"Joe Haldeman - None So Blind (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

together,
romance began to smolder in a deep and permanent place. That was even
before the
violin.
Amy liked it that Cletus didn't play with her dog and was
straightforward in his
curiosity about what it was like to be blind. She could assess people
pretty
well from their voices: after one sentence, she knew that he was young,
black,
shy, nerdly, and not from Virginia. She could tell from his inflection
that
either he was unattractive or he thought he was. She was six years
older than
him and white and twice his size, but otherwise they matched up pretty
well, and
they started keeping company in a big way.
Among the few things that Cletus did not know anything about was music.
That the
other kids wasted their time memorizing the words to inane top-40 songs
was
proof of intellectual dysfunction if not actual lunacy. Furthermore,
his parents
had always been fanatical devotees of opera. A universe bounded on one
end by
peurile mumblings about unrequited love and on the other end by
foreigners
screaming in agony was not a universe that Cletus desired to explore.
Until Amy
picked up her violin.
They talked constantly. They sat together at lunch and met between
classes. When
the weather was good, they sat outside before and after school and
talked. Amy
asked her chauffeur to please be ten or fifteen minutes late picking
her up.
So after about three weeks' worth of the fullness of time, Amy asked
Cletus to
come over to her house for dinner. He was a little hesitant, knowing
that her
parents were rich, but he was also curious about that life style and,
face it,
was smitten enough that he would have walked off a cliff if she asked
him
nicely. He even used some computer money to buy a nice suit, a symptom
that
caused his mother to grope for the Valium.
The dinner at first was awkward. Cletus was bewildered by the arsenal
of
silverware and all the different kinds of food that didn't look or