"Harris, Joanne - Blackberry Wine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harris Joanne)

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that it hadn't gone to her head. She had a house in Chelsea,
a pied-o-terre in New York and was considering liposuction
on her thighs. She had grown up. Moved on.
But, for Jay, nothing had moved on. Five years ago he had
seemed the embodiment of the temperamental artist, drinking
half a bottle of Smirnoff a day, a doomed, damaged
figure of romance. He had brought out her maternal instincts.
She was going to redeem him, inspire him and, in
return, he would write a wonderful book, a book which
would illuminate lives and which would all be due to her.
But none of that happened. Trashy sci-fi was what paid
the rent; cheap paperbacks with lurid covers. The maturity,
the puckish wisdom of that first work, had never been
duplicated, or even attempted. And for all his brooding
silences Jay had no temperament to speak of. He had never
given in to an impulse. He never really showed anger, never
lost control. His conversation was neither brilliantly intelligent
nor intriguingly surly. Even his drinking - his one
remaining excess -- seemed ridiculous now, like a man who
insists upon wearing the outmoded fashions of his youth.
He spent his time playing computer games, listening to old
singles and watching old movies on video, locked in his
adolescence like a record in a groove. Maybe she was
mistaken, thought Kerry. He didn't want to grow up. He
didn't want to be saved.
The empty bottles told a different story. He drank, Jay
told himself, for the same reason he wrote second-rate
science fiction. Not to forget, but to remember, to open
up the past and find himself there again, like the stone in a
bitter fruit. He opened each bottle, began each story with
the secret conviction that here was the magic draught that
would restore him. But magic, like wine, needs the right
conditions in order to work. Joe could have told him that.
Otherwise the chemistry doesn't happen. The bouquet is
spoiled.
I suppose I expected it to begin with me. There would
have been poetry in that. We are linked, after all, he and I.
But this story begins with a different vintage. I don't really
mind that. Better to be his last than his first. I'm not even
the star of this story, but I was there before the Specials
came, and I'll be there when they've all been drunk. I can
afford to wait. Besides, aged Fleurie is an acquired taste,
not to be rushed, and I'm not sure his palate would have
been ready.
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London, Spring 1999
IT WAS MARCH. MILD, EVEN FOR THE CELLAR. JAY HAD BEEN
working upstairs - working in his way, with a bottle at
his elbow and the television turned on low. Kerry was at a