"Lisa Goldstein - Dark Rooms" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goldstein Lisa)

The man headed for the aisle. Perhaps he hadn’t heard. Stevens
hurried after him, but the man had reached the stairs and was climbing them
quickly. Stevens followed and came out into the street. It was still daylight, a
stronger light than that of the gaslamps, and he blinked again, bewildered,
feeling as if he had surfaced by stages from strange depths.

People walked past him or headed into the café, called out to each
other or shouted for cabs. Coaches drove by, their wheels creaking, the
horses’ hooves clattering against the street. The new automobiles sped
past, smelling of hot metal and burning rubber and factory smoke, their
horns blatting.

A man of the same height and build as the one Stevens had seen
walked away down the Boulevard des Capucines, adjusting his hat. Stevens
ran after him, reached him, tapped him on the shoulder. The other man
turned, but instead of the pleasant smile he expected Stevens saw a fierce
scowl. For a moment, still tangled within the enchantment of the moving
pictures, Stevens thought the man had performed a magic trick, had
shaved off his beard and mustache and changed his soft brown eyes to an
icy blue.

“Yes?” the man said. “What do you want?”

Stevens walked away, feeling foolish. It was March, but the air still
held the chill of winter. He drew his coat closer around him and walked on.

He was twenty years old, and had come to Paris to be an artist. He’d
grown up in a small town on Lake Michigan; his father was a fisherman, and
his grandfather had been a fisherman before him, and Stevens’s own fate
and future had seemed set—and would have been, if not for a maiden aunt
who had taken an interest in him. In their town she was said to be artistic,
said with pity and disapproval, in the same way people talked about the
town madwoman. She had seen promise in him and encouraged him to
escape to Paris; she had even given him some money she had from a
small inheritance.

He had arrived in Paris a half a year ago. He’d rented a studio and
painted every day while the light held, working hard; his aunt’s money would
give him only a year in Paris, a year and a half if he was careful. He began
to meet other artists, and went to cafés with them in the evenings.

Then one day some friends took him to a studio he had never visited
before. The paintings there were a revelation, not so much for their
technique, though that was very good, but for the way the artist saw the
world, the way he was able to take ordinary things and make them seem
new, astonishing, as though no one had ever truly seen them before.

Stevens felt inspired at first, and worked harder than ever. But now all
his paintings seemed lifeless, ordinary, compared to this other man’s; they
lacked something, though he didn’t know what it was. He was good, he