"Elizabeth Hand - Calypso in Berlin" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hand Elizabeth)

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We met when Philip missed a flight out of Logan. I had business at the gallery that represents me in
Cambridge and offered him a place to stay for the night: my hotel room.

"I don't know too many painters," he said. "Free spirits, right?"

He was intrigued by what I told him of the island. The sex was good. I told him my name was Lyssa.
After that we'd see each other whenever he was on the East Coast. He was usually leaving for work
overseas but would add a few days to either end of his trip, a week even, so we could be together. I had
been on the island for—how long? I can't remember now.

I began sketching him the second time he came here. He would never let me do it while he was awake.
He was too restless, jumping up to pull a book off the shelf, make coffee, pour more wine.

So I began to draw him while he slept. After we fucked he'd fall heavily asleep; I might doze for a few
minutes, but sex energizes me, it makes me want to work.

He was perfect for me. Not conventionally handsome, though. His dark eyes were small and deep set,
his mouth wide and uneven. Dark, thick hair, gray-flecked. His skin unlined. It was uncanny—he was in
his early fifties but seemed as ageless as I was, as though he'd been untouched by anything, his time in the
Middle East, his children, his wife, his ex-wife, me. I see now that this is what obsessed me—that
someone human could be not merely beautiful but untouched. There wasn't a crack in him; no way to get
inside. He slept with his hands crossed behind his head, long body tipped across the bed. Long arms,
long legs; torso almost hairless; a dark bloom on his cheeks when he hadn't shaved. His cock long,
slightly curved; moisture on his thigh.

I sketched and painted him obsessively, for seven years. Over the centuries there have been others.
Other lovers, always; but only a few whom I've drawn or painted on walls, pottery, tapestry, paper,
canvas, skin. After a few years I'd grow tired of them—Odysseus was an exception—and gently send
them on their way. As they grew older they interested me less, because of course I did not grow old.
Some didn't leave willingly. I made grasshoppers of them, or mayflies, and tossed them into the webs of
the golden orbweaver spiders that follow me everywhere I live.

But I never grew tired of Philip.

And I never grew tired of painting him. No one could see the paintings, of course, which killed me. He
was so paranoid that he would be recognized, by his wife, his ex, one of his grown children. Coworkers.

I was afraid of losing him, so I kept the canvases in a tiny room off the studio. The sketchbooks alone
filled an entire shelf. He still worried that someone would look at them, but no one ever came to visit me,
except for him. My work was shown in the gallery just outside Boston. Winter landscapes of the bleak
New England countryside I loved; skeletons of birds, seals. Temperas, most of them; some pen-and-ink
drawings. I lived under Andrew Wyeth's long shadow, as did everyone else in my part of the country. I
thought that the paintings I'd done of Philip might change that perception. Philip was afraid that they
would.