"Lisa Goldstein - Cassandra's Photographs" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goldstein Lisa)

apartment I wished I hadn’t. It was Cassie.
‘’You want order in your life!“ she said with no preamble. Her
face was twisted and ugly, her brown eyes hard and flat. I tried to
stop her but she pushed her way into the room. ”Goddamn it, you
want everything to be dull and predictable, you want to know
what’s going to happen in your life at every minute. Don’t you?”
I couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Well, don’t you?” she said loudly. I knew enough about her to tell
that she was on the verge of tears. “The way I live is too
unpredictable for you, right? If somebody gave you a timetable of
your life that told you everything that was going to happen from
now until you die you’d welcome it, wouldn’t you? Well?”
She reached into her purse and took out a small manila envelope.
“Cassie, I—” I said.
“Well, here!” she said, thrusting the envelope at me. “I hope
you’re happy!”
A little dazed, I took it. It seemed too slight to be a timetable of
my life. I reached inside and took out—photographs. Photographs of
me.
She was turning to go. “Cassie,” I said. “Where did you get
these?”
“My grandmother!” she said, and broke away and ran loudly
down the hall.
I took all the photographs out and looked at them after she had
gone. There were only five of them. The first one showed me at my
graduation walking across the stage in a cap and gown to receive
my diploma. But I hadn’t been at either of my graduations, not the
one at my high school or the one at college where I received my
B.A. degree. I turned the picture this way and that, trying to figure
out how it had been done. There were these odd details—the guy in
front of me was in a wheelchair, for example—but on the whole it
was very believable. The person on stage looked a lot like me.
The next picture showed me in an unfamiliar kitchen, pouring
myself a cup of coffee. In the third one I was running down the
street in the rain, a briefcase flying out from one hand. I looked
harassed, and older too, in some indefinable way. The next one was
a picture of me and a woman I had never met. We were in a tight
embrace and I had a look of perfect peace on my face. The picture
ended just below the neck, but I had the impression we were both
naked. And in the last picture I was definitely older—at least
thirty—and bending down to talk to a five- or six-year-old boy.
I ran the pictures through my hands, shuffling them like a deck
of cards. So that’s what Cassie’s grandmother had been doing all
those months in her room. She must have had a darkroom in there.
I could see her bent over the photographs, cutting a head from this
one, a background from that one, maybe re-touching them,
arranging them so that they looked like actual photographs. What a
strange hobby. No wonder when she came out of her room she
would say things like “The wind blows the skeleton of his lips.”
I looked at the photographs again. Very nice, but I didn’t see