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

no longer thought about why I felt that way.
After about five years I quit the aircraft company and went into
consulting. I had saved some money, but the first year on my own
was very rocky. Then I began to make a reputation for myself and
in the second year earned almost twice what I would have with the
company. I bought a house in the suburbs. I was working very hard
now, so hard I had almost no time to date or entertain friends. It
didn’t matter, because I knew that sooner or later I would see the
blond woman and my life would change. Sometimes, working late
into the night, I caught myself wondering what she would think of
the way I’d decorated the spare bedroom, or whether she’d like it if
I had a pool put in the back yard.
One day I locked my keys in my car and hurried to a phone booth
to call the automobile club. It was raining lightly, and suddenly I
recognized the scene from the photograph. I felt vindicated. My life
was on the right track.
Ten years after I graduated I saw Cassie again. I had gone to a
firm in an unfamiliar part of town, and on my way to the car I
remembered that I didn’t have any food in the house. I crossed the
street to the supermarket, and in the parking lot, holding a bag of
groceries in one hand and a child’s hand in the other, was Cassie. It
took me a few minutes to recognize her. By that time she had
already turned to me. She knew who I was immediately. “Robert?”
she said, grinning widely. She looked as though she’d hardly aged.
“Cassie!” I said. “How you doing?”
“Fine, just fine,” she said. “How are you?”
“I’m fine. How’s Aurora? When did you get married?” I nodded at
the kid, now pulling hard on Cassie’s arm and humming to himself.
“I’m not married,” she said. Of course. Same old Cassie.
The kid said something I couldn’t catch, and I squatted down to
hear him better. “My mommy’s a singing parent,” he said, talking
around the largest piece of candy I had ever seen.
“A singing parent?” I said.
“Single parent,” Cassie said, and I stood up, feeling foolish. “So I
guess you graduated, huh?”
People in school or at the aircraft company sometimes talked
about inspiration, about suddenly solving a problem that had
bothered them for weeks, seeing the problems that their solution
brought up and going on to solve them too, on and on, effortlessly. I
had always envied them profoundly. That sort of thing had never
happened to me. But now, as I stood up, I realized that Cassie’s son
was the boy in the photograph; that he looked familiar because he
looked like Cassie, though without her red hair; that since I was the
oldest in the photograph with the child all the other scenes must
have happened to me already. All this took a fraction of a second,
and I was able to say, “Yeah, I did,” before the realization hit me
and I said, “You cheated me!”
The boy, so familiar now, looked up, alarmed. “What do you
mean?” Cassie said.
“Those photographs,” I said. “Those goddamn photographs you