her head bobbing like a cork in a rough sea. It had started to get through to her: what she had undergone had not been love, it had been something far more indelicate, something simpler, more destructive. She felt contaminated, felt insulted, in the strictest possible sense of the outmoded term, she felt sullied.
I moved over to her and put my arms around her. She was incapable, at that moment, of even knowing I was there. I held her very tightly for what seemed a long time, and slowly the shaking passed, and her head came up. The front of my shirt was soaked.
She came out from the burrow of my arms. "What's the area code to Tijuana?" she said softly.
"Nine-o-three," Rooney said, from the other side of the room. I looked at her, startled. "I've been there, too." Her face was very sad, and I realized: no one comes to anyone untouched.
Everyone goes through fire.
Jenny picked up the receiver and started to dial.
By the time the Thursday rolled around, I had six more names. A doctor in Monterey Park who was rumored to charge between three and five hundred, but had apparently been busted some time before, and was very much under wraps now. It would have entailed a drive out to that suburb. Five more in Tijuana. Two brothers with their own Enfermerнa, who only charged one hundred and fifty, and to whom you had to say, "Nurse Carlotta suggested I call you." Apparently Nurse Carlotta was a swinger in L.A. that the brothers dug. Another was alleged to keep the patient over for eight hours, and that was too terrifying for consideration. Overnight in that town would he worse than the operation for Jenny. There was an American doctor down there, Oswald Tremaine, Jr., who was appended with the title "butcher" by my informant, but he only charged one hundred and twenty-five. We decided Quintano was the best bet. His name had come up again, from a very reputable source, so we held to the date of the appointment Jenny had made that night.
It was tacitly understood that Rooney and I would drive her down. If her parents ever found out, the consequences were too hideous to consider. Jenny never expanded on the remark, but when I suggested that perhaps her parents might be very understanding, if she explained what had happened, she said, "My father has never hit me, but he has a very loud voice, and he wears a belt. My mother would cry."
We left it at that, and spent the week between the phone call and that Thursday getting ourselves ready. I was driving an MG Magnette, a pretentious, cheaper copy of the Jaguar touring sedan. It was a lovely sort of thing, though, with glove-leather upholstery, dual carbs, a solid walnut dash panel that could be lifted out, four doors and the traditional MG red-painted engine. I got it lubed and checked out for the ride down. Rooney worked, of course, so her readying was all interior. As for Jenny, all I could tell of her state of mind, her capacity for handling this thing, as her nineteenth year became a nightmare, was that she did not cry again, and her conversation was not introspective.
When I asked her what had been said on the call to the doctor, she said: "A woman answered. She said, 'Bueno.' I told her a friend from Fresno had suggested I call Doctor Quintano about consultation. Then she put me through to him, and I said the same thing, and he asked me consultation about what? I said I was having menstrual difficulties, that was what your friend told me to say, and he said just a minute; he said it very quickly, as though he didn't want to talk any more. Then the girl came back and asked me what day I wanted to come down, and I told her Thursday, and she said to call from San Diego when we got that far."
I had a feeling Jenny was going to be all right. She was getting much sharper, very quickly. Sometimes childhood and adolescence pass away just that fast, like morning mist, burned off by the sun or a rotten experience. Markham, the philosopher. You can't miss my ruminations: they're in that purple-bound folio over there.
Three hundred dollars had been the next point Quintano's woman had brought up. "Do you know the Doctor's fee?" she had asked. Jenny said three hundred. Not any more. That was last year's price. But what with the high cost of this and that, the going rate for Dilation & Curettage was now four hundred. Jenny said all right, to the woman (whose name was Nancy, and who spoke with a faint trace of Spanish accent) and to me, and to Roger Gore when she called him for the money.
She said all right.
But Roger Gore said no.
He also said she was a whore. He also said she was a harpy and a blackmailer and a tramp and slept with dogs in the streets and if she had as many sticking out of her as she'd probably had sticking in her, she'd look like a porcupine. He concluded his chivalrous polemic with the comment that she could go peddle her ass on First and Main in downtown L.A. and raise the action that way. His parting line was, "Even if you charge what you're worth, you shouldn't have to make it with more than two or three hundred guys to raise the money."
When she repeated the conversation, I felt my jaw muscles turn to concrete, and I must have scraped a hall-dozen layers of enamel off my back teeth. Frankly, I wanted to kill the bastard!
"I'll talk to him," I said.
I took a drive and stopped off at a phone booth in a gas station; while they were putting in a couple of bucks of hi-test I called Roger Gore.
"Is Roger there?"
"Who's this?"
"Ken Markham."